Probability Sun (11 page)

“All right,” Kaufman said, because further opposition wouldn’t get him anywhere anyway. “Will we get the artifact out tomorrow?”

“Sure. We’re exactly on military schedule, where everything proceeds in a timely fashion.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“No,” Capelo said wearily, “but it sounds like the kind of thing a physicist on a military project should say.”

They walked the rest of the way in silence.

At camp, the shuttle had just come down. Ann Sikorski disembarked into the red sunset, her long pale face both eager and apprehensive. Gruber, of course, was staying with his beloved dig. Kaufman moved toward Ann to tell her that humanity had been mysteriously restored to World reality, and that she had a dinner invitation for the following evening.

NINE

ABOARD THE
ALAN B. SHEPARD

L
yle,” said Marbet’s excited face on the shuttle’s viewlink the next afternoon, “I think you should come up here, if you can.”

Something in Kaufman’s chest lurched. Was it the words or the speaker? At least now, calling from the ship’s heavily shielded comroom, she was clothed. He kept his voice steady.

“The artifact lifts out of the hole later today, Marbet. And we have dinner with natives, including Enli Brimmidin. She was easy to locate, after all. Can you make an oral report and then just send me the tapes?”

“Of course,” Marbet said. “But I’d rather do it the other way around. You view the tapes and then we’ll talk.”

“I take it you’ve made progress.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Tom’s daughters were asking about you. I had to tell him that you have a virus and are in quarantine.”

“Give them my love. And now, what aren’t you telling me, Lyle? It’s something important.”

He remembered that the viewlink was two-way, and that she was reading his body language and facial expressions more minutely and easily than anyone ever had before. For a brief instant, he understood why people feared and hated Sensitives. The instant passed, and he made himself smile.

He said, “Why? What are you picking up from me?”

“Frustration. Anxiety.”

He laughed. Even to him it sounded forced. “Well, why wouldn’t I be frustrated and anxious? I’ve got a three-stranded situation here—dangerous artifact, native traders, imprisoned enemy—and every strand includes a generous share of lunatics. In your strand that refers to the Faller, not you, Marbet.”

“Tom Capelo giving you trouble?”

“Last night he and Albemarle actually swung on each other. If they were soldiers, I’d throw them both in stockade. If they were officers, I’d court-martial them. But they’re essential civilian personnel I have to work with, and they have to work with each other, and I’m manacled by that.”

“So what did you do?” Marbet said, with her quiet sympathy. Kaufman marveled at himself; he did not open up like this about difficulties, not to anyone. It was one reason he’d gotten as far as he had in the military.

“I grabbed Capelo—that skinny son-of-a-bitch is
strong
—and Gruber grabbed Albemarle. We dragged them out of sight of each other. Then Rosalind Singh talked physics to Capelo and Ann Sikorski talked data to Albemarle. Or maybe not. I didn’t listen.”

“Ah, the soothing power of us women,” Marbet said, and he heard the edge in her voice: mockery, and more.

“Of those women, anyway. I wouldn’t have sent Captain Heller to talk to either one of them. She’s furious at me, too.”

Marbet laughed. “You had to take down the perimeter.”

“How did you guess that?”

“If you’re having dinner with natives, then the Worlders must have declared humanity real again. If that’s so, you can’t risk violating shared reality by attacking them with painful shocks. You’d give everybody on the planet a communal headache, or risk being declared unreal again, or both.”

“Yes,” Kaufman said. How easy his job would be if everyone saw as clearly as Marbet Grant.

“No wonder Captain Heller is furious. Poor Lyle. But look at my tapes, they’ll cheer you up.”

“Marbet,” he said quietly, “is the Faller talking to you?”

“Sort of. Not vocally, of course—neither of our vocal chords can handle the other’s speech, even if he were inclined to talk to me. But we’re communicating. But, Lyle, I’m warning you now: I’m going to ask for something big.”

“What?”

“After you see the tapes.”

“All right.”

“Bye.” The viewscreen blanked.

Kaufman sat thinking for five minutes. Communication with a Faller. There had been no communication with the murderous Fallers in twenty years. Only death and destruction and blood, more of it human than alien. It wasn’t conceivable that the captured Faller would cooperate in reversing that bloodflow. Marbet might be the universe’s best communicator, but she was not a soldier. She had never seen combat. She was unfamiliar with military treachery.

It was thirteen hundred hours. He called Capelo on his comlink. “Tom, this is Lyle. I have a scheduling decision to make, and I want to know if the artifact is lifting out early this afternoon or later.”

“It’s not coming out today at all,” Capelo said.

“No? Why not?”

“Caution. You approve of caution, Lyle, don’t you? We got the artifact uncovered and it has markings on it pretty close to those Syree Johnson reported on the first artifact.”

“Go on.” Excitement started in him like tiny bubbles.

“There are also protuberances similar to the pressure points she described. On and off switches, or at least that’s what they were on her object. The original artifact required two points in opposition to be simultaneously activated to set off a wave, and this seems to be the same setup. Gruber and I don’t want to set it off inadvertently. Might mess the whole place up.”

“Yes.”

“So we’ve got crew in the hole hand-brushing dirt away from the artifact as if it were a pottery shard from the early Paleolithic. That takes time. We’ll lift it out tomorrow. The digger’s busy preparing a place now. Sudie, not now!”

“Daddy!” the child’s voice said excitedly, “come look!”

Kaufman said, more sharply than he intended, “Tom, are you trying to supervise a major military find and baby-sit at the same time?”

“No, no, their nanny is here. Sudie just escaped for a minute. Here, Jane, take her. Tomorrow, Lyle. Early in the morning. Then, when it’s out, I can do the real tests.”

“All right,” Kaufman said, and broke the link before he said something to Capelo that he’d regret. Capelo was a lunatic, just as he’d told Marbet. Children at a weapon site! Arrogant individualist, assuming whatever he did had to be right, simply because he did it.

Arrogant brilliant individualist.

Kaufman called the shuttle pilot, who was off-duty and asleep. “Captain DeVolites, this is Colonel Kaufman. How quickly could you take me up to the
Shepard
and back down again?”

The pilot was instantly alert. “Under emergency conditions, sir?”

“No, we’re not under attack.” Kaufman explained no further. “Leaving as soon as possible.”

DeVolites couldn’t quite keep the curiosity out of his voice, although he tried. “Two hours up, sir, including docking. Less than two down.” The
Shepard
was in geosynchronous orbit over the Neury Mountains, monitoring everything with sensors that could resolve an image to a few centimeters.

“Prepare to leave in fifteen minutes,” Kaufman said, and went to tell Captain Heller that the shuttle was making an unscheduled liftoff.

*   *   *

Commander Grafton met Kaufman in the shuttle bay. Grafton did not look happy.

“Colonel, a word, please, in private.”

“Certainly.”

Grafton led the way to a shielded conference room off the shuttle bay. “Colonel Kaufman, I request clarification of the parameters allowed for Ms. Grant’s interactions with the prisoner.”

Grafton looked very stiff, very Navy. Kaufman relaxed. He had dealt often with outraged protocol.

“What has she been doing, Commander?” Kaufman asked, allowing the slightest hint of sympathy into his voice.

“She has activated the extensive holo library, which is of course acceptable. She has commandeered—” Kaufman noted the word “—enormous computer power, which is also within her charter, even if those uses seem offensive. But she has also interfered with the feeding and possible preservation of the prisoner, which infringes on my responsibility for this operation. And now she wants one of the prisoner’s so-called ‘hands’ freed, One hand, Colonel, might be enough for a Faller to devise a method of suicide. That’s their projected primary response to captivity, as you know. I cannot permit that to happen.”

“No, of course not,” Kaufman said. The chain of command here was tricky. Grafton was Navy, Kaufman Army. Grafton had final control of anything that threatened his ship, but Kaufman was in control of the “special project” involving the alien. However, both men knew that if the only Faller ever captured alive was allowed to kill himself on Grafton’s ship, Grafton’s career was over.

Grafton said, “So you agree that Ms. Grant’s request must be denied.”

“I’d like to talk to Ms. Grant,” Kaufman said, “but it certainly sounds as if freeing the prisoner’s hand could endanger him.” A reply that actually said nothing, but denied nothing either.

Grafton was no fool. He recognized that was all he was getting at this point. He rose and said stiffly, “I’ll take you to Ms. Grant.”

Marbet waited for him in the anteroom to the prisoner’s cell, an anteroom of amazing messiness. Computer flimsies lay curled on the floor, the table, the chairs. Three holo display stages—three!—crowded one wall, interspersed with full-length mirrors. Various uniforms crumpled themselves into fantastic shapes in every corner, along with what Kaufman at first thought were dead animals. He started. Closer scrutiny showed him the things were pieces of fur. Where had she gotten fur aboard ship?

“Hello, Lyle,” she said when Grafton had left them. “The commander has been complaining about me to you.”

“Don’t tell me how my body language is revealing that,” Kaufman said, smiling. She looked wonderful, green eyes alight and brown face glowing with excitement. Even her short auburn curls seemed to have extra spring. “Tell me what you’ve done.”

She knew how to present information succinctly. “I proceeded in four stages. First, observation of the Faller, especially when he was being force fed, combined with preliminary attempts to communicate using prime numbers. He didn’t respond. But my observations, combined with the computer analysis of the holo recordings of every session, gave me a feel for how his face and body express half the human primary emotions.”

“Half?” Kaufman said. He noted that she hadn’t used a personal name for the Faller.

“Anger, fear, and disgust. The others are pleasure, surprise, and lust.”

“So next you went after those,” Kaufman said. Lust?

“Yes. I used holos on the solidest setting to elicit surprise. Animals, mostly. I don’t know yet if the Fallers have holo tech or if he thought the rabbits I pulled out of my hat were real, but. I got surprise.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Pleasure was a lot harder. I’ll come to that in a minute. And lust, too.”

“I’m fascinated,” Kaufman said, without sarcasm.

“The second stage was learning to simulate the Faller’s body language and facial expressions myself.”

“You?” Kaufman said, startled.

“Well, yes, Lyle. He has no motivation to learn our communication.”

“True enough.” You didn’t need to communicate to commit suicide.

“I used the same body language he did,” Marbet continued, “and his body responses were surprise and disgust, without any reciprocation of communication. And even then I could sense that something else was going on here, although I couldn’t put my finger on what. And neither could the computer. Why are you smiling?”

“At the idea of a computer with a finger.” Even her metaphors were body-oriented.

She smiled, without stemming her tide of words. “Stage three was holo simulation of other Fallers, programmed with the body language I’d been able to classify so far.
That
was fascinating! The Faller seemed to understand right away that those holos weren’t real, but body language is involuntary, Lyle. He couldn’t help responding somewhat And his responses were vastly different whether the Faller holo was naked, dressed in a uniform identical to the one he was captured in, or dressed in human uniforms.”

“You projected holos of a Faller dressed in human uniforms?” No wonder Grafton had found Marbet’s work “offensive.”

“Yes. Also in imaginary uniforms, basically the Faller garment but with different looks based on human notions of decoration. At least, at first And here’s where I had the first breakthrough. The Faller’s responses differed markedly depending on rank … even human rank. They know a lot more about us than we do about them.”

“I believe it,” Lyle said grimly.

“What I think is that Faller society is rigidly hierarchical. That makes sense, when you consider that they eliminate anything that looks like a threat. You’d have to have some mechanism to keep them from completely eliminating each other. I think that mechanism is strict and unvarying hierarchy, life-long. And I think that, unlike human societies that have done the same thing, the Faller mechanism is biological. Hard-wired in the brain.”

Kaufman said slowly, “You mean, like the shared-reality mechanism of the Worlders is biological and hard-wired.”

“Yes! Exactly!”

“The alien universe is turning out to be a very strange place.”

Marbet laughed, a laugh so free and joyous that Kaufman was startled. This was more than just solving a scientific and military problem. Marbet Grant relished the strangeness that made him, Colonel Lyle Kaufman, a bit uneasy.

But, then, she had always been treated as a living strangeness herself.

“Yes. What emerged from the idea of ranking was a means to discriminate among the Fallers’ reactions to different humans. The only ones he’s seen, you know, are the techs who force-feed him, who are all three crew and who happen to all be men, and the xenobiologists, who are officers but not line officers with power. He’s incredibly sensitive to the possession of power, you know, in ways we can’t imagine. It’s like a dog being so much more sensitive than we are to smells. What I had to find was a way to use that.”