Probability Sun (16 page)

What if she and Gruber were right, and it somehow created a secondary probability field that had shaped these aliens’ brains?

Only a theory. No data.

God, he sounded like Capelo.

What was Marbet doing, aboard the
Alan B. Shepard
?

“We’re finished,” Ann said in English. She removed the helmet. Unlike Voratur, Enli did not bounce joyfully off the floor pillow. She rose slowly, gravely, and the flesh between her eyes wrinkled. Her skull ridges creased. Now that Kaufman looked, he saw that Voratur’s smooth, oiled flesh wrinkled in the same way.

Head pain. The Lagerfeld scans represented some sort of unshared reality, however minor, and that had given the two aliens—no, three, Soshaf also had creased forehead and skull ridges—massive headaches. They must have known it would. Bravery indeed.

Or greed. Voratur said something to Ann, then put his hands to his head. Ann turned to Kaufman.

“Give them the six comlinks, Lyle, so they can leave. This is very painful for all of them.”

Despite his head pain, Voratur’s eyes gleamed as Kaufman handed him the small black boxes. He expected to show Voratur how they worked, but Voratur didn’t ask. He said something to Soshaf, who took one of the boxes and moved outside the hut. Expertly Voratur opened the link and spoke in World. Soshaf’s voice sounded back, and Voratur broke into a huge grin that needed no interpretation by anybody.

In thirty more seconds, with only minimum flower exchanging, the three aliens bicycled away.

“Well,” Kaufman said, “speedy diplomacy, at least.”

Ann said stubbornly, “They should not have those comlinks.”

“Then you would not have your Lagerfeld data. And the comlinks won’t affect their overall society very much. Really. If they take the comlinks apart, they won’t discover anything useful to them—these people are centuries from microchips.” He considered this, wondered if it were true, and changed the subject. “Tell me what you learned at David Allen’s grave.”

Ann was clearly impatient to get to her data. But she sat down on the pillow Enli had vacated. “What do you know about David Allen, Lyle?”

“That he was the graduate student with the previous expedition. That he got the position only because his very influential father pulled strings. That when all of you were hiding in the Neury Mountains because the Worlders had declared you unreal, David Allen took Gruber’s gun and kidnapped Enli, and neither of them was ever heard from again. A few days later a flyer picked up you others and lifted you off-planet.”

“Yes. And so we still believed humans were thought to be unreal,” Ann said. “But it turns out we were real again to Worlders. Because of what David did.”

“What did he do?”

She pushed back a few strands of the long fair hair that had come loose from her topknot. Not really pretty—her face was long and her features too small—Ann Sikorski nonetheless had one of the most attractive faces Kaufman had ever seen. For its kindness, for the steady integrity in her pale eyes. Precisely the qualities he was going to have to outrage a few minutes from now.

She said, “When David took Enli and left us in the middle of the night, we all knew that Tas—the artifact Syree Johnson had moved out of orbit—might blow if Johnson tried to take it through the space tunnel. The mass was too great. Gruber worked it out for us, because Johnson was giving out minimum information to us anthropologists on the planet. Like most military.”

Kaufman didn’t reply to the dig, but he noted it. It wasn’t like Ann. She was really upset about the comlinks.

“David was … in an excitable state,” Ann continued. Again Kaufman said nothing. The planetside team leader, Dr. Bazargan, had said in his report that Allen had developed a full-blown grandiose paranoia.

“He took Enli to the closest village and together they told the villagers that a ‘sky sickness’ was coming. That’s how he described the wave effect. He said he’d been told about the sky sickness by the First Flower while he was in the Neury Mountains.”

“Why did they believe him?”

Ann smiled wanly. In that smile Kaufman saw that she had liked David Allen, no matter what he had been. She said, “It’s a paradox. They believed him because Enli had also been in the Neury Mountains and yet wasn’t sick, which was clearly a miracle from the First Flower. And also because David
was
sick, sick enough from radiation poisoning that he died, and so clearly he gave his life to warn everyone else. Anyone who dies for another is real. And so, by extension, are the rest of us humans.”

“I see.”

“The Worlders listened to him. They sent word around the entire planet, using their sunflasher network, and by twenty-four hours later they were all holed up underground. Eventually they came out, found themselves unharmed, and made Enli real again and David a hero. I saw the flower altar they erected to him.”

It made sense, given the Worlder beliefs. They wouldn’t know about the s-suit that had protected Enli from radiation in the mountains, or about David’s mental state, or about the wave effect’s mysteriously not having any effect whatsoever on World, aboveground or below.

He said, “The outcome was fortunate for this expedition, anyway. Worlders have let us come in peace.”

“Yes,” Ann said, “and in return you’re going to destroy their entire civilization.”

So here it was. Kaufman had hoped to postpone this discussion, but he realized now how stupid that hope had been. “You talked by comlink to Dieter.”

“Of course I talked to Dieter. He’s jubilant that the mapping of the radioactivity patterns match the simulated seismic shifts of the artifact’s protuberances. It’s a directed-beam destabilizer, isn’t it? Or can be used as one?”

“Yes,” Kaufman said.

“And so you’re going to take it to a war zone.”

“Probably.”

“At the very least,” Ann said, “you’re going to remove it into space to test it, aren’t you?”

Kaufman evaded. “That’s not clear yet. We may do some on-planet tests. And, of course, we may be wrong.”

“You
are
wrong,” Ann said bitterly. “You’re wrong to think you can just remove at your pleasure something that’s holding together the entire fabric of Worlder society!”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do!” She jumped up from her pillow, forcing Kaufman to also stand. They stood facing each other, inches apart. “The shared-reality mechanism has evolved here and nowhere else in the galaxy. When Enli was in the dead ‘eye’ of its field, right above it, she had no head pain no matter how many unshared concepts were discussed. When you went into the thickest part of its field, your brain stopped thinking entirely—yes, Dieter told me that, too. The buried artifact affects thinking, Lyle! And these people have had it affect theirs throughout their entire evolution. What will happen to them if you remove it, and they no longer have operable shared-reality in their brains?”

They’ll get fewer headaches
, Kaufman thought, but didn’t say it aloud. Ann Sikorski had genuine empathy. She cared what happened to the aliens.

He suddenly wondered what Marbet would be feeling about them if she were planetside.

“Ann, let me just make two points,” he said quietly. “First, let’s assume you’re right and the aliens have evolved their shared-reality mechanism because of some planet-wide field generated by the artifact. If it’s truly an evolved brain pattern, then it’s in their genome and will continue just as if the artifact were still there.”

“No! It’s an evolved mechanism designed to operate only in the presence of the field! Otherwise, Enli wouldn’t have felt no head pain in the field’s eye!”

“Second, if what you just said is true, then removing that field will have no more effect on all the Worlders than it did on Enli. She wasn’t harmed in what you call the ‘eye.’ She merely didn’t have head pain. But she still felt healthy, acted normal, thought without difficulty. She wasn’t harmed, and neither will the rest of the aliens.”

Ann’s pale face flamed with anger. “You’re being deliberately obtuse, Lyle, and you know it. It isn’t their individual selves that will be destroyed if you remove that artifact, although I’m by no means convinced that they’re all as mentally resilient as Enli. What will be destroyed is their entire society. Every single one of their social patterns is built on shared reality.
Every single one
. If you remove shared reality, you destroy their patterns of interacting, of trading, of raising children, of mating, of all economic and political structures. Violence will emerge, with no social controls on it, because none were ever necessary before. Can you imagine what that will mean?”

“Nothing happened to Voratur when the first wave effect, the one that destroyed Nimitri, hit World. You just told me that at least at first look, Voratur’s Lagerfeld scan matches the one you took of him on your first expedition.”

“If they match, it’s because the artifact was there! It protected the Worlders from the wave effect!”

“Now
that
you don’t know. That’s speculation. We have no proof it was the buried artifact that resulted in no change in brain scans.”

She was silent; he was right about that. Kaufman pressed his advantage. “Have you discussed this with Dieter?”

She said, so bitterly that Kaufman knew husband and wife had quarreled over this, “Dieter’s not an anthropologist. He’s a geologist.”

And I’m a soldier
. “Ann, we’re at war. And we’re losing.”

“Does that justify destroying another race’s entire civilization?”

“Yes,” Kaufman said, and knew he believed it, and disliked himself for believing it and Ann for making him aware of the fact. He looked at her with distaste.

“You’re finally registering emotion, Lyle. Look at you. You don’t think removing the artifact is right, either.”

“I think it’s necessary.”

“It’s not ours! It’s theirs!”

There was no answer to that, and nowhere else for the discussion to go except into personal acrimony. Kaufman turned to leave. But Ann surprised him.

“Wait. I want to make a request.”

He turned back to face her. “What is it?”

“Before you remove the artifact, let me take Enli, Voratur, and at least six other Worlders away from the field, to see what happens to them. For at least twenty-four hours, so I can observe their interactions when they no longer have shared reality. Let me take them up to the
Alan B. Shepard
.”

It was the last thing Kaufman had expected. “It’s against all regs. And a full-scale contamination of their society, too. You even objected to giving them comlinks.”

“That was before I was sure you were going to do far worse damage by removing the artifact.”

Kaufman was thinking fast. Grafton would have a fit, of course. But this clearly came under Special Projects authority. If the aliens came up out of their “field” and didn’t kill each other, it might get Ann on Kaufman’s side. On the other hand, if they
did
end up killing each other, he would definitely lose support. How would it play at Headquarters? Probably that he had gathered all possible information before making his decision, which was always good.

Stalling, he said, “You suspected this might happen, Ann. That’s why you bargained for a Lagerfeld scan for Enli as well as Voratur. You wanted additional baseline data.”

“Yes.”

“To get—how many?—eight or ten aliens to agree to go into space, we’d have to give Voratur … I don’t know what. A lot of trade goods. I thought you didn’t want to further contaminate their culture.”

“Better to contaminate it than wipe it out completely,” Ann said. God, she was stubborn. One of those people who lose all mildness when they believe they’re on the side of the angels.

“Besides, Lyle,” she said, and now she looked not furious but shrewd, “don’t you want to know how the Worlders will react? In the name of science? Aren’t you the big science worshipper?”

She had let shrewdness slide into sarcasm. But she was right; Kaufman wanted to know. And if he lifted the artifact into space with no human observer on the planet (no reason to leave anyone behind), he would never know.

“All right,” he said. “If you can get the aliens to agree, a maximum of ten of them can be lifted to the ship for an observation period of no more than thirty-six hours, confined to a secure area that has been cleared of all advanced technology.”

“Thank you,” Ann said, and from her smile, Kaufman saw suddenly that he had made a bad mistake. She was certain that if the Worlders were badly affected by being away from their artifact, Kaufman would change his mind about removing it from World. She was wrong. Kaufman knew he would not change his mind.

He didn’t tell her that. Never enrage an ally—even a deluded ally—until you absolutely had to. Instead, he went to comlink Grafton that there were going to be more aliens aboard his strictly regulation, severely Navy ship.

THIRTEEN

IN THE NEURY MOUNTAINS

C
apelo didn’t know what to do with Amanda and Sudie while the artifact was being lifted out of its hole.

Even he recognized that this was a bizarre reason to hold up the greatest scientific find in human history. But the problem was real. He couldn’t keep them with him in the valley; nobody knew what this alien son-of-a-bitch would do when they hoisted it. Even base camp was too close, not to mention having its perimeter down. That left only sending them back up to the
Alan B. Shepard
, which would move to the relative safety of the other side of the planet. Just in case. But Capelo cringed at asking Kaufman to send the shuttle up just for Sudie and Amanda. Kaufman, who didn’t have kids and didn’t like kids and had told him not to bring his kids down from the ship in the first place.

Nonetheless, Capelo had no choice. He comlinked Kaufman. “Lyle? I have a favor to ask. I don’t want my daughters here for the artifact hoist tomorrow, or even at camp. Can they go back up on the shuttle?” More curt than he’d intended. But Capelo hated asking favors.

To his surprise, Kaufman said, “Sure, Tom. The shuttle’s leaving anyway in a few hours.”