Probability Sun (34 page)

Marbet made a hand sign. The Faller pushed the incomprehensible picture toward her. It shuddered on its easel, fell off, and hit the invisible barrier, ending face-up on the floor.

Kaufman said from the anteroom, “The bottom part is the Solar System.”

“Yes.”

“Are those flowers in that circle?”

“I don’t know,” Marbet said helplessly.

“Could he mean flowers because flowers are so important on World, where we took the artifact from?”

“How does he even know we’re orbiting World?” Marbet asked, and Kaufman felt stupid. She was right, of course. He wasn’t thinking clearly. Although the Fallers in the aggregate did know that humans had taken the first artifact, Syree Johnson’s artifact, from World.

Kaufman looked again at the drawing. It meant nothing to him, except for the Solar System covered by the thick jagged line.

“Signal to him—can you do this?—that we need more information.” If the Faller would give it.

Before Marbet could respond, the alien raised his face to the ceiling and gave the same sound as before, the deep-noted rising roar. Abruptly, he snapped his head downward to stare at the drawing on the floor.

Behind Kaufman a voice said, “Oh my God.”

Kaufman whirled. Capelo had dragged himself into the doorway, either moving noiselessly or else making noise that Kaufman, in his intense focus on Marbet and the Faller, hadn’t even heard. Capelo had somehow inched himself up against the doorjamb so that he rested half-upright, a wrapped pink caterpillar helpless as a baby, grotesque as the Faller itself. From that angle, he could see the Faller’s drawing lying face-up across the cell.

Kaufman whirled to grab Capelo. The fuck-up, the fool, if his interruption broke off the dialogue between Marbet and the Faller, Kaufman would kill Capelo himself—

“No!” Marbet cried. “Lyle, stop! Free him from the tanglefoam!”

Free him
? Kaufman hesitated. Even if she was right, tanglefoam antidote was nano-based; once you sprayed it on, it dissolved
all
the tanglefoam. You couldn’t free just arms and leave legs tied, and there was no time for Kaufman to fetch something that would do that, or even to secure Capelo with manacles. Which Kaufman didn’t have; he wasn’t an MP. More importantly, Capelo wasn’t cleared for the secure area.

“Do it!” Marbet said.

“I can’t. It’ll set off the alarm.”

“Do it anyway!” she cried, and Kaufman took the canister from his belt and sprayed Capelo with the dissolvant.

Once free, Capelo raced across the cell and drew something on Marbet’s board. He turned it toward the Faller, who did nothing. Meaningless to the alien, Kaufman guessed; the symbols were too different.

“Marbet, give him his fucking board back!” Capelo barked.

She darted into the anteroom and through the tech door, not even stopping to don a helmet. Kaufman saw her holding her breath as she erupted through the airlock. She grabbed the Faller’s board, erased both sides, set it back on its easel, and hurried out.

No MPs yet.

The Faller scribbled something, a single glyph.

“That’s useless, I don’t know what that is,” Capelo spat.

The Faller resumed drawing. This time he drew, more carefully, the same drawing that had set Capelo off before. Capelo stared at it, and Kaufman saw his face change, acquire the look of deep thought. Kaufman held his breath.

A long time seemed to pass, although it was probably no longer than thirty seconds. Still no MPs … what was Grafton up to? Marbet cried, “Tom…” and Kaufman quickly shushed her. Capelo stared again at the drawing. More time. Too long, too long … hurry it up, soldier, move it,
move it
 …

Basic training had been a long time ago, and yesterday.

Finally Capelo’s face changed again. Kaufman watched it, and knew what he was looking at. He had never expected to see it for himself, not in this lifetime, not at this height.

Capelo said again, “Oh my dear God.” And then, flatly, “The son-of-a-bitch is a physicist.” He closed his eyes.

The gas started then, spraying from the walls. Kaufman made himself sniff, and his knees wobbled in gratitude: not lethal. But no, of course not, he should have realized: two MPs lay unconscious in the connecting room and Kaufman’s own body blocked the door from sealing off this one. Not lethal, at least not to humans. But to the Faller … the sprays were set equidistant in all four walls of the cell …

Kaufman had the biggest body. Marbet fell first, landing on her back, the nipples of her small naked breasts like blind eyes. Capelo next, toppling almost gracefully from where he sat. Then the Faller, sagging in his manacles, and the last thought Kaufman had before he succumbed was,
If Grafton really wants the prisoner dead because he knows too much, this appears perfectly plausible. Shrewd choice.

His mind slipped away.

TWENTY-SEVEN

ABOARD THE
ALAN B. SHEPARD

C
apelo came slowly back to consciousness, and the Faller’s sketch came with him. The top figures weren’t flowers, as that fool Kaufman had suggested. They were Calabi-Yau spaces, the accepted configurations for the six curled-up dimensions of spacetime. The Faller’s drawing was stylized differently from humans’ stylizations, and hastily drawn as well. But Capelo was sure. The two figures inside the top half of the circle were two possible Calabi-Yau space configurations.

Including the Calabi-Yau equations in solving the riddle of the disrupter-beam shield had, of course, occurred to him long before. It had occurred to everybody long before. But the equations didn’t work, they yielded infinity. There was no way to make them work, no matter how you diddled the data. But that thick circular line leading to the Calabi-Yau—

“Dr. Capelo.”

—shapes suggested a connection to something else. And the line extended to—

“Dr. Capelo.”

—extended to—

“Dr. Capelo.”

He gave up and turned his face to the side. “Who the hell are you?”

“General Victoria Liu, Military Intelligence.”

Two stars on the shoulder. Of course; there would have to be someone like this somewhere, a SADA line officer whom Kaufman would have to report to on his unorthodox project. But where had she come from? Capelo didn’t care.

“Leave me alone.”

“I will. As soon as I inform you of a few crucial points. It won’t take long.”

Now that he had been jabbed away from Calabi-Yau dimensions and the thick circular line of the Faller’s drawing, Capelo took in his surroundings. Not his tiny cabin, not the brig, not the Faller’s cell. He lay on a bunk in a room fitted with desk, chair, paper, pencils, and access terminal. Through a half-opened door he glimpsed a bathroom. The other door had two e-locks.

“Am I under arrest?”

“Yes.” No hesitation at all. “But as I’m sure you understand, you’re a civilian. When we reach Mars, you will be turned over to a civilian court, if the prosecutor deems there to be sufficient charges.”

“Or if you tell him there are.”

She didn’t answer.

“All right, we understand each other. What do you want?”

“The same thing you do. The model and equations for the artifact’s functioning. Our aims are identical, Dr. Capelo, and without adversarial intent. You want to understand the artifact because you’re a scientist. You’re also a patriot, and you know we need that scientific breakthrough to win this war. There is no conflict between us.”

“Then why am I under arrest?” Capelo asked.

“Your methods so far have been irregular enough to warrant close supervision. I think you can’t disagree with that.”

“Very logical, aren’t you? Reasonable and agreeable. Are you a scientist, General?”

“I am not.”

“What makes you think I can create a ‘model and equations’?”

“Colonel Kaufman said you had some sort of breakthrough about the artifact physics just before we penetrated the scene.”

“He did? Maybe Lyle can’t tell a breakthrough from a breakdown. I had been swaddled in unwelcome tanglefoam, remember. Twice.”

“I remember.”

“Where are my kids?”

“With their nurse, as always. They haven’t been told you’re under arrest.”

“And I won’t see them until I cooperate, right?”

“Wrong. You can see them any time you wish.”

“What if I just want to see them and the hell with the ‘artifact physics,’ as you so simplistically and incorrectly label it?”

“That’s your privilege.”

“But when we get to Mars, I’m in jail until I produce, or until the Big Crunch, whichever comes first.”

She leaned forward earnestly. “Dr. Capelo, why would you even hesitate to create those equations? Hesitate to help your race when the enemy just wiped out ten million humans on Viridian?”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t ‘create the equations.’ But I don’t like being coerced.”

“You did flirt with treason, Doctor. And I think you know it.”

“All right, you made your point. Now get out.” She rose. Capelo sat up on the bunk. “No, wait a minute. Where are Lyle Kaufman and Marbet Grant?”

“Under arrest.”

“For more than a flirtation with treason. They bedded the old girl down and fucked her hard.”

“You have a colorful turn of phrase, Doctor. If you need anything at all, there’s a comlink in the desk drawer. Preset for certain types of ship access only.”

“Including my kids?”

“Of course.”

After she left, Capelo said to the computer, “On. Day and time.”

It said, “Wednesday, four hundred sixteen hours.”

He’d been unconscious about six hours. Undoubtedly they’d needed that much time to decide how to proceed with him, Kaufman, and Marbet. Kaufman was useless to Capelo. But he might need Marbet again, to help him check results with the Faller.

Sudden nausea spilled through him. A Faller, one of the bastards who killed Karen … Capelo had actually “talked” to that filthy thing, exchanged ideas with it. And forgotten what it was while he did so. That was the part that sickened him. He’d actually forgotten it was a Faller, thought only about that thick black line, as if it could outweigh Karen, outweigh Viridian, outweigh everything … Loathing for himself filled Capelo. That thick circular line …

That thick circular line.

The marker board with the Faller’s last drawing sat propped against the desk. Carefully, as if the floor were a minefield, Capelo got off the bunk. He sat at the access terminal and picked up the marker board. The room disappeared.

*   *   *

He started all over again, from the beginning, as if he had not already worked out anything. The marker board sat propped in front of him.
“Sit down before a fact as a little child,”
Thomas Henry Huxley had famously said,
“be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly to whatever abysses nature leads.”

Capelo the Great Crusading Lone Physicist tried to become a child.

A particle stream approaches a ship equipped with the disrupter shield, which is prime setting two on the artifact. Call it a proton beam, although it could just as well be photons focused into a laser, or a half-dozen other possibilities. Call it a proton beam. What happens next?

The beam is actually a stream of tiny oscillating threads. It is also, essentially, a moving smear of probabilities, as are all fundamental particles. The beam passes through the roiling frenzy that is the quantum world, in which particles are constantly deflected, constantly breaking apart and reforming, constantly erupting from the energy of the vacuum and disappearing again. But a proton is a heavy particle, compared to most of this frantic activity, so it speeds on its way without much interruption.

Unless a heavier particle hits it. All right, look again at that quantum agitation. A storm of known and unknown particles: virtual particles existing for a brief moment as well as more stable electrons, gravitons, photons, on and on. And, insists Capelo the Great Crusading Lone Physicist but no one else, also probons. Ubiquitous probons, woven into the very fabric of spacetime as thoroughly as are gravitons, so that gravity operates everywhere. As does probability.

Make the probon heavy, heavier even than Capelo the Great Crusading Lone Physicist had originally thought. Make it heavy because that’s why no particle accelerator anywhere in the Solar System can yet reach the energy levels needed to detect it, which explains why we haven’t. And make it heavy because the circling line on the Faller’s diagram was very heavy in relation to the line on an earlier drawing representing photons.

Each probon, like all fundamental particles, is made of tiny vibrating threads, and each is a smear of probabilities.

The probon is a messenger particle, just as gravitons are messenger particles for gravity and gluons are messenger particles for the strong force. The message it carries, the force it transmits, is probability. In the universe as we know it, probability decrees that the path an object takes
will
be the average of all paths, the path resulting from wave function amplitudes squared, the path that gravity-warped-by-mass makes into the path of least resistance. Mass tells space how to curve; space tells mass how to move.

The proton beam should therefore hit the ship.

But we know, have known for two hundred years, that a particle actually takes all possible paths. That proton beam has traveled directly to the ship, has traveled obliquely to the ship, has reached the ship by detouring first to the Andromeda Galaxy. All possible paths. Including through the six curled-up dimensions of spacetime, the Calabi-Yau spaces. That proton beam traveled through the Calabi-Yau dimensions countless times because the dimensions are so tiny, returning each time to its starting place. But, ultimately, the average of all these circuitous journeys is the least-resistance sum-over-paths integral, because that’s the force probons carry and it operates everywhere, just as gravitons make gravity operate everywhere.

Large masses warp gravity, sometimes to extremes, which is why you have black holes. What warps probons? The artifact? How?

By changing the beam’s probable path. But no detection equipment anywhere had detected the proton beam the
Alan B. Shepard
fired at the artifact. The beam hadn’t merely been deflected, it had disappeared. To where? You can’t just lose all that energy; the law of conservation of energy didn’t allow it.