PROBABILITY MOON

by Nancy Kress

  A hunger so fierce swept over her that, had she not known better, she would have said she still had her soul.

  “I accept the job, Pek Nagredil.”

  “Good. This is what has happened. A Terran who visited World before, one Ahmed Pek Bazargan, came yesterday in his metal flying boat to a village south of here, Gofkit Jemloe. He asked to live in the great household there, the Voratur, in return for any rent they chose to ask. Household Oversight approved the request, and naturally Hadjil Pek Voratur accepted.”

  “Naturally,” Enli said. Even in Gofkit Shamloe she had heard of the Voratur. They were a great trading family, rich and respected, and the Terrans had already demonstrated their willingness to share marvelous trade goods. Enli heard her own voice, and was glad it again sounded normal.

  “Six Terrans will live with the Voratur. Many sections of the government besides Household Oversight are interested in the Terran visit, as you can perhaps imagine.”

  Enli certainly could. So the question would bloom all over again, like the First Flower: Were the Terrans real?

  “You will live in the Voratur household, Pek Brimmidin,” Pek Nagredil said, “and you will inform on everything the Terrans do and say. Your position in the household will be cleaning servant, with special attention to the crelm house where the Voratur and Terran children will live.”

  “The … children? Terran children?”

  “Yes. You will—”

  “There are Terran children? What Terran children? Why would the Terrans bring children?”

  For the first time, Pek Nagredil looked slightly discomfited. “They say to raise them as Worlders. Along with the Voratur children.”

  Enli and Pek Nagredil stared at each other, the air heavy with what neither said. Children were not born real; they must grow to participate in shared reality. A few tragic empty ones never did so and must, of course, be destroyed. If the Terrans wanted their children “raised as Worlders,” did that mean they wanted them to become real? And did that in turn mean that the adult Terrans weren’t already real? That they had no souls?

  “You will report here every tenday,” Pek Nagredil said, taking visible refuge in normal routine, “and report everything you have learned about the Terrans. Every detail, no matter how small.”

  “Pek Nagredil,” Enli blurted, “am I going to be supplying information that actually determines whether or not Terrans are real?”

  “That’s not for you to know,” Pek Nagredil said severely, and Enli saw his skull ridges throb slightly. She knew he was right. She had no right to expect to know why she was informing, or what the information would be used for. To tell her those things would be to make her a sharer in reality, and she had excluded herself from that by her own crime.

  “Yes, Pek Nagredil,” Enli said. “I will report to the Voratur household tomorrow morning.”

  “You may go, Pek Brimmidin.” No farewell flower.

  Enli bicycled thoughtfully away from Rafkit Seloe, toward Gofkit Jemloe. The Voratur household did not expect her until tomorrow, but no one had said how early tomorrow. She would present herself at sunrise.

  By the time she reached the edge of Gofkit Jemloe, it was sunset. Enli found a quiet field, unrolled her bedsack, and cooked dinner on a small fire. As she worked, she kept glancing at the sky. Another clear night. Four moons were up: Ap, one of the two fast-blooming moons that raced across the sky more than once in a night; Lil; Cut; and luminous Obri, Home of the First Flower. Enli lay on her back in the bedsack, watching Obri. The sun sank below the horizon. Enli watched carefully, but no matter how hard she searched overhead with her splendid eyesight, the mysterious sunrise-and-sunset gleam in the sky wasn’t there.

  TWO

  ABOARD THE ZEUS

  Forty-five thousand kilometers above Rafkit Seloe, David Campbell Allen III stood in a bathroom aboard the Solar F Alliance Defense Council ship Zeus and breathed deeply to calm his panic.

  Damn it, he shouldn’t be feeling any panic! He had given a lot of thought to this morning’s Discipline, carefully designing the neuropharm mix for a dynamic balance between stability and hyperalertness. He took his neurological responsibility toward himself very seriously. (The boy’s a prig, Diana, he’d once overheard his father say. But then, his father would.) So why wasn’t the mixture right?

  Stepping to the wall, David stuck his finger in his biomonitor for another check. All readings looked fine: glutamate, serotonin, dopamine, cortical suppressant, amygdala regulator, P15, BDNF to strengthen the synaptic connections for learning in the hippocampus. All the rest. Maybe a touch too much noraldin, but within range for the state of mind he wanted. All right, then, the panic must be normal, too. He would handle it. He breathed deeply, bending his head toward the floor. Today, of all days, he wanted to be at his best, do his best.

  (The boy’s too earnest. Too rigid.)

  Why was he thinking so much about his father?

  All at once David realized the answer. It was the bathroom. It had been in a bathroom that he’d first told his father, the revered Barlin Prize winner in astrophysics four separate times, that his son was entering Princeton to study the squishy-soft field of alien anthropology. They’d been in the men’s room at Selfridge’s Restaurant, in Lowell City on Mars. David had picked a public bathroom for his announcement for a very good reason. It was the only place he could be sure his father would take a few more moments before turning around to face him.

  “Mr. Allen,” the system said melodiously, “message.”

  “On.”

  “The shuttle will be delayed five minutes.”

  “Thank you. Off.”

  David knotted his hair on top of his head and pulled on the Solar Alliance Defense Council civilian dress uniform, an oxymoron if he ever heard one. The official rationale was that a scientific expedition was always a representative of the home solar system, whether it was military, political, or Trans-Planetary University Foundation. They all received tax dollars from somebody’s government. The unofficial reason, David knew, was that uniforms reminded the expedition of what they were representing: the solar system in toto, not Mars or Luna or the Belt or the Confucian Hegemony or the United Atlantic Federation or any of the other possibilities. United in science. Officially, anyway.

  The problem was that the equivalent of an officer’s uniform was completely unsuited to fieldwork in anthropology. Stiff, intimidating, and equipped—God help us!—with a small ceremonial sword. Well, he wasn’t wearing that down to World. Obviously nobody had consulted a xenoscientist about designing the uniform. A sword. Might as well show up in a native village shooting a lasercannon. Anyway, after today the team would wear native dress.

  Time to go. His first trip as a xenologist, not counting university fieldwork. By any standards, a coup for his first time out; most graduate students had to be content with doing their practicum with well-worked-over aliens like the Tel or the Sien-Tu. Tame stuff. But here was David Allen on World, practically virgin territory. And he had gotten it on his own, without once asking his father to intercede. In fact, his father hadn’t even known he’d applied for the post. Didn’t know now, either, although that part of the expedition was a little vague to David. It had to do, Dr. Bazargan had explained, with the military presence aboard ship, and the war. Sensitive data. Secrecy was essential.

  David had nodded, but the truth was, he didn’t really care. As long as they didn’t encounter the Fallers on World—and he’d been assured they wouldn’t—the war was as remote to David as to most people in the solar system. It meant skirmishes fought only rarely, and elsewhere. He’d been too busy with his coursework to follow it closely. Anyway, science was concerned with knowledge for the ages, not with temporary political situations. Science was above all that.

  (The boy’s a prig, Diana.)

  He was ready to show them all.

  Dr. Ahmed Bazargan greeted his team as they assembled in the shuttle bay. Around them, the hydroponics workers loaded masses of cut flowers i
nto the shuttle. “Good morning, Ann. Ready to begin?”

  “Completely,” Mellianni Sikorski said, smiling. She was the team’s xenobiologist, an American, competent and experienced despite her youth; she was only thirty-seven. Bazargan had campaigned to get her. He’d worked with her once before, and she was invariably a calm and amiable presence. Perhaps she was simply unusually good at the Discipline, but Bazargan didn’t think it was that. Her stable sweetness seemed to go deeper, down to the bedrock of character. He had a nose for these things.

  Ann Sikorski specialized in the xenobiology of neurosys-tems. So far, it had been a disappointing field. Through the space tunnels, humans had discovered thirty-six other sentient species, and thirty-five of them had been, in essence, human. They possessed only minor variations in skeletal structure, biochemistry, genome, and neurology. The prevailing theory was that something—or some race—had seeded the galaxy with a common pseudo-human ancestor, and subsequent evolution had diverged only as various planetary conditions favored. The thirty-five sentient species ranged from stone-age cultures to middle industrial.

  That made sense. The mathematics of probability was not Bazargan’s field, but he did understand the inspection paradox: In any statistical distribution, entities that have already begun their lifetimes will have longer-than-average lifetimes. It applied to middle-aged people, and to middle-aged species. The probability had always been that Sol was thus one of the more advanced galactic civilizations.

  Except, of course, for whatever vanished race had done the initial seeding. And for the Fallers.

  Bazargan watched Ann smile at the approaching geologist for the team, Dieter Gruber. Unlike Ann, who had a long, plain, washed-out face (no genemod enhancements for beauty in her family, obviously), Gruber was an impressive physical specimen. Enhanced? Probably, although that very personal information was not in the team files. Gruber, a German, looked like somebody’s idea of a Teutonic prince: big, blond, blue-eyed, with an irreverent grin. His scientific record was good, even brilliant. Capable and agreeable, he nonetheless showed flashes of stubborn independence. Still, Bazargan anticipated no difficulties in working with the geologist, who in any case would spend much of his time off alone at promising sites.

  Bazargan wasn’t quite so sure about David Allen.

  The young intern walked too quickly toward them. Allen, who had grown up so internationally that it hardly mattered what country or planet he’d been born on, had showed competence in his student fieldwork. He also had an unusual flair for languages, better than Bazargan himself. In the team’s preparatory language immersion on Earth, judiciously aided by chemical and digital boosters, Allen had mastered World astonishingly fast. He’d also done exceptionally well at reading World facial-and-skull-ridge expressions on the recordings made by the first team.

  But against all that, Allen was mostly untried, and there was a quality about him that made Bazargan uneasy: an intensity, a fervid idealism that Bazargan suspected was capable of reaching hysteria. It was a quality familiar to Bazargan; in his native Iran it was possessed by politicians and ayatollahs, revolutionaries and generals. It had caused Iran centuries of bloody unrest, and Bazargan, himself a careful and methodical realist, distrusted David Allen’s capacity for idealism. Look at the way the boy obsessively practiced the Discipline, monitoring his neuropharm mixture several times a day, turning a tool for mental acuity into a religion. If Bazargan had had a choice, Allen would not be filling the obligatory graduate-student position on this scientific expedition, which already had too many anomalies surrounding it.

  But Bazargan had not had a choice. Science, no less than Solar Alliance Defense, had its politics. Anthropology was perpetually underfunded. There was a war on (there was always a war on). The word came down from the Trans-Planetary University Foundation: David Campbell Allen’s father wishes his son to be a member of this expedition. Funding may depend on this. Bazargan had made the best of it. David Allen would be the backup anthropologist for the nursery study.

  Of course, Bazargan had expected that the babies’ mother would be alive, running the study. But anthropologist Dr. Hannah Mason had died in a freak electrical accident aboard the Zeus, and Bazargan, stuck with deploying his small team as efficiently as possible, must needs make do with David Allen because the senior Allen wanted it so.

  And Bazargan understood. That was how it still worked in Iran: family first. But he wondered if the boy knew. Probably not. Allen struck Bazargan as capable of an enormous amount of self-delusion.

  “Sorry I’m late,” David said.

  “You’re not,” Bazargan said pleasantly. “Leila hasn’t come down yet with the twins.”

  “David,” Ann said, smiling at him. “Ready to go down?”

  “More than ready. You aren’t wearing your sword, either, I see.”

  “A sword,” Dieter Gruber said, grinning. “Well, at least we don’t need to be armed against tanglefoam or proton beams.”

  Ann said, “What were the uniform designers thinking of?”

  “The Solar Alliance,” Allen said. “Or rather, solar reliance—relying on a uniform to remind us that our separate governments are supposed to be anything but.”

  “Which is only one reason you should be wearing the sword,” said another voice behind Bazargan. “A uniform is not an à la carte menu, mister.”

  Bazargan turned, although of course he already knew who the speaker was; there was no mistaking that note of authority. Colonel Dr. Syree Johnson, military physicist, headed this scientific expedition, although she would not be descending to the planet. Why not? Space physics, Bazargan had been told, vaguely and unconvincingly. One of the expedition anomalies.

  David Allen flushed. “A sword is inappropriate to fieldwork, Colonel. It sends the natives the message that we are unfriendly.”

  “It is part of the uniform for dress occasions,” Colonel Johnson said. “The first meeting of your scientific team with the natives is a dress occasion. You need not wear the uniform for your fieldwork.”

  Allen began, with too much heat, “It’s more important to—”

  “Put on your sword,” Bazargan said clearly. “You, too, Ann and Dieter. And I will get mine.”

  Ann and Gruber both nodded and started toward their quarters. David, still flushed, set his lips together and also obeyed. Bazargan had been curious to see if he would.

  When the three returned, swords at their sides, Colonel Johnson was in conference with Commander Rafael Peres, captain of the Zeus, and Chief Engineer Major Canton Lee. David Allen said, sulkily but low, “There. I’m adequately armed, just to please the colonel. Why does she limp, anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” Bazargan said, although he did.

  “Easy enough to grow a replacement leg, and the Alliance would pay for it. Looks pretentious not to fix that limp.”

  “Here comes Leila,” Bazargan said pointedly.

  Corporal Leila DiSilvo entered the flight bay, pushing the twins. Ben and Bonnie Mason lay in a double flight seat, both asleep. Ann looked down at the sleeping babies, fourteen months old, strapped in for the flight down. “Poor pumpkins.”

  “What’s a ‘pumpkin’?” Allen said, with a shade of defiance left over from Colonel Johnson. “And why ‘poor’?”

  “A pumpkin’s a Terran vegetable, not grown much anymore. And ‘poor’ because any child who loses its mother and never knew its father is poor.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you’d had my mother and father,” Allen said, and Bazargan saw that the boy instantly regretted saying it. He didn’t want Ann Sikorski, ten years older and female, to pity him. Ann, always tactful, merely said lightly, “Ben and Bonnie will have you, and the World children as well. They’ll be fine.”

  Bazargan smiled. Americans dismissed family so lightly. He was used to it, but he still didn’t understand it.

  Colonel Johnson finished her conversation with the ship’s officers and turned again to Bazargan. “Good luck, Doctor.”

 
; “Thank you, Colonel.”

  “Do you wish to go over the emergency recall signals again?”

  “No. We are fully prepared.”

  “Then Allah be with you.”

  Bazargan was surprised. There was more to Colonel Johnson, that military martinet, than he had supposed.

  “Thank you. Ann, David, Dieter … we go.”

  As the shuttle, piloted by the popular and easygoing Captain Daniel Austen, pulled away from the Zeus, everyone looked down at the planet below. A scrap of Persian poetry came to Bazargan, as it so often did when he reflected on anything at all: Be fearful of trouble when all seems fair and clear, / For the easy is soon made grievous by the swift transforming fear. Khusrau, eleventh century.

  Although there was no reason to expect either fear or grief on World, the most idyllic civilization scientists had ever discovered. The planet was lush and fertile, the monolithic (why?) civilization peaceful and comfortable. No, this would be just another routine field trip. Gather data, go home, analyze, publish.

  And yet … there were those anomalies. Why had the recon team been ordered back to Earth after only two months? The scientists had assumed some dire development in the war, and had undoubtedly fretted during the entire eight E-day travel time from World to Space Tunnel #438. But there had been no dire developments in the war. Nor had there been any explanation of the hasty departure from World, although the scientists aboard had fumed and petitioned and filed official protests. The team had never published: “insufficient data.”

  The scientists hadn’t even been able to agree among themselves on the central issue of World culture: Why was it so uniform? Was the “shared reality” that dominated Worlders a political control mechanism, a religious belief, or—Ann’s hope—an actual unique biological development in the aliens’ evolution?

  Insufficient data.

  Why was this replacement team so small, and so hastily assembled, and so covert?

  Insufficient data.

  Why did military physicists outnumber anthropologists on what was supposed to be an anthropological expedition—moreover, military physicists listed on the ship’s roster merely as “chief engineer,” “third officer,” and “shuttle pilot”? Bazargan had his own sources of information; in Iran you did not survive without them. But why was the secrecy deemed necessary?