PROBABILITY MOON

by Nancy Kress

  On the other hand, it had been made by the same beings who made the tunnels. Perhaps that would make a difference. Although, why would it?

  Why wouldn’t it?

  Lucy Wu said, “Can we take the artifact apart? And reassemble it beyond Space Tunnel #438?”

  Ombatu said, “Do you have any ideas how to do that safely, Lieutenant? Or how to do it all?”

  Lucy Wu blushed and looked down at the floor.

  Syree said crisply, “We need more data on the interior. Maybe those massless constructs are modular, even though we know the hull isn’t.”

  Lee said, “I don’t know how to determine that, ma’am. The design is so alien …”

  “It will become less alien as we study it.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Lee said, but he sounded doubtful. So was Syree. She just didn’t see any other alternative, at least not as yet.

  On the third day after the accident, Daniel Austen could no longer talk. The inside of his mouth, like his skull and body, had become a mass of oozing sores. By the fourth day his body had swelled so much from edema that he couldn’t move, and only heavy doses of painkillers kept the pressure of the bed from being an agony. On the fifth day he died.

  They buried him in space, with a small service in the chapel for the military officers and medtechs. In the space for “Religion” on Austen’s service file, he had entered “None.” Syree dumped the standard military funeral script for secular personnel. She had heard it too often, and it was too bland. It didn’t fit Austen, with his constant ship chatter, his irreverence, his jaunty bravery. Let the games begin.

  Instead she recited a poem from Kipling, one her grandmother had quoted often. The Johnsons were not ones for poetry, but Grandmother Emily had liked Kipling. A soldier’s poet, she’d always said. Syree stood at the front of the tiny chapel, trying not to favor her left leg. She recited the Kipling as she remembered it, knowing the verses were not complete, knowing they were enough.

  “‘There was no one like him, Horse or Foot,

  Nor any of the guns I knew;

  And because it was so, why of course he went and died,

  Which is just what the best men do.

  “He was all that I had in the way of a friend,

  And I’ve had to find one new;

  But I’d give my pay and stripe for to get the beggar back,

  Which it’s just too late to do.

  “Take him away! He’s gone where the best men go …’”

  After the brief service, Syree went to the small observation chamber of the Zeus. The bridge had sharper virtual displays, but she wanted to look out on space for real, not at a digitalized simulation. Below her, World turned slowly, its single equatorial continent like a thick irregular belt around a fat civilian belly. But it wasn’t World she observed. She waited impassively until Orbital Object #7 sped by, lower than the Zeus, dazzlingly bright from the sun’s reflection off its high-albedo surface. Outlying instrument satellites monitored it constantly, of course, and their data were instantly available to Syree. But she wanted to see again, for herself, what had killed Daniel Austen.

  It looked exactly the same.

  FIVE

  GOFKIT JEMLOE

  The first major difficulty arose over flowers. Dr. Bazargan had anticipated it, but that made it no less awkward.

  He stood with Ann in her laboratory, or what passed for a lab on World. It was a large, airy room of irregular shape, with curving walls and many arched windows opening onto gardens. By Terran standards, World was a generous planet: fertile, warm, seasonless, plentiful. Building materials abounded, so walls could be made wastefully irregular. Food abounded, so the relatively small population (why? unknown so far) could spend vast resources cultivating flowers. Not even the gardens of Isfahan, the ancient Iranian city where Bazargan had been born, had had gardens to compare with those on World.

  Although Isfahan and World were closer than Bazargan had expected. Isfahan, the “Pearl of Persia” even now that it had become a museum city, also had curving doorways, arched windows overlooking elaborate gardens, pale walls (although on World they were lightest green rather than white). The saji tree outside Ann’s window, with its fragrant pink blooms, might have been a flowering almond tree in the Maidan. The swooping designs painted on the lab floor would not have been out of place on an Iranian rug or tapestry. And although in an Iranian “healer’s” workplace the lab benches would not also be curved in parabolas, nor would the ceiling rise in a dome, the overall effect didn’t feel particularly alien to Bazargan. Certainly not as alien as Argos City on Europa, where he had done graduate field work on the organisms living in hot springs below the ice. There, the people had looked like him and the environment had been exotic; here, the reverse was true.

  Beyond the lab windows, Hadjil Pek Voratur strolled through the garden in all its curving glory. World averaged roughly the same received energy per square foot as Earth, but in a shifted spectrum. To human eyes, adaptable as they were, the landscape looked subtly off in a way difficult to define. Still, the Voratur gardens were staggeringly beautiful. Colors, scents, shapes—all perfectly balanced. Even the insects that fertilized the riotous blooms fit with the garden’s serenity: They neither bit nor stung. “Lifegivers,” the Worlders called them, and they fascinated the biologist in Ann Sikorski.

  “They perch on my hand, my body, my legs, Ahmed—but never on my head. Never!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No, not yet. I haven’t run any experiments. But I’ve never seen them land on a Worlder’s head, either—have you?”

  “I haven’t been watching, but I will,” Bazargan replied, watching instead the native “assistant” assigned by Hadjil Voratur to Ann. Enli Pek Brimmidin. The girl was a spy, of course. To be expected.

  Hadjil Voratur reached the lab doorway, his sleek bulk blocking nearly all of it. “Pek Bazargan,” Voratur said, smiling. He held out a visitor’s flower, orange and yellow striped petals. “I honor the flowers of your heart.”

  “Pek Voratur,” Bazargan answered, plucking a hospitality flower from the pajal bush Ann kept by the door. “You are welcome to the flowers of your own house.”

  Voratur laughed. Worlders, Bazargan had discovered, possessed a multifaceted sense of humor. They appreciated whimsy, exaggeration, irony. Only social satire was alien to them; satire required distance from one’s own social conventions, difficult in a biologically monocultural world.

  “May your flowers also bloom, Pek Sikorski,” Voratur said to Ann. “Although that is what I am here to talk about, alas.”

  Bazargan said, “That our flowers do not bloom for you.”

  “You knew this?” Voratur said in surprise, genuine or feigned. “That we would plant the seeds from your visitors’ flowers and the seeds would fail to grow?”

  “I knew,” Bazargan said, “that such a skillful gardener and canny trader could not fail to do otherwise.”

  Voratur looked gratified; there was no higher compliment on World than “skillful gardener.” Although the gratification, too, might have been feigned. Bazargan felt at home with this play of sham emotion. In Iran, it was a necessity of survival.

  He was especially interested in how Voratur’s playacting—if such it was—fit in with the concept of totally shared reality, without subterfuge. There were two possibilities. One was that everyone in the culture knew that playacting was a part of trading, which made even sham statements fully shared in their essence. The other hypothesis was that sham statements were permitted only with Terrans, who were outside the culture. Bazargan did not yet have enough evidence to choose.

  Ann, he saw, was less comfortable with the trader’s feigned innocence. She had grown up in the American middle provinces, where straightforwardness was a virtue.

  Voratur said, “May I ask why the Terran flower seeds did not grow for us? Is Terran soil needed?”

  “No,” Bazargan said. “The seeds did not grow by design. We treated them specially.” Every bloom
brought down to World had been irradiated to sterility. “You see, Pek Voratur, these flowers do not grow naturally on World. Has it ever happened here that some very strong plant from, say, an outlying island has been brought to an inland village, planted, and perhaps completely taken over the flower bed?”

  “Ah, I see,” Voratur said. “You protect us from your beautiful flowers.”

  “From their unknown effects,” Bazargan said, smiling. The trader had no idea how far that protection in fact extended. The human team had been thoroughly decontaminated, inside and out. Every necessary microbe that could be replaced by a genemod version unable to survive outside the human body, had been. No one was naive enough to think that World would remain. untouched by the human presence, but the goal was to make that touch as delicate and smudge-free as possible.

  Voratur appeared to consider. “Let me propose a different trade. You will give us fertile seeds of your slowest-growing, hardest-to-grow flowering plant, and I will undertake to grow it in a glassed garden, with World flowers, until we are sure it can do no harm.”

  Bazargan pretended to ponder. This had all been foreseen, and hydroponic geneticists aboard the Zeus had developed a genetically modified crimson rose with limited competitive ability. Also, it would produce only three generations. The fourth-generation germ-line recombination activated a terminator gene that flooded the seeds with biotoxins. However, it would be a while before Voratur discovered that his roses had turned sterile and the negotiations proceeded to the next round.

  Bazargan said, “That is a possibility. But you spoke of a trade …”

  “What would you like in return, Pek Bazargan?”

  Ann looked sharply at Bazargan. He knew what she wanted.

  “Pek Voratur,” he said formally, “what I ask is ten minutes of time from you. In this ten minutes, we will put a metal hat on your head and a machine of ours will take a picture of your brain. That is all.”

  “A picture of my brain?” Voratur said, and this time Bazargan was sure his emotion was not feigned. Voratur’s neckfur ruffled in alarm, and his skull ridges creased into deep folds. “How can this be? The brain lies hidden from view inside the skull.”

  “Yes,” Bazargan said, “but our hat can see through the skull. It will not hurt, it will not affect you in any way, and it will take only ten minutes. In return, we will give you seeds for flowers such as World has never seen.”

  Voratur hesitated. Ann held her breath; a Lagerfeld combined brain scan was a major tool in neurobiology. Bazargan saw the trader’s greed war with the provincial’s distaste.

  Something else entirely won out.

  “The soul lives in the brain,” Voratur said reluctantly. “I cannot risk exposing my soul to something I do not understand. Perhaps if you gave me one of these hats to explore beforehand, or traded it to me …”

  “Alas, I cannot do that,” Bazargan said regretfully. He didn’t need to say more. Voratur was an ideal alien contact; as a successful trader, he understood the limits of what one was willing to give away for free.

  “Then I must refuse the brain picture and ask you to name another price for the flower seeds.”

  “Let me think about it,” Bazargan said. That would give the Worlder time to think about it as well; he might change his mind. Although the recon team had run up against the same refusal. “Perhaps you could consult the servants of the First Flower.”

  “Perhaps, perhaps,” Voratur said, although this would most likely not help Bazargan’s suit. Whatever Voratur thought, the priests would also think. Shared reality.

  Voratur added, “A bargain should be possible between us, Pek. You Terrans came to trade, did you not? The previous Terrans said, ‘We will return for the manufactured item.’”

  “They did?” Bazargan said, startled. He recovered himself. “Yes, of course. Terra is a noted trader among her neighbors.”

  “So we supposed,” Voratur said, his eyes sharp in his fleshy face. “Tell me, Pek Bazargan, must this brain picture be of me? Would any Worlder do as well?”

  “Yes,” Bazargan said. Voratur nodded, made his farewells, and left. Was he considering one of the servants? Although he would only do so if the servant, the priests, and everyone else concurred. That was how World worked. But a servant might be paid enough to voluntarily take the risk. That, too, was how World worked.

  “Do you think he will agree?” Ann asked, in English. “A Lagerfeld scan would be great!”

  “I don’t know if he will agree or not,” Bazargan said, in World. He didn’t like to exclude Ann’s alien assistant when the girl was present. Nor to give Enli reason to report back to Voratur that the Terrans were plotting in secret tongues, which might easily be construed as witchcraft. Priests everywhere could construe that.

  Ann nodded; usually she remembered to speak World, even though hers was not as good as Bazargan’s. This time excitement had gotten the better of her. “A brain picture,” she said carefully, “will help us to choose an idea about the central question.”

  “Yes,” Bazargan said. He understood her excitement. For Ann, the xenobiologist, the “central question” was the bio-mechanism of shared reality. Unlike Bazargan, she was convinced it was biological, and had formulated several hypotheses to explain it. A virus which, like neurosyphilis, overexcited one specific area of the brain. Or a condition like Tourette’s syndrome, which increased excitatory transmitters only at specific sites. Or mutant peptides present only under pathological behavioral conditions, such as the tripeptide found in anorexia nervosa.

  Bazargan added, only partly for the benefit of Enli, “Shared reality is a moral idea.”

  Ann again switched to English. “The relationship between affective and moral sensibility is always complicated.”

  Bazargan smiled. “I know.”

  “I meant cerebrally, in the frontal cortex.”

  “But I did not.”

  Ann laughed, her long plain face aglow, and turned back to her work. Bazargan’s gaze snagged on Enli.

  She bent closely over her bench, preparing thin sections of leaves for the atomic analyzer, as Ann had shown her. Unlike human hair, neckfur could not grow long enough to hide facial expressions. Enli’s skull ridges were deeply creased; her lips were pulled slightly back over her teeth; her coarse neckfur stood out. The alien girl was terrified.

  Of what? Enli hadn’t looked like that when Bazargan had entered the room. He considered. If Enli’s fear had started when Voratur asked whether anyone at all could be the subject of the brain scan, that was interesting. Not if her fear was only provincial fear of the unknown, but if it was due to something else … to what? Was Enli hiding something?

  The lily seemed to menace me/ And showed its curved and quivering blade … Hāfez. Fourteenth century.

  It was something to think about, along with everything else. World, with its complex ecology and even more complex society, was a fascinating planet. As were the natives, with their sophisticated sense of humor and finely honed acquisitiveness. Engaging, even. As long as you didn’t trust them too far.

  David Allen felt he had come home. World was what he’d been looking for his whole life.

  True, the crelm house isolated him a bit; he saw much more of babies than of government, of teething schedules than of manhood rituals (if they existed). But so what? There was material here for a dozen major anthropological papers, and all of it was interesting. His gift for languages had paid off. He spoke World better even than Dr. Bazargan, or at least with a better accent, and each evening after the crelm house lay asleep David had hardly time enough to record all his observations and ideas about the day. When he returned to Princeton, he would be an instant star in the small, fierce, fiercely coveted world of xenoanthropology.

  But it was more than the career opportunity that David loved about World. He wasn’t, he told himself proudly, that shallow. World represented far more than journal articles. It represented no less than a chance for humanity to remake itself.

  Th
inking about this actually took his breath away. At night he lay in his “personal room,” a combination of bedroom and private dining room, and shifted around on the uncomfortable pallet, unable to sleep. His mind raced, and his heart along with it. Don’t be grandiose, he would tell himself; and, In the morning be sure to adjust your Discipline for greater calm. The admonitions didn’t help. His mind still soared.

  Shared reality was the key. There had never been a war on World. Not so much as a border skirmish. The Worlders he talked to, nannies and the other tutor, Colert Pek Gamolin, explained it all casually, as if he already knew it. Which he did, from the recon team, but that was not the same as seeing it in action. When two people were not in harmony, when they did not share the same beliefs and values and worldview, they got headpain. It was as simple as that. You cannot launch a war if it will cause you major pain, and it would, because the people you were slaughtering would not share your view that this was a good thing, and you couldn’t help but know that. No, feel it, in the intimate cells of your brain, to the point of agony. So the plans for war could not even be made. And were not.

  Unpremeditated murder still existed, of course. The time it took to smash someone over the head with whatever was handy was an eye blink, not enough to cause deterrent pain. You’d have the pain afterward, maybe … wouldn’t you? He’d have to ask Colert Gamolin. Either way, the main idea was untouched.

  Humans could end war.

  All they had to do was figure out the physiological mechanism for shared reality, and then import it as a dominant gene into engineered human embryos. These genemod people would then cooperate with each other in shared reality. Cooperation was, in the long run, a more powerful evolutionary strategy than violence, once a species was high-tech. Those in shared reality would pass the successful strategy on to their children, until the solar system became the nonviolent paradise that World was.