PROBABILITY MOON

by Nancy Kress

  “I inventoried the supplies,” she told Bazargan. “They left us some of the food powder, one small torch, an expando for water, my medkit, and all the blankets. But …”

  “But what?”

  “They took Dieter’s geology equipment, of course. But they also took his gun.”

  “The gun,” Bazargan repeated stupidly.

  “The one we didn’t know he had. That he used to get us out of the Voratur household.”

  “Yes,” Bazargan said wearily. When faith went, it was as if half of a balance had been sheared off. “I remember. The gun. But who has it, and for what?”

  TWENTY

  IN THE NEURY MOUNTAINS

  Enli prepared herself to die, with rejoicing that she tried not to let Pek Allen see.

  He had woken her in the sheltered cave, where she lay asleep in her strange Terran suit beside Pek Sikorski. So close was Ann that Enli could feel the woman’s soft breath on her own cheek. But Ann had not stirred when Pek Allen leaned over Enli to put his lips to her ear and the gun—there was no World word—to her neck. “Come with me, Enli. Quietly. Now.”

  She had risen silently and moved with him out of the cave. Pek Bazargan and Pek Sikorski slept deeply. Enli didn’t see Pek Gruber; he must be farther back. She and Pek Allen padded beyond the circle of light thrown by the torch, groped through the gloom beyond, and emerged into the deeper blackness of a starless night in the tiny mountain valley. The air smelled of coming rain. Pek Allen switched on his own torch, much less powerful than Pek Gruber’s big one, and led her by the hand around the valley’s perimeter to the tunnel leading to the vug. Only when they were inside did he speak to her again.

  “Don’t be frightened, Enli. I would never ever hurt you.”

  Enli nodded. She wasn’t frightened. Whether Pek Allen killed her, or she died in whatever plan he was trying to carry out, didn’t matter. The important thing was that she was going to die here. Here, beyond the reach of the priests that would imprison her in chemicals and glass and so prevent her from rejoining her ancestors. Here, deep in the forbidden mountains, her body would decay and so release her soul, and Enli would rejoin her ancestors. It was a great gift Pek Allen was giving her.

  Of course, there was still Tabor, imprisoned in chemicals and glass at Ano’s house. But once Enli was safe in the spirit world, perhaps she could work to free Tabor from there. Such things were not unknown. Send dreams to the priests, trouble Ano’s sleep (poor Ano), do what great and unknown things would be within her new powers, and their ancestors’. Yes, Pek Allen was Enli’s savior, and her gratitude ran deep.

  “You must see,” Pek Allen went on, in his fluent World, “what’s happening here. Of course you do, you can share reality. The others can’t. Bazargan, Dieter, even Ann—you see that, of course. They’re limited, narrow-visioned, evil. Yes, evil, Enli, like the bad unreal that disturb dreams. I’ve come to realize that. Bazargan in particular. He’s in on the priests’ conspiracy to keep human and Worlder from ever becoming one. He wants to prevent that so that together he and the priests can rule World!”

  Enli nodded again. She didn’t know the Terran word evil, but it didn’t matter. Pek Allen was clearly crazed. The soil of his mind had soured, and the blooms growing from it were twisted and misshapen. Just looking at him, one would know that even though he had been real yesterday, something had happened to him during this dreamlike trip through the home of the First Flower. The muscles of his Terran face twitched, and his strangely lit eyes burned. Like a fire, his whole body gave off heat, consuming itself. Enli revised her thinking yet again. Whatever the other Terrans might be, David Pek Allen was the most unreal person Enli had ever seen.

  She wondered why she didn’t have a headpain near him. Because she didn’t. Perhaps it was a gift from the First Flower, here in the home of Her soul. Enli could think of no other explanation.

  “But I’m on to them,” Pek Allen said. “They won’t win. The shared-reality mechanism belongs to us all, and it’s up to me to see it is given to all. There’s no one else, Enli—you see that, of course. It was all fated. I didn’t choose to become the savior of my race and yours—I was chosen. To refuse to act now would be evil. What was it that Earthman said once? ‘For evil to triumph, all that is required is that good men do nothing.’ No! Whatever my father thinks of me!”

  He was mixing World and Terran words now. Enli breathed deeply. If he killed her here, maybe Pek Bazargan would carry her body out to Rafkit Seloe. It was the kind of thing Pek Bazargan would do: a responsible, head-of-household thing. Then the priests would imprison her, unreal forever. She must not let Pek Allen kill her here.

  She put a hand on his arm. “We should start now.”

  His eyes blazed even brighter. “Yes! You do see! I knew you would! Follow me, Enli. Don’t be afraid.”

  Torch glowing, he led her into the tunnel, still knee-deep in water. Enli sloshed through, sticking close to Pek Allen. Her Terran suit and boots kept her warm, but Pek Allen, suitless, must be chilled to his lungs. He didn’t act chilled. He pushed forward, sometimes falling, scrambling again to his feet, talking the whole time. To her? To himself? He didn’t seem able to stop.

  “People are afraid to act in favor of truth. Not because it’s dangerous, no. Because they’re afraid of looking like fools, choosing the wrong side, risking their status, failing … oh, a thousand things! Rotten cowardly things … it’s only when someone is willing to act, willing to do right, willing to risk failure … I won’t fail. I can’t. History is on my side, the triumph of the bold idea in the long run … all through history! Galileo … Humility, Enli. That’s what I feel. It’s an honor to be the one chosen to do this, I didn’t ask for the honor, my God what my father will know about me when he hears—but that’s not the reason. Never! Someone must act for truth and salvation … conspiracy to gain power, the most despicable of ends … at the expense of peace and shared reality! My God! What people are …”

  They came to the vug. Enli shook the water off her boots. Pek Allen swung the torch upward to shine on the ceiling. Gold glittered and sparkled. Gold surrounded the human, standing there dripping and raving, his twitching face on fire with unreality. Enli looked away.

  But Pek Allen must not kill her here, either. Bazargan would too easily find her body. It must happen somewhere she could decay without disturbance.

  “Can you do it, Enli? Can you go through that narrow tunnel again, can you? Here, take the torch, you’re going first, can you do it?”

  Why did she not have headpain enough to cleave her skull? Why?

  “I can do it.”

  “Of course you can. I’ll be right behind you. Here, go ahead, don’t be afraid, you can do it, we can do whatever needs to be done, the strength comes from somewhere have you noticed that when the need is crucial enough I didn’t ask to be chosen—”

  It was a relief to wiggle into the narrow tunnel and cut off his voice.

  Enli dragged herself forward on her elbows, protected by the tough suit. The torch lit the narrow walls and rough rock ceiling. Shorter than she remembered, the tunnel ended high in the rock wall. A stink drifted toward her.

  Just beyond here was the place she’d had diarrhea from the Terran food powders. They’d have to go back that way, and Terrans always acted strangely around shit. Well, Pek Allen could hardly act more strangely than he already was.

  Enli had eaten nothing since the food powders. Her belly rumbled as she emerged, headfirst, from the tiny tunnel. Let it rumble. Soon enough it would be still.

  Return to her ancestors! If she did it by her own hand, of course, they would reject her completely, never allow her into the spirit world. But it would not be by her own hand. Unlike Tabor, lying dead at the foot of a flower altar—an almost unthinkable blasphemy in itself. Dead by his own hand, because he and she had loved too much, more than brother and sister should ever think of doing … Even now she could remember the touch of his hands on the secret places of her body …

 
No headpain. Why not?

  Enli pushed herself out from the rock wall as far as her waist. She shone the torch downward, looking for a handhold. Below her to her right an irregular boulder jutted from the wall. By grasping it as she wriggled the rest of the way free, she broke her fall slightly, although the hard stone still bruised her through the untorn suit.

  A moment later Pek Allen shot out of the tunnel and spilled heavily to the floor. He staggered to his feet and grinned at her. Blood poured from his wide shoulders, suitless, and from one cheek. It stained his lips so that tiny flecks flew off as he talked. He didn’t seem to notice.

  “So far, so good! Come on, Enli, we can do it, we’re almost out!”

  They were nowhere near almost out. Pek Allen grabbed her hand, reclaimed his torch, and strode down the rough tunnel, slipping and lurching and talking, talking, talking. He didn’t seem to even notice the odor of shit, nor the shit itself when they walked right through it.

  They came to another cave, small and irregularly shaped, with two tunnels branching off it. No, Enli thought as Pek Allen swept his torch across the walls … three tunnels. His voice didn’t falter.

  “This is the right one, Enli, where Dieter took us before. We came this way, I’m sure of it, come on! Who knows how long before that demented Colonel Johnson explodes the alien weapon in the moon? … explodes the moon! My God! She’s in on the conspiracy, of course, she’ll share in the power with Bazargan and the filthy priests, rulers of a whole world some people need that crave it it’s like a sickness in their blood, Enli, but even so—come on! This is the right tunnel!”

  Enli knew it was not.

  She thought rapidly. If they went down the wrong tunnel, they might both die—she when this crazed Terran turned on her and killed her, he if he could not find his way back. His might be a horrible death, from starvation or injury. But if Pek Allen did find his way out of the mountains, he would be killed by the first people to recognize him, which would be the first people who saw him. By now everyone on World would have shared reality about the Terrans.

  Pek Allen would be killed swiftly and without pain, but afterward his body would be imprisoned in chemicals and glass and prevented from returning to his own ancestors. (Did Terrans have ancestors? Of course, they must.) On the other hand, if Pek Allen starved to death inside the Neury Mountains, his body, like hers, could release his soul. If he had one. Did he?

  The other Terrans did. No matter what the priests said, Pek Bazargan and Pek Gruber and Pek Sikorski, gentle Ann, were real. And so perhaps even the deranged soul of Pek Allen might return to reality, by the sweetness of the First Flower, if the twisted vessel of his mind were allowed to release it naturally.

  “Enli! Can’t you hear me? This is the right tunnel!”

  “Yes, Pek Allen,” she said. “It is.”

  TWENTY–ONE

  IN THE NEURY MOUNTAINS

  Bazargan and Ann waited in the upland valley. For what, they weren’t sure, but it seemed the best of their limited options.

  They had discussed following the three runaways. But follow where? On the other side of the vug was the body-wide high tunnel; Bazargan knew he could not wiggle through it a second time. He just couldn’t. He and Ann decided not to separate: too dangerous. A number of tunnels seemed to branch off their small valley, but there was no way to know where they led, or which one the others might have taken, or why. So they mixed food powders and fetched water, and then Ann gathered more plant samples and Bazargan tried, without success, to raise the Zeus.

  “Ann, tell me what you know about grandiose paranoid schizophrenia.”

  Ann waved an insect away from her hand. They sat on the ground just beyond the overhang, Ann’s samples spread on a blanket in front of her. “Not much, I’m afraid. A lot of mental diseases have yielded to biochemical analysis and cure, but not the delusional ones. We can alleviate symptoms, but we can’t remedy the chemical causes of schizophrenia the way we can for simpler disorders like depression or anxiety. The neurological origins of schizophrenia are too multiple.”

  “Do you think David is delusional?”

  Ann answered slowly. Her fair hair fell in greasy lanks around her scratched and smudged face. “Yes, I do. But I don’t know to what extent. If I could test his blood for phenylethy-lanine … David hasn’t talked to us much in the last few days, you know. He was holding it all in, everything about the twins’ murder and Colonel Johnson’s lies and whatever af fected our brains when we passed through this field Dieter keeps talking about. But I don’t know if he’ll hold it in indefinitely.”

  “Do you think David’s condition was affected by Dieter’s ‘field’? Any more than the rest of us?”

  “Yes. Although I don’t know why. Any more than I know why Enli is suddenly able to tolerate such big jolts to her conception of reality. She should be having crippling headaches, nausea, even shock. And all of a sudden she’s not.”

  “Ann, you know Dieter better than any of us. Where do you think he took David and Enli?”

  “You’re assuming he took them, rather than David taking them. At gunpoint.”

  Bazargan shifted on the hard ground. “No, I’m not. I thought of that. But they’ve been gone at least twelve hours by now. Dieter is strong, and smart, and far more experienced in this environment than David. If David was fool enough to take Dieter prisoner, I can’t believe Dieter would stay a prisoner. Not if he’s unfettered enough to go spelunking.”

  “Then why didn’t Enli scream or something? None of it makes sense. I don’t … Did you see that?”

  “See what?” Bazargan hadn’t seen anything but more insects. Lifegivers, Worlders called them, the pollinators of their precious flowers. The swarm had stopped bothering Ann and moved to Bazargan, buzzing around his unsuited hands.

  “The lifegivers,” Ann said. “You swatted that one away from your hand. It flew up toward your face and almost landed on your cheek. There—that one is on your cheek!”

  “So? They don’t sting.”

  “They never land on anyone’s head. Never. Not humans, not Worlders. I noticed it in Gofkit Jemloe and asked Voratur and Enli both. Lifegivers never land on anyone’s head. Look, there’s another one on your forehead!”

  “Let’s move,” Bazargan said. The lifegivers didn’t sting, but they did tickle.

  “No. If you don’t mind, just wait here a bit more … There’s another one. On me. I can feel it.”

  “What are you thinking, Ann?”

  “I’m not sure yet. But they land on heads here and they don’t anywhere else on World … It has to be because we’re in the center of Dieter’s field. Or rather, we’re in the eye of the hurricane where the field isn’t operating. That’s the only thing different about this valley and the vug from the rest of the places we’ve seen!”

  Bazargan sat up straighter. “Do you think Enli’s lack of headaches are connected with this eye of the field, too?”

  “How can I know? But they’re all brain phenomena.”

  Bazargan tried to digest it all. Biochemistry wasn’t his field; culture was. He only knew about brains working in concert to create societies. Also, he felt nauseated and cold, too cold for someone wearing an s-suit.

  Gruber had warned him that he’d taken too many rads coming through the tunnels.

  Ann hadn’t noticed his weariness. She was too excited. “Ahmed, if this ‘field’ is affecting Enli’s shared-reality mechanism and our thinking processes and even the course of David’s schizophrenia, then it’s not biochemical. Even some mysterious unseen gas or pollen or whatever couldn’t produce such diverse biochemical effects. You’re talking entirely different centers of the brain, utilizing entirely different cascades of neurochems. I just don’t believe it.”

  Bazargan nodded. He felt weak.

  “And Dieter swears there’s no peculiar electromagnetic field. Of any kind. Although how he can be so sure of that … But if he’s right, and this isn’t a biochemical phenomenon, nor an electromagnetic one
, then what is it? Heat gradients that mild don’t affect the brain. What’s left? Unless-Dieter!”

  Gruber walked toward them, so filthy with mud and rock dust that Bazargan didn’t know how Ann had even known it was him and not David Allen. She jumped up and threw herself into his arms, such an un-Ann demonstration that for the first time Bazargan realized how deeply she cared for Gruber.

  “I’m back,” Gruber said, disentangling himself from Ann’s embrace. His mud and soot had rubbed off on her suit as well. “Ahmed, don’t scold. Not until you hear what I have found. Ach, it is stupendous! Call the others to hear!”

  “Others?” Bazargan said, knowing he sounded stupid. “David and Enli? Aren’t they with you?”

  “With me? No, of course not. I left you all sleeping late last night, and went to find the tunnels down to the buried source of this field—where are David and Enli?”

  “Gone,” Ann said somberly. “With your gun, Dieter.”

  Dieter, uncharacteristically, said nothing. No one was acting in character, Bazargan thought tiredly. Not even himself. He didn’t want to hear about Gruber’s expedition, which Bazargan had forbidden. He wanted only to sleep.

  “All right,” Dieter said. “I will try to find them. But first I must sleep. And before that I must tell you what I have found. You will need to decide, Ahmed, what and how much to tell Syree Johnson.”

  “We still can’t raise the Zeus,” Ann said.

  “Has Tas gone overhead today?”

  “No,” Ann said. “We watched particularly. Whatever happened up there, they succeeded in taking the moon away.”

  “They had better be careful what they do with it,” Gruber said. “Because I think the thing underground here is another piece of whatever Tas was before it became a moon.”

  The tunnel twisted but it didn’t narrow. Enli and David could walk upright most of the time. As far as Enli could tell, they were headed downward, although in places there were abrupt turns upward. Sometimes they heard water; sometimes they waded through it. Parts of the tunnel ceiling had collapsed, and several times they had to climb over boulders or pick their way through rubble. Pek Allen didn’t appear to notice—how could that be? This route looked nothing like the one through which Pek Gruber had led them into the mountains. Pek Allen was lost in his own private garden, talking and talking and talking.