Probability Space

by Nancy Kress

  Maybe they were already on the way!

  She had to leave, now, right away. But she couldn’t go to Carol’s sister, where Carol and Sudie were visiting, because the bad people would surely know where Carol and Sudie were. Then they’d get Amanda. And she couldn’t let that happen because she was the only one who had actually seen her father get taken away. She was an eyewitness. She had to get help for her father, and it had to be somebody she could absolutely trust, and it had to be somebody the bad people wouldn’t suspect she’d go to, and it had to be somebody rich and powerful enough to help. Amanda knew that, too, from holo shows.

  Marbet Grant. On Luna.

  All the breath went out of Amanda and she almost cried with relief. Marbet was perfect. No one would think of looking for Amanda on Luna. And Marbet was the nicest, smartest, best person Amanda knew. Secretly Amanda had hoped her father would marry Marbet. Although Carol was nice, too, and maybe Carol was better for her father because Marbet was a Sensitive and her father was too ornery to want somebody guessing with such high probability what he was thinking all the time.

  Now that the decision was made, Amanda turned efficient. She ran to her room, put on shoes, and crammed her dance bag with a few clean clothes and toiletries. All the time, she was thinking furiously. Her father had given her the code to the safe. She made House open it and pulled out her passport—but if she used it, couldn’t she be traced? She took it anyway, plus all the money chips. Then she added the small blue plastic pouch with the stones from the vug.

  The vug. A sparkling cave on the planet World, like Aladdin’s cave in the story. Her father and Dieter Gruber had taken her and Sudie there, just once, when her father was making his important physics discoveries on World. Dieter had let Amanda and Sudie take double handfuls of the diamonds and gold nuggets on the cave floor and walls. Sudie had only wanted to play with them, but Amanda had been interested in how the gems got there. “Once this was the caldera of a volcano, right here,” Dieter had said. “The gold precipitates out from circulating water heated by magma.” It seemed so long ago. She’d been such a child.

  Amanda put the bag of gems into her pocket, which was the first time she realized she was still wearing her mother’s dress. Well, good. It would make her look older. Wait … yes! Quickly she ran back to her father’s room, grabbed a handful of Carol’s makeup from her drawer, and shoved it in the dance bag.

  She turned off House’s surveillance and left by the kitchen door. Quickly she disappeared into the dark woods behind the house. She and her friends played in these woods all the time; Amanda knew them well. “Manicured woods,” her father always called them, “suburban Trianons with low probability of actual wildlife.” Well, so what.

  The woods smelled of spring earth, rich and fresh. It was cold under the trees, and Amanda shivered as she hurried, surefooted, along the moonlit paths. She’d forgotten her jacket.

  Fifteen minutes later, she emerged on the other side of the woods, several blocks from home. She walked to the corner and caught a maglev to Cambridge. No one questioned her; the bus was full of kids just a little older than she was. (And her father said she was too young to ride the train alone at night!) Amanda sat in the last seat, propped Carol’s hand mirror on her knees, and applied Carol’s makeup, pursing her lips critically.

  Now she looked much older. Maybe even sixteen.

  What if the kidnappers killed her father?

  They wouldn’t kill him. Low probability! He was a famous physicist, and that was the only reason to kidnap him, so they probably wanted him alive to do physics for them. Yes. She had to stop thinking about what might happen to him and concentrate all her brain on how to help him. “Think. Reason it out. That’s what you have a brain for.”

  At the Cambridge station, she studied all the signs until she figured out how to buy a ticket for the train to Walton Spaceport, halfway across the state. She used money chips at the ticket machine; they couldn’t be traced. There were no kids on this train, but nobody bothered Amanda. She sat up straight in her seat, looking as old as she could, trying not to appear upset that her father had been kidnapped and she was afraid for her life and his life and nothing was the same as it had been two hours ago, when all she had wanted to do was find out that she looked pretty in her dead mother’s yellow dress.

  TWO

  WALTON SPACEPORT, UNITED ATLANTIC FEDERATION, EARTH

  At the spaceport, Amanda had her first big problem. She couldn’t buy a ticket to Luna without showing her passport, which had her name on it, and maybe the people who’d taken her father could get the passport list. Also, a ticket to Luna cost more than she had in money chips. She’d have to cash in a gem, and how did you do that? She had no idea.

  Amanda locked herself in a public bathroom. She took just one gem from the blue plastic bag. The bag with the rest of the gems she put in her underpants, shoving it down between her legs where it didn’t show through the swirling yellow dress. Then she walked as confidently as she could to a public information terminal and put in her money.

  “Ad search, diamond buyer, private, closest.”

  “Linked,” the terminal said. “The advertiser closest to you that buys diamonds privately is Trevinno Brothers, Walton Spaceport, Building T, fifth level.”

  Right here! What luck! Although, it made sense. Probably a lot of people decided to leave Earth quickly and didn’t want to be traced, and so they’d need a lot of money chips fast. But what kind of people would they be? Criminals, maybe. They might try to hurt her. Oh, God.

  But what choice did she have?

  She could call Marbet on Luna. Marbet might be able to arrange a ticket for Amanda from there. She could use a public phone.

  No. If Marbet bought the ticket on Luna, she’d have to give Amanda’s passport information, and it would be in the deebee from then until the next flight. The kidnappers might get the data and know where she was. But if Amanda bought the ticket at this end at the very last minute before the flight took off, there wouldn’t be time for anyone bad to stop her until she was safe with Marbet. Marbet would know just how to protect Amanda. Marbet was rich and famous and had powerful friends (high probability). The important thing was for Amanda to get to Marbet.

  For just a moment, she wondered if Marbet was really her best choice. A lot of people didn’t like Sensitives. Marbet worked a lot of negotiations, criminal trials, dangerous government stuff. She got death threats. Maybe Amanda should go to somebody else.

  There wasn’t anybody else.

  Lifting her chin, Amanda said to the terminal, “Search. Diamond prices, now, a diamond—” she hesitated, estimating, the diamond was big “—weighing ten grams.”

  “Price depends on diamond clarity, color, cut.”

  “Range.”

  “Ten thousand credits to one hundred thousand credits.”

  That much! And she had so many gems from the vug … too late, she remembered that half the gems were supposed to be Sudie’s. Well, she’d bring that half back home.

  She said, “Directions to Building T from here.”

  “Go down the corridor to your left, take the Number Sixteen train, get off at the third stop.”

  “Thank you,” she said, even though her father always complained that it was stupid to thank machines. Her father …

  “You’re welcome,” the machine said, which suddenly made her feel better. Her father didn’t know everything. And he was the smartest man in the Solar System, so that meant the kidnappers didn’t know everything either.

  Train 16 was full of soldiers who whistled and called out to Amanda. Frightened, she let that train go by and waited for the next one. It was empty, and not very clean. Neither was Building T. The fifth level wasn’t, as Amanda had supposed, the fifth story up, but the fifth story down. Traveling on the escalator, Amanda clutched her dance bag tighter. Too late, she realized the name of her school, SAULER ACADEMY, was emblazoned on the front. Anybody could have seen it. She turned the bag so the logo was agai
nst her body. Her heart was doing strange things, first beating fast, then in slow, painful thumps.

  A woman looked at her as she got off the elevator, a bizarre woman with purple hair and flashing lights in her belly button and no top to her dress. Shocked, Amanda looked away. She should leave. This wasn’t right. The woman abruptly laughed, a laugh that to Amanda sounded crazy, scary. She should just leave.

  But the woman went away, and just down the dirty corridor Amanda could see an e-sign glowing: TREVINNO BROTHERS BUY AND SELL. WITHOUT QUESTION. An animated question mark popped up and was instantly “killed,” over and over. After six “deaths,” more words appeared after WITHOUT QUESTION, so it now read WITHOUT QUESTION THE BEST.

  Even I can tell that’s not what they really mean, Amanda thought, and that gave her courage. She was smart enough to do this. This shop would buy her diamond without demanding her passport. It would only take a minute, and then she’d race back up the escalator to the train and return to the clean parts of the spaceport. It would only take a minute.

  She walked up to the door and it opened for her. The inside was small and grubby, the foamcast walls badly discolored, but relief flooded through Amanda. It was a machine! No people, just a machine to buy things. No one to hurt her.

  Almost cheerful, she stepped up to the terminal, which had slots and trays of various sizes barnacled onto its front. “I’d like to sell a diamond, please.”

  “Rest the gem on Tray A.”

  Amanda hesitated. What if the machine just swallowed the diamond without giving her any money? But if it did that, then Trevinno Brothers wouldn’t stay in business very long, would they? Anyway, she had no choice. She laid her diamond on the tray.

  It didn’t get swallowed, but a clear dome settled over it and somewhere machinery hummed softly. The machine said, “Offer: five thousand credits.”

  That was a lot less than the library terminal had promised. Could this machine know she was only a kid? Maybe it was a near-AI. But near-AIs were very expensive, her father said.

  Surprised at her own boldness, she said, “I want ten thousand credits. A library said my diamond is worth at least that much.”

  “Eight thousand credits.”

  “All right.” It was enough for the ticket to Luna. And at least she’d gotten it up by three thousand.

  Her diamond, still under the dome, disappeared. From another slot came a pile of money chips.

  Amanda, grabbed them without counting (machines were reliable, high probability), turned, and ran to the door. It was locked. The window, clear when she’d come in, was now opaque.

  “Let me out! Let me out!”

  “Not yet,” a man’s voice said behind her. Amanda whirled. “Why, you’re just a little girl.”

  She was too terrified to say anything.

  “A little girl whore, who suddenly has a huge uncut diamond. Who’d you take it off of, honey? Is he still alive to miss it?”

  Amanda started screaming. It was almost as if the screams filled the air with powder as well as sound, because when she tried to remember later exactly what had happened, everything was clouded. But she recalled the man’s hands on her, ripping her mother’s yellow dress, fumbling first at her breasts and then at her underpants. And then there was the sound of ripping foamcast and the wall collapsed, and another machine was in the room. The man let her go and he started screaming. Something or someone picked her up, and she beat at it or him or her with her fists. A great rushing sounded in her ears, like a huge waterfall, and then nothing.

  * * *

  “Drink this,” somebody said, and Amanda did. Immediately strength flowed into her body. She pushed the glass away, sat up, and looked around wildly. A shabby, tiny room with one bed and one chair and one picture on the wall and—

  “It’s all right,” said a man standing beside the bed. “You’re safe.” He was short and skinny, with a scraggly little beard at the end of his chin. Dressed in dirty black jeans and shirt, he had the pasty, grayish skin of someone who seldom walked in sunlight.

  “Who … who are you?”

  “A more relevant question is, who are you? Amanda Susan Capelo, age fourteen, citizen of the United Atlantic Federation, daughter of Dr. Thomas Capelo and the late Karen Olsen Capelo.”

  He had her passport. Without thinking she thrust a hand between her legs, felt the blue plastic pouch still there, blushed furiously, and looked away. Something terrible stood in the corner. She gasped, “What’s that?”

  “That’s my assistant. A very strong, very dumb robot who smashed through that fence’s shop and carried you out of there. Don’t thank it; it doesn’t have sound sensors. It only does what I tell it to by handheld.”

  The thing in the corner was seven feet tall, a metal rectangle with three sets of flexible tentacles, built-in gun barrels, and three spray nozzles. Amanda looked at it hopelessly. Tears pricked at her eyes, hot and scalding, but she blinked them back She wanted desperately, blindingly, to go home.

  “Don’t cry,” the man said unsympathetically, “because—”

  “I never cry!” Amanda snapped.

  “—it won’t help. If you’re old enough to go traipsing around a quarter like Building T, you’re old enough to control yourself.”

  “I didn’t know it would be like this!”

  “Of course not. Now tell me why you were there.”

  “You tell me first who you are!”

  “You can call me Father Emil. I’m a Catholic priest.”

  “What’s that?” Amanda said.

  “Oh my dear God,” he said, “you never heard of Catholicism? Not even heard of it?”

  Amanda shook her head. She actually had a vague memory of the word coming up in history, her least favorite class, but she couldn’t remember any details.

  “Stop scowling, child. Do it. Catholicism is a very old religion, and the one true faith in a world that’s forgotten faith. I run the St. Theresa the Little Flower Mission. I rescue lost souls who have fallen into thievery, drunkenness, addiction, or prostitution, which is what I thought you were. An underage prostitute in way over her head.”

  Amanda at least knew what a prostitute was. How dare he call her that! “I’m not a prostitute!”

  “No, I see that. So what were you doing at a sleazy hot shop?”

  She didn’t answer, glaring at him instead.

  “Come on, child,” Father Emil said in that same dry, unsympathetic voice, “if you don’t tell me what’s wrong, I can’t help you. What is the daughter of a world-famous physicist and war-pusher doing selling stolen goods?”

  “They aren’t stolen! And my father isn’t a war-pusher!”

  “Of course he is. The physicist Thomas Capelo, who gave the world the alien artifact that has the power to destroy not only an entire star system but the fabric of space itself. Thereby escalating the stakes in the war with the Fallers from mere destruction of humanity to destruction of the universe which a merciful God gave mankind, all so that egomaniac Stefanak can buy himself power.”

  Amanda was confused. Nobody she knew talked like that. The picture on the wall showed a man bleeding on a cross made of wood, in horrible pain. She said stubbornly, “My father only gave General Stefanak the artifact because the Fallers already have one. General Stefanak is using it to protect the Solar System!”

  Father Emil snorted. “No use talking politics with a child, especially a child without faith. Just tell me why you were selling goods—stolen or not—at Trevinno Brothers.”

  “I need the money.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere. No, don’t look away from the painting, child, that’s our dear Lord who died for your sins. Why did you need money?”

  “Why should I tell you?” Amanda demanded.

  “Because I noticed you, a little girl painted like the Scarlet Whore of Babylon, and followed you to make sure you were all right. Because I smashed into Trevinno Brothers with the Wrath of God here to save you from a truly horrible and probably short life as
a slave for the sex trade. Because I brought you here to safety in my mission and gave you some of my restorative drug, which I could ill-afford, when you seemed to be in shock. That’s why.”

  Amanda pulled the eight thousand credits from her pocket and threw two thousand onto the cot beside Father Emil. “That’s to pay for your drug!”

  “I gave you too much of it, obviously. Manic grandiosity is setting in. But thank you, I’ll take the money in a spirit of meekness, for the greater glory of God.” He pocketed the chips. “Now tell me why you needed money.”

  Amanda studied Father Emil. He had given her a drug, he said so, and maybe it was making her braver. Maybe it made her not think so well, too. But she felt like she was thinking well again, and he had saved her from … that, and he wasn’t trying to take her money. Maybe she could trust him. Besides, what was she going to do if she didn’t trust him? The spaceport was a lot scarier place than she’d imagined.

  “You are deciding to confide in me,” Father Emil said. “That’s good. The confessional is a sacred trust.”

  Amanda had no idea what he meant. He talked a little bit like her father, whose words sounded normal but sometimes had funny twists to them. “Ironic bitterness,” she had overheard Aunt Kristen say once, but Amanda didn’t know what her aunt meant and hadn’t asked. Her father was just who he was. Her father …

  “Don’t start to cry now—”

  “I told you I never cry!”

  “—or the Wrath of God will return you to that hot shop. Now tell me why you need money.”

  She said sulkily, “I have to go to Luna.”