Probability Space

by Nancy Kress

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Amanda tried again. “My father is not dead. Bad men took him, they need him. To do science.”

  “Ah, yes, science,” Konstantin said reverently. “Dr. Thomas Capelo!”

  Amanda nodded. They seemed to have reached an impasse. Suddenly Amanda realized she’d been hogging the whole conversation. She blushed. “You and Demetria and Nikos … you live at Lowell City?”

  “Demetria and me live at Greece. By Earth. We to visit Mars. Nikos live at Lowell City with father of he.”

  Nikos suddenly snorted and made a very rude gesture with his hand, one that Amanda’s father would never have permitted.

  “Nikos not to like father of he,” Konstantin explained.

  Amanda was shocked. “But … was his father in Lowell City? When the dome collapsed?”

  “Father of he by little dome. Maybe okay, maybe not okay. Nikos not to care.”

  “But…” She was silent, trying to take it in. Nikos didn’t care if his father was dead or not. “But, can you radio him, or something?”

  Konstantin spoke in Greek to Nikos, who repeated the rude gesture while answering. Amanda blushed. Konstantin said, “Father of Nikos to radio for Nikos sometime, maybe. This…” he pointed at the hopper bulkheads, evidently lacking the word, “you say how?”

  “Hopper.”

  “Yes. Splendid. This hopper are of father of Nikos. He to want this hopper again.”

  Nikos’s father would want the ship back, but wasn’t that interested in his son. No, Konstantin must be wrong. Or he was just exaggerating, the way Yaeko did at home when she said she hated her mother. Yaeko argued a lot with her mother but she didn’t really hate her, and Nikos and his father weren’t really indifferent about each other’s deaths. They couldn’t be. Awkwardly, Amanda changed the subject.

  Where are you going now?”

  Konstantin translated and a long discussion followed in Greek. Demetria tried to say something and Konstantin, to Amanda’s surprise, turned on her with a sharp order, completely different from the gentle way he spoke to Amanda. Demetria stopped talking immediately and cast her eyes down. Even Nikos seemed to defer to Konstantin … but that couldn’t be right, could it? Nikos was older, and it was his ship. Or at least his father’s.

  Finally Konstantin turned back to Amanda. “We go where you are to want go. You to hide. Yes?”

  Amanda thought. Where did she want to go? Marbet Grant wasn’t even on Mars … but did Amanda need Marbet anymore? General Stefanak might have kidnapped her father, or Life Now might have, but maybe neither one was in power now. If Admiral Pierce had won the fighting, then Amanda was safe. Admiral Pierce had no reason to follow Amanda, or to keep a guard on Aunt Kristen’s house in Tharsis, Admiral Pierce wasn’t part of whoever had taken her father. But had Admiral Pierce won the fighting, or General Stefanak?

  “Konstantin, can you turn on the radio? To see if Admiral Pierce or General Stefanak won?”

  He seemed to understand, if only the names and the word “radio.” He gave an order to Nikos, who turned on the news. It was in English; there must not be enough Greeks on Mars to broadcast in Greek.

  “—triumphant victory for freedom from military control as exemplified by martial law. Admiral Pierce has ordered the end of the curfew, effective immediately, so that survivors can begin the rebuilding of Lowell City’s central dome. Now that Sullivan Stefanak is dead, Admiral Pierce will assume the role of Supreme Command of the Solar Alliance Defense Council, and—”

  Amanda stopped listening. So he was dead, General Stefanak. It felt very strange. He had always been in charge, always been powerful, as long as Amanda could remember. She felt peculiar, as if gravity had suddenly failed.

  “What it to say?”

  She spoke slowly and clearly. “Admiral Pierce won. He’s the leader now of the Solar Alliance Defense Council.”

  “Admiral Pierce!” Nikos suddenly said, and broke into a huge smile. Amanda didn’t know why.

  “Admiral Pierce good by business of my father,” Konstantin explained.

  “What business is your father in?”

  “Many business. One, shipping from Earth at Mars. Big big shipping. Ouranis Corporation,” Konstantin said proudly.

  Amanda had never heard of them, which wasn’t surprising. Her father always dismissed business as dull and unimportant compared to science.

  Konstantin added, “My father not to like Nikos for Demetria. Demetria not to listen.”

  “Oh,” Amanda said. She was out of her depth. Still, would her father someday … if she liked a boy, somebody like, say, Konstantin … but Konstantin wanted to be a scientist. It would probably be all right.

  She blushed again at her own thoughts.

  “So where you to want go, Ah-man-dah Capelo?” Konstantin said.

  “To Tharsis. Is that all right? My aunt and uncle live there. I can stay with them.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “My aunt. Sister of my father. In Tharsis.”

  “Sister of Dr. Thomas Capelo, yes,” Konstantin said, “at Tharsis. I to go there anyways, to ask from Dr. Capelo’s work. Splendid.”

  Nikos said something. Konstantin answered; Amanda heard the words “Tharsis” and “Dr. Capelo.” Nikos shrugged and started the hopper’s engine.

  “Why does he do what you say?” Amanda asked Konstantin shyly. Really, it wasn’t any of her business. But he didn’t seem offended.

  “Nikos have no money. Demetria are girl. I have all money of my father sometime,” Konstantin said, cheerfully and brutally.

  Amanda couldn’t think of anything to answer. After her first grateful reaction, she was starting to feel uncomfortable. Had Konstantin really come to Mars to talk to Aunt Kristen about her father’s work? Or was that just something he’d made up after he recognized her at the spaceport? He knew a lot about her father. Did that mean he knew even more, which he wasn’t telling her?

  She never used to think this way, questioning everybody’s motives.

  But then Konstantin held out his hand to pull her up off the floor and into a hopper seat, and at the touch of his fingers, warm and golden, she forgot that she had any doubts at all.

  TWELVE

  GOFKIT SHAMLOE

  Kaufman, to his own surprise, did not see the angry side of Ann Sikorski again. Nor was the Ann he saw the gentle xenobiologist he had known on the Alan B. Shepard. This Ann was brisk, competent, more concerned with the material and the needful than with the intellectual. She spoke briskly of wagon axles, infant ailments, zeli gardens, jiks whose milk supply flagged. She never mentioned physiological cascades or quantum effects in the brain.

  “I don’t understand it,” Kaufman said to Marbet, “she used to be so interested in cerebral functions. She had an entire theory of shared reality, which neurotransmitters were involved, how they affected Worlders’ brains … all of it.”

  “She’s not going back, Lyle,” Marbet said.

  “Did she tell you that?”

  “She didn’t have to.”

  “Not going back to the Solar System? Ever?”

  “No. This is her life now.”

  So he had come all this way, hoping to expiate at least some of his guilt by rescuing a person who turned out not to want rescuing. And if Ann stayed, so would Dieter. Kaufman’s mission to World with regard to them was pointless.

  It seemed pointless with regard to World, too. Day after day, Kaufman saw neither the broken, savage, reverted-to-barbarism culture he had expected, nor an intact culture unaffected by what he had taken from it. Instead he witnessed a functional, matter-of-fact people adjusting to the daily tasks of survival (wagon axles, jik herds), combined with an undiminished spiritual life centering on flowers.

  “You weed that allabenirib bed,” Marbet said to him, “and I’ll take the pajalib.”

  Kaufman had spent all his savings plus most of Marbet’s, had broken the law to travel illegally, risked jail if his journey here were discovered
… and his presence was totally superfluous. World was neither flourishing nor destructing—it just was. There was nothing Kaufman could do to help, except for weeding the flower bed of allabenirib. He knelt and began pulling.

  “They want masses of these on the altar for tomorrow’s ceremony,” Marbet said, energetically pulling at the ground around the pajalib bushes. “Hospitality flowers, you know.”

  This was not how he’d imagined atoning for his guilt toward World.

  “No, don’t pull that, Lyle—that’s a plant.”

  “Oh, sorry.”

  Not at all what he’d imagined.

  He said, “I’m surprised Enli lets us work on the flower beds at all. The vegetables, yes … but not the all-sacred flowers.”

  Marbet said quietly, “Try not to be bitter, dearest”

  She knew. She always knew. Kaufman tried. It was just that, since leaving the army, he wasn’t sure what he was anymore. Not a soldier, as he’d been his whole life. Not a rescuer, which was plainly unnecessary. Not an instructor or a diplomat on World, which needed neither. Such thoughts were foreign to him, who had mostly lived his life by simply doing the task in front of him as well as he could, without thinking too much about how or why it got there. Now, it seemed, he was going to have to think about who he was and what he was going to do.

  He didn’t like it.

  The Worlders were quite clear on what their own activities meant. Enli’s child was undergoing some sort of ceremony, and the entire village was frenzied with preparing for it. Kaufman had gathered that the ceremony had once had something to do with being declared “real,” but now that shared reality had gone, the ceremony wasn’t that. Maybe just a naming ceremony. Kaufman had forgotten Enli’s child’s name. Or maybe it wouldn’t have one until tomorrow. Was the kid a girl or a boy?

  What was he going to occupy himself with for the rest of his life?

  “Good,” Marbet said. “Now let’s do the trifalitib.”

  “Tell me again when this thing takes place.”

  “Tomorrow. It’s exciting, isn’t it? Confit will be three, in World years.”

  Confit. That was the child’s name. Kaufman still couldn’t remember its sex.

  Ann walked toward them from inside the stockade. She looked cross. “Marbet, Lyle, have either of you seen Essa?”

  “No,” Marbet said. “Has she disappeared again?”

  “That girl is better at getting out of work than anyone I’ve ever seen. Enli told her to pound all that cari to bake the bread for tomorrow, and she hasn’t done any of it.”

  Marbet straightened from her weeding and flexed her back. “How did Enli become responsible for Essa, anyway?”

  “It’s a long story. The short version is that Essa was a servant in Hadjil Voratur’s household, and when the Change came, she ended up with us because she had no one else. She drives Enli to distraction.”

  Marbet said lightly, “And now Essa wants to visit other worlds.”

  “Magdalena will never take her,” Ann said shortly. “She just promised Essa that in order to stir up trouble.”

  At the mention of Magdalena, Kaufman weeded harder.

  Ann added, “Magdalena’s activities are inexplicable enough without taking an alien child into space. Why does she stay here, now that she knows you can’t help her find Amanda Capelo? And she disappears nearly every day in her skimmer, long trips. Where does she go? She’s shown no interest in World for its own sake, that’s for sure.”

  “No,” Marbet said. “She’s just using World as a place to wait.”

  “To wait?” Ann said. “For what?”

  Marbet looked at Kaufman. He said, “There may be a revolution on Mars. Stefanak could be toppled, since many people think he’s not waging the war against the Fallers aggressively enough. Magdalena has close ties to Stefanak, personal and business, and she needs a safe place to hide while the solar situation is settled and she can use her intelligence information to decide on her best scenario. A flyer will send her news from the tunnel as soon as there is any.”

  Marbet added quietly, “And the waiting is costing her every ounce of restraint she has.”

  Ann said, “Even I can feel that when I’m around her. It’s like she’s a volcano, set to blow. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to a Sensitive, Marbet.”

  Marbet changed the subject. “How are the preparations for tomorrow coming?”

  “Very well. Although that’s why I was looking for you two. Lyle, I want to ask your help.”

  His help? Kaufman stood.

  Ann looked graver than usual. “The two closest villages are coming to Confit’s flower ceremony. That’s really important, because as you know, since the Change each village has become pretty much isolated. They’re afraid of each other, because naturally they don’t know how to deal with strangers without shared reality. But Dieter and Calin and I have been trying hard to reestablish at least trading ties with Gofkit Mersoe and Gofkit Tramloe. Worlders have always been great traders, you know. And tomorrow they’re each sending visitors to Confit’s ceremony.”

  Ann stopped; she seemed embarrassed. Kaufman waited. He didn’t see how he could help with this. He didn’t even speak World.

  “This could be a real breakthrough, Lyle. But only if the visitors get here and back safely. The marauders at the old Voratur compound have gotten more organized in their attacks. Two groups of people traveling between villages, carrying food and presents, are natural targets. They enslave captives, you know, to work the Voratur fields to feed the warlords. They’re … never mind. Anyway, Dieter will go to Gofkit Mersoe on his bike early tomorrow and escort the visitors here. He’s got tanglefoam, laser guns … he can get them here safely.”

  Kaufman said, “What have the warlords got?”

  “Knives, spears, and clubs. They haven’t even invented the bow and arrow yet, thank God. But Dieter can’t be in two places at once. You’re armed, Lyle, you have to be. Will you go to Gofkit Tramloe and escort the visitors from there to here?”

  He was ashamed at how glad he was to be useful again. “Of course.”

  “Thank you. Do you need to get arms from your ship?”

  “No.” Dieter had assured him the locked, untended ship was safe behind an electrobarrier. “But, Ann…”

  “What? Look, there’s that worthless girl over there behind those bushes … Essa! You come here, Essa!”

  “Ann,” Lyle said, “the ship has real weapons. I could do a fly-over Voratur’s compound and solve your warlord problem once and for all.”

  He had her full attention again. The angry Ann, eyes diamond hard. “No, thank you, Lyle, we’re not trying to teach these people more violence than we’ve already brought on them. Magdalena offered to do the same thing. We refused her, too.”

  Kaufman said, “Why haven’t you already asked her to escort the visitors? She’s been here much longer than we have, and you’ve been planning this ceremony for weeks.”

  “I’m not going to ask Magdalena for anything,” Ann said, and Kaufman wondered if Dieter reacted to Magdalena the same way he did. Marbet, of course, would know, but Kaufman wasn’t about to ask her.

  Ann continued, “She pays Gofkit Shamloe well for food and water. That’s all we want from her.”

  So that’s where the beautiful embroidered pillow in Enli’s house had come from. Kaufman said, “I’ll need a villager to guide me to Gofkit Tramloe tomorrow and—” But Ann had stopped listening to him. She spoke heatedly in World to Essa, who had bounded up to them with something in her folded fist. Kaufman caught the words “Enli” and “cari.”

  Essa, looking totally unrepentant, unfolded her fist. On it sat a tiny data cube and an even tinier nano housing. Kaufman said, “Where did she get that?”

  Essa jabbered back at Ann. Marbet translated for Kaufman. “She figured out how to take apart the casing of her comlink. Apparently it’s mostly casing. Those are the working insides, still working.”

  Kaufman didn’t look at An
n. It was he who had traded nine comlinks with the natives in the first place, on the previous expedition, over Ann’s vigorous protests. The comlinks’ range was limited to the planet, unlike Ann’s, Kaufman’s, and, presumably, Magdalena’s. Theirs could reach anything in orbit around the tunnel, with a fifty-four-minute lag.

  He asked, “Who has the other eight comlinks? Who does Essa talk to on hers?”

  “Nobody,” Ann said shortly. “The others belong to the marauders, they were all in Voratur’s household. If they still even have them. But even Essa knows better than to try to raise anyone with hers.”

  Kaufman would have taken it away from her. An irresponsible child … Worlders had strange ideas about personal property. They tolerated stealing, but not confiscation. Maybe because it would have once violated shared reality? Apparently Ann now participated in these ideas.

  Marbet said reasonably, “If she doesn’t raise anybody with the comlink, how does she know it still works?”

  “She doesn’t really,” Ann said. Kaufman, ex-army, looked at the intact data cube and nano housing and thought, It still works.

  Ann took Essa off to pound cari bread. Marbet, done with her weeding, went with them. Before Kaufman could return to his own weeding, he saw Magdalena walking toward him.

  “Lyle?”

  “Yes?” She looked older by sunlight than by starlight. But she still walked with the spring of a young girl.

  “I just wanted to tell you that I haven’t had any news yet from the tunnel. My informant on Mars had said the move against Stefanak was set for yesterday—” as if Kaufman could forget! “—but I still have no idea if it succeeded, or on what scale, or with what outcome. I thought you’d want to know.”

  To know that she had nothing to report? Kaufman knew a subterfuge when he saw one. He said gravely, “Thank you.”

  “Are you going to this native do-ha tomorrow?”

  So that was it Magdalena hadn’t been invited. No, that wasn’t possible; villagers did things en masse, a relic of shared reality. Everyone in the village was automatically assumed to be part of the ceremony. Magdalena was in the village. Ergo.