Probability Sun

by Nancy Kress

  Gruber said, “He is afraid of the tunnels and radiation. You are a coward, Capelo.”

  Such an ugly look flashed into Capelo’s eyes that Kaufman had to stop himself from taking a step backward. Before Capelo could speak, Kaufman said quickly, “Be careful, Tom. Your children are watching.”

  Capelo spun around, so that for one heart-stopping moment Kaufman was afraid he would fall into the hole. The two little girls, tended by their nurse, played under a rock overhang as far away from the hole as the tiny valley allowed. At that moment Sudie happened to look toward her father. She waved happily. “Hi, Daddy! I’m a rock doggie!”

  “Arf, arf, sweetheart,” Capelo called, and when he turned back to Gruber, the worst moment had passed. It was the first time that Lyle had found any reason to be glad the children existed. Nonetheless, he gave Capelo no chance to speak before castigating Gruber himself.

  “Dieter, that’s slanderous and untrue, and you know it. If you call yourself a scientist, stick to facts in presenting your ease to Tom. Ja?”

  “Ja,” Gruber said. “I am sorry, Tom. You are not a coward. But you still must come experience this spot in the field.”

  Kaufman said, “I’m going on the expedition, Tom. After all, you told me yourself that scientific data are often preceded by phenomena nobody knows how to measure yet. Today’s truths were yesterday’s scientific heresies.”

  Capelo ran a hand through his dirty, already disheveled hair. He glared resentfully at Gruber; unlike the stolid geologist, Capelo remembered slights a long time. A grudge holder on a galactic scale: witness his frightening hatred for the Fallers, still white-hot three years after his wife’s death. Kaufman, a military man, knew better than to waste his energy hating the enemy. Much more productive to put the energy into defeating them. Capelo was incapable of that sort of practical detachment.

  But he was fair. “All right, damn it, I’ll go! In the interests of completion, if not rationality. But if we all get killed when a nonnano-coated tunnel falls on us, remember at your dying moment that I said ‘I told you so.’”

  “I’ll remember,” Kaufman said. “But there will be nanos reinforcing just ahead of us, so it doesn’t seem likely.”

  “There are no chimneys or hard climbs,” Gruber said. “It is an easy spelunk.”

  “Pierre Curie was killed by a beer wagon during an easy walk,” Capelo said.

  “Because he wasn’t paying attention,” Kaufman answered.

  “And he wasn’t paying attention because he was thinking about a far more important scientific problem,” Capelo retorted, and Kaufman knew enough to let him have the last word.

  * * *

  Suited but not helmeted, the three men walked through tunnels deep in the Neury Mountains. Walked, crawled, scrambled, waded … Capelo hated it. At least the damn suit kept him warm, dry, whole, and warned about radiation levels. Gruber was an idiot, and he was a bigger one to have agreed to trail along.

  The geologist led, carrying a powertorch and guided by sonar and radiation maps created from satellite information. The maps were remarkably detailed. There was no chance of getting lost, merely of getting stuck in some rocky hole-turned-tomb. Idiots all. And the supreme idiocy was the rock-climbing cord that bound them all together. Coated with nanos like minute ball-bearings so that the cord was virtually frictionless, its handled end was held by the smiling Karim Safir. Gruber had carefully stationed Safir in a cave that looked to Capelo like every other cave, but whose location apparently had significance to Gruber.

  “Everybody all right?” Gruber called back cheerfully. Why wouldn’t he be cheerful? He had the sensitivity of a water bucket, and he’d gotten his way about this stupid expedition. “Watch out ahead, it gets a little damp.”

  Wading through knee-high brackish water, his hand groping along the tunnel wall to keep himself upright, Capelo said, “‘A little damp’?”

  “Professional understatement,” Kaufman said. “Gruber cuts rocks a lot of slack.”

  “He doesn’t … Lyle! Was that a snake?”

  “I don’t think they have snakes on World,” Kaufman said uncertainly.

  “Then an alien analogue!”

  “Don’t mind that small swimmer,” Gruber called back happily. “Ann says they are harmless.”

  Then let Ann encounter them, Capelo thought savagely. But, no, the project biologist was off on some errand involving natives, while the project physicist sloshed through alien reptiles. Idiocy, stupidity …

  His nerves were too frayed. Nobody ever did any worthwhile science in this state. All right, then, he would calm himself. Don’t think about this exercise in geologic futility. Think instead about the data, clean and rational.

  Four sets of real data, he’d told Kaufman, and that was right. When all four were as complete as the team could make them, it was Capelo’s job to integrate them, to find the connections and hypotheses that would make mathematical sense out of what seemed to be happening in the quantum-level universe.

  First, the neutrino map of the Neury Mountains. That was easy, known and understood. Neutrino detectors on the Alan B. Shepard and on geosynchronous satellites had measured and plotted the unusually large neutrino flow from this section of the mountain range. The result was a map of radioactive activity centered on the buried artifact. The map showed a clear hole, fifty meters in diameter, of no unusual radioactivity directly around the artifact. It was the hole at the heart of the toroid. It was also the reason why everyone could work unsuited in the upland valley.

  Beyond that grace area, radiation increased dramatically and irregularly, then tapered off. A whole lot of nuclei around the artifact had destabilized. Which was another way of saying that, at the quantum level, a lot of matter had exceeded the usual probabilities that alpha particles would be emitted from nuclei. Nuclear particles, and the tiny vibrating threads that composed them, like all matter, had a probability field, the sum of wave functions, where they could be found. Part of that probability field lay outside the binding energy barrier. Quantum determinism decreed the probability that any particular event will occur at some chosen time in the future was fully determined by knowledge of the wave functions at any prior time. In the Neury Mountains, that equation did not hold.

  Was time the disrupting factor? Nothing in quantum physics mandated a distinction between past and future. But Capelo could see no way to fit that into the data he had.

  “Almost there!” Gruber called to his struggling, roped-together team. “Pay attention to your thinking!”

  The second set of data was the readings he, Rosalind Singh, and that pig-fat Albemarle had made at the site. These data were more ambiguous. The artifact was made of the same material as the space tunnels. Its interior, from what the team could tell, seemed to feature shadowy folded structures of no mass whatsoever, an impossibility. The buried artifact had the same markings as the much larger artifact Syree Johnson had investigated. Most pertinently, it had the same protuberances, marked in primes. Now, while he was slogging along on this moronic underground trip, Rosalind and Albemarle were setting up computer programs to compare the location of the protuberances with variations in rock radioactivity, adjusted for probable shifts over geologic time.

  Syree Johnson’s data about the other artifact, the much larger one that had exploded when she tried to send it through a space tunnel, had indicated … had indicated …

  Syree …

  Sudie …

  Sudie and … and … there was another child …

  Karen, help me …

  He was falling, upright on his feet. Falling into a blank whiteness. Then there wasn’t even the whiteness, there was nothing, not even time.

  * * *

  “Tom.”

  Whiteness.

  “Tom.”

  Blankness.

  “Tom.”

  Whiteness.

  “Tom!”

  The voice had been saying his name for a long time, he thought confusedly. Who was it? Who was he?


  “Tom.”

  “Yes,” he finally said, and the word sounded strange, from another language, or possibly another person.

  “Keep walking. Come on, walk.”

  He had no choice; a rope pulled him forward. Another few steps, and the confusion lifted slightly.

  “Walk!” The voice was … Lyle. Kaufman. Yes. And he was Tom. Capelo.

  “That’s better. You’re almost out.”

  Another few steps, and the confusion disappeared.

  “Jesus Christ! What just happened to me?”

  But Kaufman kept pulling on the rope, helped by the smiling Karim Safir. At the end of the rope Gruber stumbled forward like a sleepwalker. Capelo abruptly sat on the tunnel floor. He had been … empty. Mind-blind. Unable to think, or with thinking slowed so much that it felt like the same thing. He watched Gruber being pulled forward, watched consciousness return to Gruber’s glazed blue eyes.

  Safir said something in Arabic and kept pulling. The other three stumbled through the rest of the tunnel into a larger, comparatively dry cave. They slumped on its floor in the eerie shadows thrown by Gruber’s powertorch.

  Kaufman spoke first. His voice sounded hoarse. “All right, Gruber. Tell me the theory again. What was that?”

  “The thickest part of the toroidal field,” Gruber said. “Ach, I wish Ann were here. She can explain it so much better.”

  “You try,” Capelo rasped. He heard the panic still inhabiting his own voice. Nothing like that had ever happened to him before. To lose his mind, the only thing he possessed that justified his existence, his only real identity … Despite himself, a deep shudder shook him, and he glared at Gruber in embarrassment.

  Gruber, of course, didn’t notice. He said, “We stumbled into it on the last expedition. No rope to pull us out then, but Enli was with us—she’s a native, Tom, and apparently they are not affected as we are. Enli pulled us out. She—”

  “Forget Enli,” Kaufman said jaggedly, utterly unlike his usual smooth speech. “What just happened to us?”

  “Ann can explain it better than I can,” Gruber repeated, “but I will try. Syree Johnson’s artifact made all atoms with an atomic number over seventy-five destabilize and emit radiation, ja? It affected their probability fields. And we think the buried artifact does that, too, maybe. But the brain, too, operates on probability at the quantum level.”

  “It does?” Kaufman said.

  “Yes. The electrical impulses in the brain travel to the ends of cerebral nerves, which then release neurotransmitters into the synapses. But not always. The probability of the exact same voltage causing a release varies from seventeen percent to sixty-two percent. The release is caused by a single atom, so it is a quantum event.

  “In fact, more and more it looks like that is how consciousness is born. Through altering probability. There is no other way to explain how a purely mental event, like deciding to stand up, can produce an effect in the material world.”

  “All right,” Kaufman said, “the brain operates on probability. Then—”

  “Partly on probability,” Gruber corrected.

  “Partly on probability,” Kaufman repeated. “But why should an artifact that destabilizes atoms to produce radioactivity also wipe out my ability to think? Tom, you aren’t saying anything. Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” Capelo said, unwilling to reveal how shaken he felt. Shattered. What had just happened should not have happened, not by any laws of physics he understood.

  Kaufman turned back to Gruber. “Dieter? Why should an artifact that destabilizes atoms to produce radioactivity also wipe out my ability to think?”

  “I don’t know,” Gruber said. “I have only a theory.”

  Capelo said, more harshly than he intended, “Let’s hear it.”

  Gruber said, “I think the artifact creates also a second kind of probability field. That’s the one that affects quantum events in the brain.”

  “What’s your proof?”

  “Only what happened to us. And that Enli, whose people evolved here, was not affected at that spot. I think the artifact must generate some sort of field of varying strengths that envelops the entire planet. Ann believes that accounts for the evolution of the shared-reality mechanism in Worlders.”

  Capelo exploded. “That’s not a theory! It’s a crackpot lunacy!”

  Gruber spat, “Can you do better?”

  “Not the point. You don’t have any data, or any way to test the data you don’t have.”

  “Yes, I do,” Gruber said. “Two ways to test. First, Ann is making Lagerfeld scans of two native brains to compare with our earlier ones. To see if there was any effect from the moment the buried artifact saved World from the wave effect that irradiated Nimitri.”

  Capelo got to his feet. A familiar rage was starting in him; its very familiarity was comfortable. It was anger at the morons who desecrated science. Who wandered into universities with pathetic “theories” recorded in cheap school computers. Who put out popular flimsies, available for a fee of course, that “explained” the origin of the universe in terms of astrology or numerology or the course of ancient rivers. Who claimed that the existence of angels could be proven mathematically.

  “So this buried artifact does everything,” he said to Gruber, not hiding his contempt. Why bother? “It destabilizes atoms with an atomic number over seventy-five. It stops other destabilizing waves cold in their wavy tracks. And it generates a secondary probability field that affects brain activity. Can it also conduct an orchestra and take out the trash?”

  Gruber rose, too. Before the idiot could answer, Kaufman said quietly from the ground below both of them, “Tom, the destabilizing and wave deflection and mind-blanking were all quantum events. And they all happened.”

  Capelo looked down at Kaufman’s mild, practical, effective face. The man never looked angry, or even annoyed. He never even looked surprised. Kaufman’s clear brown eyes held steady under Capelo’s gaze.

  “Yes, Lyle,” Capelo said bleakly. “They’re all quantum events, and they all happened.”

  “Let’s head back,” Kaufman said.

  * * *

  At the hole, Albemarle, Rosalind Singh, and the techs were still at work mapping exactly how the most radioactive parts of the Neury Mountains compared with the positions of the protuberances on the artifact. The task required computer simulations of fifty thousand years of geologic activity, along with analysis of satellite imaging of the present patterns of radioactivity. Capelo couldn’t face any of it just yet, especially Albemarle.

  Nor did he want to see Amanda and Sudie. The girls were getting tired of camping out in the cave. Jane Shaw had performed miracles of instruction and amusement, but they were kids, and kids didn’t like being cooped up beside an excavation site they were forbidden to go near. Capelo couldn’t blame them; he just didn’t want to hear any more complaints about it.

  He wanted to be alone to think.

  The problem was, it was difficult to be alone in the upland valley. Too many people doing too many things. Base camp was worse, and the tunnel system between them had more traffic than New York maglevs. If he wanted to be alone, he would have to hike out of the valley.

  It wasn’t hard to do. These mountains were low and shallow, with few peaks and many rifts and passes. Capelo put on his hiking boots and took the easiest one upwards, hoping his daughters didn’t spot him going and set up a clamor.

  After a half hour of climbing, he was breathing hard. The sun beat down on him, and he sat on a convenient boulder, took off his shirt, and panted at the mess humans had made of the Neury Mountains.

  The enormous amount of dirt and rock from the excavation site—a quarter-mile down!—had to go somewhere. The digger had simply lifted it out, flown away from the valley, and dumped. The mountainsides, upland meadows, and ravines surrounding the site were smothered in raw rubble. It was ugly and depressing, and Kaufman’s only defense was that the natives, who had strong superstitious taboos about the m
ountains, would never see it. The place looked like a war zone.

  The real war was inside Capelo.

  Four sets of data. No, five now; what Gruber had made him experience could not really be left out, although calling it “data” was ludicrous. Five sets of information, with no way to integrate them. And possibly the outcome of the war rested on that integration.

  He tried to let his mind drift. It was a trick he sometimes used: focus on something irrelevant or empty your mind, and an insight may float up into the emptiness. Henri Poincare had done it, and Roger Penrose, and the great Salah Majoub.

  Capelo focused on a red flower growing on a patch of mountainside that had somehow escaped being dumped on. He let the red flower fill his mind, and then let his mind slide away from it and just drift.

  The sun slipped down the sky.

  Time slipped by unnoticed.

  No insight came.

  “Tom?”

  Capelo jumped. Kaufman, creeping up behind him. “Don’t do that!”

  “Sorry. Shall I leave?” Kaufman the considerate, the urbane.

  “No, might as well stay. Nothing going on here. What’s happening at the hole?”

  “Rosalind and Hal want you. The simulations are done. The protuberance marked as setting one seems to match up with the simulated history of geologic shifting of the radioactive veins. The artifact is a directed-beam destabilizer, just as you thought.”

  Two sets of data integrated, Tom thought, but it brought him no pleasure. He said to Kaufman, “I suppose that means the artifact will make an invaluable weapon.”

  “Yes.”

  “One that justifies this entire expedition.”

  “Oh, yes.”