by Nancy Kress
All at once Marbet changed. Her shoulders straightened and her face lost its pleading look. She stared at him. “More important, what did you just learn?”
“What?”
“You heard me. You were hostile, and by being submissive—standard pack behavior, incidentally, and doubly effective when coming from a female—I defused your hostility. I even got you to the point of cooperation. That’s exactly what I’m trying to do with the Faller. And I was succeeding until you soldiers interfered.”
A different anger swept Kaufman. “You were using me.”
“No. I was demonstrating to you. Big difference.”
“And you have no compunction about using your femininity to manipulate me. There’s a name for that, Marbet.”
To his angry surprise, she laughed. “Do you think I have to deny being female to function professionally? Or to prove anything to anybody? If so, you’re wrong. I’m a woman. Sometimes it works against me, sometimes for me, like being short, or brown-skinned, or Martian. None of it outweighs with anybody the fact that I’m a Sensitive. That’s the single defining fact about me, and the rest I use as I have to in order to do my job.”
“Including manipulating me.”
“Listen to me, Lyle. I wasn’t manipulating you, I was demonstrating to you. And you can’t tell me that my demonstration was all that different from what you do in the diplomatic.”
No. He couldn’t. She was good, and he’d hired her to be good, and anything personal should be left out of it. It was unlike him to have to make an effort to remember that fact. He said, with effort, “I’m sorry. Tell me what you’ve learned.”
“You don’t have to be stiff-neutral with me, either. I’m glad to tell you. Sit down.”
A tiny table, was jammed between the bunk and the wall. Lyle sat on one of its two chairs. Marbet took the other, looking more at ease than Kaufman felt.
“What Grafton probably told you is essentially true. I put on a helmet with air supply, went into the Faller’s space through the tech airlock, and untied the Faller’s hand. He didn’t try to attack me or to kill himself. He didn’t answer my signing, either, although everything I know about his nonverbal signals says that he understands my signing. I sign from a submissive posture, as I understand it to look to a Faller. But the main thing is hard to explain, Lyle. He wasn’t answering me, but something has shifted between us. There’s a … not a rapport, that’s too strong. But an increased receptivity.”
“Do you think he’ll answer soon?”
“Yes, although I can’t offer you any objective proof.”
Kaufman smiled thinly. “Nothing about your work is objective.”
“True enough. But the work was progressing until Grafton retied the Faller and barred me completely from seeing him until you ruled on the situation.”
Kaufman said nothing.
Marbet looked at him directly, without coyness or submission or anything but professionalism. “Lyle, I need access to the Faller, I need him to have one hand untied, and I need the freedom to work unhampered by Grafton’s notions of Navy security. Otherwise, I won’t ever get to a point where I can learn anything from the Faller about why his people are destroying ours.”
“All right,” Kaufman said. “You have it.”
“All of it? All three things?”
“Yes.”
‘Thank you, Lyle.” She stood, forcing him to do the same. “I’ll reestablish connection with the Faller—if I can—tomorrow morning. I’ll also show you the tapes from the last sessions, if you like.”
“I can’t,” Kaufman said. “Send them to me planetside. I have to go back down almost immediately. We’re lifting the artifact out of the hole tomorrow morning.”
Interest sharpened her gaze. “Tell me what’s going on.”
He did, throwing in Ann’s experiment with the natives. Marbet exclaimed, “Nine Worlders? Aboard ship now?”
“Yes. I have to explain that to Grafton, too, as well as your carte blanche.”
She grinned. “I don’t envy you that. But you’ll pull it off. You always do.”
“Not always.” Nonetheless, he was warmed by her praise, at the same time as he suspected it. Always she confused him. “Good-bye, Marbet. Keep me posted on progress.”
“I will.” She opened the door for him, waited until he was out of it, and then said, “Lyle?”
“What?”
“I would kiss you if I didn’t think you’d think it was professional manipulation. But it wouldn’t have been.” Quickly she shut the door.
He stood in the night-dimmed ship’s corridor for a long moment, and then went to wake up Grafton.
FIFTEEN
IN THE NEURY MOUNTAINS
Capelo, standing by the hole, said, “Galactic trashmen here, planetside service. One load of alien junk for recycling.”
Rosalind Singh looked at him with amusement, Albemarle with dislike. Lyle Kaufman looked only at the scene, which seemed to him ominously weird in ways he could not have explained.
The digger, reconfigured by the techs for its new role, hovered above the hole in the tiny upland valley. Almost filling the sky in the narrow place between mountain cliffs, the digger dwarfed the humans standing below. The powerful electromagnetic field that kept it there did not extend into the hole. The artifact had been tested with such a field while in the hole, producing no observable effect, but that was no guarantee there would be no effect outside the hole. Capelo was taking no chances. The artifact rested in a net of dislocation-free monofilament cables strong enough to tether a small moon.
Into his comlink Capelo said to the digger, “All right … lift.”
Slowly the digger increased elevation in the air, and the artifact rose out of burial for the first time in fifty thousand years.
Kaufman peered at the artifact’s sides as they rose past him, at its inward curvature, and finally at its underside. As it rose, the artifact shed rock and dirt like hail, sending everyone running into the ubiquitous caves for cover. Whatever the thing was made of, at least it didn’t fuse to rock, apparently not even under great heat. That was a stroke of luck. They would have to brush the artifact clean, of course, but at least they were spared laborious, and possibly damaging, rock chipping.
The digger lifted the artifact clear not only of the hole but of the entire valley. Much debate about where to put it down had finally ended in the choice of the best available mountain meadow, about a half click away. Techs had flattened the site with nano and lasers and had built a thin, strong ring to hold the artifact three feet above the ground. At roughly twenty-five meters in diameter, the artifact would look like an enormous antique floor globe from the library of a giant.
Here be dragons, thought Kaufman. Two techs climbed into the elevator to go down into the hole, in case the artifact had left anything of interest behind. Capelo had told him this was a long shot but that he didn’t want to overlook anything.
As soon as the giant ball had carried its hail of dirt and rock away from the valley, the scientists all ran out of their natural caves and into the artificial cave dug by nanos. Techs had burned and lit an entirely new tunnel system to the meadow. This path sloped sharply upward. Kaufman turned back to accompany Rosalind Singh, who would never admit that her age slowed her down but who always thanked him anyway for waiting.
“Thank you, Lyle. Don’t we look silly! Do you know what I. I. Rabi said about physicists?”
“No,” Kaufman said, although he did. He’d done a lot of reading about physicists.
Rosalind panted slightly, “Rabi said that physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race, never growing up.”
“Second tunnel to the right and straight on till morning,” Kaufman said, and she laughed.
They emerged, twenty minutes later and behind all the others, into bright sunlight. Albemarle, Gruber, and Kaufman swarmed around and under the artifact on its giant ring. Already they were cleaning it of the remaining grime with stiff-bristled brushes. Kaufman, too
, ducked underneath, wishing he knew what he was looking at.
“Don’t be so rough, Hal,” Capelo said acidly to Albemarle. “It isn’t going to rust, you know.”
Albemarle ignored him. Probably hadn’t even heard him. Albemarle, Kaufman saw, was filled with his own absorbing scientific excitement.
Kaufman studied the curve of dirty metal … no, not metal, it was some sort of fullerenes. As far as he could tell, the protuberances that Capelo had shown him on the sphere’s top and sides continued their equidistant equatorial march underneath. The protuberances totaled seven. Each was marked with a cluster of raised dots: one dot, two, three, five, seven, and, presumably under the dirt, eleven and thirteen. Primes, except for “one,” although everything the master makers had left included “one” along with primes. Because of some totally different approach to mathematics? The project team had gone along with the vanished creators. On World, “one” was a prime.
Away from the artifact, Rosalind began the non-invasive tests they had already performed a half-dozen times. Just to make sure that moving the artifact hadn’t changed anything detectably significant about it
“Oh my dear gods,” Capelo said. He stared at the patch he had just cleaned.
Instantly Kaufman was beside him. “What is it, Tom?”
“That protuberance … Rosalind! Come here! Look at this!”
She, Albemarle, and Gruber crowded close. Capelo pointed.
Each of them inspected the protuberance, then looked at each other wild-eyed. “Mein Gott,” Gruber breathed.
“What?” Kaufman said. God, it was humbling being the only non-scientist. “What is it?”
Rosalind took pity on him. “Look, Lyle, at this protuberance over here. Do you see, it has two deep dimples in it, about six centimeters apart, with nipples in the bottoms. We think that sets off whatever that protuberance does, and that both nipples must be depressed to do that. At least, that was the system on Syree Johnson’s larger artifact, although there the depressions were on opposite sides of the circumference, and much bigger. In one of the protuberances that we already cleaned off, we found a rock fragment wedged in one dimple, depressing the nipple deeper than the other. Nothing happened when we removed it. But this protuberance here, prime five, has both nipples depressed already! Look … they’re barely visible!”
Kaufman said, “How? What did it?”
“No way to tell,” Gruber said. “Maybe it has been that way since the original impact. Maybe it was created that way. How can we know?”
“Listen,” Capelo said. He wore his intent, focused look. “Here’s what we have. From the mapping to the radioactive rock distribution, we hypothesize that protuberance setting prime one is a directed beam destabilizer, and that various seismic events have set it off over the centuries. We hypothesize from the same data that protuberance setting prime three may be a spherical wave-effect destabilizer like the one Syree Johnson reported on her artifact, at its lowest setting. If so, the spherical wave effect should follow the inverse square law. And that’s all we know so far. Just speculation.”
Gruber said thoughtfully, “I offer another hypothesis.”
The others turned to look at him, and suddenly Kaufman thought how they would look from above, or from a little distance away. A tense knot of serious people standing and pontificating beside a giant alien sphere in an alien meadow.
Gruber continued, “If protuberance prime five is working, as the two depressed nipples say it is … ja?”
“Get to the point,” Capelo said.
“Then protuberance prime five is generating the probability field that affects brain probabilities. In us in the tunnel, maybe in all of World in the shared-reality mechanism, if it has been switched on for fifty thousand years, since the original impact. Maybe these things are only side effects of whatever protuberance prime five was designed to do, but they come from it anyway.”
Capelo said abruptly, “When Syree Johnson’s artifact—Tas—blew up, the wave effect that destroyed Nimitri should have reached World. It didn’t. That’s hard data, not speculation about brain events. Maybe what protuberance setting prime five was designed to do was provide planet-wide protection against a planet-wide version of the destabilizer wave.”
“Yes,” breathed Rosalind Singh, “yes.” Her placid face suddenly blazed.
“Ja,” Gruber said. “That would fit!”
“It’s only a guess,” Albemarle said. “Where’s your data? You’re the one that’s always talking about data.”
“Oh, we’ll get data,” Capelo said.
Kaufman said, “How?”
Capelo said, “Empirically. We set the thing off.”
That was the answer Kaufman had expected, had known was inevitable, had feared. It was the only practical option: Their mission was to investigate this find with regard to possible military use. For that, testing was essential. Even though there was no way to predict what the tests would do to the artifact, the testers, the natives, or the planet. On the other hand, there was no one to organize any protest against whatever the tests would do.
All at once, Kaufman was glad that Ann Sikorski was safely stowed away on the Shepard, forty-eight thousand clicks out in space.
* * *
But it was another day before they made the first test. Rosalind Singh wanted far more complete analyses of the artifact than she could make while it had been underground. More large items of equipment came down on the shuttle from the Alan B. Shepard. Kaufman used the delay to return to base camp and review the constant stream of data coming from both Ann Sikorski and Marbet Grant. For different reasons, he chose not to contact either of them directly, even though Ann had been trying to reach him for several hours now.
Marbet Grant’s recordings required no response, largely because they were incomprehensible. He watched the real-time recordings inside the prisoner’s cell, sampling them at random. The Faller’s “left” hand was again untied, his other two still manacled to the soft wall behind him. Marbet went through various grimaces and body shifts and hand signings with him. In return, he made several involuntary grimaces and body shifts—at least, Kaufman assumed they were involuntary. His free hand made no signs. None of it conveyed any meaning to Kaufman.
Ann, too, had real-time cams covering the nine Worlders in their sequestered quarters aboard ship. Kaufman watched the first hour, skipped an hour to watch fifteen minutes, and kept to that interval until he had caught up to the present. Then he accessed Ann’s recorded summaries, watching her face grow more and more haggard with each one. Finally, he ran the computer sim results she’d sent him, worked out by the sophisticated near-AI on board.
All this took most of the day. When he was finished, Kaufman went outside. The sun was just setting. He walked to the edge of the patrolled perimeter, and by then it was dusk. Three moons shone, one of them the small, close one—he’d forgotten its name—that moved so fast it looked retrograde in the sky. There were no clouds. The air had the lively, faintly sweet smell peculiar to World; maybe it came from the superabundance of flowers. Kaufman thought of Voratur’s magnificent, carefully tended gardens. Of the well-ordered Voratur household, everyone accepting his place and none of those places wretched or abused. Of Worlders’ pleasure in their fully shared rituals, where priest and rich merchant danced beside gardener and chamberpot cleaner. Shared reality.
Kaufman stared into the sweet-smelling dark a very long time.
* * *
When he arrived back at the meadow site, where the scientists and techs had camped all night, he found everything ready for the first test of the artifact. He’d almost missed it.
“Why are you so far ahead of schedule? And why wasn’t I told?” Kaufman demanded.
“We tried to comlink you; you were in the tunnels,” Rosalind Singh said. “It was a quick decision, Lyle, caused by the loss of an orbital probe. A meteor took it out. So we had to recalibrate to use a different probe, and it will be in position much sooner.”
&nb
sp; “I see,” Kaufman said. Why did they need an orbital probe?
“Put on this s-suit,” she said, and so he did.
At least he understood the planned first test. The radiation maps and geologic computer sims had showed, or seemed to show, that setting prime one was a directed beam destabilizer, operant outside of a “dead-eye” area directly surrounding the artifact. The project team had taken detailed radiation readings of a cliff face across the meadow from the artifact, beyond the “eye.” Then they rotated the artifact so that setting prime one was in direct line with the cliff face. Robots were set to simultaneously depress both nipples in prime setting one, at whatever force was necessary to get a reaction.
Kaufman said, “What if the cliff face is too far away for the beam to reach?”
Capelo glanced at him impatiently. In his s-suit, helmet on, he reminded Kaufman of a thin hopping insect. “Then we set up closer targets, which we’ll do anyway to verify the inverse-square law attribute.”
“Of course,” Kaufman said.
Rosalind added kindly, “Elevation and horizon curvature mean that if the beam has deep penetration and very long range, it will pass through the cliff and then encounter nothing but space. Nothing else on World will be affected.”
“I see.”
“More—the timing has been determined exactly, so that if the beam travels at light speed, and if it does go through the cliff, and if it does have a very long range, it will hit an orbital probe. The probe will send back radiation measurements. But we don’t expect that to happen, because we think the directed beam has a short effective range.”
“All right,” Capelo said. “Three, two, one … now!”
Kaufman saw nothing—no shaft of light shooting out from the artifact, no sudden explosion on the cliff face. But the sensors and displays in front of the scientists went crazy.
“Got it!” Albemarle shouted. “Got the son-of-a-bitch, by God!”
Capelo didn’t even answer with sarcasm. The four scientists immediately fell into excited chatter, most of which was gibberish to Kaufman. Capelo was running equations on his handheld. Rosalind captained her large equipment, re-running the tests she had done yesterday. Kaufman waited patiently.