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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE. Gofkit Shamloe, World

  ONE. Lowell City, Mars

  TWO. Tharsis Province, Mars

  THREE. Luna City, Luna

  FOUR. Aboard the Alan B. Shepard

  FIVE. Aboard the Alan B. Shepard

  SIX. Faller Space, Unnamed Star System

  SEVEN. World

  EIGHT. The Neury Mountains

  NINE. Aboard the Alan B. Shepard

  TEN. Gofkit Jemloe

  ELEVEN. The Neury Mountains

  TWELVE. base Camp

  THIRTEEN. In the Neury Mountains

  FOURTEEN. Aboard the Alan B. Shepard

  FIFTEEN. In the Neury Mountains

  SIXTEEN. Aboard the Alan B. Shepard

  SEVENTEEN. In the Neury Mountains

  EIGHTEEN. Aboard the Alan B. Shepard

  NINETEEN. Gofkit Jemloe

  TWENTY. Aboard the Alan B. Shepard

  TWENTY-ONE. Gofkit Jemloe

  TWENTY-TWO. Gofkit Jemloe

  TWENTY-THREE. Aboard the Alan B. Shepard

  TWENTY-FOUR. The Road to Gofkit Shamloe

  TWENTY-FIVE. Aboard the Alan B. Shepard

  TWENTY-SIX. Aboard the Alan B. Shepard

  TWENTY-SEVEN. Aboard the Alan B. Shepard

  TWENTY-EIGHT. Gofkit Shamloe

  TWENTY-NINE. Aboard the Alan B. Shepard

  THIRTY. Aboard the Alan B. Shepard

  EPILOGUE. Luna City, July 2167

  by Nancy Kress

  Praise

  Copyright

  For Charles Sheffield, founder, The Charitable Foundation for the Promotion of Scientific Literacy Among People Purporting to Be Science Fiction Writers

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This novel owes a large debt to Brian Greene’s fascinating Elegant Universe. Greene’s explanations of superstring theory provided the bases, both factual and speculative, for the even more speculative and eccentric theories of my character Dr. Thomas Capelo.

  I also owe gratitude to my husband, Charles Sheffield, who went over the manuscript carefully and made many valuable suggestions about both science and plot.

  PROLOGUE

  GOFKIT SHAMLOE, WORLD

  The farewell burning had reached its unfolding. Standing at the edge of the circle of mourners in her black robe, Enli held her breath. This was the moment she loved, the moment of joy.

  The procession had left Gofkit Shamloe at sunrise. Four moons had still graced the sky: Lil, Cut, Ap, and Obri. The entire village, including ancient Ayu Pek Marrifin carried on a litter and the two tiny Palofrit twins, just past their Flower Ceremony, walked slowly behind the farm cart. It was pulled by Tiril Pek Bafor’s two oldest, grandsons. The old man, chief gardener to the village for as long as Enli could remember, had been laid, unwashed, in the cart the night before and buried under mounds of flowers: huge bright red jellitib, cluster-blossoms of pajalib, fragrant waxy sajib.

  The priest stepped forward, the servant of the First Flower, and raised her hands. The subdued crowd turned toward her. Behind the priest the fire, started last night, leaped higher than the holy one’s head. Its crackling was the only sound.

  “Now,” said the servant of the First Flower, a short dumpy middle-aged woman whose neckfur was prematurely sparse.

  Tiril Pek Bafor’s grandsons pulled the cart through a narrow lane among mourners, to the very edge of the fire. They tipped the cart forward. The wood had been highly waxed; the body slid effortlessly into the flame, mostly hidden by flowers. And everyone in the entire crowd, the grieving and the old and the halt and the lame, simultaneously threw off their thin black robes and shouted loud enough to wake the dead.

  It was a shout of pure joy. The dead man was returning to his ancestors.

  The village chanted and sang. Under their black capes they all wore brilliantly-colored short tunics sewn, festooned, and entwined before dawn with fresh flowers. Each bloom represented some facet of the wearer’s relationship with the soul now so jubilantly released to the spirit world, where every flower bloomed forever.

  Everyone began to dance. People sang; the fire jumped and shouted; the air filled with the rich fragrance of the oil the priests used to make Tiril Pek Bafor’s passage smell sweet. Amid the dancing and rejoicing, the sun rose, red and warm.

  Enli danced with Calin Pek Lillifar, round and round … it wasn’t only the dance that made her head whirl. She had known Calin since childhood, but this felt like a new way of knowing, a different sharing …

  Her sister Ano tapped her on the shoulder. “Enli … come with me.”

  “Later,” Enli said. Calin was a good dancer, and Enli, helped by a generous swig of pel from the jug passed around by Pek Bafor’s daughters, even felt graceful herself. This was a rarity; Enli was a big, plain woman with no natural grace, and knew it. But Calin didn’t seem to mind. Round and round …

  “Come now,” Ano said.

  “What is it?” Enli said crossly, after following Ano away from the fire. “And why can’t it wait? I want to enjoy the farewell burning!” She glanced back at Calin, not yet dancing with anyone else.

  Ano’s skull ridges creased in worry. “I know. But there’s a government messenger to see you. He’s waiting in the hut.”

  “A government messenger? For me?”

  Ano nodded. The sisters stared at each other. There was no reason for a government messenger to seek Enli. Her old trouble was past, atoned for, finished. And to interrupt her during a farewell burning!

  “Thank you,” Enli said to Ano, in a tone that let Ano know not to follow. Enli walked among the revelers, increasingly drunk on pel, and back along the path, bright with morning flowers, to the deserted village.

  The messenger was young enough to still relish formality. “Enli Pek Brimmidin? May your garden bloom. I am come from the capital city, Rafkit Seloe. I bring a message.”

  He carried no letter. Enli heard her voice come out too hoarse. “May your blossoms flourish. And your message is what?”

  “That your presence is required at Rafkit Seloe, at the office of the Servants of the First Flower. The Sun Blossom himself wishes to talk to you.”

  “About what?” Enli said, knowing that whatever it was, the messenger would of course know. Shared reality.

  The boy couldn’t help himself. He was young, and excitement won out over dignity and formality. He shook his neckfur and said, “About the Terrans!”

  Terrans. Some Terrans had come to World three years ago, from some place unimaginably far away, in a metal flying boat. They had disrupted everything. But then they had gone away again, leaving three graves, and World had returned to sweet peace. Enli got out, “The Terrans left.”

  The boy shook his neckfur again and, in sheer exuberance, rose up on his tiptoes.

  “Yes. But, Pek Brimmidin—they have come back!”

  Enli’s headache began, the sharp boring pain between the eyes. No, no, not again … in the name of the First Flower, not again.

  “Yes,” the messenger said, when Enli didn’t respond. “And this time we know they’re real! Th
e priests made their decision last time, remember? We can trade with the Terrans again and … and everything. They came again from all that way out there beyond the stars. They have come back!

  “Isn’t it wonderful?”

  ONE

  LOWELL CITY, MARS

  General Tolliver Gordon looked up from the holocube in his meaty hands. “Who else has seen this?”

  Major Lyle Kaufman, standing at attention, permitted himself a wintry smile. “Practically everyone, sir. This civilian Dieter Gruber has spent two years trying to get someone from Alliance Command interested. Anyone.”

  “Stefanek?”

  “No, sir.” It was not lost on Major Kaufman that a general had referred to the supreme commander of the Solar Alliance Defense Council without his title, and to a junior officer. For the first time, Kaufman felt a twinge of hope. He could never get in to see General Stefanak. Gordon could.

  “General Ling?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Ling saw this, and dismissed it?”

  “He said there’s no hard evidence, sir.”

  “Hard evidence isn’t the only kind worth considering.” Gordon stood, a big man in a small room. He handled the gravity of Mars easily. Born here, decided Kaufman, who had not been. That would help, too. In theory all nation members, and all service branches, of the Solar Alliance Defense Council were equal. However, some were more equal than others, especially in wartime.

  Gordon walked to a small shelf on one wall of his underground bunker/office. On the shelf stood a mesh cage about a meter square, filled with plastic “shavings.” He picked up a watering can, poked it through the mesh, and filled a water bowl just inside the cage. “All right, Major, I’ve viewed the cube and read the report. Now tell me in your own words what this scientific quest is about, why you think it’s important, and why I should think so.”

  This was his chance. Everyone had told him that if he got this far, Gordon would really listen. Kaufman cleared his throat. “Two years ago, sir, on a routine recon, the one military officer on a scientific expedition to a new planet discovered that one of its moons was an artificial construct with the same kind of markings as the space tunnels. The war was going badly then—”

  Kaufman broke off. A mistake: The war with the Fallers was still going badly, worse than ever, but he had never met an officer in High Command who appreciated being reminded of it. Gordon, however, merely picked up a bag of small seeds and began filling a clear plastic tube leading inside the cage.

  “… And so we launched a secret expedition to see if the moon was, or could be, a weapon. That is, the expedition wasn’t secret, it looked like just another bunch of anthropologists, but it included a team of unacknowledged military scientists led by Colonel Syree Johnson, retired. The ship was the Zeus, under Commander Rafael Peres. Johnson discovered that the moon would indeed make a formidable weapon. It released a spherical wave that destabilized all nuclei with an atomic number greater than seventy-five. While they were still testing the artifact, the Fallers showed up and wanted it, too. Johnson and Peres tried a race for the system’s only space tunnel, #438, towing the moon—”

  “Towing it? How big was this moon?”

  “Almost twenty times the size of the Zeus, sir. Mass of nine hundred thousand tons. Just short of the tunnel, Peres engaged with the enemy. The next sequence of events isn’t clear, but either the Zeus, the Fallers, or the moon itself blew up all three. Colonel Johnson’s previous reports suggest that it might have been the artifact that caused the blow-up. Its mass was too great to go through a tunnel, but she tried to send it through anyway, into our space, to keep it from enemy hands.”

  “So everything blew up. And that was the end of it, from High Command’s point of view.”

  “Yes, sir.” Kaufman felt more and more hopeful. Gordon’s tone conveyed dearly his point of view about High Command’s point of view. “But not the end of it to the surface team. That included a geologist with enough physics to follow what Johnson was doing. Dr. Dieter Gruber, Berlin University. The anthropologists had some sort of trouble with the natives on the planet—”

  “Industrials?”

  “No, sir. Artisan-level at best. Gruber led his team to safety inside a cave-ridden mountain range, where the natives won’t go for religious reasons. He says that in there he discovered a second alien artifact, potentially of inestimable scientific and military value. Shortly afterward, a rescue effort lifted him out along with the two remaining anthropologists—three more humans died on the planet—and ever since, Gruber’s been trying to convince the High Command to go back and dig up the second artifact.”

  Gordon finished filling the seed tube and set the package on the shelf. “And?”

  This was the tricky part. Kaufman proceeded carefully. “Gruber says that at the moment the artifact-moon exploded—the very moment—the artifact buried in the mountains was affected. He argues for the same kind of macro-level quantum entanglement that we think might be the principle behind the space tunnels.” The words were chosen deliberately; no one knew what was the actual science behind the space tunnels, those enigmatic remains of a vanished civilization that would have dwarfed any human one.

  Gordon said, “But…”

  “But Gruber has no direct proof. Nothing documented.”

  “Still, you believe him.”

  “I don’t know him well,” Kaufman said quietly. “But I served under Colonel Syree Johnson in the action at Edge. She was the finest and most committed scientist-officer I’ve ever known. It’s not always an easy combination, sir.”

  Gordon looked at him penetratingly. “I can imagine. Pressure from science to find objective truth, pressure from the military to deploy pragmatic necessity?”

  “Yes, sir. Syree Johnson, too, thought there was some connection between the alien construct in space and the buried one in the mountains. She told Gruber so just before she died.”

  “A recorded conversation?”

  “No, sir. Unfortunately not.”

  “And there’s no direct proof.”

  “No, sir. But scientifically—”

  “Wait on the scientific ‘buts.’ I’ll hear them in a moment. Tell me what you’re going to want if I find the science convincing, and what we stand to gain from following your recommendations.”

  Kaufman took a deep breath. “I think we should send a scientific team to dig up and examine the second artifact. It would require a ship routed through Caligula space, that’s Tunnel #438, with military escort and two flyers permanently attached for tunnel communications. You’d need a good political team to handle native relations, but the crucial thing is the scientist aboard. There’s only one that, in my opinion, can do this. We stand to gain a possible weapon—only possible, of course—related to the moon/artifact that blew up. Gruber says they’re made of the same material, and it’s also the material of the space tunnels. Syree Johnson’s reports say the destroyed artifact affected radioactivity levels in a controlled way, which implies it affected the probability of atomic decay. Anything that affects probability has to be related to the Faller beam-disrupter shields that are letting them attack us with impunity. We could gain a counter-weapon to the Faller shields, sir.”

  Kaufman paused. He’d just fired his biggest gun. If it didn’t hit, nothing would. The beam-disrupter shields had only recently appeared on select Faller ships. Anything fired at such a ship-proton beam, laser cannon, any sort of beam at all—simply disappeared. Gone. Not even an energy trace left behind.

  Gordon left the mesh cage and sat down again behind his desk. His eyes were shrewd.

  “Big promises, Major.”

  “Not promises, sir. But definite possibilities. And we need those. In my opinion, General, the chance is worth the cost.”

  “Even though this geologist, Gruber, has no documentation?”

  Kaufman kept his face blank. “Nothing new starts with documentation, sir. By definition. Especially not in science.”

  “I suppose
not. All right, the costs. I listen well, Major, and I heard two worms in your carefully polished apple. First, why would we need ‘a good political team to handle native relations’? Why not just the usual anthropologists?”

  Yes, Gordon did listen well. He was good. Kaufman said, “The planet’s proscribed by the Solar Alliance, sir.”

  “A fairly large worm. Why?”

  “The natives don’t want us. They’ve decided we lack souls. In their parlance, humans are ‘unreal.’”

  “Interesting,” Gordon said. “And why didn’t you name the ‘one scientist’ that, in your opinion, can do this job? Is the job of digging up and investigating an artifact that difficult?”

  “This one is, sir. Syree Johnson didn’t get it figured out, and she was damn good. She got blown up instead. You need someone with both experimental background and theoretical brilliance, and not many physicists ever are both. I want Dr. Thomas Capelo, sir.”

  He could see the name meant nothing to Gordon.

  “He’s probably on the short list for the Nobel, sir, although he hasn’t won yet. He’s still young, physicists usually do their most innovative work young. He has won the Tabor Phillips prize. His work is on the relationship between quantum events and probability.”

  “Quantum events and probability?”

  “Yes, sir. We know that certain quantum-level events are probabilistic. They may or may not occur. We also know that some events have measurable probability—that is, we can say there’s a seventeen percent chance that x will occur, or a thirty-four percent chance, or whatever. What we can’t do yet is say why this event occurs seventeen percent of the time and that event thirty-four percent of the time. We have equations for the wave functions of quantum-mechanical probability, but no causals for the phenomenon of probability as a whole. That’s the area of Capelo’s work. He theorizes that a particle, or a virtual particle, is involved.”

  Kaufman could see that this meant nothing to General Gordon. He added, “I’m not a scientist either, sir. Just a very interested amateur. But let me go out on a limb and say that if you don’t send Dr. Capelo, I’m not sure the expedition is worth doing at all, given the awful political beating we’ll take from invading a proscribed planet.”