Probability Sun Page 25

  “You can go,” Ivi said, very low, and to Enli the words sounded almost like a flower blessing, as if Ivi were not only a farm woman but had, somehow, become also a high priest of the First Flower.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  ABOARD THE ALAN B. SHEPARD

  The flyer that had informed McChesney and Grafton of the Viridian massacre had also beamed more routine data to the Alan B. Shepard, including the mailbag. The major newsgrams showed holos taken from space of what was left of the colonized planet and its colonized moon. Kaufman looked at the ones with quarter-meter resolution and felt his stomach turn. Human presence had been firmly established on the planet, which, like World, had been fertile and welcoming, so people spent much time outdoors. The holos were horrifying.

  Around the ship small knots of crewmen spoke in low voices. Those few with relatives or friends in the Viridian system were excused from duty by their section officers. The chaplain announced an all-faith memorial service in the chapel, and had to hold more than one service because so many off-duty personnel wanted to attend. Kaufman had known the chapel, in this secular age, to be totally empty for weeks at a time.

  There was little he could do but wait. He knew what would happen, but not how soon it would happen. He couldn’t go to Marbet, or Grafton, or Capelo, not without affecting the outcome. Maybe this, he thought without humor, was a human equivalent to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Any attempt to measure the outcome would change its spin or direction.

  He told Hal Albemarle and Rosalind Singh only that Tom Capelo had been arrested for attacking two MPs. Albemarle’s lip curled knowingly. Rosalind looked grave. “Lyle, we need Tom to finish this project. No one else has a clue about a model for these phenomena.”

  “Neither does Tom,” Albemarle said. Couldn’t resist, Kaufman thought with contempt, and then forgot him. Albemarle wasn’t important.

  Kaufman said to Rosalind, “I don’t think he’ll be confined to quarters long. After all, he’s a civilian. It isn’t as if a soldier had assaulted a superior officer. Once Grafton is satisfied that Tom has calmed down and is no longer prejudicial to good order, Grafton will pretty much have to release him.”

  Rosalind, troubled, said, “He’ll be accompanied by MPs, though, won’t he? To make sure he doesn’t have another go at you or Commander Grafton. Or even try to get to the Faller prisoner.”

  “Yes, probably.”

  “Tom’s working method … you’ve seen him, Lyle. He roves around. He goes into a sort of other-worldly trance and paces restlessly about. It’s counterproductive to restrict him, or have guards constantly hemming him in. He needs to work. We need him to work.”

  “I know,” Kaufman said.

  “I don’t like this, Lyle.”

  “None of us likes it.”

  She nodded gravely. Albemarle tried to look as if he were not still sneering. Kaufman left them both and went to his quarters.

  To wait.

  * * *

  He had lost it. His own fucking fault. The red rage had grabbed him and he’d lost it. No excuse.

  Lying helpless on his bunk, wrapped from the shoulders down in tanglefoam, Capelo cursed himself. The red rage was from the time of Karen’s death, when it had gripped him every few weeks. Afterward, he wouldn’t have been able to remember what he’d done, except that the results lay around him. Broken furniture. A smashed computer. Once, his wedding ring pounded into a flat blob. That scared him, as nothing else had. After that, he worked as hard to keep the red rage in check when he was alone as he did when he was with Amanda and Sudie. And he had succeeded, until now.

  One of the motherfuckers that had killed Karen was alive on this ship.

  Capelo forced himself to breathe deeply and steadily. It took ten minutes to feel that his breathing was back in his control. Then he started on his mind. Ever since he’d been in graduate school, a favorite relaxer had been to work on the Riemann Conjecture, that piece of unsolved math left over from three centuries ago. He examined various pieces, played with extending the known results, let himself be absorbed by the challenge. Known infinite number on X=½ … extend to non-denumerable infinity … how? He let the Riemann Conjecture massage his brain, and that further massaged his body until his muscles unclenched.

  He needed to unclench. The doctor would come soon, and the doctor was strictly military. Grafton’s by-the-book military, not Kaufman’s slippery PR military. Capelo wasn’t sure which was worse. The doctor wasn’t going to authorize dissolving the tanglefoam until Capelo showed acceptable skin moisture and temperature, acceptable breathing, acceptable neural-firing patterns.

  He thought some more about an infinity of zeros.

  * * *

  They made him wait eight hours, through two separate doctor visits, before the MPs sprayed the tanglefoam with the nano-eaters and it dissolved from around Capelo as if it had never been. He sat up on his bunk and rubbed his arms.

  “You may feel some circulation slow-down for a brief time. Nothing serious,” the doctor said.

  “I understand.” Keep it quiet, reasonable. Sane.

  The Navy officer with the doctor said, “You’re now free to come and go as you wish, Dr. Capelo. But you understand that everywhere you go you’ll be accompanied by Sergeant Forrester.”

  Sergeant Forrester, a huge MP with watchful eyes, stared directly at Capelo. Augmented muscles, Capelo thought. And not a fool. Aloud he said, “I understand.”

  “Good. We’re removing computer access from your quarters. When you need access for your work, please use the equipment made available to the Special Project Team on the observation deck.”

  Under the careful eyes of the MP. Capelo could just picture that: Rosalind’s embarrassment, Albemarle’s secret smiles, the looks on the techs’ faces. Aloud he said again, “I understand.” He was sounding like a fucking parrot. Tommy want a cracker?

  “Do you have any other questions, Dr. Capelo?”

  “No. But I’d like to see my children. They’re in the next room.”

  “Certainly.”

  Doctor and officer left, trailing rectitude. Capelo was escorted next door, where Amanda and Sudie rushed into his arms. Sergeant Forrester took up a post by the door. Jane Shaw discreetly pretended the MP was not there.

  “How’re my best girls?” Capelo said.

  “I’m perfect, thanks to your genes,” Amanda said, their old joke, and tossed her hair back from her eyes. God, she was growing up fast.

  Sudie said, “Jane said you were sick, Daddy. Are you better?”

  “Much better.”

  “Who’s that man?”

  “A soldier. He’s watching me to learn how I work.”

  Sudie accepted this; she was used to grad students and postdocs following her father around. She leaned close to his ear and whispered, “We didn’t go through the secret door.”

  He whispered back, “I know you didn’t.”

  “We didn’t want the doctor to see.”

  “Good move.”

  “And we didn’t say nothing to anybody else.”

  He didn’t want her dwelling too much on the door. “What have you two been doing? Turning into space doodles?”

  Amanda said, “We’re too old for that game, Daddy.”

  “I’m not,” Sudie said. “I’m a space doodle. Look at my holo!”

  She danced him over to her construct, a tipsy thing of purple and green light circles, while Amanda went to get her most recent schoolwork to show off.

  Over Sudie’s head Capelo looked at Jane. She smiled. “Much better, Tom. No nightmares. Almost a different child.”

  “Look, Dad,” Amanda said importantly, “look at this. I can do algebra now. See, you have to solve for x. What you do is, you do this to one side of the equation…”

  Capelo listened to Amanda teach him algebra and Sudie explain her colorful construct. Jane, who had known him a long time and seen the red rage once before, studied him carefully. Jane was shrewd. Capelo was careful not to meet her e
yes.

  * * *

  After Sgt. Forrester escorted him back to his own quarters, Capelo waited half an hour. Then he crawled under his bunk and quietly pushed open Sudie’s secret door a few inches. This let him listen as Jane had the girls finish their lessons, pick up their belongings, and get ready to go to the ship’s garden. She took them there every afternoon, to get out of their one room. There weren’t too many other places on a starship where she could take two children.

  “Daddy looks terrible,” he heard Amanda say to Jane.

  “He had a retrovirus, you know,” Jane answered. “That’s why he was in quarantine.”

  “I know. But he looked terrible before the virus, too.”

  Capelo tensed for Jane’s answer. “He has a lot on his mind, Amanda.”

  “I know. But I don’t think it’s that. I think he’s getting old.”

  Jane whooped. “Old? Honey, your daddy’s thirty-four!”

  Amanda said primly, “I think thirty-four is quite old.”

  Despite himself, Capelo grinned. The grin stretched his mouth painfully, and he realized that he had been clenching his teeth for a long time.

  Sudie erupted from the bathroom, there was a fight between her and Amanda over whether or not purple was a stupid color, and then they all left for the garden.

  Capelo pushed on the crude metal plate. On its other side, it eased the antique sea chest away from the wall. He crawled through and noiselessly pushed the chest back.

  The girls’ school computer was, of course, linked to the ship’s library. It took Capelo only a few minutes to find what he wanted. The general surveillance recordings were only lightly fire-walled; Amanda could have gotten into them. He instructed the control program to give him the present whereabouts of Marbet Grant.

  “Marbet Grant is currently in the brig,” the computer said.

  In the brig? What for? Was the Faller there, too? Capelo didn’t dare ask the computer for the Faller’s whereabouts; that was undoubtedly deeply classified information and would trigger data alarms that would not be lightly firewalled. Instead, Capelo said, “Show me a map of the ship.”

  The computer complied. Capelo studied the map.

  “Access surveillance file for the brig.”

  The file was empty until two days ago; apparently nobody had been arrested before Marbet. Grafton ran a tight ship.

  He watched Marbet being brought to her cell. The brig consisted of two rooms, an anteroom crowded with storage crates and a single cell, equipped with bunk, toilet, sink. No computer. Both anteroom and cell used retina scans supplemented with non-vocal e-locks. Capelo magnified the picture again and again, but he couldn’t see what codes the MP punched in. The soldier kept his body between the codepad and the surveillance camera, undoubtedly as per regs. Capelo instructed the computer to skip to the first visual of Lyle Kaufman and track him.

  The MP got to his feet and saluted as Kaufman entered the anteroom. “Sir!”

  “At ease, sergeant. Has Commander Grafton authorized my visit to the prisoner?”

  “Yes, sir! The special project team has been cleared for entry, sir!”

  Kaufman passed into the cell. Marbet sat on the edge of the bunk, dressed in green coveralls, writing on paper with a pencil. Beside her was an untouched tray of food.

  “Hello, Marbet.”

  “Hello, Lyle.”

  “I’ve come to ask you some necessary questions about your work.”

  “Am I going to be allowed to continue it?”

  “That’s not decided yet.”

  “You’re lying,” Marbet said. “Look at you … you’re lying and you hate it.”

  “All right.” He sat beside her on the bunk. “You can’t resume your work, you can’t see the prisoner again, and you’re in the brig until we arrive back on Mars. But meantime, I need to know everything you’ve learned about how much the Faller knows about the artifact. This is an official inquiry, Marbet, but it’s also an appeal for the good of the project.”

  Capelo stopped the recording. His breath caught. The Fallers already had something like the artifact themselves; that’s where they got their beam-disrupter shields, those copies of setting prime two. So it wasn’t just the existence of artifacts in general that had gotten Marbet arrested. It was a specific artifact, the one humans had found. She had told the enemy that humans had it.

  Even Capelo, least military of men, knew that qualified as treason.

  He restarted the recording.

  Kaufman said, “Will you cooperate?”

  “Of course. I never intended anything but the good of the project.”

  “I believe that. Others won’t.”

  “At least now you’re being honest. There isn’t too much to report. Yes, the Faller recognized the artifact, immediately. He recognized the holo I programmed, too, which suggests to me that they’ve discovered how to use the directed-beam destabilizer at setting prime one. That was as far as I got. I’d planned on programming a holo to demonstrate the spherical wave-effect destabilizer, too, to see if he recognized that. But you came in before I did that.”

  My God, Capelo thought, without reverence.

  “Was there anything in his non-verbal or sign language that told you anything more than that he recognized it?”

  “Yes. He was disturbed that we knew about it, or had it. Very disturbed.”

  “What else?”

  “Nothing else. I didn’t have time.”

  She smiled. “It’s all right, Lyle. I like you, too. If things were different…”

  “Anything else?”

  “Just one thing. But it’s important. You have to convince Grafton to let me talk again to the Fatter.”

  “That’s not possible, Marbet. Can’t happen.”

  “It has to. The Faller was very disturbed that we have this artifact, Lyle.”

  “You’d expect that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes. But as far as I can estimate, his disturbance went beyond our new strategic advantage. He was trying to hide something, Lyle. Something important, that we might need to know about the artifact.”

  “Could you tell what?”

  “Not a clue. But I’m positive I’m right. You shouldn’t have had me arrested so quickly. You should have listened to me first, and weighed all the alternatives, and made your usual careful decisions. But you didn’t. You went off half-cocked because your personal feelings fir me overwhelmed you with disappointment that I did what I did. It was a mistake, Lyle. And if what you say about Grafton is true, I don’t see how you’re going to rectify it.”

  Capelo sat stunned. Not only communication with the enemy, but communication about future human weapons in the war. If Capelo had been Kaufman, he would already have had this alien killed, purely for what he now knew. But Kaufman wasn’t Capelo. Kaufman didn’t think logically. Probably the Faller was still alive somewhere on the ship. A Faller, the bastards who had killed Karen and casually demolished Capelo’s life. Alive on this ship somewhere, with Karen’s children.

  Not for long.

  He replayed a fragment of the conversation between Marbet and Kaufman, just to be sure he had it right. The young MP, talking to Kaufman: “Yes, sir! The special project team has been cleared for entry, sir!”

  Better than he’d hoped.

  The far door of the girls’ suite opened onto a service corridor. Capelo opened it a few inches and watched. Empty. He snaked into the corridor, softly closing the door behind him. Then he straightened and did his best to assume the look of a man preoccupied with important business.

  Several levels of very long corridor lay between him and the brig, located on the ship’s lowest level. There was no chance of traversing them unseen. He had to depend on most of the crew’s not realizing that he had been arrested, or that he was supposed to be accompanied by an MP. Capelo figured that his chances were good; there was no reason for the crew to be aware, with the exception of the other MPs. They would know about Forrester’s special assignment. But the M
Ps, for obvious reasons, didn’t fraternize with officers or crew. They had their own quarters, mess, recreation area, and command structure.

  Walking briskly, Capelo moved along what he hoped were the least-used corridors. He passed several crew and three low-ranking officers. The crew ignored him; the officers nodded in a distant way. Capelo nodded back.

  He buzzed the antechamber to the brig, and the MP—a different one from the surveillance tape, but also very young—opened the door.

  “I’m Dr. Thomas Capelo, here to see Marbet Grant. I am the physicist on the special project team. The team has been cleared for entry.”

  “Yes, sir. Please step up to the retina scanner to verify that you are Dr. Capelo.”

  Capelo hesitated. Probably the verification scans were simply stored until someone accessed them. On the other hand, the scans might be linked to a denied-access list, and Grafton might have thought to put him on it. He searched for a way around the scan, didn’t find it, calculated the odds, and stepped up to the machine.

  It announced, “Dr. Thomas Capelo, chief scientist, special project team.”

  “You’re verified for entry, sir.”

  “Wait a moment before you open the door, please. Ms. Grant, as you know, was a member of our team. I’d like to ask you some questions about her before I see her in person.” Capelo made his voice as authoritative as possible. Maybe the young soldier would even think he was a medical doctor.

  “Questions, sir?”

  “Yes.” He asked about Marbet’s movements in her cell, her food consumption, her sleeping habits, her conversations with the MP. There turned out to be none of the latter; apparently it was against regulations. The soldier answered him patiently. He seemed earnest but not particularly bright. Not genetically augmented. As Capelo invented questions, he kept moving slowly around the tiny anteroom. Now here, now there. He kept it up for ten minutes, until the man was used to his restlessness. Finally he said, “Thank you. I’d like to go in now.”

  The MP turned to bend over the codepad to the cell, blocking it from the surveillance camera with his body. Capelo stood between him and the desk. He waited until the door swung open, then picked up a heavy data-storage cube—the military made everything heavy and sturdy, to last—and hit the MP hard on the back of the head.