Probability Space (12 page)

A mistake. Magdalena awaited him. Once more he looked at those brilliant eyes, aging face, still lush body, and felt the unmistakable and involuntary stirring in his loins. This time she didn’t mock him for it. She had other things on her mind. “Come with me, Lyle. There’s something you must hear.”

When he didn’t answer, she grabbed his hand. He shook himself free but followed her to another house, virtually identical to Enli’s on the outside. But not inside, where it held a bed and other human furnishings. She had a ship somewhere. The girl Essa sat cross-legged on a pillow, polishing a bowl. She grinned at him.

“Listen,” Magdalena said, and switched on a data cube.

“Thass not ’sposed to be there.”
Laslo’s voice, very drunk.

“What isn’t supposed to be where
?” Another young man, sounding marginally less drunk.
“Just an asteroid.”

“Isn’t ’sposed to be there. Hand me ’nother fizzie.”

“They’re gone. You drunk the last one, you pig.”

“No fizzies? Might as well go home.”

“Just an asteroid. No … two asteroids.”

“Two!”
Laslo said, with pointless jubilation.

“Where’d they come from? Isn’t supposed to be there. Not on computer.”

“N-body problem. Gravity. Messes things up. Jupiter.”

“Let’s shoot ’em!”

“Yeah!”
Laslo cried, and hiccuped.

“What kinda guns you got on this thing? No guns, prob’ly. Fucking rich-boy pleasure craft.”

“Got … got guns put on it. Daddy-dad doesn’t know. Illegals.”

“You’re a bonus, Laslo.”

“Goddamn true. Mummy doesn’t know either. ’Bout the guns.”

“You sure ’bout that? Isn’t much your famous mother don’t know. Or do. God, that body, I saw her in an old—”

“Shut up, Conner,
” Laslo said savagely.
“Computer, activate … can’t remember the word…”

“Activate weapons. Jesus, Lash. YOU gotta say it. Voice cued.”

“Activate weapons!”

“Hey, a message from th’asteroid! People! Maybe there’s girls.”

“You are approaching a highly restricted area,
” a mechanical voice said.
“Leave this area immediately.”

“It don’t want us,
” Conner said.
“Shoot it!”

“Wait … maybe…?”

“You are approaching a highly restricted area. Leave this area immediately.”

“Fucking snakes,
” Conner said.
“Shoot it!”

“I …

“Fucking coward!”

“THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING! YOU HAVE INVADED A HIGHLY RESTRICTED AND HIGH-DANGER AREA. LEAVE IMMEDIATELY OR YOUR CRAFT WILL BE FIRED ON!”

And then a fourth voice, speaking rapidly,
“Unknown craft … SOS … Help! I’m being held prisoner here—this is Tom Capelo—”

A very brief, high-pitched whine.

“Tom!” Kaufman said.

“So it is Dr. Capelo? You recognize the voice?”

“Yes,” Kaufman said. “But I don’t understand how—where and when was this made?”

“July third, coordinates in the Belt,” Magdalena said. “I checked the location. There is nothing there now, and this recorder had a pick-up range of less than a hundred clicks. The recorder indicated that the two separate voices came from separate loci. But after that, the captors turned off the recording equipment.”

Kaufman’s mind raced. Tom had been held in the Belt, probably in a hollow asteroid habitat, and from the warning and prompt firing, something important had been housed nearby, although not with him. The Protector Artifact? Stash it there with maximum defenses, and stash Tom nearby to … do what? Work on it? Maybe, but only if you had the kind of mind that didn’t realize that there was a huge gap between experimental and theoretical physics, that Tom Capelo practiced the latter, and that theoretical physicists did not need to be in the presence of the phenomena they invented equations to explain. Kaufman could easily imagine military officers who did not realize any of this. Tom had been brought to World originally to make sense of the artifact, and he had. What had they wanted him to do now?

And Magdalena said neither Tom nor the artifact housing was there now. They’d been moved. She’d also said—

“What do you mean, ‘After that, the captors turned off the recording equipment’?”

“Laslo was doing what he always does,” Magdalena said, pushing a strand of her black hair off her face. In her deep blue pants and silver-embroidered tunic she looked completely out of place in the native hut. “Laslo wants to do without my guidance, which he can’t. So periodically he plays these idiotic games, disappearing for weeks or months. My son is very immature for his age, I’m afraid. Still, I don’t think he anticipated that this flight would end with him and his friend being captured alongside the great Dr. Capelo.”

Kaufman stared at her. Yes, she believed it. But he’d heard the warning, the characteristic weapon whine … Laslo’s ship had been vaporized.

He said carefully, “Do you have any further indication that Laslo is still alive?”

“Of course he’s still alive. You don’t think Stefanak is going to murder Thomas Capelo, savior of the Solar System, do you?”

“No, but—”

“Where Capelo is, so is Laslo,” Magdalena said.

Kaufman looked into those blue eyes, bluer than sapphires, and saw absolute conviction. She believed her son was alive and with Capelo. She had to believe it; nothing else was bearable. Kaufman was looking at self-delusion in a character strong enough to elevate it to madness.

He said carefully, “Could your contacts gain any indication of where Dr. Capelo might have been moved?”

“No, And believe me, I tried. Security is tighter than a virgin’s ass. My only lead was Amanda Capelo. She wasn’t taken along with her father, so maybe she saw something at some point that would give me a clue. She might not recognize it as a due, but I might.”

He said, still very careful, “World seems a long way to come yourself to hunt for Amanda on that slight evidence.”

She smiled. “You’re right. I’d have sent somebody, except I was warned in advance.”

“Warned of what?”

“Then you don’t know. You’d already gone through the tunnel. By now, there’s been a revolution. Stefanak declared martial law and the anti-Stefanak forces have tried to overthrow him.”

Kaufman’s stomach tightened. “Tried? Did they succeed?”

Magdalena shrugged. “I don’t know. I was warned. A friend sent me word. ‘Leave the Solar System. Pierce has decided to move on the eighteenth. The navy will lead it off.’ I got out.”

Pierce. Solar Alliance Defense Navy Chief Admiral Nikolai Pierce, a bitter rival to Stefanak. And if Magdalena had the connections that Kaufman had always heard attributed to her, she was right to get out. Pierce would have had her killed instantly. Her vast, shadowy, quasi-political empire backed Stefanak.

She said, “I have a flyer bringing me news. He’s due to arrive at this tunnel in a few days. Meanwhile, this Godawful backwater is as good a place as any to hide until things are decided.”

“Until things are decided”
—she spoke about political and military control of the entire Solar System as though it didn’t matter who won. Perhaps to her, it didn’t. Her only concern was her son. Kaufman found such misplaced single-mindedness unnerving, grotesque.

He said, “And if Pierce does win? You plan on hiding on World forever?”

She smiled at him. “Of course not. But you should know that the days immediately following a coup is the time when all sorts of people disappear. ‘Casualty of the fighting.’ I have a lot of enemies, Lyle. If Pierce wins, he’ll move to restore at least the semblance of order, and then I’d be a lot harder to kill without considerable publicity. No matter who wins, I’ll go back. Your primitive little planet here is just a convenient temporary storm shelter. And of course I hoped you had Amanda Capelo with you. You might have, you know. But you haven’t heard from or about her?”

“No,” Kaufman managed. He had been a soldier under General Sullivan Stefanak, Supreme Commander Solar Alliance Defense Council. He had, despite everything, admired the man. And now Stefanak might be deposed, or imprisoned, or murdered. Revolution …

“Yes, I could see that from your first reaction. And your pretty Sensitive’s. I’ll find him, you know. Laslo.”

She had his attention again. He looked at her closely. She believed it. She would find Tom Capelo, and with him would be her Laslo. Pity flooded Kaufman.

She saved him from speaking by adding, “Meanwhile, of course, if your little girl Amanda is still in Lowell City, it isn’t going to go very well for her. Or the whole rest of the population. Essa, what is it now?”

Humbly the native girl handed Magdalena the bowl, polished to a blinding shine. She said something in World, which neither Kaufman nor Magdalena could follow. “What?” Magdalena said irritably.

“She asks,” said Marbet’s voice behind him, “how long it’s going to be until you take her in the flying metal boat to other worlds. She says you promised, through Enli.”

“Oh, soon,” Magdalena said.

Kaufman turned to look at Marbet, standing in the doorway. Marbet said, “Lyle, Ann wants you,” and walked out. Kaufman followed. She led him not to Ann’s hut but to another one, empty except for a small table, two plain floor pillows, and a rolled-up sleeping mat.

“This is where you and I will stay. Lyle, you shouldn’t trust anything Magdalena tells you.”

“How long were you standing there? Did you hear that data cube?”

“Yes.” Marbet motioned for him to sit on one of the pillows; she took the other. “That part is real, I think. She’s looking for her son, and she genuinely believes he’s alive and with Tom.”

“He’s not alive.”

“I know.”

“Have you ever met her before?”

“No.”

“What else could you see about her now?”

Marbet was silent for a long moment. Finally she said, “I already knew something about her. You can’t do Sensitive work in negotiations without sooner or later coming across one of Magdalena’s corporations. As part of my preparation for dealing with her people, I’ve been shown holos of her, and I was briefed on what’s known of her history. Do you know it?”

“No.”

“She was born in Atlanta, on Earth. Her mother was most likely a whore. What’s definitely known is that the mother, or somebody, left the baby in a box in front of a government clinic in the Plumbob, Adanta’s worst section. Not even cops will go in there.”

“Go on,” Kaufman said.

“The baby was adopted by a nurse at the clinic, Catalune Damroscher, who was or became a peen addict. She named the child ‘May.’ Maybe Catalune Damroscher started out wanting to be a good mother, but she abused little May horribly. There are records in ten different free clinics of the child being beaten, burned, kicked. May didn’t talk until she was four years old.

“When she was six, she disappeared off any records, anywhere. The next year Catalune overdosed on peen and died. Nobody knows where May went or how she lived between six and sixteen.”

“I see,” said Kaufman, who didn’t. How could a six-year-old survive in the Plumbob?

“May turned up in two-one-two-five on the pleasure beaches of North Carolina. Those places are very heavily guarded, but somehow she got in, and became the mistress of a rich man named Amerigo Dalton for three or four years. She’s mentioned in old deebees of gossip columns, things-like that. She went from Dalton to Evan Kilhane, the porn producer, or maybe there were men in between. Kilhane gave her the name ‘Magdalena’ and launched her porn career. You probably know at least the outline of the rest.”

“Yes,” Kaufman said. Magdalena’s sorry childhood had stirred him, “But I didn’t know she had a son.”

“By Bellington Wace Arnold. Illegitimate. Lyle, if you go on looking like that I’m going to slap you.”

“Looking like what?” A mistake, he shouldn’t have asked.

“Like a man about to weep over an injured kitten. Listen to me. Magdalena is dangerous. She didn’t have her son genetically engineered because she’s so arrogant she believed that any child of hers would be wonderful without any artificial help. At the same time, she’s furious inside at the perversion of genes that brought her the beauty which ruined her life.”

He said skeptically, “Was all
that
in the official records?”

“Of course not,” Marbet snapped. “I saw it in every line of her when she stood listening to that data cube. Magdalena is furious at what Laslo is. She also has focused on him every thwarted desire of her entire life, every single denied impulse. I’ll bet she’s never had one genuine orgasm.”

That was too much. Kaufman stood and stretched, feigning nonchalance.

“Don’t pretend with me, Lyle. You’re about as indifferent to her as a bear to honey. She destroyed any potential that son of hers might have had through controlling him, excusing him, smothering him. He hated her and worshipped her and they probably fought constantly.”

Kaufman said, “Don’t you think that’s a lot to get out of one short exposure? Even for you?”

Marbet stared at him. The longer she gazed, the more uncomfortable Kaufman became. She could see so damn much!

Finally she turned away, saying over her shoulder, “We need to have our things brought here from the flyer. Don’t let May Damroscher fool you, Lyle. She’s a person consumed, and you are no match for her at all.”

TEN

LOWELL CITY, MARS

T
he Ares Abbey of the Benedictine Brothers was the strangest place to live that Amanda could imagine. Everyone was kind, but no one made any sense.

The first few days she had stayed in bed, terrified and exhausted. Brother Meissel had brought her food and sat on the edge of her bed, which embarrassed Amanda because all she had on was somebody’s old tunic that she was using as a nightshirt, and anyway she hadn’t bathed and might smell bad. Brother Meissel talked about faith and prayer and the testing of the spirit until Amanda pretended to be asleep, and then the “priest” would go away. Often she fell asleep, but she always woke to nightmares about her father or about Father Emil.