Probability Sun (8 page)

The Marines carefully bound the sleeping Faller’s limbs and carried him, suited, to the warship. McChesney immediately took off through Space Tunnel #473, followed by twelve other tunnels, some of them highly fluid. There was no way he could be followed. Xenobiologists aboard ship began careful analysis of the gas mixture inside the Faller’s suit before they removed it, as well as every other variable they could think of. By the time they let the alien wake up, their knowledge of Faller biology, until now minuscule, had increased by orders of magnitude.

The alien awoke inside an environment, constructed to his exact biological needs. Atmosphere, humidity, temperature, all matched what had been inside his suit. He also woke bound to the back wall, gently but inexorably. Small capsules had been removed from various parts of his body. Maybe they were the equivalent of tooth fillings, but maybe not. McChesney and his medical team were not going to allow the first Faller POW ever to turn suicide.

Nor were they going to let him starve himself to death. The xenobiologists weren’t exactly sure what liquids would nourish the alien, but they’d analyzed the contents of his stomachs (two) and put together what they hoped were reasonable synthetics. The synthetics would be delivered by forced feeding tube. By the time the prisoner regained consciousness, his only options in his padded prison were to communicate or not.

By that time, McChesney’s warship was in World’s remote star system, ready to transfer cell, prisoner, and xenobiologists to the
Alan B. Shepard
. After the transfer, McChesney flew back to Space Tunnel #438 to take up position in orbit around it until further orders. The warship carried every weapon known to human military. Nothing was coming through Tunnel #438 and advancing toward World without going through McChesney.

The Fallers may or may not have realized that one of their own, instead of dying with the colony skeeter, had been captured alive. But if they did, they weren’t getting him back.

*   *   *

“Tell me again,” Marbet Grant said to Lyle Kaufman as they waited at the security checkpoint in the deep gut of the
Alan B. Shepard
. She closed her eyes.

Watching her, Kaufman understood. It wasn’t that Marbet wanted to hear the information again because she hadn’t understood it. She wanted to hear it again as a mantra, a calming device, a stream of known words. After this last checkpoint, nothing would be known.

He said, “The theory—and it
is
only theory—is that the Fallers have a strong, overriding instinct to eliminate any ‘others’ that could present any danger to themselves. It’s an evolutionary strategy that may have worked and been reinforced over eons on their home planet, which we know has high cosmic bombardment and thus may have yielded many, many mutations. They simply wiped out anything, including their own children, that were too different.

“At the first sign of any otherness, a Faller seems to go into something like human instinctive fear of falling—a xenophobia way beyond what humans usually feel. Although nobody is sure, there may be only one surviving, genetically similar group of Fallers. No races, few permitted variant alleles. Anything else arouses hostility, including us.”

“The ultimate committers of hate crimes,” Marbet murmured. She still had not opened her eyes. After a moment she added, “I’ve never met any alien.”

He shouldn’t be surprised, Kaufman thought. She’d never been out of the Solar System, and no other aliens in the known galaxy except Fallers had invented space travel. Or even the steam engine.

“All right,” Marbet said, opening her eyes, “I’m ready.”

Kaufman thumbed open the door.

The Faller’s cage was ten meters wide by twenty meters long. The length was divided by an invisible, two-molecule-thick plastic sheet separating the Faller’s atmosphere from the human one. The barrier conducted sound almost perfectly. Behind it the Faller was bound naked against the far wall, which was padded so that the alien could not injure itself, no matter what it did.

Not “it,” Kaufman reminded himself. The xenobiologists, none of whom at Marbet’s request were present, had decided that the Faller was male, although not for any reason apparent to Kaufman. The alien was about a meter and a half tall, covered with hairless tough hide of deep brown. Short powerful legs. An equally powerful tail on which he balanced at rest. A torso like a barrel, with three incongruously slim “arms” that seemed all flexible tentacle, each ending in a hand with three fingers and an opposable thumb. No claws or nails. The head, although roughly the size of a human head, was far more cylindrical. Two eyes, no visible nostrils (they were located under the chin), a large mouth.

At first sight of them, the Faller bared sharp long teeth.

Marbet did not react. She walked to the barrier and sat down cross-legged in front of it, looking upward at the alien. A posture of submission, Kaufman decided, and wondered if that was a good idea with a species that wiped out anything it didn’t like.

“You can leave if you like, Lyle,” Marbet said over her shoulder. “I’m going to be here for a few days, and there won’t be anything to see.”

A few
days
? “You mean … sleeping and eating here?”

“Yes. And I’ll need a chamber pot.” And then, not rising, Marbet began removing her clothes.

“Do you … do you want me to take those away?”

“No. Leave them right here, along with everything else you bring me. Food, utensils, bedding. Also an erasable tablet and pen—not a computer or holostage, please—and a music cube.”

“All right,” Kaufman said. Marbet was now removing her underclothes. Her body, genemod perfect, gave Kaufman a sudden lamentable erection. The alien was still baring its teeth. Kaufman left to find the things Marbet wanted.

When he returned, he had controlled himself again. He laid the things beside her and then seated himself, cross-legged like her, against the back wall of the room.

Marbet drew squares on the tablet, then laid it beside her in easy view of the Faller, who did not react. Although how could you tell? Maybe it was reacting all over the place, Kaufman craned his neck to see the tablet:

Primes. Well, that made sense: The one thing in common between humans and Fallers was the space tunnels, which were marked in primes. Although the tunnels, inexplicably, included “one” along with the primes. Kaufman would have to remember to remind Marbet of that.

Marbet held up both hands, fingers splayed. She held up one finger, waited. Two fingers, waited. Three fingers, waited. Five. Seven. Eleven.

The alien did nothing.

Marbet repeated the pantomime several times, got no response, then stopped. After that she just sat, watching.

An hour passed. Somewhere in it, the alien stopped baring his teeth, perhaps because his facial muscles got tired. He did nothing else. Neither did Marbet, except watch.

Eventually, to Kaufman’s surprise, she curled up naked on the floor and went to sleep.

He watched her a while. She was so lovely. But watching even a beautiful woman sleep, and an alien do nothing, could only hold his attention so long. Kaufman left. It was all being recorded anyway, with flag programs to alert him to anything interesting.

Kaufman felt pessimistic as he went to report by comlink to McChesney, now en route to the space tunnel. No response to something as basic as primes. How were they ever supposed to wrest from this enemy any knowledge as complex as the physics of the beam-disrupter shield? It seemed hopeless.

Maybe Gruber’s buried artifact would somehow help. Tomorrow they would make orbit around World.

SEVEN

WORLD

I
don’t want to go down to the stupid planet,” Sudie said. She stuck her lip out at her father. “I want to stay on the ship with Marbet.”

“Where is Marbet, anyway?” Amanda said. “I haven’t seen her for two days, and she promised to help me with my math.”

“Life is a vale of tears,” Tom Capelo said. “Why don’t you ask me to help with your math? I’m a world-renowned physicist, after all, available to you at one-half my usual price.”

“You don’t explain things clearly,” Amanda said.

“Yeah,” Sudie echoed. “We want Marbet.”

Capelo pushed back his irritation. He couldn’t afford it, not today. He needed all his concentration for the job ahead. He looked at his daughters. God, they were so beautiful. Amanda, with her mother’s blonde calm. And Sudie, a miniature of himself, now working up to what he had to ruefully admit could be a Tom Capelo tantrum if it weren’t squashed now. He tried again.

“Sudie, Jane is going down to the planet with us.” And where
was
Jane? She was supposed to be getting the girls ready. Sudie’s hair was still a snarl, Amanda’s bag stood open but unpacked. Now Capelo had an appropriate outlet for his irritation. “Jane!”

“Don’t bellow, Daddy,” Amanda said. “Jane’s in the toilet.”

“I’m not going down to that stupid old planet!” Sudie said. “I’m not! I want Marbet!”

“Jane!”

Jane Shaw came out of the bathroom. Capelo was even more annoyed to see that her short gray hair was neatly combed, her coverall spotless. While Sudie sat in a dejected tearful untended lump. He repressed this annoyance. Jane was a treasure, the one tutor-cum-nanny who had not quit within one month of being hired, and Capelo needed her too much to rile her.

“Jane, we have insurrection. We have mutiny. We have limp pajamas, and I have to be in shuttle bay in five minutes, all of us leaving in forty-five. I am clay in your digits.”

“Go on, Tom,” Jane said. “We’ll be there on time. You just go.”

“May your blossoms bloom forever,” Capelo said, and Amanda smiled. They had all been reviewing the datacubes on World culture, but only Amanda had been truly interested. Sudie had not. She started to wail again, “I don’t want to go to the planet! I want Marbet!”

“Isaac Newton never had to put up with this,” Capelo said, and escaped.

Two corridors away, he turned back. A passing crewman flattened herself against the wall. Capelo barely saw her. He yanked open the door to the girls’ quarters. Poor Sudie, poor baby, she’d been through so much already, her little tearful face …

Sudie sat on the floor watching a holoshow, laughing at the antics of a green hippopotamus and packing her toys into a plastic case. Her hair bounced in neat shining ponytails. Jane, helping Amanda pack, smiled at him and made a go-away gesture.

Meekly Capelo closed the door and went to shuttle bay.

*   *   *

Sergeant Karim Safir, Specialist First Class, SADA, stood with Dieter Gruber, studying the flimsies of the Neury Mountains. Capelo hadn’t had much contact with the tech specialist, who had bunked and eaten with the crew and who had not, until now, been made aware of his duties beyond being told that there were caves to explore on a hew planet. Presumably Safir was used to such assignments. He was supposed to be the best Army spelunker on several worlds.

Safir was small and slim, but he looked strong. He had a thick head of black curling hair and a dapper, very anachronistic mustache. He and the enormous blond Gruber made a comic contrast.

“So how does it look?” Capelo asked. “What’s the first step when we get down there?”

Gruber handed him a flimsy. “The shuttle brings us to just beyond this side of the mountains—here, see?—and the shuttle becomes base camp. Then we go right in. This time I have such good sonar maps that we know exactly where to go. Not like last time, but then I didn’t know I would need such maps. We go in here, through these tunnels, to—”

“We can’t land in that little upland valley you told us about? The one right above the artifact?”

“No, the shuttle is too big. But the digger is hovercrafted, and after we land, Karim will fly it up and over to the valley, with the other heavy equipment. The rest of us walk. What’s the matter, Tom, do you not like caves?”

“I’m going to be underground a long time when I’m dead. I don’t want to start now.”

Gruber laughed. “Don’t worry, these are easy tunnels, big enough to walk upright, mostly dry. And after the nanos finish their smoothing, it will be like walking through the ship, only with more interest on the walls. The site is very complex, you know. Quite a history. There was underwater volcanic activity originally, then the impact of the artifact striking, then tectonic plate subduction and more hot-spot stress … marvelous! The result is different kinds of caves, some chimneys, lava tunnels … and wait till you see the vug!”

“The vug,” Capelo said. He didn’t want to admit that he didn’t know what a vug was.

“I will not tell you in advance. It is amazing! You will want to bring your children in to see it.”

“Yes,” Capelo said. “Which reminds me—where’s Marbet?”

“She is not going down yet,” Gruber said.

“Why not? I thought she was native liaison. What if natives show up?”

“They will not,” Gruber said. His joviality had abruptly faded. “We will set up an electronic perimeter.”

“Because to them we’re ‘unreal,’” Capelo said. The natives didn’t interest him, but of course he knew the situation. Part of Gruber’s theory—the crackpot part—concerned finding one specific native. A woman, Only or Anly or something like that, who had been Gruber’s main contact on the last trip. Gruber believed that this alien might have had her brain somehow affected at the moment that the first artifact, the one that Syree Johnson had been towing toward the space tunnel, blew itself up.