Kress, Nancy - Probability Moon

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PROBABILITY MOON

by NANCY KRESS (2000)

[VERSION 1.1 (Nov 27 04). If you find and correct errors in the text, please update the version

number by 0.1 and redistribute.]

For Charles, who certainly earned it

Men love liberty because it protects them from control and humiliation from others, and thus

affords them the possibility of dignity. They loathe liberty because it throws them back on their

own abilities and resources, and thus confronts them with the possibility of insignificance.

--THOMAS SZASZ

-=*=-

PROLOGUE

LOWELL CITY, MARS

The aide materialized beside General Stefanak at a most inconvenient moment. The girl with

him was too schooled to react; she'd been with her company for two years now, and it was the

most popular and discreet first-class company on Titan. The girl took no notice of the intrusion,

but the general lost his erection. "I'm so sorry, sir," the holo said, averting Malone's eyes, "but

there is a level-one message."

"You are not to blame," the general said ritualistically. "One moment."

The girl was already pulling on her dress, eyes properly downcast. She would, of course, be

paid anyway. Stefanak put on a robe and bowed to her; she returned the gesture and left through

the side door. Her long black hair flowed down her back, the ends glowing with tiny holographic

beads. There had been nothing holographic about the rest of her. This level-one had better be

important.

He walked into his outer office and waited for Malone, who probably had to travel across the

base from Communications. Level-one messages were physically encoded and hand carried. This

one must have just come through a few moments ago. While he waited, Stefanak poured himself

a drink, thinking about the girl.

Maybe he needed his hormone levels adjusted again. He wasn't eighty anymore.

Malone appeared with the communication cube, bowed, and left. Stefanak activated the

security shield. While it was on, nothing could enter or leave his quarters. No electromagnetic

radiation, no compression waves, no air, not even neutrinos. Then he switched on the cube, using

level-one protocols.

It was from a recon team to a remote and unimportant planet, funded and mounted by soft-

science professors at Princeton University, for the usual squishy "research." But every recon team

had a line-rank military representative on it. Usually junior officers fought not to go on recon.

Usually it was an E-year of irrelevant boredom on primitive planets, most of them uninhabited.

Not this time.

Stefanak viewed the cube once, and then again. He sat thinking for a full five minutes, very

carefully. The Zeus was available, or could be made available, without attracting significant

attention. A command-level line officer could not be made available, but there were ways around

that. Physicists... leave that to Malone. But maybe the whole mission could be made to look like

just another low-priority scholarly expedition. Yes. Salernos would be the one to arrange that, she

had plausible contacts...

When Stefanak finished his planning, he released the security shield. Malone waited outside.

The general told him to put together an immediate meeting with the Solar Alliance Defense

Council, highest-ranking officers only, all participating governments urged most strongly to

attend.

This might change everything.

-=*=-

ONE

RAFKIT SELOE

When Enli came outside at sunrise, her flower beds had been destroyed. The curving line of

border stones had been pointedly straightened. The jelit bushes, not yet in flower, sat broken into

pathetic piles of twigs. No one, of course, would harm the ollinib or pajalib, now in full glorious

bloom; they must have been transplanted to some neighbor's garden. Enli studied the holes where

the broken jelitib had been. At the bottom of one hole was something dark and matted, vaguely

damp-looking. She fished it out with a stick. A dead freb. Enli poked the little mammal carefully,

to see how it had died, and eventually she saw the place in the flopping neck where the knife had

gone in.

So her neighbors even knew about Tabor.

Enli's neckfur prickled. She glanced around. No one in sight, even though the sun was above

the horizon and the weather clear and warm. There should have been people riding to the fields,

to the soap manufactury by the river, to Rafkit Seloe. Children should be playing in the village

square, eating their cold breakfasts together, grudgingly minding smaller brothers and sisters.

Instead, there was only silence and emptiness, as pointed a message as the straightened stone

border and missing plants. Her neighbors were waiting for Enli Pek Brimmidin to leave.

She walked around the flower bed again, pretending to study it, working to calm her breathing.

It was always a shock. Not an unexpected shock -- this was, after all, the fifth time that a village

had discovered who she was and forced her to move on. Sometimes they did it this way, stopping

all real activities in her presence. Other times they just looked straight through her, pretending not

to see her, carrying on the life of the village as if an unreal person were not among them, as if

Enli were a ghost. Which, of course, she was. She was unreal.

Well, she couldn't stay here any longer. Her neighbors had the right of it, after all. How much

did they know? That she was unreal, yes. That she stood convicted of killing her brother. That

Reality and Atonement had, for reasons of their own, not put her in Aulit Prison for the crime.

Did the neighbors know that she was working to earn back her reality? Probably not. Although

the brighter ones might guess. Old Frablit, for instance. Not much got past that one's grizzled

neckfur. Maybe Inno. Maybe Glamit.

Enli sat down on the bench outside her hut to consider where she should go. Farther north,

maybe. Word about her might not travel north as easily; most people in this village seemed to

have family toward the south. She looked again at the straight line of border stones, where last

night there had been a long, graceful curve. Ugly, ugly. She should leave soon, this morning,

now.

Already her headpain had burst past what the government pills could control. Maybe she

should raise the dosage. Reality and Atonement had said she could do that, if the unreality hurt

too bad... So far, Enli had made do with the lower dosage. You had to be tough to stay unreal and

not go mad. Well, Enli was tough. You had to be tough to kill your beloved brother, too.

No, don't think about that.

Enli jumped to her feet. She would go now, this minute. Pack her few belongings -- the hut and

furniture were leased, of course -- get her bicycle from the shed, and go. Before her neighbors

started getting headpain, too. She owed them that much.

Someone was bicycling toward Enli's hut.

She shaded her eyes from the sun's low, red rising and squinted along the road. As she did so,

she caught again that gleam in the sky, a flash of sudden light... what was that? She'd seen it

before, always at sunrise or sunset, like something shiny high in the sky. Not one of World's

seven moons, not a bird... There was nothing else it could be. I don't see it, old Frablit had said to

her, and Inno, and even the children. But Enli had better eyes than even the children. Strong,

ugly, sharp-eyed, that was she. Oh, and, of course, unreal.

The approaching traveler was identifiable now. A young man on a government bicycle, his

neckfur barely out of childbrown. If he was from Reality and Atonement -- and of course he was,

no other government section would write to Enli while she was unreal -- then he knew she was

unreal. If he took notice of Enli, even to deliver a government message, he would be tacitly

admitting that the illusionary woman sitting on a bench existed, which of course he couldn't do. It

was a nice point.

The messenger did the right thing. Ignoring her, he tossed a letter, neatly addressed to Enli Pek

Brimmidin, down by the dusty road. Then he pedaled back toward the city.

The letter was shaped into a utilitarian circle, very businesslike, with a generic government

seal. Enli opened it. A summons: They had a job for her.

She let out a long thankful breath. Sometimes the flowers of the soul bloomed just when you

most needed them. A job would take her away from here. A job would give her something to do.

Most important, a job would earn more atonement toward completing her sentence. If it was a big

enough job, it might even finish her punishment, setting her free to become real again. And, of

course, setting Tabor free as well.

Enli packed her shoulder sack, wheeled her bicycle out of its shed, and started for the city.

Probably she would never see this place again. There was still no one around. Well, let them hide.

She didn't care.

But she had to stop her bicycle to take another pill. Damn the headpain! Boring right between

her eyes, it was almost bad enough for tears. So much unreality, so much isolation... No. She

wouldn't think about it. She would think instead about the job ahead, about the beauty of the

wildflowers along the road to the city, about anything at all except that she was unreal, and alone,

and had murdered her brother.

-=*=-

All morning Enli rode steadily. It was Am, that luscious season, and the larfruit was ready to

harvest. Villagers swarmed over the orchards, singing and picking. Between the villages and

orchards lay long lush stretches of uninhabited road, glorious with wildflowers. Shade-blooming

vekifirib, yellow mittib, the flaming red bells of adkinib. The warm air smelled sweet as shared

reality, and in the sky the sun burned clear orange. Enli passed few bicycles or handcarts, and

made good time toward Rafkit Seloe. She could be there by noon.

But then, just a few miles shy of Rafkit Seloe, she turned her bicycle off the main road, toward

the village of Gofkit Shamloe. Suddenly, desperately, Enli wanted one more look at Tabor.

The house of Enli's sister, Ano Pek Brimmidin, stood in the very heart of Gofkit Shamloe, off

the central square. At this time of day, the square frothed with harvesters back for dinner. Old

men cooked and women weaved and children made nuisances of themselves by chasing each

other between the solid brick hearths. Delicious dinner smells floated on the warm air. A group of

young people danced, giggling, to the rather inept piping of old Solor Pek Raumul. In Gofkit

Shamloe, meals were always the best time, for as long back as Enli could remember. The time of

life and warmth, the time when shared reality filled the air as strongly as the scent of roasting

meat.

She rode through the villagers as if she were invisible. No one stopped her, spoke to her,

glanced at her. No one barred her from slipping through the open door of Ano's house.

Tabor lay on his bed in the back room. He rested on his back, his strong young legs straight as

trees, his fingers lightly curled. His neckfur, more golden than either Ano's or Enli's (unfair --

why had the boy gotten all the beauty?), floated in the bondage chemicals of his clear coffin. He

looked no older than when the servants of the First Flower had imprisoned him, making him as

unreal as Enli, for their mutual crime. When Enli leaned over the coffin, Tabor's unseeing dark

eyes stared back at her.

"One more year's atonement, Tabor. Less thirty-six days. Then you will be free. And so will I."

Tabor said nothing. But, of course, there was no need. He knew as well as Enli did the time

until his burial, when he would be released from the chemicals and glass that bound his dead

body and so could rejoin their ancestors. Enli had heard that some of the unreal dead complained

and recriminated, especially in dreams, making the houses in which they lay a misery. Not Tabor,

Enli thought. Tabor had always been a well-mannered person, and he wouldn't trouble Ano's

house. Nor would he trouble Ano's sleep with fear and dreams. Only Enli's sleep.

The door to the bedroom creaked. Enli's nephew, small Fentil, came into the room, took

something out of a wooden chest, and left again, carefully not seeing her. His mother had taught

him well. But above his soft childish neckfur his little head must hurt, and his real presence made

Enli's headpain even worse. Clearly, it was time to go.

She walked back through Ano's house, not looking at its flower altar -- she owed Ano at least

that, to not pollute her flowers with unreal gazes -- and rode her bicycle down the road toward the

capital.

-=*=-

To Enli's surprise, the clerk at Reality and Atonement addressed her by name. "Pek Brimmidin,

you may go in now."

Usually the man, very old and very sour, with neckfur gone beyond yellow or even gray right

up to a sparse sickly no-color dun, never spoke. He looked at the unreal who came to petition or

object or report in; he must look at them in order to enter their comings and goings in the records,

just as he must know Enli's name. But never before had he addressed her by it.

"Thank you," Enli said, to see if he would say more. But his eyes went unfocused again, the

brief period of shared reality over.

Why had it happened in the first place? What did the sour old man know about Enli's

upcoming job? Possibly quite a bit. Long-retained clerks always did.

Cartot Pek Nagredil's office was empty when she entered, which gave her time to examine the

extraordinarily ugly sculptures on his table. Curves too exaggerated, colors too harsh. Enli felt a

sudden, delayed pang for her vanished pajalib, with their exquisite curving petals. There were

not, of course, any flowers in Pek Nagredil's office, where they would be exposed to the gaze of

the unreal. Nor would anyone offer her a hospitality flower. Not her.

"Pek Brimmidin. I have an informant job for you." Pek Nagredil never wasted words. He was

only middle-aged but so solid, so immovable, that Enli wondered if he even needed pills to talk

with her. Was that possible? Could Pek Nagredil be so coarse that he didn't feel the large, dull

pain in the soul, like gravel grinding inside the skull, or even that sharp hard shock between the

eyes, when it became evident that two people did not see World the same way? No. Not possible.

To be a Worlder was to share reality with other Worlders, or to suffer the physical pain of not

doing so. Pek Nagredil was a man; he could be no different from anyone else. He had a soul. He

must use the pills.

Enli asked, "What is the job, Pek Nagredil?"

"To inform on the Terrans that are coming to live in the household of Hadjil Pek Voratur."

Enli felt her mouth fall open. She tried to speak, but no words came out.

"You may have heard that the Terrans have returned," Pek Nagredil said, imperturbable. He

moved a sculpture a tiny bit to the right, stepped back to observe the effect, and moved it back to

the left.

"No," Enli finally managed. "I had not heard that." She had never seen a Terran. Hardly

anybody had seen a Terran. They had come a half year ago, to a village on the other side of

Rafkit Seloe, in a metal boat that flew down from the sky. They were amazingly ugly, ran the

reports, and amazingly ignorant, but apparently not dangerous. They asked a lot of rude questions

but also gave some very nice presents, which induced some people to answer the questions. After

a few tendays, they had abruptly packed up and left in their flying boat. The most important

questions, of course, were not theirs but Worlders': Were these Terrans real? Did they have

souls? The priests of Reality and Atonement had only just begun their inquiry into this when the

Terrans, without so much as a farewell flower, had left World.

Now apparently they were back.

"We knew the Terrans would return," Pek Nagredil said. "They were overheard to say, 'We

will come back for the manufactured item.' They're great traders, you see. Now, Pek Brimmidin,

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PROBABILITYMOONbyNANCYKRESS(2000)[VERSION1.1(Nov2704).Ifyoufindandcorrecterrorsinthetext,pleaseupdatetheversionnumberby0.1andredistribute.]ForCharles,whocertainlyearneditMenlovelibertybecauseitprotectsthemfromcontrolandhumiliationfromothers,andthusaffordsthemthepossibilityofdignity.Theyloathelibert...

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Kress, Nancy - Probability Moon

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