Probability Sun by Nancy Kress Page B

he did not open up like this about difficulties, not to anyone. It was one reason he’d gotten as far as he had in the military.
    “I grabbed Capelo—that skinny son-of-a-bitch is strong —and Gruber grabbed Albemarle. We dragged them out of sight of each other. Then Rosalind Singh talked physics to Capelo and Ann Sikorski talked data to Albemarle. Or maybe not. I didn’t listen.”
    “Ah, the soothing power of us women,” Marbet said, and he heard the edge in her voice: mockery, and more.
    “Of those women, anyway. I wouldn’t have sent Captain Heller to talk to either one of them. She’s furious at me, too.”
    Marbet laughed. “You had to take down the perimeter.”
    “How did you guess that?”
    “If you’re having dinner with natives, then the Worlders must have declared humanity real again. If that’s so, you can’t risk violating shared reality by attacking them with painful shocks. You’d give everybody on the planet a communal headache, or risk being declared unreal again, or both.”
    “Yes,” Kaufman said. How easy his job would be if everyone saw as clearly as Marbet Grant.
    “No wonder Captain Heller is furious. Poor Lyle. But look at my tapes, they’ll cheer you up.”
    “Marbet,” he said quietly, “is the Faller talking to you?”
    “Sort of. Not vocally, of course—neither of our vocal chords can handle the other’s speech, even if he were inclined to talk to me. But we’re communicating. But, Lyle, I’m warning you now: I’m going to ask for something big.”
    “What?”
    “After you see the tapes.”
    “All right.”
    “Bye.” The viewscreen blanked.
    Kaufman sat thinking for five minutes. Communication with a Faller. There had been no communication with the murderous Fallers in twenty years. Only death and destruction and blood, more of it human than alien. It wasn’t conceivable that the captured Faller would cooperate in reversing that bloodflow. Marbet might be the universe’s best communicator, but she was not a soldier. She had never seen combat. She was unfamiliar with military treachery.
    It was thirteen hundred hours. He called Capelo on his comlink. “Tom, this is Lyle. I have a scheduling decision to make, and I want to know if the artifact is lifting out early this afternoon or later.”
    “It’s not coming out today at all,” Capelo said.
    “No? Why not?”
    “Caution. You approve of caution, Lyle, don’t you? We got the artifact uncovered and it has markings on it pretty close to those Syree Johnson reported on the first artifact.”
    “Go on.” Excitement started in him like tiny bubbles.
    “There are also protuberances similar to the pressure points she described. On and off switches, or at least that’s what they were on her object. The original artifact required two points in opposition to be simultaneously activated to set off a wave, and this seems to be the same setup. Gruber and I don’t want to set it off inadvertently. Might mess the whole place up.”
    “Yes.”
    “So we’ve got crew in the hole hand-brushing dirt away from the artifact as if it were a pottery shard from the early Paleolithic. That takes time. We’ll lift it out tomorrow. The digger’s busy preparing a place now. Sudie, not now!”
    “Daddy!” the child’s voice said excitedly, “come look!”
    Kaufman said, more sharply than he intended, “Tom, are you trying to supervise a major military find and baby-sit at the same time?”
    “No, no, their nanny is here. Sudie just escaped for a minute. Here, Jane, take her. Tomorrow, Lyle. Early in the morning. Then, when it’s out, I can do the real tests.”
    “All right,” Kaufman said, and broke the link before he said something to Capelo that he’d regret. Capelo was a lunatic, just as he’d told Marbet. Children at a weapon site! Arrogant individualist, assuming whatever he did had to be right, simply because he did it.
    Arrogant brilliant individualist.
    Kaufman called the shuttle pilot, who was off-duty