Free Probability Sun by Nancy Kress Page B

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.
    Capelo considered this idea actively silly. If the two