Probability Space (6 page)

There were too many words. Amanda couldn’t think. Through her rising panic, she tried to sort through the words, understand what Captain Lewis was saying. Something about it wasn’t right …

The woman—Amanda still couldn’t remember her name—thought she was hesitating for a different reason. She said, in a new voice full of honey, “You don’t have to worry about what to say in the broadcast, dear. We’ll write it out for you so all you have to do is read it.”

“I—”

“But not if you prefer to use your own words,” Captain Lewis said, and now his scowl at the woman was ferocious. “All you have to do is tell the truth about how you saw the government agents kidnap your father.”

Now Amanda saw the thing that wasn’t right. “I don’t know if it was government agents. I don’t
know
who it was.”

“It
was
government agents,” Captain Lewis said. “It wasn’t Life Now … that’s us, and we didn’t kidnap your father. Why would we? The result is that all the news holos are blaming us, and why would we do that? It just opposes people to our cause.”

That made sense. Until Amanda thought about it. Then she said, “But … if I blame General Stefanak, then people will blame him. That would help your cause.”

“Yes, it would. And yours, which is getting your father back. Everyone would know the government took him, and there would be enormous pressure to release him.”

“Ye … eee … ssss, but … but
I
don’t know if the government did take him.”

“We just told you so,” Captain Lewis said evenly.

“How do you know?” Amanda said. This was familiar ground; this was what her father did with her.
“What’s your evidence, Amanda? Produce your reasoning. Why do you think that”
This was how science worked.

“Because we didn’t take him, and who else is there?”

Amanda was silent. She didn’t know that Life Now hadn’t kidnapped her father. Captain Lewis wasn’t producing either evidence or reasoning. But if she said that, it would be like accusing him, which would be rude. After all, she didn’t have any evidence, either.

So instead she repeated, “I don’t know who kidnapped him.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” the woman said.

“I’m sorry, but I just don’t know. I can’t say, if I don’t know for sure.” That was a fact. That was what her father would want her to do: Stick to the facts.

“Are you saying, Amanda,” Captain Lewis said, “that you won’t make the broadcast?”

Amanda’s stomach turned over. Captain Lewis’s face had changed, and his voice. She was in terrible trouble. She clung to the one thing she knew for sure, the fact Daddy would want her to stick to because it was true. “I’m saying I don’t know who kidnapped Daddy.”

“Will you make the broadcast for us?”

It took all of Amanda’s courage to say it. “I can’t.”

“No?” Captain Lewis was pushing hard.

“No,” Amanda said in a small voice.

“After all we’ve done for you? All Father Emil has done? He saved your life!”

Amanda turned to look at Father Emil, still standing in the doorway to the small galley. His face had gone white. He said, “Dennis, this isn’t what we agreed on.”

“You told us she would make the broadcast.”

“I can’t! I don’t know who kidnapped my father!” Amanda cried. Her head felt as if it might burst. She hated that. With as much dignity as she could gather, she got off her chair, went through the common room to her bunk, and pulled the curtain. She buried her face in her pillow.

I don’t know who kidnapped him
, she told herself fiercely, and clung to that, because it was what her father would have said and it was true and it was the only thing she was sure she understood.

*   *   *

She woke to fierce arguing and the dim sound of engines. They were in space, accelerating at one-gee. Her neck tickled and she groped for the patch and pulled it off. A sleeper, probably. Father Emil couldn’t know that she didn’t sleep long from somnambulizer patches. “A light drug responder,” her father always said about her. Amanda lay still, a bit groggy, listening to the voices in the common room beyond the bunk curtain.

“—unconscionable!” Father Emil said, a word Amanda didn’t know.

“And what would you have us do with her?” Captain Lewis said, and the anger in his voice brought Amanda out of the last of her sleep. “If she doesn’t make that broadcast, the fact that
we
have her only reinforces the impression that we kidnapped them both, God, you smeared this with shit, Emil.”

“I wanted to help. I thought she’d make the broadcast. And I wanted to get her somewhere safe.”

“Oh, your motives were impeccable,” Captain Lewis said sarcastically. “The road to hell and all that. We never should have listened to a Sunday revolutionary like you.”

Father Emil said something Amanda didn’t catch.

“The longer we have her,” the woman said, “the worse the situation gets. No one will believe we didn’t abduct her ourselves.”

Father Emil said, “Amanda will tell them the truth about the hot shop and about me and about our bringing her to Luna. She’s a truthful child.”

“Then she’ll also tell the world we tried to pressure her into making a broadcast. Unless she broadcasts voluntarily—which you said she would, Emil!—and does it soon, it looks to the eyes of the media like
we’re
holding her.”

“Aren’t we?” Father Emil said.

“No, Goddamn it, we’re doing what she wants! Now we’re taking her to Mars in search of a genetic abomination and government stooge like Marbet Grant!”

The woman said, “Essentially, a fourteen-year-old kid is calling the shots for this spaceship. She has to make that broadcast. We can make her do it, Dennis.”

“How?” Captain Lewis said. “Threats? Drugs? Don’t you think she’ll tell people about that, too, afterward?”

“Not if you terrify her enough.”

“Lucy,” Father Emil said, “stop right there. She’s a
child
.”

“A child in a position to hurt the entire Life Now organization, thanks to you,” Lucy said bitterly.

Father Emil said, in a different voice, “Dennis … did Life Now kidnap Thomas Capelo?”

“Oh, God,” Lucy said. “Amateurs.”

“Yes, I am, Lucy,” Father Emil said. “Amateur, Sunday revolutionary, as bottom of the organizational ladder as possible. Just a believer in its goals. Which is why I don’t know the answer to my question and why I want to know. Did Life Now, or any of its affiliate antiwar organizations in the AWM, kidnap Thomas Capelo?”

Amanda clasped her hands tightly together. What would Captain Lewis say? But it was Father Emil who spoke.

“You don’t know the answer, do you, Dennis? I’m in a bottom cell of Life Now, but you’re not in a top cell. You don’t know.”

“We don’t operate through kidnapping,” Captain Lewis said, and even through the curtain Amanda heard that there was something wrong with his voice.

“You don’t know that, either,” Father Emil said.

Lucy said, “You’re both losing sight of the main point. Amanda Capelo has to make that broadcast pinning the kidnapping on the government, and she has to do it now.
You
have to persuade her, Emil. You’re the only one the little bitch trusts.”

“She’s not a little bitch, Lucy,” Captain Lewis said. “But, Emil, Lucy’s right. You have to persuade her, now, as soon as she wakes up.”

“And if I can’t?”

Captain Lewis said, Then we’ve got a huge problem. We can’t go on holding her, or we’re kidnappers. And we can’t release her to Marbet Grant, or Amanda tells the world how we pressured her to pin that kidnapping on Stefanak. Even if she doesn’t tell anyone, the Grant woman will read that she’s uneasy, that she’s hiding something, that she’s lying, and will get it out of her. Have you ever known a Sensitive, Emil?”

“No.”

“I have. Go wake up Amanda, Emil, and get to work. Be persuasive. Be very persuasive.”

Lucy said, “Wait … even if Emil does persuade Amanda, and she makes the broadcast, and then later Marbet Grant finds out Emil pressured Amanda … that’s just as bad for us!”

“No,” Captain Lewis said. “If she publicly recants her statement, she’s just going to look like a confused kid. It’s if she goes on stalwartly refusing to make one at all that she becomes a heroine insisting on ‘truth.’”

“Which is what she is doing,” Father Emil said. “She is an idealist, unwilling to lie. We should not consider that a sin.”

“Oh, fuck sin,” Lucy said. “This is practical politics, Emil, not airy-merry abstract religion. She’s got to make that broadcast, almost as soon as we wake her up. And she’s got to genuinely believe she’s doing it voluntarily.”

“And if—”

Another voice cut in, a very deep voice Amanda had not heard before. The third man. He had a thick accent. “If she does not, she is a grave liability to the movement. No one knows we have her. She must just disappear.”

The other three started talking at once. The man with the deep voice silenced them all. “You are all dilettantes. The life of one child does not outweigh the lives of the thousands of children who will die if Stefanak is not stopped. Do not be so sentimental.”

No one spoke until Captain Lewis said, “Salah—” at the same time that Father Emil said, “I will not allow that to happen.”

“Nor I,” said Captain Lewis. “We are not barbarians, Salah. It’s the other side that are barbarians. Remember that!”

Salah said nothing.

Amanda lay rigid, waiting. After a long pause she heard Father Emil get up and leave the area. She knew it was Father Emil because she could hear the faint mutter as he prayed.

FIVE

EN ROUTE TO MARS

T
he curtain was pulled back. Amanda, pretending to be asleep, felt the wake-up patch laid on her neck and pretended to wake up. Father Emil stood beside her bunk. “Amanda…”

She nodded, too scared to say anything.

He looked at her hopelessly, a badly dressed little man with a scraggly beard and wrinkle-rimmed eyes. Then he climbed into the bunk, careful not to touch her, and sat with his back against the bulkhead and his knees pulled up to his chest. Amanda did the same and so they sat side by side, facing the heavy curtain, like bookends with nothing between them. And everything. Father Emil’s lips moved soundlessly, and Amanda knew that once again he was praying.

“Amanda,” he finally said, “I’m going to ask you once more. I don’t want to hound you, or scare you, so this will be the last time you’ll hear all this.” After a moment he added, “From me, anyway.”

She said nothing. Her hands were clasped together tightly. Father Emil was quiet so long she thought maybe he wasn’t going to talk to her after all, only to God, but then he began and what he said was a surprise.

“The mission where I work is about saving souls. Getting the wretched to leave their sad and sinful lives and turn back to God. The mission is called the St. Theresa the Little Flower Mission after a saint, a holy woman, named Therese of Lisieux and nicknamed ‘The Little Flower.’ She wasn’t really a woman, she was a little girl. Like you.” He stopped.

“Oh,” said Amanda, because she had to say something. Although she couldn’t see what this Little Flower had to do with anything. And anyway Amanda wasn’t a “little girl.” She was fourteen.

“The little Flower’s mother died when she was very young, like your mother. When the Little Flower was still a girl, just a few years older than you, her father was taken away, too. At age fifteen she became a nun—”

“What’s—”

“A woman who devotes her life to God and never marries. The Little Flower always tried to do the right thing, the thing that would most help others. She wrote a book about her life. I want to quote you two things in it, and I want you to think about both of them.”

Father Emil didn’t look at her. With his knees drawn up to his chest like that and his scraggly beard, he looked like a child grown horribly old before growing up. She turned her head to stare at the blue curtain.

He said, “The first thing the Little Flower said was, ‘I tried very hard to never make excuses.’” He paused briefly, then continued. “The second is longer. It’s a prayer that goes like this: ‘My Lord and my God, I have realized that whoever undertakes anything for the sake of earthly things or to earn the praise of others deceives himself. Today one thing pleases the world, tomorrow another … but You are unchangeable for all eternity.’ Do you understand, Amanda?”

“No.”

“It means that today people want you to do one thing, tomorrow another thing, but that you should always do the right thing no matter who pressures you, without making any excuses. The right thing is eternal. It’s always right.”

Facts
, Amanda thought. He meant “stick to facts.” Father Emil was talking about what Daddy called “scientific integrity.”

“I understand.”

“Good, Then I’m going to ask you again. Remember that what is fashionable or widely believed today doesn’t matter. The eternities matter, like kindness and helping people—the Little Flower devoted her life to helping people—and doing our small bit to stop evil in the world. Since all that is true, will you help stop the war by making this broadcast saying that government agents kidnapped your father?”

“No, Father Emil. I can’t.”

He said nothing. His lips moved in prayer. Then he drew aside the curtain and climbed down from her bunk.

Amanda waited for what would happen next. Nothing did. She heard no sounds. Finally, frightened, she peeked around the curtain. The common room was empty, and the door to the galley closed. So they were all in there, discussing her. Or else on the bridge, or in the storerooms.

She lay back and closed her eyes. When she opened them, she would be back home. She would be back in her own bedroom, waking up for school. Downstairs Sudie would be racketing around with the holotoons on, and her father would be in the kitchen cooking bacon and grumbling. Her bedroom would smell of bacon, and trees from the open window, and the sharp new smell of her book bag on the floor. She would get up and go to the bathroom and then go downstairs, and Carol would smile good morning, and Sudie would stick out her tongue at her, and Daddy—