ow nice to know Nancy Kress, I guess. She slips quietly into the mind and tells her tale in a voice which seems simple, seems open. If she is knitting a sting in her tale, it is invisible knitting: the story just seems to slip into the reader's mind as though it had been remembered, seamlessly. But Kress is much less kindly (in the end) than she might seem, much sharper (in the end) than she cares (one way or another) to demonstrate.
All of which makes an enigmatic little sojourn in the medium-distant future like Probability Moon something of a problem to get inside of. Indeed, actually knowing when you have actually gotten inside the real story is anything but an easy task. The apparent outside and inside of the book--the space opera bigstory stuff which seems to exist mainly to provide access to the planetary romance at the heart of things--do not really sort out very convincingly. I do not think Nancy Kress intended them to.
On the ostensible outside of the story, framing it, making it possible, we have a classic space opera situation. After discovering a stargate on Mars, humans have begun to investigate the near bits of the home galaxy, coming across a number of humanoid races so close to homo sapiens that interbreeding is possible. Clearly, some ancient race has both seeded the galaxy with lookalikes, and provided these breeding units with travel passes. So far so good. But another alien race called the Fallers--nobody knows what they look like--is also using the stargate wormhole doohinkeys, and this race does not wish to mix. An intergalactic war starts.
A current we do not know the drift of
And the novel itself begins. An enigmatic doohinkey--it is the probability moon of the title--has been discovered orbiting a planet called World, which is inhabited by humanoids. In order to cover a military investigation of the artifact, a warship is sent to World, ostensibly to deliver a field team (anthropologist, linguist, geologist, etc.) to continue (we are in medias res here: very little is actually initiated in this novel) a liaison with the natives.
Chapters begin to alternate like a current we do not know the drift of. War-torn, weary, low-affect military sorts discover that the doohinkey seems to be a weapon that works by temporarily destabilizing anything with an atomic weight about 75, causing the affected atoms to radiate furiously for a bit. The Fallers (one of whose ships soon turns up) have also invented a new weapon, which (I am not good at this sort of thing) seems to operate by making weapons trained against it not perceive it, the way a quantum particle might be tricked into failing to perceive a quantum wave, I think. Meanwhile, the human team on World, after many adventures (see below), finds another doohinkey buried deep in a geologically implausible and unstable massif; this doohinkey may well neutralize the effects of the first, thus protecting the planet against the weapon which circles it, though its main function seems to be that of creating quantum events that generate a "shared reality" inside affected humanoid brains.
A better physicist than I would almost certainly find the play of speculative thought here not only workable story-wise (which I do), but inherently fascinating (which I wish I knew enough to). That physicist might well feel that the inside of Probability Moon lies right here.
The warmth of shared reality
Others will plump for World itself. Kress describes it very coolly, but the enticing warmth of World penetrates her calmest utterance. The inhabitants of the planet "share reality"; that is, consensus is not something agreed upon but wired in. Those who inhabit shared reality have an almost (but not demeaningly literal) ecstatic understanding of what they mean in the world, what others mean, what every action amounts to. To violate shared reality, or to experience unshared reality through meeting humans from space, is physically painful. Those who do manage somehow to violate shared reality become "unreal."
The World protagonist of the novel is one of the latter (she has committed incest with a brother who then kills himself out of remorse--how she manages to commit so complicated an unreality, when almost any premeditated unreal act is almost completely impossible because of the pain it causes, Kress does not begin to explain).
In order to regain reality, she is assigned as a spy to the human compound, her task that of reporting back to her culture signs positive or negative about the reality of the intruders. When in the end they prove to be unreal--by fatally assuming that actions are based on unique (rather than shared) perceptions of the nature of things--catastrophe duly ensues.
Out in space, catastrophe has also ensued. The human warship's attempts to shove the doohinkey into a stargate, and thus out of the Fallers' grasp, goes complicatedly awry. The humans on World, accompanied by the unreal humanoid, Enlin Pek Brimmidin, escape to the bowels of the mountains where the sacred flowers which ordinate World culture first appeared to folk. In the mountains--despite the insane machinations of a young human scientist who has fallen in love with shared reality but thinks of it as a device to maintain coercive social control over the brainwashed--they find the buried doohinkey, and lots happens.
In space lots happens.
In the end, nothing happens at all, except a continuance of life on World. No reason is given for the traffic jam of doohinkeys; there is no resolution with the Fallers; the inhabitants of World decide that humans are real, but any consequence of this occurs somewhere beyond the last page of the book, where Lady Macbeth's children get counted.
A world-map of flowers
What we are left with is an algebra of interactions (the cast is substantial), a world-map of flowers, a sense of peace beyond understanding, a sense that the jumble of unresolved storylines (I've failed to mention a couple) is what life is all about. So what has Kress been doing here, in this bright silent book from the realms of Tor? Can she have been saying something like, Enough is enough?
Enough is enough.
A story does not have to tell the whole world, not even a space opera world. All a story has to do is tell.
There is no climax to Probability Moon. Only an end to telling.
Peace be with you, close the book.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia and co-editor of both The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, all Hugo Award winners. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and other places too numerous to list; much of this material has been collected in Strokes: Reviews and Essays 1966-1986 and Look at the Evidence: Reviews and Essays.
