Probability Space Read Online Free PDF Page A

erosion. Kaufman had been trying for five months to obtain authorization to travel beyond the Solar System in a private ship, to the nonproscribed planet World, away from any known theater of war. He was still in Lowell City, as stuck as if he were welded to one of the huge struts holding up its piezoelectric dome.
    “It was easier to move around when I was in the army,” Kaufman complained to Marbet Grant. She had stayed on Luna until last week; both of them thought it would be easier for Kaufman to obtain initial travel authorizations if they didn’t name the system’s most famous Sensitive as a “staff member.” But Kaufman missed Marbet. And the authorizations weren’t coming through anyway. So last week she had flown from Luna City to join him.
    “Of course it was easier to move around when you were in the army,” Marbet said. “They want the army out beyond Space Tunnel Number One, fighting the war. They want citizens safely at home.”
    “I’m not so sure, Marbet. More and more of the army seems to be right here on Mars.”
    “I know,” she said, and said no more. Both of them knew Kaufman’s hotel was probably bugged.
    It was a cheap hotel, the kind used by army dependents while they waited desperately for short-supply military housing. Small bare rooms, corridors swarming with children who had nowhere else to play except the narrow streets, drab foamcast walls without windows—for security reasons and because there was no view anyway. The war made everything on Mars more crowded and inconvenient. Kaufman, most of his life a soldier, barely noticed. Marbet did, and minded, and said nothing. Lyle had enough to contend with. She read his tension and his doubt and his unjustified guilt in every line of his body and every note of his voice.
    Marbet Grant was a Sensitive, aggressively genemod in appearance. She was short and slim, with cheekbones that cut like knives above a wide, soft nose. Her skin was chocolate brown, her eyes emerald green, her short curly hair auburn. She looked wholly artificial, but the real genetic engineering had been of her mind.
    Throughout history, there had always been people who were unusually sensitive to others, unusually adept at reading others’ states of mind. Historians claimed it was a survival necessity of the underclasses: serfs, slaves, women, subject peoples. Life itself might depend on correctly reading the mood of the masters.
    Evolutionary biologists pointed out that this fit well with Darwinian theory. Survival of the most accurately perceptive, those who could adapt to others because they perceived accurately what they must adapt to.
    Social researchers documented the tiny, unconscious clues that signaled emotion and intent: minute facial changes, shifts in body distribution, voice intonations, rise in skin temperature. Crosscultural anthropologists traced the existence of people good at perceiving these clues, almost always without knowing how they did it, in all societies.
    But it was the genetic engineers who tied this perceptiveness to specific genetic patterns, subtle but identifiable combinations of otherwise disparate genes. And it was a single group of geneticists who engineered for it, starting with the most available research subjects—their own children. The geneticists had believed themselves to be giving their children a survival advantage, not much different than the augmented muscles, boosted intelligence, or enhanced beauty common to the rich. It hadn’t quite worked out like that. Instinctively understanding your neighbor might aid you, but it disconcerted the neighbor. Many, many people do not wish to be understood. They would rather that their feelings and intentions remained hidden.
    Still, Marbet worked continually. For corporations wanting an edge in negotiations. For law enforcement interviewing major crime figures. For the government seeking to know more about individuals than the individuals wished to give away. And, once, for the