"Icehenge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

Part Three EDMOND DOYA 2610 A.D.

SOMETIMES I dreamed about Icehenge, and walked in awe across the old crater bed, among those tall white towers. Quite often in the dreams I had become a crew member of the Persephone, on that first expedition to Pluto in 2547. I landed with the rest of them on a plain of crater-pocked, shattered black basalt, down near the old mechanical probes. And I was there, in the bridge with Commodore Ehrung and the rest of her officers, when the call came in from Dr. Cereson, who was out in an LV locating the magnetic poles. His voice was high, it cracked with excitement that sounded like fear, and radio hiss sputtered in his pauses:

“I’m landing at the geographical pole — you’d better send a party up here fast… there’s a… a structure up here…”

Then I would dream I was in the LV that sped north to the pole, crowded in with Ehrung and the other officers, sharing in the tense silence. Underneath us the surface of Pluto flashed by, black and obscure, ringed by crater upon crater. I remember thinking in the dreams that the constant radio hiss was the sound of the planet. Then — just like in the films the Persephone brought back, you could say I dreamed myself into the films — we could see forward to the dark horizon. Low in the sky hung the crescent of Charon, Pluto’s moon, and below it — white dots. A cluster of white towers. “Let’s go down,” said Ehrung quietly. A circle of white beams, standing on their ends, pointing up at the thick blanket of stars.

Then we were all outside, in suits, stumbling toward the structure. The sun was a bright dot just above the towers, casting a clear pale light over the plain. Shadows of the towers stretched over the ground we crossed; members of the group stepped into the shadow of a beam, disappeared, reappeared in the next slot of sunlight. The regolith we walked over was a dusty black gravel. Everyone left big footprints.

We walked between two of the beams — they dwarfed us — and were in the huge irregular circle that the beams made. It looked as if there were a hundred of them, each a different size. “Ice,” said a voice on the intercom. “They look like ice.” No one replied. And here the dreams would always become confused. Everything happened out of order, or more or less at once; voices chattered in the earphones, and my vision bumped and jiggled, just as the film from that first hand-held camera had done. They found poor Seth Cereson, who had pressed himself against one of the largest beams, faceplate directly on the ice, in a shadow so that he was barely visible. He was in shock as they led him back to the LVs, and kept repeating in a small voice that there was something moving inside the beam. That frightened everyone a bit. Several people walked over and inspected a fallen beam, which had shattered into hundreds of pieces when it hit the ground. Others looked at the edges of the three triangular towers, which were nearly transparent. From a vantage point on top of one of the beams I looked down and saw the tiny silver figures scurrying from beam to beam, standing in the center of the circle looking about, clambering onto the fallen one…

Then there was a shout that cut through the other voices. “Look here! Look here!”

“Quietly, quietly,” said Ehrung. “Who’s speaking?”

“Over here.” One of the figures waved his arms and pointed at the beam before him. Ehrung walked swiftly toward him, and the rest of us followed. We grouped behind her and stared up at the tower of ice. In the smooth, slightly translucent white surface there were marks engraved:

For a long time Ehrung stood and stared at them, and the crew behind her stared too. And in the dream, I knew that they were two Sanskrit words, carved in the Narangi alphabet: abhy-ud, and aby-ut-sad. And I knew what they meant: to move, to push farther out; to cause to set out towards.

Another time, caught in that half sleep just before waking, when you know you want to get up but something keeps you from it, I dreamed I was on another expedition to Icehenge, a later one determined to clear up once and for all the controversy surrounding its origins. And then I woke up. Usually it is one of the few moments of grace in our lives, to wake up apprehensive or depressed about something, and then realize that the something was part of a dream, and nothing to worry about. But not this time. The dream was true. The year was 2610, and we were on our way to Pluto.

There were seventy-nine people on board Snowflake: twenty-four crew, sixteen reporters, and thirty-nine scientists and technicians. The expedition was being sponsored by the Waystation Institute for Higher Learning, but essentially it was my doing. I groaned at the thought and rolled out of bed.

My refrigerator was empty, so after I splashed water on my face, I went out into the corridor, it had rough wood walls, set at slightly irregular angles; the floor was a lumpy moss that did surprisingly well underfoot.

As I passed by Jones’s chamber the door opened and Jones walked out. “Doya!” he said, looking down at me. “You’re out! I’ve missed you in the lounge.”

“Yes,” I said, “I’ve been working too much, I’m ready for a party.”

“I understand Dr. Brinston wants to talk to you,” he said, brushing down his tangled auburn hair with his fingers. “You going to breakfast?”

I nodded and we started down the corridor together. “Why does Brinston want to talk to me?”

“He wants to organize a series of colloquia on Icehenge, one given by each of us.”

“Oh, man. And he wants me to join it?” Brinston was the chief archaeologist, and as such probably the most important member of our expedition, even though Dr. Lhotse of the Institute was our nominal leader. It was a fact Brinston was all too aware of. He was a pain in the ass — a gregarious Terran (if that isn’t being redundant), and an overbearing academic hack. Although not truly a hack — he did good work.

We turned a corner, onto the main passageway to the dining commons. Jones was grinning at me. “Apparently he believes that it would be essential to have your participation in the series, you know, given your historical importance and all.”

“Give me a break.”

In the white hallway just outside the commons there was a large blue bulletin screen in one of the walls. We stopped before it. There was a console under it for typing messages onto the board. The new question, put up just recently, was the big one, the one that was sending us out here: “Who put up Icehenge?” in bold orange letters.

But the answers, naturally, were jokes. In red script near the center of the board, was “GOD.” In yellow type, “Remnants of a Crystallized Ice Meteorite.” In a corner, in long green letters: “Nederland.” Under that someone had typed, “No, Some Other Alien.” I laughed at that. There were several more solutions (I liked especially “Pluto Is a Message Planet From Another Galaxy”), most of which had first been put forth in the year after the discovery, before Nederland published the results of his work on Mars.

Jones stepped up to the console. “Here’s my new one,” he said. “Let’s see, yellow Gothic should be right: ‘Icehenge put there by prehistoric civilization’ ” — this was Jones’s basic contention, that humans were of extraterrestrial origin, and had had a space technology in their earliest days — “’But the inscription carved on it by the Davydov starship.’”

“Jones,” I scolded him. “You’re at it again. How many of these solutions have you put up?”

“No more than half,” he said, and seeing my expression of dismay he cackled. He made me laugh too, but we straightened up and put on serious frowns before we entered the dining commons.

Inside, Bachan Nimit and his micrometeorite people were seated at a table together, eating with Dr. Brinston. I cringed when I saw him, and went to the kitchen.

Jones and I sat at a table on the other side of the room and began to eat. Jones, system- famous heretic scholar of evolution and prehistory, had nothing but a pile of apples on his plate. He adhered to the dietary laws of his home, the asteroid Icarus, which decreed that nothing eaten should be the result of the death of any living system. Jones’s particular affinity was for apples, and he finished them off rapidly.

I was nearly done with my omelet when Brinston approached our table. “Mr. Doya, it’s good to see you out of your cabin!” he said loudly. “You shouldn’t be such a hermit!”

Now I left my cabin pretty regularly to party, but when I did I was careful to avoid Brinston. Here I was reminded why. “I’m working,” I said.

“Oh, I see.” He smiled. “I hope that won’t keep you from joining our little lecture series.”

“Your what?”

“We’re organizing a series of talks, and hope everyone will give one.” The micrometeor crew had turned to watch us.

“Everyone?”

“Well — everyone who represents a different aspect of the problem.”

“What’s the point?”

“What?”

“What’s the point?” I repeated. “Everyone on board this ship already knows what everyone else has written and said about Icehenge.”

“But in a colloquium we could discuss these opinions.”

The academic mind. “In a colloquium there would be nothing but a lot of arguing and bitching and rehashing the same old points. We’ve wrangled for years without anyone changing his mind, and now we’re going to Pluto to look at Icehenge and find out who really put it there. Why stage a reiteration of what we’ve already said?”

Brinston was flushing red. “We hoped there would be new things to be said.”

I shrugged. “Maybe so. Look, just go ahead and have your talks without me.”

Brinston paused. “That wouldn’t be so bad,” he said reflectively, “if Nederland were here. But now the two principal theorists will be missing.”

I felt my distaste for him turn to dislike. He knew of the relationship between Nederland and me, and this was a jab. “Yes, well, Nederland’s been there before.” He had, too, and it was too bad he hadn’t made better use of the visit. They had done nothing but dedicate a plaque commemorating the expedition of asteroid miners that he had discovered; at the time, his explanation was so widely believed that the megalith hadn’t even been excavated.

“Even so, you’d think he’d want to be along on the expedition that will either confirm or contradict his theory.” His voice grew louder as he sensed my discomfort. “Tell me, Mr. Doya, what did Professor Nederland say was his reason for not joining us?”

I stared at him for a long time. “He was afraid there would be too many colloquia,” I said, and stood up. “Now excuse me while I return to my work.” I went to the kitchen and got some supplies, and walked back to my room, feeling that I had made an enemy, but not caring much.

Yes, Hjalmar Nederland, the famous historian of Icehenge, was my great-grandfather. It was a fact I remember always knowing, though my father never encouraged my pleasure in knowing it. (Father wasn’t his grandchild; my mother was.)

I had read all of Nederland’s books — the works on Icehenge, the five-volume Martian history, the earlier books on terran archaeology — by the time I was ten. At that time Father and I lived on Ganymede. Father had gotten lucky and was crewing on a sunsailer entered in the InandOut, a race that takes the sailers into the top layer of Jupiter’s atmosphere.

Usually he wasn’t that lucky. Sunsailing was for the rich, and they didn’t need crews often. So most of the time Father was a laborer: street sweeper, carrier at construction sites, whatever was on the list at the laborer’s guild. As I understood later, he was poor, and shiftless, and played the edges to get by. Maybe I’ve modelled my life on his.

He was a small man, my father, short and spare-framed; he dressed in worker’s clothes, and had a droopy moustache, and grinned a lot. People were always surprised to see him with a kid — he didn’t look important enough. But when he lived on Mars, and then Phobos, he had been part of a foursome. The other man was a well-known sculptor, with a lot of pull in artistic circles. And my mom, being Nederland’s granddaughter, had connections with the University of Mars. Between them they managed to get that rare thing (especially on Mars), the permission to have a child. Then when the foursome broke up, Father was the only one interested in taking care of me; he had grown up with me, in a sense, in that my presence as an infant was what brought him out of a funk. So he told me. Into his custody I went (I was six, and had never set foot on Mars), and we took off for Jupiter.

After that Father never discussed my mother, or the other members of the foursome, or my famous great-grandfather (when he could keep me from bringing up the topic), or even Mars. He was, among other things, a sensitive man — a poet who wrote poems for himself, and never paid a fee to put them in the general file. He loved landscapes and skyscapes, and after we moved to Ganymede we spent a lot of time hiking in suits over Ganymede’s stark hills, to watch Jupiter or one of the other moons rise, or to watch a sunrise, still the brightest dawn of them all. We were a comfortable pair. Ours was a quiet pastime, and the source of most of Father’s poetry. The poems of his that exerted the most pull on me, however, were those about Mars. Like this one:

Even though Father disliked Nederland (they had met, I gathered, only once) he still indulged my fascination with Icehenge. For some reason I loved that megalith; it was the greatest story I knew. On my eleventh birthday Father took me down to the local post office (at this time we were on bright Europa, and took long hikes together across its snowy plains). After a whispered conference with one of the attendants, we went into a holo room. He wouldn’t tell me what we were going to see, and I was frightened, thinking it might be my mother.

The room holo came on, and we were in darkness. Stars overhead. Suddenly a very bright one flared, defining a horizon, and pale light flooded over what now appeared as a dark, rocky plain.

Then I saw it off in the distance: the megalith. The sun (I recognized it now, the bright star that had risen) had only struck the top of the liths, and they gleamed white. Below the sunlight they were square black cutouts, blocking stars. The line quickly dropped (the holo was speeded up) and it stood revealed, tall and white. Because of the model of it that I owned at the time, it seemed immense.

“Oh, Dad.”

“Come on, let’s go look at it.”

“Bring it here, you mean.”

He laughed, “Where’s your imagination, kid?” He dialed it over — I went straight through a lith — and we were standing at its center, near the plaque commemorating the Davydov Expedition. We circled slowly, necks craned back to look up. We inspected the broken column and its scattered pieces, then looked closely at the brief inscription.

“It’s a wonder they didn’t all sign their names,” said Father.

Then the whole scene disappeared and we were standing in the bare holo room. Father caught my forlorn expression, and laughed. “You’ll see it again before you’re through. Come on, let’s go get some ice cream.”

Soon after that, when I was just fourteen, he got a chance to go to Terra. Friends of his were buying and taking a small boat all the way back, and they needed one more crew member. Or perhaps they didn’t absolutely need one, but they wanted him to come.

At that time we had just moved back to Ganymede, and I had a job at the atmosphere station. We had lived there nearly a year, off and on, and I didn’t want to move again. I had written a book describing the deep space adventures of the Davydov expedition, and with the money I was saving I planned to publish it. (For a fee anyone can put their work in the data banks, and have it listed in the general catalogue; whether anyone will ever read it is another matter, but I had hopes, at the time, that one of the book clubs would buy the rights to list it in their index.)

“See, Dad, you’ve lived on Terra and Mars, so you want to go back there so you can be outside and all. Me, I don’t care about that stuff. I’d rather stay here.”

Father stared at me carefully, suspicious of such a sentiment, as well he might be — for as I understood much later, my disinclination to go to Terra stemmed mainly from the fact that Hjalmar Nederland had said in an interview (and implied in many articles) that he didn’t like it.

“You’ve never been there,” my father said, “else you might not say that. And it’s something you should see, take my word for it. The chance doesn’t come that often.”

“I know, Dad. But the chance has come for you, not me.”

He scowled at me. In a world with so few children, everyone is treated as an adult; and my father had always treated me as an equal, to a degree that would be difficult to describe. Now he didn’t know what to say to me. “There’s room for you too.”

“But only if you make it. Look, you’ll be back out here sailing in a couple of years. And I’ll get down there someday. Meanwhile I want to stay here. I got a job and friends.”

“Okay,” he said, and looked away. “You’re your own man, you do what you want.”

I felt bad then, but not nearly so much as I did later, when I remembered the scene and understood what I had done. Father was tired, he was going through a hard time, he needed his friends. He was about seventy then, and he had nothing to show for his efforts, and he was tired. In the old days he’d have been near the end, and I suppose he felt that way — he hadn’t yet gotten that second wind that comes when you realize that, far from being over, the story has just begun. But that second wind didn’t come from me, or with my help. And yet that, it seems to me, is what sons are for.

So he left for Terra, and I was on my own. About two years later I got a letter from him. He was in Micronesia, on an island in the Pacific Ocean somewhere. He had met some Marquesan sailors. There were fleets of the old Micronesian sailing ships, called wa’a kaulua, crisscrossing the Pacific, carrying passengers and even freight. Father had decided to apprentice himself to one of the navigators from the Carolines, one of those who navigate as they did in the ancient times, without radio or sextant, or compass, or even maps.

And that’s what he has been doing, from that day to this: forty-five years. Forty-five years of learning to gauge how fast the ship is moving by watching coconuts pass by; memorizing the distances between islands; reading the stars, and the weather; lying at the bottom of the ship during cloudy nights, and feeling the pattern of the swells to determine the ship’s direction… I think back to the hand to mouth times of our brief partnership, and I see that he has, perhaps, found what he wants to do. Occasionally I get a note from Fiji, Samoa, Oahu. Once I got one from Easter Island, with a picture of one of the statues included. The note said, “And this one’s not a fake!”

That’s the only clue I’ve gotten that he knows what I’m doing.

So I stayed on Ganymede and lived in dormitories, and worked at the atmosphere station. My way of life had been learned in the years with my father; it was all I knew, and I kept to the pattern. Dorm mates were my family, and that was never a problem. After my name came up on the hitchhiker’s list I moved out to Titan, and while waiting for a job with the weather company I joined the laborer’s guild, and swept streets, and pushed wheelbarrows, and unloaded spaceships. I liked the work, and quickly became quite strong.

I got a room in a boarding house that had advertised at the guild, and found that most of my housemates were also laborers. It was a congenial crowd: the meals were rowdy affairs, and the parties sometimes lasted through the night — our landlady loved them. One of the older boarders, a woman named Angela, liked to argue philosophy — to “discuss ideas,” as she called it. On cold nights she would call a few of us on the intercom and invite us down to the kitchen, where she would brew endless pots of tea, and badger me and three or four other regulars with questions and provocations. “Don’t you think it is well established that all of the assassinated American presidents were killed by the Rosicrucians?” she would demand, and then tell us how John Wilkes Booth had escaped the burning barn to live on, take on another identity, and shoot both Garfield and McKinley…

“And Kennedy too?” John Ashley asked. “Are you sure this isn’t Ahasuerus the Assassin you’re discussing here?” John was a Rosicrucian, you see, and was naturally incensed.

“Ahasuerus?” Angela inquired.

“The Wandering Jew.”

“Did you know that originally he wasn’t a Jew at all?” George asked. “His name was Cartaphilus, and he was Pontius Pilate’s janitor.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “Let’s get back to the point. Booth was identified by his dental records, so the body they found in the barn was definitely his. Dental records are pretty conclusive. So your whole idea falls apart right at the start, Angela.”

She would contest it every time, and we would move on to the nature of evidence, and then the nature of reality, while pot after pot of tea was brewed and consumed. I would argue Aristotle against Plato, Hume against Berkeley, Peirce against the metaphysicals, Allenton against Dolpa, and the warm kitchen echoed with our fierce talk. Many was the time when I vanquished the rest with my mishmash of empiricism, pragmatism, logical positivism, and essentialist humanism — or I thought I did, until late in the night when I went up to my tiny book-walled room on the fourth floor, and lay on my bed and stared at the books and wondered what it was all about. Could it really be true that all we knew was what our senses told us?

Once John Ashley brought down to our kitchen group a volume called Sixty-six Crystals on the Ninth Planet, by a Theophilus Jones. After he had explained it to us, I couldn’t have been more scathing. I was familiar with Jones’s earlier works, and this new argument did nothing to bolster his case. “Don’t you see how illogical he’s being there? He has to contradict the whole picture of human history, the work of hundreds of scientists using thousands of pieces of evidence, just to establish the possibility that a prehistoric highly advanced civilization existed. Which by no means would prove that they flew out to Pluto of all places to set up a temple, I mean, why would they do that?”

“Yes, but look at all he says about how old Icehenge is.”

“No no no, none of those are serious dating methods. Calculating the chances of a lith getting hit by a meteorite? Why, it doesn’t matter what the chances are. The fact is it could have been hit by a meteorite the day after they completed the thing, and damn the probabilities. It doesn’t prove anything. That megalith was put there by Martians about three hundred years ago, by the Davydov expedition. They are the only ones who had the means to get out to Pluto so long ago. Read Nederland, he’s got the whole case worked up beautifully. He even found mention of the plans for the thing, in the Weil journal. With that kind of evidence you don’t need this far-fetched stuff. It’s nonsense, John.”

And John would argue right back that it wasn’t, and Angela and George and the others would usually support him. “How can you be so sure, Edmond? How can you be sure?”

“By looking at the evidence we’ve got. It stands to reason.”

Not that I was always so positive in my feelings toward my great-grandfather. Once I was walking home after a hard day of loading pipe. I had had some beers after work with the rest of the loading gang, and I was feeling low. Passing a holo sales shop I noticed a panel discussion in the window holo and stopped to watch, recognizing one of the doll- like figures to be Nederland. Curiously I contemplated him. He was discussing something or other — on the street it was hard to hear the store’s speaker — with a group of well- dressed professor types, who looked much like him; he was authoritative, impeccably groomed, and on his tiny face was an expert’s frown — he was getting ready to correct the speaker,

I remembered that once I had badgered my father: “Why don’t you like you like Great- grandpa, Dad? Why? He’s famous!” It took a lot of that to get Father even to admit he disliked Nederland, much less explain it. Finally he had said, “Well, I only met him once, but he was rude to your mother. She said it was because we had bothered him, but I still thought he could have been polite. She was his own granddaughter, and he acted like she was some beggar dunning for change. I didn’t like that.”

I left the holo shop window and continued home thinking about it, and when I came to my shabby old boarding house, and looked at its stained walls and etched windows, and remembered the sight of Nederland on that expensive Martian stage in his fine clothes, I felt a little bitter.

But most of the time I was pleased to have such a historian for an ancestor; I was fascinated by his work, and made myself an expert in it. One wall of my book-lined room was covered with shelves of books by Nederland, or about Nederland, or about Oleg Davydov and Emma Weil, and the Mars Starship Association, and the Martian Civil War, and the rest of early Martian history. I became a scholar of that whole era, and my first publications were letters of comment in Chronicle of Martian History and Shards, correcting errors in articles on the period. The publication of these letters in such prestigious journals convinced me that I was a gypsy scholar, a laborer intellectual, the equal of any university man. And I studied harder than ever, quite pleased with myself — a dabbler in a field where I had not had a single moment’s contact with the primary sources of data: one of Nederland’s many followers in the widespread revision of Martian history.

So years passed, and Icehenge, and Nederland’s explanation for it, the astonishing story of the Davydov mutiny, remained a central part of my life. The turning point in my history — the end of my innocence, so to speak — came on New Year’s Eve, when the year 2589 became 2590. By that time I was working for the Titan Weather Company. Early in the evening I was on the job, helping to create a lightning storm that crackled and boomed over the raucous new town of Simonides. Just after the big blast at midnight — two huge balls of St. Elmo’s fire, colliding just above the dome — we were let off, and we hit town ready for a good time. The whole crew, all sixteen of us, went first to our regular bar, Jacque’s. Jacque was dressed up as the Old Year, and his pet chimpanzee was in diapers and ribbons, representing the New. I drank several beers and allowed a variety of capsules to be popped under my nose, and soon like most of the people there I was very drunk. My boss, Mark Starr, was rolling on the floor, wrestling the chimp. It looked like he was losing. An impromptu chorus was bellowing out an old standard, “I Met Her in a Phobos Restaurant,” and inspired by the mentioning of my native satellite, I started singing a complicated harmony part. Apparently I was the only one who perceived its beauties. There were shouts of protest, and the woman seated next to me objected by pushing me off the bench. As I recovered my footing she stood up, and I shoved her into the table behind us. People there were upset by her arrival and began pounding on her. Feeling magnanimous, I grabbed her arm and pulled her away. The moment she was clear of them she punched me hard in the shoulder, and swung again angrily. I parried the blow with a forearm and jabbed her on the sternum, but she had a longer reach and was much angrier, and I had to retreat quickly, warding off her blows. Despite a couple of good jabs I saw that I was outmatched, and I slipped through the throng at the bar and escaped out the door and into the street.

I sat down at the curb and relaxed. I felt good. There were lots of people on the street, many of them quite drunk. One of them failed to notice me, and tripped over my legs. “Hey!” he shouted, kneeling before me and grabbing my collar. “What d’you mean tripping me like that?” He was a big barrel-chested man, with thin arms that nevertheless were very strong; he shook me a little and it seemed to me his biceps looked like wire under the skin. He had long tangled hair, a small head, and he reeked of whiskey.

“Sorry,” I said, and tried to knock his hands away from my collar. I failed. “I was just sitting here when you ran over me.”

“Sure!” he shouted, and shook me again. Then he let go of me, and his eyes rolled a little; he crumpled back onto his butt, took stock of his situation dizzily, and slid himself over so that he was seated in the trash in the gutter, out of people’s way. I shifted away from him a foot or two, and he waved at me to stop. He took a vial from his shirt pocket, opened it with awkward care, waved it under his nose.

“You shouldn’t use that stuff,” I advised him.

“And why not?”

“It’ll give you high blood pressure.”

He peered up at me with bloodshot eyes. “High blood pressure is better than no blood pressure at all.”

“There is that.”

“So you’d better try some of this, hadn’t you.”

I didn’t know if he was serious or not, but I decided not to test it. “I guess I’d better.”

Slowly he levered himself up onto the curb next to me. Seated he looked like a spider. “You got to have blood pressure, that’s my motto,” he said.

“I see.”

He waved the vial under my nose, and immediately I felt the rush of the flyer. He left it there until I almost fainted with euphoria and lack of oxygen. “Man,” he said, “on New Year’s Eve everybody just goes crazy.”

“Gosh I w-wonder why,” I managed to say.

Then Mark and Ivinny and several more of the weather crew crashed out of Jacque’s. “Come on, Edmond, the chimp has got hold of a fire extinguisher and any minute it’ll be blasting us.”

I stood up, much too quickly, and when the colored lights went away I motioned to my new companion. He started to stand, we helped him the rest of the way. He stood a score of centimeters taller than the rest of us. We trailed my group of friends, talking continuously and barely listening to each other, we were so high. Then a forty-person free-for-all swirled out of a side street and caught us up in it; Simonides was filled with Caroline Holmes’s shipworkers, and it was nearing dawn, and from the roar bouncing down on us from the dome it appeared that there were brawls going on all over town. My new companion’s arms were only thin in relation to his giant torso, and with their length and power he was able to clear an area around him. I stayed close on his heels, and was hit on the side of the head by his elbow. When I regained consciousness a few seconds later he was dragging me by the heels after Mark and the rest. “What are you doing attacking me from behind, eh?” he shouted. “Don’t you know that’s dangerous?”

“Uh.” A vial shoved up one of my nostrils and I was clearheaded again. I staggered free of my companion and followed him and the weather crew through the clogged streets.

At dawn we were on the east edge of town, sitting on the wide concrete strip just inside the dome. There were seven or eight of the weather crew left, laughing and drinking from a tall white bottle. My new friend arranged pieces of gravel into patterns on the concrete. On the horizon a white point appeared, and lengthened into a knife-edge line dividing the night: the rings. Saturn would soon be rising.

My friend had grown a little melancholy. “Sports,” he scoffed in reply to a comment I had made on the night’s brawling. “Sports, it’s always the same story. The wise old man or men against the young turk or turks, and the young turk, if he’s worth his salt which he is by definition, always seems to win it, every time. Even in chess. You heard of that guy Goodman. Guy studies chess religiously for a mere twenty-five years, comes out at age thirty-five and wins three hundred and sixty tournament games in a row, trounces five- hundred-and-fifteen-year-old Gunnar Knorrson twelve-four-two, Knorrson who held the system championship for a hundred and sixty-some years! It’s damn depressing.”

“You play chess.”

“Yeah. And I’m five hundred and fifteen years old.”

“Wow, that’s old. You’re not Knorrson?”

“No, just old.”

“I’ll say.”

“Yes, I’ve seen a lot of these New Year’s Eves. I can’t say I remember very many of them…”

“Long time.”

“Yeah. Besides I doubt I’ll even remember this one tomorrow, so you can see how they might slip away.”

“You must have seen a lot of changes.”

“Oh yeah. Not as many, though, these last couple of centuries. It appears to me things don’t change as fast as they used to. Not as fast as in the twentieth, twenty-first, twenty- second, you know. Inertia, I guess.”

“Slower turnover in the population, you mean.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Everyone takes their time. I suppose it’s a commonly observed phenomenon.”

“Is it?”

“I don’t know. But damn it, why doesn’t the wise old man beat the young turk? Why don’t you keep getting better? Where does your creativity go?”

“Same place as memory,” I said.

“I guess. Well, what the hell. Winning ain’t essential. I’m doing fine without it. I wouldn’t have it over.” He shook his head. “Wouldn’t do like those Phoenixes. You heard of them? Folks banded together way back when in a secret society, and now they’re knocking themselves off on their five-hundredth birthdays?”

I nodded. “The Phoenix Club.”

“Phoenixes. Can you believe such stupidity? I never will understand those folks. Never understand those daredevils, either. Seems like the more you have to lose the bigger thrill you get from risking your life for no reason. Those damn fools dueling with sharp blades, trying to stand on Jupiter, having picnics on some iceberg in the rings — get themselves killed!”

“You really think people have more to lose by dying now than they did when they lived their three score and ten?”

“Sure.”

“I don’t.”

He shoved me onto my side, roughly. “You’re just a kid, you don’t know anything. You don’t know how strange it’s going to get.” Angrily he swept his pattern of gravel aside. “There’s only a couple hundred people in the whole system older than me. And they’re dying off fast. One of these days I’ll go too. My body’ll toss off all this medical manipulation and stop” — he snapped his fingers — “just like that. They still don’t know why. And God damn it, I’m not used to the idea. Do you understand what it feels like to live this long? No, you don’t. There’s no way you do. I tell you, I wouldn’t mind having another six hundred years. I try talking my body into the idea all the time. And I’m damn glad I didn’t go at seventy or a hundred. What kind of a life is that? Man, I’ve done so many things…” His eyes, aimed at the concrete we were sitting on, were focused for infinite distance.

“You done everything you wanted to?”

He shook his head, irritated with me.

“Me neither.”

He laughed scornfully. “I should hope not.”

I was still drunk; my head throbbed, and my whole life seemed to swirl before me, over the concrete outside the dome. “I’d like to see Icehenge.”

He jerked around, stared at me with an odd look in his eye. He pulled tangled hair back to see me better. “You’d like to see what?”

“I’d like to stand at its center, and walk around and look at it. Icehenge, you know, the Davydov megalith, out there on Pluto.”

“Ha!” he cried. Several sharp laughs exploded from him. “Ha! Ha! Ha!” He rolled to his knees, got to his feet. “Davydov, you say!”

“He headed the expedition that put the monument there.”

In his agitation he circled me, and again sharp barks burst from him. He stood before me, leaned down to hold a tightly bunched fist before my face. “He — did — not.” At last his anger penetrated the fog of my drunkenness. “What?” I said, sobering quickly. “What did you say?”

“What makes you think this Davydov had anything to do with it?”

“Um.” I gathered my thoughts. “A historian named Nederland tracked down the story on Mars, he found this journal—”

“Well he was wrong!”

I was taken aback. “I don’t think so, I mean, he has it all well documented—”

“Idiot! He does not. What does he say — some asteroid miners put together a half- baked starship and take off, what’s that got to do with Pluto? Think about that for a while.” He stalked over to the dome, slapped it hard with an open palm.

I stood up and followed him, confused but instinctively curious. “But they were the only ones out there, see — process of elimination—”

“No!” He almost spoke — hesitated — turned on his heel and walked away from me. I followed him, and when he stopped I circled him. His hands were clenched tightly before him.

“What’s wrong?” I said. “Why are you so sure Davydov’s expedition didn’t—”

And he swung around, grabbed me by the upper arm and yanked me toward him. “Because I know,” he said, voice thick. “I know who put it there.”

He let go of me, took a deep breath. At that moment Saturn broke over the horizon, and everyone on the dome strip started to cheer. All over Simonides voices and sirens and whistles and horns and bells marked the dawn of the new year with their ragged chorus. My companion tilted his head back and hooted harshly, then began to move through the crowd away from me.

“Wait!” I cried, and struggled after him. “Wait! Hey!” I caught up with him, grabbed his sleeve, pulled him around. “What do you mean? Who put it there? How do you know?”

“I know,” he said fiercely. He stared at me. In all that cacaphony we two were still, face to face, gazes locked. And something in his expression told me that he knew. He was telling the truth. This was the moment that made the difference; this was the moment that changed me. I learned then that in certain times, in certain places, we connect in such a way that deception is impossible. The intensity of the flesh jumps the gap from mind to mind. This man’s bloodshot basilisk glare held me transfixed, and I knew that he knew.

Not that that satisfied me. “How?” I asked.

He must have read my lips. He pointed a gnarled forefinger at his own face. “I helped build it! Ha!” In all the noise it was hard to hear him, and he seemed in part to be talking only to himself, which made it even harder to hear him, but he said something like, “I helped build it, and now I’m the last one. She only” — the blast of a horn — “old men and women out there, and now they’re all dead but me!” He said more, but the shouting crowd drowned his words.

“But who, why?” I shouted. “Wh—”

He cut me off with a jab in the sternum. “You find that. I give you that.” He turned and shoved his way toward the streets again, leaving people angry enough to make it hard for me to follow. I slipped around groups and barged through others, however, desperate to catch him. I saw his wild tangle of hair beyond a small knot of people, and I crashed through them — “Wait!” I shouted. “Wait!”

He heard me, and turned and charged me, knocking me down with a hard shove. I scrambled up swiftly, and saw his head sticking above the crowd, but as I hurried after him my pace slowed: what was the use? If he didn’t want to talk I couldn’t force anything from him.

So I stopped chasing him, and stood there in smoggy dawn sunlight completely disoriented, as if this new year had brought with it a new world. Around me strangers stared, pointed me out to others. I realized that I was filthy, disheveled — not that that made me stand out particularly in that crowd, but I was suddenly conscious of myself as I had not been for several minutes, at least. I shook my head. “Happy New Year’s!” I called out to my circle of observers — to my stranger with his strange news — and tried to retrace my steps, to find what remained of the weather crew.

That man had known something about Icehenge, I was certain of it. And that certainty changed my life.

My food had run out, and my memory was exhausted, so I decided to get away from the keyboard and my memoirs for a day or two, and hang around in the commons. Maybe I would run into Jones, or I could seek him out. Some people aboard, I had heard, were affronted because Jones had been invited along (by me). Theophilus Jones was an outcast, he was one of those strange scientists who defied the basic tenets of his field and others’. But I found the huge red-haired man to be one of the most intelligent people on the Snowflake, and by far the most entertaining. And he was more inclined than the rest to talk about something other than Icehenge. Before I left for the commons I went to my library console to print up one of Jones’s books. Should I read from The Case for Prehistoric Technology (Volume Five)? Sure. I typed out the code for it.

In the kitchen I got a large bowl of ice cream, and went to a table to eat and read. The commons was empty — perhaps this was the sleep shift? I wasn’t sure.

I opened my crisp new book, pages still stiff around the ring binding, and began to read:

…We must suspect alien presence in the unsolved problem of human origins, for science has significantly failed to discover the beginnings of human evolution, the point at which human beings and a terrestrial species might meet; and the recent finds in the Urals and in southern India, in which fossilized human skeletons one hundred million years old have been found, show that the scientific description of human evolution held up to this time was wrong. Alien interference, in the form of genetic engineering, crossbreeding, or most likely, colonization, is almost a certainty.

So it is not impossible that a human civilization of high technology existed in prehistoric times — an earlier wave of history, now lost to us. That such a civilization would be lost to us is inevitable. Continents and seas have come and gone since it existed, and humanity itself must have come close to extinction more than once. If there had been a great and ageless city on the wide triangle of India, when it was a splinter of Gondwanaland inching north, what would we know of it now, crushed as it must have been in the collision between Asia and India, thrust deep beneath the Himalayas by the earth itself? Perhaps this is why Tibet is a place where humans have always possessed an ancient and intricate wisdom, and what we now know to be the oldest of written languages, Sanskrit. Perhaps some few of that ancient race survived the millennial thrust skyward; or perhaps there are caves the Tibetans have found, with deep fissures winding down through the mountain’s basalt to chambers in that crushed city…

My ice cream bowl was empty, so I got up and went to the kitchen to refill it, shaking my head over the passage in Jones’s book. When I returned, Jones himself was in the room, deep in conversation with Arthur Grosjean. They were at the long blackboard, and Grosjean was picking up a writing stick. He had been the chief planetologist on the Persephone in 2547, and had co-authored the only detailed description of the megalith. He was an old man, nearly five hundred, short and frail. Now he was tying a piece of string around the stick, listening to Jones’s excited voice. I sat down and watched them as I ate.

“First you draw a regular semicircle,” said Grosjean. “That’s the south half. Then the north half — the half closest to the pole, that is — is flattened.” He drew a horizontal diameter, and a semicircle below it. “We figured out the construction that will flatten the north half correctly. Divide the diameter into three parts. Use the two dividing points B and C for centers of the two smaller arcs, radius BD and CE” He drew and lettered busily. “At their meeting point, F, draw a perpendicular line through centerpoint A to south point G. Draw GBH — and GCI — then the arc HI, from center G. And voila!”

“The construction,” Jones said. He took the writing stick and began making little rectangles around the circle.

“All the sixty-six liths are within three meters of this construction,” Grosjean said.

“And this is a prehistoric Celtic pattern, you say?” asked Jones.

“Yes, we discovered later that it was used in Britain in the second millennium B.C. But I don’t see how that supports your theory, Mr. Jones. It would be just as easy for later builders of Icehenge to copy the Celts as it would be for the Celts to copy earlier builders of Icehenge — easier, if you ask me.”

“Well, but you never can be sure,” Jones said. “It looks awfully suspicious to me.”

Then Brinston and Dr. Nimit walked in. Jones looked over and saw them. “So what does Dr. Brinston think of this?” he said to Grosjean. Brinston heard the question and looked over at them.

“Well,” Grosjean said uncomfortably, “I’m afraid that he believes our measurements of the monument were inaccurate.”

“What?”

Brinston left Nimit and approached the blackboard. “Examination of the holograms made of Icehenge show that the on-site measurements — which were not made by Dr. Grosjean, by the way — were off badly.”

“They’d have to be pretty inaccurate,” Jones said, turning back to the board, “to make this construction bad speculation.”

“Well, they were,” Brinston said easily. “Especially on the north side.”

“To tell you the truth,” Grosjean informed Jones, “I still believe the construction was the one used by the builders.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good attitude,” Brinston said, his voice smooth with condescension. “I think the fewer preconceived notions we have before we actually see it, the better.”

“I have seen it,” Grosjean snapped.

“Yes,” said Brinston, voice still cheerful, “but the problem isn’t in your field.”

Jones slammed down the writing stick, “You’re a fool, Brinston!” There was a shocked silence. “Icehenge is not exclusively your problem because you are the archaeologist.” I stood up, jarred by the tableau: plump Brinston, still trying to look unconcerned; angry red-headed Jones towering over him; frail grim Grosjean completing the triangular composition; and Nimit and I across the room, watching.

Jones’s lip curled and Brinston stepped back, jaw suddenly tensed. “Come on, Arthur,” said Jones. “Let’s continue our conversation elsewhere.” He stalked out of the room, and Grosjean followed.

I remembered Nederland saying to me, It will become a circus. Brinston approached us, his face still tense. He noticed Nimit and me staring, and looked embarrassed. “A touchy pair,” he said.

“They’re not touchy,” I said. “You were harassing them, being a disruption.”

“I’m a disruption!” he burst out. “You’re the disruptive force on this ship, Doya, hiding in your cabin all the time as if you had nothing to do with us! Refusing to join our talks! Living on Waystation for twenty years like a bum has made you some sort of misanthropist.”

“Not wanting to play with you doesn’t make me a misanthropist,” I said. “Besides, I’m working.”

“Working,” he sneered. “Your work is done.” He walked into the kitchen, leaving Nimit and me to stare silently at each other.

Waystation — where I lived for fifteen years, not twenty — is the freight train, the passenger express, the permanent highspeed rocket of the Outer Satellites. It uses the sun and the gas giants as buoys, or gravity handles to swing around. It travels about the same distance as Saturn’s orbit in a year — a fast rock. It began as an idea of Caroline Holmes, the shipping magnate who built most of the Jupiter colonies; and she profited from it most, as she did from all the rest of her ideas. Her company Jupiter Metals took a roughly cylindrical asteroid, twelve kilometers long and around five across. The inside was hollowed out, one end was honeycombed by the huge propulsion station, and off it went, careening around the sun, constantly shifting orbit to make its next rendezvous.

I boarded it on a shuttle from Titan, in 2594. My name had finally come up on the hitchhiker’s list — the Outer Satellites Council provides free travel between the satellites, which otherwise would be too expensive for most individuals, and all you have to do is put your name on the list and wait for it to come to the top. I had waited four years.

Jumping on Waystation is like running in a relay race, and handing the baton to a runner five times faster than you — for getting a transfer craft up to Waystation’s velocity would defeat the purpose of having Waystation at all. Our shuttle craft was moving at top speed, and we passengers were each in anti-G chambers (called the Jelly) within tiny transfer craft. As Waystation flashed by the transfer vessels were fired after it, at tremendous acceleration, and the transfer crews on Waystation then snagged them and they accelerated some more, while the crews reeled us in.

Even in the Jelly the sudden accelerations were a strain. At the moment we were snagged, the breath was knocked out of me and I blacked out for a second. While I was unconscious I had a brief vision, intense and clear. I could see only black, except for the middle distance, directly before me: there stood a block of ice, cut in the shape of a coffin. And frozen in this glittering bier was me, myself — eyes wide and staring back at me.

The vision passed, I came to, shook my head, blinked. Waystation people helped me out of the Jelly, and I joined the other passengers in a receiving room. Several of them looked distinctly ill.

A Waystation official greeted us, and without further ceremony we were escorted through the Port and into the city itself. It was crowded at that time — drop-offs to Jupiter were just about to be made, and there were a lot of merchants in town, moving goods. I found a job washing dishes first thing, and then went out to the front end of Waystation, rented a suit and took the elevator to the surface near the methane lake. I sat there for a long time. I was on Waystation, the next step outward.

For I was still chasing Icehenge, yes, I was. My dreams, my acceleration-induced visions, my studies, my physical movement, all centered around the idea of the megalith. And after the chance meeting with the stranger on Titan — after my most cherished story had been shattered — I returned to my studies with an obsessive purpose, fueled by a vague sense of betrayal: I was going to find out who put that damn thing there.

And I took my time about it, too. None of Nederland’s hasty rushing about. In his need for precedence — his drive to be the one who solved the mystery — he had been reckless, he had jumped to too many conclusions, and taken too many facts for granted. I would not make the same mistake. With the memory of the stranger’s bloodshot glare in mind, I hunted through the records of the Mars Development Committee, and the Outer Satellites Council, and the various mining companies that had plied the outer satellites, and the shipyards of the spaceship manufacturers, and the Persephone expedition, and so on: years and years of work. And slowly I began to see the pattern.

Some years after my move to Waystation I woke up one morning in the park, arms wrapped around a very young girl. The Sunlight had just come on and was still at half strength, giving its comforting illusion of morning. I stood up, went through a quick salute-to-the-sun exercise to alleviate the stiffness in my legs. The girl woke up. In the light she looked about fifteen or sixteen. She stretched like a cat. Her coat was wrinkled. She had joined me the previous night, waking me up to do so, because it was cold, and I had a blanket. It had felt good to sleep with someone, to spoon together for warmth, to feel human contact even through coats.

She got up and brushed off her pants. She looked at me and smiled.

“Hey,” I said. “You want to go over to the Red Cafe and get some breakfast?”

“No,” she said. “I have to go to work. Thanks for taking me in.” She turned and walked off through the park. I watched her until a stand of walnut blocked my sight of her. Rare to see someone so young on Waystation.

I went and ate — said good morning to Dolores the cashier as she typed my money from me to them, but she just shrugged. I went out and strolled aimlessly up the curved streets. Sometimes the real world seems just like the inside of a holo, where nothing you say or do will have any effect on what is happening around you. I hate mornings like that.

For something to do I went down to the post office and checked my mail. And there, in my March 2606 issue of Shards. was my own article. My first published article, containing sixteen years’ work. I hadn’t expected it to appear for months yet. I whooped once and disturbed people in the booths next to mine. I read quickly through the introduction, working hard to comprehend that the words were still mine.

Davydov and Icehenge: A Re-examination by Edmond Doya

There are many reasons for supposing that the megalith on Pluto called “Icehenge” was constructed within the last one hundred and fifty years, by a group that has not yet been identified.

1) 2443, when the Ferrando Corporation’s Ferrando-X spaceships were first made available to the public, is the earliest date at which ships capable of making the round trip from the outermost spaceship ports to Pluto and back existed. Before that date, because Pluto was at its aphelion, and on the opposite side of the solar system from Jupiter and Saturn, and because of the limited capabilities of all existing spaceships before the Ferrando-Xs, Pluto was simply out of human reach. So a working assumption can be made that Icehenge was constructed after 2443.

2) The Davydov Theory, which is the only theory that pushes back this necessary time limit, asserts that the megalith was built by asteroid miners who were leaving the solar system in a modified pair of spaceships of the PR Deimos class. But a close examination of the evidence supporting this theory has revealed the following discrepancies:

a) The only data indicating the existence of the Mars Starship Association — the group of miners that supposedly built Icehenge — were found in two places: a file found in Cabinet 14A23546-6 in the Physical Records Annex in Alexandria, Mars; and the journal of Emma Weil, found in a buried field car during the excavation of New Houston, Mars. While Mars Development Committee records do mention the existence of Davydov and the others named in this file and journal, they do not mention anywhere else the Mars Starship Association.

This fact becomes more disturbing with the introduction of new evidence concerning these sole supports for the Davydov Theory:

b) Jorge Balder, professor of history at the University of Mars, Hellas, searched the Physical Records Annex in Alexandria in 2536, as part of his research on a related incident in early Martian history. His records show that he searched Cabinet 14A23546 (all six drawers) at that time, and he catalogued its contents. In his catalogue there is no mention of the file found in 2548 by Professor Hjalmar Nederland, on Oleg Davydov and the Mars Starship Association. The implication is that the file was placed in the cabinet at a later date.

c) The records of the New Houston excavation show that William Strickland and Xhosa Ti, working under Professor Nederland, did a seismic scan of precisely the area in which the abandoned field car was found, two weeks before it was discovered. Their scan showed no sign of such an object. During the intervening two weeks a storm kept all workers out of the area, and the car was found because of a landslide that could have easily been triggered by explosives.

The article went on to list exactly what was documented about Davydov and the rest, and to show where information about them and the MSA should have been located but wasn’t. After that were suggestions for further inquiry, including a physical examination and dating, if possible, of the abandoned field car, Emma Weil’s notebook, and the file from Alexandria. My conclusion was tentative, as was only proper at that point, but still it was a shocker: “…Thus we are inclined to believe that these artifacts, and the Davydov theory that depends upon them, have been manufactured, apparently by the same agents who are responsible for the construction of Icehenge, and that they constitute a ‘false explanation’ for the megalith, linking it to the Martian Civil War when it apparently was erected at least two centuries later.”

Yes, that would open their eyes all right! It threw the whole issue into question again. And Shards was one of the major journals, it was read system-wide. Nederland himself would read the article. Perhaps he was reading it at that very moment. Something in the notion was disturbing. I said to myself, The battle is on.

Quitting time at the restaurant. I went over to see Fist Matthews, one of the cooks. “Fist, can you lend me ten till payday?”

“Why do you want money, wild man? The way you eat here you ain’t hungry.”

“No, I need to pay off the post office before they’ll let me see my mail.”

“What’s a dishwasher like you doing with mail? Never mess with it myself. Keep your friends where you can see them, that’s what I say.”

“Yeah, I do. It’s my foes I want to hear from! Listen, I’ll pay you back payday, that’s the day after tomorrow.”

“You can’t wait till then? Oh all right, what’s your number…”

He went to the restaurant’s register and made the exchange. “Okay, you got it. Remember payday.”

“I will. Thanks, Fist.”

“Don’t mention it. Hey, me and the girls are going body-surfing when we get off — want to come along?”

“I’ve got to check my mail first, but then I’ll think about it.”

I threw a few more dishes on the washer belt — grabbed a piece of lobster tail the size of my finger, tossed it in my mouth, fuel for the fire, waste not want not — until my replacement arrived, looking sleepy.

The streets of Waystation were as empty as they ever get. In the green square of the park, up above me on the other side of the cylinder, a group was playing cricket. I hurried past one of my sidewalk sleeping spots, stepping over prone figures. As I neared the post office I skipped. I hadn’t been able to afford to see my mail for several days — it happened like that at the end of every month. Post office has mail freaks over a barrel, and they know it.

When I got there it was crowded, and I had to hunt for a console. More and more people were going to general delivery, it seemed, especially on Waystation where almost everyone was transient.

I sat down before one of the gray screens and began typing, paying off the post office and identifying myself, calling up my correspondence from the depths of the computer. I sat back to read.

Nothing! “Damn it!” I shouted, startling a young man in the booth next to me. Junk mail, nothing but junk. Why had no one written? “No one writes to Edmond,” I muttered, in the singsong I had given the phrase over the years. There was an issue of Archaeological Review, and a notice that my subscription to Marscience had run out, for which I thanked God, and an inquiry from a local politician, asking if this was my current mail number.

I blanked the screen and left. Keep your friends where you can see them. Well, it was good advice. There were more people in the streets, on the trams, going to work, getting off work. I didn’t know any of them. I knew almost all the locals on Waystation, and they were good people, but suddenly I missed my old friends from Titan. I wanted something… something I had thought the mail could give me; but that wasn’t quite right either.

I hated mornings like this. I decided to take up Fist’s invitation, and got on a tram going to the front of the town. At the last stop I got off and took the short elevator through the wall of the asteroid to the surface. Leaving the elevator I went to the big window overlooking Emerald Lake. We were somewhere near Uranus, so the lake was full. The changing room, however, was nearly empty. I went to the ticket window, and they took more of Fist’s ten. The suit attendant helping me looked sleepy, so I checked my helmet seam in the mirror. The black, aquatic creature — like a cross between a frog and a seal — stared back at me out of its facemask, and I smiled. In the reflection the humorless fish grin appeared. The slug-broad head, webbed and finned handscoops, long finny feet, torso fins, and the cyclopslike facemask transformed me (appropriately, I thought) into an alien monster. I walked slowly into the lock, lifting my knees high to swing my feet forward.

The outer lock door opened, I felt the tiny rush of air, and I was outside, on my own. It felt the same, but I breathed quicker for a time, as always; I’d not spent very much time in the open recently. A ramp extended out into the lake, and I waddled to the end of it.

Around the lake, flat blue-gray plains rose up to the close horizon of an ancient worn- down crater wall. It looked like the surface of any asteroid. Waystation’s existence — the hollowed interior, the buildings and people, the complicated spaceport, the huge propulsion station on the other end, the rock’s extraordinary speed — all could seem the work of an excited fancy, here by this lake of liquid methane, trapped in an old crater.

Below me the stars were reflected, green as — yes, emeralds — in the glassy surface of the methane. I could see the bottom, three or four meters below. A series of ripples washed by, making the green stars dance for a moment.

Out on the lake the wave machine was a black wall, hard to distinguish in the pale sunlight. Its sudden shift toward me (which looked like a visual mistake caused by blinking) marked the creation of another tall green swell. The swells could hardly be seen until they crossed the submerged crater wall near the center of the lake; then they rose up, pitched out and fell, breaking in both directions around the submerged crater, throwing sheets of methane like mercury drops into space, where they floated slowly down.

I dove in. Under the surface I was effectively weightless, and swimming took little effort. Over the sound of my breath was the steady krkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkr of waves breaking, and every ten or fifteen seconds I heard the emphatic ka-THUNKuh of the wave machine. Ahead of me the green of the methane became murky, because of the turbulence over the submerged crater. I stuck my head above the surface to see, and all sound except that of my breathing instantly ceased.

A few other swimmers were out, and I guessed some of my fellow restaurant workers were among them. I swam around the break, out beyond the crater, where the swells first hit the shelf and started to rise to their full height, which today was nearly ten meters. Three of my friends were out there, Wendy, Laura, and Fist; I waved to them, then floated on my back and waited for them to take their turns. Rising and falling on those smooth swells I felt quite inhuman; all that I saw, felt, and heard — even the sound of my own breath — was strange, alien, too sublime for human sensibility.

Then I was alone at the point break. A swell approached and I backstroked away from it, toward the point where it would first break, adjusting my speed so I would be just outside that point when the wave picked me up.

The wave reached me and I felt its strong lift. I turned luxuriously onto my stomach, skimmed down the steepening face until I felt that the swell was pitching out over me. From my thighs up I was clear of the methane, skating on my hand — fins — I turned them left, and swerved across the wave, just ahead of the break, flying, flying… I moved my feet to retard my speed a fraction, and the roof of the breaking wave moved ahead of me. It got dark. I was in the tube. My hands were below me, jammed into the methane to keep me from falling down the face. I was motionless yet flying, propelled through the blackness at tremendous speed by the liquid which rushed up past my left shoulder, arched over my head, and fell out beyond my right shoulder. Before me there was a huge tunnel, and at the end of this swirling obsidian tube a small ellipse of velvet black, packed with stars.

The opening got smaller, indicating that the wave was past the submerged crater, and receding. I dropped to gain speed, turned back up and shot through the hole, over the swell and back onto the smooth glassy surface, under the night.

Swimming slowly back to the point break, I watched another swimmer spin silently across the next rushing wall. She rose too high and was thrown over with the lip of the wave. If she hit the crater reef and broke the seal of her suit, she would freeze instantly — but she knew that, and would be careful to avoid being forced too deep.

I radioed the shore and had them pipe Gregorian chants into my headphones; and I swam, and rode waves, and hummed with the chants when I could catch my breath, and thought not at all. And later I switched over to the common band, and talked at great length with Fist and Wendy and Laura, as we analyzed every wave and every ride. I swam till there was too much sweat in my suit, and not enough oxygen.

Back on the tram into town, I felt good: free and self-sufficient, cosmopolitan, ready to work. It was time to attack the next facet of the Icehenge problem: the identity of its builder. My research had given me a good idea of who it might be, but the problem would be to prove it — or even to make a convincing case. And the next day I checked my mail again, and there was a long rambling letter from Mark Starr. PRINT, I typed, and out of the slot in the side of the console it appeared, blue ink on gray paper, just as always.

One day I went down to Waystation’s News and Information Center in search of the latest Nederland press conference. The lobby of the center was nearly empty, and I went directly into a booth. The index I called up listed only Nederland’s regularly scheduled lectures, and I had to search through the new entries to find the press conference I wanted. Finally I discovered it and typed the code to run it, then sat back in the center chair of the booth to watch.

The room darkened. There was a click and I was in a large conference room, fully lit, filled with the holo images of upper-class Martians: reporters, students, officials (as in any Martian holo there were a lot of these), and some scientists I recognized. And there was Nederland, moving down an aisle next to me, toward a podium at the front. I moved through people and chairs to the aisle, and stood in front of Nederland. He walked right through me. Smiling at my little joke, and at my quick moment of involuntary fright at the unfelt collision, I said, “You’ll see me yet,” and kicked about until I relocated my chair.

Nederland reached the podium and the irregular percussion of voices died. He was a small man, and only his head showed over the podium’s top. Underneath his wild black hair was a look of triumph; his bright red cheeks were blazing with excitement. “You hopeless old romantic,” I said. “You’ve got something up your sleeve, you can’t fool me.”

He cleared his throat, his usual sign that he was taking over. “I think my statement will answer most of the questions you have today, so why don’t I start with that, and then we’ll answer any questions you might have.”

“Since when has it been any different?” I asked, but it was the only response. Nederland looked at his notes, looked up — his eyes crossed mine — and he extended a benedictory hand.

“The recent critics of the Davydov explanation claim that the Pluto monument is a modern hoax, and that in my work on the subject I have ignored the physical evidence. The absence of any disturbance in the regolith around the site, and our inability to find any signs of construction, are cited as facts which contradict or do not fit my explanation.

“I submit that it is the critics who are ignoring the physical evidence. If the Davydov expedition did not build Icehenge, why did Davydov himself study the megalithic cultures of Terra?”

“What?” I cried.

“What are we to make of his stated intention to leave some sort of mark on the world? Can we label it coincidence that Davydov’s ship disappeared just three years before the date found on Icehenge? I think not…”

He went on, outlining the same arguments he had been espousing for the last fifty years. “Come on,” I groaned, “get down to it.” He droned on, ignoring the fact that his critics had shown the whole Davydov story to be part of the hoax. “I know you’ve got something new up your sleeve, let’s see it.” Then he flipped over a notecard, and an involuntary smile creased his face. I sat forward.

“My critics,” he said in his high voice, “are simply attacking in a purely destructive way. Aside from the vague claim that the monument is a modern hoax — perpetrated by whom, they cannot say — there is no theory to replace mine, and nothing to explain away the evidence found in the archives on Mars—”

“Oh, my God, exactly wrong!”

“-Which are constantly being re-ordered and refiled.”

“Oh. You hope.”

“The general claim of people like Doya, Satarwal, and Jordan, is that there is nothing at the site which will prove Icehenge’s age. On the other hand, there is nothing there that shows the monument to be modern, either, which given the sophistication of dating methods there almost certainly would be, if it were indeed modern.

“In fact, there is now evidence conclusively proving that Icehenge cannot be modern.” He stopped to let the statement sink in. “You are all aware that micrometeors, the dusty debris of space, are continually falling on all the bodies of the solar system; and that when they fall on those bodies without an atmosphere, they leave small traces. Even the tiniest of fragments leave their mark. The fall of these micrometeors is regular, and is a constant throughout the system. Professor Mund Stallworth, of the university here, has received a grant from the Holmes Foundation, and he has done extensive work in this field. He has established rates of fall for different gravities, and thus a micrometeorite count can now be used as an accurate dating method. Professor Stallworth has made a detailed computer scan of the exposed faces of the liths, and of the surrounding grounds, which the builders swept clear, and the count as revealed in these holograms is such that he puts the date of the erection of Icehenge at a thousand years before present, plus or minus five hundred years. His paper on the subject will appear in the next issue of Marscience. In it he explains that it is impossible to be more precise given the short time spans involved, and the fact he worked with holograms only. This places the latest date of construction one hundred and fifty years or so before the date left on the Inscription Lith, but this may be explained by the fact that the smooth surfaces of the liths record a higher percentage of blemishes than other surfaces. In any case, it is impossible that so many micrometeorites could have fallen in the short amount of time postulated by those who think that Icehenge is part of a hoax.

“Thus there is nothing that factually disproves the Davydov theory — there are only the doubts and fanciful speculations of detractors, some of whom have clear political motivations. And there is something that factually disproves the notions that these detractors hold. I thank you for your attention.”

Pandemonium broke loose among the previously attentive figures around me. Questions were shouted out, incomprehensible under the noise of cheers and applause. “Oh, shut up,” I said to the image of the woman next to me, who was clapping. As questions became audible — some of them were good ones — order was re-established, but apparently the news service people had considered the question and answer period unimportant. With another click the scene disappeared, and I was again in the dark, silent holo room. Lights came on. I sat.

Had Nederland proved his theory at last? Was the stranger on Titan wrong after all? (and I as well?) “Hmm,” I said. Apparently I was going to have to start looking into dating methods.

I woke up in the alley behind one of Waystation’s main boulevards. I had been sleeping on my side, and my neck and hip were sore. I took off my coat and shook the dust off it. Pushed my fingers through my hair and made it all lie down flat, brushed my teeth with a fingernail, looked around for something to drink. Put my coat back on. Flapped my arms.

Around me prone figures were still slumbering. Waking up is the worst part of living on the streets of Waystation; they drop the temperature down to ten degrees during the nights, to encourage travelers to take rooms. Helping out the hotel trade. A lot of people stay on the streets anyway, since most of them are transients. They aren’t bothered in any way aside from the cold, so they save their money for things more important than a room for the night. We all have the necessary shelter, inside this rock.

Low on money again, but I needed something to eat. Onto the tram.

Down at the spaceport I spent my last ten in Waystation’s cheapest restaurant. With the change I bought myself a bath, and sat in a corner of the public pool resting and thinking nothing.

When I was done I felt refreshed, but I was also broke. I went to my restaurant and hit Fist for another ten, then I walked around to the post office. Not much mail; but there at the end, to my great surprise, was a letter from a Professor Rotenberg, head of the Fine Arts Lecture Series at the Waystation Institute for Higher Learning (which, like many of the institutions on Waystation, had been founded by Caroline Holmes). Professor Rotenberg, who had enjoyed my “interesting revisionist articles” on Icehenge, wondered if I would consider accepting a semester’s employment as lecturer and head of a seminar studying the Pluto megalithic monument literature — “My my my,” I said, and typed out instructions to print the letter with my mouth hanging wide open.

I went out of my cabin for the first time in a while, to restock my supply of crackers and orange juice. The wood and moss hallways of Snowflake were quite empty; it seemed that people were staying in their rooms, or in the tiny lounges that the rooms opened onto. Dr. Lhotse had brought Brinston by for a peacemaking visit, and they had dropped in on Jones as well. Now we interacted, when necessary, with careful politeness; but mostly we were just settling in for the last wait. It would be a few more weeks until we reached Pluto. That wasn’t long; everyone is patient, everyone is good at waiting in this world where everything proceeds so slowly.

Yesterday was my birthday. I was sixty-two years old. One tenth of my life done and gone, the endless childhood over.

Those years feel like eternity in my head, and the thing is hardly begun. Hard to believe. I thought of the ancient stranger I had met on Titan, and wondered what it meant to live so unnaturally long, and then die anyway. What have we become?

When I am as old as that stranger, I will have forgotten these first sixty-two years and more. Or they will recede into depths of memory beyond the reach of recollection — the same as forgotten — recollection being a power inadequate to our new time scale. And how many other powers are like it?

Autobiography is now the necessary extension of memory. Five centuries from now I may live, but the I writing this will be nothing in his mind but a bare fact. I write this, then, for that stranger myself, so that he may know who he has been. I hope it will be enough. I am confident it will; my memory is strong.

My father sent me a birthday poem that arrived just last night. He’s given me one every birthday now for fifty-four years; they’re beginning to make quite a volume. I’ve encouraged him to put them and the rest of his poems into the general file, but he still refuses. Here is the latest:

Walking back to my room with my food, saying his poem to myself in my mind, I realized that I miss him.

I met with the Institute seminar I was to teach about a month after I got the invitation from Professor Rotenberg. At my urging we decided to meet at the back table of a pub across the street from the Institute, and we moved there forthwith.

It quickly became clear that they had read the literature on the subject. What more could I tell them?

“Who put it there?” said a man named Andrew.

“Wait a minute, start at the beginning.” That was Elaine, a good-looking hundredish woman on my left. “Give us your background, how you got into this.”

I told them my story as briefly as possible, feeling sheepish as I described the random meeting that had triggered my whole search. “…So you see, essentially, I believe I met someone who had a hand in constructing Icehenge, which necessarily eliminates the Davydov party from consideration.”

“You must have been astonished,” Elaine said.

“For a while. Astonished, shocked — betrayed… but soon the idea that the monument was put there by someone other than Davydov obsessed me. It made the whole problem unsolved again, you see.”

“Part of you welcomed it.” That was April, a very attentive woman sitting across from me.

“Yeah.”

“But what about Davydov?”

“What about Nederland?” asked April. She had a rather sharp and scornful way of speaking.

“I wasn’t sure. It didn’t seem possible that Nederland could be wrong — there were all those volumes, the whole edifice of his case. And I had believed it for so long. Everyone had. If he was wrong, what then of Davydov? Or Emma? Many times when I thought about it the certainty I had felt that night — that that stranger knew what had happened there — faded. But the memory… refused to change. He had known, and I knew that, I was sure of it. So the search was on.”

“How did you start?”

“With a premise. Induction, same as Nederland. I started with the theory that Icehenge was not built until humans were capable of getting to Pluto, which struck me as very reasonable. And there were no spaceships that could have taken us there and back until 2443. So Icehenge was a relatively modern construct, made anonymous in the deliberate attempt to obscure its origins.”

“A hoax,” April said.

“Well, yes, in a way, although it’s not the structure that’s a hoax, I mean it is definitely there no matter who set it up—”

“The Davydov expedition, then.”

“Right. Suddenly I had to wonder whether Davydov and Emma — whether any of them had existed at all.”

“So you checked Nederland’s early work.” This from Sean, a very big, bearded man.

“I did. I found that both Davydov and Emma had actually existed — Emma held some Martian middle-distance running records for several years, and some records of their careers were extant. And they both disappeared with a lot of other people in the Martian Civil War. But the only things connecting them with Icehenge were a file in the Alexandrian archives that apparently was planted, and Emma Weil’s journal, which was excavated outside New Houston. Now I got a chemist named Jordan interested in the case, and he has been investigating the aging of the field car that the journal was found in. You know metal oxidizes to an extent when buried in Martian soil, and the rate is measureable — and Jordan’s analysis of the field car seems to indicate that it was never buried in smectite clay, but apparently was exposed to the atmosphere. That is very suspicious, of course. And an engineer named Satarwal has figured out a list of the equipment necessary to construct Icehenge, and by Weil’s own account the asteroid miners didn’t have all of that equipment. So the Davydov explanation has been falling apart from more than one angle in the past few years, and in fact this seminar is one sign of that collapse.”

“So what did you do, then?” Sean asked.

“I made a list of qualities and attributes that the builder of Icehenge had to have had, thinking that I could then draw up a list of suspects. They had to have had a lot of money. They had to have help — my stranger for one, I guessed. They had to have a fairly big spaceship, and one that could be taken out of the usual flight control logbooks, which is a difficult task. And they had to have some specialized equipment, some of which was a little unusual. After I made this list I started making assumptions, about motivation and so forth, that were less certain, though they helped me a lot—”

“But you could make assumptions forever,” April said. “What did you do?”

“Uh. I did research. I sat in front of a screen and punched out codes, read the results, found new indexes, punched out more codes. I looked through shipping records, equipment manufacturing records, sales records — I investigated various rich people. That sort of thing. It was boring work in some ways, but I enjoyed doing it. At first I thought of myself as working my way through a maze. Then that seemed the wrong image. In front of a library screen I could go anywhere. Because of the access-to-information laws I could look in every file and record that existed, except for the illegal secret ones — there are a lot of those — but if they had code call-ups, you know, were hidden somewhere in larger data banks — then I could probably get into those too. I bumped into file freaks and learned new codes, and learning them took me into data banks that taught me even more. Trying to visualize it, I could see myself as a tiny component in a single communications network, a multibank computer complex that spanned the solar system — a dish-shaped, invisible, seemingly telepathic web, a wave pattern that added one more complication to the quark dance swirling in the sun’s gravity well. So I was not in a maze, I was above it, and I could see all of it at once — and its walls formed a pattern, had a meaning, if I could learn how to read it…”

I stopped and looked around. Blank faces, neutral, tolerant nods. “You know what I mean?” I asked.

No answers. “Sort of,” said Elaine. “But our time’s up.”

“Okay,” I said. “More next time.”

One night after a party in the restaurant’s kitchen I wandered the streets, my mind in a ferment. The Sunlight was off and the other side of the cylinder was a web of streetlights and colored neon points. It was the day after payday, so I stopped at the News and Information Center and waited until I could get a booth. When I got one I sat down and aimlessly called up indexes. Something was bothering me, but I didn’t know exactly what it was; and now I only wanted to be distracted. Eventually I selected Recreation News, which played continuously.

The room darkened and then revealed a platform in space. The scene moved to one side and I could see we were on the extension of a small satellite, in a low orbit around an asteroid.

The lilting voice of one of the sports commentators spoke. “The ancient game of golf has undergone yet another transformation out here on Hebe,” he said. We moved farther out onto the platform, and two golfers appeared at the edge of it, in thin hoursuits. “Yes, Philip John and Arafura Aloesi have added a new dimension to their golfing on and around Hebe. Let’s hear them describe it for themselves. Arafura?”

“Well, Connie, we tee off from up here, that’s about it in a nutshell. The pin is back down there near the horizon, see the light? It’s two meters wide, we figured we deserved that much from up here. Mostly we play hole-in-one.”

“What do you have to think about when you’re hitting a shot from up here, Phil?”

“Well, Connie, we’re in a Clarke orbit, so we don’t have to worry about orbital velocity. It’s a lot like every other drive, actually, except you’re higher up than usual—”

“You have to watch out for hitting it too hard; gravity’s not much around a small rock like this, if you drive with a one wood you’re liable to put the ball in orbit, or out in space even—”

“Yeah, Connie, I generally use a three iron and shoot down at it, that works best. Sometimes we play where we have to put the ball through one orbit before it can hit the ground, but it’s hard enough as it is, and—”

“All right, let’s see you guys put one down there.”

They swung and the balls disappeared.

“Now how do you see where it’s hit, guys?”

“Well, Connie, we got this radar screen following them down to the horizon — see, mine’s right on track — then the green has a hundred-meter diameter, and if we land on that it shows on this screen here. Here, they’re about to hit—”

Nothing appeared on the green screen beside them. Phil and Arafura looked crestfallen.

“Well, guys, any future plans for this new twist?”

Phil brightened. “Well, I was thinking if we were to set up just off Io, we could use the Red Spot as the hole and shoot for that. No problem with gravity there—”

“Yes, that’d be one hell of a fairway. And that’s all from Hebe for now, this is Connie McDowell—”

My time ran out and the room was dark, then bright with roomlight. Eventually the attendant came in and roused me. Again my mouth was hanging open: the astonishment of inspiration. I jumped up laughing. “That’s it!” I said, “golf balls!” Still laughing wildly: “I got the old fool this time!” The attendant stared at me and shook his head.

Only a month later (I had written it in a week) a long letter of mine appeared in the Commentary section of Shards. Part of it said,

There is no good evidence concerning the age of Icehenge. This is because most dating methods that have been developed by archaeologists are applicable to substances or processes found only on Terra. Some of these have been adapted for use on Mars, but on planetary bodies without atmospheres, most of the processes that are measured simply do not occur.

The ice of Icehenge, it has been determined, is about two billion years old. But when that ice was cut into beams and placed on Pluto has proven more difficult to determine. Two changes in the ice beams offer possible dating methods. First, a certain amount of the ice has sublimed spontaneously, but at seventy degrees Kelvin this process is extremely slow, and its effects at Icehenge are too small to measure. (This argues against any very great age for the megalith — those ages proposed by all of the “prehistoric” theories — but is no help in determining the date of construction more precisely.)

An attempt has been made to measure the second change occurring in the ice, which is the pitting that results from the fall of micrometeorites. Professor Mund Stallworth, with the help of Professor Hjalmar Nederland and the Holmes Foundation, has developed a micro-meteorite count method by which he claims to have dated the monument. This method is the equivalent of the terrestrial dating method of patination, and like patination it relies on an intimate knowledge of local conditions if it is to achieve any accuracy. Stallworth has assumed, and assumed only, that micrometeor fall is a constant both temporally and spatially. After making this assumption he has been fairly rigorous, and has taken counts on artificial surfaces on Luna and in the asteroids to establish a reliable short-term time chart. According to his calculations, micrometeors have fallen on Icehenge for a thousand years plus or minus five hundred. This makes Icehenge at least a hundred and fifty years older than the 2248 dating, but is considered close enough by Nederland, who has used Stallworth’s results to support his theory.

But the main problem with this dating (aside from the fact that the method is based on an assumption) is that the micrometeor fall on Icehenge could be part of the manufactured evidence. Micrometeorites are, for the most part, carbon dust. A handful of carbon dust sprinkled from a few hundred meters over the monument would create exactly the same effect as a thousand years of natural micrometeor fall. There would be no way of telling the difference.

Also, this is a precaution that would occur very quickly to the builders of Icehenge if they were attempting to make the monument appear older than it really is, for micrometeorites would be the only force acting on the structure over the short term. Though a method for measuring this action did not exist at the time of the monument’s construction (and still does not, in my opinion), the existence of micrometeor fall was known, and so the dating method could be both foreseen and dealt with, by an artificial fall. Given the elaborate nature of this hoax it is a possibility more likely than not—”

At the next seminar meeting, in the same pub, after we had had a few drinks, Andrew waved a finger at me. “So give, Edmond,” he said. “We want to know who put it there.”

I put down my glass. I had never written this down; never said it to anybody. All their eyes were on me.

“Caroline Holmes,” I said.

“What?”

“No!”

“What?”

“No, nooooo…”

They quieted down. Sean said, “Why?”

“Start from the beginning,” Elaine said.

I nodded. “It started with shipping records. You remember the list of criteria I gave you last time? Well, it seemed to me that access to a spaceship would be the best point on the list for narrowing down the group of potential suspects. The Outer Satellites Council licenses all spaceships, and keeps flight logs for all flights made. The same is true for Mars and Terra. So the flight to Pluto would have to be made, um, off the books, you know. So I started checking the records of all the spaceships capable of making the round trip to Pluto—”

“My God!” Sean said. “What a chore.”

“Yes. But there are a finite number of those ships, and I had a lot of time. I wasn’t in any hurry. And eventually I found that Caroline Holmes’s shipyards had tucked away a couple of Ferrando-X spaceships for five years in the 2530s, for unspecified repairs. So I started investigating Holmes herself. She fulfills all the criteria: she’s rich enough, she has the equipment, the spaceships, the employees that depend on her for everything and wouldn’t be likely to talk. Her foundation financed the development of Stallworth’s micrometeorite dating method, by giving him a grant. And there was something about her — she wasn’t obviously secretive, I mean we all know something about her — but it was curious how little I could find out about her once I tried. Especially about her earlier years.”

“I know a fair bit about her company,” Sean said. “It domed Hyperion Crater on Ganymede, where I was born. Nearly half of the first Jovian colonies were her projects, as I understand it. But I don’t know anything about her before that.”

“Well,” I said, “I never found any record of her birth. And no one knows how old she is. Her parents were Johannes Toquener and Jane Leaf. Leaf was the chairperson of Arco until she was killed in a docking accident on Phobos, in 2289. The next year Holmes named herself and moved to Ceres. With her inheritance she started a shipping, mining and exploration firm, and she got the patents on several recycling devices that were widely used in the Jovian colonies. Between 2290 and 2460, when the Outer Satellites Council was formed on Titan, she had become one of the major developers in the outer satellites. I know most of the general outline of her story — my question is, can any of you explain it?”

“Good business sense,” Andrew said.

“She’s completely ruthless,” said April.

“She had good business sense,” insisted Andrew. “She was a smart miner. She could find metal ores that were in short supply on Terra faster than her competitors. I worked in mining, I know. She was a legend. Like once they thought all the manganese ore was gone. They were dragging nodules off of Terra’s ocean floors, and since heavy metals are less frequent the farther away from the sun you get, there wasn’t much hope held for finding any more outside of Mars. But Holmes’s Jupiter Metals supplied thousands of tons of the ore in the 2370s. It was like she was pulling the stuff out of her hat. That in itself made her a billionaire, and that was just part of it.”

“And after that,” I said, “she could just leave it up to gravity.”

“What?”

“Acute students of finance will have observed that money, abstract concept though it is, behaves as if it had mass. Economic laws imitate physical laws. Everyone’s collection of money is a planetary body, in other words, exerting influence on everyone else’s. Thus the more money you have the stronger its gravity is, and the easier it is to attract more. Now most of us own mere asteroids of money. But some people own stars of money, and some of those stars, like Holmes’s, reach their Chadresekhar Limit and turn into black holes. Now any money that comes close enough to Holmes is sucked in. There is an event horizon, of course, where this captured money appears to slow down, like Apollo in Zeno’s Paradox, ever closer by smaller degrees to Holmes’s Jupiter Metals — but in actuality those ‘subsidiary corporations’ have flashed invisibly to the no-point of infinite mass which is Holmes’s wealth.”

Andrew and Elaine laughed; the rest stared at me. “Edmond, you’re crazy tonight,” Elaine said. “But we’ve run out of time again, and I have to get to work.” She was a bartender.

“No, finish the story!”

“Next time,” I said. “Okay — assignment, here. Next time come with some information about Caroline Holmes. We’ll see what you find.”

Elaine and April then left, and Andrew and Sean and I settled down for some serious drinking, some serious argument.

In those weeks when the seminar was running I had a bit more money than usual, even after I had paid Fist what I owed him. One night when I was walking the streets for entertainment, hanging out with the locals I knew, I decided to do some mental traveling instead. It was a pastime I had indulged fairly often when I first arrived on Waystation, and had a little nest egg of savings. I went to the nearest Recreation Center, and paid for three hours in one of the sensory deprivation tanks.

I stripped in the locker room and went down to one of the little chambers. The attendant slapped the drug band on my arm, and helped me into the warm bath. “Lie back and float.” I did, and found it very near weightlessness. The attendant left, and shut the door, the lights went out. It was completely dark, completely silent, odorless, and in the body temperature water I could scarcely feel a thing. I was nothing, it seemed, but my mind. I rested.

The first hallucinations were auditory, as always. I heard faint music in the distance, which gave me the impression of being in a vast open space, and I thought, as I often had before, that if I could remember that music I would be a great composer. Then I heard whispers, from a group of voices around me. As I concentrated they became the choral babble you hear in audiences before a show begins.

Lights bobbed in my peripheral vision. “Hello?” I said aloud, and felt I was in a universe of salt taste. Talking to yourself again? I thought. No answer but the babbling. The lights circled and weaved until they were in front of me, several meters away. When they bobbed up they flashed in my eyes like a security’s flashlight. Then I noticed something in front of the lights, blocking them off. A short figure it was, perhaps human. “Hello?” I said apprehensively.

For a long time I floated, pulsing with my heart, and the voices around me said gudda gudda gudda gudda… The short figure approached me. It said, “I feel (gudda gudda gudda) that you are… (gudda gudda)… afraid.”

“I’m not,” I said, suddenly fearful. Talking to yourself again, I thought, this is silly. But the figure stood before me as real as a bedpost. The circling lights moved like fireflies into my peripheral vision, and bobbed up from time to time, illuminating the figure’s face in quick flashes. A woman. Face thin, eyes and hair brown, a rich brown that I could see, in flashes, as clearly as the lights bobbing to the side, and the black all around.

The anima takes many forms, but I had met this one before. “Emma!” I said, and then, boldly: “I don’t believe in you.”

She laughed, a musical sound that blended in with the background babble, echoed, redoubled on itself, filled space.

“And I don’t believe you,” she said, in a contralto as musical as her laugh. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Yes, but it isn’t you. Who are you, exactly? Where are you now?”

“You always ask the same questions.” She pointed an arm, blocking out the lights behind her. “Come along.”

And then we were both moving, rushing through salt space together, with the voices keening in flight all around us. I felt her hand clasping my wrist, and for a time we conversed soundlessly of matters that were vital, though I couldn’t have said exactly what they were, not aloud.

Then she pulled away from me, and floated over a pulsing black-red plain. I said, “It seems like I’ve been looking for you all my life, but you’re never there. When I was a kid I read your journal and I thought you would be coming out soon. I thought you were hiding, and that any day now you would appear.”

Her clear laugh sounded like a bell and below her the black-red mountains vibrated at the sound. “I was killed after I finished the journal, and left my body. No hiding.”

“Ah,” I said, filling with sadness, and then with dread; I was talking to a ghost, then. “I knew that, though. I shouldn’t be afraid, I knew that, even when I was a kid.”

“But you are afraid.”

“I… maybe. Because it’s not the same now, don’t you see that? The journal… it isn’t yours. Someone else is doing this, you aren’t the woman I thought you were.”

The choral babble rose up around us, the black-red mountains bobbed like a wheat field in the wind, and Emma moved away from me, slowly. The lights blinked behind her, under her arm, she was nothing but a silhouette; and the fear that had been tightly bound in my chest burst through me. “Don’t leave, Emma,” I whispered. “I’m alone, I don’t know why I do the things I do. You could help me.”

“Don’t fret.” Her voice was distant, the chorus grew behind it, roaring like the sound of a sea. “You can’t be helped by what you don’t believe, can you. Look to what you believe in. Look to what you believe in. Look…” Her voice drowned in the babble, gudda gudda gudda. Off among the lights I saw her pass, a tiny silhouette. I tried to follow her and realized I was trapped — that somehow I had been frozen in my tracks. Suddenly I was terrified, the tights swirled and the babble roared and I was out there all alone, thrashing in place… Some part of me remembered the release button in my left palm, and I squeezed it hard, again and again. I felt myself drop; they were draining the tank. They were letting me out. And there far across the blackness, a tiny black figure…

Lights, bumps, the sounds of the attendant unstrapping me, taking me out. I couldn’t look at him. I checked the clock on the wall; two and a half hours had passed. The drugs were still at work, and in the dim red light of the chamber I stood unsteadily, watching the walls pulse in and out. The attendant observed me without much interest. I walked down to the locker room, got dressed, stepped out into the bright lights of Waystation. Silently I cursed myself. What kind of entertainment was that? The stands of walnut and maple waved their arms covered with turning leaves, yellow and red all intermixed, and all sparkling in the light. I cursed again and started to walk it off.

The next time the seminar met, they were ready to go.

Elaine began. “Caroline Holmes visited Terra only once, in 2344. She was part of an archaeological tour, and they visited Mexico, Peru, Easter Island, Angkor Wat, Iran, Egypt, Italy — and Stonehenge and some other British stone circles. She liked ruins.”

“Tenuous stuff,” said April decisively. Elaine looked annoyed.

“Yes, I know,” Elaine replied. “But as we all know, the concerns of youth endure. Anyway, it was a fact that I thought was interesting.”

“Aside from shipping and mining, what has she done with her money?” I asked.

“She started the Holmes Foundation,” April said. “Which gives grants for scientific research of various kinds. In 2605 the Foundation gave a grant to Dr. Mund Stallworth of the University of Mars, who used it to develop the dating method that places the construction of Icehenge around Davydov’s time.”

“Or a little before,” I added.

“Yes. He had had trouble getting the project funded up to that time.”

“Is there anything to indicate that Holmes herself influenced the Foundation’s decision?” asked Elaine.

“Not that I could find,” April said defensively, “although it’s well known she takes a great interest in the Foundation’s work.”

“Pretty tenuous,” Elaine said, drawing the words out.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Yes,” Sean said, with a slight smile at me. “One of Holmes’s companies built the settlement on Saturn Twenty-five, which was intended to be an artists’ colony. Of course very few artists went to live there, and Holmes was ridiculed pretty harshly in the intellectual media for planning to remove artists from the society at large. She was called stupid and vulgar more than once, and it occurred to me that she might have taken offense, and decided to get back at them in a sense.”

“Ah ha,” I said. “Here we get into the curious ground of the mentality of the hoaxer. The motivation for such an act.”

Andrew said, “Something similar to that might be Holmes’s Museum of the Outer Satellites, on Elliot Titania. You know how much critical condemnation that received.”

“This is pretty weak evidence,” April said.

“I know,” I replied. “But they are interesting indications. The question of motivation is a hard one. Olaf Ohman, a nineteenth-century hoaxer, once said, ‘I should like to do something that would bother the brains of the learned.’ I thought that these little incidents might show that Holmes had a similar feeling.”

“But you’re only guessing at her reaction! The scorn of intellectuals may have just made her laugh.”

“Who laughs at scorn?” said Elaine.

“Someone who has done as much as she has,” April said. “To someone who has had such a major hand in the development of the outer satellites, that museum and that artist colony must seem like the most minor of efforts, small failures in a giant success story. Why should she care what people say about them? She can look all over space beyond Mars and see her colonies, places she had built — and those are her cultural efforts.”

“That’s probably true,” I admitted. “Although some people like that get proud, and then any little failure gets to be extremely irritating. But I have to admit that in all the research I’ve done on Holmes, I’ve never found a single solid, central motive for building Icehenge. If she did it — and I’m almost certain she did — then the reason remains a mystery. But the more I’ve thought about it, the less surprised I am by that. It seems to me that the reasons one might perpetrate such a hoax are not the sorts of things that can be discovered by examining the public records years and years later. Chances are much higher that they would be something very personal, very private.” I sighed. “Meanwhile, we have these indications that you’ve found. And certainly something seems to have affected her, because in 2550 she put a large satellite into a polar orbit around Saturn, and has lived in seclusion there ever since. No more projects of any kind. It appears she has become a hermit.”

“For the time being,” April said.

“It would help if she had written an autobiography,” said Andrew. “But there’s not a thing by her in the files.”

“That in itself struck me as odd,” I said. “In this age of autobiography, who does not write one?”

“A hoaxer?” Sean suggested.

“Maybe she did write one,” April said. “Maybe she just didn’t publish it. Lots of people don’t publish their autobiographies — Nederland never has, has he? And what about you?”

“All right,” I said. “You’re right. All the motivational stuff is weak. But when you add it to the concrete points, the qualities that the builder absolutely had to have, then she becomes almost the only person to fill the bill. She had an organization large enough to conceal the disappearance of a ship or two for a few years — something that no single ship owner could have done. And in fact two of her ships were mysteriously drydocked for five years. Her Foundation supported the research that helped to establish the Davydov theory, or to shore it up. And lastly, I got on the vidphone last week and called up her father, Johannes Toquener. He still lives on Mars, but the Institute here paid for the call. I asked him if he had ever written anything about his daughter, and if so whether I could read it. He said he hadn’t written anything. Then I said I was doing an article on her and asked if he would give me some information about her youth. He said he’d rather not, and then, when I pressed him to at least tell me how old she was, he said she had been born in 2248, He was surprised to hear there was no birth certificate — he said it must have been destroyed in the civil war.”

Sean whistled. “Same as the number on the Inscription Lith!”

“That’s right. Icehenge has her birth year carved on it. And it could have been coincidence, but now there were too many of them. Now I was sure.”

Later that evening, after we had taken a break for drinks, April said, “You sure do guess a lot.”

I laughed. “Do you think so? I suppose I prefer to call it inductive reasoning. It’s the method everyone uses, no matter what they claim. My methods are no different from Nederland’s, or for that matter Theophilus Jones’s!” They laughed. “These days Jones is claiming that the monument was an alien message device sailing through space, that speared Pluto by coincidence and stuck there. Seriously! And he has ‘facts’ to back up the premise. Everyone does. The difference comes in how careful you are with your premise, and then how rigorously you test it. And it helps not to have a big emotional investment in the premise. Nederland, for instance, really wanted very much for Icehenge to be built by the Davydov expedition, because it helped him in his political jockeying on Mars. And that meant he only saw the facts he wanted to see.”

“You need to go out there,” Andrew said. “All this searching through records can only accomplish so much. You need to go out there and tear up Icehenge and find some solid evidence of who put it there. A rigorous investigation, with trained archaeologists—”

“Which I’m not,” I said.

“I know. You’re a historian.”

“A file freak,” said April.

“You need to have people run as many different tests as they can think of,” Andrew continued.

“That’s right,” I said. “That’s precisely what we need.”

But how to get such an expedition underway? The expense would be enormous. And no one would be in any hurry about it. In this world of long-lived people nobody hurried about anything. It all would happen, eventually; why rush? Especially into something so costly.

So I decided to spur the action, and publish an article that would finger Holmes without actually naming her. I sent a short letter to Shards, and they published it in their very next issue:

…With the evidence now available we can provisionally list several attributes of the agent who constructed Icehenge:

1) Access to at least one spaceship equal or superior in capabilities to the Ferrando-X, and possibly to one or two more of the same class.

2) The ability to remove this ship (or these ships) from the Outer Satellites Council flight control and monitoring system, and from all other space flight recording systems extant during the period of the megalith’s construction. This removal would not have been simple by any means and the fact that it was accomplished implies the use of some large resource base, such as a fleet of spaceships, a large shipyard, an entire space flight corporation, or the like.

3) The ability to obtain the cooperation and subsequent silence of at least the twelve people necessary to operate a spaceship of the Ferrando-X class, and possibly many more.

4) Access to Cabinet 14A23546 in Room 319 of the Physical Records Annex in Alexandria, Mars, between the years 2536 and 2548.

5) Access to a Ford field car of the mid-Twenty-third century, and the means and ability to half bury it outside New Houston crater during the stormy two weeks beginning October 2547.

6) The ability to remove fairly large ice boulders from the rings of Saturn without being noticed; this would be easiest for an agent who is a constant presence around Saturn.

7) The tools and equipment with which to cut these ice boulders into the liths of the monument, and place them into position without leaving signs of construction, would have to be available to the builder — as they were not to the Davydov expedition, even granting the latter’s existence.

8) The wealth needed to accomplish all of the above.

Other attributes of the agent are implied by the appearance of the megalith:

1) A knowledge of the megalithic cultures of prehistoric Britain.

2) Some significant connection with the number 2248.

Two weeks after the publication of this short article I received a letter.

Mr. Edmond Doya

Box 510

Waystation

Dear Mr. Doya:

Please visit me for a talk about matters of mutual interest. I will provide your transportation from Waystation to Saturn and back. If it is convenient to you, Captain Pada of the Io can leave Waystation immediately; and if you can stay for a week or ten days (which I urge you to do) she can return you to Waystation by the New Year. Sincerely,

Caroline Holmes

Saturn Artificial Satellite Four

Saturn looked like a striped basketball in the viewscreen of the Io. Five or six of its moons were visible as white crescents. Titan was immediately recognizable because of its size and its atmosphere — fuzzy crescent points; I watched it with the interest one has when seeing an old home.

Captain Pada, a quiet woman I had seldom seen on the voyage to Saturn, pointed above the planet. “See the moving white point? That’s her satellite. We’ll meet it just 18 September 2609 below the rings.”

She said her with a special emphasis, I noticed. I said, “Does it have a name?”

“No. Just Sas Four.”

Pada left the room. I stayed, and kept the screen locked on Saturn until the knife-edge of the rings began to broaden, and the whole vista became too large for me, in my distraction, to focus on. I found the coordinates for Holmes’s satellite, and switched the screen to it.

We were closing on it fast. It was big: a torus spinning slowly, a wheel a kilometer across. A thin crescent on the sunward side was bright with reflected sunlight, and another half of the surface facing me was Saturn-lit, a dusky, burnished yellow. Handrails, locks, and small bays studded or indented the curving metal. There was a small, classically designed observatory sticking out of the hub on the side opposite the dock; its telescope appeared to be trained on Saturn. The spokes connecting hub and wheel looked thin as wire. At regular intervals in the torus itself there were windows, some of them half globes protruding into the vacuum. Many of the rooms behind the windows were lit, and I caught quick glimpses, as we circled it, of red and gold walls, rich brown furnishings, marble busts, a huge crystal chandelier. The total effect was that of a nineteenth-century fantasy, a bathysphere cast by some accident into the wrong time and medium.

The largest of the windows was almost dark — the room behind it was filled with a dim, dusky blue light — and someone stood in this window, a black silhouette that appeared to be observing our approach.

Over the intercom Captain Pada called me to the transfer room. We were about to dock.

While crossing the ship I felt the bump of docking, and I stopped for a moment and tried to quell my excitement. Just an old woman, I thought, just a rich old lady. But the old epithets had little effect, and I was nervous as I floated into the transfer room.

The locks were already open. Captain Pada was there, and she shook my hand. “Nice having you aboard,” she said, and waved me forward. I thought this formality a little odd; would the crew of the Io stay in their ship for the duration of my visit?

I passed through the docking sleeve and was in Holmes’s world. A man dressed in red coat and pants, embroidered with gold, stood at attention before me. He nodded. “My name is Charles, Mr. Doya. Welcome to Sas Four. I’ll show you your rooms and you can arrange your belongings. Caroline will receive you after that.”

He took off with a neat leap and I hurried after him. We dropped down a hall with clear walls, in which terrestrial seashells were embedded; again I thought of the bathysphere. Another hall perpendicular to that one enabled us to walk, in light gravity, and I deduced we were in the torus itself. This hallway did indeed curve always upward, and after a short walk Charles opened the door to a room off the hall.

The room we entered was walled with reddish Persian rugs, and the ceiling and floors were a light wood. The floor was on several levels, with broad steps separating them.

“This is your room,” said Charles. “That control panel over there will provide whatever furniture you need — wardrobe, bed, screens, desk, chairs. The robots will obey you.” He indicated two boxes on wheels.

“Thank you.”

Charles left, somewhat to my surprise. But I assumed he would return soon, and went to the control panel, which was behind a wall tapestry. I pushed Bed. A circular section of floor slid away and a circular bed rose. I traversed the room to it, flopped down, and waited for my things to arrive. And wondered what I would say to Holmes. My stay on her satellite was going to be conducted entirely on her terms, I was beginning to see; and that frightened me a little. Once again I pondered without success her purposes, her motivation in all this. Icehenge and the Davydov explanation were such an elaborate hoax… It occurred to me that if I were correct, and Holmes had manufactured all the parts of the story that Nederland and the Persephone expedition had between them discovered — and everything that had happened recently reinforced my conviction that I was correct — then I was soon going to meet the author of Emma Weil’s journal. I would be confronting the mind that had created that story that had so enthralled me as a boy — so in a sense I would be meeting Emma Weil. But what an odd way to think of it, given what I now knew! I shook my head, and muttered to myself something that I had said more than once in the seminar “A hoax is a curious thing.”

I sat on the bed and waited — lying down to nap more than once — for what seemed like hours. There was no way to measure the passage of time in the room; there were no buttons on the control panel labelled clock. Presumably I could call somebody on the intercom, but I didn’t know whom. Eventually I got hungry, and that, combined with growing irritation, drove me into the hallways. I decided to find my way back to the docking bay; my hope, though there was not much to support it, was that Charles would be there. Or somebody.

I came to the hallway that led up to the hub, the one with the clear walls and the hundreds of seashells, As I pulled myself up it using a brass railing that extended from one wall, I could see a wavery dark image moving up the hall with me, which I thought to be my reflection. But when I stopped for a moment to inspect a huge nautilus, the form continued to move. Surprised, I caught up with it and pressed my face against the glass, but its thickness, and some ripples in it, reduced the image on the other side to a brown blob. The blob, however, had stopped across from me. Perhaps it was pressed to the glass also, trying to see me. It appeared to be wearing dark green — hair perhaps gray. It moved again, in the same direction, and I followed it up until the wall changed from glass to teak, and the figure disappeared.

Almost simultaneously with this disappearance there was a click, below me in my hallway. I looked down, on a head of gray hair, a woman wearing a dark green jumpsuit… a silver ring on her left ring finger tapped against the railing as she pulled herself up. Confused, I pressed my face to the last section of clear wall, looking for the figure I had been following.

The woman pulled up beside me, and I looked over at her. I am afraid my mouth was still hanging open a bit with my surprise at this strange “teleporting” that I seemed to have witnessed. Then again the woman — it was Caroline Holmes — looked just a trifle surprised herself. I don’t look much like a scientist, I suppose — I let my hair do what it wants, and that plus my face got me called the Wild Man on Waystation — and so I had seen this look once or twice before, and recognized it.

But quickly it was gone. “Hello,” she said, in a well modulated alto voice. She was tall, and her gray hair was tied back in a single knot and then let loose over her back. Under the jumpsuit she appeared thin. Her face was handsome in a severe sort of way: deeply lined and aged, slightly tanned, with the finest of silky hairs just visible on her cheeks and upper lip. The line of her jaw and nose were sharply defined, giving her an ascetic look. Her eyes were brown. It was a hard face, marked by centuries of — who knows what? — and seeing it made me swallow involuntarily, aware of what I was up against.

“It’s good to meet you,” she went on. “I’ve been reading your articles with interest.”

First probe. “I’m glad,” I said, and searched for more words, stupidly fumbling in a moment I had imagined many times. “Hello.”

She said, “Why don’t we go to one of the observation rooms and have some food sent there.”

“Fine.”

She let go of the railing, and drifted down the hallway to the main hall of the torus, where she led me. She had a long stride, one that revealed bare feet.

We left the hall and stepped down a broad spiral staircase into a large dim room, which was walled and ceilinged with wood. The floor was clear, it was one of the windows I had seen while approaching. To one side of it Saturn shone like a lamp globe. It was our only illumination. There were couches arranged in a small square near the middle of the room. Holmes sat on one, leaned forward, and looked down at the planet. She appeared to have forgotten me. I sat down on the couch opposite her, and looked down.

We were over one of the poles, looking at Saturn and its rings from a perspective none of its natural satellites ever had. The latitude bands marking the planet (half of it was dark, though slightly illuminated by light reflected from the rings) were light greens and yellows, with streaks of orange. Seen from above they were full semicircles; bright cream in the equatorial bands, yellow in the higher latitudes, dusky green at the pole.

Outside the planet were the rings, scores of them, all of them perfectly smooth and circular, as if drawn with a compass, except for three or four braided sets that were not so smooth. The entire sight reminded me of a dartboard: the pole was the bull’s-eye, the rings the outermost circles; but it was impossible to imagine Saturn flat, because of its dark side and its shadow erasing the rings behind it; so that it seemed a dartboard with an odd hemispherical center.

This uncanny sight filled one whole side of our floor-window. Around it a few bright stars gleamed, and seven of Saturn’s moons were visible, all of them perfectly aligned half moons. As we sat there like statues and watched, the scene shifted perceptibly. Saturn’s shadow on the rings appeared to shorten, the moons were becoming crescents, the rings were tilting and becoming huge ellipses; and all slowly, very slowly, as in some inhuman, natural dance.

“Always the same but always different,” I said.

After a long pause, she said, “The landscape of the mind.” I became aware of the profound silence in which we were speaking. “There are more beautiful places on Terra, but none that are so sublime.”

I know about your trip to Terra, I thought. And then I looked at her face and thought again. There were the centuries, written across it — and what could I say I really knew of her? She might have visited Terra a dozen times.

“Perhaps,” I said, “that is because space itself has many attributes of sublimity: vastness, simplicity, mystery, that which causes terror…”

“These exist only in the mind, you must remember that. But space provides much that reminds the mind of itself, yes.”

I considered it. “Do you really think that if we did not exist, Saturn would not be sublime?”

I thought she wasn’t going to answer. The silence stretched on, for a minute and more. Then: “Who would know it?”

“So it is the knowing,” I said.

She nodded. “To know is sublime.”

And I thought, that is true. I agree with that. But…

She sat back and looked across at me. “Would you like to eat?”

“Yes.”

“Alaskan king crab?”

“That would be fine.”

She turned and called out, “We’ll have dinner in twenty minutes,” to the empty room.

A small tray covered with crackers and blocks of cheese slid out of a new aperture in her couch. I blinked. A bottle of wine and two glasses were presented on individual glass trays. She poured wine and drank in silence. We leaned forward to look at the planet. In the odd illumination — dusky yellow light, from below — her eyesockets were in shadow, and appeared very deep; the lines in her face seemed chiseled by ages of suffering. To my relief the meal was brought in by Charles, and we leaned back to attend to it. Below us Saturn and its billion satellites still wheeled, a stately art deco lamp.

After the meal Charles took away our dishes and utensils. Holmes shifted on her couch and stared down at the planet with an intensity that completely discouraged interruption. Between watching Holmes and Saturn I was kept busy enough; but the longer the silence continued, the more disconcerted I became.

Holmes remained in her contemplation until the ringed ball was nearly out of our floor window, and the tight in the room was a murky brown. Then she stood and said, “Good night,” in a companionable tone, as if this were a routine we had established through years and years of dining together — and she walked out of the room. I stood, filled with confusion. What could I say? I looked down at the stars for quite some time, then I made my way without difficulty back to my room.

When I awoke the next morning I felt sure I had slept for an uncommonly long time. I showered in water as cold as I could stand, disturbed by dreams I couldn’t remember.

Apparently I was being left to my own devices again. After a long wait on my bed, wondering if I should be annoyed as I felt, I went to the control panel and called every destination on the intercom. No replies. I couldn’t even find out what time it was.

Remembering the previous night, I left my room and ventured into the hallway again. If I had never left my room, I wondered, would I ever have met Holmes?

Today she wasn’t in the room we had dined in, or behind the seashell wall. I circled the satellite entirely, checking room after empty room, and becoming slightly disoriented, as the central hallway of the torus often disappeared into short mazes of multiplicity. Quite a few doors on every level were locked. The silence on board — actually a pervasive, soft, electric whirrr — began to bother me.

I took an elevator up one of the spokes to the observatory in the hub, and tried the door; to my surprise it opened. Inside I heard a voice. I entered the weightless room and found it a tall cylindrical chamber, with a domed ceiling. The telescope, a long shiny silver and white thing, extended from a vertical strip in the curved ceiling to the center of the chamber, where a crow’s-nest arrangement with a leather and brass chair was welded to it.

Holmes stood behind that chair, leaning over it to look into the mask of the eyepiece. Every few seconds she called out a string of figures, her voice vibrant with intensity. Charles, seated at a console in the wall of the chamber (still in his red and gold), tapped at a keyboard and occasionally quoted a set of numbers back to Holmes. I pulled myself down the bannister of a short staircase into the room.

Holmes looked up, startled, and saw me. She nodded, said “Mr. Doya” in greeting, looked back into the eyepiece. She pulled away again and stared down at me; I was braced against a platform railing a meter or two below her. “So you think I built Icehenge, eh, Mr. Doya?”

And then she looked into the telescope again. I stared up at her, at a loss. She read off another string of figures, sounding as vitally interested as she had when I entered the room. Finally she called to Charles, “Lock it on the inside limit of ring forty-six, please,” and turned on me again.

“I’ve been reading your articles,” she said. “I’ve been a student of the Icehenge controversy for a long time.”

“Have you,” I managed to say.

“Yes, I have. I followed it from the beginning. In your last article in Shards I can see you are implicating me, and I want to know why.”

I looked away from her, over at Charles, down at the end of the telescope. Adrenaline flushed through me, preparing me for flight, but not for conversation.

Finally I raised my eyes to meet hers, and decided not to say anything. A staredown developed; I could have laughed, but it was too serious.

“Who are you?” she said irritably.

I shrugged. “A dishwasher.”

“And I am a suspect in your little investigation? You can admit that much?”

“…You are a suspect, Ms. Holmes.”

She smiled. And leaned over to stare into the damned telescope again. I crossed my arms over my chest, feeling completely confused.

“Have you lived on Waystation long?” she asked.

“Not long,”

“And where did you come from?”

I tried to pull myself together and make a coherent story of my past — a difficult task under the best of circumstances — but my distraction must have been obvious.

Holmes cut me off. “Would you like to retire now, and continue this conversation later?”

Upon reflection I agreed that I would, and I left hastily, remembering as I returned to my room the calm smile she had given me when I told her she was a suspect. So strange! What did she want of me? I called up my bed and collapsed on it, and lay pondering her purposes, more than a little fearful. Much later one of the robots brought me a meal, and I picked at it. Afterwards, though I was sure I never would, I fell asleep.

“Tell me,” demanded Holmes, “is it true that Hjalmar Nederland is your great- grandfather?” Her face loomed over me.

I didn’t want to answer. “Yes.”

“How odd,” she said. Her hair was arranged on her head in a complex knot (like my mother used to have it). She was wearing earrings, three or four to an ear, and her eyebrows had been plucked to thin black arches. She was looking out a window, at the sun.

“Odd?” I said, though I did not want to say anything,

“Yes,” she said, annoyance lacing her voice. “Odd. All this marvelous work that you’ve done. If your theory is accepted, then Nederland’s theory — his lifework — will be destroyed.”

Her glare was fierce, and I had to struggle to reply. “But even if his theory was wrong,” I said, “his work was still necessary. It is always that way in science. His work is still good work.”

Her face was close to mine. “Would Nederland agree?” she cried. She pointed a finger at me. “Or are you just lying to yourself, trying to hide what will really happen?”

“No!” I said, and weakly tried to strike back at her: “It’s your fault, anyway!”

“So you say,” she sneered. “But you know it’s your fault. It’s your fault,” she shouted, looming over me, her face inches from mine. “You are the one destroying him, him and Icehenge as well, you—” A noise. I twisted around in my bed, looked down at my pillow, realized I was dreaming. My heart was hammering. I nibbed my eyes and looked up-

Holmes was standing over me, looking down at me with clinical interest (hair piled on top of her head)-

I jerked up into a sitting position, and she disappeared. Nobody there.

I tossed the bedsheets aside and leaned out of bed. I hurried to the door; it was locked on the inside, though I couldn’t remember locking it. In fact I was sure I hadn’t. The dark room reeked of sweat, it was filled with shadows. I ran to the control panel and switched on all the lights in the room. It blazed, white streaks everywhere on the polished wood. It was empty. I stood there for a long time, waiting for heartbeat and breathing to slow. I walked over and lifted the covers to search beneath the bed. Nothing there but a platform flush with the floor. The image I had seen over me, I thought, could have been a hologram. I began circling the room, inspecting the wood for apertures.

But the dream. Did she have a machine that created images within the mind, as a holograph created them without?

I didn’t sleep again that night.

“Mr. Doya.”

“What?” I had been drowsing.

“Mr. Doya.” It was Holmes’s voice, on the intercom.

“Yes?”

“The sun will rise over Saturn in thirty-five minutes, and I thought you might like to see it. It’s quite spectacular.”

“Thank you.” I tried to figure out what she was up to. “I would.”

“Fine. I’ll be in the dome room, then. Charles will show you the way.”

When Charles showed me in she was seated in the lotus position, staring out. The room was shoved out from the body of the satellite, so that the clear dome served as both floor and walls. Saturn was outside one wall, just clear of the surface of the torus. The planet was dark, but its polar cap glowed green, as though lit from within. To the sides the rings, thin now, shone like bright scimitars.

“Most of Saturn’s mass is at its core,” Holmes said without turning her head. “The upper atmosphere is very thin, enough so that the sun shines through it just before rising.”

“Is that what that glow is,” I said warily. The luminous green gained brilliance near the pole, and seemed even brighter contrasted with the dark side of the planet. Finally I could see the sun itself, a fiery green gem that flared to an intense white as it cleared Saturn. The green faded and became a crescent of reflected light: the sunward side of the planet. The rings broadened and separated into their multiple strands.

“Well,” said Holmes. “Good morning.”

“Good morning.” I stared at her closely. She ordered breakfast innocently enough, and we ate in silence. When we were done she said, “Tell me, am I your only suspect?”

I saw that she intended to have it out. I said shortly, “I think you put it there.”

“Genoa Ferrando fits the qualifications as well as I. So does Alice Waite, and a couple of others as well. Why do you think it was me?”

In a burst of impulsive anger I decided to show her how thoroughly she was found out. I told her the tale of the long search, gave her all the pieces of the puzzle she had left behind, put them together for her. It took quite a while.

At the end of it she smiled — again that calm, enigmatic smile. “That isn’t very much,” she said, and swiftly got up and left the room.

I took a long, deep breath, and wondered what was going on. “What do you want?” I shouted after her. No reply. My head was spinning, my vision was a field of pointillist dots. Had my breakfast been drugged? Was I full of some sinister truth serum, thus to tell her everything I had? But hadn’t I wanted to tell her? Oh, I was becoming confused, no doubt of it; confused and frightened. Yet I certainly did feel dizzy, and my vision was somehow altered. I tried to shrug off the thought, and failed. If she had drugged me — invaded my room — my dreams — what would she not do? Before me Saturn glowed, a huge crescent of swirled cream and green, wave patterns curling between every band of color. I watched for a long time, as the planet and its delicate minions continued to turn, in arcs and curves and ellipses of light, slow and inevitable and majestic, like the music Beethoven might have written had he ever seen the sea.

That night I couldn’t sleep for dreaming.

In the morning I dozed, then awoke cold and sober. I made my way up to the observatory.

She was there, working again with Charles. “Pay attention to what you’re doing,” she snapped at him as I opened the door.

She watched me enter, smiled politely. “Mr. Doya,” she said. She put her head down to the eyepiece, then pulled up; I am sure she never saw a thing. I was just below her. “Would you like to take a look?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Do you want to see the rings first?”

“Sure.”

She pushed buttons on a console beside her. The telescope and its containing strip in the ceiling shifted, and there was a low, vibrating whirrr; though I could barely sense it, clearly the entire chamber was revolving. Holmes leaned forward and looked into the eyepiece, pushed buttons with her eyes still to it.

“There.” She pushed a final button and got up. I sat in the chair and looked in. The field was jammed with white boulders, irregular ice asteroids.

“My.” Even as close as we were in the satellite, with the naked eye the rings appeared to be solid strands, scores of narrow solid white bands.

“Isn’t it a nice view?”

“How big are they?”

“Most of them are like snowballs, but some are as large as a kilometer in diameter, or more. That’s what creates the grooved effect.”

“It’s amazing what a thin plane they stay in,” I said.

“Yes. It’s a wonderful display of gravity at work. I find it fascinating — a force the workings of which we can describe and predict with minute accuracy, without understanding in the slightest.”

“It seems to me you can say that about almost any natural force.”

“Or about anything at all, I’m sure.”

That caused me to shake my head, and she laughed. “Here, I’ll shift the field to include this ring’s outer edge. It’s a good example of the rigor of gravity’s laws.”

She pushed buttons, and the field became a flurry of white, like a snowstorm, I imagined. When it cleared again there was white rubble there still closely packed together — and then, straight as a ruler, the boulders ceased and black starry space began. “My,” I said.

“A couple of the kilometer-sized moonlets share an orbit here, and sweep the smaller pieces inside.”

“And how thick is the plane?”

“Twenty-five kilometers or so.”

One of the boulders, long and narrow like a beam, caught my eye. It occurred to me that she was showing me her quarry… I decided to make the first lunge this time.

“You know,” I said, “some physicists on Mars have determined that the columns of Icehenge came from here.”

“Yes,” she replied. “A ring of ice boulders made from ice taken from a ring of ice boulders. How nice.”

I continued to look in the eyepiece, mimicking her behavior. “Some would say that that fact tends to support the idea that a resident of the Saturn area built Icehenge.”

“So they might, but it’s just circumstantial evidence. Hasn’t Nederland shown how easily Davydov’s expedition could have passed by here?” Her voice was unconcerned. “Your whole case against me is circumstantial.”

“True. But you can make a very good case if there are enough circumstances.”

“But you cannot prove your case, no matter how many circumstances.”

I pulled my head back to look at her, and she was smiling. “And if you can’t prove it,” she said, “you can’t publish it, since it would constitute defamation of character, slander, libel… I am fascinated by the monument, I have told you that, and it is amusing that you believe I built it, but both I and Icehenge have enough troubles without a connection being made between us. If you make one I will see that you are destroyed.”

Taken aback, I cleared my throat. “And if I find proof—”

“You will not find proof. There is none to be found. Be warned, Mr. Doya. I will not tolerate having my name associated with it.”

“But—”

“There is no proof,” she said, patiently but insistently. We hung there silently, and I could feel myself blushing. Was this why I was here, and all that preceded it a preparation, lending force to her warning? The thought angered me, her self-assurance angered me, everything she had done angered me; and as an angry idea came to me I spoke it.

“Since you are so sure of this, perhaps you would, um, help me close my investigation?” She stared. “The Waystation Institute for Higher Learning wants to sponsor another expedition to Pluto, to investigate the questions I and others have raised.” I was making this up, and it was exciting. “Since you are so certain I will never find any proof that you did it, perhaps you’d be interested in funding this expedition, to lay all questions to rest? And as a favor in return for my visit?” I nearly smiled at that.

She saw it, and smiled in return. “You think I won’t do it.”

“I hope you will.”

After a long pause she said, “I’ll do it.” And then, with a casual wave of her hand: “Now you must excuse me, I must return to my work.”

After that conversation I seldom saw her. I wasn’t invited to dinner that evening, and after a long wait I had one of the little square robots bring a meal. For the next three days I was on my own; Holmes sent not a single message. I began to think that supporting an expedition to Pluto disturbed her more than it had seemed when she agreed to it. Perhaps she was having second thoughts.

There is an old truism: every hoaxer secretly wants to be discovered, eventually, and so they sow the seeds of their own destruction. But I was never very sure about that truism; I didn’t quite believe it. In any case, the two conflicting urges — to deceive, to be discovered — must create in every hoaxer’s mind a terrible ambivalence. And it seemed to me then that Caroline Holmes basically wanted to keep deceiving, to stay secret; so that if for a moment the contrary urge had seized control and granted me my expedition, Holmes herself might soon regret it. But maybe not. I could not be sure; she was a mystery to me.

She continued with her binary behavior, however, which I felt I did understand: she either chatted pleasantly about other things, as if we had no central disagreement to discuss, or else she flipped over instantly into direct discussion of our problem. Once I met her in the clear-walled hallway, and she spent quite a bit of time telling me about some of the seashells in the glass; then in the midst of this dispassionate lecture, she said, “Are you aware of the political ramifications that the overthrow of Nederland’s work might have on Mars?”

“I don’t care. I’m not a political person.”

The deep lines in her face twisted into a grimace. “How I hate people who say that! Everyone is a political person, don’t you understand that? You would have to be autistic or a hermit to be truly apolitical! People who say that are merely saying they support the status quo, which is a profoundly political stance—”

“All right all right,” I said, cutting her off. “Let me put it another way. Mars is a moribund bureaucratic police state, in the service of even more oppressive forces on Terra. I can’t imagine why anyone in their right mind would live there, especially when they have the alternative of the outer satellites. I have little respect for Martians, therefore, and I don’t care much about their problems. If by ramifications you mean the admissions that the Martian government made about their conduct in the civil war after Nederland published his discoveries at New Houston — ah ha — I see you do — then I don’t agree that the exposure of the problems in Nederland’s work will make any difference.”

“Of course it will!”

“No it won’t. The Martian government made their admissions, and opened up the evidence that proved conclusively they crushed a major revolution. They can’t go back on that now. It doesn’t matter whether what prompted them was the truth or a lie. In fact — if that’s the effect you wanted to create with your Icehenge story” — and I stopped and stared at her closely, for it seemed to me that there might be a faint blush on her lined old cheeks — “then you got it. Nothing that happens now will change that.”

“Hmph. You don’t know Mars as well as you think you do.” But I had set her to thinking, and since she wanted to think, why she just turned around and pulled herself down the hall away from me.

“That’s because I’m not a political person,” I muttered, feeling a grim satisfaction. Even a wild man dishwasher gets his points in once in a while.

One night I dreamed that Holmes and I were in a weightless, locked room: her hair waved around her nude shoulders like snakes, and she shrieked, “Don’t go on! Stop!” I woke up immediately, sitting up with twisted bedsheets clutched in my hands. After a while I laughed uneasily; Holmes was prevented from violating my dreams, because such interference frightened me so badly that I would wake up.

And as I thought about it, I realized that this idea of a dream holograph was nonsense. Nobody has a machine that can violate your dreams. The idea had come to me because, in the first days after my arrival, Holmes’s behavior had definitely shaken me. And our interactions had been so charged that I dreamed about them at night, continuing our arguments; it was a simple case of day residue.

But I thought there was a very good chance that she had drugged me, that morning. I fell asleep again thinking about that, not quite so self-assured, so confident I was winning our bout, and safe. I wouldn’t be truly safe until — well… I wasn’t sure when.

The next day I was still thinking about a locked room. I wandered around the torus, looking methodically for any sections that were closed off. Many small rooms were locked, but there was one big section — an arc of the torus below the main hallway — that I couldn’t enter. It took a lot of wandering around that area to make sure, and when I was, my curiosity grew.

That night my dreams were particularly violent; though Holmes never appeared in them, my mother did, and my father was in several, always leaving for Terra, asking me to come along…

The following morning I decided to break into the closed arc. In a room down the hall from mine there was a console of the satellite’s computer; I sat before it and went to work. It only took me half an hour of sifting through satellite layout diagrams to find the locking codes I wanted, there in the original blueprints of the thing. I scribbled down a few numbers and left the console.

I checked to make sure Holmes and Charles were in the observatory — they were — Holmes seemed truly obsessed by those rings — then I went to the inoperative elevator above the closed arc. On the console beside it I punched out the command codes I had written down. When I was done the elevator doors slid open. I walked in.

I was on the third of seven floors, the interior control panel told me. I pushed seven. The doors closed and I felt the beginning of the elevator’s drop.

The elevator stopped, the doors opened and I walked out into another passageway. The floors were black tile, the walls and ceiling darkest wood. I walked up and down hallways. Aside from the walls and ceilings, nothing seemed to be different. Rooms I looked into were empty. (Where was Pada and her crew?) I had walked for some time (always staying aware of the location of my elevator), and was starting to feel disappointed, when I rounded yet another corner: there before me I saw a door that seemed to lead into the vacuum of black space; and in the center of that space was Icehenge.

It was small, and as I hurried toward it across a glass floor, I thought it was a holocube standing on a table. Then I saw that it was made instead of actual pieces of ice, standing in a big sphere of glass that rested on a white plastic cylinder.

The room itself was spherical, a tiny planetarium, with a clear bisecting floor. There were stars above and below, and the sun, just a few times brighter than Sirius, was just above floor level. It was Pluto’s sky.

The ice liths of the model were nearly transparent, but aside from that it looked like a perfect representation, even down to the little fragments of the Fallen Lith. After a time I circled it slowly, and found an unmarked control console on the other side of the plastic stand.

There were small colored buttons in a row on the console. I pushed a yellow one, and a long narrow beam of yellow laser light appeared in the room. It just touched the top of one of the triangular liths, on the flattened side of the ring, and the top of the shortest lith, on the southeast side… And aligned like this, the slender cylinder covered the sun and turned it yellow.

The other buttons produced laser beams of different colors, marking the sight lines that certain pairs of liths established. But these sight lines were not there for observers on the surface of Pluto, for they extended across lith tops in both directions into space. And the sight lines would be good for only a certain point in Pluto’s orbit — in fact, for only a certain moment in Pluto’s history. And one could only see them if an elaborate model such as this were constructed… It was a private reference, to a single moment. I pushed the other buttons, wondering if there were some way I could figure out what moment that had been. Or would be. Violet was Sirius. Orange was the Pleiades. Green was, I guessed, Pluto’s moon Charon. A blue beam extended straight up out of the tallest lith, and defined Kachab, Pluto’s pole star. And red, stretching across the two remaining triangular liths, turned Barnard’s Star — Davydov’s destination — into a Mars-red ruby.

“Mr. Doya?” Holmes was on the intercom again. “What?” In my dream my father had been telling me a story. “Captain Pada can leave for Waystation today, if you like.”

“Oh… all right.” All of a sudden I was furious. Sending me off like that! “Would you join me for breakfast?”

“…Sure. In an hour.”

She wasn’t in the dining room — that is, the first room we had eaten in — when I got there, so after a short wait I called the robots in and had them bring me a meal that I ate alone. I looked out at Saturn. It was hard to chew the pastries, because I was grinding my teeth with anger.

When I was done with breakfast, an image of Holmes, seated in a chair, popped into being across from me.

“Excuse me for saying good-bye to you like this,” she said. “You are in a holo field yourself, so we can converse—”

“The hell we can,” I said. “What’s the meaning of this? You come out here where I can see you in the flesh!”

“We will talk this way—”

“We will not talk this way—”

“Or not at all.”

“That’s what you think,” I exclaimed, and ran from the room. Something about it just made me furious. I pulled my way up to the hub and barged into the observatory. Empty. Back in the torus’s main hall. I began to realize I was going to have a problem confronting her. The satellite was too big — I didn’t even know where her quarters were. When a bulkhead-like partition dropped down and blocked off the hallway ahead of me, I knew I was beaten. I returned to the dining room. The image of Holmes still sat in the image of a chair, watching me as I entered.

“What’s the meaning of this?” I burst out, and went over and stepped right into the image of her. “Don’t you have the nerve to confront me in person?”

“Mr. Doya,” she said icily. Over the intercom her voice rang a bit. “Quit being stupid. I prefer to speak to you this way.”

I stepped back out of her semitransparent image, so that our faces were just a few centimeters apart. “Speak, then,” I said. “Can you see me well enough? Am I looking directly at you? Can you hear me?”

“I hear you all too well. Let me speak. I want you to understand that my desire not to be associated with Icehenge is very serious.”

“You shouldn’t have built it, then.”

“I didn’t.”

“You did,” I said, and hoped my image’s eyes met hers. “You built it and then built the false explanation that went with it — and all for naught! All for naught.” I swung a hand through her head, then tried to control myself. “Why did you do it? With all that money, Ms. Holmes, why did you build nothing but a hoax? Why construct nothing but the story of a starship when you could have made it real? You could have done something great,” I said, and my voice hurt in my throat. “And instead you’ve done nothing but make a fool of an old man on Mars.”

“Not if the Davydov story holds true—”

“But it won’t! It hasn’t! And the sooner it falls the less foolish he appears.” I turned and walked toward the door, too angry to look at her a moment longer.

“Mr. Doya!”

I stopped, half turned, enough to see she was standing. “Icehenge… was not my idea.”

“Then why is that model of it here in your home?”

A long pause. I walked back to see the image of her face more clearly. Again she smiled, that same mysterious half smile — and in a flash I understood that she had meant me to find it. Perhaps she saw that on my face, perhaps not; her smile shifted, changed character, was marred by trouble — and in one of those subtle shifts of musculature I seemed to recognize someone else in her, someone I had known, or seen — who was this woman, anyway? What in God’s name did she want? Shocked, disoriented, I lost all sense that I could read her face; emotions were playing across it one after another, that was certain, but what they were I had no idea. I felt the abyss that lies between any two of us gaping under me, and I knew that the image of the face before me, great map of emotion though it was, masked an utter stranger, completely unknown to me; everything that I knew about Caroline Holmes was as nothing when weighed against this feeling.

I shuddered convulsively. “If you analyzed the ice in that model,” I said carefully, “you would find it the same as the ice in the liths on Pluto. They are splinters of the same boulder.”

She stared at me, her face still a mask. “You may think what you like, Mr. Doya,” she said. “But you will never know.” She and her chair disappeared.

Charles opened the door of the room. “The Io is ready,” he said. “Your luggage is aboard.”

I followed him to the docking bay, crossed into the Io. As I pulled myself to the bridge I felt the clank of our disengagement, and realized I was shaking.

The viewscreen in the lounge had an image of the satellite in it. Helplessly I hung before the great wheel and watched, shaking still. For a moment, seeing its windows and rails and the observatory, I thought again of a bathysphere. As we moved away I could see the domed floor, a clear glassine bubble; and inside it the tiny figure of Holmes paced around the dome’s perimeter, upside-down as it seemed, watching us. Her purposes, I thought. Had she accomplished them?

I remembered a moment in the journal of Emma Weil. She too had stood before a window, and watched a spaceship depart, just as Holmes now watched me. And I felt like the ghost of Davydov — the ghost of a ghost — leaving behind me everything known, and venturing outward. Suddenly the satellite shrank with great speed, to a white dot over the ringed eldritch ball. And we were on our way.

There was a holo message transmitter on board the Io. After a month or so of waiting out the long reach back to Waystation, I went into the transmission room. I was nervous and I had to compose myself before I faced the empty row of chairs that indicated where the audience receiving the message would sit.

“Begin,” I said. The red light in the center chair blinked on.

“Professor Nederland,” I said. “This is Edmond Doya. Our previous interactions have all occurred in the periodicals, but now I want to communicate with you as directly as possible.” I leaned against a table, kicked rhythmically at one of its legs. “The Waystation Institute for Higher Learning is mounting an expedition to Pluto, to make another investigation of Icehenge that will attempt to clear up the present mystery concerning its origins.”

I cleared my throat. That last wouldn’t go down too well with him. “I know you believe that there is no mystery concerning its origins. But—” I stopped again, tried to recollect what I was going to say. All of the sentences I had thought of during the previous month jammed together, demanding to be spoken first, I stood and paced back and forth, looking frequently to the red dot that represented my great-grandfather.

“But I think you must admit, having read my work, that there is at least the possibility of a hoax. Certainly the possibility. Yet in the present state of knowledge there is no way of telling who really built the monument, I truly believe that.” So? “So… all of the serious researchers and, and theorists, of Icehenge, will be invited to join the expedition. As the senior and principal theorist your addition to the company would be valued by all.”

Somehow that didn’t sound right. I was being too stiff, too artificial; this was an invitation, I wanted to show how I felt. But it was too complex. I just couldn’t talk to a chair. Still, I had to try to fix this, or I would have to tape the whole thing again.

“I know that many people have construed my work to be an attack on you. I assure you, Professor Nederland, that isn’t true! I admire the work you did, it was a good investigation, and if someone was deliberately misleading the investigation… there was no way for you to know. And I don’t agree that believing it a hoax destroys the monument’s aesthetic worth. Davydov or not, the megalith is still there. Human beings still constructed it. Emma’s story still exists, no matter who wrote it…”

It was coming out wrong. I couldn’t say it. I paced even more rapidly. “Perhaps I am wrong, and Davydov did build Icehenge. If so, then we should be able to prove that on this expedition. I hope you agree to join us. I… bid you farewell. End transmission.”

The red light blinked off.

The following day, at about the same time, the reply arrived. I sat down in the chair with the red dot. The scene appeared, and I blinked while my eyes accommodated the light.

He was sitting behind a Martian Planetary Survey desk, in one of those big luxurious government offices. He looked just as he did in the press conferences: black hair slicked down except in a couple of places, where it was flying out of control; pinched face, chapped cheeks; expensive suit (the latest Martian style), pressed and carefully adjusted. It was the official, pontificating image.

“Mr. Doya,” he said, looking just to my right. I shifted. “We haven’t met before, even by means of this illusory medium, yet I am aware that we are related — that I am your greatgrandfather. How do you do. I hope we meet in the flesh someday, for I can see we have common interests as well as common blood.” He smiled for a moment, and adjusted a sheet of paper on the desk. “Let me assure you, I understand that your arguments concern archaeology and are not directed against my person.” He moved the paper again, and began tapping it with a forefinger. The corner of his mouth tightened, as if he were about to perform an unpleasant task.

“I disagree with many of the things you said in your invitation. There isn’t any evidence in your work sufficient to convince me that the Davydov explanation is not true. So I don’t believe an on-site investigation made up of diverse theorists, each attempting to prove his own case, can become anything but a circus. For these reasons I decline your invitation, though I thank you for making it.” He stopped, and appeared to consider what he had just said. He looked down at the paper again, then up, and this time he seemed to be looking directly into my eyes.

“When you say that Emma’s story will still exist no matter who wrote it, you imply that it doesn’t matter whether Emma’s story is true or not. I say it does matter. I think in your heart you agree with that, and there is no reason for you to misrepresent the situation, as if to disguise its meaning. If your theory becomes accepted, I know what that will mean as well as you do.”

He looked down again, made desultory taps with his fingers. “I cannot wish you good luck. End transmission.”

Blackout. I sat there and thought of many things. I thought of Nederland charging around Mars so ferociously in the last century, breaking apart the whole history of the planet with his work; and then of the gray old bureaucrat, lying in press conferences to accomplish a cover-up of his own. And refusing to join an archaeological dig. I thought, he’s changed, he’s not the man who wrote the books you read when you were a child. I sat in the dark.

We were close, very close. Activity began on the Snowflake — like water thawing after a long winter, people began to move in the halls, to meander past each other, scuffing at moss and greeting shyly… Jones and I escaped the expedition group and went down to the crew’s lounge, where they were drinking and sniffing drugs. At the appearance of Jones and me they declared a party, and we all went at it with a will, turning the music up loud and bouncing up and down against the newly returned deceleration gee. There was a viewscreen in the lounge displaying the space we were headed toward — a black square sparkling with stars.

“So where is it?” said Jones to one of the crew. She pointed out Pluto, just ahead of Aries. It was about second magnitude, and there beside it was Charon, barely visible. Jones lifted his drink bulb to it, and cried, “You’re right! There’s Icehenge, I see it right there on top!”

Later, after we had danced to exhaustion (and a number of bruises, because deceleration gee wasn’t all that strong), Jones and I hunkered over to one of the corner tables. I was pretty drunk, and ideas swirled dizzily in my head. “I’ve been writing a lot of this down, Jones. A sort of journal.” He nodded and snapped a capsule under his nose. “Sometimes — sometimes it seems to me that what I’m writing is the sequel to Emma Weil’s journal — which I’m certain was written by Caroline Holmes.”

“Umph,” Jones said.

“I’m certain of it,” I said, interpreting his grunt of doubt accurately. “If you had seen Holmes like I saw her during my visit, you’d know what I meant. When I told her I had found the Icehenge model…”

“Umph.” But that one meant understanding. I had described my stay at Holmes’s to Jones in great detail, and now with some big sniffs he nodded.

“And my story — my story tells of a voyage to Pluto, which is exactly what Emma said was going to happen. And this voyage is being paid for by Holmes! Sometimes, I tell you, that old woman looks very much in control of things out here… sometimes I wonder how much of it she may have planned, and what she has in store for us out there—”

“Who knows?” said Jones. “There are so many influences on our lives that we don’t control — you might as well not worry about another one that you may be making up. Right? Whatever happens on Pluto, I’m looking forward to it. I’m anxious to get there. We are close, you know.” Dramatically he pointed at the screen. “I can see those ice towers! I can!”

And then we were there. We were there, circling the ninth planet. When the orbit was established Dr. Lhotse gave the orders and we rushed into the LVs, burst out of the bays of the Snowflake and fell in long arcs onto the cratered polar plain, settling with a gentle last bump like little crystals of the mother flake. I felt solid and substantial, heavier than I had in years and years. The dust thrown up by our landing cleared and off beyond the glare-white area under the spotlights I saw a horizon almost flat. The flattest horizon I had ever seen. “This is the biggest thing I ever stood on,” I said aloud, though in the scramble for suits no one heard me. “I’m on a planet. First planet I ever stood on, and it’s Pluto.” Something in the thought was odd and distressing, and by the time I shook it off all the suits had been claimed. “Hey!” I shouted. “Someone give me one of those — I’m the one who got you out here!” But they all ignored me or pretended not to hear me or counted on someone else to oblige me, and in three great noisy charges they crushed into the lock and were spewed onto the surface. I was left to fume and leap around the main room cursing and fizzing with a few others, until Arthur Grosjean (who had seen the megalith before, and, I think, was doing me a favor) returned early and gave me his suit. “Thanks, Arthur,” I babbled, “I really appreciate it,” and the static shocks jumped between us as he helped the suit onto me — and then I was into the lock, and through, and stumbling onto the surface. I started to run and immediately fell full-length into the gravel. It made me laugh, because I knew then that the rocks were real, that I was really there.

The dust we had thrown up in our landing served to hold a little of the light from our searchlights, and so there was a faint glow in the sky to show me where the megalith was, as well as a wide road of footprints. Some of them were no doubt footprints from the Persephone’s people, perfectly sharp-edged after more than sixty years. I broke into a trot, keeping my eyes on the smooth horizon to the north, and damned if I didn’t trip and fall again.

I got up and ran, kicked my own heel and fell. Sitting there on Pluto’s gravelly, dusty surface, I looked north and saw the very tops of the liths, rising just behind a low hill. The sun was off to my right, a dazzling morning star just a few degrees over the horizon. On their eastern sides the liths were patches of gleaming white; to the west they were barely visible black shadows.

I was shivering, as if I could feel through my suit a touch of Pluto’s cold, only seventy degrees above the absolute zero of total stillness. I got up and walked with a long slow stride, as if I were in a parade. Icehenge, Icehenge, Icehenge, Icehenge, Icehenge. Every step brought more of it over the horizon to me, until I topped the low mound and it was all there, the whole ring, silent and expansive on the plain before me.

The little human figures were standing in groups inside the giant circle, or bounding about from lith to lith, and to my surprise I appreciated their presence very much. I turned on my intercom and heard them all talking at once so that not one of them could have understood anything, and it made me laugh. They were so small — one of them stood by the Fallen Lith, and even he appeared insignificantly short. Exhilarated, I continued my march down the slope to it, humming bum, bom, bum, bom, bum, bom. I passed between two liths. Looking down the curving row of columns I saw that they were much more irregularly placed than they had ever seemed in holograms. Just the act of transmitting and imaging them had somehow given their ensemble more order. Here, in reality, their placement seemed jumbled, the work of an alien intelligence. The ring was huge, monstrous; the area encircled by the white beams was a giant field! It took a while to walk to the center of it. There, in a circle trodden smooth by prints, was the plaque left there by Nederland’s Martian expedition. I ignored the plaque and looked around. The ring was a rough circle — I couldn’t perceive the flattened side to the “north,” for the different dimensions of each lith, and the varying angles of placement, created an irregular display of white and black parallelograms that were hard to get in perspective. Most of the western liths gleamed in the sun, though some were darkened by the endless shadows cast by the liths to the east. The eastern liths themselves were black cutouts against the starry sky, except for a few that caught the reflected light from some more westerly lith, and gleamed dully. To the north the Six Great Liths stood like a huge curving line of towers; yet the jagged arc of small liths near the fallen one seemed not much shorter, though the shortest ones were all there.

Groups of people approached me, and I shook hands with everyone before they headed back. We all chattered happily, saying nothing yet conveying just what we wanted to. Then they were all off over the low rise to the south, to the landing vehicles. The last figure approached; by his height and gait I already had identified him as Jones. “Hey, Theophilus,” I said. “Here we are.” He extended his arm and we shook hands. Through his faceplate I saw his bright eyes, and a wide grin. He drew me toward him and hugged me, and then, without a word, he turned and left.

I was alone at Icehenge.

I sat down and let the feeling saturate me. All my life I had wanted to be here, and now I was. A pebble held between gloved fingers resisted all the pressure I could put on it. Yes, I was really here. No hologram this. I could hardly believe it.

The ring was roughly contiguous with a very old, subdued crater, so that some of the liths stood on low knobs or prominences of the almost-buried rim. It made for a very beautiful effect: each lith appeared to be “placed” with the utmost of care, in the spot perfectly appropriate for it. This impression co-existed with the obvious irregularity of the ring, in that liths were bunched together in groups of four or five or six, placed markedly out of line, placed so that their broad smooth faces pointed at every direction of the compass… And the combination, I thought, was wonderful.

I stood and walked over to the Inscription Lith. The words and the 2-2-4-8 slashes were deeply incised in the surface, and as the sunlight slanted across the ice the words were easy to read. I imagined the megalith’s discoverer Seth Cereson, staring up at that alien-looking script. To move, to push farther out; to cause to set out towards. It was a good motto. My father’s remark came back to me: It’s a wonder they didn’t all sign their names. So true, I thought. If the Davydov expedition had built the monument, why hadn’t they said so? It only made sense if they identified themselves, it seemed to me. Wasn’t this message an obvious attempt to be enigmatic, so that its goal was a clear ambiguity?

Continuing around the circumference of the ring, I touched my glove lightly to the sharp edge of one of the triangular liths, then walked into the field of broken ice boulders that was the Fallen Lith. Here every crack and splinter of ice looked absolutely fresh, in places as sharp as chipped obsidian. Ice at seventy degrees Kelvin is terrifically hard and brittle, and whatever hit it — meteor, construction tool, we would no doubt find out in the next few weeks — had shattered it into scores of cracked pieces, which had fallen to the inside of the ring. Looking through a clearish pane of ice (sort of like Holmes’s wall of wavy glass), I thought that the cracking looked very recent. It was true that ice sublimed very slowly at this low temperature, but it did sublime; yet I could see nothing but those fine obsidian edges. I wondered what the scientists would make of it.

Then I continued my circumference hike, skipping in places, and using the arc of liths as a slalom course in others, just as I would have done if I had truly been at the megalith back on my eleventh birthday. From every vantage point I saw a different Icehenge, as the play of sunlight and deep shadow shifted; when I noticed this each step brought me a new megalith, and jubilantly I circled the ring again and again, until I was too exhausted to skip, and had to sit on a waist-nigh block of the Fallen Lith. I was here.

Over the next week or two the various teams established their pattern of investigation. Those working on the ice spent a good deal of their time in the landing vehicles’ laboratories. Dr. Hood and his team worked to determine what kind of cutting tool had shaped the liths. Bachan Nimit and his people from Ganymede were following a new line of inquiry that I thought held promise; they were looking at pieces of the Fallen Lith in hopes of finding out if as many micrometcors had hit the hidden underside of the fragments as had hit the exposed surfaces.

But the most visible, and it seemed the most energetic, team was Brinston’s excavation group. Brinston was showing himself to be extremely competent and well organized, to no one’s surprise. The day after we arrived he had his people out laying down the gridwork, and quickly they were making the preliminary line digs. He spent long hours at the site, moving from trench to trench, inspecting what was revealed, consulting and giving instructions. In conversations he was confident. “The substructure of the megalith will explain it,” he said. At the same time he warned us against expecting any immediate information: “Digging is slow work — even with as simple a situation as this, one has to be very careful not to tear up the evidence one is looking for, which in this case is something as delicate as the marks of a previous excavation and fill, in regolith no less…” He would talk on endlessly about the various aspects of his task, and I would leave him nearly as convinced as he that he would solve the mystery.

The teams established a common working period that they called “day,” and during this time the site swarmed with busy figures. Outside these times the landscape emptied.

I had no specific work to do, I was uncomfortably aware of that. The investigation I had stimulated was being made, by professionals competent to the task. There was nothing left for me but to witness what they found. So I quickly took to visiting the monument in the off hours. Those few who stayed, or returned to visit, soon became still, contemplative figures, and we didn’t bother each other.

At those times, wandering among the massive blocks in a vast silence, the abandoned equipment and all the trenches and mounds gave it the look of a work in progress, a work of giants left unfinished for unknown reasons… leaving the skeleton or framework of something larger. I sat at the center point of the ring for hours, and learned the various aspects it presented at different times of the Plutonian day. It was spring in the northern hemisphere — coldest, longest spring under the sun — and the sun stayed just over the horizon all the time. It took nearly a week for Pluto to spin around, for the sun to circle our horizon; and even at that slow speed I could see the movement of light and shadow, if I watched long enough, creating a different Icehenge at every moment, just as when I had run around it that first day; only this time I was still, and it was the planet that moved.

Near the center of the ring was the memorial plaque left by Nederland’s expedition. A block of brecciated rock had been hauled into the old crater, and its top had been cut flat and covered by a platinum plaque.

Staring at this oddity I tried to sort it all out in my mind. Apparently those three asteroid miners had disappeared in the years before the Martian revolution; it was a fact documented in a variety of times and places. So the three ships had disappeared, yes. But almost anything might have happened to them. And since the documents — some of them — concerning their disappearance had been released in the early 2500s, Holmes could have found out about them, and decided then to explain her monument as an artifact left by those miners… thus creating an attractive tale of successful resistance against the Martian oligarchy and its police state, and recovering a victory from the unmitigated defeat of the failed revolt. This gave the hoaxer a motive beyond that of mere mystification… and it was the kind of story people liked to believe.

And so the file on Davydov in Alexandria, and the buried field car, miraculously unburied at New Houston. The file, simply enough, had not been in the cabinet in Alexandria just a few years before Nederland searched there. He could claim for as long as he liked that records were always being shifted around the archives, but the truth was that such shifts were also documented, and that this cabinet had not been tampered with, officially. The file, in short, was a plant. Part of the hoax.

That implied very strongly that the New Houston field car was also part of the hoax, planted there for the archaeologists to find. Their initial survey of Spear Canyon had found no metal bodies on that buried road; and after the storm that had trapped the archaeologists in their tents, tracks had been found in the snow to the north that no one was ever able to explain. So it looked as though the car had been placed there during the storm. But there was still a storm of controversy raging over that point, back on Mars. The journal of Emma Weil — part of the hoax! — had been dated to the mid-twenty-third century, the time of the revolution — or so it was claimed. Others contested that, and still others attacked the authenticity of the car itself, of the weathering of its surface, of the secondary documents found in it, of the likelihood of the slide that had revealed it… From every angle conceivable the field car and the entire Davydov theory was challenged, and found lacking, and poor Nederland ran around Mars like the Dutch boy, poking his fingers in the holes of a dike that was about to collapse entirely. The Davydov expedition was a fiction. There never had been any Mars Starship Association. It was all a giant hoax.

Bitterly I kicked the plaque. It was set solidly. I picked up a double handful of regolith, dumped it on the marker. Several handfuls made a good pile; it looked like a cairn of pebbles, set on a big flat boulder. “Stupid romantic story,” I muttered.

“Preying on what we want to believe…” Why had she done it?

My only regular companion during these off hours’ meditations was Jones. It was natural that he should prefer these times, for only then did the monument fully regain its solitary power, its shadowed majesty. But I thought, also, that he felt self-conscious doing his work before the others.

For work he was doing, laboriously and painstakingly, with a surveying distance gun. He was measuring the megalith. When I switched to the common band on the intercom, I heard him muttering numbers to himself, and humming snatches of music. He had arranged to have music piped in to him from the landing vehicles while he worked; usually when I switched to that band one of Brahms’s symphonies was playing.

Occasionally he enlisted my aid. He would stand at a lith and aim his gun at me while I held a small mirror before a lith; then I walked to the next lith, and repeated the operation. I laughed at the tiny figure across the central crater.

“Sixty-six times sixty-six, that’s a lot of measurements,” I said. “Just what do you think you’re doing?”

“Numbers,” he replied. “Whoever built this was very very careful about numbers. I want to see if I can find the lith by looking very carefully at the numbers that are made by the monument.”

“The lith?”

“The patterns are singling out a particular lith, I feel.”

“Ah.”

“Therefore I must try to find the unit of measurement they used when building. Note that it was not metrical or foot and inch. Long ago a man named Alexander Thorn discovered that all of the stone megaliths in northern Europe used the same unit, which he called the megalithic yard. It was about seventy-four centimeters,” He stopped what he was doing, and I saw the tiny red dot of his gun wander over the liths to my left. “Now, no one but me has ever noticed that this megalithic yard from northern Europe is almost exactly the same length as the ancient Tibetan unit—”

“And the Egyptian unit used at the Pyramids, undoubtedly, but isn’t that because they’re the standard elbow to finger units of early civilizations?”

“Maybe, maybe. But since the flattened ring construction here is one of the common patterns for British henges, I thought I’d check to see.”

“How is it coming along?”

“I don’t know yet.”

I laughed. “You could find out in seconds on the Snowflake’s computer.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m glad you’re here with us, Jones, I really am.”

He chuckled. “You like having someone here crazier than you. But just wait. The numerology of Icehenge was always a rich field, even before these new measurements I’m taking. Did you know that if you begin at the Fallen Lith and count counterclockwise by prime numbers, the width of each lith increases by one point two three four times? Or that the heights of each foursome of consecutive liths add up to either ninety-five point four, or one hundred and one meters? Or that each length divided by width ends with a prime number—”

“Who says all this?”

“I do. You must not have read my book, Mathematics and Metaphysics At Icehenge.”

“I missed that one, I guess.”

“One of my best. See how much you don’t know?”

In this manner several weeks quickly passed. Brinston’s face took on a slightly anxious expression, though he was finding out some interesting things. It appeared that for every lith a large cylindrical posthole had been dug — the ice beam had been positioned on the floor of the hole, which was invariably bedrock, and the hole was then filled. The only other fact they had discovered was that there were no individual postholes for the Six Great Liths. Perhaps because they were so near each other, a single big hole, still cylindrical, had been dug for all of them. Brinston’s team had marked out the circumference of this cylinder, and it encompassed nine liths. “But I don’t know what it means,” he confessed irritably.

The day Brinston presented this information, Jones and I walked out to the site. Jones was excited, but he wouldn’t tell me why.

It was after the working hours, and we were the only ones out there. We walked through the circle of towers and on to the pole, to watch the henge from there. Dr. Grosjean had had a short metal pole placed at the axis of rotation to help his first survey of the site, and it stood there still, a little less than shoulder high. We sat on either side of it. The sun was on the other side of the megalith, and the liths were more obscure than ever — faint reverse shadows, dim areas of lightness against the pervading black. The gravel underneath me felt cold.

“Now we’re spinning like a top,” said Jones. “Feel it?” I laughed easily, yet as we sat there I could suddenly visualize Pluto as a tiny twirling ball, a handful of ice toothpicks stuck in its top, two antlike creatures seated on the axis of rotation.

I moved and the sun disappeared behind a lith. I felt the ancient fear — eclipse, sun death.

After a long silence Jones took his distance gun from his suit’s thigh pocket and turned it on. He pointed it at the henge. On lith number three, the tallest one, a red spot appeared, brighter than the sun. Jones moved the spot in a small circle on the lith.

“That one,” he said. “There’s something special about lith three.”

“Aside from it being the tallest?”

“Yes.” He jumped up and took off rapidly toward it. “Come on!”

I hurried alter him. As we approached it, he said, “I told you I would find something in those measurements. Though it wasn’t exactly what I had expected.”

We stopped before it, standing just outside the arc of the Six Great Liths. Number three was massive, endlessly tall, big as a Martian skyscraper. On this side it was in total darkness, or rather, was illuminated only by starlight, which was barely adequate for our vision; the circle of shadows reared up into eerie obscurity. We stared up into it.

“If you take the centerpoint of the lith,” Jones said, “at ground level, and measure from there. Then every center of every lith in the henge is an exact multiple of the megalithic yard away.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, seriously. It doesn’t work for any other lith, either.”

I looked up at his faceplate, but it was too dark — from a meter or two away I could barely see him. “You used the computers.”

“Yes.”

“Jones, you amaze me.”

“What’s more, number three is right near the center of that big excavation that Brinston and his folks found. That’s interesting. For the longest time I’ve thought that it was the triangular liths that our attention was being drawn to. Now I’m pretty sure it’s this one — that it’s the center of the henge.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know!”

“No! Perhaps to satisfy an alien geometry, perhaps to provide a key to a code — it could be anything. My brilliant investigation has gone only so far.”

“Ho, ho.” We circled the lith slowly, looking for some remarkable sign, some new attribute. There were none evident. A rectangular slab of ice-

A thought, slipping at the edges of consciousness. I stopped and tried to retrace my thinking. Stars, nothing… I shifted my head through the position it had been in when I had the thought, tried all the other remembering tricks I knew. I looked up at the top of the lith, and stepped back, and as I did so a bright star appeared, defining the top of the lith. Was that Kachab, brightest star in Ursa Minor? I found the other stars of the constellation — it was. Pluto’s Pole Star.

I remembered. “Inside it,” I said, and heard Jones’s surprised breath. “That’s it! There’s something inside it.”

Jones faced me. “Do you really think so?”

“I’m certain of it.”

“How?”

“Holmes told me. Or rather, Holmes gave it away.” I reminded him of the model with the laser sight lines, in the spherical planetarium: “And there was one beam of blue light pointing straight out of the tallest lith. It must have been this one. And it was the only laser beam coming directly out of a lith.”

“That could be what it means, I suppose. But how do we find out?”

“Listen,” I said. I pressed my faceplate against the surface of the lith and rapped hard on the ice. A certain vibration… I hurried to the adjacent lith and did the same. Vibrations again, but I couldn’t tell if they were different.

“Hmm,” I said.

“I hope you wouldn’t melt holes in it—”

“No, no.” The certainty of my guess, which had felt so much like an act of memory, didn’t fade. I switched my intercom to a landing vehicle band. “Could you get me Dr. Lhotse, please?” The crew member called him up.

“Dr. Lhotse? This is Doya. Listen, could you run an easy test to find out if one of the liths had any hollow spaces in it?”

“Or spaces occupied by something other than ice?” Jones was on the band as well.

Lhotse considered it for a moment — it sounded as if he had been asleep — and then supposed that some mass tests, or sonar and x-ray and such, could determine it.

“That’s excellent,” I said. “Could you bring out the necessary gear and people?… Yes, now; Jones and I have found the key lith and we suspect there is a hollow in it.” Jones laughed aloud. I could imagine Lhotse’s thoughts — the two strange ones had finally gone over the rim…

“Is this serious?” Lhotse asked. Jones laughed.

“Oh, yes,” I said. “Quite serious.”

Lhotse agreed to do it and hung up. Jones said. “You’d better be right, or we may have to walk home.”

“There’ll be something,” I said, feeling an apprehension that verged, curiously enough, on exhilaration.

“I hope so. It’s a long walk.”

There was a hollow column in the center of the lith, running from top to bottom.

“I’ll be damned,” said Lhotse. Jones and the sonar people were whooping. Searchlights flashed off the ice as from the surface of a mirror. Circles and ellipses of white bobbed around the ground and caught dancing figures, flashed in my eyes. The surrounding scene was blacker, more obscure. My heart pounded the inside of my chest like a living child.

“There must be an entrance at the top!”

There was an extension ladder that could be roped to the liths, on the other side of the site. Lhotse ordered the people he had brought with him to set it up, and he called back to the LVs. “You’d better get out here,” he told Brinston and Hood and the rest. “Jones and Doya found a hollow lith.”

Jones and I grinned at each other. While they were moving the ladder across the dark old crater bed, Jones told Lhotse the story of our search. I could see Lhotse shaking his head. Then the ladder was moored against the lith and secured. Huge lamps, their beams invisible in the vacuum, made Lith number three a blazing white tower, and it cast a faint illumination over the rest of the henge, bringing the beams into ghostly presence. Lhotse climbed the ladder and set the next section in place. It just reached the top. I followed him up, and Jones clambered at my heels.

Lhotse kneeled on the top, roped himself to the ladder securely. I looked down; the painfully bright lamps seemed far below. Lhotse’s quiet voice in my ear “There are cracks.” He looked up at me as my head rose over the edge, and I could see that his face was flushed red, and dripping with sweat. I myself felt chills, as if we were in a wind.

“There’s a block of ice here plugging the shaft. It’s flush with the surface, I don’t know how we’ll get it out.” He ordered another ladder sent up. There were a lot of people talking on the common bands, though I couldn’t see many of them. I tied myself to the ladder and climbed onto the top of the lith. Jones followed me up. It was a big flat rectangle, but I worried that it might be slippery.

Eventually we secured a pulley above the lith, on two ladder extensions, and then sank heated curved rods into the plug. The line was rigged and when those on the ground pulled, the trap door — a square block about three meters by three by two, cut like a wedge so it would fit into the top snugly — rose up easily. The blocks of ice were too cold to stick to each other. Jones and Lhotse and I, standing on the ladders, stuck our heads over the black hole and looked down. The shaft was cylindrical, and a little smaller than the plug cut. With a powerful light we could distinguish an end or turning in the shaft, far below.

“Bring up some more rope,” ordered Lhotse. “Something we can use for belay swings, and some of those expanding trench rods. If we used crampons we’d kick the lith down before we cut even a scratch in this stuff.” The block was lowered, the ropes brought up, and we were tied into torso slings, and given lamps. Lhotse climbed in and said, “Let me down slowly.” I followed him in, breathing rapidly. Jones hung above me like a spider.

The walls of the shaft were slick-looking under our bright lights. We inspected the ice as we pushed off and descended, pushed off and descended.

Lhotse looked up. “You probably should wait till I get to the bottom.” The people at the top of the ladder heard him and Jones and I slowed. Lhotse dropped away swiftly.

The descent lasted a long time. Our lamps made the ice around us gleam, but above and below us it was black. The ice changed to dark, smoothly cut rock. We were underground.

Finally we hit a gravelly floor. Lhotse was waiting, crouched in the end of a tunnel that — I struggled to keep oriented — extended away from the ring, therefore northward. It descended at a slight slope. Ahead lay pitch blackness.

“Send another person down to this point for a radio relay,” said Lhotse, and then, holding his lamp ahead of him, he hurried down the tunnel.

Jones and I stayed close behind him. We walked for a long time, down the bottom of a cylindrical tunnel. Except for the fact that the walls were rock-solid basalt, the tunnel had been bored through it — it might have been a sewer pipe. I was shivering uncontrollably, colder than ever. Jones kept stumbling over me, ducking his head at imaginary low points.

Lhotse stopped. Looking past him I could see a blue glow. I rounded him and ran.

Suddenly the tunnel opened up, and I was in a chamber, a blue chamber. A cobalt blue chamber! It was an ovoid, like the inside of a chicken’s egg, about ten meters high and seven across. As Lhotse’s lamp swung unnoticed in his hand, streaks and points of red light gleamed from within the surface of the blue walls. It was like a blue glass, or a ceramic glaze. I reached out and ran a gloved hand over it; it was a glassy but lumpy surface. The points and lines of dark red came from chips under the surface… Lhotse raised his lamp to head level and rotated slowly, looking up at the curved ceiling of the chamber. His voice barely stimulated the intercom. “What is this…”

I shook my head, sat down and leaned back against the blue wall, overwhelmed.

“Who put this here?” Lhotse asked.

“Not Davydov,” I said. “There’s no way they could have put this under here.”

“Nor Holmes neither,” suggested Jones.

Lhotse waved his lamp, and red points sparked. “Let’s discuss it later.”

So we stood, and sat, in silence, and watched the blue walls corruscate with red. The constantly shifting patterns created the illusion of extended space, the room seemed to grow larger even as we watched… I felt fear, fear of Holmes, fear that I had been in her power. Who was she, to have created this? Could she have?

Questions, doubts, thought receded, and the three of us remained mesmerized by light.

After a time white flashes from the tunnel, and voices on the intercom, snapped us awake. Our air was low. Several others were coming down the tunnel, crowding into the chamber, and we moved out so they could see and marvel freely.

Jones, through his faceplate, looked stunned. His mouth was open. As we trudged slowly back up the sloping tunnel, he was shaking his head, and I could hear his deep voice, muttering, “…Strange blue glass under Icehenge… star chamber, red light… a space… underground.”

Then they hauled us up the long narrow shaft of the hollow lith. I stood on the rim at the top, and looked up, up to the great blanket of stars.

It gave the scientists a lot more to work on.

They soon reported that the chamber was directly under the pole — that is, the pole passed directly through the chamber. The walls were covered by a ceramic glaze, fired onto the bedrock.

Dr. Hood and his team soon discovered traces of the drill bits used to bore out the tunnel in the bedrock — tiny smears of metal, of an alloy exactly like that used for the bits of a boring machine designed to cut tunnels through asteroids. The machine had been first produced in 2514… by Caroline Holmes’s Jupiter Metals.

And Brinston was ecstatic. “Ceramic!” he cried. “Ceramic! When they fired that glass up to melting temperature, they started up a clock. They put a date on it as clear as those marks on the Inscription Lith — with no chance of lying, either.”

It turned out that thermoluminescence measurement was a method that had been used to date terrestrial pottery for centuries. Samples of the ceramic are heated to firing temperatures, and the amount of light released by them is a measure of the total dose of radiation to which the ceramic has been exposed since the last previous heating. The technique can determine age — even over short periods of time — with an accuracy of plus or minus ten percent.

After a week Brinston triumphantly released the results of the tests. The Blue Chamber was eighty years old. “We’ve got her!” Brinston cried. “It was Holmes! Doya, you were right. I don’t know why she did it, or how she did all of it, but I know she did it.”

The reporters had a field day. Icehenge was once again a nine-day wonder. This time the scoop was that it was a modern hoax. Speculation was endless, but Holmes was named most often, by more people than she could ever sue — or destroy. They called this the Holmes explanation — or Doya’s Theory.

I sat around the site.

One day I heard that Nederland had been interviewed on the holonews. Several hours later I went down to the holo room and ran the scene through. I couldn’t help it.

It wasn’t at the usual Planetary Survey press conference room. As the scene appeared, Nederland was leaving a building, and a group of reporters circled him, trapped him against the side of the building.

“Professor Nederland, what do you think of the new developments on Pluto?”

“They’re very interesting.” He looked resigned to the questioning.

“Do you still support the Davydov theory?”

His jaw muscles tightened. “I do.” The wind ruffled his hair, left tufts of it poking out.

“What about — But what about — What about the fact that a twenty-sixth century drill bit was used to bury the Blue Egg?”

“I think there may be some other explanation for those deposits… for instance—”

“What about the thermoluminescence dating?”

“The ceramic measured was buried too deep for the method to work,” he snapped.

“What about the alleged inauthenticity of the Weil journal?”

“I don’t believe that,” he said. “Emma’s journal is genuine—”

“What’s your proof? What’s your proof?”

Nederland looked down at his feet, shook his head. He looked up, and there were deep lines around his mouth. “I must go home now,” he said, and then repeated it in such a low voice the microphones barely caught it: “I must go home now…” Then, in his full voice, “I’ll answer all these questions later.” He turned and made his way through them, head down, and twisted to avoid a reporter’s grasp, and as he did so I saw his lowered face, and it looked haggard, exhausted, and I slammed the holo off and made my way blindly to the door, struck it with my hand, “Damn it,” I said, “damn it, why aren’t you dead!”

The day before we were to leave, a bulletin came in from Waystation. A group there at the Institute — led by my old student April — had presented a new solution. They agreed that it was a modern construct, but contended that it was put up by Commodore Ehrung and her crew, right after they arrived on Pluto, and just before they “discovered” it. The group had a whole case worked up, showing how both Davydov and Holmes were red herrings, planted by Ehrung’s people…

“That’s absurd!” I cried, and laughed harshly. “There’s a dozen reasons why that can’t be true, including everything that Brinston just found!” Nevertheless I was furious, and though I laughed again to hide it as I left the room, the people there stared at me as if I had kicked the holo projector.

Later I walked out to the site. The henge was gleaming in the washed-out clarity of Pluto’s day. It looked unchanged by all our new discoveries; it was just the same, obscure and strange, a sight to make me shiver.

Jones was out there. He had taken to spending almost all of his time at the site; I had even chanced upon him lying between two pieces of the Fallen Lith, fast asleep. For days he hadn’t spoken to anyone, not even — or especially not — to me. Brahms coursed through his intercom all the time, nothing else.

This time — our last hours on Pluto — he sat near the little boulder at the center. I walked up to him, sat down beside him. Nederland’s memorial plate lay buried under my stack of pebbles; I couldn’t bear to look at it. The sight of the Six Great Liths (one shackled with ladders) left me numb.

We sat in silence for a long, long time. Eventually I switched to a private band and nudged him to do the same.

“Did you hear about the new theory from Waystation?”

He shook his head. I told him about it.

Again he shook his head. “That isn’t right. I’ve gotten to know Arthur Grosjean pretty well, and he would never be a party to something like that. It won’t wash.”

“No… That won’t keep people from believing it, though.”

“No. But I’ve heard a better one than that.”

“You have?”

He nodded. “Say the Mars Starship Association really existed. Davydov, Weil, the whole group. They hijacked those asteroid miners, got a starship built, sent Emma and the rest back to Mars. Emma escaped from the police, hid in the chaos for a certain number of years. Then she decided she wanted back into the world. She concocted a new identity — maybe she got her father to take a new identity, too, to give her story a back- up. She went out to the Jovian system, made her fortune in mining and life-support systems. Then she got curious to see if Davydov’s ship had left a monument on Pluto, as he had hoped they would, and she went out to look. But the starship people were in a hurry, and worried about the Martian police — they couldn’t take the time, and there wasn’t anything there, on Pluto. So Emma decided to build it for them. Then how could she show the world who it was really for, without revealing herself? She took the journal she had written so many years before, planted it outside New Houston. Planted Davydov’s records in the archives. She slipped the truth back into the world, just as if it were a lie — because she herself was the lie, you see?”

“So Caroline Holmes is…”

“Or Emma Weil is Caroline Holmes, yes.”

I shook my head. “They don’t look anything alike.”

“Looks can be changed. Looks, fingerprints, voice prints, retinal prints — they all can be changed. And the last pictures of Emma were taken before she was eighty. People change. If you saw pictures of me at eighty you wouldn’t believe it.”

“But it won’t work. Holmes has been well documented all her life, almost. You can’t make up a whole past like that, not a really public one.”

“I’m not so sure. We live a long, long time. What happened two, three, four hundred years ago — it isn’t easy to be sure about that.”

“I don’t know, Jones. An awful lot survives.” I shook my head, tired of it all. “You’re just adding an unnecessary complication. No, Caroline Holmes did it. Something happened to her… I just don’t know what it was.” Still, Jones’s idea: “But I can see why you would like the idea. Who gave it to you, now?”

“Why, you did!” he said, leaning back to peer down at me with mock surprise. “Isn’t that what you were telling me just before planetfall, when we got drunk with the crew?”

“No! For God’s sake, Jones. You just made that whole thing up.”

“No, no, you told me about it. You may have been too drunk to remember it.”

“The hell I was. I know what I’ve said about Icehenge, and that’s for sure. You made that up.”

“Well, whatever. But I bet it’s true.”

“Uhn. What’s that, your fifteenth theory of the origins of Icehenge?”

“Well, I don’t know. Let me count—”

“Enough, Jones! Please. Enough.”

I sat there, utterly discouraged. The memorial boulder before us mocked me; I stood, kicked it with a toe.

“Hey! Watch out, there.”

I swung at my stack of pebbles and knocked them flying out over the dust. Hands trembling I removed the remaining stones, dropping them randomly. When the plaque was clear I ran my fingers between the letters until all the dust was gone. I looked around at the scattering of pebbles. “Here,” I said. “Help me with these.” Wordlessly he stood, and slowly, carefully, we gathered up all the pebbles and made a small pyramid out of them, a cairn set beside the plaque’s boulder. When we were done we stood before it, two men looking down at a pile of stones.

“Jones,” I said, in a conversational tone, though my voice was quavering, I didn’t know why, “Jones, what do you think really happened here?”

He chuckled. “You won’t give up, will you… I’m like the rest of us, I suppose, in that I think much as I thought before. I think… that more has occurred at this place than we can understand.”

“And you’re content with that?”

He shrugged. “Yes.”

I was shivering, my voice hardly worked. “I just don’t know why I did all this!”

After a while: “It’s done.” He put his arm around my shoulder. “Come on, Edmond, let’s go back. You’re tired.” He pulled me around gently. “Let’s go back,”

When we got to the low hill between the site and the landing vehicles, we turned and looked at it. Tall white towers against the night…

“What will you do,” Jones asked.

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I’ve never thought of it. Maybe — I’ll go back to Terra. See my father. I don’t know!… I don’t know anything.”

Jones’s bass chuckle rumbled in the vacuum’s silence. “That’s probably as it should be.” He put his arm around my shoulders, steered me around again. We began walking toward the landing vehicles, going back to the others, going back. Jones shook his head, spoke in a sort of singsong: “We dream, we wake on a cold hillside, we pursue the dream again. In the beginning was the dream, and the work of disenchantment never ends.”