Icehenge (11 page)

Satarwal, flexing his boss muscle: “Shouldn't we set camp first?”

“You've got more than enough people for that. And someone needs to go up there and confirm that we're at the right crater.”

Giving excuses: a mistake. “We're at the right crater,” said Satarwal.

Petrini grinned. “Don't you think we're at the right crater, Hjalmar?”

“I'm sure we are. Still it wouldn't hurt to see, would it. Before the whole camp is set.”

They glanced at each other, paused to make me stew. “Okay,” Satarwal said. “You can go.”

“Thanks,” I said, bland as ever. Petrini shot a look at Satarwal to see how the head of the Planetary Survey would take this sarcasm; but Satarwal hadn't noticed it. Stupid policeman.

With a jerk of the head I led half a dozen students, and staff toward the rim. It was midafternoon, and we hiked up the gentle slope with the sun over our shoulders and the quartet of dusk mirrors almost overhead. It felt good to walk off the exchange with Satarwal and Petrini, and I left my group behind. They knew better than to catch up with me when I walked that fast. Those two clowns: I blew frost plumes as solid as cotton balls into the chill highland air at the thought of them. This was
my
dig. I had worked for twenty years to get the site off the Committee's proscribed list; and I would have worked a hundred years more and never gotten their permission, too, if a friend hadn't been put on the Committee. But it pleased him to sanction the dig for the season directly following the end of my stint as chairman of the department. So that the new chairman, Petrini, was made the codirector of the dig along with the Committee watchdog Satarwal; while I, whose work the dig would support or refute, was nearly forbidden to accompany it. I had had to grovel for the better part of a year before they allowed me to join the expedition. And my friend only laughed. “You're lucky to be going at all, you fearsome radical!”

But here we were. I booted a rock uphill to remind me of the reality of our presence, to clear my mind of all the poison poured into it by the government. We were here. That meant that, no matter what else happened, I had won: a site had been taken off the proscribed list for the first time. And now it loomed before me—ah!—my heart leaped at the thought. I picked up my pace; the only thing that kept me from bounding up the slope was the presence of my students behind me. The ejecta shield became steeper and rougher as I approached the rim; above me blocks stuck into the dirty lavender sky, and they gave me an excuse to bound upward, to clear them. Below me the shouts of my companions sounded like the cheeps of snow finches. Between the broken blocks of compressed basalt were drifts of fine frost-crunchy sand—

And then the slope curved flat and I was on the rim. Topping it was an embankment of tan concrete; I ran to it. Concrete, with a steel coping laid in its top: a dome foundation of the early twenty-second century. So we were at the right crater. From my new vantage I could see around the circumference of the rim, and the embankment grew or shrank to level it off. Here and there struts stuck out of the embankment over the crater below, for two meters or five or ten, until they twisted down and broke off. The supports for the dome. In several places the embankment was blasted down into the rim; one such disruption was a short distance away from me, and I went to have a look. The concrete in the break had been reduced to something like black sandstone, which crumbled into my glove when rubbed. So they had blown down the dome. I shook my head. Nasty shock for the inhabitants, no doubt.

Hana Ingtal, the least stupid of my students, popped over the rim and interrupted my survey. “Professor Nederland!” she cried, holding out between two gloved fingers a chip of blue plastic.

“What.”

“Look here—it's a taggart.”

I took the chip from her and inspected it.

“Explosives companies put them in their products so they can determine whose explosives made any particular—”

“I know what taggarts are, Ingtal. Put this back where you found it. You know excavation procedures, don't you? Move nothing except as part of a methodical exploration, that can be confirmed by others and recorded as authentic data. Especially on this dig. You may have destroyed this piece's worth as data already!”

Crestfallen, she turned and walked back down the rim. But that is how students learn. “And make sure you put it where you can find it again!” I shouted after her. She was one of those students who progress in leaps, and miss things along the way—practical matters like methodology. No doubt she had developed a complete theory of the city's end from that single chip of plastic. But she was young. A century or two of defeat would teach her what it took to build a case in Martian history.

I hiked to the inner edge of the rim, and looked down a nearly sheer cliff onto the crater floor.

A lot of sand had been deposited in the last three hundred years, but some of the roofs were still exposed. From my vantage it looked like a village of dirt hummocks, at the bottom of a big dirt bowl. The hummocks stood in faint squares and oblongs, and together they formed a grid of sand-filled depressions, that once had been busy streets, and wide boulevards lined with trees. The pattern extended to the crater wall on all sides, although to the east the sand tended to bury everything.

Trembling slightly, I stepped as close to the cliff's edge as I dared. Those were the ruins of New Houston, down there. I had been born in that ruined city; my first years had been spent in the confines of this very crater.—This had impeded my efforts to get the dig approved, in fact, although I never understood why. My birthplace: so what? No one remembers their childhood. I knew I had been born there in the same way anybody else did—I looked it up. So the unspoken implication that my motives were in some way personal was entirely unfounded, as was tacitly admitted when the dig was approved and I was allowed to join it.

Nevertheless, as I looked down onto the hummock roofs and the solar-panel ridges and the sand-filled streets, I caught myself searching for something in the pattern, or in the etching of vertical ravines into the crater wall, that I might recognize from those first years. But it was just a site. An old city in ruins.

New Houston. During the Unrest of 2248 the city had been taken over by rioters, and held against the police of the Mars Development Committee. (I must have been there?) The police reports said the rebels had blown down the dome, destroyed the city, and killed all the noncombatants; but the samizdat said otherwise. In these ruins I intended to find the truth.

So as I surveyed the crater floor and its faint gridwork, now accentuated by the growing shadows of late afternoon, my pulse quickened, my spirits soared. For as long as I could remember I had wanted to excavate one of the lost Martian cities, and now I was here at last. Now I would be an archaeologist in deed, as well as in name. Visions of the digs I had taught in classes jumbled in my mind—all those cities that had been razed and abandoned by conquerors, Troy, Carthage, Palmyra, Tenochtitlán, all resurrected by scientists and their work; now New Houston would be added to those, to become part of history again. Oh, yes—it was that moment in a dig, before the work has begun, when the site lies undisturbed in its shadows and all things seem possible, when one can imagine the ruins to be those of a city as ancient and huge as Persepolis, with the strata of centuries under the rubble-crazed surface, containing the debris of countless lives that can be deciphered and understood, recouped from the dead past to be known and treasured and made part of us forever. Why, down in those ruins we might find almost
anything.

*   *   *

Of course it is easy to feel that way above a site on a good prospect, in late afternoon light, alone. Everything looks burnished and charged with meaning, and somehow one's own.

Down in the tents it was different. That evening I entered the large commons tent where everyone was celebrating our arrival, and felt like an ant dropped in a terrarium of trapdoor spiders. Satarwal and his thugs from Planetary Survey stared at me, and Petrini and his faintly insolent students glanced at me as they stood in rings around tables, poking at maps and arguing like experts, and my students and McNeil's and Kalinin's blinked at me as stupidly as sheep. I went in search of the Kleserts and found them in the dining room, and joined them for a silent meal. I didn't know them well, but they were my age and knew how to leave one alone. It was too bad for me that their work on water stations would take them away, to Nirgal Vallis some kilometers to the southwest of us.

Then it was back to the main room, to the arguing and poking. Petrini's group was determined to be vehement, yet there was no point to their talk—except to show Satarwal how
reliable
they were, how fiercely they could go after “the facts” without endangering the official version of New Houston's history. They were good at that. And Satarwal soaked it up. He enjoyed the meaningless chatter about the Athenian and Parisian models of crater city planning, because it so obviously avoided the central question of the dig. His stubbly blue jowls bounced with pleasure at this spectacle of his power over us, and I could not stand it. I had to leave the room.

Only to run into Petrini in one of the smaller lounges. But Petrini was easier on the nerves than Satarwal. It was like going from the dentist to an ear specialist (I have poor hearing): someone still working on you, but without the drills.

“Well, Hjalmar, how was the view from the rim? The old city still there, eh?”

“Ah—yes. Yes it is.”

“Did you find anything interesting on the rim?”

“Well—the dome foundation, of course. I won't know until we have studied it more closely.”

“Of course.”

“Nothing extraordinary, though.”

“No. I guess we'd have heard if you had, from your students.”

“Do you think so?”

“Oh, come now, Hjalmar. You know students.”

“Do I?”

“Who better? You're the pillar of the university, Hjalmar, you've been there longer than the buildings.”

“Not really. Besides, only the buildings stay. The students keep changing.” Until you end up teaching members of a different civilization.

Petrini tilted his head back and laughed. “Well,” he said, sobering rapidly and making sure I saw he was now serious: “I'll have a tough time filling your shoes, I really will.”

“Nonsense. You'll be the best chairman yet.”

Conversation on automatic pilot. Meanwhile I watched him work on me. Such charm. But Petrini's problem was his transparency. He was one of those people who made it their life's project to rise into the halls of power; everything he did was part of his campaign. I knew someone like that myself, so I recognized the type. But Petrini's purpose was always obvious, and this would impede his progress. The best politicans appear to fall upward accidentally, so that people are inclined to help them on their way.

He slapped me on the arm affectionately. “Thanks for the vote of confidence. Now—I hope you don't mind me saying this—I know what you will be trying to prove here on this dig. And believe me, I'm sympathetic to it. But the evidence, Hjalmar. The Aimes Report, you know, and Colonel Shay's account. Those things couldn't have been falsified.”

“Certainly they could have.” I tilted my head at him curiously. “Those aren't things, Petrini. The things are here, on the site. The only good evidence is here, because the city can't lie. We'll see what we find out.”

“Just be prepared for a letdown.” He put his hand to my arm again. “I tell you this for your own sake.”

“Thanks.”

I considered going back to my tent and reading. My supervisors were intolerable, my colleagues irritating, my students dull. But then Hana Ingtal appeared as if I had called her up by the thought, and asked me to join her for a drink with an enthusiasm that made it difficult for me to refuse. Reluctantly I nodded, and followed her into the dining room's bar. While she mixed us drinks she chattered about our afternoon on the rim. I watched her, perplexed. We had worked together for over five years, and she still seemed to like me. I didn't understand it. Most students so obviously work their professors for advancement, and how can they help it? It is that sort of master-slave situation. I doubt I would ever go near a university if I had it to do again. Twenty years of indenture to some old man or woman who “knows,” all to get into a position where you too can be treated as master by people you barely know. Stupid (although it beat mining).

But Hana appeared to enjoy conversation with me for its own sake. She was undeferential, and watching her I could almost imagine what it would be like to learn the discipline anew. Fifty-two years old, chestnut hair, hazel eyes, nice bones, calm expression: my single graduate students were tripping over each other to be with her, and here she was at a corner table with me, a man who truly did not know how to speak with her. Once I knew what to say to the young (when I was young myself, perhaps) but I've lost the art. Life is the history of losses.

So she said, “Is this dig much like the ones you did on Earth?” and I tried to figure out what she meant by it.

“Well. I never actually participated in a dig on Earth—as I thought you knew?” I was almost certain she knew that. “But the site is much like an abandoned Norse settlement on the west coast of Greenland that I visited when I was there,” and I described the terran site using what I could remember of my lecture notes on the place—for my trip to Earth was a blank to me—until I became too aware of the discrepancy between what I described and what we had actually seen that afternoon, and stumbled to a halt, and waited with some trepidation for her to bring up something else to discuss. You see, quiet people know they have a reputation for being close-mouthed. Sometimes the reputation is like a power, for they see their acquaintances think that when they are moved to speak it will be for something special. But that is also a sort of pressure, a pressure that grows as the years pass and the quiet person's reputation ages. What, after all, is really important enough to say? Not much. And quiet people become overly aware of that, and thus aware that most talk is a code masking vastly more complex meanings—meanings unfathomable to the very people most aware of their existence.