Icehenge (14 page)

Hana nodded. “But they're letting up now, don't you think? I mean, here we are at New Houston. And Publications Review lets through almost everything submitted.”

“They know we'll censor ourselves before submitting.”

“But not you, or Nakayama, or Lebedyan. And all of you have been published extensively. And people can move wherever they want, now. When the forms come through.”

“Publications Review doesn't care about the past. Try an anti-Committee editorial and it would be a different story.” I tossed the rock down at the city. “But they are letting up a bit, you're right.”

“Maybe the Committee is getting more liberal. New members and all.”

Did she mean Shrike? Her face was carefully averted, as she pretended to look down at the city. Perhaps this was a try at a personal comment.

“I think it's only that they don't need to keep the reins so tight anymore. They can afford to ease off, and in fact it makes sense. Keeping the happy consciousness, you know. Everybody's happy.”

“You're not.”

“Uhn.” There, she was doing it again! What did she mean by it? “Maybe I remember too much,” I said, to put her off; but then I laughed. “Which is funny, because I hardly remember anything.”

She looked up at me curiously. “But you remember the fall of the city?”

“I did remember, that night down in the street. Now I remember that I remembered. Which isn't the same, but it's enough.”

“So you want to prove the police did it, because you were there.”

Time for some distance; this was making me uncomfortable. “There are other revisionists working with me. Or in the same direction. Nakayama and Lebedyan are both older than me—I wonder if they didn't see the truth too, in some other city.…”

But she was looking back toward the escalator. “That's Bill!” She hadn't heard me. “I wonder if he's up here after me.”

“You're the only one, then,” I said, and was immediately shocked at my rudeness. “He's after you all right,” I heard myself go on, with an inane giggle.

“I like him,” she said sharply.

“That's good. That makes it easier for him.” I could scarcely believe what I heard; I was making it worse with every word! I stood. “I mean, sorry, I mean that makes it better for him. I—I think I'll finish my walk now.”

She nodded, still looking back at Bill.

“Those American taggarts will help,” I said. “Very useful part of our case.”

“I'll write up the results with Bill and Xhosa,” she said evenly, without looking up.

*   *   *

We fragment these ruins against our shore: items brushed and tagged and numbered, laid in neat rows on the floor of the museum tent, as we each play Sherlock Holmes with the junk of the past. Archaeology.

So we dug and we sifted, we cleaned and we squinted, and day followed day and week followed week, in a house-to-house search of the dead city. Loss of air pressure when the dome fell had caused some well sealed houses to explode like popped balloons. Messy. Occasionally we discovered the bodies of police troopers, hidden so well that their fellow soldiers had not found them; and what could we say of them? Satarwal proclaimed them victims of the riots, and had them buried. It was driving me mad. Perhaps we would never disprove the Aimes Report. Perhaps it would stand as part of Martian history forever. History is made by the winners, after all; and it is always the loser's fault. Eight hundred thousand people killed?—A very serious riot indeed, and a treacherous mutiny on the part of the Soviet fleet. Two hundred volumes will show you how it happened, and if you want to know more, perhaps we will send you to do research in the asteroids. Perhaps you do not want to know more? We understand.

And so history is made, because facts are not things. But things make facts or break them, or so the archaeologist believes. For every great lie of history—if we assume they were all caught, which would be wrong—for the Tudor's Richard III, for the first Soviet century, the Americans' Truman, the South African war, the Mercury disaster—for each of these lies there had been a revision based on things.

And I swore there would be a revision here too. Satarwal's sneer: “We can explain every thing you find.” And his Ministry of Truth stood massively behind him, confident because the real history never got written down. But archaeology is the art of reading what did not get written. And things don't lie.

*   *   *

“The dome fell and suddenly the rim defense is useless,” I said to Hana and Bill and Heidi, one day as we stood in the ruins of the physical plant. “Thousands are dead and the rest are trapped in shelters, and police troops are falling out of the sky. So what do you do? Where do you go?”

“The physical plant here was their last hold-out, right?” said Bill. I regarded him with a skeptical eye; he was quick with the freewheeling theory, slow to back it. “Over the rim from here is what they called Spear Canyon—maybe they used it for cover, and tried to evacuate. Like that note we found seemed to indicate.”

“They'd be seen going over the rim,” I said. “We need something more likely than that.”

Bill shrugged, turned away. And the more I thought of it, the more sense it made. But I said, “Any better ideas?”

“They could have mingled with the civilians and disappeared,” Hana said. “When the police made their final assault they would find no one there.”

“In which case they would roust the civilians and jail all of them. Although that beats getting killed, I admit. The police reported finding thirty-eight people alive”—including me, I thought—“but they might have lied about that too.”

Heidi said, “Kalinin's team found a burn zone just south of here that they think marks a rocket's descent—police supply ship, they're guessing. But maybe the rebels had a ship ready to take off if necessary. Maybe they blasted right out of here.”

“Awfully dangerous,” Hana said.

“They would be shot right down,” I said. “They wouldn't do something that stupid.”

So they all stood around and looked cross, as if it were my fault they couldn't think of anything sensible. Though that Spear Canyon was an idea. “No doubt they were captured, executed and shipped out of here,” I said.

*   *   *

Radial fracture—crustal stresses caused by the Tharsis bulge have resulted in an extensive system of fractures in the terrain around it.

The time came for my visit to the gerontologist, and I got the necessary releases from Satarwal and Burroughs, and took a car to the train depot at Coprates Overlook. I took the train into Alexandria, and went to the clinic early one morning.

It was an all-day exam. I spent the usual hour in Dr. Laird's waiting room, looking at the same old photographs of the Jovian moons. When I walked into his examining room we greeted each other and he went to work in his businesslike way. He had me strip and put me before the gaze of his machines. I drank liquids and stood in front of a battery of mechanical eyes, then was injected and clamped to a slab to submit to more penetrations. Meanwhile pieces of me—blood, urine, feces, saliva, skin, muscle tissue, bone, etc.—were taken away for tests. Dr. Laird then thumped and prodded me with his fingers; primitive stuff, but he appeared to think it necessary. While the samples were being tested and the pictures developed, he pinched my skin in places and asked me questions.

“How's the tendinitis in the knee?”

“Bad. I've felt it more than ever this year.”

“Hmm. Well, we could strip that tendon clean, you know. But I'm not sure you shouldn't wait a few years.”

“I'll wait.”

“How have your moods been?”

Naturally I refused to reply to such an impertinent question. But as he continued to prod and pinch, like a plant geneticist testing the roots and leaves of a new hybrid (will this little shrub live on Mars, Dr. Science?) I thought, why not. When they test the plant they need to know how the flower fares.

“My moods have been up and down.” What was the technical terminology for all this? “Out of my control. I'm depressed. I worry about losing it and falling into a funk. Sometimes I feel one coming so clearly … to counteract it I may work too hard, I don't know. I'm frustrated—”

The nurse came in with the developed pictures, and interrupted my confession. Dr. Laird didn't seem to mind. He took the pictures from her and pored over them. Still checking them he said slowly, “Your physiological signs don't show any indication of reduced affectual function. I wouldn't worry about it.”

It's worse than reduction, I wanted to say. It's absence. Total indifference. Thalamic shutdown, and so no new memories. Emotional death.

“Your heart is a little enlarged. How much time are you spending in a centrifuge?”

“None.”

“That's not quite enough.” A disapproving look. “Humans weren't made for this gravity, you know. We can do the whole program for your immune system and your cell division accuracy, and you can still ruin it with negligence. I notice also that your facial skin is severely chapped, and your bone calcium deficient,” and so on—going into his usual litany of my ills. It lasted about ten minutes. Then he began writing out prescriptions and giving me “the whole program” for curing these ills, talking as if to somebody else about a plant with problems, a Hokkaido pine with sick needles, broken bark, twisted limbs, stunted roots. He used up almost an entire prescription pad, and we spent half an hour going through the explanation of the drugs and the instructions for their use. Acetylcholine stimulants, new form of vasopressin-equivalent: these drugs were new to me, so perhaps he had been listening to my confession after all. Perhaps there were signs of a funk he hadn't told me about. “And that tendinitis—I'm going to have you try this,” and he rattled off a new syllabic witches' brew for me. “Remember—take care of yourself, and you've got an endlessly replicating system, there. Think about that. If you don't take care, nothing else is going to matter.” A friendly shake of the hand. Good little shrub. “See you next year.”

I put my clothes on and walked into the waiting room. Mimas's bull's-eye crater stared at me from its poster like the Cyclops. I looked at the sheaf of prescriptions in my hand. Things as they are have been destroyed.…

I could not stand to be in fleshy hothouse Alexandria that night, and I walked to the station to take the very next train east, back to New Houston. In the station I stopped in the drug store and got my prescriptions filled.

Once we were taut bowstrings, vibrant on the bow of mortality—now the bow has been unstrung, and we lie limp, and the arrow

has clattered to the ground.

Graben

But then I left the station and went back into the city, to see Shrike. That night we had dinner in an Indian restaurant in the lower part of the city, where canals alternate with industrial plants and tenement dormitories, and the poor live everywhere, even under the bridges where the icy canals abrade their skin until the sores look like leprosy. Of course they could get a prescription for it, if they could afford it.

“It's like Soviet history,” I said on one of the canal bridges.

Shrike stopped at the bridge's peak. Above us between the shabby dormitories the sky was marbled like a jar of marmalade. “What is?”

“We are. Right after the 1917 revolution the Bolsheviks set up the government, and it ruled the country. Then Lenin built up the party until it was his tool. To get into the government you had to be in the party first, so the party lay on top of the government and was the real power system. Then when Stalin took over, he built the security network as his personal power base. It didn't matter if you were in the party or not—it was the secret police had the power, and Stalin controlled the police. So there was a three-tiered system. Khrushchev's big reform was to dismantle the secret police, and return the power to the Communist party. So it was back to two tiers.”

“How are we like that?” Shrike said, peering closely at the tenements surrounding us, looking into an open window where a woman washed clothes.

“You can see it as well as I! The first power system on Mars was the individual rule of the corporations here. The Committee was convened first to be no more than an information pool for the corporations and the Soviets. But the Russians and Americans decided to use the Committee to get control of the planet away from the corporations.”

“That would be like Lenin's use of the party?” Shrike said, his voice mocking me with faked interest.

“Right.”

“It's not a very close analogy, is it.”

“Close enough. And the third step was when the Committee took over all planetary policy—took over the legislative, executive, and judicial powers. At that point Chairman Sarionovich—Kremlin-trained, remember—set up his own five-year plans, overstressing the Martian economy and of course the people, to prove to the two superpowers that we could make them money if he was given a free hand. And they gave him a free hand, and he increased the size and power of the police enormously to accomplish his goals. And so we got the Unrest.”

“And now?” Shrike asked, humoring me. “Are we like Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, Kerens?”

“Brezhnev was nongovernment. Confusion and corruption, even when he was healthy. And Andropov and Chernenko were still in the push and pull with the Americans. I'd say you're most like Kerens.”

Shrike contemplated me with a big O of mockery rounding his lips. “Why, Hjalmar! What a compliment! That's the nicest thing you've said to me in months, are you sure you spoke correctly?”

“Ach,” I said. “Quit being an ass and listen.”

“I know. I'm not taking your history lesson seriously. But to tell the truth I find the analogy stretched. Don't you find historical analogies a bit … artificial? And you're distracting me from my walk.”