Icehenge (20 page)

Or, if they catch themselves sliding down the long slope soon enough, they move to Alexandria.

*   *   *

For Alexandria is a city of the senses, and one can live a full life there with the senses alone; this despite the libraries and the archives. I understood this anew as I debarked from the train and walked out of the station into the broad central boulevard—and part of me was relieved. The city is at the western end of Noctis Labyrinthus, and because it is nearly at the top of Tharsis (eleven kilometers above the datum), it is still tented. So the greenhouse air is warm, and pungent with smells. And the public buildings in the heart of town each are fronted with a different stone, so that the eye is surprised at every turn. As I walked across town toward the campus I passed a skyscraper of purple marble, another of rose quartz, both anchoring parts of the dome tent and blending into the color of the sky; the blocks of archival buildings alternated between serpentine, chalcedony and jaspar; the police station was a square tower of obsidian reflecting the buildings around it; and in the big central park were bathhouses of coral and olivine, turquoise and jade and chert. I cut through the park looking only at the Martian juniper and Hokkaido pine, and walked onto campus feeling virtuous. My rooms in the visiting scholars' apartment would be ready, but I hesitated, already feeling the spell of the city. Perhaps it would be all right to go to a bathhouse; perhaps it was just what I needed. From a dusk-dark kiosk shone a white handprint. This city looked nothing like the Egyptian sink of the old novelist, but in every way that mattered it was the same place—such is the power of naming. I shook off the attraction of the bathhouse, and took an escalator to the roof patio of the scholars' apartment. Off to the west the three great volcanoes appeared over the horizon like peaks of another planet entirely, their upper halves in full sun though I stood in murk. Ascraeus Mons, the one farthest north, had snow on its middle slopes. I felt as though my heart had expanded to fill my chest, and I recognized the emotion: Alexandria.…

*   *   *

It was a marvelous Idea they had had, to bring together all of the material of Martian history in a single spot, and create a Planetary Archives, and add to it a collection of libraries and galleries and conservatories and a campus of the university. (Chairman Sarionovich, trying to be Alexander the Great.) Alexandria, the Capital of Memory: but it could not be said that the idea had been realized with any success. A hothouse tented city full of money, on the route from Burroughs to Olympus Mons, from Arcadia to Argyre, Alexandria had drawn a whole other city into itself, and now co-existing with the city of libraries was the city of banks and brothels, bazaars and bathhouses, dorms and slum tenements.

In the archives there were failures caused chiefly by the Unrest itself. The rebels had destroyed all the records they could in the final days of the revolt, to hamper the ferreting of them; so data of all kinds for the years before 2248 were patchy. Another problem, almost as serious, was that each regime of archivists had used a different filing system, using different programs; one had to become a historian of programming to work through the records.

I set to work in the archival labyrinth in a fever of energy, as if struggling against a spell. I spent days typing before a screen, for most of the records were on disks: files of the Soviet mining fleet (fragmentary); minutes of the Mars Corporations Co-op for the Outer Satellites (trivial); records for all the people mentioned in Emma's journal. These last were the most interesting, for they confirmed that all those named in Emma's account had disappeared in the Unrest; and for most, there was no explanation nor any definite last locations. This was common in the annals of the Unrest, but still, it was something.

When I got sick of staring at screens I walked across a park to the Physical Records annex. Here were all the remaining documents. Some of them were originals for what I had found on disk, others had never been recorded. At first it was a relief to deal with the actuality of paper. I am happier with things than with facts, I know this. But in a few weeks the big rooms lined with file cabinets and shelves, filled with the excrement of bureaucracy, were more frustrating and depressing than the computer screens. In these rooms I could see the extent of my task, and I could finger the results of endless hours of wasted labor. And I could see the disorganization and the gaps, not merely as bad results on a screen, but as whole drawers and cabinets and
rooms
of botched filing, un-catalogued documents—unknown material. Eventually I was forced back to the computers, and I shuttled between them like that, driven by frustration.

In neither building could I find any mention of a Mars Starship Association. Three months after I came to Alexandria I hadn't found a thing. And there was still no response to my letter in
Marscience.

Emma searched;

We research.

The city pulled at me. The smooth face of a young man, in a bathhouse door. On a sidewalk cafe table, lying in coffee stains face down: the Martian translation of Cavafy's poems. How well the old poet's work fit this namesake city. I saw the collected edition everywhere—on trolley seats, on the leafstrewn paths of the parks, in libraries misshelved under
Astronomy
or
Polynesia;
and from the back of every dog-eared copy, Cavafy's sad weird bespectacled gaze, which said: the scholar melts in Alexandria. I tried to ignore it. Same with the white handprint, glowing out of every dark alley. Mornings and afternoons I spent in the archives; evenings I ate in the plaza cafes, watching the poor who lived in great crowds around the big public buildings, eking a living from those inside. Nights I stayed in my apartment, blank as a computer screen turned off.

One night I glanced at my kitchen calendar and understood that I had lived a week without knowing it. If the thalamus breaks down, we are incapable of laying down new memories. Fearfully I dressed and took a late trolley downtown. I stood on the curb of the broad sidewalk before the skyscraper containing Shrike's apartment. Up there were his big rooms with all their windows, above the dome. I wanted to go into the foyer and ring his bell, I wanted him to be home, to ask me up. I went into the foyer and stood before the console.
Alexander Selkirk, 8008.
But he wouldn't want me calling him from the building, would he? If he were in town, he would have someone else with him. He wouldn't care what shape I was in; he wouldn't want to know I needed him. The idea would make him very polite—as unlike Shrike as it was possible to be. I couldn't stand the thought of it.

Under the curious eye of a policeman I left the building and walked around the corner into the nearest bathhouse. I paid my fee, shed my clothes and stuffed them into a locker, walked out into the tight network of red hallways, to one of the steamrooms. Sat in the hot water and tried to calm myself and feel sensually. In the dim red light bodies moved languorously, skin wet and gleaming, ruddy and smooth. Muscle definition of male backs. Smooth curves of female legs. Breasts and cocks, wet hair, parted lips. I took one of the hoses snaking about the bottom of the bath, ran the cold stream over my body. Across the room two lithe bodies tangled, slid together in a slow rhythm. They sloshed off, seeking one of the niches in the hallway corners. Another pair coupled in the corner of the steaming pool; blind eyes stared through me. I ran the cold spurt from the hose over my cock, felt nothing. Leaving the bath I wandered the halls, looking into niches. In one a woman straddled a man, slid up and down on him; she looked up and saw me, smiled, leaned forward to cover him; I felt a faint stir in my pelvis.

In a distant niche beyond the last bath Emma sat crosslegged, alone. She gestured to me—she crooked a finger at me. I knelt beside her in the niche, heart pounding. Up close I saw she only looked like Emma, but I banished the thought and kissed her. Our hands explored each other, I slid into her and we copulated right there where passers-by would trip over my feet. When we were spent she rolled me to one side, got to her knees; she put a finger to my lips, kissed my forehead, left.

So I added a new component to my life. Every night I visited bathhouses. Sometimes I met my Emma-partner, and we made love with ever-increasing facility. Most nights our paths didn't cross, and I merely soaked and watched, or found another partner. But what happened with her was different. We never said a word; that was what created the passion, we knew. Days now passed when I read Emma's journal and thought only of her, and on some nights I walked from bathhouse to bathhouse, searching for her. Once in front of the Physical Annex, we crossed paths; neither of us acknowledged the other by more than a meeting of the eye. But that night, in the bathhouse where we had met, we almost fused in our mute passion. We understood.

And I felt I was coming to life: when actually I was only coming to Alexandria.

*   *   *

We lead our lives as if perpetually waking from a long coma. What really happened to me in my first lives, to lead me to Alexandria? Some midnights on the streets, with all the poor, I would stop and ask myself that. How had I gotten to this strange state? What had my life been like? I knew I had been a child, a student, a driver for the Planetary Survey—but what had
happened,
what had it been
like?
“I only know it got me here, and here I am.”

*   *   *

During the long days in the Archives I chatted with the people who worked there, solicited their help and their opinions, and told them about my task and my theory concerning the Pluto megalith and the Unrest. I am a very social person, you see; I need to talk to people every day, perhaps more than I have ever gotten a chance to. One day over an after-lunch Turkish coffee I asked an archivist I had just met, Vadja Sandor, if he knew of any records for the mining subcommittee that had been labelled confidential, and hidden in the data banks by a secret code. “Especially records for the years between the Committee takeover and the Unrest.”

Sandor was a respected historian of that period; it was said he had sixty papers waiting for the approval of Publications Review. “I know of such records,” he said in his musical Russian. “But they're still classified, and I don't have access. My requests for the entry codes have been denied.”

I got out my notebook. “Tell me which ones they are. I'll make my own requests.” And I sent off the forms that very day, wondering if I would have to ask Shrike for help again. If I could bring myself to it.

But I didn't have to. Perhaps Shrike helped without being asked. The codes were sent to me with letters from the police, loyalty oaths, etc. I threw them out and hurried to the Archives to type in the codes.

One of the many confidential files for that period was the Subcommittee on Mining's records on missing asteroid mining ships.

Five asteroid miners had been lost in the years 2150 to 2248. Wreckage of the first had been found, but not of the last four. And the last three had been commanded by Oleg Davydov, Olga Borg, and Eric Swann.

*   *   *

I called Sandor over to my console to take a look. He saw the list and nodded. “Yes, I've heard of those before. The Committee declassified a general report on mining history forty years ago that mentioned these.”

“You didn't tell me about them?”

“But you knew they disappeared. No one denies it. Besides, I figured you had seen that stuff—it's right there in the public record.”

“Damn it! I went back to the primary sources, and never looked in that report! You knew I was looking for something like this—”

He looked nonplussed, and I tried to calm down. I said, “The Committee must have been worried by these disappearances.”

“Probably. But the report I read claimed that such disappearances weren't a complete mystery. If an explosion destroyed a miner and propelled a wreck out of the planetary plane, there would be little chance of finding it.”

“But three of the five disappearances came in the five years before the Unrest! And now we've found the New Houston material, and the Pluto monument.”

“Yes.” Sandor smiled. “You've got something here, you should write it up.”

“I need more.”

“Maybe so, but that shouldn't keep you from writing this up and getting it out there. You might get some help.”

So I wrote it up: a full article outlining the revisionist account of the Unrest, detailing what I knew of the MSA. I proposed that the Unrest included the mutiny and starship construction revealed in Emma's journal, and that the starship crew had built the Pluto monument to mark its departure from the solar system. I sent the article to
Marscience,
and they published it. My explanation of the monument was now out there competing with the Atlantean theory, the alien theory, the natural coincidence theory, and all the rest. No one seemed very impressed. Letters were sent to
Marscience
complaining about the sparseness of my evidence compared to the largeness of my conclusions; and then there was silence. It was like dropping a rock through the ice of a canal. I began to understand that there was jealousy among my colleagues. They thought that I was being given preferential access to classified sites and records—and I couldn't very well deny it—so naturally they disliked my work and snubbed it.

*   *   *

Discouragement in the mirror dusk of a sidewalk cafe: drinking a thimble of coffee I watched the poor go home, each face a map of trouble. Rust-coated policemen on every corner to watch with me. Someone had left a red-backed copy of
Justine
on the dirty tabletop next to mine. I paged through it. Strange jumble of thoughts and images: I liked the helpless lack of structure. “I simply make these few notes to record a block of my life which has fallen into the sea.” Or: “I began to describe to myself in words this whole quarter of Alexandria for I knew that soon it would be forgotten and revisited only by those whose memories had been appropriated by the fevered city.…”