Icehenge (21 page)

I was interrupted in my bemused reading by a young man and a pregnant woman, standing before my table. “Are you Professor Nederland?” asked the woman.

“Yes, I am.”

“We've seen you on the news.”

I lifted my eyebrows. Fame: a curious sensation, to be known by strangers. Maybe there really was something happening out there, with the news of the excavation and the thing on Pluto.

“Yes?” I said.

“I'm your granddaughter, Mary Shannon. Hester's daughter?”

“Oh, yes.” I recalled Maggie mentioning her. I hadn't heard from Hester herself in more years than this young woman had lived. And here she was pregnant; they must have had influence somewhere.

“And this is my husband, Herbert.”

“Hello.” I stood and extended a hand toward the man. Mary lifted his arm and he took my hand, looking past me. I realized he was in a funk, and felt a stab of fear. “Pleased to meet you,” I said, and napkinned my mouth.

“Pleased to meet you,” he said. Mary darted a glance at him, smiled at me apologetically.

“And you're soon to be a great-grandfather again,” she said. “As I guess you noticed.”

“Yes. Congratulations.” How could she have gotten permission to get pregnant when he was in a funk? I wondered if my name had been invoked in the permission proceedings. “It will be my ninth, if I'm not mistaken.”

“No, Hester told me that Stephanie had another one two years ago.”

“Oh? I hadn't heard.”

“Oh. Well.… We're about to move to Phobos. So when I saw you I thought we should say hello.”

“I'm glad you did. Phobos is an exciting place, I've heard.”

“We've been ordered to move there, actually. But Herb works on sunsailers, so it will be good for him.”

I felt a pang for this brave woman, exiled to Phobos with two such responsibilities. “I'm glad.”

Family. A whole genealogical chart extending away in both directions—especially, for an old man like me, downward. A whole clan of descendants. Most of mine were on the Outer Satellites. I never saw the point of keeping in touch with so many strangers, who proved over and over again that nothing of you lasts beyond yourself. My granddaughter shuffled her feet, glanced at her husband anxiously. What would she be, sixty? Hard to say. She looked like a large child.

“We should let you eat,” she said. “I just wanted to say hello. And that we enjoy hearing about you on the news.”

“Good, good. Good to see you. Good luck on Phobos. Nice to meet you, ah, Herb. Take care, yes. Say hello to Hester. Bye bye.”

I sat down again on the uncomfortable metal chair, picked up the book automatically. “I suppose events are simply a sort of annotation of our feelings—” I shut the book. Down the boulevard the white streetlights came on all at once. In the plaza fountain's basin water, squiggles of light
S
'ed over the glassy black surface. Couples walked around its edge. Some threw tokens in, the rest watched. It reminded me of Earth, somehow.

Those memories of my voyage to Earth that had burst into me in Burroughs, what did they mean? Was that really what happened? Suddenly I doubted it. Could we ever hold on to enough of the present to represent it accurately when it was gone? We try. We rehearse our pasts to ourselves in images and repeat them through the years until the images are all we have. Which means we have nothing. We are stuck in the knife-edged present, it extends everywhere—except during the hallucinatory moment of involuntary memory, when images impact like the real. I felt on the verge of such a moment, the pressure welled up at the bottom of my mind: something evoked by this granddaughter, descendant of a wife I scarcely remembered—something—something—

But it never came. A blocked epiphany. And suddenly I did not believe in my voyage to Earth. I remembered the night in Burroughs, after seeing the monument—but now it meant nothing to me. A hallucination. And how much of my written account of it was made up? I no longer believed any of it. Opening my notebook, I jotted a couplet to describe the process—in alexandrines, of course—

The memory's the bone; imagination, flesh;

The animating spirit?—is a forlorn wish.

Emma the only refuge, Emma the only anchor. How many nights I read her, and was re-oriented to the real.

*   *   *

The codes sent to me unlocked other classified information, and eventually I found a long list of files never programmed, which sent me running over to the Physical Annex. The reference was to Davydov, and the file collection was in a room I had familiarized myself with. I began searching the cabinets that stood in rows in the room. One bottom drawer was jammed with folders and pages; it looked like someone had ransacked it, or dropped the drawer and then replaced the contents in a hurry. Near the back I found the folder:
Davydov—Confidential.
Inside it was a sheaf of papers.

Soviet fleet papers. Expedition to the Jovian moons in 2182-8. Record of an assault on a superior officer. Permissions for a leave on Earth.

Then in 2211 he was brought before a court-martial, but he was found innocent. Written under
Charge
was
sedition—see Space Security, Valenski.
Nothing more.

The next document was a fifteen-page application for a lobbying association and club to be called the Mars Starship Association. “Ah ha!” I shouted. The application was dated 2208. At that time any meeting of over ten people had to be approved by the police, so the questions were detailed. Davydov was named copresident of the club along with Borg. All potential members were identified. Many I had seen in Emma's journal. Under
Purpose of Association
was typed, “To advocate the use of a certain percentage of mining profits for the construction of a long-range ship and the financing of a transplutonian expedition.”

So I had found it. Independent confirmation of the Mars Starship Association, right there in a cabinet drawer open to anyone's inspection, in a cabinet I had casually glanced through several months before. That was archival cataloguing for you. I called Sandor to the room and got him to witness the find, and we had it copied. “You're building quite a case,” he said.

I wrote it up,
Chronicle of Martian History
published it. No comment.

Oh, I suppose there was some comment, I got calls from Nakayama and Lebedyan and some others. But the theory popular that week was that Pluto was an erratic caught by the sun, and that the megalith was ancient, perhaps fifteen billion years old—nearly as old as the universe itself. Naturally this created a stir and there were calls for a new expedition to Pluto to investigate the megalith and test this theory.

*   *   *

Over a year's labor and all I had found were scraps. I thought they were important scraps, but few people agreed. Meaningless work. And me so deep in the rhythms of Alexandria that I could scarcely see out of them, to know they were habits I had recently sheathed myself in. Each night I visited the bathhouses, and cared not who I saw, who I joined for company. I no longer searched for the woman who looked like Emma; I still found her occasionally, and we still coupled, but it was tempered by familiarity. Even the strangest liaisons lose their mystery.

And relationships grow whether we want them to or not. Once I recognized the woman in a restaurant—we were both leaving. It was peculiar to see her with clothes on. She smiled and indicated I should follow; I accompanied her to what I assumed were her rooms, and inside we stripped each other violently—a new touch to our liaison—and made love in our customary silence.

Later, when I had dressed, we sat on the bed and looked out the window at an alley wall. She said, “And what are you running from?”

I felt my stomach drop. “My work.” A pause. “And you?”

“The same.”

We laughed. It was more intimate than anything we had shared thus far; sex can be as solipsistic as suicide. To laugh together was not
Alexandrian.
“Does it work for you?” she sputtered. I shook my head, still giggling. “Me neither,” she said, and set us off again. After that we talked. She too worked in research, in one of the libraries. I told her she looked like Emma Weil, and she shrugged. Later, when we met in bathhouses, she merely smiled and continued on her way. Once we tried it again. But it was over.

*   *   *

Sometimes I get so tired. Day follows day follows day in an endless round, each day filled with habits constructed to patch over the emptiness at the heart of things. I exist and so I have to occupy my time. But there is no more to it than that. Apprehensions of this truth make it hard even to keep to the day to day. I feel like a stagehand moving all the props of the play by myself—holding the backdrops steady, placing the costumes on their hooks, conducting the pit band, cueing the players, rushing to and fro—and at the same time I am expending all this backstage effort I am supposed to pretend to believe that the production is real life. It's impossible.

I never felt this exhaustion more than in my last months in Alexandria. I kept to my habits out of the strength of habituation, and fear, but I was lost. I didn't know what next to search for in the archives, and grubbed in them randomly. I stopped paying attention to my dress; grew a beard to avoid shaving; paid no attention to my food, and ate semi-consciously on the schedule of habit; lived in an apartment piled with worn clothes and refuse; and if it weren't for the habit of the bathhouses, I doubt I would even have stayed clean. I was far enough into a funk that I didn't recognize it, and that is dangerously far.

I have always feared insanity. It seems to me the most horrifying of illnesses, and the Achilles heel of modern medicine. And I feel that I might be particularly susceptible to it. I am anxious and easily frightened, so that terror might overwhelm me. And I have little understanding of why other people act as they do, so that I am often isolated to a nearly unbearable degree. —And I bear all the physical marks of the potential schizophrenic: over-large head, low ears, tufty electric hair, poor meeting of the bone ridges at the intersection of eyebrows and nose. These are all signs, used by doctors.

One day I found myself sitting outside the great jade library, stroking one of the chert lions that flanked the steps, almost too tired to move my hand. I couldn't remember how I had gotten there, or where I had been, or what I had been doing, for … I didn't know how long. And then I knew I was lost.

*   *   *

It was Shrike who pulled me out. One look at my face: “Jesus Christ, man, you've fallen in a funk!” Right there at my front door. “You of all people! I thought you were too full of bile. Here it's all coming your way at once and you're falling in a funk. I don't understand you, Hjalmar, I truly don't.” He looked past me at my apartment with distaste. “Come on up to my place and clean up. Where have you
been?
”

“I don't know.”

He looked at me oddly. “You've been working too hard,” he said in a tone I'd never heard from him, and took me by the arm.

He led me across the city to his apartment, muttering all the way. “Should have known something like this had happened, it's been so long since you last pestered me. What's the matter, lost your nerve? Got yourself on the big stage and found it a scary place?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

He took me by the shoulders and shook me.
“Wake up.”
Into his bathroom, clothes yanked off, shower first boiling then freezing, and back and forth like that. “What's this,” I moaned, “you got a degree in physical therapy?” He laughed crazily. I felt his hands like the hot water, his barbs like the cold. He pulled me out, forced me to swallow some pills, slapped me, pushed me into the wall. “Enough of this,” I said. “I should think you'd get enough of pushing people around in your daytime work.”

He shouted his laughter. “You prig! How you bore me with your self-righteousness! What are you but a self-serving academic bourgeois
ass,
after all, living fat off the very system you denounce. An
archaeologist!
Archaeology, what dull nonsense! Why pursue it at all? What could be less re-vo-LU-tionary?”

“Well, no,” I said slowly, struggling. “That's not exactly right. It's a search for reality, you see. The presence of history in our moment. In those objects we can see truths of our nature. Expressed in the way we lived during the eons of prehistory. Which formed our brains and our desires and our goals and our satisfactions and our raptures—”

“What crap! What do you mean? We're not cavemen anymore, fool—”

“No! No. We also see the few millennia of change that transformed us from that stable cycle to our current misery on Mars.”

“How you hate Mars. Why don't you go back to Earth if you hate Mars so much.”

I wiped wet hair off my forehead. “Because I'm a Martian!” I burst out. I shook a fist at him: “I lived too long on Mars before I ever went to Earth, and so I grew the last part of my brain—the part grown by living—into the brain of a Martian. So when I went to Earth it was foreign to me, it fired synapses in the parts of my brain that never grew, and every waking moment was a dream. And I saw everything in a double focus of real and dream, Martian and ancient Earth mammal—so that I had to come back here to see clearly.”

“So there you have it! Here—”

“Here I
do
see clearly, you Shrike, and what I see disturbs me! We could be making a utopia of Mars, the planet insists we create a new society with every bloody icy dawn—in fact we
need
to create such a society for our sanity's sake, because now we're all going to live a thousand years and
we
are going to have to live in the system we make, for year after year beyond our ability to imagine!
That's
what we've forgotten, Shrike. It used to be that people could say to themselves, why should I sacrifice my life for social change, it will take years and I'll not see the benefits of it, let this time be peaceful at least and the next generation can worry about it. That was one of the biggest forces against change, the selfishness of the individual who only wanted peace. But now people are dragging it out day to day on Mars forgetting that not their children but
they
are going to have to live in the future they build. Why I think they must forget it to keep from revolting that very moment in the streets! I see it on every face in every street of every city, all of them working desperately to make profits for people we never see. And we elite desperate at our collaboration in it—or at least I am—I
hate
my position and I want to strike out and I barely hold it in, I hop in the gutters to hold it in and I must
do
something—”