Icehenge (26 page)

So I had lived my life on false premises. All those complaints about the pain of existence—what a fool I had been to ape the ennui of the immortal, ignoring the flesh metronome ticking inside, marking each of a finite number of moments we could never return to. I had behaved as if I were a god, and hiked alone into the chaos careless of my own life; and in the cold night learned better, the hard way.

And as the light leaked out of the sky, and black clouds loomed out of the north over the land like immense dark beings, I felt that all my springs of action were wrong. I groaned, shuffled to the heating ring and the cabinet below it. Making each move like a wooden man I rehydrated a packet of beef stroganoff, and stirred it in a frypan. I got out the brandy and drank from the bottle. At the smell of the beef my stomach growled. All those times when Shrike had pricked me with his scorn; each time he had been right. I took another swig of the brandy. “You're an ass, Nederland. An idiot, a fool. You've lived your life like a mouse hare in its hole, while all the while red Mars spun through the ether like a top. A hare pawing over stones, wanting to feel the same way over and over, alive only when the shrike seized you and impaled you on his thorn bush.” Another swallow of brandy, burning its way down, swimming in the brain. I poured the stroganoff onto a plate and sat before it at the tiny table. Only the heating ring illuminated the compartment; I turned on a lamp, and faint reflections of the interior appeared in the windows, obscuring the cloudy sky outside. I ate for a while; then the fork halted over the plate, and I stared out at the night. “You must change your life.”

*   *   *

The next day I followed my route back, driving with a ruthless skill that returned to me from my life in the Survey. That had been a good time, those years of driving over the planet; I remembered that in my hands, in the act of driving itself, and it gave me something to ponder during the trip from marker to marker. It was still early afternoon when I drove up the ramp onto the mesa, and into the cold water station's yard. The whole crew tumbled out of the buildings and gathered around the car to greet me. As I eased my way awkwardly out of the lock, and looked at all their round-eyed faces, full of curiosity and dismay, I knew what it was to be a prophet returning from the wilderness, I felt that my stubble should have been a beard flowing to my knees, that I should have carried tablets or the like. Xhosa's face was split into a big grin; Hana tried to help me walk, and I brushed her off irritably, limped across the yard and into the biggest tent, followed by the whole congregation. “What happened to you?” Bill asked in a horrified tone.

I told them a little, leaving most of it out. When I got to the escarpment and my decision to hike, Hana sucked air through her teeth as if I were still in danger. And when I mentioned my night in the open without oxygen, Xhosa whistled. “I'm not sure that's ever been done before,” he said.

That intrigued me, and later I looked into it. I found that a group of four climbers in the Kasei Vallis had lost their cart in a crevasse (easy to do!) and been forced to bivouac a night in suits, without oxygen, at two kilometers above the datum. Two of them died, but the other two were rescued the next day. So I was not the first human to spend a night free on the surface of Mars; but close enough.

When I was done with my story, Bill said, “There's been a radio message for you. They want you to return to Burroughs as quickly as possible. Apparently you're to head an expedition to Pluto, to dedicate Icehenge.”

“Dedicate Icehenge?”

“To the memory of those killed in the Unrest. The Committee is sponsoring the expedition, and Mr. Selkirk is organizing it. He hopes they can leave soon, he wanted to tell you—he would like to have the expedition reach Pluto in time to coordinate the dedication with the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the convening of the Committee.”

I couldn't help laughing. Pierce me, Shrike! Prick me to life! Of course my companions stared at me as if I were mad. Yes, I could see them thinking it: he wandered in the chaos and suffered oxygen deprivation, and it's killed so many brain cells that he's over the rim at last. That's the trouble with a reputation for eccentricity; after you've got it, even the most ordinary behavior looks odd, just because it's yours.

So after I had my skin tended to, and rested a couple of days, I took a car and a couple of students I barely knew, and started back, taking a detour so I could visit New Houston one more time. Selkirk's expedition would wait for me.

*   *   *

The Aquifer

In New Houston I limped up and walked around the rim, to look down into the town of my birth, now a ruin. And then I went down to the abandoned field car, and sat in it. Through the starred windshield the sun shone brightly.

Here sat Emma Weil. Here in New Houston lived Emma Weil, for a few embattled weeks, anyway—weeks when I too had lived here. I rubbed the seat's arms with a gloved finger. Soon I would be off to Pluto, to “dedicate” the monument left behind by Oleg Davydov and his band of voyagers—to dedicate it to the Mars Development Committee, the very force that had driven Davydov's group to its desperate act.

And yet Davydov and Emma and the Mars Starship Association
would be remembered;
this megalith would be theirs, now, forever. The Committee flexed back where it had to like a judo wrestler, hoping to pull me off balance and spin me away; but if I kept the pressure on in the right way, I might topple it. This time their plan might be foiled. The Mars Starship Association had resisted, Emma Weil had resisted, I had resisted, and I would keep resisting; and perhaps one day we would make Mars free.

*   *   *

What does it mean to love the past? Each day disappears into nothingness, and we must live every moment of our lives in the present. The present is the whole of reality. But human beings are more than real. We plunge through the years like giants, as the poet said, and not one of us can be understood except as creatures continuously exfoliating. When memory fails to contain us we must love the past more than ever, to hold it to us—or else the present becomes a meaningless blaze of color and sound, in which no two humans, great elongate beings, will be able to do more than touch at their very lips, their spatial selves—no one will ever truly understand another. To love the past is to become fully human.

I clutched the armrests of that old car seat as hard as I could, and heard them crackle. Here a human being I understood had once sat. Whether she had died here or escaped, I would never know. My pilgrimage to find her had failed, and all I had met out there in the broken land was myself; or ghosts. But then the realization came to me that it didn't matter. It didn't matter. Immediately I was filled, as with water or air, with an overwhelming sense of peace. Whether Emma lived or died that night in Spear Canyon, she had lived, she had resisted—one great woman loved Mars and struggled for it, committed the whole continuum of her self to the idea that we could live here as free human beings. And I knew that it was so. So that whether she escaped from the car or died right there in the very seat I sat in, she lived on in my heart, in my mind and my life. And that was enough.

*   *   *

Our lives are plants, creating leaves and flowers that fall away and are lost forever. I suppose that writing this account on these leaves will make little difference; words are gossamer in a basalt world. Still I am glad I did it. Soon we will descend to the ninth planet, and in this interregnum I feel completely cast loose, on the edge of a new world, a new life; stripped of all habits, opinions and expectations, I tremble like a blade of grass in the open air. The old life swirls in my mind like rock jasmine blooms down a canyon stream, and I wonder what will live on into my new existence, for even my unsheathing feels like a dream to me now, fragmentary, delirious, unreal. Still, spun into gossamer these parts of a world may remain within my ken: what we feel most, we remember best. The weak link is.

III

EDMOND DOYA

2610
A.D
.

“Ill did those mightie men to trust thee with their stories,

That hast forgot their names, who rear'd thee for their glorie:

For all their wondrous cost, thou that hast serv'd them so,

What tis to trust to Tombes, by thee we easely know.”

—
Michael Drayton,
“Poly-Olbion”

 

 

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:
abhyud,
and
abyut-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.