Icehenge (27 page)

My refrigerator was empty, so after I splashed water on my face, I went out into the corridor. It had rough wood walls, set at slightly irregular angles; the floor was a lumpy moss that did surprisingly well underfoot.

As I passed by Jones's chamber the door opened and Jones walked out. “Doya!” he said, looking down at me. “You're out! I've missed you in the lounge.”

“Yes,” I said, “I've been working too much, I'm ready for a party.”

“I understand Dr. Brinston wants to talk to you,” he said, brushing down his tangled auburn hair with his fingers. “You going to breakfast?”

I nodded and we started down the corridor together. “Why does Brinston want to talk to me?”

“He wants to organize a series of colloquia on Icehenge, one given by each of us.”

“Oh, man. And he wants me to join it?” Brinston was the chief archaeologist, and as such probably the most important member of our expedition, even though Dr. Lhotse of the Institute was our nominal leader. It was a fact Brinston was all too aware of. He was a pain in the ass—a gregarious Terran (if that isn't being redundant), and an overbearing academic hack. Although not truly a hack—he did good work.

We turned a corner, onto the main passageway to the dining commons. Jones was grinning at me. “Apparently he believes that it would be essential to have your participation in the series, you know, given your historical importance and all.”

“Give me a break.”

In the white hallway just outside the commons there was a large blue bulletin screen in one of the walls. We stopped before it. There was a console under it for typing messages onto the board. The new question, put up just recently, was the big one, the one that was sending us out here: “Who put up Icehenge?” in bold orange letters.

But the answers, naturally, were jokes. In red script near the center of the board, was “GOD.” In yellow type, “Remnants of a Crystallized Ice Meteorite.” In a corner, in long green letters: “Nederland.” Under that someone had typed, “No, Some Other Alien.” I laughed at that. There were several more solutions (I liked especially “Pluto Is a Message Planet From Another Galaxy”), most of which had first been put forth in the year after the discovery, before Nederland published the results of his work on Mars.

Jones stepped up to the console. “Here's my new one,” he said. “Let's see, yellow Gothic should be right: ‘Icehenge put there by prehistoric civilization'”—this was Jones's basic contention, that humans were of extraterrestrial origin, and had had a space technology in their earliest days—“‘But the inscription carved on it by the Davydov starship.'”

“Jones,” I scolded him. “You're at it again. How many of these solutions have you put up?”

“No more than half,” he said, and seeing my expression of dismay he cackled. He made me laugh too, but we straightened up and put on serious frowns before we entered the dining commons.

Inside, Bachan Nimit and his micrometeorite people were seated at a table together, eating with Dr. Brinston. I cringed when I saw him, and went to the kitchen.

Jones and I sat at a table on the other side of the room and began to eat. Jones, system-famous heretic scholar of evolution and prehistory, had nothing but a pile of apples on his plate. He adhered to the dietary laws of his home, the asteroid Icarus, which decreed that nothing eaten should be the result of the death of any living system. Jones's particular affinity was for apples, and he finished them off rapidly.

I was nearly done with my omelet when Brinston approached our table. “Mr. Doya, it's good to see you out of your cabin!” he said loudly. “You shouldn't be such a hermit!”

Now I left my cabin pretty regularly to party, but when I did I was careful to avoid Brinston. Here I was reminded why. “I'm working,” I said.

“Oh, I see.” He smiled. “I hope that won't keep you from joining our little lecture series.”

“Your what?”

“We're organizing a series of talks, and hope everyone will give one.” The micrometeor crew had turned to watch us.

“Everyone?”

“Well—everyone who represents a different aspect of the problem.”

“What's the point?”

“What?”

“What's the point?” I repeated. “Everyone on board this ship already knows what everyone else has written and said about Icehenge.”

“But in a colloquium we could discuss these opinions.”

The academic mind. “In a colloquium there would be nothing but a lot of arguing and bitching and rehashing the same old points. We've wrangled for years without anyone changing his mind, and now we're going to Pluto to look at Icehenge and find out who really put it there. Why stage a reiteration of what we've already said?”

Brinston was flushing red. “We hoped there would be new things to be said.”

I shrugged. “Maybe so. Look, just go ahead and have your talks without me.”

Brinston paused. “That wouldn't be so bad,” he said reflectively, “if Nederland were here. But now the two principal theorists will be missing.”

I felt my distaste for him turn to dislike. He knew of the relationship between Nederland and me, and this was a jab. “Yes, well, Nederland's been there before.” He had, too, and it was too bad he hadn't made better use of the visit. They had done nothing but dedicate a plaque commemorating the expedition of asteroid miners that he had discovered; at the time, his explanation was so widely believed that the megalith hadn't even been excavated.

“Even so, you'd think he'd want to be along on the expedition that will either confirm or contradict his theory.” His voice grew louder as he sensed my discomfort. “Tell me, Mr. Doya, what did Professor Nederland say was his reason for not joining us?”

I stared at him for a long time. “He was afraid there would be too many colloquia,” I said, and stood up. “Now excuse me while I return to my work.” I went to the kitchen and got some supplies, and walked back to my room, feeling that I had made an enemy, but not caring much.

*   *   *

Yes, Hjalmar Nederland, the famous historian of Icehenge, was my great-grandfather. It was a fact I remember always knowing, though my father never encouraged my pleasure in knowing it. (Father wasn't his grandchild; my mother was.)

I had read all of Nederland's books—the works on Icehenge, the five-volume Martian history, the earlier books on terran archaeology—by the time I was ten. At that time Father and I lived on Ganymede. Father had gotten lucky and was crewing on a sunsailer entered in the InandOut, a race that takes the sailers into the top layer of Jupiter's atmosphere.

Usually he wasn't that lucky. Sunsailing was for the rich, and they didn't need crews often. So most of the time Father was a laborer: street sweeper, carrier at construction sites, whatever was on the list at the laborer's guild. As I understood later, he was poor, and shiftless, and played the edges to get by. Maybe I've modelled my life on his.

He was a small man, my father, short and spare-framed; he dressed in worker's clothes, and had a droopy moustache, and grinned a lot. People were always surprised to see him with a kid—he didn't look important enough. But when he lived on Mars, and then Phobos, he had been part of a foursome. The other man was a well-known sculptor, with a lot of pull in artistic circles. And my mom, being Nederland's granddaughter, had connections with the University of Mars. Between them they managed to get that rare thing (especially on Mars), the permission to have a child. Then when the foursome broke up, Father was the only one interested in taking care of me; he had grown up with me, in a sense, in that my presence as an infant was what brought him out of a funk. So he told me. Into his custody I went (I was six, and had never set foot on Mars), and we took off for Jupiter.

After that Father never discussed my mother, or the other members of the foursome, or my famous great-grandfather (when he could keep me from bringing up the topic), or even Mars. He was, among other things, a sensitive man—a poet who wrote poems for himself, and never paid a fee to put them in the general file. He loved landscapes and skyscapes, and after we moved to Ganymede we spent a lot of time hiking in suits over Ganymede's stark hills, to watch Jupiter or one of the other moons rise, or to watch a sunrise, still the brightest dawn of them all. We were a comfortable pair. Ours was a quiet pastime, and the source of most of Father's poetry. The poems of his that exerted the most pull on me, however, were those about Mars. Like this one:

In the Lazuli Canyon, boating.

Sheet ice over shadowed stream,

Crackling under our bow.

Stream grows wide, bends out into sunlight:

A million turns following the old vallis.

Plumes of frost at every breath.

Endless rise of the red canyon,

Mountains and canyons, no end to them.

Black webs in rust sandstone:

Wind-carved boulders hang over us.

There, on the wet red beach:

Dull green Syrtis grass. Green.

In the canyon my heart is pure—

Why ever leave?

The western sky deep violet,

In it two stars, white and indigo:

Venus, and the Earth.

Even though Father disliked Nederland (they had met, I gathered, only once) he still indulged my fascination with Icehenge. For some reason I loved that megalith; it was the greatest story I knew. On my eleventh birthday Father took me down to the local post office (at this time we were on bright Europa, and took long hikes together across its snowy plains). After a whispered conference with one of the attendants, we went into a holo room. He wouldn't tell me what we were going to see, and I was frightened, thinking it might be my mother.

The room holo came on; and we were in darkness. Stars overhead. Suddenly a very bright one flared, defining a horizon, and pale light flooded over what now appeared as a dark, rocky plain.

Then I saw it off in the distance: the megalith. The sun (I recognized it now, the bright star that had risen) had only struck the top of the liths, and they gleamed white. Below the sunlight they were square black cutouts, blocking stars. The line quickly dropped (the holo was speeded up) and it stood revealed, tall and white. Because of the model of it that I owned at the time, it seemed immense.

“Oh,
Dad.
”

“Come on, let's go look at it.”

“Bring it here, you mean.”

He laughed. “Where's your imagination, kid?” He dialed it over—I went straight through a lith—and we were standing at its center, near the plaque commemorating the Davydov Expedition. We circled slowly, necks craned back to look up. We inspected the broken column and its scattered pieces, then looked closely at the brief inscription.

“It's a wonder they didn't all sign their names,” said Father.

Then the whole scene disappeared and we were standing in the bare holo room. Father caught my forlorn expression, and laughed. “You'll see it again before you're through. Come on, let's go get some ice cream.”

*   *   *

Soon after that, when I was just fourteen, he got a chance to go to Terra. Friends of his were buying and taking a small boat all the way back, and they needed one more crew member. Or perhaps they didn't absolutely need one, but they wanted him to come.

At that time we had just moved back to Ganymede, and I had a job at the atmosphere station. We had lived there nearly a year, off and on, and I didn't want to move again. I had written a book describing the deep space adventures of the Davydov expedition, and with the money I was saving I planned to publish it. (For a fee anyone can put their work in the data banks, and have it listed in the general catalogue; whether anyone will ever read it is another matter, but I had hopes, at the time, that one of the book clubs would buy the rights to list it in their index.)

“See, Dad, you've lived on Terra and Mars, so you want to go back there so you can be outside and all. Me, I don't care about that stuff. I'd rather stay here.”

Father stared at me carefully, suspicious of such a sentiment, as well he might be—for as I understood much later, my disinclination to go to Terra stemmed mainly from the fact that Hjalmar Nederland had said in an interview (and implied in many articles) that he didn't like it.

“You've never been there,” my father said, “else you might not say that. And it's something you should see, take my word for it. The chance doesn't come that often.”

“I know, Dad. But the chance has come for you, not me.”

He scowled at me. In a world with so few children, everyone is treated as an adult; and my father had always treated me as an equal, to a degree that would be difficult to describe. Now he didn't know what to say to me. “There's room for you too.”

“But only if you make it. Look, you'll be back out here sailing in a couple of years. And I'll get down there someday. Meanwhile I want to stay here. I got a job and friends.”

“Okay,” he said, and looked away. “You're your own man, you do what you want.”

I felt bad then, but not nearly so much as I did later, when I remembered the scene and understood what I had done. Father was tired, he was going through a hard time, he needed his friends. He was about seventy then, and he had nothing to show for his efforts, and he was tired. In the old days he'd have been near the end, and I suppose he felt that way—he hadn't yet gotten that second wind that comes when you realize that, far from being over, the story has just begun. But that second wind didn't come from me, or with my help. And yet that, it seems to me, is what sons are for.

So he left for Terra, and I was on my own. About two years later I got a letter from him. He was in Micronesia, on an island in the Pacific Ocean somewhere. He had met some Marquesan sailors. There were fleets of the old Micronesian sailing ships, called
wa'a kaulua,
crisscrossing the Pacific, carrying passengers and even freight. Father had decided to apprentice himself to one of the navigators from the Carolines, one of those who navigate as they did in the ancient times, without radio or sextant, or compass, or even maps.