Icehenge (28 page)

And that's what he has been doing, from that day to this: forty-five years. Forty-five years of learning to gauge how fast the ship is moving by watching coconuts pass by; memorizing the distances between islands; reading the stars, and the weather; lying at the bottom of the ship during cloudy nights, and feeling the pattern of the swells to determine the ship's direction.… I think back to the hand to mouth times of our brief partnership, and I see that he has, perhaps, found what he wants to do. Occasionally I get a note from Fiji, Samoa, Oahu. Once I got one from Easter Island, with a picture of one of the statues included. The note said, “And this one's not a fake!”

That's the only clue I've gotten that he knows what I'm doing.

*   *   *

So I stayed on Ganymede and lived in dormitories, and worked at the atmosphere station. My way of life had been learned in the years with my father; it was all I knew, and I kept to the pattern. Dorm mates were my family, and that was never a problem. After my name came up on the hitchhiker's list I moved out to Titan, and while waiting for a job with the weather company I joined the laborer's guild, and swept streets, and pushed wheelbarrows, and unloaded spaceships. I liked the work, and quickly became quite strong.

I got a room in a boarding house that had advertised at the guild, and found that most of my housemates were also laborers. It was a congenial crowd: the meals were rowdy affairs, and the parties sometimes lasted through the night—our landlady loved them. One of the older boarders, a woman named Angela, liked to argue philosophy—to “discuss ideas,” as she called it. On cold nights she would call a few of us on the intercom and invite us down to the kitchen, where she would brew endless pots of tea, and badger me and three or four other regulars with questions and provocations. “Don't you think it is well established that all of the assassinated American presidents were killed by the Rosicrucians?” she would demand, and then tell us how John Wilkes Booth had escaped the burning barn to live on, take on another identity, and shoot both Garfield and McKinley.…

“And Kennedy too?” John Ashley asked. “Are you sure this isn't Ahasuerus the Assassin you're discussing here?” John was a Rosicrucian, you see, and was naturally incensed.

“Ahasuerus?” Angela inquired.

“The Wandering Jew.”

“Did you know that originally he wasn't a Jew at all?” George asked. “His name was Cartaphilus, and he was Pontius Pilate's janitor.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “Let's get back to the point. Booth was identified by his dental records, so the body they found in the barn was definitely his. Dental records are pretty conclusive. So your whole idea falls apart right at the start, Angela.”

She would contest it every time, and we would move on to the nature of evidence, and then the nature of reality, while pot after pot of tea was brewed and consumed. I would argue Aristotle against Plato, Hume against Berkeley, Peirce against the meta-physicals, Allenton against Dolpa, and the warm kitchen echoed with our fierce talk. Many was the time when I vanquished the rest with my mishmash of empiricism, pragmatism, logical positivism, and essentialist humanism—or I thought I did, until late in the night when I went up to my tiny bookwalled room on the fourth floor, and lay on my bed and stared at the books and wondered what it was all about. Could it really be true that all we knew was what our senses told us?

Once John Ashley brought down to our kitchen group a volume called
Sixty-six Crystals on the Ninth Planet,
by a Theophilus Jones. After he had explained it to us, I couldn't have been more scathing. I was familiar with Jones's earlier works, and this new argument did nothing to bolster his case. “Don't you see how illogical he's being there? He has to contradict the whole picture of human history, the work of hundreds of scientists using thousands of pieces of evidence, just to establish the
possibility
that a prehistoric highly advanced civilization existed. Which by no means would prove that they flew out to
Pluto
of all places to set up a temple. I mean, why would they do that?”

“Yes, but look at all he says about how
old
Icehenge is.”

“No no no, none of those are serious dating methods. Calculating the chances of a lith getting hit by a meteorite? Why, it doesn't matter
what
the chances are. The fact is it could have been hit by a meteorite the day after they completed the thing, and damn the probabilities. It doesn't prove anything. That megalith was put there by Martians about three hundred years ago, by the Davydov expedition. They are the only ones who had the means to get out to Pluto so long ago. Read Nederland, he's got the whole case worked up beautifully. He even found mention of the plans for the thing, in the Weil journal. With that kind of evidence you don't need this far-fetched stuff. It's nonsense, John.”

And John would argue right back that it wasn't, and Angela and George and the others would usually support him. “How can you be so sure, Edmond? How can you be
sure?
”

“By looking at the evidence we've got. It stands to reason.”

Not that I was always so positive in my feelings toward my great-grandfather. Once I was walking home after a hard day of loading pipe. I had had some beers after work with the rest of the loading gang, and I was feeling low. Passing a holo sales shop I noticed a panel discussion in the window holo and stopped to watch, recognizing one of the doll-like figures to be Nederland. Curiously I contemplated him. He was discussing something or other—on the street it was hard to hear the store's speaker—with a group of well-dressed professor types, who looked much like him; he was authoritative, impeccably groomed, and on his tiny face was an expert's frown—he was getting ready to correct the speaker.

I remembered that once I had badgered my father: “Why don't you like Great-grandpa, Dad? Why? He's famous!” It took a lot of that to get Father even to admit he disliked Nederland, much less explain it. Finally he had said, “Well, I only met him once, but he was rude to your mother. She said it was because we had bothered him, but I still thought he could have been polite. She was his own granddaughter, and he acted like she was some beggar dunning for change. I didn't like that.”

I left the holo shop window and continued home thinking about it, and when I came to my shabby old boarding house, and looked at its stained walls and etched windows, and remembered the sight of Nederland on that expensive Martian stage in his fine clothes, I felt a little bitter.

But most of the time I was pleased to have such a historian for an ancestor; I was fascinated by his work, and made myself an expert in it. One wall of my book-lined room was covered with shelves of books by Nederland, or about Nederland, or about Oleg Davydov and Emma Weil, and the Mars Starship Association, and the Martian Civil War, and the rest of early Martian history. I became a scholar of that whole era, and my first publications were letters of comment in
Chronicle of Martian History
and
Shards,
correcting errors in articles on the period. The publication of these letters in such prestigious journals convinced me that I was a gypsy scholar, a laborer intellectual, the equal of any university man. And I studied harder than ever, quite pleased with myself—a dabbler in a field where I had not had a single moment's contact with the primary sources of data: one of Nederland's many followers in the widespread revision of Martian history.

*   *   *

So years passed, and Icehenge, and Nederland's explanation for it, the astonishing story of the Davydov mutiny, remained a central part of my life. The turning point in my history—the end of my innocence, so to speak—came on New Year's Eve, when the year 2589 became 2590. By that time I was working for the Titan Weather Company. Early in the evening I was on the job, helping to create a lightning storm that crackled and boomed over the raucous new town of Simonides. Just after the big blast at midnight—two huge balls of St. Elmo's fire, colliding just above the dome—we were let off, and we hit town ready for a good time. The whole crew, all sixteen of us, went first to our regular bar, Jacque's. Jacque was dressed up as the Old Year, and his pet chimpanzee was in diapers and ribbons, representing the New. I drank several beers and allowed a variety of capsules to be popped under my nose, and soon like most of the people there I was very drunk. My boss, Mark Starr, was rolling on the floor, wrestling the chimp. It looked like he was losing. An impromptu chorus was bellowing out an old standard, “I Met Her in a Phobos Restaurant,” and inspired by the mentioning of my native satellite, I started singing a complicated harmony part. Apparently I was the only one who perceived its beauties. There were shouts of protest, and the woman seated next to me objected by pushing me off the bench. As I recovered my footing she stood up, and I shoved her into the table behind us. People there were upset by her arrival and began pounding on her. Feeling magnanimous, I grabbed her arm and pulled her away. The moment she was clear of them she punched me hard in the shoulder, and swung again angrily. I parried the blow with a forearm and jabbed her on the sternum, but she had a longer reach and was much angrier, and I had to retreat quickly, warding off her blows. Despite a couple of good jabs I saw that I was outmatched, and I slipped through the throng at the bar and escaped out the door and into the street.

I sat down at the curb and relaxed. I felt good. There were lots of people on the street, many of them quite drunk. One of them failed to notice me, and tripped over my legs. “Hey!” he shouted, kneeling before me and grabbing my collar. “What d'you mean tripping me like that?” He was a big barrel-chested man, with thin arms that nevertheless were very strong; he shook me a little and it seemed to me his biceps looked like wire under the skin. He had long tangled hair, a small head, and he reeked of whiskey.

“Sorry,” I said, and tried to knock his hands away from my collar. I failed. “I was just sitting here when you ran over me.”

“Sure!” he shouted, and shook me again. Then he let go of me, and his eyes rolled a little; he crumpled back onto his butt, took stock of his situation dizzily, and slid himself over so that he was seated in the trash in the gutter, out of people's way. I shifted away from him a foot or two, and he waved at me to stop. He took a vial from his shirt pocket, opened it with awkward care, waved it under his nose.

“You shouldn't use that stuff,” I advised him.

“And why not?”

“It'll give you high blood pressure.”

He peered up at me with bloodshot eyes. “High blood pressure is better than no blood pressure at all.”

“There is that.”

“So you'd better try some of this, hadn't you.”

I didn't know if he was serious or not, but I decided not to test it. “I guess I'd better.”

Slowly he levered himself up onto the curb next to me. Seated he looked like a spider. “You got to have blood pressure, that's my motto,” he said.

“I see.”

He waved the vial under my nose, and immediately I felt the rush of the flyer. He left it there until I almost fainted with euphoria and lack of oxygen. “Man,” he said, “on New Year's Eve everybody just goes
crazy.
”

“Gosh I w-wonder why,” I managed to say.

Then Mark and Ivinny and several more of the weather crew crashed out of Jacque's. “Come on, Edmond, the chimp has got hold of a fire extinguisher and any minute it'll be blasting us.”

I stood up, much too quickly, and when the colored lights went away I motioned to my new companion. He started to stand, we helped him the rest of the way. He stood a score of centimeters taller than the rest of us. We trailed my group of friends, talking continuously and barely listening to each other, we were so high. Then a forty-person free-for-all swirled out of a side street and caught us up in it; Simonides was filled with Caroline Holmes's shipworkers, and it was nearing dawn, and from the roar bouncing down on us from the dome it appeared that there were brawls going on all over town. My new companion's arms were only thin in relation to his giant torso, and with their length and power he was able to clear an area around him. I stayed close on his heels, and was hit on the side of the head by his elbow. When I regained consciousness a few seconds later he was dragging me by the heels after Mark and the rest. “What are you doing attacking me from behind, eh?” he shouted. “Don't you know that's dangerous?”

“Uh.” A vial shoved up one of my nostrils and I was clearheaded again. I staggered free of my companion and followed him and the weather crew through the clogged streets.

At dawn we were on the east edge of town, sitting on the wide concrete strip just inside the dome. There were seven or eight of the weather crew left, laughing and drinking from a tall white bottle. My new friend arranged pieces of gravel into patterns on the concrete. On the horizon a white point appeared, and lengthened into a knife-edge line dividing the night: the rings. Saturn would soon be rising.

My friend had grown a little melancholy. “Sports,” he scoffed in reply to a comment I had made on the night's brawling. “Sports, it's always the same story. The wise old man or men against the young turk or turks, and the young turk, if he's worth his salt which he is by definition, always seems to win it, every time. Even in chess. You heard of that guy Goodman. Guy studies chess religiously for a mere twenty-five years, comes out at age thirty-five and wins three hundred and sixty tournament games in a row, trounces five-hundred-and-fifteen-year-old Gunnar Knorrson twelve-four-two, Knorrson who held the system championship for a hundred and sixty-some years! It's damn depressing.”

“You play chess.”

“Yeah. And I'm five hundred and fifteen years old.”

“Wow, that's old. You're not Knorrson?”