Icehenge (32 page)

*   *   *

I went out of my cabin for the first time in a while, to restock my supply of crackers and orange juice. The wood and moss hallways of
Snowflake
were quite empty; it seemed that people were staying in their rooms, or in the tiny lounges that the rooms opened onto. Dr. Lhotse had brought Brinston by for a peacemaking visit, and they had dropped in on Jones as well. Now we interacted, when necessary, with careful politeness; but mostly we were just settling in for the last wait. It would be a few more weeks until we reached Pluto. That wasn't long; everyone is patient, everyone is good at waiting in this world where everything proceeds so slowly.

Yesterday was my birthday. I was sixty-two years old. One tenth of my life done and gone, the endless childhood over. Those years feel like eternity in my head, and the thing is hardly begun. Hard to believe. I thought of the ancient stranger I had met on Titan, and wondered what it meant to live so unnaturally long, and then die anyway. What have we become?

When I am as old as that stranger, I will have forgotten these first sixty-two years and more. Or they will recede into depths of memory beyond the reach of recollection—the same as forgotten—recollection being a power inadequate to our new time scale. And how many other powers are like it?

Autobiography is now the necessary extension of memory. Five centuries from now I may live, but the
I
writing this will be nothing in his mind but a bare fact. I write this, then, for that stranger myself, so that he may know who he has been. I hope it will be enough. I am confident it will; my memory is strong.

My father sent me a birthday poem that arrived just last night. He's given me one every birthday now for fifty-four years; they're beginning to make quite a volume. I've encouraged him to put them and the rest of his poems into the general file, but he still refuses. Here is the latest:

Looking for the green flash

At sea, north of Hawaii.

Still day, no clouds:

On a dark blue plane,

Under a limpid blue hemisphere.

Our craft one mote in Terra's blue dance

Of wind water and light.

Sunset near.

To the west the ocean midnight blue

Broken by blued silver.

The sun light orange,

Slowing down,

Flattening as it touches horizon:

Earth is between us and sun by now,

Only light bending through atmosphere

Left to us: image of sun.

Half down, don't look, too bright.

Sky around sun white.

Mere sliver left, look now:

Bare paring turning back

From orange to yellow,

Yellow to yellow-green,

Then just as it disappears,

Bright green!

Walking back to my room with my food, saying his poem to myself in my mind, I realized that I miss him.

*   *   *

I met with the Institute seminar I was to teach about a month after I got the invitation from Professor Rotenberg. At my urging we decided to meet at the back table of a pub across the street from the Institute, and we moved there forthwith.

It quickly became clear that they had read the literature on the subject. What more could I tell them?

“Who put it there?” said a man named Andrew.

“Wait a minute, start at the beginning.” That was Elaine, a good-looking hundredish woman on my left. “Give us your background, how you got into this.”

I told them my story as briefly as possible, feeling sheepish as I described the random meeting that had triggered my whole search. “… So you see, essentially, I believe I met someone who had a hand in constructing Icehenge, which necessarily eliminates the Davydov party from consideration.”

“You must have been astonished,” Elaine said.

“For a while. Astonished, shocked—betrayed … but soon the idea that the monument was put there by someone other than Davydov obsessed me. It made the whole problem unsolved again, you see.”

“Part of you welcomed it.” That was April, a very attentive woman sitting across from me.

“Yeah.”

“But what about Davydov?”

“What about Nederland?” asked April. She had a rather sharp and scornful way of speaking.

“I wasn't sure. It didn't seem possible that Nederland could be wrong—there were all those volumes, the whole edifice of his case. And I had believed it for so long. Everyone had. If he was wrong, what then of Davydov? Or Emma? Many times when I thought about it the certainty I had felt that night—that that stranger
knew
what had happened there—faded. But the memory … refused to change. He had known, and I
knew
that, I was sure of it. So the search was on.”

“How did you start?”

“With a premise. Induction, same as Nederland. I started with the theory that Icehenge was not built until humans were capable of getting to Pluto, which struck me as very reasonable. And there were no spaceships that could have taken us there and back until 2443. So Icehenge was a relatively modern construct, made anonymous in the deliberate attempt to obscure its origins.”

“A hoax,” April said.

“Well, yes, in a way, although it's not the structure that's a hoax, I mean it is definitely there no matter who set it up—”

“The Davydov expedition, then.”

“Right. Suddenly I had to wonder whether Davydov and Emma—whether any of them had existed at all.”

“So you checked Nederland's early work.” This from Sean, a very big, bearded man.

“I did. I found that both Davydov and Emma had actually existed—Emma held some Martian middle-distance running records for several years, and some records of their careers were extant. And they both disappeared with a lot of other people in the Martian Civil War. But the only things connecting them with Icehenge were a file in the Alexandrian archives that apparently was planted, and Emma Weil's journal, which was excavated outside New Houston. Now I got a chemist named Jordan interested in the case, and he has been investigating the aging of the field car that the journal was found in. You know metal oxidizes to an extent when buried in Martian soil, and the rate is measurable—and Jordan's analysis of the field car seems to indicate that it was
never
buried in smectite clay, but apparently was exposed to the atmosphere. That is very suspicious, of course. And an engineer named Satarwal has figured out a list of the equipment necessary to construct Icehenge, and by Weil's own account the asteroid miners didn't have all of that equipment. So the Davydov explanation has been falling apart from more than one angle in the past few years, and in fact this seminar is one sign of that collapse.”

“So what did you do, then?” Sean asked.

“I made a list of qualities and attributes that the builder of Icehenge
had
to have had, thinking that I could then draw up a list of suspects. They had to have had a lot of money. They had to have help—my stranger for one, I guessed. They had to have a fairly big spaceship, and one that could be taken out of the usual flight control logbooks, which is a difficult task. And they had to have some specialized equipment, some of which was a little unusual. After I made this list I started making assumptions, about motivation and so forth, that were less certain, though they helped me a lot—”

“But you could make assumptions forever,” April said. “What did you do?”

“Uh. I did research. I sat in front of a screen and punched out codes, read the results, found new indexes, punched out more codes. I looked through shipping records, equipment manufacturing records, sales records—I investigated various rich people. That sort of thing. It was boring work in some ways, but I enjoyed doing it. At first I thought of myself as working my way through a maze. Then that seemed the wrong image. In front of a library screen I could go anywhere. Because of the access-to-information laws I could look in every file and record that existed, except for the illegal secret ones—there are a lot of those—but if they had code call-ups, you know, were hidden somewhere in larger data banks—then I could probably get into those too. I bumped into file freaks and learned new codes, and learning them took me into data banks that taught me even more. Trying to visualize it, I could see myself as a tiny component in a single communications network, a multibank computer complex that spanned the solar system—a dish-shaped, invisible, seemingly telepathic web, a wave pattern that added one more complication to the quark dance swirling in the sun's gravity well. So I was not in a maze, I was above it, and I could see all of it at once—and its walls formed a pattern, had a meaning, if I could learn how to read it.…”

I stopped and looked around. Blank faces, neutral, tolerant nods. “You know what I mean?” I asked.

No answers. “Sort of,” said Elaine. “But our time's up.”

“Okay,” I said. “More next time.”

*   *   *

One night after a party in the restaurant's kitchen I wandered the streets, my mind in a ferment. The Sunlight was off and the other side of the cylinder was a web of streetlights and colored neon points. It was the day after payday, so I stopped at the News and Information Center and waited until I could get a booth. When I got one I sat down and aimlessly called up indexes. Something was bothering me, but I didn't know exactly what it was; and now I only wanted to be distracted. Eventually I selected Recreation News, which played continuously.

The room darkened and then revealed a platform in space. The scene moved to one side and I could see we were on the extension of a small satellite, in a low orbit around an asteroid.

The lilting voice of one of the sports commentators spoke. “The ancient game of golf has undergone yet another transformation out here on Hebe,” he said. We moved farther out onto the platform, and two golfers appeared at the edge of it, in thin hour-suits. “Yes, Philip John and Arafura Aloesi have added a new dimension to their golfing on and around Hebe. Let's hear them describe it for themselves. Arafura?”

“Well, Connie, we tee off from up here, that's about it in a nutshell. The pin is back down there near the horizon, see the light? It's two meters wide, we figured we deserved that much from up here. Mostly we play hole-in-one.”

“What do you have to think about when you're hitting a shot from up here, Phil?”

“Well, Connie, we're in a Clarke orbit, so we don't have to worry about orbital velocity. It's a lot like every other drive, actually, except you're higher up than usual—”

“You have to watch out for hitting it too hard; gravity's not much around a small rock like this, if you drive with a one wood you're liable to put the ball in orbit, or out in space even—”

“Yeah, Connie, I generally use a three iron and shoot down at it, that works best. Sometimes we play where we have to put the ball through one orbit before it can hit the ground, but it's hard enough as it is, and—”

“All right, let's see you guys put one down there.”

They swung and the balls disappeared.

“Now how do you see where it's hit, guys?”

“Well, Connie, we got this radar screen following them down to the horizon—see, mine's right on track—then the green has a hundred-meter diameter, and if we land on that it shows on this screen here. Here, they're about to hit—”

Nothing appeared on the green screen beside them. Phil and Arafura looked crestfallen.

“Well, guys, any future plans for this new twist?”

Phil brightened. “Well, I was thinking if we were to set up just off Io, we could use the Red Spot as the hole and shoot for that. No problem with gravity there—”

“Yes, that'd be one hell of a fairway. And that's all from Hebe for now, this is Connie McDowell—”

My time ran out and the room was dark, then bright with roomlight. Eventually the attendant came in and roused me. Again my mouth was hanging open: the astonishment of inspiration. I jumped up laughing. “That's it!” I said, “golf balls!” Still laughing wildly: “I got the old fool this time!” The attendant stared at me and shook his head.

*   *   *

Only a month later (I had written it in a week) a long letter of mine appeared in the Commentary section of
Shards.
Part of it said,

There is no good evidence concerning the age of Icehenge. This is because most dating methods that have been developed by archaeologists are applicable to substances or processes found only on Terra. Some of these have been adapted for use on Mars, but on planetary bodies without atmospheres, most of the processes that are measured simply do not occur.

The ice of Icehenge, it has been determined, is about two billion years old. But when that ice was cut into beams and placed on Pluto has proven more difficult to determine. Two changes in the ice beams offer possible dating methods. First, a certain amount of the ice has sublimed spontaneously, but at seventy degrees Kelvin this process is extremely slow, and its effects at Icehenge are too small to measure. (This argues against any very great age for the megalith—those ages proposed by all of the “prehistoric” theories—but is no help in determining the date of construction more precisely.)

An attempt has been made to measure the second change occurring in the ice, which is the pitting that results from the fall of micrometeorites. Professor Mund Stall-worth, with the help of Professor Hjalmar Nederland and the Holmes Foundation, has developed a micrometeorite count method by which he claims to have dated the monument. This method is the equivalent of the terrestrial dating method of patination, and like patination it relies on an intimate knowledge of local conditions if it is to achieve any accuracy. Stallworth has assumed, and assumed only, that micrometeor fall is a constant both temporally and spatially. After making this assumption he has been fairly rigorous, and has taken counts on artificial surfaces on Luna and in the asteroids to establish a reliable short-term time chart. According to his calculations, micrometeors have fallen on Icehenge for a thousand years plus or minus five hundred. This makes Icehenge at least a hundred and fifty years older than the 2248 dating, but is considered close enough by Nederland, who has used Stallworth's results to support his theory.