Icehenge (33 page)

But the main problem with this dating (aside from the fact that the method is based on an assumption) is that the micrometeor fall on Icehenge could be part of the manufactured evidence. Micrometeorites are, for the most part, carbon dust. A handful of carbon dust sprinkled from a few hundred meters over the monument would create exactly the same effect as a thousand years of natural micrometeor fall. There would be no way of telling the difference.

Also, this is a precaution that would occur very quickly to the builders of Icehenge if they were attempting to make the monument appear older than it really is, for micrometeorites would be the only force acting on the structure over the short term. Though a method for measuring this action did not exist at the time of the monument's construction (and still does not, in my opinion), the existence of micrometeor fall was known, and so the dating method could be both foreseen and dealt with, by an artificial fall. Given the elaborate nature of this hoax it is a possibility more likely than not.…”

At the next seminar meeting, in the same pub, after we had had a few drinks, Andrew waved a finger at me. “So give, Edmond,” he said. “We want to know who put it there.”

I put down my glass. I had never written this down; never said it to anybody. All their eyes were on me.

“Caroline Holmes,” I said.

“What?”

“No!”

“What?”

“No, nooooo.…”

They quieted down. Sean said, “Why?”

“Start from the beginning,” Elaine said.

I nodded. “It started with shipping records. You remember the list of criteria I gave you last time? Well, it seemed to me that access to a spaceship would be the best point on the list for narrowing down the group of potential suspects. The Outer Satellites Council licenses all spaceships, and keeps flight logs for all flights made. The same is true for Mars and Terra. So the flight to Pluto would have to be made, um, off the books, you know. So I started checking the records of all the spaceships capable of making the round trip to Pluto—”

“My God!” Sean said. “What a chore.”

“Yes. But there are a finite number of those ships, and I had a lot of time. I wasn't in any hurry. And eventually I found that Caroline Holmes's shipyards had tucked away a couple of Ferrando-X spaceships for five years in the 2530s, for unspecified repairs. So I started investigating Holmes herself. She fulfills all the criteria: she's rich enough, she has the equipment, the spaceships, the employees that depend on her for everything and wouldn't be likely to talk. Her foundation financed the development of Stallworth's micrometeorite dating method, by giving him a grant. And there was something about her—she wasn't obviously secretive, I mean we all know something about her—but it was curious how little I could find out about her once I tried. Especially about her earlier years.”

“I know a fair bit about her company,” Sean said. “It domed Hyperion Crater on Ganymede, where I was born. Nearly half of the first Jovian colonies were her projects, as I understand it. But I don't know anything about her before that.”

“Well,” I said, “I never found any record of her birth. And no one knows how old she is. Her parents were Johannes Toquener and Jane Leaf. Leaf was the chairperson of Arco until she was killed in a docking accident on Phobos, in 2289. The next year Holmes named herself and moved to Ceres. With her inheritance she started a shipping, mining and exploration firm, and she got the patents on several recycling devices that were widely used in the Jovian colonies. Between 2290 and 2460, when the Outer Satellites Council was formed on Titan, she had become one of the major developers in the outer satellites. I know most of the general outline of her story—my question is, can any of you
explain
it?”

“Good business sense,” Andrew said.

“She's completely ruthless,” said April.

“She had good business sense,” insisted Andrew. “She was a smart miner. She could find metal ores that were in short supply on Terra faster than her competitors. I worked in mining, I know. She was a legend. Like once they thought all the manganese ore was gone. They were dragging nodules off of Terra's ocean floors, and since heavy metals are less frequent the farther away from the sun you get, there wasn't much hope held for finding any more outside of Mars. But Holmes's Jupiter Metals supplied thousands of tons of the ore in the 2370s. It was like she was pulling the stuff out of her hat. That in itself made her a billionaire, and that was just part of it.”

“And after that,” I said, “she could just leave it up to gravity.”

“What?”

“Acute students of finance will have observed that money, abstract concept though it is, behaves as if it had mass. Economic laws imitate physical laws. Everyone's collection of money is a planetary body, in other words, exerting influence on everyone else's. Thus the more money you have the stronger its gravity is, and the easier it is to attract more. Now most of us own mere asteroids of money. But some people own stars of money, and some of those stars, like Holmes's, reach their Chadresekhar Limit and turn into black holes. Now any money that comes close enough to Holmes is sucked in. There is an event horizon, of course, where this captured money appears to slow down, like Apollo in Zeno's Paradox, ever closer by smaller degrees to Holmes's Jupiter Metals—but in actuality those ‘subsidiary corporations' have flashed invisibly to the nopoint of infinite mass which is Holmes's wealth.”

Andrew and Elaine laughed; the rest stared at me. “Edmond, you're crazy tonight,” Elaine said. “But we've run out of time again, and I have to get to work.” She was a bartender.

“No, finish the story!”

“Next time,” I said. “Okay—assignment, here. Next time come with some information about Caroline Holmes. We'll see what you find.”

Elaine and April then left, and Andrew and Sean and I settled down for some serious drinking, some serious argument.

*   *   *

In those weeks when the seminar was running I had a bit more money than usual, even after I had paid Fist what I owed him. One night when I was walking the streets for entertainment, hanging out with the locals I knew, I decided to do some mental traveling instead. It was a pastime I had indulged fairly often when I first arrived on Waystation, and had a little nest egg of savings. I went to the nearest Recreation Center, and paid for three hours in one of the sensory deprivation tanks.

I stripped in the locker room and went down to one of the little chambers. The attendant slapped the drug band on my arm, and helped me into the warm bath. “Lie back and float.” I did, and found it very near weightlessness. The attendant left, and shut the door; the lights went out. It was completely dark, completely silent, odorless, and in the body temperature water I could scarcely feel a thing. I was nothing, it seemed, but my mind. I rested.

The first hallucinations were auditory, as always. I heard faint music in the distance, which gave me the impression of being in a vast open space, and I thought, as I often had before, that if I could remember that music I would be a great composer. Then I heard whispers, from a group of voices around me. As I concentrated they became the choral babble you hear in audiences before a show begins.

Lights bobbed in my peripheral vision. “Hello?” I said aloud, and felt I was in a universe of salt taste. Talking to yourself again? I thought. No answer but the babbling. The lights circled and wove until they were in front of me, several meters away. When they bobbed up they flashed in my eyes like a security's flashlight. Then I noticed something in front of the lights, blocking them off. A short figure it was, perhaps human. “Hello?” I said apprehensively.

For a long time I floated, pulsing with my heart, and the voices around me said
gudda gudda gudda gudda
.…

The short figure approached me. It said, “I feel (
gudda gudda gudda
) that you are … (
gudda gudda
) … afraid.”

“I'm not,” I said, suddenly fearful. Talking to yourself again, I thought, this is silly. But the figure stood before me as real as a bedpost. The circling lights moved like fireflies into my peripheral vision, and bobbed up from time to time, illuminating the figure's face in quick flashes. A woman. Face thin, eyes and hair brown, a rich brown that I could see, in flashes, as clearly as the lights bobbing to the side, and the black all around.

The anima takes many forms, but I had met this one before. “Emma!” I said, and then, boldly: “I don't believe in you.”

She laughed, a musical sound that blended in with the background babble, echoed, redoubled on itself, filled space.

“And I don't believe you,” she said, in a contralto as musical as her laugh. “I'm here, aren't I?”

“Yes, but it isn't you. Who are you, exactly? Where are you now?”

“You always ask the same questions.” She pointed an arm, blocking out the lights behind her. “Come along.”

And then we were both moving, rushing through salt space together, with the voices keening in flight all around us. I felt her hand clasping my wrist, and for a time we conversed soundlessly of matters that were vital, though I couldn't have said exactly what they were, not aloud.

Then she pulled away from me, and floated over a pulsing black-red plain. I said, “It seems like I've been looking for you all my life, but you're never there. When I was a kid I read your journal and I thought you would be coming out soon. I thought you were hiding, and that any day now you would appear.”

Her clear laugh sounded like a bell and below her the black-red mountains vibrated at the sound. “I was killed after I finished the journal, and left my body. No hiding.”

“Ah,” I said, filling with sadness, and then with dread; I was talking to a ghost, then. “I knew that, though. I shouldn't be afraid, I knew that, even when I was a kid.”

“But you are afraid.”

“I … maybe. Because it's not the same now, don't you see that? The journal … it isn't yours. Someone else is doing this, you aren't the woman I thought you were.”

The choral babble rose up around us, the black-red mountains bobbed like a wheat field in the wind, and Emma moved away from me, slowly. The lights blinked behind her, under her arm, she was nothing but a silhouette; and the fear that had been tightly bound in my chest burst through me. “Don't leave, Emma,” I whispered. “I'm alone, I don't know why I do the things I do. You could help me.”

“Don't fret.” Her voice was distant, the chorus grew behind it, roaring like the sound of a sea. “You can't be helped by what you don't believe, can you. Look to what you believe in. Look to what you believe in. Look.…” Her voice drowned in the babble,
gudda gudda gudda.
Off among the lights I saw her pass, a tiny silhouette. I tried to follow her and realized I was trapped—that somehow I had been frozen in my tracks. Suddenly I was terrified, the lights swirled and the babble roared and I was out there all alone, thrashing in place.… Some part of me remembered the release button in my left palm, and I squeezed it hard, again and again. I felt myself drop; they were draining the tank. They were letting me out. And there far across the blackness, a tiny black figure.…

Lights, bumps, the sounds of the attendant unstrapping me, taking me out. I couldn't look at him. I checked the clock on the wall; two and a half hours had passed. The drugs were still at work, and in the dim red light of the chamber I stood unsteadily, watching the walls pulse in and out. The attendant observed me without much interest. I walked down to the locker room, got dressed, stepped out into the bright lights of Waystation. Silently I cursed myself. What kind of entertainment was that? The stands of walnut and maple waved their arms covered with turning leaves, yellow and red all intermixed, and all sparkling in the light. I cursed again and started to walk it off.

*   *   *

The next time the seminar met, they were ready to go.

Elaine began. “Caroline Holmes visited Terra only once, in 2344. She was part of an archaeological tour, and they visited Mexico, Peru, Easter Island, Angkor Wat, Iran, Egypt, Italy—and Stonehenge and some other British stone circles. She liked ruins.”

“Tenuous stuff,” said April decisively. Elaine looked annoyed.

“Yes, I know,” Elaine replied. “But as we all know, the concerns of youth endure. Anyway, it was a fact that
I
thought was interesting.”

“Aside from shipping and mining, what has she done with her money?” I asked.

“She started the Holmes Foundation,” April said. “Which gives grants for scientific research of various kinds. In 2605 the Foundation gave a grant to Dr. Mund Stallworth of the University of Mars, who used it to develop the dating method that places the construction of Icehenge around Davydov's time.”

“Or a little before,” I added.

“Yes. He had had trouble getting the project funded up to that time.”

“Is there anything to indicate that Holmes herself influenced the Foundation's decision?” asked Elaine.

“Not that I could find,” April said defensively, “although it's well known she takes a great interest in the Foundation's work.”

“Pretty tenuous,” Elaine said, drawing the words out.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Yes,” Sean said, with a slight smile at me. “One of Holmes's companies built the settlement on Saturn Twenty-five, which was intended to be an artists' colony. Of course very few artists went to live there, and Holmes was ridiculed pretty harshly in the intellectual media for planning to remove artists from the society at large. She was called stupid and vulgar more than once, and it occurred to me that she might have taken offense, and decided to get back at them in a sense.”

“Ah ha,” I said. “Here we get into the curious ground of the mentality of the hoaxer. The motivation for such an act.”