Icehenge (34 page)

Andrew said, “Something similar to that might be Holmes's Museum of the Outer Satellites, on Elliot Titania. You know how much critical condemnation that received.”

“This is pretty weak evidence,” April said.

“I know,” I replied. “But they are interesting indications. The question of motivation is a hard one. Olaf Ohman, a nineteenth-century hoaxer, once said, ‘I should like to do something that would bother the brains of the learned.' I thought that these little incidents might show that Holmes had a similar feeling.”

“But you're only guessing at her reaction! The scorn of intellectuals may have just made her laugh.”

“Who laughs at scorn?” said Elaine.

“Someone who has done as much as she has,” April said. “To someone who has had such a major hand in the development of the outer satellites, that museum and that artist colony must seem like the most minor of efforts, small failures in a giant success story. Why should she care what people say about them? She can look all over space beyond Mars and see her colonies, places she had built—and those are her cultural efforts.”

“That's probably true,” I admitted. “Although some people like that get proud, and then any little failure gets to be extremely irritating. But I have to admit that in all the research I've done on Holmes, I've never found a single solid, central motive for building Icehenge. If she did it—and I'm almost certain she did—then the reason remains a mystery. But the more I've thought about it, the less surprised I am by that. It seems to me that the reasons one might perpetrate such a hoax are not the sorts of things that can be discovered by examining the public records years and years later. Chances are much higher that they would be something very personal, very private.” I sighed. “Meanwhile, we have these indications that you've found. And certainly something seems to have affected her, because in 2550 she put a large satellite into a polar orbit around Saturn, and has lived in seclusion there ever since. No more projects of any kind. It appears she has become a hermit.”

“For the time being,” April said.

“It would help if she had written an autobiography,” said Andrew. “But there's not a thing by her in the files.”

“That in itself struck me as odd,” I said. “In this age of autobiography, who does not write one?”

“A hoaxer?” Sean suggested.

“Maybe she did write one,” April said. “Maybe she just didn't publish it. Lots of people don't publish their autobiographies—Nederland never has, has he? And what about you?”

“All right,” I said. “You're right. All the motivational stuff is weak. But when you add it to the concrete points, the qualities that the builder absolutely
had
to have, then she becomes almost the only person to fill the bill. She had an organization large enough to conceal the disappearance of a ship or two for a few years—something that no single ship owner could have done. And in fact two of her ships were mysteriously drydocked for five years. Her Foundation supported the research that helped to establish the Davydov theory, or to shore it up. And lastly, I got on the vid-phone last week and called up her father, Johannes Toquener. He still lives on Mars, but the Institute here paid for the call. I asked him if he had ever written anything about his daughter, and if so whether I could read it. He said he hadn't written anything. Then I said I was doing an article on her and asked if he would give me some information about her youth. He said he'd rather not, and then, when I pressed him to at least tell me how old she was, he said she had been born in 2248. He was surprised to hear there was no birth certificate—he said it must have been destroyed in the civil war.”

Sean whistled. “Same as the number on the Inscription Lith!”

“That's right. Icehenge has her birth year carved on it. And it could have been coincidence, but now there were too many of them. Now I was sure.”

*   *   *

Later that evening, after we had taken a break for drinks, April said, “You sure do guess a lot.”

I laughed. “Do you think so? I suppose I prefer to call it inductive reasoning. It's the method everyone uses, no matter what they claim. My methods are no different from Nederland's, or for that matter Theophilus Jones's!” They laughed. “These days Jones is claiming that the monument was an alien message device sailing through space, that speared Pluto by coincidence and stuck there. Seriously! And he has ‘facts' to back up the premise. Everyone does. The difference comes in how careful you are with your premise, and then how rigorously you test it. And it helps not to have a big emotional investment in the premise. Nederland, for instance, really wanted very much for Icehenge to be built by the Davydov expedition, because it helped him in his political jockeying on Mars. And that meant he only saw the facts he wanted to see.”

“You need to go out there,” Andrew said. “All this searching through records can only accomplish so much. You need to go out there and tear up Icehenge and find some solid evidence of who put it there. A rigorous investigation, with trained archaeologists—”

“Which I'm not,” I said.

“I know. You're a historian.”

“A file freak,” said April.

“You need to have people run as many different tests as they can think of,” Andrew continued.

“That's right,” I said. “That's precisely what we need.”

*   *   *

But how to get such an expedition underway? The expense would be enormous. And no one would be in any hurry about it. In this world of long-lived people nobody hurried about anything. It all would happen, eventually; why rush? Especially into something so costly.

So I decided to spur the action, and publish an article that would finger Holmes without actually naming her. I sent a short letter to
Shards,
and they published it in their very next issue:

… With the evidence now available we can provisionally list several attributes of the agent who constructed Icehenge:

1) Access to at least one spaceship equal or superior in capabilities to the Ferrando-X, and possibly to one or two more of the same class.

2) The ability to remove this ship (or these ships) from the Outer Satellites Council flight control and monitoring system, and from all other space flight recording systems extant during the period of the megalith's construction. This removal would not have been simple by any means and the fact that it was accomplished implies the use of some large resource base, such as a fleet of spaceships, a large shipyard, an entire space flight corporation, or the like.

3) The ability to obtain the cooperation and subsequent silence of at least the twelve people necessary to operate a spaceship of the Ferrando-X class, and possibly many more.

4) Access to Cabinet 14A23546 in Room 319 of the Physical Records Annex in Alexandria, Mars, between the years 2536 and 2548.

5) Access to a Ford field car of the mid-Twenty-third century, and the means and ability to half bury it outside New Houston crater during the stormy two weeks beginning October 2547.

6) The ability to remove fairly large ice boulders from the rings of Saturn without being noticed; this would be easiest for an agent who is a constant presence around Saturn.

7) The tools and equipment with which to cut these ice boulders into the liths of the monument, and place them into position without leaving signs of construction, would have to be available to the builder—as they were not to the Davydov expedition, even granting the latter's existence.

8) The wealth needed to accomplish all of the above.

Other attributes of the agent are implied by the appearance of the megalith:

1) A knowledge of the megalithic cultures of prehistoric Britain.

2) Some significant connection with the number 2248.

Two weeks after the publication of this short article I received a letter.

18 September 2609

Mr. Edmond Doya

Box 510

Waystation

Dear Mr. Doya:

Please visit me for a talk about matters of mutual interest. I will provide your transportation from Waystation to Saturn and back. If it is convenient to you, Captain Pada of the
Io
can leave Waystation immediately; and if you can stay for a week or ten days (which I urge you to do) she can return you to Waystation by the New Year.

Sincerely,

Caroline Holmes

Saturn Artificial Satellite Four

Saturn looked like a striped basketball in the viewscreen of the
Io.
Five or six of its moons were visible as white crescents. Titan was immediately recognizable because of its size and its atmosphere-fuzzy crescent points; I watched it with the interest one has when seeing an old home.

Captain Pada, a quiet woman I had seldom seen on the voyage to Saturn, pointed above the planet. “See the moving white point? That's her satellite. We'll meet it just below the rings.”

She said
her
with a special emphasis, I noticed. I said, “Does it have a name?”

“No. Just Sas Four.”

Pada left the room. I stayed, and kept the screen locked on Saturn until the knife-edge of the rings began to broaden, and the whole vista became too large for me, in my distraction, to focus on. I found the coordinates for Holmes's satellite, and switched the screen to it.

We were closing on it fast. It was big: a torus spinning slowly, a wheel a kilometer across. A thin crescent on the sunward side was bright with reflected sunlight, and another half of the surface facing me was Saturn-lit, a dusky, burnished yellow. Handrails, locks, and small bays studded or indented the curving metal. There was a small, classically designed observatory sticking out of the hub on the side opposite the dock; its telescope appeared to be trained on Saturn. The spokes connecting hub and wheel looked thin as wire. At regular intervals in the torus itself there were windows, some of them half globes protruding into the vacuum. Many of the rooms behind the windows were lit, and I caught quick glimpses, as we circled it, of red and gold walls, rich brown furnishings, marble busts, a huge crystal chandelier. The total effect was that of a nineteenth-century fantasy, a bathysphere cast by some accident into the wrong time and medium.

The largest of the windows was almost dark—the room behind it was filled with dim, dusky blue light—and someone stood in this window, a black silhouette that appeared to be observing our approach.

Over the intercom Captain Pada called me to the transfer room. We were about to dock.

While crossing the ship I felt the bump of docking, and I stopped for a moment and tried to quell my excitement. Just an old woman, I thought, just a rich old lady. But the old epithets had little effect, and I was nervous as I floated into the transfer room.

The locks were already open. Captain Pada was there, and she shook my hand. “Nice having you aboard,” she said, and waved me forward. I thought this formality a little odd; would the crew of the
Io
stay in their ship for the duration of my visit?

I passed through the docking sleeve and was in Holmes's world. A man dressed in red coat and pants, embroidered with gold, stood at attention before me. He nodded. “My name is Charles, Mr. Doya. Welcome to Sas Four. I'll show you your rooms and you can arrange your belongings. Caroline will receive you after that.”

He took off with a neat leap and I hurried after him. We dropped down a hall with clear walls, in which terrestrial seashells were embedded; again I thought of the bathysphere. Another hall perpendicular to that one enabled us to walk, in light gravity, and I deduced we were in the torus itself. This hallway did indeed curve always upward, and after a short walk Charles opened the door to a room off the hall.

The room we entered was walled with reddish Persian rugs, and the ceiling and floors were a light wood. The floor was on several levels, with broad steps separating them.

“This is your room,” said Charles. “That control panel over there will provide whatever furniture you need—wardrobe, bed, screens, desk, chairs. The robots will obey you.” He indicated two boxes on wheels.

“Thank you.”

Charles left, somewhat to my surprise. But I assumed he would return soon, and went to the control panel, which was behind a wall tapestry. I pushed
Bed.
A circular section of floor slid away and a circular bed rose. I traversed the room to it, flopped down, and waited for my things to arrive. And wondered what I would say to Holmes. My stay on her satellite was going to be conducted entirely on her terms, I was beginning to see; and that frightened me a little. Once again I pondered without success her purposes, her motivation in all this. Icehenge and the Davydov explanation were such an
elaborate
hoax.… It occurred to me that if I were correct, and Holmes had manufactured all the parts of the story that Nederland and the
Persephone
expedition had between them discovered—and everything that had happened recently reinforced my conviction that I
was
correct—then I was soon going to meet the author of Emma Weil's journal. I would be confronting the mind that had created that story that had so enthralled me as a boy—so in a sense I would be meeting Emma Weil. But what an odd way to think of it, given what I now knew! I shook my head, and muttered to myself something that I had said more than once in the seminar: “A hoax is a curious thing.”

*   *   *

I sat on the bed and waited—lying down to nap more than once—for what seemed like hours. There was no way to measure the passage of time in the room; there were no buttons on the control panel labelled
clock.
Presumably I could call somebody on the intercom, but I didn't know whom. Eventually I got hungry, and that, combined with growing irritation, drove me into the hallways. I decided to find my way back to the docking bay; my hope, though there was not much to support it, was that Charles would be there. Or somebody.