Icehenge (35 page)

I came to the hallway that led up to the hub, the one with the clear walls and the hundreds of seashells. As I pulled myself up it using a brass railing that extended from one wall, I could see a wavery dark image moving up the hall with me, which I thought to be my reflection. But when I stopped for a moment to inspect a huge nautilus, the form continued to move. Surprised, I caught up with it and pressed my face against the glass, but its thickness, and some ripples in it, reduced the image on the other side to a brown blob. The blob, however, had stopped across from me. Perhaps it was pressed to the glass also, trying to see me. It appeared to be wearing dark green—hair perhaps gray. It moved again, in the same direction, and I followed it up until the wall changed from glass to teak, and the figure disappeared.

Almost simultaneously with this disappearance there was a click, below me in my hallway. I looked down, on a head of gray hair, a woman wearing a dark green jumpsuit … a silver ring on her left ring finger tapped against the railing as she pulled herself up. Confused, I pressed my face to the last section of clear wall, looking for the figure I had been following.

The woman pulled up beside me, and I looked over at her. I am afraid my mouth was still hanging open a bit with my surprise at this strange “teleporting” that I seemed to have witnessed. Then again the woman—it was Caroline Holmes—looked just a trifle surprised herself. I don't look much like a scientist, I suppose—I let my hair do what it wants, and that plus my face got me called the Wild Man on Waystation—and so I had seen this look once or twice before, and recognized it.

But quickly it was gone. “Hello,” she said, in a well modulated alto voice. She was tall, and her gray hair was tied back in a single knot and then let loose over her back. Under the jumpsuit she appeared thin. Her face was handsome in a severe sort of way: deeply lined and aged, slightly tanned, with the finest of silky hairs just visible on her cheeks and upper lip. The line of her jaw and nose were sharply defined, giving her an ascetic look. Her eyes were brown. It was a hard face, marked by centuries of—who knows what?—and seeing it made me swallow involuntarily, aware of what I was up against.

“It's good to meet you,” she went on. “I've been reading your articles with interest.”

First probe. “I'm glad,” I said, and searched for more words, stupidly fumbling in a moment I had imagined many times. “Hello.”

She said, “Why don't we go to one of the observation rooms and have some food sent there.”

“Fine.”

She let go of the railing, and drifted down the hallway to the main hall of the torus, where she led me. She had a long stride, one that revealed bare feet.

We left the hall and stepped down a broad spiral staircase into a large dim room, which was walled and ceilinged with wood. The floor was clear; it was one of the windows I had seen while approaching. To one side of it Saturn shone like a lamp globe. It was our only illumination. There were couches arranged in a small square near the middle of the room. Holmes sat on one, leaned forward, and looked down at the planet. She appeared to have forgotten me. I sat down on the couch opposite her, and looked down.

We were over one of the poles, looking at Saturn and its rings from a perspective none of its natural satellites ever had. The latitude bands marking the planet (half of it was dark, though slightly illuminated by light reflected from the rings) were light greens and yellows, with streaks of orange. Seen from above they were full semicircles; bright cream in the equatorial bands, yellow in the higher latitudes, dusky green at the pole.

Outside the planet were the rings, scores of them, all of them perfectly smooth and circular, as if drawn with a compass, except for three or four braided sets that were not so smooth. The entire sight reminded me of a dartboard: the pole was the bull's-eye, the rings the outermost circles; but it was impossible to imagine Saturn flat, because of its dark side and its shadow erasing the rings behind it; so that it seemed a dartboard with an odd hemispherical center.

This uncanny sight filled one whole side of our floor-window. Around it a few bright stars gleamed, and seven of Saturn's moons were visible, all of them perfectly aligned half moons. As we sat there like statues and watched, the scene shifted perceptibly. Saturn's shadow on the rings appeared to shorten, the moons were becoming crescents, the rings were tilting and becoming huge ellipses; and all slowly, very slowly, as in some inhuman, natural dance.

“Always the same but always different,” I said.

After a long pause, she said, “The landscape of the mind.” I became aware of the profound silence in which we were speaking. “There are more beautiful places on Terra, but none that are so sublime.”

I know about your trip to Terra, I thought. And then I looked at her face and thought again. There were the centuries, written across it—and what could I say I really knew of her? She might have visited Terra a dozen times.

“Perhaps,” I said, “that is because space itself has many attributes of sublimity: vastness, simplicity, mystery, that which causes terror.…”

“These exist only in the mind, you must remember that. But space provides much that reminds the mind of itself, yes.”

I considered it. “Do you really think that if we did not exist, Saturn would not be sublime?”

I thought she wasn't going to answer. The silence stretched on, for a minute and more. Then: “Who would know it?”

“So it is the knowing,” I said.

She nodded. “To know is sublime.”

And I thought, that is true. I agree with that. But …

She sat back and looked across at me. “Would you like to eat?”

“Yes.”

“Alaskan king crab?”

“That would be fine.”

She turned and called out, “We'll have dinner in twenty minutes,” to the empty room.

A small tray covered with crackers and blocks of cheese slid out of a new aperture in her couch. I blinked. A bottle of wine and two glasses were presented on individual glass trays. She poured wine and drank in silence. We leaned forward to look at the planet. In the odd illumination—dusky yellow light, from below—her eye-sockets were in shadow, and appeared very deep; the lines in her face seemed chiseled by ages of suffering. To my relief the meal was brought in by Charles, and we leaned back to attend to it. Below us Saturn and its billion satellites still wheeled, a stately art deco lamp.

After the meal Charles took away our dishes and utensils. Holmes shifted on her couch and stared down at the planet with an intensity that completely discouraged interruption. Between watching Holmes and Saturn I was kept busy enough; but the longer the silence continued, the more disconcerted I became.

Holmes remained in her contemplation until the ringed ball was nearly out of our floor window, and the light in the room was a murky brown. Then she stood and said, “Good night,” in a companionable tone, as if this were a routine we had established through years and years of dining together—and she walked out of the room. I stood, filled with confusion. What could I say? I looked down at the stars for quite some time, then I made my way without difficulty back to my room.

*   *   *

When I awoke the next morning I felt sure I had slept for an uncommonly long time. I showered in water as cold as I could stand, disturbed by dreams I couldn't remember.

Apparently I was being left to my own devices again. After a long wait on my bed, wondering if I should be annoyed as I felt, I went to the control panel and called every destination on the intercom. No replies. I couldn't even find out what time it was.

Remembering the previous night, I left my room and ventured into the hallway again. If I had never left my room, I wondered, would I ever have met Holmes?

Today she wasn't in the room we had dined in, or behind the seashell wall. I circled the satellite entirely, checking room after empty room, and becoming slightly disoriented, as the central hallway of the torus often disappeared into short mazes of multiplicity. Quite a few doors on every level were locked. The silence on board—actually a pervasive, soft, electric
whirrr
—began to bother me.

I took an elevator up one of the spokes to the observatory in the hub, and tried the door; to my surprise it opened. Inside I heard a voice. I entered the weightless room and found it a tall cylindrical chamber, with a domed ceiling. The telescope, a long shiny silver and white thing, extended from a vertical strip in the curved ceiling to the center of the chamber, where a crow's-nest arrangement with a leather and brass chair was welded to it.

Holmes stood behind that chair, leaning over it to look into the mask of the eyepiece. Every few seconds she called out a string of figures, her voice vibrant with intensity. Charles, seated at a console in the wall of the chamber (still in his red and gold), tapped at a keyboard and occasionally quoted a set of numbers back to Holmes. I pulled myself down the bannister of a short staircase into the room.

Holmes looked up, startled, and saw me. She nodded, said “Mr. Doya” in greeting, looked back into the eyepiece. She pulled away again and stared down at me; I was braced against a platform railing a meter or two below her. “So you think I built Icehenge, eh, Mr. Doya?”

And then she looked into the telescope again. I stared up at her, at a loss. She read off another string of figures, sounding as vitally interested as she had when I entered the room. Finally she called to Charles, “Lock it on the inside limit of ring forty-six, please,” and turned on me again.

“I've been reading your articles,” she said. “I've been a student of the Icehenge controversy for a long time.”

“Have you,” I managed to say.

“Yes, I have. I followed it from the beginning. In your last article in
Shards
I can see you are implicating me, and I want to know why.”

I looked away from her, over at Charles, down at the end of the telescope. Adrenaline flushed through me, preparing me for flight, but not for conversation.

Finally I raised my eyes to meet hers, and decided not to say anything. A staredown developed; I could have laughed, but it was too serious.

“Who
are
you?” she said irritably.

I shrugged. “A dishwasher.”

“And I am a suspect in your little investigation? You can admit that much?”

“… You are a suspect, Ms. Holmes.”

She smiled. And leaned over to stare into the damned telescope again. I crossed my arms over my chest, feeling completely confused.

“Have you lived on Waystation long?” she asked.

“Not long.”

“And where did you come from?”

I tried to pull myself together and make a coherent story of my past—a difficult task under the best of circumstances—but my distraction must have been obvious.

Holmes cut me off. “Would you like to retire now, and continue this conversation later?”

Upon reflection I agreed that I would, and I left hastily, remembering as I returned to my room the calm smile she had given me when I told her she was a suspect. So strange! What did she want of me? I called up my bed and collapsed on it, and lay pondering her purposes, more than a little fearful. Much later one of the robots brought me a meal, and I picked at it. Afterwards, though I was sure I never would, I fell asleep.

*   *   *

“Tell me,” demanded Holmes, “is it true that Hjalmar Nederland is your great-grandfather?” Her face loomed over me.

I didn't want to answer. “Yes.”

“How odd,” she said. Her hair was arranged on her head in a complex knot (like my mother used to have it). She was wearing earrings, three or four to an ear, and her eyebrows had been plucked to thin black arches. She was looking out a window, at the sun.

“Odd?” I said, though I did not want to say anything.

“Yes,” she said, annoyance lacing her voice. “
Odd.
All this marvelous work that you've done. If your theory is accepted, then Nederland's theory—his lifework—will be destroyed.”

Her glare was fierce, and I had to struggle to reply. “But even if his theory was wrong,” I said, “his work was still necessary. It is always that way in science. His work is still good work.”

Her face was close to mine. “Would Nederland agree?” she cried. She pointed a finger at me. “Or are you just lying to yourself, trying to hide what will really happen?”

“No!” I said, and weakly tried to strike back at her: “It's your fault, anyway!”

“So you say,” she sneered. “But you know it's your fault. It's
your fault,
” she shouted, looming over me, her face inches from mine. “
You
are the one destroying him, him and Icehenge as well,
you
—”

A noise. I twisted around in my bed, looked down at my pillow, realized I was dreaming. My heart was hammering. I rubbed my eyes and looked up—

Holmes was standing over me, looking down at me with clinical interest (hair piled on top of her head)—

I jerked up into a sitting position, and she disappeared. Nobody there.

I tossed the bedsheets aside and leaped out of bed. I hurried to the door; it was locked on the inside, though I couldn't remember locking it. In fact I was sure I hadn't. The dark room reeked of sweat, it was filled with shadows. I ran to the control panel and switched on all the lights in the room. It blazed, white streaks everywhere on the polished wood. It was empty. I stood there for a long time, waiting for heartbeat and breathing to slow. I walked over and lifted the covers to search beneath the bed. Nothing there but a platform flush with the floor. The image I had seen over me, I thought, could have been a hologram. I began circling the room, inspecting the wood for apertures.

But the dream. Did she have a machine that created images within the mind, as a holograph created them without?