Icehenge (37 page)

I was on the third of seven floors, the interior control panel told me. I pushed seven. The doors closed and I felt the beginning of the elevator's drop.

The elevator stopped, the doors opened and I walked out into another passageway. The floors were black tile, the walls and ceiling darkest wood. I walked up and down hallways. Aside from the walls and ceilings, nothing seemed to be different. Rooms I looked into were empty. (Where was Pada and her crew?) I had walked for some time (always staying aware of the location of my elevator), and was starting to feel disappointed, when I rounded yet another corner: there before me I saw a door that seemed to lead into the vacuum of black space; and in the center of that space was Icehenge.

It was small, and as I hurried toward it across a glass floor, I thought it was a holocube standing on a table. Then I saw that it was made instead of actual pieces of ice, standing in a big sphere of glass that rested on a white plastic cylinder.

The room itself was spherical, a tiny planetarium, with a clear bisecting floor. There were stars above and below, and the sun, just a few times brighter than Sirius, was just above floor level. It was Pluto's sky.

The ice liths of the model were nearly transparent, but aside from that it looked like a perfect representation, even down to the little fragments of the Fallen Lith. After a time I circled it slowly, and found an unmarked control console on the other side of the plastic stand.

There were small colored buttons in a row on the console. I pushed a yellow one, and a long narrow beam of yellow laser light appeared in the room. It just touched the top of one of the triangular liths, on the flattened side of the ring, and the top of the shortest lith, on the southeast side.… And aligned like this, the slender cylinder covered the sun and turned it yellow.

The other buttons produced laser beams of different colors, marking the sight lines that certain pairs of liths established. But these sight lines were not there for observers on the surface of Pluto, for they extended across lith tops in both directions into space. And the sight lines would be good for only a certain point in Pluto's orbit—in fact, for only a certain moment in Pluto's history. And one could only see them if an elaborate model such as this were constructed.… It was a private reference, to a single moment. I pushed the other buttons, wondering if there were some way I could figure out what moment that had been. Or would be. Violet was Sirius. Orange was the Pleiades. Green was, I guessed, Pluto's moon Charon. A blue beam extended straight up out of the tallest lith, and defined Kachab, Pluto's pole star. And red, stretching across the two remaining triangular liths, turned Barnard's Star—Davydov's destination—into a Mars-red ruby.

*   *   *

“Mr. Doya?” Holmes was on the intercom again.

“What?” In my dream my father had been telling me a story.

“Captain Pada can leave for Waystation today, if you like.”

“Oh … all right.” All of a sudden I was furious. Sending me off like that!

“Would you join me for breakfast?”

“… Sure. In an hour.”

She wasn't in the dining room—that is, the first room we had eaten in—when I got there, so after a short wait I called the robots in and had them bring me a meal that I ate alone. I looked out at Saturn. It was hard to chew the pastries, because I was grinding my teeth with anger.

When I was done with breakfast, an image of Holmes, seated in a chair, popped into being across from me.

“Excuse me for saying good-bye to you like this,” she said. “You are in a holo field yourself, so we can converse—”

“The hell we can,” I said. “What's the meaning of this? You come out here where I can see you in the flesh!”

“We will talk this way—”

“We will
not
talk this way—”

“Or not at all.”

“That's what you think,” I exclaimed, and ran from the room. Something about it just made me furious. I pulled my way up to the hub and barged into the observatory. Empty. Back in the torus's main hall I began to realize I was going to have a problem confronting her. The satellite was too big—I didn't even know where her quarters were. When a bulkhead-like partition dropped down and blocked off the hallway ahead of me, I knew I was beaten. I returned to the dining room. The image of Holmes still sat in the image of a chair, watching me as I entered.

“What's the meaning of this?” I burst out, and went over and stepped right into the image of her. “Don't you have the nerve to confront me in person?”

“Mr. Doya,” she said icily. Over the intercom her voice rang a bit. “Quit being stupid. I prefer to speak to you this way.”

I stepped back out of her semitransparent image, so that our faces were just a few centimeters apart. “Speak, then,” I said. “Can you see me well enough? Am I looking directly at you? Can you hear me?”

“I hear you all too well. Let me speak. I want you to understand that my desire not to be associated with Icehenge is very serious.”

“You shouldn't have built it, then.”

“I didn't.”

“You did,” I said, and hoped my image's eyes met hers. “You built it and then built the false explanation that went with it—and all for naught! All for naught.” I swung a hand through her head, then tried to control myself. “Why did you do it? With all that money, Ms. Holmes, why did you build nothing but a hoax? Why construct nothing but the story of a starship when you could have made it real? You could have done something great,” I said, and my voice hurt in my throat. “And instead you've done nothing but make a fool of an old man on Mars.”

“Not if the Davydov story holds true—”

“But it won't! It hasn't! And the sooner it falls the less foolish he appears.” I turned and walked toward the door, too angry to look at her a moment longer.

“Mr. Doya!”

I stopped, half turned, enough to see she was standing. “Icehenge … was not my idea.”

“Then why is that model of it here in your home?”

A long pause. I walked back to see the image of her face more clearly. Again she smiled, that same mysterious half smile—and in a flash I understood that she had meant me to find it. Perhaps she saw that on my face, perhaps not; her smile shifted, changed character, was marred by trouble—and in one of those subtle shifts of musculature I seemed to recognize someone else in her, someone I had known, or seen—who
was
this woman, anyway? What in God's name did she want? Shocked, disoriented, I lost all sense that I could read her face; emotions were playing across it one after another, that was certain, but what they were I had no idea. I felt the abyss that lies between any two of us gaping under me, and I knew that the image of the face before me, great map of emotion though it was, masked an utter stranger, completely unknown to me; everything that I knew about Caroline Holmes was as nothing when weighed against this feeling.

I shuddered convulsively. “If you analyzed the ice in that model,” I said carefully, “you would find it the same as the ice in the liths on Pluto. They are splinters of the same boulder.”

She stared at me, her face still a mask. “You may think what you like, Mr. Doya,” she said. “But you will never know.” She and her chair disappeared.

Charles opened the door of the room. “The
Io
is ready,” he said. “Your luggage is aboard.”

I followed him to the docking bay, crossed into the
Io.
As I pulled myself to the bridge I felt the
clank
of our disengagement, and realized I was shaking.

The viewscreen in the lounge had an image of the satellite in it. Helplessly I hung before the great wheel and watched, shaking still. For a moment, seeing its windows and rails and the observatory, I thought again of a bathysphere. As we moved away I could see the domed floor, a clear glassine bubble; and inside it the tiny figure of Holmes paced around the dome's perimeter, upside-down as it seemed, watching us. Her purposes, I thought. Had she accomplished them?

I remembered a moment in the journal of Emma Weil. She too had stood before a window, and watched a spaceship depart, just as Holmes now watched me. And I felt like the ghost of Davydov—the ghost of a ghost—leaving behind me everything known, and venturing outward. Suddenly the satellite shrank with great speed, to a white dot over the ringed eldritch ball. And we were on our way.

*   *   *

There was a holo message transmitter on board the
Io.
After a month or so of waiting out the long reach back to Waystation, I went into the transmission room. I was nervous and I had to compose myself before I faced the empty row of chairs that indicated where the audience receiving the message would sit.

“Begin,” I said. The red light in the center chair blinked on.

“Professor Nederland,” I said. “This is Edmond Doya. Our previous interactions have all occurred in the periodicals, but now I want to communicate with you as directly as possible.” I leaned against a table, kicked rhythmically at one of its legs. “The Waystation Institute for Higher Learning is mounting an expedition to Pluto, to make another investigation of Icehenge that will attempt to clear up the present mystery concerning its origins.”

I cleared my throat. That last wouldn't go down too well with him. “I know you believe that there is no mystery concerning its origins. But—” I stopped again, tried to recollect what I was going to say. All of the sentences I had thought of during the previous month jammed together, demanding to be spoken first. I stood and paced back and forth, looking frequently to the red dot that represented my great-grandfather.

“But I think you must admit, having read my work, that there is at least the possibility of a hoax. Certainly the possibility. Yet in the present state of knowledge there is no way of telling who really built the monument, I truly believe that.” So? “So … all of the serious researchers and, and theorists, of Icehenge, will be invited to join the expedition. As the senior and principal theorist your addition to the company would be valued by all.”

Somehow that didn't sound right. I was being too stiff, too artificial; this was an invitation, I wanted to show how I felt. But it was too complex. I just couldn't talk to a chair. Still, I had to try to fix this, or I would have to tape the whole thing again.

“I know that many people have construed my work to be an attack on you. I assure you, Professor Nederland, that isn't true! I admire the work you did, it was a good investigation, and if someone was deliberately misleading the investigation … there was no way for you to know. And I don't agree that believing it a hoax destroys the monument's aesthetic worth. Davydov or not, the megalith is still there. Human beings still constructed it. Emma's story still exists, no matter who wrote it.…”

It was coming out wrong. I couldn't say it. I paced even more rapidly. “Perhaps I am wrong, and Davydov did build Icehenge. If so, then we should be able to prove that on this expedition. I hope you agree to join us. I … bid you farewell. End transmission.”

The red light blinked off.

*   *   *

The following day, at about the same time, the reply arrived. I sat down in the chair with the red dot. The scene appeared, and I blinked while my eyes accommodated the light.

He was sitting behind a Martian Planetary Survey desk, in one of those big luxurious government offices. He looked just as he did in the press conferences: black hair slicked down except in a couple of places, where it was flying out of control; pinched face, chapped cheeks; expensive suit (the latest Martian style), pressed and carefully adjusted. It was the official, pontificating image.

“Mr. Doya,” he said, looking just to my right. I shifted. “We haven't met before, even by means of this illusory medium, yet I am aware that we are related—that I am your great-grandfather. How do you do. I hope we meet in the flesh someday, for I can see we have common interests as well as common blood.” He smiled for a moment, and adjusted a sheet of paper on the desk. “Let me assure you, I understand that your arguments concern archaeology and are not directed against my person.” He moved the paper again, and began tapping it with a forefinger. The corner of his mouth tightened, as if he were about to perform an unpleasant task.

“I disagree with many of the things you said in your invitation. There isn't any evidence in your work sufficient to convince me that the Davydov explanation is not true. So I don't believe an on-site investigation made up of diverse theorists, each attempting to prove his own case, can become anything but a circus. For these reasons I decline your invitation, though I thank you for making it.” He stopped, and appeared to consider what he had just said. He looked down at the paper again, then up, and this time he seemed to be looking directly into my eyes.

“When you say that Emma's story will still exist no matter who wrote it, you imply that it doesn't matter whether Emma's story is true or not. I say it does matter. I think in your heart you agree with that, and there is no reason for you to misrepresent the situation, as if to disguise its meaning. If your theory becomes accepted, I know what that will mean as well as you do.”

He looked down again, made desultory taps with his fingers. “I cannot wish you good luck. End transmission.”

Blackout. I sat there and thought of many things. I thought of Nederland charging around Mars so ferociously in the last century, breaking apart the whole history of the planet with his work; and then of the gray old bureaucrat, lying in press conferences to accomplish a cover-up of his own. And refusing to join an archaeological dig. I thought, he's changed, he's not the man who wrote the books you read when you were a child. I sat in the dark.

*   *   *

We were close, very close. Activity began on the
Snowflake
—like water thawing after a long winter, people began to move in the halls, to meander past each other, scuffing at moss and greeting shyly.… Jones and I escaped the expedition group and went down to the crew's lounge, where they were drinking and sniffing drugs. At the appearance of Jones and me they declared a party, and we all went at it with a will, turning the music up loud and bouncing up and down against the newly returned deceleration gee. There was a viewscreen in the lounge displaying the space we were headed toward—a black square sparkling with stars.