Icehenge (38 page)

“So where is it?” said Jones to one of the crew. She pointed out Pluto, just ahead of Aries. It was about second magnitude, and there beside it was Charon, barely visible. Jones lifted his drink bulb to it, and cried, “You're right! There's Icehenge, I see it right there on top!”

Later, after we had danced to exhaustion (and a number of bruises, because deceleration gee wasn't all that strong), Jones and I hunkered over to one of the corner tables. I was pretty drunk, and ideas swirled dizzily in my head. “I've been writing a lot of this down, Jones. A sort of journal.” He nodded and snapped a capsule under his nose. “Sometimes—sometimes it seems to me that what I'm writing is the sequel to Emma Weil's journal—which I'm certain was written by Caroline Holmes.”

“Umph,” Jones said.

“I'm
certain
of it,” I said, interpreting his grunt of doubt accurately. “If you had seen Holmes like I saw her during my visit, you'd know what I meant. When I told her I had found the Icehenge model.…”

“Umph.” But that one meant understanding. I had described my stay at Holmes's to Jones in great detail, and now with some big sniffs he nodded.

“And my story—my story tells of a voyage to Pluto, which is exactly what Emma said was going to happen. And this voyage is being paid for by Holmes! Sometimes, I tell you, that old woman looks very much in control of things out here … sometimes I wonder how much of it she may have planned, and what she has in store for us out there.…”

“Who knows?” said Jones. “There are so many influences on our lives that we don't control—you might as well not worry about another one that you may be making up. Right? Whatever happens on Pluto, I'm looking forward to it. I'm anxious to get there. We are close, you know.” Dramatically he pointed at the screen. “I can see those ice towers! I can!”

*   *   *

And then we were there. We were there, circling the ninth planet. When the orbit was established Dr. Lhotse gave the orders and we rushed into the LVs, burst out of the bays of the
Snowflake
and fell in long arcs onto the cratered polar plain, settling with a gentle last bump like little crystals of the mother flake. I felt solid and substantial, heavier than I had in years and years. The dust thrown up by our landing cleared and off beyond the glare-white area under the spotlights I saw a horizon almost flat. The flattest horizon I had ever seen. “This is the biggest thing I ever stood on,” I said aloud, though in the scramble for suits no one heard me. “I'm on a planet. First planet I ever stood on, and it's
Pluto.
” Something in the thought was odd and distressing, and by the time I shook it off all the suits had been claimed. “Hey!” I shouted. “Someone give me one of those—I'm the one who got you out here!” But they all ignored me or pretended not to hear me or counted on someone else to oblige me, and in three great noisy charges they crushed into the lock and were spewed onto the surface. I was left to fume and leap around the main room cursing and fizzling with a few others, until Arthur Grosjean (who had seen the megalith before, and, I think, was doing me a favor) returned early and gave me his suit. “Thanks, Arthur,” I babbled, “I really appreciate it,” and the static shocks jumped between us as he helped the suit onto me—and then I was into the lock, and through, and stumbling onto the surface. I started to run and immediately fell full-length into the gravel. It made me laugh, because I knew then that the rocks were real, that I was really there.

The dust we had thrown up in our landing served to hold a little of the light from our searchlights, and so there was a faint glow in the sky to show me where the megalith was, as well as a wide road of footprints. Some of them were no doubt footprints from the
Persephone
's people, perfectly sharp-edged after more than sixty years. I broke into a trot, keeping my eyes on the smooth horizon to the north, and damned if I didn't trip and fall again.

I got up and ran, kicked my own heel and fell. Sitting there on Pluto's gravelly, dusty surface, I looked north and saw the very tops of the liths, rising just behind a low hill. The sun was off to my right, a dazzling morning star just a few degrees over the horizon. On their eastern sides the liths were patches of gleaming white; to the west they were barely visible black shadows.

I was shivering, as if I could feel through my suit a touch of Pluto's cold, only seventy degrees above the absolute zero of total stillness. I got up and walked with a long slow stride, as if I were in a parade. Icehenge, Icehenge, Icehenge, Icehenge, Icehenge. Every step brought more of it over the horizon to me, until I topped the low mound and it was all there, the whole ring, silent and expansive on the plain before me.

The little human figures were standing in groups inside the giant circle, or bounding about from lith to lith, and to my surprise I appreciated their presence very much. I turned on my intercom and heard them all talking at once so that not one of them could have understood anything, and it made me laugh. They were so small—one of them stood by the Fallen Lith, and even he appeared insignificantly short. Exhilarated, I continued my march down the slope to it, humming
bum, bom, bum, bom, bum, bom.

I passed between two liths. Looking down the curving row of columns I saw that they were much more irregularly placed than they had ever seemed in holograms. Just the act of transmitting and imaging them had somehow given their ensemble more order. Here, in reality, their placement seemed jumbled, the work of an alien intelligence. The ring was huge, monstrous; the area encircled by the white beams was a giant field! It took a while to walk to the center of it. There, in a circle trodden smooth by prints, was the plaque left there by Nederland's Martian expedition. I ignored the plaque and looked around. The ring was a rough circle—I couldn't perceive the flattened side to the “north,” for the different dimensions of each lith, and the varying angles of placement, created an irregular display of white and black parallelograms that were hard to get in perspective. Most of the western liths gleamed in the sun, though some were darkened by the endless shadows cast by the liths to the east. The eastern liths themselves were black cutouts against the starry sky, except for a few that caught the reflected light from some more westerly lith, and gleamed dully. To the north the Six Great Liths stood like a huge curving line of towers; yet the jagged arc of small liths near the fallen one seemed not much shorter, though the shortest ones were all there.

Groups of people approached me, and I shook hands with everyone before they headed back. We all chattered happily, saying nothing yet conveying just what we wanted to. Then they were all off over the low rise to the south, to the landing vehicles. The last figure approached; by his height and gait I already had identified him as Jones. “Hey, Theophilus,” I said. “Here we are.” He extended his arm and we shook hands. Through his faceplate I saw his bright eyes, and a wide grin. He drew me toward him and hugged me, and then, without a word, he turned and left.

I was alone at Icehenge.

*   *   *

I sat down and let the feeling saturate me. All my life I had wanted to be here, and now I was. A pebble held between gloved fingers resisted all the pressure I could put on it. Yes, I was really here. No hologram this. I could hardly believe it.

The ring was roughly contiguous with a very old, subdued crater, so that some of the liths stood on low knobs or prominences of the almost-buried rim. It made for a very beautiful effect: each lith appeared to be “placed” with the utmost of care, in the spot perfectly appropriate for it. This impression co-existed with the obvious irregularity of the ring, in that liths were bunched together in groups of four or five or six, placed markedly out of line, placed so that their broad smooth faces pointed at every direction of the compass.… And the combination, I thought, was wonderful.

I stood and walked over to the Inscription Lith. The words and the 2-2-4-8 slashes were deeply incised in the surface, and as the sunlight slanted across the ice the words were easy to read. I imagined the megalith's discoverer Seth Cereson, staring up at that alien-looking script. To move, to push farther out; to cause to set out towards. It was a good motto. My father's remark came back to me: It's a wonder they didn't all sign their names. So true, I thought. If the Davydov expedition had built the monument, why hadn't they said so? It only made sense if they identified themselves, it seemed to me. Wasn't this message an obvious attempt to be enigmatic, so that its goal was a clear ambiguity?

Continuing around the circumference of the ring, I touched my glove lightly to the sharp edge of one of the triangular liths, then walked into the field of broken ice boulders that was the Fallen Lith. Here every crack and splinter of ice looked absolutely fresh, in places as sharp as chipped obsidian. Ice at seventy degrees Kelvin is terrifically hard and brittle, and whatever hit it—meteor, construction tool, we would no doubt find out in the next few weeks—had shattered it into scores of cracked pieces, which had fallen to the inside of the ring. Looking through a clearish pane of ice (sort of like Holmes's wall of wavy glass), I thought that the cracking looked very recent. It was true that ice sublimed very slowly at this low temperature, but it did sublime; yet I could see nothing but those fine obsidian edges. I wondered what the scientists would make of it.

Then I continued my circumference hike, skipping in places, and using the arc of liths as a slalom course in others, just as I would have done if I had truly been at the megalith back on my eleventh birthday. From every vantage point I saw a different Icehenge, as the play of sunlight and deep shadow shifted; when I noticed this each step brought me a new megalith, and jubilantly I circled the ring again and again, until I was too exhausted to skip, and had to sit on a waist-high block of the Fallen Lith. I was here.

*   *   *

Over the next week or two the various teams established their pattern of investigation. Those working on the ice spent a good deal of their time in the landing vehicles' laboratories. Dr. Hood and his team worked to determine what kind of cutting tool had shaped the liths. Bachan Nimit and his people from Ganymede were following a new line of inquiry that I thought held promise; they were looking at pieces of the Fallen Lith in hopes of finding out if as many micrometeors had hit the hidden underside of the fragments as had hit the exposed surfaces.

But the most visible, and it seemed the most energetic, team was Brinston's excavation group. Brinston was showing himself to be extremely competent and well organized, to no one's surprise. The day after we arrived he had his people out laying down the gridwork, and quickly they were making the preliminary line digs. He spent long hours at the site, moving from trench to trench, inspecting what was revealed, consulting and giving instructions. In conversations he was confident. “The substructure of the megalith will explain it,” he said. At the same time he warned us against expecting any immediate information: “Digging is slow work—even with as simple a situation as this, one has to be very careful not to tear up the evidence one is looking for, which in this case is something as delicate as the marks of a previous excavation and fill, in regolith no less.…” He would talk on endlessly about the various aspects of his task, and I would leave him nearly as convinced as he that he would solve the mystery.

*   *   *

The teams established a common working period that they called “day,” and during this time the site swarmed with busy figures. Outside these times the landscape emptied.

I had no specific work to do, I was uncomfortably aware of that. The investigation I had stimulated was being made, by professionals competent to the task. There was nothing left for me but to witness what they found. So I quickly took to visiting the monument in the off hours. Those few who stayed, or returned to visit, soon became still, contemplative figures, and we didn't bother each other.

At those times, wandering among the massive blocks in a vast silence, the abandoned equipment and all the trenches and mounds gave it the look of a work in progress, a work of giants left unfinished for unknown reasons … leaving the skeleton or framework of something larger. I sat at the center point of the ring for hours, and learned the various aspects it presented at different times of the Plutonian day. It was spring in the northern hemisphere—coldest, longest spring under the sun—and the sun stayed just over the horizon all the time. It took nearly a week for Pluto to spin around, for the sun to circle our horizon; and even at that slow speed I could see the movement of light and shadow, if I watched long enough, creating a different Icehenge at every moment, just as when I had run around it that first day; only this time I was still, and it was the planet that moved.

*   *   *

Near the center of the ring was the memorial plaque left by Nederland's expedition. A block of brecciated rock had been hauled into the old crater, and its top had been cut flat and covered by a platinum plaque.

This Marker Has Been Placed Here

To Honor the Members of the

MARS STARSHIP ASSOCIATION

Who Built This Monument Soon After the Year

2248 A.D.

To Commemorate the Martian Revolution of 2248

And To Mark Their Departure From the Solar System.

There Will Never Come An End to the Good That They Have Done.

Staring at this oddity I tried to sort it all out in my mind. Apparently those three asteroid miners
had
disappeared in the years before the Martian revolution; it was a fact documented in a variety of times and places. So the three ships had disappeared, yes. But almost anything might have happened to them. And since the documents—some of them—concerning their disappearance had been released in the early 2500s, Holmes could have found out about them, and decided then to explain her monument as an artifact left by those miners … thus creating an attractive tale of successful resistance against the Martian oligarchy and its police state, and recovering a victory from the unmitigated defeat of the failed revolt. This gave the hoaxer a motive beyond that of mere mystification … and it was the kind of story people liked to believe.