Icehenge (40 page)

“Bring up some more rope,” ordered Lhotse. “Something we can use for belay swings, and some of those expanding trench rods. If we used crampons we'd kick the lith down before we cut even a scratch in this stuff.” The block was lowered, the ropes brought up, and we were tied into torso slings, and given lamps. Lhotse climbed in and said, “Let me down slowly.” I followed him in, breathing rapidly. Jones hung above me like a spider.

The walls of the shaft were slick-looking under our bright lights. We inspected the ice as we pushed off and descended, pushed off and descended.

Lhotse looked up. “You probably should wait till I get to the bottom.” The people at the top of the ladder heard him and Jones and I slowed. Lhotse dropped away swiftly.

The descent lasted a long time. Our lamps made the ice around us gleam, but above and below us it was black. The ice changed to dark, smoothly cut rock. We were underground.

Finally we hit a gravelly floor. Lhotse was waiting, crouched in the end of a tunnel that—I struggled to keep oriented—extended away from the ring, therefore northward. It descended at a slight slope. Ahead lay pitch blackness.

“Send another person down to this point for a radio relay,” said Lhotse, and then, holding his lamp ahead of him, he hurried down the tunnel.

Jones and I stayed close behind him. We walked for a long time, down the bottom of a cylindrical tunnel. Except for the fact that the walls were rock—solid basalt, the tunnel had been bored through it—it might have been a sewer pipe. I was shivering uncontrollably, colder than ever. Jones kept stumbling over me, ducking his head at imaginary low points.

Lhotse stopped. Looking past him I could see a blue glow. I rounded him and ran.

Suddenly the tunnel opened up, and I was in a chamber, a blue chamber. A cobalt blue chamber! It was an ovoid, like the inside of a chicken's egg, about ten meters high and seven across. As Lhotse's lamp swung unnoticed in his hand, streaks and points of red light gleamed from within the surface of the blue walls. It was like a blue glass, or a ceramic glaze. I reached out and ran a gloved hand over it; it was a glassy but lumpy surface. The points and lines of dark red came from chips under the surface.… Lhotse raised his lamp to head level and rotated slowly, looking up at the curved ceiling of the chamber. His voice barely stimulated the intercom. “What is this.…”

I shook my head, sat down and leaned back against the blue wall, overwhelmed.

“Who put this here?” Lhotse asked.

“Not Davydov,” I said. “There's no way they could have put this under here.”

“Nor Holmes neither,” suggested Jones.

Lhotse waved his lamp, and red points sparked. “Let's discuss it later.”

So we stood, and sat, in silence, and watched the blue walls corruscate with red. The constantly shifting patterns created the illusion of extended space, the room seemed to grow larger even as we watched.… I felt fear, fear of Holmes, fear that I had been in her power. Who was she, to have created this? Could she have?

Questions, doubts, thought receded, and the three of us remained mesmerized by light.

After a time white flashes from the tunnel, and voices on the intercom, snapped us awake. Our air was low. Several others were coming down the tunnel, crowding into the chamber, and we moved out so they could see and marvel freely.

Jones, through his faceplate, looked stunned. His mouth was open. As we trudged slowly back up the sloping tunnel, he was shaking his head, and I could hear his deep voice, muttering, “… Strange blue glass under lith … star chamber, red light … a space … underground.”

Then they hauled us up the long narrow shaft of the hollow lith. I stood on the rim at the top, and looked up, up to the great blanket of stars.

*   *   *

It gave the scientists a lot more to work on.

They soon reported that the chamber was directly under the pole—that is, the pole passed directly through the chamber. The walls were covered by a ceramic glaze, fired onto the bedrock.

Dr. Hood and his team soon discovered traces of the drill bits used to bore out the tunnel in the bedrock—tiny smears of metal, of an alloy exactly like that used for the bits of a boring machine designed to cut tunnels through asteroids. The machine had been first produced in 2514 … by Caroline Holmes's Jupiter Metals.

And Brinston was ecstatic. “Ceramic!” he cried. “Ceramic! When they fired that glass up to melting temperature, they started up a clock. They put a date on it as clear as those marks on the Inscription Lith—with no chance of lying, either.”

It turned out that thermoluminescence measurement was a method that had been used to date terrestrial pottery for centuries. Samples of the ceramic are heated to firing temperatures, and the amount of light released by them is a measure of the total dose of radiation to which the ceramic has been exposed since the last previous heating. The technique can determine age—even over short periods of time—with an accuracy of plus or minus ten percent.

After a week Brinston triumphantly released the results of the tests. The Blue Chamber was eighty years old. “We've got her!” Brinston cried. “It was Holmes! Doya, you were right. I don't know why she did it, or how she did all of it, but I know she did it.”

*   *   *

The reporters had a field day. Icehenge was once again a nine-day wonder. This time the scoop was that it was a modern hoax. Speculation was endless, but Holmes was named most often, by more people than she could ever sue—or destroy. They called this the Holmes explanation—or Doya's Theory.

I sat around the site.

One day I heard that Nederland had been interviewed on the holonews. Several hours later I went down to the holo room and ran the scene through. I couldn't help it.

It wasn't at the usual Planetary Survey press conference room. As the scene appeared, Nederland was leaving a building, and a group of reporters circled him, trapped him against the side of the building.

“Professor Nederland, what do you think of the new developments on Pluto?”

“They're very interesting.” He looked resigned to the questioning.

“Do you still support the Davydov theory?”

His jaw muscles tightened. “I do.” The wind ruffled his hair, left tufts of it poking out.

“What about—But what about—What about the fact that a twenty-sixth century drill bit was used to bury the Blue Egg?”

“I think there may be some other explanation for those deposits … for instance—”

“What about the thermoluminescence dating?”

“The ceramic measured was buried too deep for the method to work,” he snapped.

“What about the alleged inauthenticity of the Weil journal?”

“I don't believe that,” he said. “Emma's journal is genuine—”

“What's your proof? What's your proof?”

Nederland looked down at his feet, shook his head. He looked up, and there were deep lines around his mouth. “I must go home now,” he said, and then repeated it in such a low voice the microphones barely caught it: “I must go home now.…” Then, in his full voice, “I'll answer all these questions later.” He turned and made his way through them, head down, and twisted to avoid a reporter's grasp, and as he did so I saw his lowered face, and it looked haggard, exhausted, and I slammed the holo off and made my way blindly to the door, struck it with my hand, “Damn it,” I said, “damn it, why aren't you dead!”

*   *   *

The day before we were to leave, a bulletin came in from Waystation. A group there at the Institute—led by my old student April—had presented a new solution. They agreed that it was a modern construct, but contended that it was put up by Commodore Ehrung and her crew, right after they arrived on Pluto, and just before they “discovered” it. The group had a whole case worked up, showing how both Davydov
and
Holmes were red herrings, planted by Ehrung's people.…

“That's absurd!” I cried, and laughed harshly. “There's a dozen reasons why that can't be true, including everything that Brinston just found!” Nevertheless I was furious, and though I laughed again to hide it as I left the room, the people there stared at me as if I had kicked the holo projector.

*   *   *

Later I walked out to the site. The henge was gleaming in the washed-out clarity of Pluto's day. It looked unchanged by all our new discoveries; it was just the same, obscure and strange, a sight to make me shiver.

Jones was out there. He had taken to spending almost all of his time at the site; I had even chanced upon him lying between two pieces of the Fallen Lith, fast asleep. For days he hadn't spoken to anyone, not even—or especially not—to me. Brahms coursed through his intercom all the time, nothing else.

This time—our last hours on Pluto—he sat near the little boulder at the center. I walked up to him, sat down beside him. Nederland's memorial plate lay buried under my stack of pebbles; I couldn't bear to look at it. The sight of the Six Great Liths (one shackled with ladders) left me numb.

We sat in silence for a long, long time. Eventually I switched to a private band and nudged him to do the same.

“Did you hear about the new theory from Waystation?”

He shook his head. I told him about it.

Again he shook his head. “That isn't right. I've gotten to know Arthur Grosjean pretty well, and he would never be a party to something like that. It won't wash.”

“No.… That won't keep people from believing it, though.”

“No. But I've heard a better one than that.”

“You have?”

He nodded. “Say the Mars Starship Association really existed. Davydov, Weil, the whole group. They hijacked those asteroid miners, got a starship built, sent Emma and the rest back to Mars. Emma escaped from the police, hid in the chaos for a certain number of years. Then she decided she wanted back into the world. She concocted a new identity—maybe she got her father to take a new identity, too, to give her story a back-up. She went out to the Jovian system, made her fortune in mining and life-support systems. Then she got curious to see if Davydov's ship had left a monument on Pluto, as he had hoped they would, and she went out to look. But the starship people were in a hurry, and worried about the Martian police—they couldn't take the time, and there wasn't anything there, on Pluto. So Emma decided to build it for them. Then how could she show the world who it was really for, without revealing herself? She took the journal she had written so many years before, planted it outside New Houston. Planted Davydov's records in the archives. She slipped the truth back into the world, just as if it were a lie—because she herself was the lie, you see?”

“So Caroline Holmes is.…”

“Or Emma Weil is Caroline Holmes, yes.”

I shook my head. “They don't look anything alike.”

“Looks can be changed. Looks, fingerprints, voice prints, retinal prints—they all can be changed. And the last pictures of Emma were taken before she was eighty. People change. If you saw pictures of me at eighty you wouldn't believe it.”

“But it won't work. Holmes has been well documented all her life, almost. You can't make up a whole past like that, not a really public one.”

“I'm not so sure. We live a long, long time. What happened two, three, four hundred years ago—it isn't easy to be sure about that.”

“I don't know, Jones. An awful lot survives.” I shook my head, tired of it all. “You're just adding an unnecessary complication. No, Caroline Holmes did it.
Something
happened to her … I just don't know what it was.” Still, Jones's idea: “But I can see why you would like the idea. Who gave it to you, now?”

“Why, you did!” he said, leaning back to peer down at me with mock surprise. “Isn't that what you were telling me just before planetfall, when we got drunk with the crew?”

“No! For God's sake, Jones. You just made that whole thing up.”

“No, no, you told me about it. You may have been too drunk to remember it.”

“The hell I was. I know what I've said about Icehenge, and that's for sure. You made that up.”

“Well, whatever. But I bet it's true.”

“Uhn. What's that, your fifteenth theory of the origins of Icehenge?”

“Well, I don't know. Let me count—”

“Enough, Jones! Please. Enough.”

I sat there, utterly discouraged. The memorial boulder before us mocked me; I stood, kicked it with a toe.

“Hey! Watch out, there.”

I swung at my stack of pebbles and knocked them flying out over the dust. Hands trembling I removed the remaining stones, dropping them randomly. When the plaque was clear I ran my fingers between the letters until all the dust was gone. I looked around at the scattering of pebbles. “Here,” I said. “Help me with these.” Wordlessly he stood, and slowly, carefully, we gathered up all the pebbles and made a small pyramid out of them, a cairn set beside the plaque's boulder. When we were done we stood before it, two men looking down at a pile of stones.

“Jones,” I said, in a conversational tone, though my voice was quavering, I didn't know why, “Jones, what do you think really happened here?”

He chuckled. “You won't give up, will you.… I'm like the rest of us, I suppose, in that I think much as I thought before. I think … that more has occurred at this place than we can understand.”

“And you're content with that?”

He shrugged. “Yes.”

I was shivering, my voice hardly worked. “I just don't know why I did all this!”

After a while: “It's done.” He put his arm around my shoulder. “Come on, Edmond, let's go back. You're tired.” He pulled me around gently. “Let's go back.”

When we got to the low hill between the site and the landing vehicles, we turned and looked at it. Tall white towers against the night.…