Icehenge

  * * *

  In Burroughs I went to my apartment on campus to store my bags. Kitchen in mahogany and black-green ceramic; living room dominated by a bookcase that extended from floor to ceiling around two walls; a thick silver-gray carpet leading down a skylighted hall to a tiled bathroom the size of the living room, almost; and a bedroom filled by a square bed on a dais. The stupid splendor of the bachelor professor. I couldn’t believe I had had it furnished myself. Who was that Nederland, anyway? No wonder I always wanted to be out on a dig.

  I crossed the big campus yard, muttered, “Tear it all out, leave bare chambers of wood and plaster, books piled up, mattress in the corner.” The yard lay above the city center and I paused near the statue of the Princess to look out at it. My year in New Houston had warped my sense of scale, and the skyscrapers by the river, the bridge of the water district, the broad boulevards like spokes of a bent wheel, radiating out to the higher residential areas on the slopes of Isidis Planitia, all of it seemed fantastically large to me, gigantic beyond the ability of city planners to conceive. An entire basin made into a river valley, a city of four million under the open sky: what would the citizens of New Houston have thought? What would we have thought of it, three hundred years before?… The past was a simpler place (I know that’s wrong). Our minds are formed in our youth, and stay the same no matter how long we live. “Come on, fossil,” I told myself. The Princess looked down on me compassionately. “Stone man, go see this circle of ice men.” Students glanced at me, walked on unconcerned.

  In the department office everything was the same, of course. Lucinda and Corey greeted me and gave me my mail. I have often thought of the department as family: secretaries as aunts and uncles, colleagues as fierce siblings, students as children. How much closer to me were these people than my biological family. Children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, great-great, etc.—I don’t know how far it extends—I had seen none of them in decades. Most of them were in the asteroids, or farther out, where the Outer Satellites Council lets anarchy reign. Blood, when you get right down to it, is not much thicker than water. But here in the familiar offices Lucinda asked how the dig was coming, how Hana and Bill were progressing, what Xhosa’s latest complaint was—and what did I think of this remarkable thing on Pluto? “Alien radio receiver,” I said, and they laughed. That’s family for you.

  My mail was junk, except for a long handwritten letter from my third wife. She was struggling with a funk, and this letter was part of her therapy. It had taken her a month to compose it, and it read like the diary of a zombie. “I took a walk by the canal. The ice was thick and starred by rocks thrown by little boys.” Poor Maggie. I put the letter away to finish another time. She had written boring letters even when she wasn’t in a funk.

  Over in the space center’s big projection room Stallworth, Lewis, Nguyen, and some others I didn’t know were ready and waiting for me. “Roll it,” Nguyen called to the technician.

  Black room. Then over the floor appeared the dark ringed plain I had seen in the little photo. A star-thick night sky appeared against the domed ceiling; the sun was two or three times brighter than Sirius, and lay low on the horizon.

  “Icehenge at its closest is fifty meters from the geographical north pole,” Nguyen said.

  “Icehenge?”

  “That’s what they’re calling it.”

  “A henge is a circular earthen mound,” I objected.

  “The analogy is with Stonehenge,” Nguyen said cheerfully. “Besides, the liths have been set on the rim of a subdued crater, so that they’re a meter or two above the plain. So you can call the rim your henge.”

  “Ridiculous.”

  “So where is it?” Stallworth said. I had worked with him before on dating methods, his specialty.

  “This holo was made by Arthur Grosjean, the chief planetologist on the Persephone. He gives us the same walking approach that they had. Note the jiggling horizon. It’ll appear in front of us. It’s summer in Pluto’s northern hemisphere, so the megalith is in constant sunlight.”

  “Shouldn’t that be megahydor?” I asked caustically.

  “You know what I mean. Quiet, here it comes.”

  But Stallworth said, “This cratering must have spanned billions of years. How did a planet so far away from everything else get so heavily cratered?”

  “There’s no agreement on that,” Lewis said. “One theory is that Pluto was a moon of one of the gas giants, and that after it took the usual heavy bombardment it was cast out to the edge of the system by a near collision.”

  “With what?” Stallworth said.

  “I don’t know. Ask Velikovsky.” Lewis laughed. “Mountjove claims the cratering is fifteen billion years old, and that Pluto is a captive planet from a very early solar system.”

  The horizon was suddenly cracked by a dozen white points, like stars growing to spires of white light. We shut up. The cart that had carried the holo camera jiggled over a submerged crater wall. Soon the entire ring of towers was over the horizon and in our sight. As it came toward us my heart began to flutter painfully. The cart moved between two towers and into the center of the ring. The regolith surface was undisturbed; shouldn’t the construction of the monument have chewed up the area with tracks?

  The average towers were ten to fifteen meters tall, two or three meters wide, and one or two thick; some were much bigger. Three of the liths were triangular in cross-section rather than rectangular. One of the big squarish ones had broken off near its base and fallen in toward the center, shattering into scores of sharp-edged white blocks. The holo camera rolled toward this ruin, and when it stopped I walked over to that side of the chamber and stood waist deep in the mirage of an ice boulder.

  The others chattered to each other about Saturn’s water ice and the stone circles of Neolithic Britain, etc., but I shut my ears to them and looked at the thing. I fell into the illusion of vast space that the holo created, and tried to get a sense of the place.

  “The north pole is beyond the sequence of very large liths,” Nguyen said.

  “Be quiet for a while and let us look,” I said.

  I walked around and looked at it. Someone had had a good sense of form. It was a human construct, I felt sure; it had the look of mind marking cosmos, like the paintings on a cave wall. Sixty-six liths. Distance between them, ten meters or so. Something brushed the edge of memory and I walked away from it, over to where the others were reading the inscription lith. Deeply cut curved calligraphy, and under that the sixteen slashes.

  Was it Stonehenge I was reminded of? No—I had a postcard picture of that in my mind, a little domesticated thing in a protective dome, looking like a piece of sculpture by Rinaldi. And the lintels gave it a different shape. No, it was something else—a moor—the sea like pewter—

  Another tendril of an image was drowned in the present. What the senses tell us can overwhelm all else, and that is good, but sometimes I could wish otherwise. Or was it relief I felt? Confused, I stepped away from the others. Looking around at the ice beams poking out of that stark landscape I was struck by the strangeness of it, and I sank to the floor, slipping through the gravel as if I didn’t exist, as if I were the holo and the ground were real. The sense of the room left me entirely and for a moment I was on Pluto, on an almost transparent Pluto where you could sit unsuited, and breathe cool air, and stare at a megalith more silent and enigmatic than any pointing at Earth’s sky. Awe—so rare, so longed for—so much like its cousin terror, when it does flood the mind. And it was the edge of deep fear that brought the elusive memory crashing out of presque vu into consciousness: the moor by the sea, a thumbnail crescent of moon, Madeleine’s round face full of pity. I scrambled to my feet, frightened and excited. My trip to Earth—images from it were strung like algae in filaments, one led me to the next immediately. My nerves jangled and my blood spurted through me, and Pluto and Mars alike vanished.

  I was holding my temples in my hand when the lights came up, and I am afraid my c
olleagues saw me in that pose and thought me mad. I barely noticed; I made some excuse to Nguyen and Stall-worth, and stumbled out of the center into the surprising light of a clear afternoon.

  * * *

  Lemniscate islands—in the outflow channels these knobs of rock harder than their surroundings were scoured into their characteristic shape by the catastrophic floods that carved the channels.

  I remember I spent the trip to Earth in the centrifuge, working out in terran gravity to prepare myself for landfall. My third wife Maggie had just left me; she hadn’t wanted me to make the trip. I didn’t want the marriage to end. We had children, my habits were firm. Nothing would have tempted me to break them but a voyage to Earth. The Committee hated anyone going, but I got the chance and I left, feeling utterly depressed, a whole life shattered behind me. Again I was in an interregnum, stripped of habits, painfully alive.

  Quickly I took new habits, grew a new exfoliation. The voyage itself was a life, and I remember it all of a piece. I worked out every day until my body no longer felt like a backpack weighing me down; it was still heavy, but I could carry it. Every day I worked on those machines until I was too tired to think.

  There was a woman there doing the same work, though her motives were less negative. She worked to make her lungs pump like bellows, her skin pop sweat at every pore. She attacked the machines with brio, and laughed at my grimness. Have you tried this machine? she would ask. That one? I would shake my head and try them. She only talked about workouts, and I liked that. Her name was Madeleine. She was about my age—one hundred or so. Of her appearance I recall only a mass of thick dark blond hair, tied back in the centrifuge, let free in the commons, where it drew my eye always. And she was strong.

  But it didn’t occur to me that I was falling in love. How could I be? I was tired, sick of love, too drained ever to feel it again. How many times could it happen, after all? Wasn’t love another finite power of ours, that would run out like water from an aquifer? And Madeleine was so distanced (but I liked that). So we talked for hours as we worked out. She taught me to jump rope. We traded our stories. She had helped to organize the tour, and had been to Earth twice before. And every day we worked until we collapsed, in the “air soup” of Earth. Perhaps that soup does something to the brain. Because I could feel it happening again, no matter what I commanded myself to think. It’s frightening how helplessly people are themselves! We think, “I understand myself, I will change, I will take control, I will protect myself,” and then in any kind of stress we behave with exactly the same character we were born with, the character beneath the “I.” So I fell in love helplessly, as if catching a disease.

  And Madeline liked me. I pumped weights until I could be pleased with my body, and I avoided looking in the centrifuge mirrors, where my red cheeks and stiff black hair would have mocked me. Too bad you can’t work out on your face. (Vanity is slow to die; even past two hundred, when our faces resemble turtles’, we value them as great maps of experience, histories of emotional lives. And at this time I was only a hundred, and looked very young.)

  The memory exists in small linked cells, like diatoms of algae in a filament; next diatom: stepping out of a shuttle onto a desert floor, our group like a croud of Columbuses. Despite my workouts I felt heavy, and the blazing sun stunned me. It seemed the sky burned. And the blue—that color doesn’t exist on Mars, but I felt that there was a part of my brain that was made to recognize sky blue.

  Brief images of our tour: Madeleine led me up trails from Macchu Pichu; we laughed at the solemn statues of Easter Island; a tour guide deferred to my knowledge of some site or other. Though I felt a dreamlike recognition for Earth’s ruins from my years of study, I still clumped around as wide-eyed and rubbernecked as the rest of our group. We looked like asteroid miners in Burroughs, I am sure.

  Bigger diatom: at Angkor Wat one evening, Madeleine and I crawled over the crumbling temples under smeary twinkling stars. Standing on a vine-covered roof in the twilit jungle I saw a look I knew on her face. Just as I embraced her to kiss her a bug the size of my fist buzzed between our faces. We leapt back—“My God!”—stumbled on vines, laughed. “What was that?”

  “I don’t know,” Madeleine said, “but it sure was ugly!”

  “You’re not kidding! A dragonfly?”

  “You’ve got me.” We looked about warily. “Hope there aren’t more.”

  “Me too.”

  “Sure glad there aren’t any big bugs like that on Mars.”

  “Me too. Pretty scary bug, all right.”

  And we laughed. That was the embrace. A few minutes later she said, “But we can’t do it out here. We might get attacked by bugs!” And we went back to her room at the hotel.

  And in Persepolis, one sharp image: as I strode over the hectares of strewn marble like Tamburlaine, euphoric with the raw impact of the past, she said to me, “You make it new.”

  But in Florence we joined another group, from the university in Hellas, and their guide and Madeleine were old friends. Wasn’t that how it happened? They took off together into the city. Why not? Jealousy, what foolishness. Perhaps I am less able than most people to control my emotions. Florence reminded me of Burroughs, with the yellowing stone and the river running down the crease in the hills, and all the bridges. I walked the narrow streets with a marble pedestal in my stomach that almost bowed me over. The fierce sun beat on me in pulses and burned my neck, and I could hardly breathe in the thick wet air. Madeleine and her friend appeared in an alley, searching for local ice cream. I got sick of all the beggars and sat in my room at the hotel listening to the cutting melancholy of the “Souvenir of Florence.” I forgot the Etruscans, the Renaissance; all I cared for was the feeling in that sextet. You can make unhappiness into an aesthetic experience, and everyone tries to, so there must be something to it; but I don’t think it does much good. It only means you will remember it better, because of the coding in objective correlatives. It doesn’t make you less unhappy.

  Well, it was stupid of me. I admit that.

  Last diatom, the largest—the one remembered in the holo chamber: we visited the Orkney Islands north of Britain, to see the passage graves and the stone rings of Stenness and Brodgar. The islands were abandoned, and a rime of frost covered the ground in the mornings, as it was early winter. I insisted that Madeleine take a dawn walk with me, over the heath to Stenness ring. The land we crossed looked almost Martian. I told her that I loved her, she said I didn’t know her well enough to say such a thing. As if knowledge had anything to do with love. “You know what I mean,” I said.

  “I think I do. But you know Onega, the guide for the Hellas group?”

  I nodded.

  “I love him, Hjalmar. I have for years. Please don’t be angry! I’ve enjoyed our trip,” etc. Then she left, claiming duties at the hotel.

  I walked among the standing stones of Stenness, overlooking the lochs of Harray and Stenness to east and west. The narrow irregular gray stones spiked up at the swiftly moving, stippled clouds. Off across the loch the ring of Brodgar, tiny in the distance, stood in a patch of sun. A world of slates. Slate people: old tales said these stones were farmers caught dancing in a pagan rite. I leaned my forehead against the pitted, lichen-covered side of one, and felt myself shake. So often this had happened and I had resolved never to extend myself again—the aquifer was drained, the land above collapsing!—and here just the slightest show of friendship and I had done it again. Not the slightest bit of control over myself. There was something wrong with me, I knew it. I felt it.

  What I wanted then was a marriage like the Greek ideal, two strong trees grown round each other in a double helix, each stronger for the help of the other, and intertwined for good. Some people found such marriages even in our age, and I wanted one. I was just beginning to understand that my life was a series of discrete lives, and that I could not count on any family or friend to stay with me through more than one life. So that I would never really come to know anybody. Unless I
could find that partner, you see, that Greek marriage.

  But I couldn’t. And leaning against that rough stone it seemed to me that there were two kinds of people: the attractive sociable people, who drew to each other and had their serious relations together; and the rest of us, the plain or ugly or maladroit, who had to make do with one another no matter how much we loved beauty and charm. And realizing this warped the maladroit even more, so that our relations among ourselves were filled with resentment and frustration and anger and pity, which doomed them to failure. As in my three marriages, and in all the other liaisons in which I had tried so hard and failed so miserably.

  In the midst of this fit of bitter self-pity I caught sight of a dozen or so of our party, hiking in my direction and pointing across the loch at the stones of Brodgar. One great ring viewed from another, across a band of metallic water: it was an eerie, wonderful sight. The group was like a pantomime of excitement, and though I did not feel it, I understood. On all of Earth I had not seen a place more beautiful (that is, more like Mars). So the cheerful alien tourists approached, happy on familiar ground, and when they saw me some waved. They entered the ring. One of the women was telling them about the megalithic yard, and the astronomical significance of the stones’ placement. She was a withdrawn, shy woman who had scarcely said a word during the rest of the tour, but the stone rings appeared to be her subject. “They could calculate the midsummer and midwinter sunrises, and they could even predict eclipses.”

  “Wrong,” I told them. “Your information is as dated as the idea of ley lines. These rings had some simple sun alignments, but they were by no means scientific observatories. To think so is to impose our way of thinking onto the prehistoric mind, and so to distort the past. And the megalithic yard, by the way, is no more than a freak of statistical interpretation.”

  The woman looked down, turned away. The others glanced at her awkwardly; her reign as expert was done. But I saw they also thought me an ass, and I knew I had been rude at best. Immediately I wanted to apologize to the poor woman, to explain my ill humor, but I couldn’t see how without bringing up my own affairs. Besides, she had been spouting nonsense; what was I supposed to have said? A tall, brown-haired woman broke the uncomfortable pause with a hearty, “Well, shall we see Brodgar and the Comet Stone?” And they trooped off around the shore of the loch, surrounding the expert, pointedly not inviting me along. The tall woman stared back at me.