I was nearly done with my omelet when Brinston approached our table. “Mr. Doya, it’s good to see you out of your cabin!” he said loudly. “You shouldn’t be such a hermit!”
Now I left my cabin pretty regularly to party, but when I did I was careful to avoid Brinston. Here I was reminded why. “I’m working,” I said.
“Oh, I see.” He smiled. “I hope that won’t keep you from joining our little lecture series.”
“Your what?”
“We’re organizing a series of talks, and hope everyone will give one.” The micrometeor crew had turned to watch us.
“Everyone?”
“Well—everyone who represents a different aspect of the problem.”
“What’s the point?”
“What?”
“What’s the point?” I repeated. “Everyone on board this ship already knows what everyone else has written and said about Icehenge.”
“But in a colloquium we could discuss these opinions.”
The academic mind. “In a colloquium there would be nothing but a lot of arguing and bitching and rehashing the same old points. We’ve wrangled for years without anyone changing his mind, and now we’re going to Pluto to look at Icehenge and find out who really put it there. Why stage a reiteration of what we’ve already said?”
Brinston was flushing red. “We hoped there would be new things to be said.”
I shrugged. “Maybe so. Look, just go ahead and have your talks without me.”
Brinston paused. “That wouldn’t be so bad,” he said reflectively, “if Nederland were here. But now the two principal theorists will be missing.”
I felt my distaste for him turn to dislike. He knew of the relationship between Nederland and me, and this was a jab. “Yes, well, Nederland’s been there before.” He had, too, and it was too bad he hadn’t made better use of the visit. They had done nothing but dedicate a plaque commemorating the expedition of asteroid miners that he had discovered; at the time, his explanation was so widely believed that the megalith hadn’t even been excavated.
“Even so, you’d think he’d want to be along on the expedition that will either confirm or contradict his theory.” His voice grew louder as he sensed my discomfort. “Tell me, Mr. Doya, what did Professor Nederland say was his reason for not joining us?”
I stared at him for a long time. “He was afraid there would be too many colloquia,” I said, and stood up. “Now excuse me while I return to my work.” I went to the kitchen and got some supplies, and walked back to my room, feeling that I had made an enemy, but not caring much.
* * *
Yes, Hjalmar Nederland, the famous historian of Icehenge, was my great-grandfather. It was a fact I remember always knowing, though my father never encouraged my pleasure in knowing it. (Father wasn’t his grandchild; my mother was.)
I had read all of Nederland’s books—the works on Icehenge, the five-volume Martian history, the earlier books on terran archaeology—by the time I was ten. At that time Father and I lived on Ganymede. Father had gotten lucky and was crewing on a sunsailer entered in the InandOut, a race that takes the sailers into the top layer of Jupiter’s atmosphere.
Usually he wasn’t that lucky. Sunsailing was for the rich, and they didn’t need crews often. So most of the time Father was a laborer: street sweeper, carrier at construction sites, whatever was on the list at the laborer’s guild. As I understood later, he was poor, and shiftless, and played the edges to get by. Maybe I’ve modelled my life on his.
He was a small man, my father, short and spare-framed; he dressed in worker’s clothes, and had a droopy moustache, and grinned a lot. People were always surprised to see him with a kid—he didn’t look important enough. But when he lived on Mars, and then Phobos, he had been part of a foursome. The other man was a well-known sculptor, with a lot of pull in artistic circles. And my mom, being Nederland’s granddaughter, had connections with the University of Mars. Between them they managed to get that rare thing (especially on Mars), the permission to have a child. Then when the foursome broke up, Father was the only one interested in taking care of me; he had grown up with me, in a sense, in that my presence as an infant was what brought him out of a funk. So he told me. Into his custody I went (I was six, and had never set foot on Mars), and we took off for Jupiter.
After that Father never discussed my mother, or the other members of the foursome, or my famous great-grandfather (when he could keep me from bringing up the topic), or even Mars. He was, among other things, a sensitive man—a poet who wrote poems for himself, and never paid a fee to put them in the general file. He loved landscapes and skyscapes, and after we moved to Ganymede we spent a lot of time hiking in suits over Ganymede’s stark hills, to watch Jupiter or one of the other moons rise, or to watch a sunrise, still the brightest dawn of them all. We were a comfortable pair. Ours was a quiet pastime, and the source of most of Father’s poetry. The poems of his that exerted the most pull on me, however, were those about Mars. Like this one:
In the Lazuli Canyon, boating.
Sheet ice over shadowed stream,
Crackling under our bow.
Stream grows wide, bends out into sunlight:
A million turns following the old vallis.
Plumes of frost at every breath.
Endless rise of the red canyon,
Mountains and canyons, no end to them.
Black webs in rust sandstone:
Wind-carved boulders hang over us.
There, on the wet red beach:
Dull green Syrtis grass. Green.
In the canyon my heart is pure—
Why ever leave?
The western sky deep violet,
In it two stars, white and indigo:
Venus, and the Earth.
Even though Father disliked Nederland (they had met, I gathered, only once) he still indulged my fascination with Icehenge. For some reason I loved that megalith; it was the greatest story I knew. On my eleventh birthday Father took me down to the local post office (at this time we were on bright Europa, and took long hikes together across its snowy plains). After a whispered conference with one of the attendants, we went into a holo room. He wouldn’t tell me what we were going to see, and I was frightened, thinking it might be my mother.
The room holo came on; and we were in darkness. Stars overhead. Suddenly a very bright one flared, defining a horizon, and pale light flooded over what now appeared as a dark, rocky plain.
Then I saw it off in the distance: the megalith. The sun (I recognized it now, the bright star that had risen) had only struck the top of the liths, and they gleamed white. Below the sunlight they were square black cutouts, blocking stars. The line quickly dropped (the holo was speeded up) and it stood revealed, tall and white. Because of the model of it that I owned at the time, it seemed immense.
“Oh, Dad.”
“Come on, let’s go look at it.”
“Bring it here, you mean.”
He laughed. “Where’s your imagination, kid?” He dialed it over—I went straight through a lith—and we were standing at its center, near the plaque commemorating the Davydov Expedition. We circled slowly, necks craned back to look up. We inspected the broken column and its scattered pieces, then looked closely at the brief inscription.
“It’s a wonder they didn’t all sign their names,” said Father.
Then the whole scene disappeared and we were standing in the bare holo room. Father caught my forlorn expression, and laughed. “You’ll see it again before you’re through. Come on, let’s go get some ice cream.”
* * *
Soon after that, when I was just fourteen, he got a chance to go to Terra. Friends of his were buying and taking a small boat all the way back, and they needed one more crew member. Or perhaps they didn’t absolutely need one, but they wanted him to come.
At that time we had just moved back to Ganymede, and I had a job at the atmosphere station. We had lived there nearly a year, off and on, and I didn’t want to mov
e again. I had written a book describing the deep space adventures of the Davydov expedition, and with the money I was saving I planned to publish it. (For a fee anyone can put their work in the data banks, and have it listed in the general catalogue; whether anyone will ever read it is another matter, but I had hopes, at the time, that one of the book clubs would buy the rights to list it in their index.)
“See, Dad, you’ve lived on Terra and Mars, so you want to go back there so you can be outside and all. Me, I don’t care about that stuff. I’d rather stay here.”
Father stared at me carefully, suspicious of such a sentiment, as well he might be—for as I understood much later, my disinclination to go to Terra stemmed mainly from the fact that Hjalmar Nederland had said in an interview (and implied in many articles) that he didn’t like it.
“You’ve never been there,” my father said, “else you might not say that. And it’s something you should see, take my word for it. The chance doesn’t come that often.”
“I know, Dad. But the chance has come for you, not me.”
He scowled at me. In a world with so few children, everyone is treated as an adult; and my father had always treated me as an equal, to a degree that would be difficult to describe. Now he didn’t know what to say to me. “There’s room for you too.”
“But only if you make it. Look, you’ll be back out here sailing in a couple of years. And I’ll get down there someday. Meanwhile I want to stay here. I got a job and friends.”
“Okay,” he said, and looked away. “You’re your own man, you do what you want.”
I felt bad then, but not nearly so much as I did later, when I remembered the scene and understood what I had done. Father was tired, he was going through a hard time, he needed his friends. He was about seventy then, and he had nothing to show for his efforts, and he was tired. In the old days he’d have been near the end, and I suppose he felt that way—he hadn’t yet gotten that second wind that comes when you realize that, far from being over, the story has just begun. But that second wind didn’t come from me, or with my help. And yet that, it seems to me, is what sons are for.
So he left for Terra, and I was on my own. About two years later I got a letter from him. He was in Micronesia, on an island in the Pacific Ocean somewhere. He had met some Marquesan sailors. There were fleets of the old Micronesian sailing ships, called wa’a kaulua, crisscrossing the Pacific, carrying passengers and even freight. Father had decided to apprentice himself to one of the navigators from the Carolines, one of those who navigate as they did in the ancient times, without radio or sextant, or compass, or even maps.
And that’s what he has been doing, from that day to this: forty-five years. Forty-five years of learning to gauge how fast the ship is moving by watching coconuts pass by; memorizing the distances between islands; reading the stars, and the weather; lying at the bottom of the ship during cloudy nights, and feeling the pattern of the swells to determine the ship’s direction.… I think back to the hand to mouth times of our brief partnership, and I see that he has, perhaps, found what he wants to do. Occasionally I get a note from Fiji, Samoa, Oahu. Once I got one from Easter Island, with a picture of one of the statues included. The note said, “And this one’s not a fake!”
That’s the only clue I’ve gotten that he knows what I’m doing.
* * *
So I stayed on Ganymede and lived in dormitories, and worked at the atmosphere station. My way of life had been learned in the years with my father; it was all I knew, and I kept to the pattern. Dorm mates were my family, and that was never a problem. After my name came up on the hitchhiker’s list I moved out to Titan, and while waiting for a job with the weather company I joined the laborer’s guild, and swept streets, and pushed wheelbarrows, and unloaded spaceships. I liked the work, and quickly became quite strong.
I got a room in a boarding house that had advertised at the guild, and found that most of my housemates were also laborers. It was a congenial crowd: the meals were rowdy affairs, and the parties sometimes lasted through the night—our landlady loved them. One of the older boarders, a woman named Angela, liked to argue philosophy—to “discuss ideas,” as she called it. On cold nights she would call a few of us on the intercom and invite us down to the kitchen, where she would brew endless pots of tea, and badger me and three or four other regulars with questions and provocations. “Don’t you think it is well established that all of the assassinated American presidents were killed by the Rosicrucians?” she would demand, and then tell us how John Wilkes Booth had escaped the burning barn to live on, take on another identity, and shoot both Garfield and McKinley.…
“And Kennedy too?” John Ashley asked. “Are you sure this isn’t Ahasuerus the Assassin you’re discussing here?” John was a Rosicrucian, you see, and was naturally incensed.
“Ahasuerus?” Angela inquired.
“The Wandering Jew.”
“Did you know that originally he wasn’t a Jew at all?” George asked. “His name was Cartaphilus, and he was Pontius Pilate’s janitor.”
“Wait a second,” I said. “Let’s get back to the point. Booth was identified by his dental records, so the body they found in the barn was definitely his. Dental records are pretty conclusive. So your whole idea falls apart right at the start, Angela.”
She would contest it every time, and we would move on to the nature of evidence, and then the nature of reality, while pot after pot of tea was brewed and consumed. I would argue Aristotle against Plato, Hume against Berkeley, Peirce against the meta-physicals, Allenton against Dolpa, and the warm kitchen echoed with our fierce talk. Many was the time when I vanquished the rest with my mishmash of empiricism, pragmatism, logical positivism, and essentialist humanism—or I thought I did, until late in the night when I went up to my tiny bookwalled room on the fourth floor, and lay on my bed and stared at the books and wondered what it was all about. Could it really be true that all we knew was what our senses told us?
Once John Ashley brought down to our kitchen group a volume called Sixty-six Crystals on the Ninth Planet, by a Theophilus Jones. After he had explained it to us, I couldn’t have been more scathing. I was familiar with Jones’s earlier works, and this new argument did nothing to bolster his case. “Don’t you see how illogical he’s being there? He has to contradict the whole picture of human history, the work of hundreds of scientists using thousands of pieces of evidence, just to establish the possibility that a prehistoric highly advanced civilization existed. Which by no means would prove that they flew out to Pluto of all places to set up a temple. I mean, why would they do that?”
“Yes, but look at all he says about how old Icehenge is.”
“No no no, none of those are serious dating methods. Calculating the chances of a lith getting hit by a meteorite? Why, it doesn’t matter what the chances are. The fact is it could have been hit by a meteorite the day after they completed the thing, and damn the probabilities. It doesn’t prove anything. That megalith was put there by Martians about three hundred years ago, by the Davydov expedition. They are the only ones who had the means to get out to Pluto so long ago. Read Nederland, he’s got the whole case worked up beautifully. He even found mention of the plans for the thing, in the Weil journal. With that kind of evidence you don’t need this far-fetched stuff. It’s nonsense, John.”
And John would argue right back that it wasn’t, and Angela and George and the others would usually support him. “How can you be so sure, Edmond? How can you be sure?”
“By looking at the evidence we’ve got. It stands to reason.”
Not that I was always so positive in my feelings toward my great-grandfather. Once I was walking home after a hard day of loading pipe. I had had some beers after work with the rest of the loading gang, and I was feeling low. Passing a holo sales shop I noticed a panel discussion in the window holo and stopped to watch, recognizing one of the doll-like figures to be Nederland. Curiously I contemplated him. He was discussing something or other—on the street it wa
s hard to hear the store’s speaker—with a group of well-dressed professor types, who looked much like him; he was authoritative, impeccably groomed, and on his tiny face was an expert’s frown—he was getting ready to correct the speaker.
I remembered that once I had badgered my father: “Why don’t you like Great-grandpa, Dad? Why? He’s famous!” It took a lot of that to get Father even to admit he disliked Nederland, much less explain it. Finally he had said, “Well, I only met him once, but he was rude to your mother. She said it was because we had bothered him, but I still thought he could have been polite. She was his own granddaughter, and he acted like she was some beggar dunning for change. I didn’t like that.”
I left the holo shop window and continued home thinking about it, and when I came to my shabby old boarding house, and looked at its stained walls and etched windows, and remembered the sight of Nederland on that expensive Martian stage in his fine clothes, I felt a little bitter.
But most of the time I was pleased to have such a historian for an ancestor; I was fascinated by his work, and made myself an expert in it. One wall of my book-lined room was covered with shelves of books by Nederland, or about Nederland, or about Oleg Davydov and Emma Weil, and the Mars Starship Association, and the Martian Civil War, and the rest of early Martian history. I became a scholar of that whole era, and my first publications were letters of comment in Chronicle of Martian History and Shards, correcting errors in articles on the period. The publication of these letters in such prestigious journals convinced me that I was a gypsy scholar, a laborer intellectual, the equal of any university man. And I studied harder than ever, quite pleased with myself—a dabbler in a field where I had not had a single moment’s contact with the primary sources of data: one of Nederland’s many followers in the widespread revision of Martian history.
* * *
So years passed, and Icehenge, and Nederland’s explanation for it, the astonishing story of the Davydov mutiny, remained a central part of my life. The turning point in my history—the end of my innocence, so to speak—came on New Year’s Eve, when the year 2589 became 2590. By that time I was working for the Titan Weather Company. Early in the evening I was on the job, helping to create a lightning storm that crackled and boomed over the raucous new town of Simonides. Just after the big blast at midnight—two huge balls of St. Elmo’s fire, colliding just above the dome—we were let off, and we hit town ready for a good time. The whole crew, all sixteen of us, went first to our regular bar, Jacque’s. Jacque was dressed up as the Old Year, and his pet chimpanzee was in diapers and ribbons, representing the New. I drank several beers and allowed a variety of capsules to be popped under my nose, and soon like most of the people there I was very drunk. My boss, Mark Starr, was rolling on the floor, wrestling the chimp. It looked like he was losing. An impromptu chorus was bellowing out an old standard, “I Met Her in a Phobos Restaurant,” and inspired by the mentioning of my native satellite, I started singing a complicated harmony part. Apparently I was the only one who perceived its beauties. There were shouts of protest, and the woman seated next to me objected by pushing me off the bench. As I recovered my footing she stood up, and I shoved her into the table behind us. People there were upset by her arrival and began pounding on her. Feeling magnanimous, I grabbed her arm and pulled her away. The moment she was clear of them she punched me hard in the shoulder, and swung again angrily. I parried the blow with a forearm and jabbed her on the sternum, but she had a longer reach and was much angrier, and I had to retreat quickly, warding off her blows. Despite a couple of good jabs I saw that I was outmatched, and I slipped through the throng at the bar and escaped out the door and into the street.