Then I was alone at the point break. A swell approached and I backstroked away from it, toward the point where it would first break, adjusting my speed so I would be just outside that point when the wave picked me up.
The wave reached me and I felt its strong lift. I turned luxuriously onto my stomach, skimmed down the steepening face until I felt that the swell was pitching out over me. From my thighs up I was clear of the methane, skating on my handfins—I turned them left, and swerved across the wave, just ahead of the break, flying, flying.… I moved my feet to retard my speed a fraction, and the roof of the breaking wave moved ahead of me. It got dark. I was in the tube. My hands were below me, jammed into the methane to keep me from falling down the face. I was motionless yet flying, propelled through the blackness at tremendous speed by the liquid which rushed up past my left shoulder, arched over my head, and fell out beyond my right shoulder. Before me there was a huge tunnel, and at the end of this swirling obsidian tube a small ellipse of velvet black, packed with stars.
The opening got smaller, indicating that the wave was past the submerged crater, and receding. I dropped to gain speed, turned back up and shot through the hole, over the swell and back onto the smooth glassy surface, under the night.
Swimming slowly back to the point break, I watched another swimmer spin silently across the next rushing wall. She rose too high and was thrown over with the lip of the wave. If she hit the crater reef and broke the seal of her suit, she would freeze instantly—but she knew that, and would be careful to avoid being forced too deep.
I radioed the shore and had them pipe Gregorian chants into my headphones; and I swam, and rode waves, and hummed with the chants when I could catch my breath, and thought not at all. And later I switched over to the common band, and talked at great length with Fist and Wendy and Laura, as we analyzed every wave and every ride. I swam till there was too much sweat in my suit, and not enough oxygen.
Back on the tram into town, I felt good: free and self-sufficient, cosmopolitan, ready to work. It was time to attack the next facet of the Icehenge problem: the identity of its builder. My research had given me a good idea of who it might be, but the problem would be to prove it—or even to make a convincing case. And the next day I checked my mail again, and there was a long rambling letter from Mark Starr. PRINT, I typed, and out of the slot in the side of the console it appeared, blue ink on gray paper, just as always.
* * *
One day I went down to Waystation’s News and Information Center in search of the latest Nederland press conference. The lobby of the center was nearly empty, and I went directly into a booth. The index I called up listed only Nederland’s regularly scheduled lectures, and I had to search through the new entries to find the press conference I wanted. Finally I discovered it and typed the code to run it, then sat back in the center chair of the booth to watch.
The room darkened. There was a click and I was in a large conference room, fully lit, filled with the holo images of upper-class Martians: reporters, students, officials (as in any Martian holo there were a lot of these), and some scientists I recognized. And there was Nederland, moving down an aisle next to me, toward a podium at the front. I moved through people and chairs to the aisle, and stood in front of Nederland. He walked right through me. Smiling at my little joke, and at my quick moment of involuntary fright at the unfelt collision, I said, “You’ll see me yet,” and kicked about until I relocated my chair.
Nederland reached the podium and the irregular percussion of voices died. He was a small man, and only his head showed over the podium’s top. Underneath his wild black hair was a look of triumph; his bright red cheeks were blazing with excitement. “You hopeless old romantic,” I said. “You’ve got something up your sleeve; you can’t fool me.”
He cleared his throat, his usual sign that he was taking over. “I think my statement will answer most of the questions you have today, so why don’t I start with that, and then we’ll answer any questions you might have.”
“Since when has it been any different?” I asked, but it was the only response. Nederland looked at his notes, looked up—his eyes crossed mine—and he extended a benedictory hand.
“The recent critics of the Davydov explanation claim that the Pluto monument is a modern hoax, and that in my work on the subject I have ignored the physical evidence. The absence of any disturbance in the regolith around the site, and our inability to find any signs of construction, are cited as facts which contradict or do not fit my explanation.
“I submit that it is the critics who are ignoring the physical evidence. If the Davydov expedition did not build Icehenge, why did Davydov himself study the megalithic cultures of Terra?”
“What?” I cried.
“What are we to make of his stated intention to leave some sort of mark on the world? Can we label it coincidence that Davydov’s ship disappeared just three years before the date found on Icehenge? I think not.…”
He went on, outlining the same arguments he had been espousing for the last fifty years. “Come on,” I groaned, “get down to it.” He droned on, ignoring the fact that his critics had shown the whole Davydov story to be part of the hoax. “I know you’ve got something new up your sleeve, let’s see it.” Then he flipped over a notecard, and an involuntary smile creased his face. I sat forward.
“My critics,” he said in his high voice, “are simply attacking in a purely destructive way. Aside from the vague claim that the monument is a modern hoax—perpetrated by whom, they cannot say—there is no theory to replace mine, and nothing to explain away the evidence found in the archives on Mars—”
“Oh, my God, exactly wrong!”
“—Which are constantly being re-ordered and refiled.”
“Oh. You hope.”
“The general claim of people like Doya, Satarwal, and Jordan, is that there is nothing at the site which will prove Icehenge’s age. On the other hand, there is nothing there that shows the monument to be modern, either, which given the sophistication of dating methods there almost certainly would be, if it were indeed modern.
“In fact, there is now evidence conclusively proving that Icehenge cannot be modern.” He stopped to let the statement sink in. “You are all aware that micrometers, the dusty debris of space, are continually falling on all the bodies of the solar system; and that when they fall on those bodies without an atmosphere, they leave small traces. Even the tiniest of fragments leave their mark. The fall of these micrometeors is regular, and is a constant throughout the system. Professor Mund Stallworth, of the university here, has received a grant from the Holmes Foundation, and he has done extensive work in this field. He has established rates of fall for different gravities, and thus a micrometeorite count can now be used as an accurate dating method. Professor Stallworth has made a detailed computer scan of the exposed faces of the liths, and of the surrounding grounds, which the builders swept clear; and the count as revealed in these holograms is such that he puts the date of the erection of Icehenge at a thousand years before present, plus or minus five hundred years. His paper on the subject will appear in the next issue of Marscience. In it he explains that it is impossible to be more precise given the short time spans involved, and the fact he worked with holograms only. This places the latest date of construction one hundred and fifty years or so before the date left on the Inscription Lith, but this may be explained by the fact that the smooth surfaces of the liths record a higher percentage of blemishes than other surfaces. In any case, it is impossible that so many micrometeorites could have fallen in the short amount of time postulated by those who think that Icehenge is part of a hoax.
“Thus there is nothing that factually disproves the Davydov theory—there are only the doubts and fanciful speculations of detractors, some of whom have clear political motivations. And there is something that factually disproves the notions that these detractors hold. I thank you for your attention.”
Pandemonium broke loose among the previously attentive figu
res around me. Questions were shouted out, incomprehensible under the noise of cheers and applause. “Oh, shut up,” I said to the image of the woman next to me, who was clapping. As questions became audible—some of them were good ones—order was reestablished, but apparently the news service people had considered the question and answer period unimportant. With another click the scene disappeared, and I was again in the dark, silent holo room. Lights came on. I sat.
Had Nederland proved his theory at last? Was the stranger on Titan wrong after all? (and I as well?) “Hmm,” I said. Apparently I was going to have to start looking into dating methods.
* * *
I woke up in the alley behind one of Waystation’s main boulevards. I had been sleeping on my side, and my neck and hip were sore. I took off my coat and shook the dust off it. Pushed my fingers through my hair and made it all lie down flat, brushed my teeth with a fingernail, looked around for something to drink. Put my coat back on. Flapped my arms.
Around me prone figures were still slumbering. Waking up is the worst part of living on the streets of Waystation; they drop the temperatures down to ten degrees during the nights, to encourage travelers to take rooms. Helping out the hotel trade. A lot of people stay on the streets anyway, since most of them are transients. They aren’t bothered in any way aside from the cold, so they save their money for things more important than a room for the night. We all have the necessary shelter, inside this rock.
Low on money again, but I needed something to eat. Onto the tram.
Down at the spaceport I spent my last ten in Waystation’s cheapest restaurant. With the change I bought myself a bath, and sat in a corner of the public pool resting and thinking nothing.
When I was done I felt refreshed, but I was also broke. I went to my restaurant and hit Fist for another ten, then I walked around to the post office. Not much mail; but there at the end, to my great surprise, was a letter from a Professor Rotenberg, head of the Fine Arts Lecture Series at the Waystation Institute for Higher Learning (which, like many of the institutions on Waystation, had been founded by Caroline Holmes). Professor Rotenberg, who had enjoyed my “interesting revisionist articles” on Icehenge, wondered if I would consider accepting a semester’s employment as lecturer and head of a seminar studying the Pluto megalithic monument literature—“My my my,” I said, and typed out instructions to print the letter with my mouth hanging wide open.
* * *
I went out of my cabin for the first time in a while, to restock my supply of crackers and orange juice. The wood and moss hallways of Snowflake were quite empty; it seemed that people were staying in their rooms, or in the tiny lounges that the rooms opened onto. Dr. Lhotse had brought Brinston by for a peacemaking visit, and they had dropped in on Jones as well. Now we interacted, when necessary, with careful politeness; but mostly we were just settling in for the last wait. It would be a few more weeks until we reached Pluto. That wasn’t long; everyone is patient, everyone is good at waiting in this world where everything proceeds so slowly.
Yesterday was my birthday. I was sixty-two years old. One tenth of my life done and gone, the endless childhood over. Those years feel like eternity in my head, and the thing is hardly begun. Hard to believe. I thought of the ancient stranger I had met on Titan, and wondered what it meant to live so unnaturally long, and then die anyway. What have we become?
When I am as old as that stranger, I will have forgotten these first sixty-two years and more. Or they will recede into depths of memory beyond the reach of recollection—the same as forgotten—recollection being a power inadequate to our new time scale. And how many other powers are like it?
Autobiography is now the necessary extension of memory. Five centuries from now I may live, but the I writing this will be nothing in his mind but a bare fact. I write this, then, for that stranger myself, so that he may know who he has been. I hope it will be enough. I am confident it will; my memory is strong.
My father sent me a birthday poem that arrived just last night. He’s given me one every birthday now for fifty-four years; they’re beginning to make quite a volume. I’ve encouraged him to put them and the rest of his poems into the general file, but he still refuses. Here is the latest:
Looking for the green flash
At sea, north of Hawaii.
Still day, no clouds:
On a dark blue plane,
Under a limpid blue hemisphere.
Our craft one mote in Terra’s blue dance
Of wind water and light.
Sunset near.
To the west the ocean midnight blue
Broken by blued silver.
The sun light orange,
Slowing down,
Flattening as it touches horizon:
Earth is between us and sun by now,
Only light bending through atmosphere
Left to us: image of sun.
Half down, don’t look, too bright.
Sky around sun white.
Mere sliver left, look now:
Bare paring turning back
From orange to yellow,
Yellow to yellow-green,
Then just as it disappears,
Bright green!
Walking back to my room with my food, saying his poem to myself in my mind, I realized that I miss him.
* * *
I met with the Institute seminar I was to teach about a month after I got the invitation from Professor Rotenberg. At my urging we decided to meet at the back table of a pub across the street from the Institute, and we moved there forthwith.
It quickly became clear that they had read the literature on the subject. What more could I tell them?
“Who put it there?” said a man named Andrew.
“Wait a minute, start at the beginning.” That was Elaine, a good-looking hundredish woman on my left. “Give us your background, how you got into this.”
I told them my story as briefly as possible, feeling sheepish as I described the random meeting that had triggered my whole search. “… So you see, essentially, I believe I met someone who had a hand in constructing Icehenge, which necessarily eliminates the Davydov party from consideration.”
“You must have been astonished,” Elaine said.
“For a while. Astonished, shocked—betrayed … but soon the idea that the monument was put there by someone other than Davydov obsessed me. It made the whole problem unsolved again, you see.”
“Part of you welcomed it.” That was April, a very attentive woman sitting across from me.
“Yeah.”
“But what about Davydov?”
“What about Nederland?” asked April. She had a rather sharp and scornful way of speaking.
“I wasn’t sure. It didn’t seem possible that Nederland could be wrong—there were all those volumes, the whole edifice of his case. And I had believed it for so long. Everyone had. If he was wrong, what then of Davydov? Or Emma? Many times when I thought about it the certainty I had felt that night—that that stranger knew what had happened there—faded. But the memory … refused to change. He had known, and I knew that, I was sure of it. So the search was on.”
“How did you start?”
“With a premise. Induction, same as Nederland. I started with the theory that Icehenge was not built until humans were capable of getting to Pluto, which struck me as very reasonable. And there were no spaceships that could have taken us there and back until 2443. So Icehenge was a relatively modern construct, made anonymous in the deliberate attempt to obscure its origins.”
“A hoax,” April said.
“Well, yes, in a way, although it’s not the structure that’s a hoax, I mean it is definitely there no matter who set it up—”
“The Davydov expedition, then.”
“Right. Suddenly I had to wonder whether Davydov and Emma—whether any of them had existed at all.”
“So you checked Nederland’s early work.” This from Sean, a very big, bearded man.
“I did. I found that bot
h Davydov and Emma had actually existed—Emma held some Martian middle-distance running records for several years, and some records of their careers were extant. And they both disappeared with a lot of other people in the Martian Civil War. But the only things connecting them with Icehenge were a file in the Alexandrian archives that apparently was planted, and Emma Weil’s journal, which was excavated outside New Houston. Now I got a chemist named Jordan interested in the case, and he has been investigating the aging of the field car that the journal was found in. You know metal oxidizes to an extent when buried in Martian soil, and the rate is measurable—and Jordan’s analysis of the field car seems to indicate that it was never buried in smectite clay, but apparently was exposed to the atmosphere. That is very suspicious, of course. And an engineer named Satarwal has figured out a list of the equipment necessary to construct Icehenge, and by Weil’s own account the asteroid miners didn’t have all of that equipment. So the Davydov explanation has been falling apart from more than one angle in the past few years, and in fact this seminar is one sign of that collapse.”
“So what did you do, then?” Sean asked.
“I made a list of qualities and attributes that the builder of Icehenge had to have had, thinking that I could then draw up a list of suspects. They had to have had a lot of money. They had to have help—my stranger for one, I guessed. They had to have a fairly big spaceship, and one that could be taken out of the usual flight control logbooks, which is a difficult task. And they had to have some specialized equipment, some of which was a little unusual. After I made this list I started making assumptions, about motivation and so forth, that were less certain, though they helped me a lot—”
“But you could make assumptions forever,” April said. “What did you do?”
“Uh. I did research. I sat in front of a screen and punched out codes, read the results, found new indexes, punched out more codes. I looked through shipping records, equipment manufacturing records, sales records—I investigated various rich people. That sort of thing. It was boring work in some ways, but I enjoyed doing it. At first I thought of myself as working my way through a maze. Then that seemed the wrong image. In front of a library screen I could go anywhere. Because of the access-to-information laws I could look in every file and record that existed, except for the illegal secret ones—there are a lot of those—but if they had code call-ups, you know, were hidden somewhere in larger data banks—then I could probably get into those too. I bumped into file freaks and learned new codes, and learning them took me into data banks that taught me even more. Trying to visualize it, I could see myself as a tiny component in a single communications network, a multibank computer complex that spanned the solar system—a dish-shaped, invisible, seemingly telepathic web, a wave pattern that added one more complication to the quark dance swirling in the sun’s gravity well. So I was not in a maze, I was above it, and I could see all of it at once—and its walls formed a pattern, had a meaning, if I could learn how to read it.…”