Icehenge

  First probe. “I’m glad,” I said, and searched for more words, stupidly fumbling in a moment I had imagined many times. “Hello.”

  She said, “Why don’t we go to one of the observation rooms and have some food sent there.”

  “Fine.”

  She let go of the railing, and drifted down the hallway to the main hall of the torus, where she led me. She had a long stride, one that revealed bare feet.

  We left the hall and stepped down a broad spiral staircase into a large dim room, which was walled and ceilinged with wood. The floor was clear; it was one of the windows I had seen while approaching. To one side of it Saturn shone like a lamp globe. It was our only illumination. There were couches arranged in a small square near the middle of the room. Holmes sat on one, leaned forward, and looked down at the planet. She appeared to have forgotten me. I sat down on the couch opposite her, and looked down.

  We were over one of the poles, looking at Saturn and its rings from a perspective none of its natural satellites ever had. The latitude bands marking the planet (half of it was dark, though slightly illuminated by light reflected from the rings) were light greens and yellows, with streaks of orange. Seen from above they were full semicircles; bright cream in the equatorial bands, yellow in the higher latitudes, dusky green at the pole.

  Outside the planet were the rings, scores of them, all of them perfectly smooth and circular, as if drawn with a compass, except for three or four braided sets that were not so smooth. The entire sight reminded me of a dartboard: the pole was the bull’s-eye, the rings the outermost circles; but it was impossible to imagine Saturn flat, because of its dark side and its shadow erasing the rings behind it; so that it seemed a dartboard with an odd hemispherical center.

  This uncanny sight filled one whole side of our floor-window. Around it a few bright stars gleamed, and seven of Saturn’s moons were visible, all of them perfectly aligned half moons. As we sat there like statues and watched, the scene shifted perceptibly. Saturn’s shadow on the rings appeared to shorten, the moons were becoming crescents, the rings were tilting and becoming huge ellipses; and all slowly, very slowly, as in some inhuman, natural dance.

  “Always the same but always different,” I said.

  After a long pause, she said, “The landscape of the mind.” I became aware of the profound silence in which we were speaking. “There are more beautiful places on Terra, but none that are so sublime.”

  I know about your trip to Terra, I thought. And then I looked at her face and thought again. There were the centuries, written across it—and what could I say I really knew of her? She might have visited Terra a dozen times.

  “Perhaps,” I said, “that is because space itself has many attributes of sublimity: vastness, simplicity, mystery, that which causes terror.…”

  “These exist only in the mind, you must remember that. But space provides much that reminds the mind of itself, yes.”

  I considered it. “Do you really think that if we did not exist, Saturn would not be sublime?”

  I thought she wasn’t going to answer. The silence stretched on, for a minute and more. Then: “Who would know it?”

  “So it is the knowing,” I said.

  She nodded. “To know is sublime.”

  And I thought, that is true. I agree with that. But …

  She sat back and looked across at me. “Would you like to eat?”

  “Yes.”

  “Alaskan king crab?”

  “That would be fine.”

  She turned and called out, “We’ll have dinner in twenty minutes,” to the empty room.

  A small tray covered with crackers and blocks of cheese slid out of a new aperture in her couch. I blinked. A bottle of wine and two glasses were presented on individual glass trays. She poured wine and drank in silence. We leaned forward to look at the planet. In the odd illumination—dusky yellow light, from below—her eye-sockets were in shadow, and appeared very deep; the lines in her face seemed chiseled by ages of suffering. To my relief the meal was brought in by Charles, and we leaned back to attend to it. Below us Saturn and its billion satellites still wheeled, a stately art deco lamp.

  After the meal Charles took away our dishes and utensils. Holmes shifted on her couch and stared down at the planet with an intensity that completely discouraged interruption. Between watching Holmes and Saturn I was kept busy enough; but the longer the silence continued, the more disconcerted I became.

  Holmes remained in her contemplation until the ringed ball was nearly out of our floor window, and the light in the room was a murky brown. Then she stood and said, “Good night,” in a companionable tone, as if this were a routine we had established through years and years of dining together—and she walked out of the room. I stood, filled with confusion. What could I say? I looked down at the stars for quite some time, then I made my way without difficulty back to my room.

  * * *

  When I awoke the next morning I felt sure I had slept for an uncommonly long time. I showered in water as cold as I could stand, disturbed by dreams I couldn’t remember.

  Apparently I was being left to my own devices again. After a long wait on my bed, wondering if I should be annoyed as I felt, I went to the control panel and called every destination on the intercom. No replies. I couldn’t even find out what time it was.

  Remembering the previous night, I left my room and ventured into the hallway again. If I had never left my room, I wondered, would I ever have met Holmes?

  Today she wasn’t in the room we had dined in, or behind the seashell wall. I circled the satellite entirely, checking room after empty room, and becoming slightly disoriented, as the central hallway of the torus often disappeared into short mazes of multiplicity. Quite a few doors on every level were locked. The silence on board—actually a pervasive, soft, electric whirrr—began to bother me.

  I took an elevator up one of the spokes to the observatory in the hub, and tried the door; to my surprise it opened. Inside I heard a voice. I entered the weightless room and found it a tall cylindrical chamber, with a domed ceiling. The telescope, a long shiny silver and white thing, extended from a vertical strip in the curved ceiling to the center of the chamber, where a crow’s-nest arrangement with a leather and brass chair was welded to it.

  Holmes stood behind that chair, leaning over it to look into the mask of the eyepiece. Every few seconds she called out a string of figures, her voice vibrant with intensity. Charles, seated at a console in the wall of the chamber (still in his red and gold), tapped at a keyboard and occasionally quoted a set of numbers back to Holmes. I pulled myself down the bannister of a short staircase into the room.

  Holmes looked up, startled, and saw me. She nodded, said “Mr. Doya” in greeting, looked back into the eyepiece. She pulled away again and stared down at me; I was braced against a platform railing a meter or two below her. “So you think I built Icehenge, eh, Mr. Doya?”

  And then she looked into the telescope again. I stared up at her, at a loss. She read off another string of figures, sounding as vitally interested as she had when I entered the room. Finally she called to Charles, “Lock it on the inside limit of ring forty-six, please,” and turned on me again.

  “I’ve been reading your articles,” she said. “I’ve been a student of the Icehenge controversy for a long time.”

  “Have you,” I managed to say.

  “Yes, I have. I followed it from the beginning. In your last article in Shards I can see you are implicating me, and I want to know why.”

  I looked away from her, over at Charles, down at the end of the telescope. Adrenaline flushed through me, preparing me for flight, but not for conversation.

  Finally I raised my eyes to meet hers, and decided not to say anything. A staredown developed; I could have laughed, but it was too serious.

  “Who are you?” she said irritably.

  I shrugged. “A dishwasher.”

  “And I am a suspect in your little investigation? You can admit that mu
ch?”

  “… You are a suspect, Ms. Holmes.”

  She smiled. And leaned over to stare into the damned telescope again. I crossed my arms over my chest, feeling completely confused.

  “Have you lived on Waystation long?” she asked.

  “Not long.”

  “And where did you come from?”

  I tried to pull myself together and make a coherent story of my past—a difficult task under the best of circumstances—but my distraction must have been obvious.

  Holmes cut me off. “Would you like to retire now, and continue this conversation later?”

  Upon reflection I agreed that I would, and I left hastily, remembering as I returned to my room the calm smile she had given me when I told her she was a suspect. So strange! What did she want of me? I called up my bed and collapsed on it, and lay pondering her purposes, more than a little fearful. Much later one of the robots brought me a meal, and I picked at it. Afterwards, though I was sure I never would, I fell asleep.

  * * *

  “Tell me,” demanded Holmes, “is it true that Hjalmar Nederland is your great-grandfather?” Her face loomed over me.

  I didn’t want to answer. “Yes.”

  “How odd,” she said. Her hair was arranged on her head in a complex knot (like my mother used to have it). She was wearing earrings, three or four to an ear, and her eyebrows had been plucked to thin black arches. She was looking out a window, at the sun.

  “Odd?” I said, though I did not want to say anything.

  “Yes,” she said, annoyance lacing her voice. “Odd. All this marvelous work that you’ve done. If your theory is accepted, then Nederland’s theory—his lifework—will be destroyed.”

  Her glare was fierce, and I had to struggle to reply. “But even if his theory was wrong,” I said, “his work was still necessary. It is always that way in science. His work is still good work.”

  Her face was close to mine. “Would Nederland agree?” she cried. She pointed a finger at me. “Or are you just lying to yourself, trying to hide what will really happen?”

  “No!” I said, and weakly tried to strike back at her: “It’s your fault, anyway!”

  “So you say,” she sneered. “But you know it’s your fault. It’s your fault,” she shouted, looming over me, her face inches from mine. “You are the one destroying him, him and Icehenge as well, you—”

  A noise. I twisted around in my bed, looked down at my pillow, realized I was dreaming. My heart was hammering. I rubbed my eyes and looked up—

  Holmes was standing over me, looking down at me with clinical interest (hair piled on top of her head)—

  I jerked up into a sitting position, and she disappeared. Nobody there.

  I tossed the bedsheets aside and leaped out of bed. I hurried to the door; it was locked on the inside, though I couldn’t remember locking it. In fact I was sure I hadn’t. The dark room reeked of sweat, it was filled with shadows. I ran to the control panel and switched on all the lights in the room. It blazed, white streaks everywhere on the polished wood. It was empty. I stood there for a long time, waiting for heartbeat and breathing to slow. I walked over and lifted the covers to search beneath the bed. Nothing there but a platform flush with the floor. The image I had seen over me, I thought, could have been a hologram. I began circling the room, inspecting the wood for apertures.

  But the dream. Did she have a machine that created images within the mind, as a holograph created them without?

  I didn’t sleep again that night.

  * * *

  “Mr. Doya.”

  “What?” I had been drowsing.

  “Mr. Doya.” It was Holmes’s voice, on the intercom.

  “Yes?”

  “The sun will rise over Saturn in thirty-five minutes, and I thought you might like to see it. It’s quite spectacular.”

  “Thank you.” I tried to figure out what she was up to. “I would.”

  “Fine. I’ll be in the dome room, then. Charles will show you the way.”

  When Charles showed me in she was seated in the lotus position, staring out. The room was shoved out from the body of the satellite, so that the clear dome served as both floor and walls. Saturn was outside one wall, just clear of the surface of the torus. The planet was dark, but its polar cap glowed green, as though lit from within. To the sides the rings, thin now, shone like bright scimitars.

  “Most of Saturn’s mass is at its core,” Holmes said without turning her head. “The upper atmosphere is very thin, enough so that the sun shines through it just before rising.”

  “Is that what that glow is,” I said warily. The luminous green gained brilliance near the pole, and seemed even brighter contrasted with the dark side of the planet. Finally I could see the sun itself, a fiery green gem that flared to an intense white as it cleared Saturn. The green faded and became a crescent of reflected light: the sunward side of the planet. The rings broadened and separated into their multiple strands.

  “Well,” said Holmes. “Good morning.”

  “Good morning.” I stared at her closely. She ordered breakfast innocently enough, and we ate in silence. When we were done she said,

  “Tell me, am I your only suspect?”

  I saw that she intended to have it out. I said shortly, “I think you put it there.”

  “Genoa Ferrando fits the qualifications as well as I. So does Alice Waite, and a couple of others as well. Why do you think it was me?”

  In a burst of impulsive anger I decided to show her how thoroughly she was found out. I told her the tale of the long search, gave her all the pieces of the puzzle she had left behind, put them together for her. It took quite a while.

  At the end of it she smiled—again that calm, enigmatic smile. “That isn’t very much,” she said, and swiftly got up and left the room.

  I took a long, deep breath, and wondered what was going on. “What do you want?” I shouted after her. No reply. My head was spinning, my vision was a field of pointillist dots. Had my breakfast been drugged? Was I full of some sinister truth serum, thus to tell her everything I had? But hadn’t I wanted to tell her? Oh, I was becoming confused, no doubt of it; confused and frightened. Yet I certainly did feel dizzy, and my vision was somehow altered. I tried to shrug off the thought, and failed. If she had drugged me—invaded my room—my dreams—what would she not do? Before me Saturn glowed, a huge crescent of swirled cream and green, wave patterns curling between every band of color. I watched for a long time, as the planet and its delicate minions continued to turn, in arcs and curves and ellipses of light, slow and inevitable and majestic, like the music Beethoven might have written had he ever seen the sea.

  * * *

  That night I couldn’t sleep for dreaming.

  * * *

  In the morning I dozed, then awoke cold and sober. I made my way up to the observatory.

  She was there, working again with Charles. “Pay attention to what you’re doing,” she snapped at him as I opened the door.

  She watched me enter, smiled politely. “Mr. Doya,” she said. She put her head down to the eyepiece, then pulled up; I am sure she never saw a thing. I was just below her. “Would you like to take a look?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Do you want to see the rings first?”

  “Sure.”

  She pushed buttons on a console beside her. The telescope and its containing strip in the ceiling shifted, and there was a low, vibrating whirrr; though I could barely sense it, clearly the entire chamber was revolving. Holmes leaned forward and looked into the eyepiece, pushed buttons with her eyes still to it.

  “There.” She pushed a final button and got up. I sat in the chair and looked in. The field was jammed with white boulders, irregular ice asteroids.

  “My.” Even as close as we were in the satellite, with the naked eye the rings appeared to be solid strands, scores of narrow solid white bands.

  “Isn’t it a nice view?”

  “How big are they?”

>   “Most of them are like snowballs, but some are as large as a kilometer in diameter, or more. That’s what creates the grooved effect.”

  “It’s amazing what a thin plane they stay in,” I said.

  “Yes. It’s a wonderful display of gravity at work. I find it fascinating—a force the workings of which we can describe and predict with minute accuracy, without understanding in the slightest.”

  “It seems to me you can say that about almost any natural force.”

  “Or about anything at all, I’m sure.”

  That caused me to shake my head, and she laughed. “Here, I’ll shift the field to include this ring’s outer edge. It’s a good example of the rigor of gravity’s laws.”

  She pushed buttons, and the field became a flurry of white, like a snowstorm, I imagined. When it cleared again there was white rubble there still closely packed together—and then, straight as a ruler, the boulders ceased and black starry space began. “My,” I said.

  “A couple of the kilometer-sized moonlets share an orbit here, and sweep the smaller pieces inside.”

  “And how thick is the plane?”

  “Twenty-five kilometers or so.”

  One of the boulders, long and narrow like a beam, caught my eye. It occurred to me that she was showing me her quarry.… I decided to make the first lunge this time.

  “You know,” I said, “some physicists on Mars have determined that the columns of Icehenge came from here.”

  “Yes,” she replied. “A ring of ice boulders made from ice taken from a ring of ice boulders. How nice.”

  I continued to look in the eyepiece, mimicking her behavior. “Some would say that that fact tends to support the idea that a resident of the Saturn area built Icehenge.”

  “So they might, but it’s just circumstantial evidence. Hasn’t Nederland shown how easily Davydov’s expedition could have passed by here?” Her voice was unconcerned. “Your whole case against me is circumstantial.”

  “True. But you can make a very good case if there are enough circumstances.”

  “But you cannot prove your case, no matter how many circumstances.”

  I pulled my head back to look at her, and she was smiling. “And if you can’t prove it,” she said, “you can’t publish it, since it would constitute defamation of character, slander, libel.… I am fascinated by the monument, I have told you that, and it is amusing that you believe I built it, but both I and Icehenge have enough troubles without a connection being made between us. If you make one I will see that you are destroyed.”