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.…
“What will you do?” Jones asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I’ve never thought of it. Maybe—I’ll go back to Terra. See my father. I don’t know!… I don’t know anything.”
Jones’s bass chuckle rumbled in the vacuum’s silence. “That’s probably as it should be.” He put his arm around my shoulders, steered me around again. We began walking toward the landing vehicles, going back to the others, going back. Jones shook his head, spoke in a sort of singsong: “We dream, we wake on a cold hillside, we pursue the dream again. In the beginning was the dream, and the work of disenchantment never ends.”
By Kim Stanley Robinson
Antarctica
The Blind Geometer
Blue Mars
Escape from Kathmandu
Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias (Editor)
The Gold Coast
Green Mars
Icehenge
Pacific Edge
The Planet on the Table
Red Mars
Remaking History
A Short, Sharp Shock
The Wild Shore
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
ICEHENGE
Copyright © 1984 by Kim Stanley Robinson
All rights reserved.
“Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” copyright © 1923 and renewed 1951 by Wallace Stevens. Reprinted from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Parts of this novel have appeared in substantially different form under the titles:
“To Leave a Mark,” copyright © 1982 by The Mercury Press. Published in the November 1982 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
“On the North Pole of Pluto,” copyright © 1980 by Damon Knight. Published in Orbit 21.
An Orb Edition
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
Tor Books on the World Wide Web : http://www.tor.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Robinson, Kim Stanley.
Icehenge / Kim Stanley Robinson. — 1st Orb ed.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN 0-312-86609-7 ISBN 978-0-312-86609-9
I. Title.
PS3568.02893134 1998
813'.54—dc21
98–23487
CIP
eISBN 9781466862203
First eBook edition: December 2013
Kim Stanley Robinson, Icehenge
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