Icehenge (17 page)

But I had expected it. I was prepared for something of the sort; I had already made plans to keep stabbing away. Still, it had been a shock to hear Shrike lie like that. My old heart fluttered and my stomach clenched, and though I wanted to leave the main tent I had to sit down for a while first. Even though I had known perfectly well they would do something like this.

*   *   *

The computer link-up to Alexandria told me a little about Emma Weil. She was born in the Galle Crater camp on the rim of the Argyre basin, in 2168. Her parents divorced and she lived with her father. She studied mathematics on the campus in Burroughs, led the ecologic engineers designing the Hellas basin complex, broke records in four middle-distance runs. When the Committee took over the mining fleets in 2213 she was shifted from Royal Dutch to the center for development of life-support systems, then shifted again to active duty on the miners. The records for the asteroid mining projects were incomplete, because of damage to offices and archives in the Unrest; I found no account of
Rust Eagle,
or of Emma after 2248. And there was no comment on her disappearance.

For Oleg Davydov, I could find only a listing in the Birth Registry (born on Deimos in 2159) and an appointment as a rocketry and guidance cadet in the Soviet mining fleet. After that, nothing: no appointments, no trial, no command of
Hidalgo.
No mention of
Hidalgo,
either.

And I could find nothing whatsoever concerning the Mars Starship Association. Not a single word about it.

Clearly the censors had been at work. But the documentation of Martian history was damaged and disorganized for good by the Unrest. Pockets of information exist in odd places, and it is seldom the censors can catch everything. It would take a more extensive, on-site search than I could make from New Houston, but I thought that if I had some time in Alexandria, I might be able to ferret out more. I had done it before.

I gave up on that aspect of things and switched back to Emma. I had a picture of her sent out, one taken at the beginning of her mining service. She had an oval face, a serious mouth, brown hair and eyes, fine cheekbones and jaw; I liked her look. I stared at that photo for many a night, and read her journal,
I hated the Mars Development Committee as much as I hated anything. I hated their lies; that they were taking over power to make a better life on an alien planet etc. etc. Everyone knew that was a lie. But we kept our mouths shut; talk too much and you might get relocated in Texas. Or on Amor. The members of the MSA had compensated with a stupid plan, but they resisted! And me? I didn't even have the guts to tell my friends how I felt. I had thought cowardice was the norm, and that made it okay,
and so I sat in my plush university apartment writing papers about events three hundred years past, pretending I was the fiercest anti-Committee man on the planet, while I lapped up every sop they threw me, and fawned for the favors of a Committee member. What kind of resistance was that? What had I ever done but gesture and shout, before rulers who tolerated me and smiled behind their hands to hear one of the professors at it again. Oh Emma! I wanted to be like her, I wanted to be able to act.

*   *   *

Nakayama and Lebedyan and several others rose up in protest against the Committee's claim that what we had found in New Houston could be squared with the Aimes Report. Criticisms were flying in from every direction, and I only needed to stand aside and help orchestrate it, and keep records. Parts of Emma's journal were released by the university to the newspapers, and the whole thing was published soon after; it became a bit of a best-seller. It seemed there was a public intrigued by this news from their own forgotten pasts, at least for a week or two. Anya Lebedyan gave me a call to congratulate me and ask some questions, and without hesitation she began the conversation in Russian; I felt a thrill to speak in the language of the samizdat. I found I spoke Mars's underground language as fluently as I read it, though I could not remember the long-ago life in which I had learned it.

*   *   *

Out on the rim on a cloudy day: chocolate thunderheads scudded north, and thick bolts of lightning alternated with shafts of buttery sunlight. Then the clouds flattened out and covered everything like a rumpled blanket, and it was evening all afternoon. Below me my team worked in the dead city. Strolling the rim ridge I examined its texture as if I could see the world beneath the rock. Samuel Barber's “Adagio for Strings” floated through my mind. Down at the physical plant Hana and Bill discussed something intently. They paid more attention to each other than to their work. I hiked down the rock ledges to Spear Canyon, descended the canyon to the field car. Climbed in and sat down.

Here Emma Weil had once sat, perhaps in the very seat I was occupying. It had been night; their lights would have been off as they inched down the road with the canyon dropping away to their left. Police artillery hammering at the city. Hearts hammering inside spacesuits that are no shield against shrapnel—or bullet or heat beam. The electric motors are silent, and no helicopters fly in the primal atmosphere; but somewhere, on the rim perhaps, heat-seeking automatic artillery has turned in its bed, aimed and fired, and some cars explode, others are damaged and halt, still others, perhaps, turn off their motors and coast down the canyon, rolling to freedom.

Some of them undoubtedly were killed. But there had been no bodies in this car. If the police had removed the bodies, they would have taken the papers as well. The same was true of the rebels. Since we found the papers, no bodies had been removed. Thus the explosion that stopped the car had not killed the occupants. Or so one line of reasoning could lead one to conclude. And it appealed to me, oh yes, it appealed to me. Sitting there on the crackly frozen plastic seat I tried to
feel
what had happened to her; and in my vision she lived. There was no sense of death in that car. Perhaps she had only lived long enough to crawl out of the car, so that her body lay in the soil of her beloved planet just meters from me. But no. The metal detectors would have indicated her suit. No, she had escaped. Escaped to the hills. Not dead, not my Emma.

I took out the small photo of her that I carried in my suit pocket, and smoothed it over my thigh. They had been headed for refuges in the chaos, where they very well might have hidden, from that day to this. Emma still alive, working with her biogeocenosis on the planet she loved.

And it occurred to me that I might find her.

*   *   *

Impact crater—with a diameter of 2,000 kilometers, Hellas Basin is the largest impact crater on Mars.

Then came the discovery on Pluto. It was Strickland who brought word out to us in the city. We were digging out a defensive center that had been bombed flat, and I was down with Xhosa attaching crane cables to a beam we had cleared. “Dr. Nederland! Hana! There's news in from Burroughs,” and
crunch
he jumped over the rubble and into the cellar with us. We stared at him, surprised, and he drew up like a policeman at attention.

“What is it,” I said.

Hana looked into the cellar and Bill turned to her. I thought that in his agitation there was a certain pleasure. “They've found a monument on Pluto. The Outer Satellites Council sent the first manned expedition out last year, and they've just arrived and found some sort of monument. Rectangular beams of ice set on their ends, in a big circle. Apparently it looks very old—”

“But that's crazy!” Hana said.

“I know! Why do you think I ran over here shouting and all?” Bill sat on the ground, dialed up his oxygen flow.

“It is crazy,” Xhosa said. “Somebody must have…”

“Come back to the tents and see,” Bill said. “They sent pictures.”

So we dropped our work as if it were nothing, and followed him back to camp. The main tent was already filled with people, and the clamor of voices assaulted us as we entered; it had never been so loud in there. I barged through the crowd and wedged into the group surrounding the largest table. Several photos were being passed from hand to hand; abruptly I reached out and snatched one as it was held across the table. “Hey!” my victim yelled, but I turned my back on her and plunged out of the crowd, into the dining room.

It was a small photo and it looked as though it had been taken in black and white. Black sky, a gray regolith plain marked by the low superimposed rings of ancient craters, and in the middle distance, a ring of tall upright white blocks, some slender, others thick and massive. They were lit by searchlights set off to one side, and five or six of the columns' faces were brilliantly white, as if they were mirrors catching the light. Human figures in bulky whitish suits were a quarter or a fifth of the height of the columns; they stood on the outside of the circle, heads craned back as they looked up at the closest block to them. The ring appeared to be about two hundred meters in diameter, maybe half again more. I couldn't be sure. A little stone circle (white stone?) on Pluto.

I must have stood hunched over that photo for half an hour. I don't know what I thought in that time; I was a blank. The photo seemed out of a dream. It was just the sort of thing I would dream. And I am always stunned to blankness in my dreams. Yet here my colleagues milled about the next room chattering, announcing the real.

Petrini banged on the table. “Please, people. I have more news. Listen here. Pretty clearly the group that recently arrived there was not the first to visit Pluto, as they thought they were. It must have been quite a shock! Anyway, they've sent back some information with these photos. The object is located at the geographical north pole. The towers in the ring are made of water ice. There are sixty-six of them, and one has fallen over and shattered. Another has an inscription on it.”

This brought complete silence.

“Jefferson at the university library in Alexandria has identified the inscription as Sanskrit. I know, I know! Don't ask
me
to explain it. I suppose someone has been up to games out there. The inscription is a couple of verbs and a series of slashmarks. The verbs both mean roughly ‘to push farther away.' The slashes make a simple arithmetical progression, two then two, then four then eight.”

“Twenty-two forty-eight,” I said. “The year of the Unrest.” And immediately a certain passage in Emma Weil's journal came to mind. She had visited Davydov's cabin, found him sleeping, found plans on his desk.…

Petrinin shrugged. “If you assume the slashes are a date in our calendar. But with this I don't think it's safe to assume anything.”

I scarcely heard him. “Where are the expedition's transmissions coming to?”

“Burroughs. The university's space center.”

“I'm going to go there and send up some questions, and monitor everything they send down.”

“But why?”

“I'll be back as soon as I can.” I excused myself and left. Some curious looks were given me, but I didn't care. Let them think what they liked.

… They were diagrams, several versions of the same thing … all circular, or near it … a circle slightly flattened on one side. Around this faint circumference were little rectangles, set at different angles, blackened by pencil.… “Something to leave a mark on the world, something to show we were here at all—”

Perhaps, I thought, perhaps this discovery on Pluto, which had given me such a shock, and made me so uneasy, might be turned to advantage after all. Perhaps it was not the disaster it had felt to me down in that cellar.

*   *   *

Ejecta

The Planetary Survey refused me permission to leave New Houston, so I called Shrike. “You need help,” he observed.

“Yes.”

“Did you see my press conference?”

“Yes. Did you write the speech yourself?”

“No.”

“I didn't think so. Do you know how many lies there were in it? Or do you care?”

“Were there
lies
in it?”

“You don't care. You'd read anything you were given, wouldn't you. That's the fate of the new man on the Committee. It's disgusting.”

“I thought you were calling for a favor?”

“… I am.”

“I'll think about it. But I'm disappointed you didn't like my performance.”

“A performance is just what it was.” I couldn't contain myself. “But it won't wash, you know. Lebedyan and the rest are already poking holes in what you said, and in all the other statements made by the Survey on the find. You can't pretend there wasn't a false history, Shrike. There are too many contradictions. What we've found here plain contradicts what Shay said about the assault on New Houston. Check it out in the Aimes Report.”

“I'll do that, Hjalmar,” he said with a smile.

“You'd better! Aside from the gall of it, which is disgusting, it makes you look foolish to get sent out there to spout obvious lies. It weakens your position because as the spokesman
you
get associated with the lies, and the clumsiness behind them. It's bad for you. And you aren't going to be able to lie your way out of this one. You'd better tell your bosses that, and start figuring out something else.”

“Thanks for the statecraft lesson, Hjalmar,” he said, mocking me.

“I'll trade it for a trip to Burroughs,” I said roughly. “I want to find out more about that thing on Pluto.”

“Fascinating, isn't it? It's the talk of Burroughs. What is it, do you think?”

“More trouble for you.” But I saw his upper lip lift a touch, and I let off. “But good for Mars, my Shrike; you can bet on that.”

“Hmph.” And he made me sweat and plead for a while. But I said the right things, and he agreed to help.

*   *   *

Riding the train to Burroughs, forehead pressed to the window glass: copper clouds shredded under a dark brown sky. Sometimes I feel like those clouds, torn east and scattered in the gales of Time. I knew that with this trip another life of mine was ending. Around me in the train car voices discussed the marvel of the day, the mysterious monument on Pluto. Did it mean the Atlanteans had actually lived? And developed space flight too? In my mind's voice, so much more mellifluous than my own, I groaned and lectured the speakers severely. No crackpot theories, please! This is difficult enough as it is! But of course crackpot theories would spring up around this discovery like a ring of daughter mushrooms around one of those spore-exploding kinds. No avoiding it. Out on the rock-stubbled expanse of Sinus Sabaeus someone had cleared an area and lined up the collected rocks to spell REPENT. I stared at the message through the faint reflection of my head: tufted black hair, close-set eyes, grim little mouth. How could Shrike stand me.