Icehenge (30 page)

“What?”

Brinston left Nimit and approached the blackboard. “Examination of the holograms made of Icehenge show that the on-site measurements—which were not made by Dr. Grosjean, by the way—were off badly.”

“They'd have to be pretty inaccurate,” Jones said, turning back to the board, “to make this construction bad speculation.”

“Well, they were,” Brinston said easily. “Especially on the north side.”

“To tell you the truth,” Grosjean informed Jones, “I still believe the construction was the one used by the builders.”

“I'm not sure that's a good attitude,” Brinston said, his voice smooth with condescension. “I think the fewer preconceived notions we have before we actually see it, the better.”

“I have seen it,” Grosjean snapped.

“Yes,” said Brinston, voice still cheerful, “but the problem isn't in your field.”

Jones slammed down the writing stick. “You're a fool, Brinston!” There was a shocked silence. “Icehenge is not exclusively your problem because you are
the archaeologist.
”

I stood up, jarred by the tableau: plump Brinston, still trying to look unconcerned; angry red-headed Jones towering over him; frail grim Grosjean completing the triangular composition; and Nimit and I across the room, watching.

Jones's lip curled and Brinston stepped back, jaw suddenly tensed. “Come on, Arthur,” said Jones. “Let's continue our conversation elsewhere.” He stalked out of the room, and Grosjean followed.

I remembered Nederland saying to me, It will become a circus. Brinston approached us, his face still tense. He noticed Nimit and me staring, and looked embarrassed. “A touchy pair,” he said.

“They're not touchy,” I said. “You were harassing them, being a disruption.”

“
I'm
a disruption!” he burst out. “You're the disruptive force on this ship, Doya, hiding in your cabin all the time as if you had nothing to do with us! Refusing to join our talks! Living on Waystation for twenty years like a bum has made you some sort of misanthropist.”

“Not wanting to play with
you
doesn't make me a misanthropist,” I said. “Besides, I'm working.”

“Working,” he sneered. “Your work is done.” He walked into the kitchen, leaving Nimit and me to stare silently at each other.

*   *   *

Waystation—where I lived for fifteen years, not twenty—is the freight train, the passenger express, the permanent high-speed rocket of the Outer Satellites. It uses the sun and the gas giants as buoys, or gravity handles to swing around. It travels about the same distance as Saturn's orbit in a year—a fast rock. It began as an idea of Caroline Holmes, the shipping magnate who built most of the Jupiter colonies; and she profited from it most, as she did from all the rest of her ideas. Her company Jupiter Metals took a roughly cylindrical asteroid, twelve kilometers long and around five across. The inside was hollowed out, one end was honeycombed by the huge propulsion station, and off it went, careening around the sun, constantly shifting orbit to make its next rendezvous.

I boarded it on a shuttle from Titan, in 2594. My name had finally come up on the hitchhiker's list—the Outer Satellites Council provides free travel between the satellites, which otherwise would be too expensive for most individuals, and all you have to do is put your name on the list and wait for it to come to the top. I had waited four years.

Jumping on Waystation is like running in a relay race, and handing the baton to a runner five times faster than you—for getting a transfer craft up to Waystation's velocity would defeat the purpose of having Waystation at all. Our shuttle craft was moving at top speed, and we passengers were each in anti-G chambers (called the Jelly) within tiny transfer craft. As Waystation flashed by the transfer vessels were fired after it, at tremendous acceleration, and the transfer crews on Waystation then snagged them and they accelerated some more, while the crews reeled us in.

Even in the Jelly the sudden accelerations were a strain. At the moment we were snagged, the breath was knocked out of me and I blacked out for a second. While I was unconscious I had a brief vision, intense and clear. I could see only black, except for the middle distance, directly before me: there stood a block of ice, cut in the shape of a coffin. And frozen in this glittering bier was me, myself—eyes wide and staring back at me.

The vision passed, I came to, shook my head, blinked. Waystation people helped me out of the Jelly, and I joined the other passengers in a receiving room. Several of them looked distinctly ill.

A Waystation official greeted us, and without further ceremony we were escorted through the Port and into the city itself. It was crowded at that time—drop-offs to Jupiter were just about to be made, and there were a lot of merchants in town, moving goods. I found a job washing dishes first thing, and then went out to the front end of Waystation, rented a suit and took the elevator to the surface near the methane lake. I sat there for a long time. I was on Waystation, the next step outward.

*   *   *

For I was still chasing Icehenge, yes, I was. My dreams, my acceleration-induced visions, my studies, my physical movement, all centered around the idea of the megalith. And after the chance meeting with the stranger on Titan—after my most cherished story had been shattered—I returned to my studies with an obsessive purpose, fueled by a vague sense of betrayal: I was going to find out who put that damn thing there.

And I took my time about it, too. None of Nederland's hasty rushing about. In his need for precedence—his drive to be the one who
solved the mystery
—he had been reckless, he had jumped to too many conclusions, and taken too many facts for granted. I would not make the same mistake. With the memory of the stranger's bloodshot glare in mind, I hunted through the records of the Mars Development Committee, and the Outer Satellites Council, and the various mining companies that had plied the outer satellites, and the shipyards of the spaceship manufacturers, and the
Persephone
expedition, and so on: years and years of work. And slowly I began to see the pattern.

*   *   *

Some years after my move to Waystation I woke up one morning in the park, arms wrapped around a very young girl. The Sunlight had just come on and was still at half strength, giving its comforting illusion of morning. I stood up, went through a quick salute-to-the-sun exercise to alleviate the stiffness in my legs. The girl woke up. In the light she looked about fifteen or sixteen. She stretched like a cat. Her coat was wrinkled. She had joined me the previous night, waking me up to do so, because it was cold, and I had a blanket. It had felt good to sleep with someone, to spoon together for warmth, to feel human contact even through coats.

She got up and brushed off her pants. She looked at me and smiled.

“Hey,” I said. “You want to go over to the Red Cafe and get some breakfast?”

“No,” she said. “I have to go to work. Thanks for taking me in.” She turned and walked off through the park. I watched her until a stand of walnut blocked my sight of her. Rare to see someone so young on Waystation.

I went and ate—said good morning to Dolores the cashier as she typed my money from me to them, but she just shrugged. I went out and strolled aimlessly up the curved streets. Sometimes the real world seems just like the inside of a holo, where nothing you say or do will have any effect on what is happening around you. I hate mornings like that.

For something to do I went down to the post office and checked my mail. And there, in my March 2606 issue of
Shards,
was
my own article.
My first published article, containing sixteen years' work. I hadn't expected it to appear for months yet. I whooped once and disturbed people in the booths next to mine. I read quickly through the introduction, working hard to comprehend that the words were still mine.

Davydov and Icehenge: A Re-examination
by Edmond Doya

There are many reasons for supposing that the megalith on Pluto called “Icehenge” was constructed within the last one hundred and fifty years, by a group that has not yet been identified.

1) 2443, when the Ferrando Corporation's Ferrando-X spaceships were first made available to the public, is the earliest date at which ships capable of making the round trip from the outermost space ports to Pluto and back existed. Before that date, because Pluto was at its aphelion, and on the opposite side of the solar system from Jupiter and Saturn, and because of the limited capabilities of all existing spaceships before the Ferrando-Xs, Pluto was simply out of human reach. So a
working assumption
can be made that Icehenge was constructed after 2443.

2) The Davydov Theory, which is the only theory that pushes back this necessary time limit, asserts that the megalith was built by asteroid miners who were leaving the solar system in a modified pair of spaceships of the PR Deimos class. But a close examination of the evidence supporting this theory has revealed the following discrepancies:

a) The
only
data indicating the existence of the Mars Starship Association—the group of miners that supposedly built Icehenge—were found in two places: a file found in Cabinet 14A23546-6 in the Physical Records Annex in Alexandria, Mars; and the journal of Emma Weil, found in a buried field car during the excavation of New Houston, Mars. While Mars Development Committee records do mention the existence of Davydov and the others named in this file and journal, they do not mention
anywhere else
the Mars Starship Association. This fact becomes more disturbing with the introduction of new evidence concerning these sole supports for the Davydov Theory:

b) Jorge Balder, professor of history at the University of Mars, Hellas, searched the Physical Records Annex in Alexandria in 2536, as part of his research on a related incident in early Martian history. His records show that he searched Cabinet 14A23546 (all six drawers) at that time, and he catalogued its contents. In his catalogue there is no mention of the file found in 2548 by Professor Hjalmar Nederland, on Oleg Davydov and the Mars Starship Association. The implication is that the file was placed in the cabinet at a later date.

c) The records of the New Houston excavation show that William Strickland and Xhosa Ti, working under Professor Nederland, did a seismic scan of precisely the area in which the abandoned field car was found, two weeks before it was discovered. Their scan showed no sign of such an object. During the intervening two weeks a storm kept all workers out of the area, and the car was found because of a landslide that could have easily been triggered by explosives.

The article went on to list exactly what was documented about Davydov and the rest, and to show where information about them and the MSA should have been located but wasn't. After that were suggestions for further inquiry, including a physical examination and dating, if possible, of the abandoned field car, Emma Weil's notebook, and the file from Alexandria. My conclusion was tentative, as was only proper at that point, but still it was a shocker: “… Thus we are inclined to believe that these artifacts, and the Davydov theory that depends upon them, have been manufactured, apparently by the same agents who are responsible for the construction of Icehenge, and that they constitute a ‘false explanation' for the megalith, linking it to the Martian Civil War when it apparently was erected at least two centuries later.”

Yes, that would open their eyes all right! It threw the whole issue into question again. And
Shards
was one of the major journals, it was read system-wide. Nederland himself would read the article. Perhaps he was reading it at that very moment. Something in the notion was disturbing. I said to myself, The battle is on.

*   *   *

Quitting time at the restaurant. I went over to see Fist Matthews, one of the cooks. “Fist, can you lend me ten till payday?”

“Why do you want money, wild man? The way you eat here you ain't hungry.”

“No, I need to pay off the post office before they'll let me see my mail.”

“What's a dishwasher like you doing with mail? Never mess with it myself. Keep your friends where you can see them, that's what I say.”

“Yeah, I do. It's my foes I want to hear from! Listen, I'll pay you back payday, that's the day after tomorrow.”

“You can't wait till then? Oh all right, what's your number.…”

He went to the restaurant's register and made the exchange. “Okay, you got it. Remember payday.”

“I will. Thanks, Fist.”

“Don't mention it. Hey, me and the girls are going bodysurfing when we get off—want to come along?”

“I've got to check my mail first, but then I'll think about it.”

I threw a few more dishes on the washer belt—grabbed a piece of lobster tail the size of my finger, tossed it in my mouth, fuel for the fire, waste not want not—until my replacement arrived, looking sleepy.

The streets of Waystation were as empty as they ever get. In the green square of the park, up above me on the other side of the cylinder, a group was playing cricket. I hurried past one of my sidewalk sleeping spots, stepping over prone figures. As I neared the post office I skipped. I hadn't been able to afford to see my mail for several days—it happened like that at the end of every month. Post office has mail freaks over a barrel, and they know it.

When I got there it was crowded, and I had to hunt for a console. More and more people were going to general delivery, it seemed, especially on Waystation where almost everyone was transient.

I sat down before one of the gray screens and began typing, paying off the post office and identifying myself, calling up my correspondence from the depths of the computer. I sat back to read.

Nothing! “Damn it!” I shouted, startling a young man in the booth next to me. Junk mail, nothing but junk. Why had no one written? “No one writes to Edmond,” I muttered, in the singsong I had given the phrase over the years. There was an issue of
Archaeological Review,
and a notice that my subscription to
Marscience
had run out, for which I thanked God, and an inquiry from a local politician, asking if this was my current mail number.