Icehenge

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Taken aback, I cleared my throat. “And if I find proof—”

  “You will not find proof. There is none to be found. Be warned, Mr. Doya. I will not tolerate having my name associated with it.”

  “But—”

  “There is no proof,” she said, patiently but insistently. We hung there silently, and I could feel myself blushing. Was this why I was here, and all that preceded it a preparation, lending force to her warning? The thought angered me, her self-assurance angered me, everything she had done angered me; and as an angry idea came to me I spoke it.

  “Since you are so sure of this, perhaps you would, um, help me close my investigation?” She stared. “The Waystation Institute for Higher Learning wants to sponsor another expedition to Pluto, to investigate the questions I and others have raised.” I was making this up, and it was exciting. “Since you are so certain I will never find any proof that you did it, perhaps you’d be interested in funding this expedition, to lay all questions to rest? And as a favor in return for my visit?” I nearly smiled at that.

  She saw it, and smiled in return. “You think I won’t do it.”

  “I hope you will.”

  After a long pause she said, “I’ll do it.” And then, with a casual wave of her hand: “Now you must excuse me, I must return to my work.”

  * * *

  After that conversation I seldom saw her. I wasn’t invited to dinner that evening, and after a long wait I had one of the little square robots bring a meal. For the next three days I was on my own; Holmes sent not a single message. I began to think that supporting an expedition to Pluto disturbed her more than it had seemed when she agreed to it. Perhaps she was having second thoughts.

  There is an old truism: every hoaxer secretly wants to be discovered, eventually, and so they sow the seeds of their own destruction. But I was never very sure about that truism; I didn’t quite believe it. In any case, the two conflicting urges—to deceive, to be discovered—must create in every hoaxer’s mind a terrible ambivalence. And it seemed to me then that Caroline Holmes basically wanted to keep deceiving, to stay secret; so that if for a moment the contrary urge had seized control and granted me my expedition, Holmes herself might soon regret it. But maybe not. I could not be sure; she was a mystery to me.

  She continued with her binary behavior, however, which I felt I did understand: she either chatted pleasantly about other things, as if we had no central disagreement to discuss, or else she flipped over instantly into direct discussion of our problem. Once I met her in the clear-walled hallway, and she spent quite a bit of time telling me about some of the seashells in the glass; then in the midst of this dispassionate lecture, she said, “Are you aware of the political ramifications that the overthrow of Nederland’s work might have on Mars?”

  “I don’t care. I’m not a political person.”

  The deep lines in her face twisted into a grimace. “How I hate people who say that! Everyone is a political person, don’t you understand that? You would have to be autistic or a hermit to be truly apolitical! People who say that are merely saying they support the status quo, which is a profoundly political stance—”

  “All right all right,” I said, cutting her off. “Let me put it another way. Mars is a moribund bureaucratic police state, in the service of even more oppressive forces on Terra. I can’t imagine why anyone in their right mind would live there, especially when they have the alternative of the outer satellites. I have little respect for Martians, therefore, and I don’t care much about their problems. If by ramifications you mean the admissions that the Martian government made about their conduct in the civil war after Nederland published his discoveries at New Houston—ah ha—I see you do—then I don’t agree that the exposure of the problems in Nederland’s work will make any difference.”

  “Of course it will!”

  “No it won’t. The Martian government made their admissions, and opened up the evidence that proved conclusively they crushed a major revolution. They can’t go back on that now. It doesn’t matter whether what prompted them was the truth or a lie. In fact—if that’s the effect you wanted to create with your Icehenge story”—and I stopped and stared at her closely, for it seemed to me that there might be a faint blush on her lined old cheeks—“then you got it. Nothing that happens now will change that.”

  “Hmph. You don’t know Mars as well as you think you do.” But I had set her to thinking, and since she wanted to think, why she just turned around and pulled herself down the hall away from me.

  “That’s because I’m not a political person,” I muttered, feeling a grim satisfaction. Even a wild man dishwasher gets his points in once in a while.

  * * *

  One night I dreamed that Holmes and I were in a weightless, locked room: her hair waved around her nude shoulders like snakes, and she shrieked, “Don’t go on! Stop!”

  I woke up immediately, sitting up with twisted bedsheets clutched in my hands. After a while I laughed uneasily; Holmes was prevented from violating my dreams, because such interference frightened me so badly that I would wake up.

  And as I thought about it, I realized that this idea of a dream holograph was nonsense. Nobody has a machine that can violate your dreams. The idea had come to me because, in the first days after my arrival, Holmes’s behavior had definitely shaken me. And our interactions had been so charged that I dreamed about them at night, continuing our arguments; it was a simple case of day residue.

  But I thought there was a very good chance that she had drugged me, that morning. I fell asleep again thinking about that, not quite so self-assured, so confident I was winning our bout, and safe. I wouldn’t be truly safe until—well … I wasn’t sure when.

  The next day I was still thinking about a locked room. I wandered around the torus, looking methodically for any sections that were closed off. Many small rooms were locked, but there was one big section—an arc of the torus below the main hallway—that I couldn’t enter. It took a lot of wandering around that area to make sure, and when I was, my curiosity grew.

  That night my dreams were particularly violent; though Holmes never appeared in them, my mother did, and my father was in several, always leaving for Terra, asking me to come along.…

  The following morning I decided to break into the closed arc. In a room down the hall from mine there was a console of the satellite’s computer; I sat before it and went to work. It only took me half an hour of sifting through satellite layout diagrams to find the locking codes I wanted, there in the original blueprints of the thing. I scribbled down a few numbers and left the console.

  I checked to make sure Holmes and Charles were in the observatory—they were—Holmes seemed truly obsessed by those rings—then I went to the inoperative elevator above the closed arc. On the console beside it I punched out the command codes I had written down. When I was done the elevator doors slid open. I walked in.

  I was on the third of seven floors, the interior control panel told me. I pushed seven. The doors closed and I felt the beginning of the elevator’s drop.

  The elevator stopped, the doors opened and I walked out into another passageway. The floors were black tile, the walls and ceiling darkest wood. I walked up and down hallways. Aside from the walls and ceilings, nothing seemed to be different. Rooms I looked into were empty. (Where was Pada and her crew?) I had walked for some time (always staying aware of the location of my elevator), and was starting to feel disappointed, when I rounded yet another corner: there before me I saw a door that seemed to lead into the vacuum of black space; and in the center of that space was Icehenge.

  It was small, and as I hurried toward it across a glass floor, I thought it was a holocube standing on a table. Then I saw that it was made instead of actual pieces of ice, standing in a big sphere of glass that rested on a white plastic cylinder.

  The room itself was spherical, a tiny planetarium, with a clear bisecting floor. There were stars above and below, and the sun, just a few times brighter than Siri
us, was just above floor level. It was Pluto’s sky.

  The ice liths of the model were nearly transparent, but aside from that it looked like a perfect representation, even down to the little fragments of the Fallen Lith. After a time I circled it slowly, and found an unmarked control console on the other side of the plastic stand.

  There were small colored buttons in a row on the console. I pushed a yellow one, and a long narrow beam of yellow laser light appeared in the room. It just touched the top of one of the triangular liths, on the flattened side of the ring, and the top of the shortest lith, on the southeast side.… And aligned like this, the slender cylinder covered the sun and turned it yellow.

  The other buttons produced laser beams of different colors, marking the sight lines that certain pairs of liths established. But these sight lines were not there for observers on the surface of Pluto, for they extended across lith tops in both directions into space. And the sight lines would be good for only a certain point in Pluto’s orbit—in fact, for only a certain moment in Pluto’s history. And one could only see them if an elaborate model such as this were constructed.… It was a private reference, to a single moment. I pushed the other buttons, wondering if there were some way I could figure out what moment that had been. Or would be. Violet was Sirius. Orange was the Pleiades. Green was, I guessed, Pluto’s moon Charon. A blue beam extended straight up out of the tallest lith, and defined Kachab, Pluto’s pole star. And red, stretching across the two remaining triangular liths, turned Barnard’s Star—Davydov’s destination—into a Mars-red ruby.

  * * *

  “Mr. Doya?” Holmes was on the intercom again.

  “What?” In my dream my father had been telling me a story.

  “Captain Pada can leave for Waystation today, if you like.”

  “Oh … all right.” All of a sudden I was furious. Sending me off like that!

  “Would you join me for breakfast?”

  “… Sure. In an hour.”

  She wasn’t in the dining room—that is, the first room we had eaten in—when I got there, so after a short wait I called the robots in and had them bring me a meal that I ate alone. I looked out at Saturn. It was hard to chew the pastries, because I was grinding my teeth with anger.

  When I was done with breakfast, an image of Holmes, seated in a chair, popped into being across from me.

  “Excuse me for saying good-bye to you like this,” she said. “You are in a holo field yourself, so we can converse—”

  “The hell we can,” I said. “What’s the meaning of this? You come out here where I can see you in the flesh!”

  “We will talk this way—”

  “We will not talk this way—”

  “Or not at all.”

  “That’s what you think,” I exclaimed, and ran from the room. Something about it just made me furious. I pulled my way up to the hub and barged into the observatory. Empty. Back in the torus’s main hall I began to realize I was going to have a problem confronting her. The satellite was too big—I didn’t even know where her quarters were. When a bulkhead-like partition dropped down and blocked off the hallway ahead of me, I knew I was beaten. I returned to the dining room. The image of Holmes still sat in the image of a chair, watching me as I entered.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” I burst out, and went over and stepped right into the image of her. “Don’t you have the nerve to confront me in person?”

  “Mr. Doya,” she said icily. Over the intercom her voice rang a bit. “Quit being stupid. I prefer to speak to you this way.”

  I stepped back out of her semitransparent image, so that our faces were just a few centimeters apart. “Speak, then,” I said. “Can you see me well enough? Am I looking directly at you? Can you hear me?”

  “I hear you all too well. Let me speak. I want you to understand that my desire not to be associated with Icehenge is very serious.”

  “You shouldn’t have built it, then.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You did,” I said, and hoped my image’s eyes met hers. “You built it and then built the false explanation that went with it—and all for naught! All for naught.” I swung a hand through her head, then tried to control myself. “Why did you do it? With all that money, Ms. Holmes, why did you build nothing but a hoax? Why construct nothing but the story of a starship when you could have made it real? You could have done something great,” I said, and my voice hurt in my throat. “And instead you’ve done nothing but make a fool of an old man on Mars.”

  “Not if the Davydov story holds true—”

  “But it won’t! It hasn’t! And the sooner it falls the less foolish he appears.” I turned and walked toward the door, too angry to look at her a moment longer.

  “Mr. Doya!”

  I stopped, half turned, enough to see she was standing. “Icehenge … was not my idea.”

  “Then why is that model of it here in your home?”

  A long pause. I walked back to see the image of her face more clearly. Again she smiled, that same mysterious half smile—and in a flash I understood that she had meant me to find it. Perhaps she saw that on my face, perhaps not; her smile shifted, changed character, was marred by trouble—and in one of those subtle shifts of musculature I seemed to recognize someone else in her, someone I had known, or seen—who was this woman, anyway? What in God’s name did she want? Shocked, disoriented, I lost all sense that I could read her face; emotions were playing across it one after another, that was certain, but what they were I had no idea. I felt the abyss that lies between any two of us gaping under me, and I knew that the image of the face before me, great map of emotion though it was, masked an utter stranger, completely unknown to me; everything that I knew about Caroline Holmes was as nothing when weighed against this feeling.

  I shuddered convulsively. “If you analyzed the ice in that model,” I said carefully, “you would find it the same as the ice in the liths on Pluto. They are splinters of the same boulder.”

  She stared at me, her face still a mask. “You may think what you like, Mr. Doya,” she said. “But you will never know.” She and her chair disappeared.

  Charles opened the door of the room. “The Io is ready,” he said. “Your luggage is aboard.”

  I followed him to the docking bay, crossed into the Io. As I pulled myself to the bridge I felt the clank of our disengagement, and realized I was shaking.

  The viewscreen in the lounge had an image of the satellite in it. Helplessly I hung before the great wheel and watched, shaking still. For a moment, seeing its windows and rails and the observatory, I thought again of a bathysphere. As we moved away I could see the domed floor, a clear glassine bubble; and inside it the tiny figure of Holmes paced around the dome’s perimeter, upside-down as it seemed, watching us. Her purposes, I thought. Had she accomplished them?

  I remembered a moment in the journal of Emma Weil. She too had stood before a window, and watched a spaceship depart, just as Holmes now watched me. And I felt like the ghost of Davydov—the ghost of a ghost—leaving behind me everything known, and venturing outward. Suddenly the satellite shrank with great speed, to a white dot over the ringed eldritch ball. And we were on our way.

  * * *

  There was a holo message transmitter on board the Io. After a month or so of waiting out the long reach back to Waystation, I went into the transmission room. I was nervous and I had to compose myself before I faced the empty row of chairs that indicated where the audience receiving the message would sit.

  “Begin,” I said. The red light in the center chair blinked on.

  “Professor Nederland,” I said. “This is Edmond Doya. Our previous interactions have all occurred in the periodicals, but now I want to communicate with you as directly as possible.” I leaned against a table, kicked rhythmically at one of its legs. “The Waystation Institute for Higher Learning is mounting an expedition to Pluto, to make another investigation of Icehenge that will attempt to clear up the present mystery concerning its origins.�
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  I cleared my throat. That last wouldn’t go down too well with him. “I know you believe that there is no mystery concerning its origins. But—” I stopped again, tried to recollect what I was going to say. All of the sentences I had thought of during the previous month jammed together, demanding to be spoken first. I stood and paced back and forth, looking frequently to the red dot that represented my great-grandfather.

  “But I think you must admit, having read my work, that there is at least the possibility of a hoax. Certainly the possibility. Yet in the present state of knowledge there is no way of telling who really built the monument, I truly believe that.” So? “So … all of the serious researchers and, and theorists, of Icehenge, will be invited to join the expedition. As the senior and principal theorist your addition to the company would be valued by all.”

  Somehow that didn’t sound right. I was being too stiff, too artificial; this was an invitation, I wanted to show how I felt. But it was too complex. I just couldn’t talk to a chair. Still, I had to try to fix this, or I would have to tape the whole thing again.

  “I know that many people have construed my work to be an attack on you. I assure you, Professor Nederland, that isn’t true! I admire the work you did, it was a good investigation, and if someone was deliberately misleading the investigation … there was no way for you to know. And I don’t agree that believing it a hoax destroys the monument’s aesthetic worth. Davydov or not, the megalith is still there. Human beings still constructed it. Emma’s story still exists, no matter who wrote it.…”

  It was coming out wrong. I couldn’t say it. I paced even more rapidly. “Perhaps I am wrong, and Davydov did build Icehenge. If so, then we should be able to prove that on this expedition. I hope you agree to join us. I … bid you farewell. End transmission.”