Icehenge (29 page)

“No, just old.”

“I'll say.”

“Yes, I've seen a lot of these New Year's Eves. I can't say I remember very many of them.…”

“Long time.”

“Yeah. Besides I doubt I'll even remember this one tomorrow, so you can see how they might slip away.”

“You must have seen a lot of changes.”

“Oh yeah. Not as many, though, these last couple of centuries. It appears to me things don't change as fast as they used to. Not as fast as in the twentieth, twenty-first, twenty-second, you know. Inertia, I guess.”

“Slower turnover in the population, you mean.”

“Yeah, that's right. Everyone takes their time. I suppose it's a commonly observed phenomenon.”

“Is it?”

“I don't know. But damn it, why doesn't the wise old man beat the young turk? Why don't you keep getting better? Where does your creativity go?”

“Same place as memory,” I said.

“I guess. Well, what the hell. Winning ain't essential. I'm doing fine without it. I wouldn't have it over.” He shook his head. “Wouldn't do like those Phoenixes. You heard of them? Folks banded together way back when in a secret society, and now they're knocking themselves off on their five-hundredth birthdays?”

I nodded. “The Phoenix Club.”

“Phoenixes. Can you believe such stupidity? I never will understand those folks. Never understand those daredevils, either. Seems like the more you have to lose the bigger thrill you get from risking your life for no reason. Those damn fools dueling with sharp blades, trying to stand on Jupiter, having picnics on some iceberg in the rings—get themselves killed!”

“You really think people have more to lose by dying now than they did when they lived their three score and ten?”

“Sure.”

“I don't.”

He shoved me onto my side, roughly. “You're just a kid, you don't know anything. You don't know how strange it's going to get.” Angrily he swept his pattern of gravel aside. “There's only a couple hundred people in the whole system older than me. And they're dying off fast. One of these days I'll go too. My body'll toss off all this medical manipulation and
stop
”—he snapped his fingers—“just like that. They still don't know why. And God damn it, I'm not used to the idea. Do you understand what it feels like to live this long? No, you don't. There's no way you do. I tell you, I wouldn't mind having another six hundred years. I try talking my body into the idea all the time. And I'm
damn
glad I didn't go at seventy or a hundred. What kind of a life is that? Man, I've done so many things.…” His eyes, aimed at the concrete we were sitting on, were focused for infinite distance.

“You done everything you wanted to?”

He shook his head, irritated with me.

“Me neither.”

He laughed scornfully. “I should hope not.”

I was still drunk; my head throbbed, and my whole life seemed to swirl before me, over the concrete outside the dome. “I'd like to see Icehenge.”

He jerked around, stared at me with an odd look in his eye. He pulled tangled hair back to see me better. “You'd like to see
what?
”

“I'd like to stand at its center, and walk around and look at it. Icehenge, you know, the Davydov megalith, out there on Pluto.”

“Ha!” he cried. Several sharp laughs exploded from him. “Ha! Ha! Ha!” He rolled to his knees, got to his feet. “Davydov, you say!”

“He headed the expedition that put the monument there.”

In his agitation he circled me, and again sharp barks burst from him. He stood before me, leaned down to hold a tightly bunched fist before my face. “He—did—
not.
”

At last his anger penetrated the fog of my drunkenness. “What?” I said, sobering quickly. “What did you say?”

“What makes you think this Davydov had anything to do with it?”

“Um.” I gathered my thoughts. “A historian named Nederland tracked down the story on marks, he found this journal—”

“Well he was wrong!”

I was taken aback. “I don't think so, I mean, he has it all well documented—”

“Idiot! He does not. What does he say—some asteroid miner put together a half-baked starship and take off, what's that got to do with Pluto? Think about that for a while.” He stalked over to the dome, slapped it hard with an open palm.

I stood up and followed him, confused but instinctively curious. “But they were the only ones out there, see—process of elimination—”

“No!” He almost spoke—hesitated—turned on his heel and walked away from me. I followed him, and when he stopped I circled him. His hands were clenched tightly before him.

“What's wrong?” I said. “Why are you so sure Davydov's expedition didn't—”

And he swung around, grabbed me by the upper arm and yanked me toward him. “Because I know,” he said, voice thick. “I know who put it there.”

He let go of me, took a deep breath. At that moment Saturn broke over the horizon, and everyone on the dome strip started to cheer. All over Simonides voices and sirens and whistles and horns and bells marked the dawn of the new year with their ragged chorus. My companion tilted his head back and hooted harshly, then began to move through the crowd away from me.

“Wait!” I cried, and struggled after him. “Wait! Hey!” I caught up with him, grabbed his sleeve, pulled him around. “What do you mean? Who put it there? How do you know?”

“I
know,
” he said fiercely. He stared at me. In all that cacophony we two were still, face to face, gazes locked. And something in his expression told me that he knew. He was telling the truth. This was the moment that made the difference; this was the moment that changed me. I learned then that in certain times, in certain places, we
connect
in such a way that deception is impossible. The intensity of the flesh jumps the gap from mind to mind. This man's bloodshot basilisk glare held me transfixed, and I knew that he knew.

Not that that satisfied me. “How?” I asked.

He must have read my lips. He pointed a gnarled forefinger at his own face. “I helped build it! Ha!” In all the noise it was hard to hear him, and he seemed in part to be talking only to himself, which made it even harder to hear him, but he said something like, “I helped build it, and now I'm the last one. She only”—the blast of a horn—“old men and women out there, and now they're all dead but me!” He said more, but the shouting crowd drowned his words.

“But who, why?” I shouted. “Wh—”

He cut me off with a jab in the sternum. “You find that. I give you that.” He turned and shoved his way toward the streets again, leaving people angry enough to make it hard for me to follow. I slipped around groups and barged through others, however, desperate to catch him. I saw his wild tangle of hair beyond a small knot of people, and I crashed through them—“Wait!” I shouted. “Wait!”

He heard me, and turned and charged me, knocking me down with a hard shove. I scrambled up swiftly, and saw his head sticking above the crowd, but as I hurried after him my pace slowed: what was the use? If he didn't want to talk I couldn't force anything from him.

So I stopped chasing him, and stood there in smoggy dawn sunlight completely disoriented, as if this new year had brought with it a new world. Around me strangers stared, pointed me out to others. I realized that I was filthy, disheveled—not that that made me stand out particularly in that crowd, but I was suddenly conscious of myself as I had not been for several minutes, at least. I shook my head. “Happy New Year's!” I called out to my circle of observers—to my stranger with his strange news—and tried to retrace my steps, to find what remained of the weather crew.

That man had known something about Icehenge, I was certain of it. And that certainly changed my life.

*   *   *

My food had run out, and my memory was exhausted, so I decided to get away from the keyboard and my memoirs for a day or two, and hang around in the commons. Maybe I would run into Jones, or I could seek him out. Some people aboard, I had heard, were affronted because Jones had been invited along (by me). Theophilus Jones was an outcast, he was one of those strange scientists who defied the basic tenets of his field and others'. But I found the huge red-haired man to be one of the most intelligent people on the
Snowflake,
and by far the most entertaining. And he was more inclined than the rest to talk about something other than Icehenge. Before I left for the commons I went to my library console to print up one of Jones's books. Should I read from
The Case for Prehistoric Technology
(Volume Five)? Sure. I typed out the code for it.

In the kitchen I got a large bowl of ice cream, and went to a table to eat and read. The commons was empty—perhaps this was the sleep shift? I wasn't sure.

I opened my crisp new book, pages still stiff around the ring binding, and began to read:

… We must suspect alien presence in the unsolved problem of human origins, for science has significantly failed to discover the beginnings of human evolution, the point at which human beings and a terrestrial species might meet; and the recent finds in the Urals and in southern India, in which fossilized human skeletons one hundred million years old have been found, show that the scientific description of human evolution held up to this time was wrong. Alien interference, in the form of genetic engineering, crossbreeding, or most likely, colonization, is almost a certainty.

So it is not impossible that a human civilization of high technology existed in prehistoric times—an earlier wave of history, now lost to us. That such a civilization would be lost to us is inevitable. Continents and seas have come and gone since it existed, and humanity itself must have come close to extinction more than once. If there had been a great and ageless city on the wide triangle of India, when it was a splinter of Gondwanaland inching north, what would we know of it now, crushed as it must have been in the collision between Asia and India, thrust deep beneath the Himalayas by the earth itself? Perhaps this is why Tibet is a place where humans have always possessed an ancient and intricate wisdom, and what we now know to be the oldest of written languages, Sanskrit. Perhaps some few of that ancient race survived the millennial thrust skyward; or perhaps there are caves the Tibetans have found, with deep fissures winding down through the mountain's basalt to chambers in that crushed city …

My ice cream bowl was empty, so I got up and went to the kitchen to refill it, shaking my head over the passage in Jones's book. When I returned, Jones himself was in the room, deep in conversation with Arthur Grosjean. They were at the long blackboard, and Grosjean was picking up a writing stick. He had been the chief planetologist on the
Persephone
in 2547, and had coauthored the only detailed description of the megalith. He was an old man, nearly five hundred, short and frail. Now he was tying a piece of string around the stick, listening to Jones's excited voice. I sat down and watched them as I ate.

“First you draw a regular semicircle,” said Grosjean. “That's the south half. Then the north half—the half closest to the pole, that is—is flattened.” He drew a horizontal diameter, and a semicircle below it. “We figured out the construction that will flatten the north half correctly. Divide the diameter into three parts. Use the two dividing points
B
and
C
for centers of the two smaller arcs, radius
BD
and
CE.
” He drew and lettered busily. “At their meeting point,
F,
draw a perpendicular line through centerpoint
A
to south point
G.
Draw
GBH
—and
GCI
—then the arc
HI,
from center
G.
And
voilá!
”

“The construction,” Jones said. He took the writing stick and began making little rectangles around the circle.

“All the sixty-six liths are within three meters of this construction,” Grosjean said.

“And this is a prehistoric Celtic pattern, you say?” asked Jones.

“Yes, we discovered later that it was used in Britain in the second millennium B.C. But I don't see how that supports your theory, Mr. Jones. It would be just as easy for later builders of Icehenge to copy the Celts as it would be for the Celts to copy earlier builders of Icehenge—easier, if you ask me.”

“Well, but you never can be sure,” Jones said. “It looks awfully suspicious to me.”

Then Brinston and Dr. Nimit walked in. Jones looked over and saw them. “So what does Dr. Brinston think of this?” he said to Grosjean. Brinston heard the question and looked over at them.

“Well,” Grosjean said uncomfortably, “I'm afraid that he believes our measurements of the monument were inaccurate.”