Icehenge (36 page)

I didn't sleep again that night.

*   *   *

“Mr. Doya.”

“What?” I had been drowsing.

“Mr. Doya.” It was Holmes's voice, on the intercom.

“Yes?”

“The sun will rise over Saturn in thirty-five minutes, and I thought you might like to see it. It's quite spectacular.”

“Thank you.” I tried to figure out what she was up to. “I would.”

“Fine. I'll be in the dome room, then. Charles will show you the way.”

When Charles showed me in she was seated in the lotus position, staring out. The room was shoved out from the body of the satellite, so that the clear dome served as both floor and walls. Saturn was outside one wall, just clear of the surface of the torus. The planet was dark, but its polar cap glowed green, as though lit from within. To the sides the rings, thin now, shone like bright scimitars.

“Most of Saturn's mass is at its core,” Holmes said without turning her head. “The upper atmosphere is very thin, enough so that the sun shines through it just before rising.”

“Is that what that glow is,” I said warily. The luminous green gained brilliance near the pole, and seemed even brighter contrasted with the dark side of the planet. Finally I could see the sun itself, a fiery green gem that flared to an intense white as it cleared Saturn. The green faded and became a crescent of reflected light: the sunward side of the planet. The rings broadened and separated into their multiple strands.

“Well,” said Holmes. “Good morning.”

“Good morning.” I stared at her closely. She ordered breakfast innocently enough, and we ate in silence. When we were done she said,

“Tell me, am I your only suspect?”

I saw that she intended to have it out. I said shortly, “I think you put it there.”

“Genoa Ferrando fits the qualifications as well as I. So does Alice Waite, and a couple of others as well. Why do you think it was me?”

In a burst of impulsive anger I decided to show her how thoroughly she was found out. I told her the tale of the long search, gave her all the pieces of the puzzle she had left behind, put them together for her. It took quite a while.

At the end of it she smiled—again that calm, enigmatic smile. “That isn't very much,” she said, and swiftly got up and left the room.

I took a long, deep breath, and wondered what was going on. “What do you want?” I shouted after her. No reply. My head was spinning, my vision was a field of pointillist dots. Had my breakfast been drugged? Was I full of some sinister truth serum, thus to tell her everything I had? But hadn't I wanted to tell her? Oh, I was becoming confused, no doubt of it; confused and frightened. Yet I certainly did feel dizzy, and my vision was somehow altered. I tried to shrug off the thought, and failed. If she had drugged me—invaded my room—my dreams—what would she not do? Before me Saturn glowed, a huge crescent of swirled cream and green, wave patterns curling between every band of color. I watched for a long time, as the planet and its delicate minions continued to turn, in arcs and curves and ellipses of light, slow and inevitable and majestic, like the music Beethoven might have written had he ever seen the sea.

*   *   *

That night I couldn't sleep for dreaming.

*   *   *

In the morning I dozed, then awoke cold and sober. I made my way up to the observatory.

She was there, working again with Charles. “Pay attention to what you're doing,” she snapped at him as I opened the door.

She watched me enter, smiled politely. “Mr. Doya,” she said. She put her head down to the eyepiece, then pulled up; I am sure she never saw a thing. I was just below her. “Would you like to take a look?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Do you want to see the rings first?”

“Sure.”

She pushed buttons on a console beside her. The telescope and its containing strip in the ceiling shifted, and there was a low, vibrating
whirrr;
though I could barely sense it, clearly the entire chamber was revolving. Holmes leaned forward and looked into the eyepiece, pushed buttons with her eyes still to it.

“There.” She pushed a final button and got up. I sat in the chair and looked in. The field was jammed with white boulders, irregular ice asteroids.

“My.” Even as close as we were in the satellite, with the naked eye the rings appeared to be solid strands, scores of narrow solid white bands.

“Isn't it a nice view?”

“How big are they?”

“Most of them are like snowballs, but some are as large as a kilometer in diameter, or more. That's what creates the grooved effect.”

“It's amazing what a thin plane they stay in,” I said.

“Yes. It's a wonderful display of gravity at work. I find it fascinating—a force the workings of which we can describe and predict with minute accuracy, without understanding in the slightest.”

“It seems to me you can say that about almost any natural force.”

“Or about anything at all, I'm sure.”

That caused me to shake my head, and she laughed. “Here, I'll shift the field to include this ring's outer edge. It's a good example of the rigor of gravity's laws.”

She pushed buttons, and the field became a flurry of white, like a snowstorm, I imagined. When it cleared again there was white rubble there still closely packed together—and then, straight as a ruler, the boulders ceased and black starry space began. “My,” I said.

“A couple of the kilometer-sized moonlets share an orbit here, and sweep the smaller pieces inside.”

“And how thick is the plane?”

“Twenty-five kilometers or so.”

One of the boulders, long and narrow like a beam, caught my eye. It occurred to me that she was showing me her quarry.… I decided to make the first lunge this time.

“You know,” I said, “some physicists on Mars have determined that the columns of Icehenge came from here.”

“Yes,” she replied. “A ring of ice boulders made from ice taken from a ring of ice boulders. How nice.”

I continued to look in the eyepiece, mimicking her behavior. “Some would say that that fact tends to support the idea that a resident of the Saturn area built Icehenge.”

“So they might, but it's just circumstantial evidence. Hasn't Nederland shown how easily Davydov's expedition could have passed by here?” Her voice was unconcerned. “Your whole case against me is circumstantial.”

“True. But you can make a very good case if there are enough circumstances.”

“But you cannot
prove
your case, no matter how many circumstances.”

I pulled my head back to look at her, and she was smiling. “And if you can't prove it,” she said, “you can't publish it, since it would constitute defamation of character, slander, libel.… I am fascinated by the monument, I have told you that, and it is amusing that you believe I built it, but both I and Icehenge have enough troubles without a connection being made between us. If you make one I will see that you are destroyed.”

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.