Icehenge (7 page)

But to us children it was perfectly natural. And in the late afternoons, after dinner, we would play hide-and-seek. In my dream it was near sunset, one of the dust sunsets, when you could look straight at the little red sun, and the sky was ribbed with pink bands of dust, and the rust-colored plain was marked by long black shadows, one for each rock. I was hiding behind a spherical boulder about waist-high, crouched down, watching the other kids make their dashes for home base. Home base was a long way away. I could see the wind, picking up swirls of sand, but in my suit I couldn't feel it. There were giggles and quick breathing on the radio band, which was turned down so that the sounds were all very quiet. My mike was turned off. The person who was it gave up; there were too many boulders, too many shadows. “Olly olly oxen, free free free,” she called; singing the phrase in a quavering voice. “Olly olly oxen, free free free.”

But I couldn't come in. There was another it, something I didn't recognize, a tall dark thing like one of the long black shadows come alive. It was nearly sunset, the ruby sun was touching the old crater wall to the west. I was hiding in earnest. I could just dare to put one eye over the rock, to see the dark shape move around, looking behind one rock after the other. Where was home base? The radio transmitter hissed. No one called. The dark thing that was it was moving toward my hiding place, checking boulder after boulder. The shadow of the crater wall was stretching across the plain, blacking out everywhere.…

I shifted against the bed, half woke for a moment. Then my father had me by the hand. We were free of suits, under the dome. I was younger, about seven. We were walking across the baseball diamond. Dad had our gloves and the ball, one of the kids' softballs that wouldn't go very far when you hit it. “When I was your age and played baseball,” Dad told me, “the field was about the same size as this one.”

“This one's little.”

“On Mars it is. But on Earth even the grown-up balls wouldn't go very far when you hit them.”

“Because of gravity.” Whatever that meant.

“Right. The Earth pulls harder.” He gave me my glove and I stood behind home plate. He stood on the pitcher's mound and we threw the ball back and forth. “That pitcher really got you yesterday.”

“Yeah. Right on my kneecap.”

Dad grinned. “I saw how you hung in there the next time you got up. I like that.” He caught and threw. “But why did you try to steal third when you had just been hit on the knee?”

“I don't know.”

“You were out by a mile.” He fielded a low one. “And Sandy had just bunted and got out to get you to second. And once you're on second you're in scoring position.”

“I know,” I said. “I just took off when I got a good lead.”

“You sure did.” Dad was grinning, he threw a hard one at me. “That's my Emma. You're awful fast. You could probably steal third, if you worked hard enough. Sure. We work hard at it, you could be a real speedster.…”

And then I was running, across the open desert, the hard-baked oxidized sand of south Syrtis. In my dream the broad plain was like the Lazuli Canyon, filled with breathable air. I ran barefoot, in my gym shorts and shirt. In Mars's gentle grasp I bounded forward, arms making a sort of swimming motion, as my father had taught me. No one had really worked on running in Martian gravity; I was working it out for myself, with Dad's help. I was in some sort of race, far ahead of the others, pushing off the warm gritty sand with great shoves of my thighs; feeling the thin chill air rush by. I could hear my father's voice: “Run, Emma, run!” And I ran across that red plain, free and powerful, faster and faster, feeling like I could run over the horizon before me and on forever, all the way around the planet.

Nadezhda and Marie-Anne woke me coming through the door, talking of excess biomass. My heart was thumping, my skin was damp. In my mind I still heard my father's voice. “Run!”

*   *   *

They began working incessantly to complete the starship. Nadezhda and Marie-Anne stayed up to all hours in our room, poring over programs and program results. It was laughable, really, for having missed them the Committee police weren't likely to pass that way again. Nevertheless they hurried, and my roommates grew more and more serious as days passed.

“… Degree of closure of any substance is established by its rate of consumption in the system, E, and the rate of flow in incomplete closure, e,” Nadezhda would mutter, as if praying, glancing balefully at me as I refused to work with them for more than several hours a day. The lights focused on the little desk, Marie-Anne hunched over the computer screen, copying down figures.… “The substance's closure coefficient K is determined by K equals I minus e over E.…”

And closure for the whole system was a complex compilation of the degrees of closure for all the substances being recycled. But they could not get that master coefficient high enough, do what they might. I tried hard to figure out something myself. But perfect closure is not natural, it does not exist anywhere, except perhaps in the universe as a whole. Even there, no doubt each big bang is a little bit smaller.… In the starship, the leaks would be in waste recycling. They couldn't deal with the accumulation of chlorides, or the accumulation of humic matter in the algal reactors. And they wouldn't be able to completely recycle corpses, neither animal nor human. Certain minerals … if only they could be re-introduced into the system, made useful to something which would transform them into something back in the mainstream of the cycle.… So we worked, for hours and hours, mutating and testing bacteria, juggling the physiochemical processes, trying to make a tail-in-mouth snake that would roll across the galaxy.

One night when they were gone I typed out the full program and filled in estimated figures of my own, to find the point where the accumulations would imbalance the system enough to break it down. I got about seventy years.

It was an impressive achievement, given what they were given, but the universe is a big place, and they needed to do better.

One day while thinking about this problem of closure, a week or more after the fly-by, Andrew Duggins, Al Nordhoff, and Valenski stopped me in the hall. Duggins looked fat and unhealthy, as if the situation were taking its toll on him.

“We hear that you helped the mutineers evade a Committee police fleet that came near here,” he accused.

“Who told you that?” I said.

“It's the talk of the ship,” he said angrily.

“Among whom?” I asked.

“That doesn't matter,” Valenski said in his clipped, accented English. “The question is, did Committee police pass us by while we three were incarcerated last Friday?”

“Yes, they did.”

“And you were instrumental in making the plans to hide from them?”

I considered it. Well, I had done it. And I wanted to be known for what I was. I stared Valenski in the eye. “You could say that, yes.” A strange feeling, to be in the open—

“You helped them escape capture!” Duggins burst out. “We could have been free by now!”

“I doubt it,” I said. “These people would have resisted. The police would have blown us all to dust. I saved your lives, probably.”

“The point is,” said Valenski, “you aided the mutineers.”

“You've been helping them all along,” Duggins said. The animosity flowing from him was almost tangible, and I couldn't understand it. “Your part in the attack on the radio room was a sham, wasn't it? Designed to get you into our confidence. It was you who told them about our plans, and now you're
helping
them.”

I refrained from pointing out the lack of logic in his indictment. As I said, paranoia on spaceships is common. “What do you think, Al?” I said flippantly.

“I think you're a traitor,” quiet Al Nordhoff said, and I felt it.

“When we return to Mars,” Valenski pronounced, “your behavior will have to be reported. And you will have no part in commanding the return flight. If you return.”

“I'm going back to Mars,” I said firmly, still shaken by Al's words.

“Are you?” Duggins sneered. “Are you sure you're going to be able to jump out of Oleg Davydov's bed when the time comes?”

“Andrew,” I heard Al protest; by that time I was taking an alternative route to the dining commons, walking fast,
rip rip rip.

“Damned treacherous
woman,
” Duggins shouted after me. His two companions were remonstrating with him as I turned a corner and hurried out of earshot.

Upset by this confrontation, aware of the pressures that were steadily mounting on me from all sides (when would I be compressed to a new substance, I wondered?), I wandered through the complex of lounges outside the dining area. The autumn colors were getting closer to winter: torpid browns, more silver and white. In the tapestry gallery, among the complicated wall hangings, there was a bulletin screen filled with messages and games and jokes. I stopped before it, and a sentence struck my eye. “Only under the stresses of total social emergencies do the effectively adequate alternative technical strategies synergetically emerge.” Jeez, I thought, what prose artist penned that? I looked down—the ascription was to one Buckminster Fuller. The quote continued: “Here we witness mind over matter and humanity's escape from the limitations of his identity with some circumscribed geographical locality.” That was for sure.

Part of the bulletin screen was reserved for suggestions for the name of the starship. Anyone could pick his color and typeface, and tap a name onto the space on the screen. It was getting crowded. Most of them were dull:
First, One, The Starship.
Others were better. There were classical allusions, of course:
The Ark, Santa Maria, Kon-Tiki III, Because It's There.
The names of the two halves of the ship had been joined—
Lerdalgo, Himontov
—I doubted they would be chosen. In the center of the screen was the suggestion rumored to be Davydov's:
Anicarus.
I liked that one. Also
Transplutonia,
which sounded like the Vampires of Outer Space. About a third of the names were in the Cyrillic alphabet, which I can barely transliterate. And the names would have been Russian, anyway. They all looked good, though.

Looking at the names I thought about all that had happened, about Davydov, Swann and Breton, Duggins and Valenski. I would be in trouble if I returned to Mars … if I returned?
When
I returned! Seized by undirected danger, I was suddenly inspired to add a name to the screen. In the biggest letters available, in orange, just below Davydov's suggestion, I typed out THE SHIP OF FOOLS. The ship of fools. How perfect. We would make an illustration for the allegory, with me large among the foreground characters. It made me laugh, and feeling better, though I knew that was illogical, I went to eat.

But the next day the feeling of pressure returned. I felt like a chunk of chondrite being transformed to Chantonnay. My life's course had been bent by this event, and there was no way to straighten it out; all my choices lay in a new direction, where eventual disaster seemed more and more likely. This sense of pressure became unbearable, and I went to the centrifuge to run. It felt good to get in the gravity and run like a hamster in a wheel, like a creature without choices.

So I was running. The floor of the centrifuge was made of curved wooden planking, the walls and ceiling were white, dotted by numbered red circles to tell runners where they were. There were unmarked, informal lanes—slow to the right, fast to the left. Usually I just went to the left wall and started running, looking at the planks as they passed under me.

This time I heard the thump of feet directly behind me, and I moved over, thinking, stupid sprinters. It was Davydov. He drew even with me.

“Mind if I run with you?”

I shook my head, although I don't like running with others. We ran side by side for a few revolutions.

“Do you always run this fast?” he said.

Now when I run, I am doing a middle-distance workout, and the point is to get up to about ninety percent maximum pulse rate and keep it there for up to twenty or thirty minutes. It is working to the limit. When Davydov asked me this question I had been going for almost half an hour, and I was about to collapse. Nevertheless, I said, “Or faster.”

He grunted. We ran on. His breathing quickened.

“You about ready to take off?” I asked.

“Yeah. A few days. I think.”

“Going to make closure?”

He glanced at me briefly; he knew that I knew that they weren't. Then he looked back at the floor, thinking about it.

“No,” he said. A few strides. “Water loss. Waste build-up. Not enough fuel.”

“How long can you go?”

“Eighty. Eighty years.”

I smiled for a moment, pleased with the accuracy of my own calculations. They should have had me from the start, I thought. I said, “Doesn't that worry you?”

Again he watched the floor. We took quite a few strides, nearly circled the run.

“Yes,” he expelled suddenly. A slight stumble to mark the admission. “Yes, I'm worried.” Several strides. “I've got to. Stop now. Join me? In game room?”

“In a few minutes.” He slowed abruptly and dropped back to the right. I waved a hand without turning and started to run freely again, thinking about the look on his face and the sense of release when he said yes, I'm worried.

After six thousand meters I climbed up to the hub and got out of the centrifuge, took a quick sponge bath. I walked down to the game room, feeling much better, tired and strong in the no-gee.

Davydov was over in an isolated corner of the game room, sitting at a table for two, staring out the tiny port in the wall beside him. It seemed that the seasons were accelerating aboard our ship, for the room was walled in somber tones, brown and thunderhead blue and silver. I sat down beside him and we stared at the little square of stars. He got me a bulb of milk. His big dark face was lined with concern, and he didn't meet my gaze.