Icehenge (13 page)

A desk in the back room appeared to have been cleared hastily; all the drawers were empty, but under it was a scrap of paper with its curl frozen into it. On it was scrawled,
Susan—start the evacuation at dusk—A.
Hana brought the scrap out to show it to me; when I was done examining it I gave it back to her and walked away. Dark and cold in the empty street. The voices behind were like those of workers in a tavern. I sat on my old apartment stoop, turned up my suit's heat, felt the hot air waft out of my hood vents onto my face. I breathed the cold night air deep into me. So they had broken the dome of New Houston. And how many other cities had died like it?

The others left the tavern in a group, arguing. “Obviously there was a well organized resistance,” Hana said angrily. “This is one of their headquarters! The reason we've never found more evidence of them is they were a secret organization, and the police didn't want to acknowledge their existence—”

“I know,” Petrini said in a soothing voice. “Professor Nederland has argued that view very cogently for many years.” They walked before a light spearing the length of the street and split it four ways. “But still—Hjalmar, you must admit this,” he said to me on my stoop. “You are explaining an absence of data, not the presence of it. And you can't rely on those samizdat you prize so highly. After all, we have samizdat accounts of green Martian natives joining the riots from their hideaways”—this got a laugh or two from his staff—“and then leading the defeated rioters into their Pellucidarian refuge. But we can't believe in them just because there is a suspicious
lack
of other data proving their existence, now can we.”

I suppose he thought he was being funny. “Here's your evidence,” I said.

Satarwal spoke up. “This is just the nest of some of the rioters who destroyed this city. An isolated cell of killers.”

“I notice they're the dead ones.”

Satarwal waved a finger at me angrily. “There was no organized resistance! No Washington-Lenin Alliance, as some of your cohorts call it. It is nothing more than a malicious fiction, made up by dissidents to attempt to embarrass the government.”

Wearily I explained to Petrini, “The size of the revolt is itself the largest and most obvious sort of evidence. There is no way a spontaneous revolt could have held off the police for five months. And taken over all these cities.”

“That was due to the Soviet fleet's defection,” Satarwal answered.

“That was the Lenin half of the Alliance. Here we stand in a Texan city that had to be destroyed, it was so well defended. This is the Washington half.”

“The rioters themselves destroyed the city,” Satarwal insisted. “I have proved this—”

“You work for the Committee,” I said, and stood. My head spun, lights crawled in my vision. I spoke loudly so everyone there would hear me. “The rebels didn't destroy this city.” Hana stared at me, consternation deforming her face. The rest of them stared as well. “The police troopers did it. I know because I was there.” I waved around me. “I was right here when it happened!”

“You may have been in the city,” Petrini said reassuringly, “but you can't possibly recall the incident—”

“It wasn't an
incident.
It was war—a massacre, do you understand? They blasted the dome and came down on rocket packs and—and
killed
everybody! When I stood in this street I had an epiphanic recollection—you've all had those, you know what they're like—and I remembered it all. I was young then, but I remember.”

“Ridiculous!” Satarwal cried furiously. “Why should we believe somebody so biased—”

“Because
I was there!
”

At that moment a student bumped the light, and its beam fell on me. In an intact window across the street I could suddenly see my reflection: short, tubby, licks of electric hair tufting away from a large head, rubbery small-eyed face puffy with vehemence … an old man fizzing with indignation, over something only he cared about. And there were Hana and Bill and Xhosa and Heidi and all the rest, staring at me. What a ludicrous figure I must have cut, crying out my testament as though anyone there would believe it! In disgust I snarled and twisted away, as if when I could not see my reflection, they could not see me.

But I had been there, and I remembered.

Petrini, pleading in his let's-be-reasonable tone: “A three-hundred-year-old memory, Hjalmar? Again you must agree, it's not very
strong
evidence.”

I shrugged, wishing to escape. “When human witness becomes weak evidence we're in bad trouble. I say it happened. I was here, I saw it. That's how we make history, by eyewitness accounts. That's what the samizdat are.”

“Even the green Martian one?” Petrini said gently. “Besides, we are archaeologists.”

I shook my head, stared around at the dark apartments, desperation filling me, flooding me. “We are
amnesiacs,
” I cried. Helplessly I saw again the rock behind the door, the dome falling. My students watched me tensely, ready for an opportunity to extricate me from my folly; they didn't believe me any more than Petrini did.

*   *   *

Graben—a depressed crustal block, bounded by faults on its long sides.

Once I said nearly the same thing to the Shrike. We were up in his bedroom on the eightieth floor of the Barnard Tower, and he adjusted the wall-sized window so we could see out. He stood before the glass watching a big Arctic eagle gliding on the stiff wind coursing over Alexandria. From the bed I observed his supple back, the curve of his buttock against the bruised sky and the last flare of the dusk mirrors' sunset. Below the myriad city lights blinked on. “We're amnesiacs, Shrike,” I said to him. I call him Shrike (he doesn't get it); his real name is Alexander Graham Selkirk (his father's best joke). So I watched him there at his island's window lighting a pipe, and I said, “We're amnesiacs, it doesn't matter what we do. It doesn't matter what you do, Shrike. You won't remember it in a century.”

“By that time I doubt I'll care,” he said, expelling the fruity smoke of his pipe. “Why should I? Besides, there's always the memory drugs.”

“They don't work.”

He shrugged. “It depends on how particular you are when you say
work.
Besides, what can you do? Would you rather be dead?” He puffed energetically. “It's just the way things are.”

“Sometimes I get so tired of things as they are. Look down there at all those people in the street, Shrike. Can you see them?”

“They look like ants.”

“Very original. And that's how you think of them, too. The workers, the poor, the miners who make this planet profitable to its owners on Earth—what do you care for them? You live up here like Syrtis grass in its sheath of ice, shielded from the grubby Martian world and all its ants.”

“You're up here too, aren't you.”

“Who wouldn't be if they could? But we're all bound in the same system. We struggle in our casings and then forget whatever efforts we make.”

“The way you describe it, perhaps it's better that way.”

“Bah. Have you ever been poor, I mean Martian poor?”

“Yes. I was born in a mine, actually. And grew up in a mining camp.”

“And do you remember it?”

“Of course not. Can't say I'd care to.”

“You'd rather stay sheathed in privilege.”

He nodded. “And so would you. Please—don't protest. How often you've said all this. Get comfortable and you start feeling guilty. Is that why you like going off on those awful digs all the time? And now you're being kept from it? But don't be cross. You'll get your dig, I'll see to that.”

“You haven't been on the Committee long enough to see to anything,” I said. “You've got a century more of running errands first. And the Committee will let me go to New Houston as soon as I'm no longer department chair, and no sooner.”

He smiled sardonically. “But they will let you go. And you'll know who to thank.”

“Oh yes,” I said, and threw myself back against the big pillows. “I'll know. But how will I thank you, Shrike? What can poor I, lowly professor at university, give you? You who have—” I waved out at the vast lit map of Alexandria.

He shrugged, a beautiful movement to watch—a movement I tried to imitate in my own affairs. “You do fine. I like your company.”

“I don't see why.”

“Sometimes I don't either!” He laughed. “Usually you aren't this cranky.”

“Ach—” I looked away. “I'm your pet scientist, and we both know it. How many other pets do you keep.”

The silence stretched on. Shrike stepped to the music console, pushed buttons, and the very slowest version of “Django” made its melancholy beginning. When he saw I was watching him again he pointed his pipe at me. “How many other governors do you keep?”

“None!”

He laughed at me, went back to the window. “Perhaps it's best we forget our pasts. How much could we be saddled with before we buckled under the stupidity of it all?”

“Perhaps we would learn to do better.”

“Perhaps. But I doubt it. Meanwhile, we have no choice. Think of your dig, Hjalmar. When you get to New Houston you'll be in your element, out in nowhere land up to your elbows in mud and junk, putting together ancient history like a puzzle. What could be nicer?” He laughed again, and again he was laughing at me, but something in it—his pleasure at his own charm—and the sight of him, and the view over the city and Noctis Labyrinthus beyond, and the music, all filled me and forced a turn in my mood. Or something did. Often my moods shift on their own, for no reason I can tell. But frequently Shrike has something to do with it. “Come back to bed?”

*   *   *

Densely Cratered Terrain—the central and southern uplands are as much as a hundred times more cratered than the plains of the north, and are over 3.9 billion years old.

Excavation is slow work. Each dig becomes a little culture of its own, formed partly by the digger's culture, partly by what they find. McNeil estimated that there were 3,500 buildings on the crater floor, and Kalinin guessed 2,000 of them were still standing, and all of them were filled with the artifacts—and sometimes the occupants—of three hundred years before. We built quite a cemetery out on the ejecta shield. Kalinin's team came across a mass grave containing four hundred and twenty-eight bodies. Most had been shot or killed in explosions, or asphyxiated. Bodies frozen together like packed fish. Satarwal declared they were victims of the rioters. I only had to walk out on him to make my point, and even Petrini looked disbelieving, in the moment when he knew Satarwal wasn't watching, in the moment when he knew I was.

I hiked up to the crater rim as I had so often before, for the solitude and the view over the great Martian uplands. Those bodies. Where among them were my parents, my sisters?—But it was stupid to think of it. The real problem was to prove the police had destroyed the city. But what in New Houston would
prove
it?

I was halfway around the rim before I noticed someone trying to catch up to me. A surprise; since my outburst at the Leaky Tap, my reputation as a madman was enough to keep me undisturbed. When I saw it was Hana I slowed down. “What do you want?” I called out.

She joined me without speaking up, then said, “I've identified the taggarts in the explosives that brought down the dome.” Her face glowed under the oxygen flowing from her hood's edge. She was upset. “They're American.”

“I'm not surprised.”

“But—” She made her mouth into a side-funnel to suck down more oxygen, and her eyes watered. She wanted praise, reassurance, I didn't know what. “The Americans?”

“Of course.” I was irritated with her naiveté. “Who do you think owns this planet?”

“I know,” she protested. “I mean, they back the Committee. But this—”

“This isn't anything new. That 1776 thing is just a story. America runs an empire, and we're part of it. The outermost colony.”

“I'm not so sure it's that simple—”

“A colony, I say! The Committee works directly for the Americans and the Soviets.”

She sat down on a squarish boulder.

“What's the matter?” I asked. “You've heard me say this before.”

“I know, but…” She held up the taggart, stared at it.

“But now you know it's true.”

She nodded, and I felt sorry for her. But I was angry at her too. She should have believed me before. Wasn't that why she studied with me, to learn what I had taken the trouble to abstract from this mess of a world? That is the trouble with teaching; students only really believe what they've discovered for themselves. You might as well give them a hammer and magnifying glass and throw them into the field.

She sat there like a train had run over her dog. I took a seat on an impact-tortured boulder next to her. Down on the crater floor they were ending the day's work. Through the sepia haze it looked like a town under construction: half the houses done, the other sites covered with building material.

I tried to explain to her how it had come about. “It's the worst of the American and Soviet systems that combined here, I'm afraid.” I hefted a shard of compressed basalt. “They wanted the same things out of us, and by the time they were partners down there it was a long established fact up here. And the worst of both systems were the parts that meshed the easiest. So that's what rules us, and everything else too.”

“I suppose so.”

“Now it was the best of the American and Soviet ways that combined to fight the Committee in 2248, if you ask me. An attempt to enact ideals that never were realized on Earth. But—” I waved the rock at the scene below. “You see what happened to them. And after that they cracked down harder than ever.”