Icehenge (16 page)

“He's wrong, you know. We'll need every bit of supporting physical evidence that we can find.” So that her taggarts would still mean something, you see.

And the way she smiled at me I knew I had guessed what troubled her. She had felt what I would have felt in her place; and I had figured it out and done something about it to help. I don't know if I am less able than other people to understand my fellow humans, but I suspect it is so. It happened so seldom like this, to see someone's face and know what they felt! Elation bloomed in me like a flower, and impulsively I shook Hana's hand. Even the sight of Petrini and Satarwal conferring down the hall could do nothing to dampen my mood. I returned to the main commons and wandered, looking over shoulders and congratulating students right and left for their good work, causing a growing ripple of smiles and laughter. I shook hands with McNeil, who was still cataloguing. Behind him the Kleserts were leaning over a table, absorbed in one of the notebooks. “It's like reading Scott's journal,” Claudia said.

Satarwal came back into the room, and I approached him. “This material implies a cover-up by the Aimes Commission, you know,” I said in a friendly way. “Aimes and many of the witnesses are still in government service. Questions are going to have to be asked.” And the answers will make heads roll! I wanted to add. Satarwal gave me a cold look, and Petrini joined him.

Petrini, looking over at Satarwal to be sure he had it right, said, “We feel that even though the rioters here in New Houston obviously fancied themselves part of a larger thing, it is still a question whether any planet-wide revolution was planned. Especially given the great bulk of evidence to the contrary in the Aimes Report.”

But it only made me laugh, at the time. I was too happy for such nonsense to disturb me. “You people will try to explain away anything. But how much longer can you carry it off?”

*   *   *

So I ignored them and went back to it. Bill Strickland was repacking one of the boxes of Xeroxes under McNeil's direction. He had a worried look on his face, and he said to me, “We should re-scan the whole south slope of Spear Canyon. There may be other things we missed.”

“You do that.” I saw by his elbow the little plastic notebook that had lain free on the floor of the car. Curiously I picked it up and tucked it under my arm; I had forgotten about it, and now I wanted to have a look at it. McNeil asked me where the boxes of duplicates should be sent, and that took a while. “Hiroko Nakayama and Anya Lebedyan will really enjoy these.” Then there were more questions concerning the car from Kalinin, and a quick meal, eaten on our feet; then Hana wanted me to look at one of the city maps found in the first box, which showed that the Leaky Tap tavern had been one of the neighborhood defense centers. With these and other matters a few hours passed, and it was not until everyone but McNeil and I had gone to bed that I got a chance to sit down with the notebook and look at it. “You've had this copied?” I asked McNeil.

“Several times.”

So I opened the dirty blue cover. The first page was blank; the second filled with careful, pointy handwriting.

The first indication I had of the mutiny came as we approached the inner limit of the first asteroid belt. Of course I didn't know what it meant at the time; it was no more than a locked door.

I followed the crabbed lines of script rapidly. “Emma Weil,” I said, looking up at McNeil. “Have I heard that name before?”

“Hellas?” he said, without looking up. “I think she helped design the first city over the reservoir. I repaired the plumbing there once—it was good work for that time. I think she disappeared in the Unrest.”

“Well, I've found her again. It says here she was on a mining ship.”

“So how did she end up here?”

“I don't know yet.”

McNeil came over to my table. “Where's a duplicate of that?”

I laughed. “Did I hear that from McNeil?” I went back to reading. McNeil found a duplicate of the journal, and joined me.

So a Mars Starship Association had started their own private revolution, using the larger one on Mars to cover their theft of three miners, their construction of a
starship.…
“That Soviet fleet,” I said in wonder, and McNeil was far enough along to nod his agreement. “Have you ever heard of this Mars Starship Association?”

McNeil shook his head. “I just heard of it two pages ago.” He looked up. “This is really something!”

“I know.” And once I got to the point where Weil agreed to help the mutineers construct their jury-rigged starship, curiosity got the better of me, and I began skimming the pages to discover what happened next. Evading the police—readying the starship—departing for deep space—each incident set me reading faster, until Emma Weil returned to a Mars in the throes of revolution. At that point I slowed, and read with care. I cannot well describe my emotions as I made my way through the last part of her journal; each sentence seemed to answer some question I had, so that I was galvanized repeatedly by shocks of confirmation or surprise. It was as if her voice spoke to me in direct revelation, as if I had stumbled on the greatest samizdat account of them all. I was completely unprepared for the end of the account; on one page she was detailing their plans for the escape from the city, and the next page was blank. The notebook was only two-thirds full. I closed it slowly, thinking hard.

“Looks like they didn't make it,” McNeil said. He had skimmed even faster than I. “Those burn marks—the car must have been hit.”

“True.” I stood to walk around. “But there weren't any bodies in the car. Maybe the car was hit, and in their hurry they left all this.”

“Maybe.”

“Where's that map of the chaotic terrain east of Marineris?”

“Second box, top. But it's such a small scale map, it couldn't have been used to lead them to anything. The marks may just be water stations.”

“Same problem for them, though.” I found the map and opened it. Topographic map in faint brown lines, marking the unmistakable forms of the eastern end of Valles Marineris, and the patches of chaotic terrain farther east; and in this wordless forest of closely set lines were four small red dots, three in the southern border of one of the sinks of chaos, and the fourth in its center. Without print I could not immediately name the sink, but a quick check with a planetary map was enough to recognize it; the red dots were in the Aureum Chaos, a deep sink of what was still untouched wilderness. “Maybe this was a general map, and they took the local ones with them.”

“Maybe.”

I folded the map and placed it in the notebook. “A starship! Can you believe it?”

“No. No wonder she thought they were crazy.”

“Yes.” But I liked the spirit of the group, their resistance to the Committee. “I wonder how they did.”

“Weil was a good designer. If they had the fuel, and the supplies, they might have gone a long way. But who knows how far they would have to go. What did they think they would find? Another Earth?”

“Or another Mars. They were desperate people.” Their hatred of the Committee—I knew the feeling, but I had never acted on it. All my work only helped the Committee. What had prodded them to action? What kept me from it? “Is there a spare copy of the journal?”

“Over on the far table.”

I walked over and picked up a copy, took it to our mail slots, shoved it savagely into Satarwal's tray, where it wedged firmly. “I don't think he's gotten a chance to see this yet.”

McNeil smiled. “The prize of the dig. Martian history won't be the same.”

“Yes.” I was warm all through, and I knew I was flushed dirt red and grinning like a clown, but I didn't care. I clutched Emma Weil's journal to my stomach and waggled my other hand speechlessly. It felt so strange to have what I wanted. An empty camp commons, tables covered with boxes and papers, lights faintly pulsing, coffeemaker faintly buzzing, a single colleague hunched wearily over a chair in the midnight calm: such a familiar scene in my life, and yet now utterly transformed by the words pressed against me. Now I was the victor in a strewn battlefield, the dreamer standing in his dream realized. “I almost … I almost lost hope.” McNeil cocked his head at me, showing he was listening with the relaxed economy of a tired man. “But I didn't! And—” I felt the grin grow across my face again. “I'm going to go to bed and read this thing properly.”

And so I did. That was the second reading. And how many times since then have I lain down at night to be with Emma Weil, and read her mind, and feel her anger and hope, and wonder fearfully at the blank pages, with their unwritten message concerning her survival and whereabouts, I would not care to guess. A hundred times, perhaps, perhaps more. I lived with that notebook, and Emma Weil became part of my mind, so that I often wondered (fearfully) what she would have made of me, and a day never passed when I didn't think of her. But I never read her again as I did on that first night, when I trembled uncontrollably in my bed at the shock of it, and each successive phrase was like a window into another person's mind—like a new world.

*   *   *

Within the week dozens of reporters joined us, and the students guided them down Spear Canyon to look at the field car, which had been completely excavated and pulled out of landslide danger. The car appeared on all the Martian holo stations. I observed this activity with great interest; Public Information and Publications Review were letting all of these reports on the air, and I wasn't sure what that meant. Satarwal's bosses in Planetary Survey had not released any statements concerning the find, and until they did we wouldn't learn how they planned to deal with it. I answered reporters' questions over and over: “Some of this evidence contradicts the Aimes Report, yes. No, I can't explain it. Speculate? You can do that as well as I. Probably better.” Soon the reporters were off to Burroughs, to question Aimes himself; but Aimes refused comment. And the Committee and all its subcommittees stayed silent. Still, since they had allowed the dig to take place, they surely had plans to deal with a discovery like this. I waited to see what they were.

Satarwal threw his copy of Emma's journal back on my desk. “Bad luck for her, to fall in with such fools.”

I smiled. “One might say the same of you.” I tried to hide my sense of triumph over him, but it may be I failed. “You see, there was a Washington-Lenin Alliance fighting you.”

He grimaced. “No matter what they called themselves, they were still murderers.”

Then a few days later he was recalled to Burroughs. He had all of his policemen pack up, and they left together, in the cars of the last group of reporters. What the reporters made of the opportunity I never discovered. I did not go out to see them off.

A few days after that, word arrived that Petrini and I had been made codirectors of the dig. No mention of Satarwal. With this announcement came news of a press conference to be held in the state office in Burroughs. We gathered to watch it on the holo in the main commons. Petrini shook my hand. “Now we are codirectors, as we should have been from the start.”

“And with so much left to do,” I said; but he took me seriously.

The Committee's spokesman was Shrike. I moved to the back of the commons to watch him, feeling uncomfortable under the eyes of the others in the room.

Shrike was as languid and charming as always with the press, and they loved it. He looked down at the podium, composing his features to an official seriousness: a lean, silver-haired man in a very expensive gray suit; small silver rings on each little finger and in each earlobe; sharp nose, thick eyebrows, dark blue eyes. He read a statement first. “The recent finds in the excavation of New Houston are an exciting and moving addition to our knowledge of one of the most troubled times in Martian history. Those months of 2248 called the Unrest were a time of great suffering and heroism, and this new account of the brave defense of a beleaguered city is inspiring to all of us who love Mars. The men and women who fought for New Houston were struggling for the rights and privileges that we now take for granted, and it is partly because of their sacrifices that we enjoy the free and open lives that we now live. We commend the fine archaeologists of the Planetary Survey and the University of Mars for their historic discovery.”

And he looked directly into the cameras, knowing that I would be watching—so that I could feel the shock of his mocking smile, and know it was meant for me.

First newswoman: “Mr. Selkirk, don't these discoveries, particularly the proof of the existence of the Washington-Lenin Alliance, contradict the conclusions of the Aimes Commission Report on the Unrest?”

“Not at all,” Shrike said cheerfully. “If you will read the Aimes Report again”—he stopped to allow the laugh he had drawn to extend as far as possible, smiling a little—“you will see that it concludes that there was a well-organized revolt against the legal authority on Mars, led by the Soviet mining fleet. The Commission never found the name of this organization, but the new discoveries in New Houston do substantiate what the Commission found. Eminent historians such as Hiroko Nakayama and Hjalmar Nederland have been working for years to identify the secret organizers of the Unrest, and in fact it was Nederland who discovered the so-called ‘escape car' outside New Houston. In the same way other historians have been exploring the connections between the Unrest and the reforms made in Martian government in the century following the Unrest.”

And the reporters nodded faithfully and whispered their approval into their wrist recorders, for the general populace, still in the mines and dormitories, to hear.

So they would explain it all away.

I left the room feeling sick. They would admit what they had to, and twist everything else to fit their new story, which would constantly change, constantly protect them. I tasted defeat like copper coating my tongue. Every thing I stabbed them with they would accommodate with elastic facts, until the thing was absorbed and dissolved.