Icehenge Read online

  * * *

  Later that day Andrew Duggins told me that the people who were not members of the MSA were getting together in the lounge down the hall. I went to see who they were. There were fourteen of us. Among them were Ethel Jurgenson, Amy Van Danke, Al Nordhoff, Sandra Starr, Yuri Kopanev, and Olga Dzindzhik. The others had faces I knew but couldn’t put names to. We sat about exchanging our experiences during the rendezvous; everyone had been arrested, and most only released a few hours before. After these stories were exchanged we began to discuss possible courses of action, and the bickering began.

  I told them what I knew, keeping to myself only the fact that I had been asked for help.

  More discussion and arguing.

  “We have to find out if there were any prisoners on Lermontov.”

  “Or Hidalgo.” I thought about that—prisoners for three years.

  “We have to act,” Duggins said. “We could organize another attack on the radio room. Take it over and put out a call to Mars or Ceres.”

  “We could slip out of the ship,” Al put in. “Patch a radio onto the high gain antenna.…”

  “They’re probably listening to us right now,” Yuri said, and Olga nodded. In the Soviet sector they’re used to such practices—or perhaps I should say they are more aware of them.

  Anyway, the conversation was killed for a while. We stared at each other. It was a strange situation: prisoners of our shipmates, on what had been our ship. The talk resumed, quieter than before, until disagreements about what to do brought the volume back up. “I don’t care if they steal the Committee blind,” Yuri said, “and I certainly wouldn’t risk myself to stop them.”

  “What do you think we should do, Weil?” asked Andrew, refusing to look at Yuri. He seemed annoyed at my lack of involvement.

  “I think we should sit tight, take Rust Eagle back to Mars when they let us, and then tell the authorities what we know. To try to stop them here just puts us in danger.”

  Andrew didn’t like that either. “We should fight! Sitting here passively would be helping them, and the Committee will know it.” He squinted at me suspiciously. “You’re close friends with Swann, aren’t you? Didn’t he ever tell you what was going on?”

  “No,” I said, feeling myself blush. They all watched me.

  “You’re telling us he just let you walk into this situation without any kind of warning or anything?” Duggins said.

  “That’s right,” I snapped. “You saw me in the radio room, Duggins. I was as surprised as anyone by the mutiny.”

  But Duggins was unconvinced, and the rest of them looked skeptical as well. They all knew Swann was a considerate person, and it didn’t make sense to them that he would have deceived a good friend so. There was a long, uncomfortable silence. Duggins stood up. “I’ll talk to some of you another time,” he said, and left the lounge. Suddenly angry, I left too. Looking back at the confused, suspicious people in the lounge, grouped in a disconsolate circle with their colored drink bulbs floating around them, I thought, They look scared.

  When I got back to my room, two people were moving into it. A Nadezhda Malkiv, and a Marie-Anne Kotovskaya—both BLSS engineers, both members of the Soviet branch of the MSA. The other two ships were being emptied so that they could be worked on freely, they told me. Nadezhda was 124 years old, a specialist in the gas exchange; Marie-Anne was 108, a biologist whose study was the algae and bacteria in the waste recycling system. They were both from Lermontov, which they said, had been in the asteroid belt nearly four months before the MSA took over, broke radio contact with Mars, and circled around to the rendezvous behind the sun.

  Shocked into a stiff silence by this new development, I went back into the halls, and then to the small lounge around the corner from my room. There I met the leader of the non-MSA people from Lermontov, a dour man named Ivan Valenski. He had been the Committee police leader aboard, until the mutiny. I did not like him—he was a sort of dully furious Soviet bureaucrat, a petty man used to giving orders and being obeyed. He seemed as little impressed by me as I by him. Duggins, I thought, would be more to his taste. They were men scarred by so many years of authority that they actively worked for its continuance—to justify their lives up to this point, perhaps. But how was I different from them?

  I returned to my room. My new roommates left me the top bunk; the bottom, which I had used as a convenient counter, was occupied by Nadezhda. Marie-Anne planned to sleep in the corner where the walls met the ceiling. Their belongings were strapped all over the floor. I talked with them for a while in English, with some fumbling attempts on my part at Russian. They were nice women, and after the earlier meetings of the day I appreciated the company of calm, undemanding people.

  That night Swann came by my room, and asked me if I wanted to eat dinner with him. After a moment’s thought I agreed.

  “I’m glad you aren’t still angry with me,” he babbled, ingenuous as ever. Although I had to remind myself that he had been high in the councils of the MSA for as long as I’d known him. So how well had I known him?

  “Shut up about that and let’s go eat,” I said. Somewhat subdued, he led the way to the dining commons through the dark halls.

  Once there I looked around at the place, imagining it as the dining commons of the starship. People in neutral-toned one-piece suits walked up to the food counter; there they pushed the buttons for the meal they desired, most of them never looking up at the menu. The foods grown on ship—salads, vegetable drinks, fish or scallops or chicken or rabbit, goat cheese, milk, yoghurt—were supplemented by non-renewable supplies: coffee, tea, bread, beef.… They would run out of those things pretty fast. Then it would be the ship-grown stuff, in enclosed plates, with drinks in bulbs. I watched all the precise forking going on around me. It had a Japanese tea ceremony atmosphere.

  “You’ll have to keep accelerating,” I said. “You can’t stay weightless for long, it would kill you.”

  He smiled. “We’ve got forty-two cesium tanks.” I stared at him. “That’s right. This is the biggest theft in history, Emma. At least that’s one way to think of it.”

  “It sure is.”

  “So, we plan to keep a constant acceleration-deceleration pattern, and create half-Mars gravity most of the time.” We walked up to the food counter and punched out our orders. Our trays slid out of their slot.

  We sat down against the wall away from the mirror wall; I don’t like to eat next to the mirror image of myself. The other three walls of the commons were bright tones of yellow, red, orange, yellow-green. It was autumn on Rust Eagle.

  “We’ll keep up the seasonal colors on board the starship,” Swann said as we ate. “Shorten the daylight hours in winter, make it colder, colors all silver and white and black.… I like winter best. The solstice festival and all.”

  “But it’ll just be a game.”

  He chewed thoughtfully. “I guess.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Not sure. No, seriously! There’s a planetary system around Barnard’s Star. That’s nine light-years. We’ll probably check that out, and at least resupply with water and deuterium, if nothing else.”

  We ate in silence for a time. At the next table a trio sat excavating their trays, arguing about the hydrogen-fixing capabilities of a certain Hydrogenomonas eutropha. Engineering the rebirth of breath. At the next table a young woman reached up to capture an escaping particle of chicken. The diminution of it all!

  “How long?” I asked, eating steadily.

  Swann’s freckle-face took on a calculating look as he chewed. “We could go a hundred, maybe two hundred years.…”

  “For God’s sake, Eric.”

  “It’s only a quarter of our predicted lifetimes. It’s not like generations will live and die on the ship. We’ll have a past on Mars, and a future on some world that could be more like Earth than Mars is! You act like we’re leaving such a natural way of life on Mars. Mars is just a big starship, Emma.”

  “It is not! It’
s a planet. You can go outside and stand on the ground. Run around.”

  Swann shoved his tray away, sucked on his drink bulb. “Your five-hundred-year project is the terraforming of Mars,” he said. “Ours is the colonization of a planet in another system. What’s the big difference?”

  “About ten or twenty light-years.”

  We finished our drinks in silence. Swann took our trays to the counter and brought back bulbs of coffee.

  “Was—is Charlie one of you?”

  “Charlie?” He looked at me strangely. “No. He works for the Committee’s secret police, didn’t you know that? Internal security?”

  I shook my head.

  “That’s why you don’t see him on miners anymore.”

  “Ah.” Who did I know, I thought unhappily.

  He was looking beyond me. “I remember … about 2220 or 21 … Charlie dropped by one of our labs with one of his police friends. This was in Argyre. We had completely infiltrated the Soviet space research labs, and had requisitioned this particular one for some tests—reactor-mass conservation, I think it was. I was visiting to help with a supply problem. They couldn’t get all the cesium they wanted. And then there was Charlie and this woman, him saying hello how are you Eric, just dropped by to see how you’re doing.… And I could not tell whether the woman was his girlfriend and he really was just saying hello to me, or whether they were checking out the lab as part of their police work. I showed them all around the lab, told them that we were doing all the work for a Soviet-Arco-Mobil consortium, which of course the record would confirm. I remember walking around talking about old times with him, explaining some of the lab rooms, all the time wondering if both of us were acting, or just me. And I was scared, that somehow our security had broken, and this was the first sign of it.…” He shook his head, laughed shortly. “But computer government came through again. They scarcely knew enough to be aware of their losses. Computer bureaucracy—no wonder Earth is falling apart. I have no doubt all of those governments are being stolen blind.”

  “There’s probably a Terran Starship Association that you’ve never heard of,” I said absently, thinking of the past.

  He laughed. “I wouldn’t doubt it.” He put his drink bulb down. “Although we have kept pretty good track of the other underground organizations on Mars. In fact, we chose this particular time for the construction of the starship because we think that the Committee police will be too busy back on Mars to make much of a search for us.”

  “Why is that?”

  “A group called the Washington-Lenin Alliance is planning to start a revolt sometime in mid-August, when Mars is farthest from Earth. Some other groups are going to join them. We don’t know how big it will get, but there should be enough turmoil to keep the police occupied.”

  “Great.” Oh, no, I thought. Not Mars, too. Please. Not Mars.

  Swann moved his hands nervously. I sipped coffee.

  “So you’re not going to help us?” he said suddenly.

  I shook my head, swallowed. “Nope.”

  The corners of his mouth tightened. He looked down at the table.

  “Does that end your starship attempt?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “They’ll get very near full closure, I’m sure. It’s just—well, on a voyage this long, the slightest difference in the ship’s efficiency will mean a lot. Really a lot. You know that. And I know that if you were to help them the system would end up being more efficient.”

  “Listen, Eric,” I said, and took a deep breath. “What I don’t understand is this. You people have been working on this problem for years. You and I have been friends for years, and all during that time you’ve known that I’m good at life-support systems. So why didn’t you ever tell me about it?”

  He reddened, chewed his lower lip. “Oh—no reason—”

  “Why, Eric? Why?”

  “Well—at first it was Charlie, you know. Being your husband and all—”

  “Come on, Eric. We were only married a few years. You and I have been friends a lot longer than that. Or was it like with Charlie in the lab that day—just acting?”

  “No, no,” he said emphatically. “Not at all. I wanted to tell you, believe me.” He looked up from the table at me. “I just couldn’t be sure about you, Emma. I couldn’t be sure that you wouldn’t tell the Committee about us. You always spoke in favor of the Committee and its policies, whenever the subject came up—”

  “I did not!”

  He stared at me. “You did. You’d complain about being given too much work and being shunted from place to place, but you’d always end up saying you were glad the sectors were being coordinated, pulled off each others’ throats. And that you were pleased with the life the Committee arranged for you. That’s what you said, Emma!” He pulled at his cheeks as I shook my head. “Then when they jailed your father I thought you would change—”

  “My father broke the law,” I said, thinking about things I had said through the years.

  “So are we! See? What if I had told you about us back on Mars, and you had said, you’re breaking the law. I couldn’t take the chance. Davydov was against it, and I couldn’t take the chance on my own, although believe me I wanted to—”

  “Damn you,” I said. “Damn Oleg Davydov—”

  “How were we to know any better?” he asked, his blue eyes unflinching. “I’m sorry, but you asked me why. We thought you were Committee all the way. I was the only one who thought otherwise, and even with me it was just a hope. We couldn’t take the chance. It was too important, we were trying to accomplish something great—”

  “You were pursuing a crackpot scheme that is going to kill sixty people for no reason,” I said harshly, standing up as I spoke. “A stupid plan that takes you off into space and leaves you there with no way to colonize a planet even if you found one—” I shoved my chair back and walked quickly away, my eyes filling with tears so that it was hard to balance. People were watching me; I had shouted.

  I pulled myself furiously through the halls of the living quarters, cursing Swann and Davydov and the entire MSA. He should have known. How could they not have known? I crashed into my room, and happily it was empty. I banged from wall to wall for a time, crying and muttering angrily to myself. Why didn’t he know? Why couldn’t he tell, the idiot?

  For a moment I caught sight of my reflection in my little washstand mirror, and I went over to look at it, floating in midair. I was so upset I had to squeeze my eyes shut as hard as I could, before I could look in the glass at myself: and when I did, I experienced a frightening thing. It seemed that the true three-dimensional world was on the other side of the glass, and that I was looking into it through a window. The person floating in there was looking out. She appeared distraught over something or other.…

  And in this curious state I had the realization, at the moment of seeing that stranger there, that I was a person like everybody else. That I was known by my actions and words, that my internal universe was unavailable for inspection by others.

  They didn’t know.

  They didn’t know, because I never told them. I didn’t tell them that I hated the Mars Development Committee—yes, admit it, I did hate them!—I hated those petty tyrants as much as I hated anything. I hated the way they had treated my foolish father. I hated their lies—that they were taking over power to make a better life on an alien planet, etc., etc. Everyone knew that was a lie. They just wanted power for themselves. But we kept our mouths shut; talk too much and you might get relocated to Texas. Or on Amor. The members of the MSA had compensated with a stupid plan, to escape to the stars in secret—but they resisted, they stole, they subverted, they disbelieved, they resisted! And me? I didn’t even have the guts to tell my friends how I felt. I had thought that cowardice was the norm, and that made it okay. I had thought that resistance necessarily would be like the rash and drunken words of my father, pointless and dangerous. I had been scared of the idea of resistance, and the worst of it was, I had thought that e
veryone was like me.

  I looked at the stranger in the other room through the glass. There was Emma Weil. You couldn’t read her mind. She looked plain and grim, skinny, dedicated, unhumorous. What was she thinking? You would never know. She sounded pretty self-satisfied. People who sound self-satisfied usually are. But you would never know for sure. You could look in her eyes as hard as you wanted, for an hour and more: nothing there but empty, weightless black pools.…

  * * *

  For a couple of days I sat in my room and did nothing. Then one morning when Nadezhda and Marie-Anne were leaving to work on the starship, I said, “Take me with you.”

  They looked at each other. “If you like,” Nadezhda said.

  The two ships had been placed side by side. We took our boat into the bay of Hidalgo. I followed my roommates back to the farm, ignoring the occasional stare we received from other workers in the halls.

  They had already added a few rows of vegetable tanks to the standard farm set-up. The glare of white light from the many lamps made me blink. I trailed behind the two women, listening as they talked to other technicians. Then we were off by ourselves, among the big suspension bottles, spotted green and brown, of the algae room. The glare of the lamps forced us to put on dark blue sunglasses.

  “Chlorella pyrenoidosa with nitrate as its nitrogen source takes ten times less iron out of that nutrient medium than when urea is the nitrogen source, see?” Nadezhda was talking.

  “But we have to use that urea somewhere,” Marie-Anne said.

  “Sure. But I’m worried that the biomass created will eventually become too much to handle.”

  “Feed it to the goats?”

  “But what happens when the nutrient medium is exhausted? No source of iron in the vacuum, you know.…”

  They had a problem there. There had to be a very close agreement between the photosynthetic coefficient for algae and the respiratory coefficient for the humans and animals; otherwise too much CO2 or too much oxygen would build up, depending. One way to deal with this is to provide different sources of nitrogen to different sections of algae, as this will alter the photosynthetic coefficient. But the algae use up their mineral supplies at different rates, depending on their type of nitrogen feed. And over long periods of time this could be significant; to keep up a balanced gas exchange might take more minerals than the rest of the biocenosis would be producing.