Icehenge Read online

  The plasteel rained down for over a minute. Police troops followed immediately, coming down on individual rocket backpacks. Figures in suits began pouring into our lock from indoors, not worrying about air loss. Andrew and I were handed two of the long-nosed light rifles, and we slung the straps over our shoulders and stepped out of the lock.

  There were a lot of them falling, in pale red suits. But it was a vulnerable way to come down. Beams of light laced the dark pink sky, and the police troops shot back as they descended. But they had to control their rocket packs, and they were falling. Their aim was bad. We shot them out of the sky. I pushed the trigger button on my gun and watched the beam intersect with a human form that was falling and shooting in my direction. Suddenly he tilted over and his rockets powered him down into buildings a few blocks away. I sat down, feeling sick, cursing the Committee for attacking in such a stupid and wasteful manner, cursing and cursing. The common band roared with voices. A beam hissed near me and I scrambled for cover under a building’s eave, thinking, not rain drops but death beams, these eaves are for … stupid stuff like that. I looked up again. If a beam hit the rocket packs for more than an instant they exploded. Little pops like obscene firecrackers burst everywhere above me. I cursed and sobbed, hit the wall of the building with my gun, pointed it at the sky and shot again.

  Over on the other side of the city the defense wasn’t doing well. Hundreds of police descended in the residential district across the crater from us. Then they stopped falling.

  A voice on the radio said, “Enemy is trapped in the residential quarter, northwest. Return to headquarters or to outposts five, six, seven or nine.” This was the first sentence in half an hour I had understood. I found Andrew and followed him to the command building. It was just three hours after dawn, when we had ascended the crater wall.

  In the command apartment everyone took off the head-pieces. Andrew looked fierce, desperate. Others were helping a man who was shaking uncontrollably.

  After an hour to clear our senses and take accounts, there was a meeting in the central lounge. Susan Jones, still in her silver day-suit, sat down beside me. “We’re going to evacuate the city.”

  “And go where?” I asked dully.

  “We have a contingency plan for this situation.”

  “Good.”

  Ethel and Sandra and Yuri joined us, and Susan raised her voice to include them.

  “There was always the chance this would happen, of course. We had to risk it.” Her mouth pursed. “Anyway, we’ve got some retreats in the chaos to the north of here. Hidden colonies, underground or in caves. They’re all small and well separated. Since we took over the cities we’ve been stocking them and supplying them with the equipment we’ll need to make them self-contained systems.”

  “They’ll spot us from satellite photos,” I said.

  She shook her head. “There’s almost as much land surface on Mars as on Earth. And geographic features so impenetrable as to defy belief. I know, I’ve been up there. Even if they photograph it all, they’ll never have the time or the people to examine all the photographs.”

  “Computer scan—”

  “Can only catch regular shapes. Ours are disguised and hidden. They’d have to check all the photos by eye, and even then they wouldn’t see us. Mars is too big, and the retreats too well hidden. So. We have a refuge, and it’s ready.

  “The other choice,” she continued, looking at our faces, “is to fade away in the city, and pretend you were neutral and hiding the whole time. Could be tough. But we’ve programmed a lot of imaginary people into the city register, and you could become one of those.”

  Then the meeting was called to order by a tall thin man, and Susan joined him. “The police are contained for now,” he said. “But our situation in New Houston is untenable, as you know. As soon as it’s dark, we’re going to disperse, and either evacuate or infiltrate the city. Field cars hidden in Spear Canyon will take off for the north. There we’ll start the revolution over again.” The man looked tired, disappointed. “You all knew this was a possibility. That the best we would do this time would be to establish the hidden outposts. Well, that’s how it has turned out. I’m afraid we’re losing space control. And that we’re one of the last cities left holding out.” He consulted with Susan. “Those of you who want to continue on in the city, we’ve got a list of apartments near here that still have air. And we’ve got the fake identities ready for your pictures and fingerprints and all.”

  He whispered with the people around him some more. Ginger Sims joined us. Conversations began among the forty or fifty people in the room. “Okay. Get some rest before sunset. That’s all for now.”

  * * *

  So there it is. Ethel and Yuri are in the next room, arguing about what to do. But I never even thought about it. I’m going into the chaos. In a curious way it is as though I had decided to go with the starship after all … enclosed in a little underground colony, where we will have to work hard to establish a life-support system, I have no doubt. And yet we are still on Mars, and still opposing the Committee. So I have what I want. I’m satisfied.

  There is little time left. I am too nervous to rest, I have been writing for an hour or more. We will leave soon. All of my friends from Rust Eagle are coming along—Ethel and Yuri have just decided. I think of the starship, flying away from all this … of my father. My thoughts are dense and confused, it’s hard to write one thing at a time.

  The police will follow us into the chaotic terrain. The Committee will want to wipe out every vestige of resistance. But this desire is part of what insures that we will succeed. We didn’t come to this red planet to repeat all the miserable mistakes of history, we didn’t. Even if it looks like it so far. Martians want to be free; truly free.

  I’m going to go in the car with Andrew, so he tells me. His sister and my companions will be along. That will be the most dangerous part, the escape tonight. It looks as though it will all happen as I dreamed it out there with the starship, in the asteroid belt—I will run over the surface of red Mars forever and ever, for the rest of my life. Except in the real world they’ll be chasing me.

  II

  HJALMAR NEDERLAND

  2547 A.D.

  “I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw

  Or heard or felt came not but from myself;

  And there I found myself more truly and more strange.”

  —Wallace Stevens, “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”

  Memory is the weak link. This year I will be three hundred and ten years old, but most of my life is lost to me, buried in the years. I might as well be a creature of incarnations, moving from life to life, ignorant of my own past. Oh, I “know” that once I climbed Olympus Mons, that once I visited the Earth, and so on; I can check the record like anyone else; but to recall none of the detail, to feel nothing for this knowledge, is not to have done it.

  It isn’t as simple as that, I admit. Certain events, moments scattered here and there in my life, exist in my memory like artifacts in the layers of an excavation: fragments of meaning in the debris of time, left in a pattern of deposition that I fail to understand. On occasion I will stumble on one of these artifacts—a trolley bell in the street, and I see an Alexandrian’s smile—a whiff of ammonia, and suddenly I am reacquainted with my first daughter’s birth—but the process of deposition, the process of recovery, both are mysteries to me. And each little epiphany reminds me that there are things I have forgotten forever—things that might explain me to myself, which explanation I sorely need—and I clutch at the fragment knowing I might never stumble across it again.

  So I have decided to collect these artifacts, with the idea that I had better try to understand them now, while they are still within my reach—working as the archaeologists of old did so often, against rising waters in haste, while the chance yet exists: hurrying to invent a new archaeology of the self.

  * * *

  What we feel most, we remember best.

  * *
*

  The Tharsis Bulge—the bulge is five thousand kilometers across and seven kilometers high, and formed early in Mars’s history. The stresses caused by this deformation in the crust were instrumental in the formation of the large volcanoes, the equatorial canyon system, and an extensive system of radial fractures.

  We came on the site in a hundred field cars, a caravan that lofted a plume of umber dust over the rocky plain. The site looked like any other youngish crater: a low rampart we could drive right up, and then a flat-topped symmetrical rim-hill, surrounded by the hummocky slope of the ejecta shield. Few craters look impressive from the outside, and this was not one of the exceptions. But my pulse quickened at the sight of it. It had been a long time coming.

  I put on a thermal suit, and ordered those of my students in the car to do the same, as I needed companions for a hike to the rim. Gritting my teeth I walked up to the car containing Satarwal and Petrini, and knocked on their door window. The door popped open with a hiss and there they were, faces poking out like Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee: the codirectors of my dig. Blandly I told them I was going up to the rim with a few students to have a look around.

  Satarwal, flexing his boss muscle: “Shouldn’t we set camp first?”

  “You’ve got more than enough people for that. And someone needs to go up there and confirm that we’re at the right crater.”

  Giving excuses: a mistake. “We’re at the right crater,” said Satarwal.

  Petrini grinned. “Don’t you think we’re at the right crater, Hjalmar?”

  “I’m sure we are. Still it wouldn’t hurt to see, would it. Before the whole camp is set.”

  They glanced at each other, paused to make me stew. “Okay,” Satarwal said. “You can go.”

  “Thanks,” I said, bland as ever. Petrini shot a look at Satarwal to see how the head of the Planetary Survey would take this sarcasm; but Satarwal hadn’t noticed it. Stupid policeman.

  With a jerk of the head I led half a dozen students, and staff toward the rim. It was midafternoon, and we hiked up the gentle slope with the sun over our shoulders and the quartet of dusk mirrors almost overhead. It felt good to walk off the exchange with Satarwal and Petrini, and I left my group behind. They knew better than to catch up with me when I walked that fast. Those two clowns: I blew frost plumes as solid as cotton balls into the chill highland air at the thought of them. This was my dig. I had worked for twenty years to get the site off the Committee’s proscribed list; and I would have worked a hundred years more and never gotten their permission, too, if a friend hadn’t been put on the Committee. But it pleased him to sanction the dig for the season directly following the end of my stint as chairman of the department. So that the new chairman, Petrini, was made the codirector of the dig along with the Committee watchdog Satarwal; while I, whose work the dig would support or refute, was nearly forbidden to accompany it. I had had to grovel for the better part of a year before they allowed me to join the expedition. And my friend only laughed. “You’re lucky to be going at all, you fearsome radical!”

  But here we were. I booted a rock uphill to remind me of the reality of our presence, to clear my mind of all the poison poured into it by the government. We were here. That meant that, no matter what else happened, I had won: a site had been taken off the proscribed list for the first time. And now it loomed before me—ah!—my heart leaped at the thought. I picked up my pace; the only thing that kept me from bounding up the slope was the presence of my students behind me. The ejecta shield became steeper and rougher as I approached the rim; above me blocks stuck into the dirty lavender sky, and they gave me an excuse to bound upward, to clear them. Below me the shouts of my companions sounded like the cheeps of snow finches. Between the broken blocks of compressed basalt were drifts of fine frost-crunchy sand—

  And then the slope curved flat and I was on the rim. Topping it was an embankment of tan concrete; I ran to it. Concrete, with a steel coping laid in its top: a dome foundation of the early twenty-second century. So we were at the right crater. From my new vantage I could see around the circumference of the rim, and the embankment grew or shrank to level it off. Here and there struts stuck out of the embankment over the crater below, for two meters or five or ten, until they twisted down and broke off. The supports for the dome. In several places the embankment was blasted down into the rim; one such disruption was a short distance away from me, and I went to have a look. The concrete in the break had been reduced to something like black sandstone, which crumbled into my glove when rubbed. So they had blown down the dome. I shook my head. Nasty shock for the inhabitants, no doubt.

  Hana Ingtal, the least stupid of my students, popped over the rim and interrupted my survey. “Professor Nederland!” she cried, holding out between two gloved fingers a chip of blue plastic.

  “What.”

  “Look here—it’s a taggart.”

  I took the chip from her and inspected it.

  “Explosives companies put them in their products so they can determine whose explosives made any particular—”

  “I know what taggarts are, Ingtal. Put this back where you found it. You know excavation procedures, don’t you? Move nothing except as part of a methodical exploration, that can be confirmed by others and recorded as authentic data. Especially on this dig. You may have destroyed this piece’s worth as data already!”

  Crestfallen, she turned and walked back down the rim. But that is how students learn. “And make sure you put it where you can find it again!” I shouted after her. She was one of those students who progress in leaps, and miss things along the way—practical matters like methodology. No doubt she had developed a complete theory of the city’s end from that single chip of plastic. But she was young. A century or two of defeat would teach her what it took to build a case in Martian history.

  I hiked to the inner edge of the rim, and looked down a nearly sheer cliff onto the crater floor.

  A lot of sand had been deposited in the last three hundred years, but some of the roofs were still exposed. From my vantage it looked like a village of dirt hummocks, at the bottom of a big dirt bowl. The hummocks stood in faint squares and oblongs, and together they formed a grid of sand-filled depressions, that once had been busy streets, and wide boulevards lined with trees. The pattern extended to the crater wall on all sides, although to the east the sand tended to bury everything.

  Trembling slightly, I stepped as close to the cliff’s edge as I dared. Those were the ruins of New Houston, down there. I had been born in that ruined city; my first years had been spent in the confines of this very crater.—This had impeded my efforts to get the dig approved, in fact, although I never understood why. My birthplace: so what? No one remembers their childhood. I knew I had been born there in the same way anybody else did—I looked it up. So the unspoken implication that my motives were in some way personal was entirely unfounded, as was tacitly admitted when the dig was approved and I was allowed to join it.

  Nevertheless, as I looked down onto the hummock roofs and the solar-panel ridges and the sand-filled streets, I caught myself searching for something in the pattern, or in the etching of vertical ravines into the crater wall, that I might recognize from those first years. But it was just a site. An old city in ruins.

  New Houston. During the Unrest of 2248 the city had been taken over by rioters, and held against the police of the Mars Development Committee. (I must have been there?) The police reports said the rebels had blown down the dome, destroyed the city, and killed all the noncombatants; but the samizdat said otherwise. In these ruins I intended to find the truth.

  So as I surveyed the crater floor and its faint gridwork, now accentuated by the growing shadows of late afternoon, my pulse quickened, my spirits soared. For as long as I could remember I had wanted to excavate one of the lost Martian cities, and now I was here at last. Now I would be an archaeologist in deed, as well as in name. Visions of the digs I had taught in classes jumbled in my mind—all those cities that had been ra
zed and abandoned by conquerors, Troy, Carthage, Palmyra, Tenochtitlán, all resurrected by scientists and their work; now New Houston would be added to those, to become part of history again. Oh, yes—it was that moment in a dig, before the work has begun, when the site lies undisturbed in its shadows and all things seem possible, when one can imagine the ruins to be those of a city as ancient and huge as Persepolis, with the strata of centuries under the rubble-crazed surface, containing the debris of countless lives that can be deciphered and understood, recouped from the dead past to be known and treasured and made part of us forever. Why, down in those ruins we might find almost anything.

  * * *

  Of course it is easy to feel that way above a site on a good prospect, in late afternoon light, alone. Everything looks burnished and charged with meaning, and somehow one’s own.

  Down in the tents it was different. That evening I entered the large commons tent where everyone was celebrating our arrival, and felt like an ant dropped in a terrarium of trapdoor spiders. Satarwal and his thugs from Planetary Survey stared at me, and Petrini and his faintly insolent students glanced at me as they stood in rings around tables, poking at maps and arguing like experts, and my students and McNeil’s and Kalinin’s blinked at me as stupidly as sheep. I went in search of the Kleserts and found them in the dining room, and joined them for a silent meal. I didn’t know them well, but they were my age and knew how to leave one alone. It was too bad for me that their work on water stations would take them away, to Nirgal Vallis some kilometers to the southwest of us.

  Then it was back to the main room, to the arguing and poking. Petrini’s group was determined to be vehement, yet there was no point to their talk—except to show Satarwal how reliable they were, how fiercely they could go after “the facts” without endangering the official version of New Houston’s history. They were good at that. And Satarwal soaked it up. He enjoyed the meaningless chatter about the Athenian and Parisian models of crater city planning, because it so obviously avoided the central question of the dig. His stubbly blue jowls bounced with pleasure at this spectacle of his power over us, and I could not stand it. I had to leave the room.