Icehenge Read online

  Only to run into Petrini in one of the smaller lounges. But Petrini was easier on the nerves than Satarwal. It was like going from the dentist to an ear specialist (I have poor hearing): someone still working on you, but without the drills.

  “Well, Hjalmar, how was the view from the rim? The old city still there, eh?”

  “Ah—yes. Yes it is.”

  “Did you find anything interesting on the rim?”

  “Well—the dome foundation, of course. I won’t know until we have studied it more closely.”

  “Of course.”

  “Nothing extraordinary, though.”

  “No. I guess we’d have heard if you had, from your students.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Oh, come now, Hjalmar. You know students.”

  “Do I?”

  “Who better? You’re the pillar of the university, Hjalmar, you’ve been there longer than the buildings.”

  “Not really. Besides, only the buildings stay. The students keep changing.” Until you end up teaching members of a different civilization.

  Petrini tilted his head back and laughed. “Well,” he said, sobering rapidly and making sure I saw he was now serious: “I’ll have a tough time filling your shoes, I really will.”

  “Nonsense. You’ll be the best chairman yet.”

  Conversation on automatic pilot. Meanwhile I watched him work on me. Such charm. But Petrini’s problem was his transparency. He was one of those people who made it their life’s project to rise into the halls of power; everything he did was part of his campaign. I knew someone like that myself, so I recognized the type. But Petrini’s purpose was always obvious, and this would impede his progress. The best politicans appear to fall upward accidentally, so that people are inclined to help them on their way.

  He slapped me on the arm affectionately. “Thanks for the vote of confidence. Now—I hope you don’t mind me saying this—I know what you will be trying to prove here on this dig. And believe me, I’m sympathetic to it. But the evidence, Hjalmar. The Aimes Report, you know, and Colonel Shay’s account. Those things couldn’t have been falsified.”

  “Certainly they could have.” I tilted my head at him curiously. “Those aren’t things, Petrini. The things are here, on the site. The only good evidence is here, because the city can’t lie. We’ll see what we find out.”

  “Just be prepared for a letdown.” He put his hand to my arm again. “I tell you this for your own sake.”

  “Thanks.”

  I considered going back to my tent and reading. My supervisors were intolerable, my colleagues irritating, my students dull. But then Hana Ingtal appeared as if I had called her up by the thought, and asked me to join her for a drink with an enthusiasm that made it difficult for me to refuse. Reluctantly I nodded, and followed her into the dining room’s bar. While she mixed us drinks she chattered about our afternoon on the rim. I watched her, perplexed. We had worked together for over five years, and she still seemed to like me. I didn’t understand it. Most students so obviously work their professors for advancement, and how can they help it? It is that sort of master-slave situation. I doubt I would ever go near a university if I had it to do again. Twenty years of indenture to some old man or woman who “knows,” all to get into a position where you too can be treated as master by people you barely know. Stupid (although it beat mining).

  But Hana appeared to enjoy conversation with me for its own sake. She was undeferential, and watching her I could almost imagine what it would be like to learn the discipline anew. Fifty-two years old, chestnut hair, hazel eyes, nice bones, calm expression: my single graduate students were tripping over each other to be with her, and here she was at a corner table with me, a man who truly did not know how to speak with her. Once I knew what to say to the young (when I was young myself, perhaps) but I’ve lost the art. Life is the history of losses.

  So she said, “Is this dig much like the ones you did on Earth?” and I tried to figure out what she meant by it.

  “Well. I never actually participated in a dig on Earth—as I thought you knew?” I was almost certain she knew that. “But the site is much like an abandoned Norse settlement on the west coast of Greenland that I visited when I was there,” and I described the terran site using what I could remember of my lecture notes on the place—for my trip to Earth was a blank to me—until I became too aware of the discrepancy between what I described and what we had actually seen that afternoon, and stumbled to a halt, and waited with some trepidation for her to bring up something else to discuss. You see, quiet people know they have a reputation for being close-mouthed. Sometimes the reputation is like a power, for they see their acquaintances think that when they are moved to speak it will be for something special. But that is also a sort of pressure, a pressure that grows as the years pass and the quiet person’s reputation ages. What, after all, is really important enough to say? Not much. And quiet people become overly aware of that, and thus aware that most talk is a code masking vastly more complex meanings—meanings unfathomable to the very people most aware of their existence.

  Abruptly I stood. “I’m off to bed now,” I said, and went back to my tent.

  * * *

  “—When we were sure they would honor the truce we met seven of them at the spaceport depot. We told them they were the last city on Mars resisting legal authority, but they did not believe us. I told them their situation was hopeless no matter what was happening elsewhere, and offered them the terms we had offered all the rioters: due process; suspension of the death penalty; and a reasonable dialogue (to be defined later) to be established to air grievances concerning planetary policy. I added that all noncombatants in New Houston were to be released to us immediately. The leader of the group, a bearded man of seventy or eighty years, demanded complete amnesty as a condition of surrender. I said I was unauthorized to grant amnesty, but that it would be considered by the Committee when violence ceased. The rioters discussed the matter in Russian among themselves, and my officers heard the word “Leningrad” repeated. The leader said they would return to the city and put the matter to a vote, and we agreed to meet again in two days. The next morning, however, more than twenty explosions from the crater rim indicated they had brought down the city dome. By the time our forces could enter the city the power plant was destroyed and fires had gone out for lack of oxygen, though the smoke was still thick. This smoke covered rebel snipers, and by the time we could subdue them nearly all the noncombatants in the city had died of asphyxiation. Rescue work continued for three days, and thirty-eight people were found in intact rooms, air locks, individual suits, and the like. All of them claimed noncombatant status; their interviews are appended. When the city was secured it was no longer habitable; damage caused by the rioters was such that it would have been easier to build in a new crater than to reconstruct the city.”

  So said Police Colonel Ernest Shay, field commander for the Committee police during the Unrest, when he was questioned by the Aimes Commission in 2250. But I had found records of the Royal Dutch police division showing that Shay was in Enkhuisen in December 2248, supervising the war there. Why had he answered the Commission’s questions, and not the officer actually in charge at New Houston? Why had he lied, and said he was there conducting negotiations himself?

  I put the bulky printout of the 194th Volume of the Aimes Report down on my nightstand, on top of a thick folder of samizdat, an illegal collection of newsletters, pamphlets, xeroxes and broadsides I had made over many years. In slangy, sarcastic, bitter Russian (the underground language of Mars, the language of resistance, the counter-English) the samizdat, many of them handwritten to avoid police identification of printer or typewriter, told the real story of New Houston. Should I pull out the newsletter carry on with it, by “Yevgeny”? “The Dragon descended, lightning bolted from its mouth, ‘the sky is falling, the sky is falling!’ and no air for the fire so that it fled down throats to combust in lungs, fire balloon people wafting up past the dragon
chicks falling on stacks of fire.…” Or the more prosaic account by “Medvedev”? “24 December 2248—tenth politzei blitzkrieg—New Houston, Texan sector—estimated two thousand attack troops descended on rocket packs onto open city after dome knocked down at dawn—resistance continued three days—captured rebels executed—” But I knew them all by heart. These ragged narratives told the true story of the Unrest, I had become convinced. Few historians agreed with me; they sided with the Committee’s official view, that the samizdat were written by malcontents, and were nothing but lies, filled with contradictions and obvious inaccuracies. And it was true that they were anonymous, and contained contradictions, they were sourceless, and had no evidence to support them; and some were full of tall tales, the Unrest made myth. But in some ways writers like “Medvedev” made a more coherent account of the Unrest than the Aimes Report did. And if they were nothing but fictions, why had the Committee made it illegal to publish or own them? Why had the Committee begun the process of installing “watermarks” in every Xerox machine, to help them locate the ones used to print samizdat? And why had excavation of over a dozen abandoned cities been forbidden? No. There was something wrong; the Committee had lied, was lying. The true story of the Unrest had yet to be told.

  * * *

  The excavation teams got to street level in the old city at different speeds, depending on their method and what they found. McNeil worked as if he had the rest of his life to finish the next centimeter of the dig, and he had his students record everything so thoroughly that they could have reconstructed their ruins just as they found them. “You never know what questions you may want to ask a hundred years from now,” McNeil declared. The rest of us already had questions, and only used the string grids and toothbrushes when we were near what we were looking for. I set my team to work in the area of the city’s physical plant, under the eastern wall of the crater. Under several meters of sand we found the big buildings of the plant, partially buried under the avalanched crater wall, so that the walls were broken and the interiors filled with rubble and shattered equipment. Moving away from the plant we found control terminal housing, administrative offices, and supply sheds; then outside a wrought iron fence were service shops, restaurants, and bars, and beyond them were the dormitories and apartments of those who had worked in the plant. All of these structures, especially the physical plant itself, were scorched, melted, knocked over. Sifting through this evidence of destruction took weeks. We took holograms, and made models of what we found, and programmed computer explosions, and even set up little real explosions in the models, to see what form the assault had taken; and all the while I kept one group enlarging the excavation of the surrounding neighborhood, especially to the north of the plant where the damage was most extensive.

  Street level against the crater’s east wall was about nine meters below the top of the sand drift, and so we worked at the bottom of a craterling of our own making. Elsewhere teams had dug other holes, and as I walked about the sand surface in the evenings, stopping here or there to scuff an exposed solar panel’s edge, or inspect a patch of lichen, it seemed that I strolled across an old battlefield, a no-man’s land pocked with bomb craters and giant foxholes. Looking into the trenches gave me an odd feeling, as if I stared into graves—archaeology regressing to graverobbing—and might see the dead carrying on with their daily lives. Tall dredges stood insectlike over the rim of each craterling, and tubes extended from them across the crater floor, up and over the rim. It was an eerie place, this dead city. Frost crunched under my boots, my nose and lungs were cold. I hiked back to our own little graben (grave) and looked down at the sand-filled apartments we had recently exposed. They had built eaves on the roofs, here where no rain would ever have fallen. Where were we? What city of the mind?

  Down on the shadowy streets figures emerged from a building, carrying the long vacuum tubes that led back to the dredge. Ghost firemen. Bill Strickland looked up and saw me; he shouted something I couldn’t hear. He pointed back into the building, waved me down. My heart gave a skip and I hurried to the ramp, descended. Xhosa, the chief of my staff, ran by. “What have they found?” I said.

  “I don’t know, they just said hurry.”

  “It’s not likely to run away,” I said, but Xhosa was already down the street. I kept my pace steady to show them I was not excitable. I rounded a bluff in our new sand cliff and found five or six of them in the entrance of a newly exposed building; it appeared to be a hotel with a tavern in the ground floor. I walked past them and entered. Rooms free of sand gaped like caves, and it smelled of clay and paint. I heard voices in an inner room and continued in.

  “Has anyone checked this building for its structural integrity?” I said loudly.

  Strickland and a few others were in a large room. “Sort of,” he said.

  “Fine. The whole building could come down on us.”

  Strickland moved aside, so I could see through a door into an adjoining room.

  Four bodies lay on the floor, dressed in old spacesuits. Two held light rifles in their gloved hands. One was curled around the leg of a big empty desk. The dead: how still they are, how other.

  “Get out of here before the place falls down,” I said harshly, shocked at the sight. “Xhosa, give this place a structural check and get holo crews in here. Holos of every room. Look at the tracks you’ve made. Who vacuumed this building?” Strickland and Heidi Mueller stepped forward. “How often did you check the filters?”

  “After every room,” Heidi said. Bill looked sullen.

  “Find anything?”

  “It’s all in the boxes in the front room,” Bill said.

  I grimaced. Here McNeil’s maddening slowness might have done some good. Hana Ingtal entered the room, stopped when she saw the bodies through the doorway. Frost plumed from her nostrils and drifted to the floor.

  “Hana, go find Petrini and bring him here,” I said. “Tell him I want his help.”

  She looked at me as if I had gone mad at last.

  “I want him to see it,” I said.

  She nodded and left.

  “Leave everything alone,” I said. “When Petrini gets here we’ll start work again.” I herded them out of the building. I didn’t want to stay in there with those bodies; they made me uneasy and disoriented, and something more I could not name. Out in the street my students walked down the excavated sand canyon to our little working tent: pale blue and brown figures in a residential street, at the bottom of two steep walls of red sand. I looked out of the shadows to the dark crater rim, and the plum-colored sky. No stars. But once they had been thick—and that pungent smell, of wet dust and street surface fixative—

  My father had sewn a flag, stripes and a star, the lone star state, he had said, with a red star that made him laugh.

  Dizzily I took a step in the street, looked up at a black second-story window in the apartment across the way—gasped—

  My father came home late to find a group of us kids gathered before the big maps in the window of the Leaky Tap. The generals! he cried cheerily. He took my arm to lead me in and—and—

  I was at the plant to get the day’s water ration when the dome fell. The dome fell. Great crashing outside and the roar of air rushing up. I ran to struggle into a daysuit, clamped on helmet and turned on oxygen as I had been taught. Excited at my chance to fight I rushed into the street and couldn’t see a thing in the smoke. The ground was vibrating, the smoke cleared and plates of the dome rained down, tumbling in the turbulence. Flashes on the crater rim made my sight swim with red spurts, and through the spurts dorm-sized boulders rolled down the wall onto us. Fear stunned me like a blow to the head, it smashed me into a different world. I ran for home thinking only to hide, tripped over big plates—pieces of the dome—got lost in smoke, looked up and saw red figures falling out of the sky on rocket backpacks. Hundreds of them fell, like drops of blood or meteorites or pieces of the dome come to life. Red beams lanced the smoke, I fell, got up and ran head down for home.
A woman lay sprawled in the street. I ran up my steps relieved to see them, but when I pulled open the door I saw I had been fooled—the apartment front had been left whole, but it was like a stage prop now, because behind it an immense tan chunk of the crater wall had crushed the apartment and its contents into a meter-thick pancake of plastic paneling. Door in my hand. I could have pulled the facade down.

  Sudden time in a world without time: I found myself sitting in the street. I had broken a sweat; my suit’s thermostat had been overwhelmed. I stood carefully, finishing crossing the street, and climbed the front steps to the apartment door under the black second-story window. Hesitantly I pulled it back. Tan rock. I closed the door, sat on the step.

  Vague impression of parents, sisters. They must have been killed. Perhaps not in the apartment itself, but somewhere. Otherwise they would have reunited me with them when the survivors were sorted out. Gingerly I probed my memory: what had happened after I opened the door? Nothing. The blank of the past, as empty as always. The images that had just welled up in me still lived, but they were fragments, bright in the surrounding darkness like mirror suns in a twilight sky—broken out of the past by the smell of a street, the sight of rock behind a door, or bodies in a hallway. Trembling uncontrollably I racked my mind to learn more, I rocked back and forth on the stoop under the force of feeling what it meant to raze a city and murder its inhabitants—my family—

  “Professor Nederland?”

  I looked up. Petrini; and behind him, among others, Satarwal.