Damon Knight - Orbit 21

This comment confirmed my opinion of him. “I’m working,” I said.

“Oh, I see.” He smiled. “I hope that won’t keep you from joining our little lecture series.”

“Your what?”

“We’re organizing a series of talks, and hope everyone will give one.” The micrometeor crew had turned to watch us.

“Everyone?”

“Well . . . everyone who represents a different aspect of the problem.”

“What’s the point?”

“What?”

“What’s the point?” I repeated. “Everyone on board already knows what everyone else has written about Icehenge.”

“But in a colloquium we could discuss these opinions.”

“In a colloquium there would be nothing but a lot of contention to no purpose. We’ve wrangled for years without anyone changing his mind, and now we’re going to Pluto to find out. Why stage a reiteration of what we’ve already said?”

Brinston was flushing red. “We hoped there would be new things to be said.”

I shrugged. “Maybe so. Look, just go ahead and have your talks without me.”

Brinston paused. “That wouldn’t be so bad,” he said reflectively, “if Nederland were here. But now the two principal theorists will be missing.”

I felt my distaste for him turn to dislike. He knew of the relationship between Nederland and me. “Yes, well, Nederland’s been there before.” He had, too, to dedicate the plaque commemorating the expedition of asteroid miners he had discovered; at the time his explanation was so widely believed that the monument hadn’t been examined closely, hadn’t even been excavated. . . .

“Even so, you’d think he’d want to be along on the expedition that will either confirm or contradict his theory.” His voice grew louder as he sensed my discomfort. “Tell me, Mr. Doya, what did Nederland say was his reason for not joining us?”

I stared at him for a long time. “Because, Dr. Brinston, he was afraid there would be too many colloquia.” I stood up. “Now, excuse me while I return to my work.” I went to the kitchen and got some supplies, and walked back to my cabin, feeling that I had made an enemy, but not caring much.

Yes, Hjalmar Nederland, the famous historian of Icehenge, was my great-grandfather. It was a fact I could always remember knowing, though my father never encouraged my pleasure in knowing it. (Father wasn’t his grandchild; my mother was.)

I had read all of Nederland’s books—the works on Icehenge, the four volumes of the autobiography, the earlier works on Terran cultures—by the time I was ten years old. At that time Father and I lived on Jupiter Thirteen. Father had gotten lucky and was crewing on a sunboat entered in the InandOut, a race that takes the boats into the top layer of Jupiter’s atmosphere.

Usually he wasn’t that lucky. Sunboat sailing was for the rich, and they didn’t need crews often. So most of the time Father was a laborer. Street sweeper, carrier at construction sites, whatever was on the list at the laborer’s guild. As I understood later, he was poor, and shiftless, and played the edges to get by.

He was a small man, my father, short and spare-framed; he dressed in worker’s clothes, and had a droopy moustache, and grinned a lot. People were often surprised to see him with a kid —he didn’t look important enough. But when he lived on Phobos he had been part of a foursome. The other man was a well-known sculptor, with a lot of pull in artistic circles. And my mom had had connections with the University of Mars. . . . Between them they managed to get that rarest of official sanctions, the permission to have a child. Then, when the foursome broke up, Father was the only one interested in taking care of me. Into his custody I went (I was six, and had never set foot on Mars) and we took off for Jupiter.

After that Father never discussed my mother, or the other half of the foursome, or my famous great-grandfather (when he could keep me from bringing up the topic) or even Mars. He was, among other things, a sensitive man—a poet who wrote poems for himself, and never paid a fee to put them in the general file. He loved landscapes and skyscapes, and after we moved out to Ganymede we spent a lot of time sightseeing, hiking in suits over Ganymede’s stark hills, to watch Jupiter or one of the other moons rise, or to watch a sunrise, still the brightest dawn of them all. We were a comfortable pair. Ours was a quiet pastime, and the source of most of Father’s poetry. Here is one of his earlier poems:

Even though Father disliked Nederland (they had met, I gathered, several times) he still indulged my fascination with Icehenge. On my eleventh birthday he took me down to the local post office (at this time we were on bright Europa, and took long hikes together across its crystal plains). After a whispered conference with one of the attendants, we went into a holo room. He wouldn’t tell me what we were going to see, and I was frightened, thinking it might be my mother.

The room came on, and we were in darkness. Stars overhead. Suddenly a very bright one flared, defining a horizon, and pale light flooded over what now appeared as a dark, rocky plain.

Then I saw it off in the distance: the monument. The sun (I recognized it now, the bright star that had risen) had only struck the tops of the liths, and they gleamed white. Below the sunlight they were square black cutouts blocking stars. The line quickly dropped (the holo was speeded up) and it stood revealed, tall and white. Because of the model of it that I owned at the time, it seemed immense.

“Oh, Dad.“

“Come on, let’s go look at it.”

“Bring it here, you mean.”

He laughed. “Where’s your imagination, kid?” He dialed it over—I went straight through a lith—and we were standing at its center. We circled about slowly, necks craned back to look up. We inspected the broken column and its scattered pieces, then looked closely at the brief inscription.

“It’s a wonder they didn’t all sign their names,” said Father.

Then the whole scene disappeared and we were standing in the bare holo room. Father caught my forlorn expression, and laughed. “You’ll see it again before you’re through. Come on, let’s go get some ice cream.”

Soon after that, when I was just fourteen, he got a chance to go to Terra. Friends of his were buying and taking a small boat all the way back, and they needed one more crew member. Or perhaps they didn’t need one, but they wanted him to come.

At that time we had just moved back to Ganymede, and I had a job at the atmosphere station. We’d lived there nearly a year, off and on, and I didn’t want to move again. I had written a book (describing the post-Icehenge adventures of the Vasyutin Expedition), and with the money I was saving I planned to publish it. (For a fee anyone can put their work in the data banks and have it listed in the huge general catalog; whether anyone will ever read it is another matter. But I had hopes, at the time, that one of the book clubs would buy the right to list it in their own index.)

“See, Dad, you’ve lived on Terra and Mars, so you want to go back there so you can be outside and all. Me, I don’t care about that stuff. I’d rather stay here.”