Damon Knight - Orbit 21

“Thus, my friends, there is nothing that factually disproves the Vasyutin theory—there are only the doubts and fanciful speculations of detractors. And there is something that factually disproves the notions that these detractors hold. I thank you for your attention.”

Pandemonium broke loose among the previously attentive figures around me. Questions were shouted out, incomprehensible under the noise of cheers and applause. (The woman next to me was clapping and I wanted to restrain her, hit her, actually. . . . ) As questions became audible order was reestablished, but apparently the news service people had considered the question-and-answer period unimportant. With another click the scene disappeared, and I was again in the dark, silent holo room. Lights came on. I sat.

Had Nederland proved his theory at last? Was the tall man I had met on Titan thirteen years before wrong after all? (And I as well?) “Son of a bitch,” I said, no longer referring to the smiling man on the podium.

Woke up in the alley behind one of Waystation’s main thoroughfares. I’d been sleeping on my side and my neck and hip were sore. Took off my coat and shook the dust off it. Pushed my fingers through my hair and made it all lie down flat, brushed my teeth with a fingernail, looked around for something to drink. Put my coat back on. Flapped my arms.

Around me prone figures were still slumbering. Waking up is the worst part of living on the streets of Waystation. They drop the temperature down to ten degrees during the nights, to encourage travelers to take rooms—helping out the hotel trade. A lot of people stay on the streets, anyway, since most of them are transients. They aren’t bothered in any way aside from the cold, so they save their money for things more important than a room for the night. We all have the necessary shelter, inside this rock. . . .

Low on money again, but I needed something to eat. Onto the peoplemover.

Down at the spaceport I ate in the restaurant. Then I bought myself a bath, and sat in a corner of the public pool watching people wash, resting and thinking nothing.

When I was done I felt refreshed, and I walked around to the post office. Not much mail; but there at the end, to my great surprise, was a letter from a Professor Emanuel Rotenberg, head of the Fine Arts Lecture Series at the Waystation Institute for Higher Learning (which, like many of the institutions on Waystation, had been founded by Caroline Holmes): Professor Rotenberg, who had enjoyed my “series of interesting revisionist articles” on Icehenge, wondered if I would consider accepting a semester’s employment, as lecturer and head of a seminar studying the Pluto megalithic monument— “My, my, my , “ I said, and typed out instructions to print the letter, with my mouth hanging wide open.

I went out of my cabin for the first time in a while, to restock my supply of crackers and orange juice. The wood and moss hallways of the Snowflake were quite empty; it seemed that people were staying in their rooms, or in the tiny lounges that the rooms opened onto. Dr. Lhotse had brought Brinston by for a peacemaking visit, and they had dropped in on Jones as well. Now we interacted, when necessary, with careful politeness; but mostly we were just settling in for the last wait. It would be a few more weeks until we reached Pluto. That wasn’t long; everyone is patient, everyone is good at waiting in this world—in this life that goes so slowly.

Yesterday was my birthday—March 23rd, 2621. I was fifty years old. One tenth of my life done and gone—the endless childhood over. Those fifty years feel like eternity in my mind, and the thing is hardly begun. My God! ... I thought of the ancient stranger I had met on Titan so long ago, and wondered: we humans, who live centuries and then die anyway, what have we become?

When I am as old as that stranger, my first half-century will be forgotten. Or it will recede into depths of memory beyond the reach of recollection—the same as forgotten—recollection being a power inadequate to our new time-scale. And how many other powers like it?

Autobiography is now the necessary extension of memory. Five centuries from now, bar accident, I will live; but the I writing this will be nothing in his mind but a bare fact. I write this, then, for that stranger, myself, so that he may know who he has been.

My father sent me a birthday poem that arrived just last night. He’s given me one every birthday now for forty-four years; they’re beginning to make quite a volume. Here it is:

Walking back to my room with my food, saying his poem to myself in my mind, I realized that I miss him.

I met with the Institute seminar I was to teach about a month after I got the invitation from Professor Rotenberg. We decided to meet at the back table of a pub across the street from the Institute, and moved there forthwith.

It quickly became clear that they had read the literature on the subject. What more could I tell them?

“Who!” cried a man named Andrew. “Whodunit!” “Wait a second, start at the beginning.” That was Elaine, a good-looking hundredish woman on my left.

I told them my story as briefly as possible, feeling sheepish as I described the unscientific reason for my work, the appearance of the stranger on Titan.

“You must have been astonished,” said Elaine.

“For a while. Soon the idea that the monument was put there by someone other than Vasyutin obsessed me ... it made the whole problem unsolved again.”

“Part of you welcomed it.” That was April, an attentive woman sitting across from me.

“Yeah.”

“But what about Vasyutin?”

“What about Nederland?” asked April. She had a rather sharp and scornful way of speaking.

“I wasn’t sure. It didn’t seem possible that Nederland could be wrong—there were all those volumes, the whole edifice of his story. And I had believed it for so long, everyone had. If he was wrong, what then about Vasyutin? Or Emma? Many times when I thought about it the certainty I had felt that night—that that stranger knew what had happened—faded right away. But the memory . . . refused to change. So the search was on.”

“How did you start?”

“With a premise. Induction, same as Nederland. I started with the theory that Icehenge was a modern construct, made anonymous in a deliberate attempt to obscure its origins.”

“A hoax.” April.

“Well, yes, although it’s not really the structure that’s a hoax, I mean it’s definitely there no matter who set it up—”

“The Vasyutin explanation.” Elaine.

“Right. Suddenly I had to wonder whether Vasyutin—and Emma—whether any of them had existed at all.”

“So you checked Nederland’s early work.” This from Sean, a very big, bearded man.

“I did. And both Vasyutin and Emma actually existed—Emma held some Martian long-distance running records for several years. And they both disappeared with their ships around twenty-two forty. But the only thing connecting them with Icehenge was Emma’s journal. And as you have read, I couldn’t find her grandson anywhere, or any sign he had ever lived. I got an engineer named Jordan interested in the case, and he determined that the starship Emma described would have been impossible to build with the resources available to those miners. And I worked with an archeologist named Satawal, who lives on Terra, and he figured out a list of equipment necessary to construct Icehenge, and the asteroid miners had very little of that equipment. The Vasyutin explanation began to look inadequate from every angle.”