Damon Knight: Orbit 21

At another seminar meeting, at the same table, after we’d all had a few drinks. We’d gotten to know each other pretty well.

“So give, Edmond,” said April. “We want to know who put it there.”

I waited, pretending to consider it. Then: “Caroline Holmes.”

“No!”

“What?”

“No, noo . . .”

They became silent, watching my face. Sean said, “Why?”

I grinned. “Let me tell you about it. At first, it was because I kept running across her name. And not just because her company built most of the colonies outside Jupiter. She fulfilled all the criteria I had set: she had the money, ships and equipment to do it. She was interested in the monument when it was found. She financed the development of the micrometeor dating method by giving Stallworth a grant. And there was something about her personality—she wasn’t overtly secretive, but it was curious how little I could find out about her, once I tried.

“She was the daughter of Johannes Tocquener and Jane Leaf. She was born sometime in the middle of the twenty-third century, I couldn’t find the exact date. Jane Leaf was the chairperson of the Mars Development Committee for most of Carol’s childhood, until she was killed in a docking accident on Phobos. The next year, on her Naming Day, Carol named herself Caroline Holmes, and took her share of the Leaf inheritance (which made her moderately wealthy) out to Ceres. She invested it in shipping, and was one of the first shipping magnates to buy the new Brindisi-class ships, that were large enough to go from Mars to Saturn and back. A lot of Mars corporations were in on the development of Jupiter’s satellites, and many of them had much more experience than Holmes. But between twenty-two ninety-three, when she moved to Ceres, and twenty-four sixty, when the Outer Satellites Council was formed on Titan, she had won most of the economic battles, won the war certainly, and owned outright several of the biggest Jupiter colonies. I know most of you know this; does someone want to tell us how she managed to do that?”

“Good business sense,” said Andrew, breaking his usual silence.

“She’s completely ruthless,” said April.

“Starting with so much money,” Sean said. “As I understand it, she had a lot more than you made it sound like. And she was the first to start building the permanent colonies around Jupiter. Her company domed the Hyperion Crater on Ganymede, did you know that? That’s where I was born. Almost all of the first colonies were hers.”

“She had good business sense,” insisted Andrew. “She could find minerals and ores that were in short supply on Terra, faster than any of her competitors. I worked in mining, I know. She was a legend. No one knew how she did it. She made the prospecting trips herself. The most celebrated case was the time they couldn’t find any more manganese ore, anywhere. They thought it was all gone—the farther from the sun the less heavy metals, so there wasn’t much hope held for finding it farther out. Holmes’s Jupiter Metals supplied over a thousand tons of the ore in the twenty-three seventies. Nobody could believe it, it was like she was pulling the stuff out of her hat. That in itself made her rich.”

“And after that,” I said, “she could just leave it up to gravity.”

“What?” chorus.

“Acute students of finance will have observed that money, abstract concept that it is, actually behaves as if it had mass. Economic laws imitate physical laws. Everyone’s collection of money is a planetary body, in other words, exerting influence on everyone else’s. Thus the more money you have the stronger its gravity is, and the easier it is to attract more. People have recognized this law for years in the saying, ‘The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.’ “ Laughter, and nods of understanding. “Now most of us own mere asteroids, meteorites even, of money. But some own stars of money, and some of those stars, like that of Caroline Holmes, reach their Chadresekhar Limit and turn into black holes. Nowadays, any money that comes close enough to Holmes is unavoidably sucked in. There is an event horizon, of course, where this captured money appears to slow down, like Apollo in Zeno’s Paradox, ever closer by smaller degrees to Holmes’s Jupiter Metals—but those ‘subsidiary corporations,’ in actuality, have flashed invisibly to the no-point of infinite mass which is Holmes’s wealth. . . .”

They were staring at me again. “Edmond, you’re crazy tonight,” said Elaine, “but I have to go home.”

“No, finish the story!”

“Later,” I said. “Next time. Next time come with some information you’ve found about Caroline Holmes, and we’ll see what you can find.” Then we got up, and they left, and I was alone again, on the streets of Waystation. . . .

Next time we met, they were ready to go. Elaine began.

“She went to Terra only once, in her childhood, when Jane Leaf was still alive. In many ways it was a diplomatic visit. Apparently she didn’t like it, and she stayed for just less than two years. She’s never been back. But while she was there she visited Athens, Luxor, Angkor Wat, Easter Island . . . and Stonehenge. She liked ruins—”

“Tenuous stuff,” said April. Elaine looked annoyed.

“Yes, I know,” she replied. “But if there’s anything we’ve learned since lifetimes were extended so, it is that the concerns of youth endure, for a long time. Anyway, it was a fact that I thought was interesting.”

“Aside from shipping and mining, what has she done with her money?” I asked.

“She started the Holmes Foundation,” said April quickly, “which gives grants for scientific research of various kinds. In twenty-six sixteen the Foundation gave a grant to Dr. Mund Stallworth of the University of Mars, who used it to develop the dating method that places the construction of Icehenge around Vasyutin’s time. He had had trouble getting the project funded up to that time.”

“Is there anything to indicate that Holmes herself influenced the Foundation’s decision?” asked Elaine.

“No,” April said.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Sean, with a slight smile at me. “One of her companies built the dome over Hyperion Crater, as I said. That company also built Jupiter Thirteen, which was designed to be a colony for artists. Of course, very few artists went to live there, and eventually it became an enclave for rich exiles from Mars, and later, after all the really rich moved out to Saturn, it became just another city. There was a lot of attention given to these developments, especially in the artistic and intellectual media, most of it pointing out the stupidity of planning to remove artists from the society at large. So indirectly Holmes took a lot of criticism for that, and it could be that she took offense at it.”

I nodded. “She was ultimately responsible for the Museum of the Outer Satellites, on Elliot, as well. You know how much critical condemnation that’s received.”

April said, “You know this isn’t very good evidence.”

“I know,” I replied. “But they seemed to me interesting indications. I wanted to know why the hoaxer did it. Olaf Ohman, a nineteenth-century hoaxer, once said, ‘I should like to do something that would bother the brains of the learned.’ I thought perhaps Holmes might have had a similar feeling.”

“But you’re only guessing her reaction! The scorn of intellectuals may have just made her laugh.”

“Who laughs at scorn?” said Elaine.

“Someone who has done as much as she has,” said April. “To someone who’s had such a major hand in the colonization of the Outer Satellites, that museum and that artist-place must look like very minor efforts! Why should she care what people say about them? She can look all over the space outside the asteroids and see her colonies, places she had built—and those are her cultural efforts.”