Damon Knight - Orbit 21

“That’s probably true,” I admitted. “In all the research I’ve done on Holmes, I’ve never found a solid, central motive for building Icehenge. If she did it, then the reason remains a mystery. But I’m not really surprised. I think the reasons one might do such a thing are not the sort that can be discovered by examining the public records decades later.” I sighed. “And there are these indications. . . . And something certainly was affecting her, because around twenty-five fifty she put a large satellite into a polar orbit around Saturn, and has lived in seclusion there ever since. No more projects of any kind.”

“It would help,” said Andrew suddenly, “if she had written an autobiography. But there isn’t one to be found.”

“That’s true,” I said. “That in itself struck me as odd. In this age of autobiography, who does not write one?”

“A hoaxer?” suggested Sean.

“Maybe she did write one,” said April. “Maybe she just didn’t catalog it.”

“All right,” I said. “You’re right. But there are some more concrete things that point to her. She had an organization large enough to conceal the disappearance of a ship for a few years, something that would be difficult for a single ship owner, say, to do. So I examined all the records of her ships’ movements, a major task, believe me. I found a Holmes Ferrando-class ship that spent nearly four years in her shipyard on Titan, from twenty-five ten to twenty-five fourteen. But it had been hit by a meteor— there were pictures—and there was no way of finding out if it had left the shipyard.

“So that was inconclusive as well, and I had the same doubts April is expressing. Then I got in touch with Holmes’s father, Johannes Tocquener, who still lives on Mars. I asked him if he had ever written anything about Caroline, and if so, whether I could read it. He replied that portions of his autobiography discussed her youth, but that he had never published it. Upon my request he sent me the number of his file, and I read the autobiography avidly—and there was nothing of interest in it, except her age.

“You’ll remember that no one knew her age precisely—it was a secret, Jane Leaf had concealed her pregnancy for reasons of her own, that sort of thing. Well. In this year twenty-six twenty she is three hundred and seventy-two years old. She was born July twentieth, twenty-two forty-eight. And it could have been coincidence, but somehow I was sure.”

Later that evening, after we had taken a break for drinks, April said, “You sure do guess a lot.”

I laughed. “I know. Call it inductive reasoning. My methods sometimes remind me of that Theophilus Jones—” They laughed. “But these days Jones has come to the conclusion that the monument was an alien message device sailing through space, that speared Pluto by coincidence and stuck there. Seriously! Now I think my theory is likelier than that, whatever my method.”

“You need to go out there,” said Andrew. “And make a rigorous investigation, with trained archeologists—”

“—which I’m not,” I interjected.

“I know. You’re a historian.”

“A file-freak,” said April.

“You need to find out how Holmes could have soft-landed such brittle ice without shattering all of it. You need to run as many different scientific tests as you can think of,” Andrew continued.

“That’s right,” I said. “That’s precisely what we need.”

After the meeting had broken up, Andrew approached me.

“I found your stranger,” he said quietly. “In the morgue. It was a murder, on Elliot, Uranus. The victim was named Paul Rebosky. He was five hundred and thirty-two—a ship design engineer. He was poisoned—apparently the murderer tried to make it look like a breakdown in his immune system, the usual thing, but a coroner on Elliot caught traces of the poison. Anyway, I got a picture of him.”

He held it out—I looked at the dull colors of the Xerox. The dead. It was my stranger from Titan, the small pinched face looking worried at death. I remembered sitting near the edge of the dome, waiting for Saturn to rise.

“He worked for Holmes’s Jupiter Metals from twenty-five oh-three to twenty-five thirty-nine,” Andrew continued. “Is it him?”

I nodded.

“It could be a coincidence,” he ventured.

“Maybe,” I said. “Or she’s getting serious.”

“What are you going to do?”

I took the picture from him, put it in my folder of materials for the seminar. “Get serious myself.”

Finally I decided to publish an article on the hoaxer; to try naming her without naming her. I sent this to Shards , and they published it in their very next issue:

We can list several necessary attributes of the agent who constructed Icehenge:

1) Access to a Ferrando-class spaceship, and the ability to remove it from the Outer Satellites Council monitoring system.

2) The cooperation of at least the ten persons necessary to operate a Ferrando.

3) Access to the 563-92-7246 data bank on Mars, where the Weil journal was found.

4) The means to convince somebody to impersonate the “grandson” of Weil.

5) The ability to remove ice-asteroids from the rings of Saturn without being detected.

6) The tools with which to cut these ice-asteroids into the liths of the structure, and the equipment needed to place the liths in position without leaving signs of construction (equipment which, as Jordan has shown, the Vasyutin Expedition, if it existed, could not have had).

7) The wealth necessary to accomplish all of the above.

8) A reason to perpetrate such a hoax.

Other attributes are not necessary, but are strongly indicated by the evidence:

1) A knowledge of the megalithic cultures of prehistoric Europe.

2) Some significant connection with the date 2248.

Two weeks later I received a letter:

18 September 2620

Edmond Doya

Box 510

Waystation

Dear Mr. Doya:

Please come visit me for a talk about matters of mutual interest. I will provide your transportation from Waystation to Saturn and back. If it is convenient to you, Captain Pada of the Io can leave Waystation immediately; and if you can stay for a week or ten days (which I urge you to do) she can return you to Waystation by the New Year.

Sincerely,

Caroline Holmes

Saturn Artificial Satellite Four

Saturn was a striped basketball in the viewscreen of the Io. Five or six of its moons were visible as white crescents; Titan fuzzy at the edges because of its growing atmosphere. I watched it with the interest one has when seeing an old home.

Captain Pada, a quiet woman I had seldom seen on the voyage, pointed above the planet. “See that white point? That’s her satellite. We’ll meet it just below the Rings.”

“Does it have a name?”

“No. Just Sas Four.” Pada left the room.

I stayed and kept the screen locked on Saturn until the knife-edge of the Rings began to broaden, and the whole vista became too large for me, in my distraction, to focus on. I found the coordinates for Holmes’s satellite and switched the screen to it.

We were closing on it, and it was big: a torus, spinning slowly, a wheel with spokes a kilometer long. A thin crescent on the sunward side was bright with reflected sunlight, and another half of the surface facing me was Saturn-lit, a dusky, burnished yellow. Locks, handrails and small bays studded the curving metal. There was a small, classically designed observatory, sticking out of the hub on the side opposite the dock; its telescope appeared to be trained on Saturn. The spokes connecting hub and wheel looked thin as wire. At regular intervals there were windows, some of them half-globes protruding into the vacuum. Many of the rooms behind the windows were lit, and I caught quick glimpses, as we circled it, of red and gold walls, rich brown furnishings, marble busts, a huge crystal chandelier. The entire thing brought to mind a nineteenth-century bathysphere, cast by some accident into the wrong time and medium. The largest of the windows was almost dark—the room behind it was filled with a pale blue light —and someone stood in it, close to the window. The rest of the rooms had been quite empty.