Damon Knight - Orbit 21

When I awoke the next morning, I was sure I had slept for an uncommonly long time. I showered in water cold as I could stand, feeling disturbed by dreams I couldn’t remember.

Apparently I was being left to my own devices again. After a long wait on my bed, during which I wondered if I should be as annoyed as I felt, I went to the control panel and called up every destination on the intercom. None of them replied. I couldn’t even find out what time it was.

I left my room and ventured into the halls again, remembering the previous night; if I hadn’t left my rooms, I wondered, would I ever have met Holmes?

Today she wasn’t in the room we had dined in, or behind the seashell wall. I circled the satellite a couple of times, checking room after empty room, and became completely disoriented. Quite a few doors on every level were locked. The silence on board—actually it was a pervasive, soft, electric whirr —began to bother me.

I took an elevator up one of the spokes to the observatory and tried the door; to my surprise it opened. Inside there was a voice: I entered the weightless room. It was a tall cylindrical chamber, with a domed ceiling. The telescope was a long black thing, tricked out in brass. It extended from a vertical strip in the curving ceiling to the center of the chamber, where a crow’s-nest with a leather and brass chair was welded to it.

Holmes was behind that chair, leaning over to look into the mask of the eyepiece. Every few moments she called out a string of figures. Charles, seated at a console in the wall of the chamber (still in his red and gold) tapped at a keyboard and occasionally quoted a set of numbers back to Holmes. I pulled myself down a railing set into the wall. Holmes looked up. She nodded, said “Mr. Doya,” in greeting, and looked back into the eyepiece. I pushed off and floated to a platform just below her crow’s nest. She continued working.

After a while she called to Charles, “Put it on the inside limit of the crêpe ring, please,” and straightened up. She looked down at me.

“I’ve been reading your articles with fascination,” she said. “I’ve been a student of the Icehenge controversy for a long time.”

“Have you,” I managed to say.

“Oh, yes, I followed it from the beginning. That last article of yours, the one in Shards , was tantalizing. But tell me. Who do you suspect was this marvelous hoaxer?”

I looked away from her, over at Charles, down at the end of the telescope. Adrenaline flushed through me, preparing me for flight, but not for conversation. . . .

“Do you really want to go into something so complex now?” I asked, and then, as she stared down at me, continued: “I really don’t know who put it there. All that I have are hints, possibilities —conjectures.”

“When you are inclined to it,” she replied, with a slight smile, “I’d like to hear them. I’ve observed that I fit all of your hoaxer’s attributes, and I want to know if I, too, am a suspect.”

She stared at me for a long time, while I looked down at the telescope and tried to think. Finally I raised my eyes to meet hers,

“You are a suspect, Ms. Holmes.”

She smiled. “Now that is exciting.”

After another pause she appeared to sense how disconcerted I was, and she looked into the eyepiece again. She threw an occasional comment to me, and I replied when I could muster my attention.

“Have you lived on Waystation long?” she asked.

“Not long.”

“Ah. My corporation had a good deal to do with the construction of it, you know. But where did you come from?”

I tried to pull myself together and make a coherent story of my past—a difficult task under the best of circumstances—but my distraction must have been very obvious. Eventually Holmes cut me off.

“Would you like to retire now, and continue this conversation later?”

I agreed that I would, and left hastily, remembering, as I returned to my room, her calm and enigmatic smile. What did she want of me? I called up my bed and collapsed on it, and lay pondering her purposes, more than a little fearful. Much later one of the robots brought me a meal, and I picked at it. Afterwards, though I thought I never would, I fell asleep.

“Tell me,” demanded Holmes, “is it true that Hjalmar Nederland is your great-grandfather?” Her face loomed over me.

I didn’t want to answer. “Yes.”

“How odd,” she said. Her hair was arranged on her head in a complex knot (like my mother used to wear). She was wearing earrings, three or four to an ear, and her eyebrows had been plucked to thin black arches. She was looking out a window, at the sun.

“Odd?” I said, though I did not want to say anything.

“Yes,” she said, annoyance in her voice. “Odd. All this marvelous work that you’ve done. If your theory is accepted, then Nederland’s theory—his life’s work—will be destroyed.”

Her glare was fierce, and I had to struggle to reply. “But even if his theory was wrong,” I said, “his work was still necessary. It is always that way in science. His work is still good work.”

She followed me back, her face very close to mine. “Would Nederland agree?” she cried. She pointed a finger at me. “Or are you just lying to yourself, trying to hide what will really happen!”

“No!” I said, and weakly tried to strike back at her: “It’s your fault, anyway!”

“So you say,” she sneered. “But you know it’s your fault. It’s your fault, “ she shouted, looming over me, her face inches from mine. “ You are the one destroying him, him and Icehenge as well—”

A noise. I twisted around in my bed, looked down at my pillow, realized I was dreaming. My heart was hammering. I rubbed my eyes and looked up—

Holmes was standing over me, looking down at me with clinical interest (hair piled on top of her head)—

I jerked up into a sitting position and she disappeared. Nobody there.

I tossed the bedsheets aside and leaped out of bed. I hurried to the door; it was locked on the inside, though I couldn’t remember locking it. The darkened room reeked of sweat; it was filled with shadows. ... I ran to the control panel and switched on all the lights in the room. It blazed, white streaks everywhere on the polished wood. It was empty. I stood there for a long time, waiting for heartbeat and breathing to slow down. The image I had seen over me, I thought, could have been a hologram. I began circling the room, inspecting the wood for apertures. . . But the dream. Did she have a machine that created images within the mind, as a holograph created them without?

I didn’t sleep again that night.

“Mr. Doya.”

“What?”

“Mr. Doya.” It was Holmes’s voice, from the intercom.

“Yes?”

“The sun will rise over Saturn in thirty-five minutes, and I thought you might like to see it. It’s quite spectacular.”

“Thank you, I would.”

“Fine. I’ll be in the dome room, then. Charles will show you the way.”

When I got there she was seated in the lotus position, staring out. The room was shoved out from the body of the satellite, so that the clear dome served as both floor and walls. Saturn, rather than directly below us, was off to one side, just clear of the surface of the satellite. Saturn was dark, but the north polar cap glowed green, as though lit from within. To the sides the rings, very thin now, shone brightly.

“Most of Saturn’s mass is at its core,” Holmes said, without turning her head. “The upper atmosphere is very thin, enough so that the sun shines through it, just before rising.”

“Is that what that glow is,” I said. The luminous green gained brilliance near the pole, and seemed even brighter contrasted with the dark side of the planet. Finally I could see the sun itself, a fiery green gem that flared to an intense white as it cleared Saturn. The green faded and became a crescent of reflected light: the sunward side of the planet. We could see more of the rings.