Kim Robinson - Icehenge

We sat in silence for a long, long time. Eventually I switched to a private band and nudged him to do the same.

“Did you hear about the new theory from Waystation?”

He shook his head. I told him about it.

Again he shook his head. “That isn’t right. I’ve gotten to know Arthur Grosjean pretty well, and he would never be a party to something like that. It won’t wash.”

“No… That won’t keep people from believing it, though.”

“No. But I’ve heard a better one than that.”

“You have?”

He nodded. “Say the Mars Starship Association really existed. Davydov, Weil, the whole group. They hijacked those asteroid miners, got a starship built, sent Emma and the rest back to Mars. Emma escaped from the police, hid in the chaos for a certain number of years. Then she decided she wanted back into the world. She concocted a new identity — maybe she got her father to take a new identity, too, to give her story a back- up. She went out to the Jovian system, made her fortune in mining and life-support systems. Then she got curious to see if Davydov’s ship had left a monument on Pluto, as he had hoped they would, and she went out to look. But the starship people were in a hurry, and worried about the Martian police — they couldn’t take the time, and there wasn’t anything there, on Pluto. So Emma decided to build it for them. Then how could she show the world who it was really for, without revealing herself? She took the journal she had written so many years before, planted it outside New Houston. Planted Davydov’s records in the archives. She slipped the truth back into the world, just as if it were a lie — because she herself was the lie, you see?”

“So Caroline Holmes is…”

“Or Emma Weil is Caroline Holmes, yes.”

I shook my head. “They don’t look anything alike.”

“Looks can be changed. Looks, fingerprints, voice prints, retinal prints — they all can be changed. And the last pictures of Emma were taken before she was eighty. People change. If you saw pictures of me at eighty you wouldn’t believe it.”

“But it won’t work. Holmes has been well documented all her life, almost. You can’t make up a whole past like that, not a really public one.”

“I’m not so sure. We live a long, long time. What happened two, three, four hundred years ago — it isn’t easy to be sure about that.”

“I don’t know, Jones. An awful lot survives.” I shook my head, tired of it all. “You’re just adding an unnecessary complication. No, Caroline Holmes did it. Something happened to her… I just don’t know what it was.” Still, Jones’s idea: “But I can see why you would like the idea. Who gave it to you, now?”

“Why, you did!” he said, leaning back to peer down at me with mock surprise. “Isn’t that what you were telling me just before planetfall, when we got drunk with the crew?”

“No! For God’s sake, Jones. You just made that whole thing up.”

“No, no, you told me about it. You may have been too drunk to remember it.”

“The hell I was. I know what I’ve said about Icehenge, and that’s for sure. You made that up.”

“Well, whatever. But I bet it’s true.”

“Uhn. What’s that, your fifteenth theory of the origins of Icehenge?”

“Well, I don’t know. Let me count—”

“Enough, Jones! Please. Enough.”

I sat there, utterly discouraged. The memorial boulder before us mocked me; I stood, kicked it with a toe.

“Hey! Watch out, there.”

I swung at my stack of pebbles and knocked them flying out over the dust. Hands trembling I removed the remaining stones, dropping them randomly. When the plaque was clear I ran my fingers between the letters until all the dust was gone. I looked around at the scattering of pebbles. “Here,” I said. “Help me with these.” Wordlessly he stood, and slowly, carefully, we gathered up all the pebbles and made a small pyramid out of them, a cairn set beside the plaque’s boulder. When we were done we stood before it, two men looking down at a pile of stones.

“Jones,” I said, in a conversational tone, though my voice was quavering, I didn’t know why, “Jones, what do you think really happened here?”

He chuckled. “You won’t give up, will you… I’m like the rest of us, I suppose, in that I think much as I thought before. I think… that more has occurred at this place than we can understand.”

“And you’re content with that?”

He shrugged. “Yes.”

I was shivering, my voice hardly worked. “I just don’t know why I did all this!”

After a while: “It’s done.” He put his arm around my shoulder. “Come on, Edmond, let’s go back. You’re tired.” He pulled me around gently. “Let’s go back,”

When we got to the low hill between the site and the landing vehicles, we turned and looked at it. Tall white towers against the night…

“What will you do,” Jones asked.

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I’ve never thought of it. Maybe — I’ll go back to Terra. See my father. I don’t know!… I don’t know anything.”

Jones’s bass chuckle rumbled in the vacuum’s silence. “That’s probably as it should be.” He put his arm around my shoulders, steered me around again. We began walking toward the landing vehicles, going back to the others, going back. Jones shook his head, spoke in a sort of singsong: “We dream, we wake on a cold hillside, we pursue the dream again. In the beginning was the dream, and the work of disenchantment never ends.”