I hiked to the inner edge of the rim, and looked down a nearly sheer cliff onto the crater floor.
A lot of sand had been deposited in the last three hundred years, but some of the roofs were still exposed. From my vantage it looked like a village of dirt hummocks, at the bottom of a big dirt bowl. The hummocks stood in faint squares and oblongs, and together they formed a grid of sand-filled depressions, that once had been busy streets, and wide boulevards lined with trees. The pattern extended to the crater wall on all sides, although to the east the sand tended to bury everything.
Trembling slightly, I stepped as close to the cliff’s edge as I dared. Those were the ruins of New Houston, down there. I had been born in that ruined city; my first years had been spent in the confines of this very crater. This had impeded my efforts to get the dig approved, in fact, although I never understood why. My birthplace: so what? No one remembers their childhood. I knew I had been born there in the same way anybody else did — I looked it up. So the unspoken implication that my motives were in some way personal was entirely unfounded, as was tacitly admitted when the dig was approved and I was allowed to join it.
Nevertheless, as I looked down onto the hummock roofs and the solar-panel ridges and the sand-filled streets, I caught myself searching for something in the pattern, or in the etching of vertical ravines into the crater wall, that I might recognize from those first years. But it was just a site. An old city in ruins.
New Houston. During the Unrest of 2248 the city had been taken over by rioters, and held against the police of the Mars Development Committee. (I must have been there?) The police reports said the rebels had blown down the dome, destroyed the city, and killed all the noncombatants; but the samizdat said otherwise. In these ruins I intended to find the truth.
So as I surveyed the crater floor and its faint gridwork, now accentuated by the growing shadows of late afternoon, my pulse quickened, my spirits soared. For as long as I could remember I had wanted to excavate one of the lost Martian cities, and now I was here at last. Now I would be an archaeologist in deed, as well as in name. Visions of the digs I had taught in classes jumbled in my mind — all those cities that had been razed and abandoned by conquerors, Troy, Carthage, Palmyra, Tenochtitlan, all resurrected by scientists and their work; now New Houston would be added to those, to become part of history again. Oh, yes — it was that moment in a dig, before the work has begun, when the site lies undisturbed in its shadows and all things seem possible, when one can imagine the ruins to be those of a city as ancient and huge as Persepolis, with the strata of centuries under the rubble-crazed surface, containing the debris of countless lives that can be deciphered and understood, recouped from the dead past to be known and treasured and made part of us forever. Why, down in those ruins we might find almost anything. Of course it is easy to feel that way above a site on a good prospect, in late afternoon light, alone. Everything looks burnished and charged with meaning, and somehow one’s own.
Down in the tents it was different. That evening I entered the large commons tent where everyone was celebrating our arrival, and felt like an ant dropped in a terrarium of trapdoor spiders. Satarwal and his thugs from Planetary Survey stared at me, and Petrini and his faintly insolent students glanced at me as they stood in rings around tables, poking at maps and arguing like experts, and my students and McNeil’s and Kalinin’s blinked at me as stupidly as sheep. I went in search of the Kleserts and found them in the dining room, and joined them for a silent meal. I didn’t know them well, but they were my age and knew how to leave one alone. It was too bad for me that their work on water stations would take them away, to Nirgal Vallis some kilometers to the southwest of us.
Then it was back to the main room, to the arguing and poking. Petrini’s group was determined to be vehement, yet there was no point to their talk — except to show Satarwal how reliable they were, how fiercely they could go after “the facts” without endangering the official version of New Houston’s history. They were good at that. And Satarwal soaked it up. He enjoyed the meaningless chatter about the Athenian and Parisian models of crater city planning, because it so obviously avoided the central question of the dig. His stubbly blue jowls bounced with pleasure at this spectacle of his power over us, and I could not stand it. I had to leave the room.
Only to run into Petrini in one of the smaller lounges. But Petrini was easier on the nerves than Satarwal. It was like going from the dentist to an ear specialist (I have poor hearing): someone still working on you, but without the drills.
“Well, Hjalmar, how was the view from the rim? The old city still there, eh?”
“Ah — yes. Yes it is.”
“Did you find anything interesting on the rim?”
“Well — the dome foundation, of course. I won’t know until we have studied it more closely.”
“Of course.”
“Nothing extraordinary, though.”
“No. I guess we’d have heard if you had, from your students.”
“Do you think so?”
“Oh, come now, Hjalmar. You know students.”
“Do I?”
“Who better? You’re the pillar of the university, Hjalmar, you’ve been there longer than the buildings.”
“Not really. Besides, only the buildings stay. The students keep changing.” Until you end up teaching members of a different civilization.
Petrini tilted his head back and laughed. “Well,” he said, sobering rapidly and making sure I saw he was now serious: “I’ll have a tough time filling your shoes, I really will.”
“Nonsense. You’ll be the best chairman yet.”
Conversation on automatic pilot. Meanwhile I watched him work on me. Such charm. But Petrini’s problem was his transparency. He was one of those people who made it their life’s project to rise into the halls of power; everything he did was part of his campaign. I knew someone like that myself, so I recognized the type. But Petrini’s purpose was always obvious, and this would impede his progress. The best politicians appear to fall upward accidentally, so that people are inclined to help them on their way.
He slapped me on the arm affectionately. “Thanks for the vote of confidence. Now — I hope you don’t mind me saying this — I know what you will be trying to prove here on this dig. And believe me, I’m sympathetic to it. But the evidence, Hjalmar. The Aimes Report, you know, and Colonel Shay’s account. Those things couldn’t have been falsified.”
“Certainly they could have.” I tilted my head at him curiously. “Those aren’t things, Petrini. The things are here, on the site. The only good evidence is here, because the city can’t lie. We’ll see what we find out.”
“Just be prepared for a letdown.” He put his hand to my arm again. “I tell you this for your own sake.”
“Thanks.”
I considered going back to my tent and reading. My supervisors were intolerable, my colleagues irritating, my students dull. But then Hana Ingtal appeared as if I had called her up by the thought, and asked me to join her for a drink with an enthusiasm that made it difficult for me to refuse. Reluctantly I nodded, and followed her into the dining room’s bar. While she mixed us drinks she chattered about our afternoon on the rim. I watched her, perplexed. We had worked together for over five years, and she still seemed to like me.
I didn’t understand it. Most students so obviously work their professors for advancement, and how can they help it? It is that sort of master-slave situation. I doubt I would ever go near a university if I had it to do again. Twenty years of indenture to some old man or woman who “knows,” all to get into a position where you too can be treated as master by people you barely know. Stupid (although it beat mining).