“I like him,” she said sharply.
“That’s good. That makes it easier for him.” I could scarcely believe what I heard; I was making it worse with every word! I stood. “I mean, sorry, I mean that makes it better for him. I — I think I’ll finish my walk now.”
She nodded, still looking back at Bill.
“Those American taggarts will help,” I said. “Very useful part of our case.”
“I’ll write up the results with Bill and Xhosa,” she said evenly, without looking up.
We fragment these ruins against our shore: items brushed and tagged and numbered, laid in neat rows on the floor of the museum tent, as we each play Sherlock Holmes with the junk of the past. Archaeology.
So we dug and we sifted, we cleaned and we squinted, and day followed day and week followed week, in a house-to-house search of the dead city. Loss of air pressure when the dome fell had caused some well sealed houses to explode like popped balloons. Messy. Occasionally we discovered the bodies of police troopers, hidden so well that their fellow soldiers had not found them; and what could we say of them? Satarwal proclaimed them victims of the riots, and had them buried. It was driving me mad. Perhaps we would never disprove the Aimes Report. Perhaps it would stand as part of Martian history forever. History is made by the winners, after all; and it is always the loser’s fault. Eight hundred thousand people killed? A very serious riot indeed, and a treacherous mutiny on the part of the Soviet fleet. Two hundred volumes will show you how it happened, and if you want to know more, perhaps we will send you to do research in the asteroids. Perhaps you do not want to know more? We understand.
And so history is made, because facts are not things. But things make facts or break them, or so the archaeologist believes. For every great lie of history — if we assume they were all caught, which would be wrong — for the Tudors’ Richard III, for the first Soviet century, the Americans’ Truman, the South African war, the Mercury disaster — for each of these lies there had been a revision based on things.
And I swore there would be a revision here too. Satarwal’s sneer: “We can explain every thing you find.” And his Ministry of Truth stood massively behind him, confident because the real history never got written down. But archaeology is the art of reading what did not get written. And things don’t lie.
“The dome fell and suddenly the rim defense is useless,” I said to Hana and Bill and Heidi, one day as we stood in the ruins of the physical plant. “Thousands are dead and the rest are trapped in shelters, and police troops are falling out of the sky. So what do you do? Where do you go?”
“The physical plant here was their last hold-out, right?” said Bill. I regarded him with a skeptical eye; he was quick with the freewheeling theory, slow to back it. “Over the rim from here is what they called Spear Canyon — maybe they used it for cover, and tried to evacuate. Like that note we found seemed to indicate.”
“They’d be seen going over the rim,” I said. “We need something more likely than that.”
Bill shrugged, turned away. And the more I thought of it, the more sense it made. But I said, “Any better ideas?”
“They could have mingled with the civilians and disappeared,” Hana said. “When the police made their final assault they would find no one there.”
“In which case they would roust the civilians and jail all of them. Although that beats getting killed, I admit. The police reported finding thirty-eight people alive” — including me, I thought — “but they might have lied about that too.”
Heidi said, “Kalinin’s team found a burn zone just south of here that they think marks a rocket’s descent — police supply ship, they’re guessing. But maybe the rebels had a ship ready to take off if necessary. Maybe they blasted right out of here.”
“Awfully dangerous,” Hana said.
“They would be shot right down,” I said. “They wouldn’t do something that stupid.”
So they all stood around and looked cross, as if it were my fault they couldn’t think of anything sensible. Though that Spear Canyon was an idea. “No doubt they were captured, executed and shipped out of here,” I said.
Radial fracture-crustal stresses caused by the Tharsis bulge have resulted in an extensive system of fractures in the terrain around it.
The time came for my visit to the gerontologist, and I got the necessary releases from Satarwal and Burroughs, and took a car to the train depot at Coprates Overlook. I took the train into Alexandria, and went to the clinic early one morning.
It was an all-day exam. I spent the usual hour in Dr. Laird’s waiting room, looking at the same old photographs of the Jovian moons. When I walked into his examining room we greeted each other and he went to work in his businesslike way. He had me strip and put me before the gaze of his machines. I drank liquids and stood in front of a battery of mechanical eyes, then was injected and clamped to a slab to submit to more penetrations. Meanwhile pieces of me — blood, urine, feces, saliva, skin, muscle tissue, bone, etc. — were taken away for tests. Dr. Laird then thumped and prodded me with his fingers; primitive stuff, but he appeared to think it necessary. While the samples were being tested and the pictures developed, he pinched my skin in places and asked me questions.
“How’s the tendonitis in the knee.”
“Bad. I’ve felt it more than ever this year.”
“Hmm. Well, we could strip that tendon clean, you know. But I’m not sure you shouldn’t wait a few years.”
“I’ll wait.”
“How have your moods been?”
Naturally I refused to reply to such an impertinent question. But as he continued to prod and pinch, like a plant geneticist testing the roots and leaves of a new hybrid (will this little shrub live on Mars, Dr. Science?) I thought, why not. When they test the plant they need to know how the flower fares.
“My moods have been up and down.” What was the technical terminology for all this? “Out of my control. I’m depressed. I worry about losing it and falling into a funk. Sometimes I feel one coming so clearly… to counteract it I may work too hard, I don’t know. I’m frustrated—”
The nurse came in with the developed pictures, and interrupted my confession. Dr. Laird didn’t seem to mind. He took the pictures from her and pored over them. Still checking them he said slowly, “Your physiological signs don’t show any indication of reduced affectual function. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
It’s worse than reduction, I wanted to say. It’s absence. Total indifference. Thalamic shutdown, and so no new memories. Emotional death.
“Your heart is a little enlarged. How much time are you spending in a centrifuge?”
“None.”
“That’s not quite enough.” A disapproving look. “Humans weren’t made for this gravity, you know. We can do the whole program for your immune system and your cell division accuracy, and you can still ruin it with negligence. I notice also that your facial skin is severely chapped, and your bone calcium deficient,” and so on — going into his usual litany of my ills. It lasted about ten minutes. Then he began writing out prescriptions and giving me “the whole program” for curing these ills, talking as if to somebody else about a plant with problems, a Hokkaido pine with sick needles, broken bark, twisted limbs, stunted roots. He used up almost an entire prescription pad, and we spent half an hour going through the explanation of the drugs and the instructions for their use. Acetylcholine stimulants, new form of vasopressin-equivalent: these drugs were new to me, so perhaps he had been listening to my confession after all. Perhaps there were signs of a funk he hadn’t told me about. “And that tendonitis — I’m going to have you try this,” and he rattled off a new syllabic witches’ brew for me. “Remember — take care of yourself, and you’ve got an endlessly replicating system, there. Think about that. If you don’t take care, nothing else is going to matter.” A friendly shake of the hand. Good little shrub. “See you next year.”