Discouragement in the mirror dusk of a sidewalk cafe: drinking a thimble of coffee I watched the poor go home, each face a map of trouble. Rust-coated policemen on every corner to watch with me. Someone had left a red-backed copy of Justine on the dirty tabletop next to mine. I paged through it. Strange jumble of thoughts and images: I liked the helpless lack of structure. “I simply make these few notes to record a block of my life which has fallen into the sea.” Or: “I began to describe to myself in words this whole quarter of Alexandria for I knew that soon it would be forgotten and revisited only by those whose memories had been appropriated by the fevered city—”

I was interrupted in my bemused reading by a young man and a pregnant woman, standing before my table. “Are you Professor Nederland?” asked the woman.

“Yes, I am.”

“We’ve seen you on the news.”

I lifted my eyebrows. Fame: a curious sensation, to be known by strangers. Maybe there really was something happening out there, with the news of the excavation and the thing on Pluto.

“Yes?” I said.

“I’m your granddaughter, Mary Shannon. Hester’s daughter?’

“Oh, yes.” I recalled Maggie mentioning her. I hadn’t heard from Hester herself in more years than this young woman had lived. And here she was pregnant; they must have had influence somewhere.

“And this is my husband, Herbert.”

“Hello.” I stood and extended a hand toward the man. Mary lifted his arm and he took my hand, looking past me. I realized he was in a funk, and felt a stab of fear. “Pleased to meet you,” I said, and napkinned my mouth.

“Pleased to meet you,” he said. Mary darted a glance at him, smiled at me apologetically.

“And you’re soon to be a great-grandfather again,” she said. “As I guess you noticed.”

“Yes. Congratulations.” How could she have gotten permission to get pregnant when he was in a funk? I wondered if my name had been invoked in the permission proceedings. “It will be my ninth, if I’m not mistaken.”

“No, Hester told me that Stephanie had another one two years ago.”

“Oh? I hadn’t heard.”

“Oh. Well… We’re about to move to Phobos. So when I saw you I thought we should say hello.”

“I’m glad you did. Phobos is an exciting place, I’ve heard.”

“We’ve been ordered to move there, actually. But Herb works on sunsailers, so it will be good for him.”

I felt a pang for this brave woman, exiled to Phobos with two such responsibilities. “I’m glad.”

Family. A whole genealogical chart extending away in both directions — especially, for an old man like me, downward. A whole clan of descendants. Most of mine were on the Outer Satellites. I never saw the point of keeping in touch with so many strangers, who proved over and over again that nothing of you lasts beyond yourself. My granddaughter shuffled her feet, glanced at her husband anxiously. What would she be, sixty? Hard to say. She looked like a large child.

“We should let you eat,” she said. “I just wanted to say hello. And that we enjoy hearing about you on the news.”

“Good, good. Good to see you. Good luck on Phobos. Nice to meet you, ah, Herb. Take care, yes. Say hello to Hester. Bye bye.”

I sat down again on the uncomfortable metal chair, picked up the book automatically. “I suppose events are simply a sort of annotation of our feelings—” I shut the book. Down the boulevard the white streetlights came on all at once. In the plaza fountain’s basin water, squiggles of light S’ed over the glassy black surface. Couples walked around its edge. Some threw tokens in, the rest watched. It reminded me of Earth, somehow.

Those memories of my voyage to Earth that had burst into me in Burroughs, what did they mean? Was that really what happened? Suddenly I doubted it. Could we ever hold on to enough of the present to represent it accurately when it was gone? We try. We rehearse our pasts to ourselves in images and repeat them through the years until the images are all we have. Which means we have nothing. We are stuck in the knife-edged present, it extends everywhere — except during the hallucinatory moment of involuntary memory, when images impact like the real. I felt on the verge of such a moment, the pressure welled up at the bottom of my mind: something evoked by this granddaughter, descendant of a wife I scarcely remembered — something — something-

But it never came. A blocked epiphany. And suddenly I did not believe in my voyage to Earth. I remembered the night in Burroughs, after seeing the monument — but now it meant nothing to me. A hallucination. And how much of my written account of it was made up? I no longer believed any of it. Opening my notebook, I jotted a couplet to describe the process — in alexandrines, of course—

The memory’s the bone; imagination, flesh; The animating spirit? — is a forlorn wish.

Emma the only refuge, Emma the only anchor. How many nights I read her, and was re-oriented to the real.

The codes sent to me unlocked other classified information, and eventually I found a long list of files never programmed, which sent me running over to the Physical Annex. The reference was to Davydov, and the file collection was in a room I had familiarized myself with. I began searching the cabinets that stood in rows in the room. One bottom drawer was jammed with folders and pages; it looked like someone had ransacked it, or dropped the drawer and then replaced the contents in a hurry. Near the back I found the folder Davydov — Confidential. Inside it was a sheaf of papers.

Soviet fleet papers. Expedition to the Jovian moons in 2182-8. Record of an assault on a superior officer. Permissions for a leave on Earth.

Then in 2211 he was brought before a court-martial, but he was found innocent. Written under Charge was sedition — see Space Security, Valenski. Nothing more.

The next document was a fifteen-page application for a lobbying association and club to be called the Mars Starship Association. “Ah ha!” I shouted. The application was dated 2208. At that time any meeting of over ten people had to be approved by the police, so the questions were detailed. Davydov was named copresident of the club along with Borg. All potential members were identified. Many I had seen in Emma’s journal. Under Purpose of Association was typed, “To advocate the use of a certain percentage of mining profits for the construction of a long-range ship and the financing of a transplutonian expedition.”

So I had found it. Independent confirmation of the Mars Starship Association, right there in a cabinet drawer open to anyone’s inspection, in a cabinet I had casually glanced through several months before. That was archival cataloguing for you. I called Sandor to the room and got him to witness the find, and we had it copied. “You’re building quite a case,” he said. I wrote it up, Chronicle of Martian History published it. No comment.

Oh, I suppose there was some comment, I got calls from Nakayaina and Lebedyan and some others. But the theory popular that week was that Pluto was an erratic caught by the sun, and that the megalith was ancient, perhaps fifteen billion years old — nearly as old as the universe itself. Naturally this created a stir and there were calls for a new expedition to Pluto to investigate the megalith and test this theory.

Over a year’s labor and all I had found were scraps. I thought they were important scraps, but few people agreed. Meaningless work. And me so deep in the rhythms of Alexandria that I could scarcely see out of them, to know they were habits I had recently sheathed myself in. Each night I visited the bathhouses, and cared not who I saw, who I joined for company. I no longer searched for the woman who looked like Emma; I still found her occasionally, and we still coupled, but it was tempered by familiarity. Even the strangest liaisons lose their mystery.