“Uh.” A vial shoved up one of my nostrils and I was clearheaded again. I staggered free of my companion and followed him and the weather crew through the clogged streets.

At dawn we were on the east edge of town, sitting on the wide concrete strip just inside the dome. There were seven or eight of the weather crew left, laughing and drinking from a tall white bottle. My new friend arranged pieces of gravel into patterns on the concrete. On the horizon a white point appeared, and lengthened into a knife-edge line dividing the night: the rings. Saturn would soon be rising.

My friend had grown a little melancholy. “Sports,” he scoffed in reply to a comment I had made on the night’s brawling. “Sports, it’s always the same story. The wise old man or men against the young turk or turks, and the young turk, if he’s worth his salt which he is by definition, always seems to win it, every time. Even in chess. You heard of that guy Goodman. Guy studies chess religiously for a mere twenty-five years, comes out at age thirty-five and wins three hundred and sixty tournament games in a row, trounces five- hundred-and-fifteen-year-old Gunnar Knorrson twelve-four-two, Knorrson who held the system championship for a hundred and sixty-some years! It’s damn depressing.”

“You play chess.”

“Yeah. And I’m five hundred and fifteen years old.”

“Wow, that’s old. You’re not Knorrson?”

“No, just old.”

“I’ll say.”

“Yes, I’ve seen a lot of these New Year’s Eves. I can’t say I remember very many of them…”

“Long time.”

“Yeah. Besides I doubt I’ll even remember this one tomorrow, so you can see how they might slip away.”

“You must have seen a lot of changes.”

“Oh yeah. Not as many, though, these last couple of centuries. It appears to me things don’t change as fast as they used to. Not as fast as in the twentieth, twenty-first, twenty- second, you know. Inertia, I guess.”

“Slower turnover in the population, you mean.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Everyone takes their time. I suppose it’s a commonly observed phenomenon.”

“Is it?”

“I don’t know. But damn it, why doesn’t the wise old man beat the young turk? Why don’t you keep getting better? Where does your creativity go?”

“Same place as memory,” I said.

“I guess. Well, what the hell. Winning ain’t essential. I’m doing fine without it. I wouldn’t have it over.” He shook his head. “Wouldn’t do like those Phoenixes. You heard of them? Folks banded together way back when in a secret society, and now they’re knocking themselves off on their five-hundredth birthdays?”

I nodded. “The Phoenix Club.”

“Phoenixes. Can you believe such stupidity? I never will understand those folks. Never understand those daredevils, either. Seems like the more you have to lose the bigger thrill you get from risking your life for no reason. Those damn fools dueling with sharp blades, trying to stand on Jupiter, having picnics on some iceberg in the rings — get themselves killed!”

“You really think people have more to lose by dying now than they did when they lived their three score and ten?”

“Sure.”

“I don’t.”

He shoved me onto my side, roughly. “You’re just a kid, you don’t know anything. You don’t know how strange it’s going to get.” Angrily he swept his pattern of gravel aside. “There’s only a couple hundred people in the whole system older than me. And they’re dying off fast. One of these days I’ll go too. My body’ll toss off all this medical manipulation and stop” — he snapped his fingers — “just like that. They still don’t know why. And God damn it, I’m not used to the idea. Do you understand what it feels like to live this long? No, you don’t. There’s no way you do. I tell you, I wouldn’t mind having another six hundred years. I try talking my body into the idea all the time. And I’m damn glad I didn’t go at seventy or a hundred. What kind of a life is that? Man, I’ve done so many things…” His eyes, aimed at the concrete we were sitting on, were focused for infinite distance.

“You done everything you wanted to?”

He shook his head, irritated with me.

“Me neither.”

He laughed scornfully. “I should hope not.”

I was still drunk; my head throbbed, and my whole life seemed to swirl before me, over the concrete outside the dome. “I’d like to see Icehenge.”

He jerked around, stared at me with an odd look in his eye. He pulled tangled hair back to see me better. “You’d like to see what?”

“I’d like to stand at its center, and walk around and look at it. Icehenge, you know, the Davydov megalith, out there on Pluto.”

“Ha!” he cried. Several sharp laughs exploded from him. “Ha! Ha! Ha!” He rolled to his knees, got to his feet. “Davydov, you say!”

“He headed the expedition that put the monument there.”

In his agitation he circled me, and again sharp barks burst from him. He stood before me, leaned down to hold a tightly bunched fist before my face. “He — did — not.” At last his anger penetrated the fog of my drunkenness. “What?” I said, sobering quickly. “What did you say?”

“What makes you think this Davydov had anything to do with it?”

“Um.” I gathered my thoughts. “A historian named Nederland tracked down the story on Mars, he found this journal—”

“Well he was wrong!”

I was taken aback. “I don’t think so, I mean, he has it all well documented—”

“Idiot! He does not. What does he say — some asteroid miners put together a half- baked starship and take off, what’s that got to do with Pluto? Think about that for a while.” He stalked over to the dome, slapped it hard with an open palm.

I stood up and followed him, confused but instinctively curious. “But they were the only ones out there, see — process of elimination—”

“No!” He almost spoke — hesitated — turned on his heel and walked away from me. I followed him, and when he stopped I circled him. His hands were clenched tightly before him.

“What’s wrong?” I said. “Why are you so sure Davydov’s expedition didn’t—”

And he swung around, grabbed me by the upper arm and yanked me toward him. “Because I know,” he said, voice thick. “I know who put it there.”

He let go of me, took a deep breath. At that moment Saturn broke over the horizon, and everyone on the dome strip started to cheer. All over Simonides voices and sirens and whistles and horns and bells marked the dawn of the new year with their ragged chorus. My companion tilted his head back and hooted harshly, then began to move through the crowd away from me.

“Wait!” I cried, and struggled after him. “Wait! Hey!” I caught up with him, grabbed his sleeve, pulled him around. “What do you mean? Who put it there? How do you know?”

“I know,” he said fiercely. He stared at me. In all that cacaphony we two were still, face to face, gazes locked. And something in his expression told me that he knew. He was telling the truth. This was the moment that made the difference; this was the moment that changed me. I learned then that in certain times, in certain places, we connect in such a way that deception is impossible. The intensity of the flesh jumps the gap from mind to mind. This man’s bloodshot basilisk glare held me transfixed, and I knew that he knew.

Not that that satisfied me. “How?” I asked.

He must have read my lips. He pointed a gnarled forefinger at his own face. “I helped build it! Ha!” In all the noise it was hard to hear him, and he seemed in part to be talking only to himself, which made it even harder to hear him, but he said something like, “I helped build it, and now I’m the last one. She only” — the blast of a horn — “old men and women out there, and now they’re all dead but me!” He said more, but the shouting crowd drowned his words.

“But who, why?” I shouted. “Wh—”

He cut me off with a jab in the sternum. “You find that. I give you that.” He turned and shoved his way toward the streets again, leaving people angry enough to make it hard for me to follow. I slipped around groups and barged through others, however, desperate to catch him. I saw his wild tangle of hair beyond a small knot of people, and I crashed through them — “Wait!” I shouted. “Wait!”