“I’m a disruption!” he burst out. “You’re the disruptive force on this ship, Doya, hiding in your cabin all the time as if you had nothing to do with us! Refusing to join our talks! Living on Waystation for twenty years like a bum has made you some sort of misanthropist.”

“Not wanting to play with you doesn’t make me a misanthropist,” I said. “Besides, I’m working.”

“Working,” he sneered. “Your work is done.” He walked into the kitchen, leaving Nimit and me to stare silently at each other.

Waystation — where I lived for fifteen years, not twenty — is the freight train, the passenger express, the permanent highspeed rocket of the Outer Satellites. It uses the sun and the gas giants as buoys, or gravity handles to swing around. It travels about the same distance as Saturn’s orbit in a year — a fast rock. It began as an idea of Caroline Holmes, the shipping magnate who built most of the Jupiter colonies; and she profited from it most, as she did from all the rest of her ideas. Her company Jupiter Metals took a roughly cylindrical asteroid, twelve kilometers long and around five across. The inside was hollowed out, one end was honeycombed by the huge propulsion station, and off it went, careening around the sun, constantly shifting orbit to make its next rendezvous.

I boarded it on a shuttle from Titan, in 2594. My name had finally come up on the hitchhiker’s list — the Outer Satellites Council provides free travel between the satellites, which otherwise would be too expensive for most individuals, and all you have to do is put your name on the list and wait for it to come to the top. I had waited four years.

Jumping on Waystation is like running in a relay race, and handing the baton to a runner five times faster than you — for getting a transfer craft up to Waystation’s velocity would defeat the purpose of having Waystation at all. Our shuttle craft was moving at top speed, and we passengers were each in anti-G chambers (called the Jelly) within tiny transfer craft. As Waystation flashed by the transfer vessels were fired after it, at tremendous acceleration, and the transfer crews on Waystation then snagged them and they accelerated some more, while the crews reeled us in.

Even in the Jelly the sudden accelerations were a strain. At the moment we were snagged, the breath was knocked out of me and I blacked out for a second. While I was unconscious I had a brief vision, intense and clear. I could see only black, except for the middle distance, directly before me: there stood a block of ice, cut in the shape of a coffin. And frozen in this glittering bier was me, myself — eyes wide and staring back at me.

The vision passed, I came to, shook my head, blinked. Waystation people helped me out of the Jelly, and I joined the other passengers in a receiving room. Several of them looked distinctly ill.

A Waystation official greeted us, and without further ceremony we were escorted through the Port and into the city itself. It was crowded at that time — drop-offs to Jupiter were just about to be made, and there were a lot of merchants in town, moving goods. I found a job washing dishes first thing, and then went out to the front end of Waystation, rented a suit and took the elevator to the surface near the methane lake. I sat there for a long time. I was on Waystation, the next step outward.

For I was still chasing Icehenge, yes, I was. My dreams, my acceleration-induced visions, my studies, my physical movement, all centered around the idea of the megalith. And after the chance meeting with the stranger on Titan — after my most cherished story had been shattered — I returned to my studies with an obsessive purpose, fueled by a vague sense of betrayal: I was going to find out who put that damn thing there.

And I took my time about it, too. None of Nederland’s hasty rushing about. In his need for precedence — his drive to be the one who solved the mystery — he had been reckless, he had jumped to too many conclusions, and taken too many facts for granted. I would not make the same mistake. With the memory of the stranger’s bloodshot glare in mind, I hunted through the records of the Mars Development Committee, and the Outer Satellites Council, and the various mining companies that had plied the outer satellites, and the shipyards of the spaceship manufacturers, and the Persephone expedition, and so on: years and years of work. And slowly I began to see the pattern.

Some years after my move to Waystation I woke up one morning in the park, arms wrapped around a very young girl. The Sunlight had just come on and was still at half strength, giving its comforting illusion of morning. I stood up, went through a quick salute-to-the-sun exercise to alleviate the stiffness in my legs. The girl woke up. In the light she looked about fifteen or sixteen. She stretched like a cat. Her coat was wrinkled. She had joined me the previous night, waking me up to do so, because it was cold, and I had a blanket. It had felt good to sleep with someone, to spoon together for warmth, to feel human contact even through coats.

She got up and brushed off her pants. She looked at me and smiled.

“Hey,” I said. “You want to go over to the Red Cafe and get some breakfast?”

“No,” she said. “I have to go to work. Thanks for taking me in.” She turned and walked off through the park. I watched her until a stand of walnut blocked my sight of her. Rare to see someone so young on Waystation.

I went and ate — said good morning to Dolores the cashier as she typed my money from me to them, but she just shrugged. I went out and strolled aimlessly up the curved streets. Sometimes the real world seems just like the inside of a holo, where nothing you say or do will have any effect on what is happening around you. I hate mornings like that.

For something to do I went down to the post office and checked my mail. And there, in my March 2606 issue of Shards. was my own article. My first published article, containing sixteen years’ work. I hadn’t expected it to appear for months yet. I whooped once and disturbed people in the booths next to mine. I read quickly through the introduction, working hard to comprehend that the words were still mine.

Davydov and Icehenge: A Re-examination by Edmond Doya

There are many reasons for supposing that the megalith on Pluto called “Icehenge” was constructed within the last one hundred and fifty years, by a group that has not yet been identified.

1) 2443, when the Ferrando Corporation’s Ferrando-X spaceships were first made available to the public, is the earliest date at which ships capable of making the round trip from the outermost spaceship ports to Pluto and back existed. Before that date, because Pluto was at its aphelion, and on the opposite side of the solar system from Jupiter and Saturn, and because of the limited capabilities of all existing spaceships before the Ferrando-Xs, Pluto was simply out of human reach. So a working assumption can be made that Icehenge was constructed after 2443.

2) The Davydov Theory, which is the only theory that pushes back this necessary time limit, asserts that the megalith was built by asteroid miners who were leaving the solar system in a modified pair of spaceships of the PR Deimos class. But a close examination of the evidence supporting this theory has revealed the following discrepancies:

a) The only data indicating the existence of the Mars Starship Association — the group of miners that supposedly built Icehenge — were found in two places: a file found in Cabinet 14A23546-6 in the Physical Records Annex in Alexandria, Mars; and the journal of Emma Weil, found in a buried field car during the excavation of New Houston, Mars. While Mars Development Committee records do mention the existence of Davydov and the others named in this file and journal, they do not mention anywhere else the Mars Starship Association.