“Thus there is nothing that factually disproves the Davydov theory — there are only the doubts and fanciful speculations of detractors, some of whom have clear political motivations. And there is something that factually disproves the notions that these detractors hold. I thank you for your attention.”

Pandemonium broke loose among the previously attentive figures around me. Questions were shouted out, incomprehensible under the noise of cheers and applause. “Oh, shut up,” I said to the image of the woman next to me, who was clapping. As questions became audible — some of them were good ones — order was re-established, but apparently the news service people had considered the question and answer period unimportant. With another click the scene disappeared, and I was again in the dark, silent holo room. Lights came on. I sat.

Had Nederland proved his theory at last? Was the stranger on Titan wrong after all? (and I as well?) “Hmm,” I said. Apparently I was going to have to start looking into dating methods.

I woke up in the alley behind one of Waystation’s main boulevards. I had been sleeping on my side, and my neck and hip were sore. I took off my coat and shook the dust off it. Pushed my fingers through my hair and made it all lie down flat, brushed my teeth with a fingernail, looked around for something to drink. Put my coat back on. Flapped my arms.

Around me prone figures were still slumbering. Waking up is the worst part of living on the streets of Waystation; they drop the temperature down to ten degrees during the nights, to encourage travelers to take rooms. Helping out the hotel trade. A lot of people stay on the streets anyway, since most of them are transients. They aren’t bothered in any way aside from the cold, so they save their money for things more important than a room for the night. We all have the necessary shelter, inside this rock.

Low on money again, but I needed something to eat. Onto the tram.

Down at the spaceport I spent my last ten in Waystation’s cheapest restaurant. With the change I bought myself a bath, and sat in a corner of the public pool resting and thinking nothing.

When I was done I felt refreshed, but I was also broke. I went to my restaurant and hit Fist for another ten, then I walked around to the post office. Not much mail; but there at the end, to my great surprise, was a letter from a Professor Rotenberg, head of the Fine Arts Lecture Series at the Waystation Institute for Higher Learning (which, like many of the institutions on Waystation, had been founded by Caroline Holmes). Professor Rotenberg, who had enjoyed my “interesting revisionist articles” on Icehenge, wondered if I would consider accepting a semester’s employment as lecturer and head of a seminar studying the Pluto megalithic monument literature — “My my my,” I said, and typed out instructions to print the letter with my mouth hanging wide open.

I went out of my cabin for the first time in a while, to restock my supply of crackers and orange juice. The wood and moss hallways of Snowflake were quite empty; it seemed that people were staying in their rooms, or in the tiny lounges that the rooms opened onto. Dr. Lhotse had brought Brinston by for a peacemaking visit, and they had dropped in on Jones as well. Now we interacted, when necessary, with careful politeness; but mostly we were just settling in for the last wait. It would be a few more weeks until we reached Pluto. That wasn’t long; everyone is patient, everyone is good at waiting in this world where everything proceeds so slowly.

Yesterday was my birthday. I was sixty-two years old. One tenth of my life done and gone, the endless childhood over.

Those years feel like eternity in my head, and the thing is hardly begun. Hard to believe. I thought of the ancient stranger I had met on Titan, and wondered what it meant to live so unnaturally long, and then die anyway. What have we become?

When I am as old as that stranger, I will have forgotten these first sixty-two years and more. Or they will recede into depths of memory beyond the reach of recollection — the same as forgotten — recollection being a power inadequate to our new time scale. And how many other powers are like it?

Autobiography is now the necessary extension of memory. Five centuries from now I may live, but the I writing this will be nothing in his mind but a bare fact. I write this, then, for that stranger myself, so that he may know who he has been. I hope it will be enough. I am confident it will; my memory is strong.

My father sent me a birthday poem that arrived just last night. He’s given me one every birthday now for fifty-four years; they’re beginning to make quite a volume. I’ve encouraged him to put them and the rest of his poems into the general file, but he still refuses. Here is the latest:

Walking back to my room with my food, saying his poem to myself in my mind, I realized that I miss him.

I met with the Institute seminar I was to teach about a month after I got the invitation from Professor Rotenberg. At my urging we decided to meet at the back table of a pub across the street from the Institute, and we moved there forthwith.

It quickly became clear that they had read the literature on the subject. What more could I tell them?

“Who put it there?” said a man named Andrew.

“Wait a minute, start at the beginning.” That was Elaine, a good-looking hundredish woman on my left. “Give us your background, how you got into this.”

I told them my story as briefly as possible, feeling sheepish as I described the random meeting that had triggered my whole search. “…So you see, essentially, I believe I met someone who had a hand in constructing Icehenge, which necessarily eliminates the Davydov party from consideration.”

“You must have been astonished,” Elaine said.

“For a while. Astonished, shocked — betrayed… but soon the idea that the monument was put there by someone other than Davydov obsessed me. It made the whole problem unsolved again, you see.”

“Part of you welcomed it.” That was April, a very attentive woman sitting across from me.

“Yeah.”

“But what about Davydov?”

“What about Nederland?” asked April. She had a rather sharp and scornful way of speaking.

“I wasn’t sure. It didn’t seem possible that Nederland could be wrong — there were all those volumes, the whole edifice of his case. And I had believed it for so long. Everyone had. If he was wrong, what then of Davydov? Or Emma? Many times when I thought about it the certainty I had felt that night — that that stranger knew what had happened there — faded. But the memory… refused to change. He had known, and I knew that, I was sure of it. So the search was on.”