Caroline Holmes

Saturn Artificial Satellite Four

Saturn looked like a striped basketball in the viewscreen of the Io. Five or six of its moons were visible as white crescents. Titan was immediately recognizable because of its size and its atmosphere — fuzzy crescent points; I watched it with the interest one has when seeing an old home.

Captain Pada, a quiet woman I had seldom seen on the voyage to Saturn, pointed above the planet. “See the moving white point? That’s her satellite. We’ll meet it just 18 September 2609 below the rings.”

She said her with a special emphasis, I noticed. I said, “Does it have a name?”

“No. Just Sas Four.”

Pada left the room. I stayed, and kept the screen locked on Saturn until the knife-edge of the rings began to broaden, and the whole vista became too large for me, in my distraction, to focus on. I found the coordinates for Holmes’s satellite, and switched the screen to it.

We were closing on it fast. It was big: a torus spinning slowly, a wheel a kilometer across. A thin crescent on the sunward side was bright with reflected sunlight, and another half of the surface facing me was Saturn-lit, a dusky, burnished yellow. Handrails, locks, and small bays studded or indented the curving metal. There was a small, classically designed observatory sticking out of the hub on the side opposite the dock; its telescope appeared to be trained on Saturn. The spokes connecting hub and wheel looked thin as wire. At regular intervals in the torus itself there were windows, some of them half globes protruding into the vacuum. Many of the rooms behind the windows were lit, and I caught quick glimpses, as we circled it, of red and gold walls, rich brown furnishings, marble busts, a huge crystal chandelier. The total effect was that of a nineteenth-century fantasy, a bathysphere cast by some accident into the wrong time and medium.

The largest of the windows was almost dark — the room behind it was filled with a dim, dusky blue light — and someone stood in this window, a black silhouette that appeared to be observing our approach.

Over the intercom Captain Pada called me to the transfer room. We were about to dock.

While crossing the ship I felt the bump of docking, and I stopped for a moment and tried to quell my excitement. Just an old woman, I thought, just a rich old lady. But the old epithets had little effect, and I was nervous as I floated into the transfer room.

The locks were already open. Captain Pada was there, and she shook my hand. “Nice having you aboard,” she said, and waved me forward. I thought this formality a little odd; would the crew of the Io stay in their ship for the duration of my visit?

I passed through the docking sleeve and was in Holmes’s world. A man dressed in red coat and pants, embroidered with gold, stood at attention before me. He nodded. “My name is Charles, Mr. Doya. Welcome to Sas Four. I’ll show you your rooms and you can arrange your belongings. Caroline will receive you after that.”

He took off with a neat leap and I hurried after him. We dropped down a hall with clear walls, in which terrestrial seashells were embedded; again I thought of the bathysphere. Another hall perpendicular to that one enabled us to walk, in light gravity, and I deduced we were in the torus itself. This hallway did indeed curve always upward, and after a short walk Charles opened the door to a room off the hall.

The room we entered was walled with reddish Persian rugs, and the ceiling and floors were a light wood. The floor was on several levels, with broad steps separating them.

“This is your room,” said Charles. “That control panel over there will provide whatever furniture you need — wardrobe, bed, screens, desk, chairs. The robots will obey you.” He indicated two boxes on wheels.

“Thank you.”

Charles left, somewhat to my surprise. But I assumed he would return soon, and went to the control panel, which was behind a wall tapestry. I pushed Bed. A circular section of floor slid away and a circular bed rose. I traversed the room to it, flopped down, and waited for my things to arrive. And wondered what I would say to Holmes. My stay on her satellite was going to be conducted entirely on her terms, I was beginning to see; and that frightened me a little. Once again I pondered without success her purposes, her motivation in all this. Icehenge and the Davydov explanation were such an elaborate hoax… It occurred to me that if I were correct, and Holmes had manufactured all the parts of the story that Nederland and the Persephone expedition had between them discovered — and everything that had happened recently reinforced my conviction that I was correct — then I was soon going to meet the author of Emma Weil’s journal. I would be confronting the mind that had created that story that had so enthralled me as a boy — so in a sense I would be meeting Emma Weil. But what an odd way to think of it, given what I now knew! I shook my head, and muttered to myself something that I had said more than once in the seminar “A hoax is a curious thing.”

I sat on the bed and waited — lying down to nap more than once — for what seemed like hours. There was no way to measure the passage of time in the room; there were no buttons on the control panel labelled clock. Presumably I could call somebody on the intercom, but I didn’t know whom. Eventually I got hungry, and that, combined with growing irritation, drove me into the hallways. I decided to find my way back to the docking bay; my hope, though there was not much to support it, was that Charles would be there. Or somebody.

I came to the hallway that led up to the hub, the one with the clear walls and the hundreds of seashells, As I pulled myself up it using a brass railing that extended from one wall, I could see a wavery dark image moving up the hall with me, which I thought to be my reflection. But when I stopped for a moment to inspect a huge nautilus, the form continued to move. Surprised, I caught up with it and pressed my face against the glass, but its thickness, and some ripples in it, reduced the image on the other side to a brown blob. The blob, however, had stopped across from me. Perhaps it was pressed to the glass also, trying to see me. It appeared to be wearing dark green — hair perhaps gray. It moved again, in the same direction, and I followed it up until the wall changed from glass to teak, and the figure disappeared.

Almost simultaneously with this disappearance there was a click, below me in my hallway. I looked down, on a head of gray hair, a woman wearing a dark green jumpsuit… a silver ring on her left ring finger tapped against the railing as she pulled herself up. Confused, I pressed my face to the last section of clear wall, looking for the figure I had been following.

The woman pulled up beside me, and I looked over at her. I am afraid my mouth was still hanging open a bit with my surprise at this strange “teleporting” that I seemed to have witnessed. Then again the woman — it was Caroline Holmes — looked just a trifle surprised herself. I don’t look much like a scientist, I suppose — I let my hair do what it wants, and that plus my face got me called the Wild Man on Waystation — and so I had seen this look once or twice before, and recognized it.

But quickly it was gone. “Hello,” she said, in a well modulated alto voice. She was tall, and her gray hair was tied back in a single knot and then let loose over her back. Under the jumpsuit she appeared thin. Her face was handsome in a severe sort of way: deeply lined and aged, slightly tanned, with the finest of silky hairs just visible on her cheeks and upper lip. The line of her jaw and nose were sharply defined, giving her an ascetic look. Her eyes were brown. It was a hard face, marked by centuries of — who knows what? — and seeing it made me swallow involuntarily, aware of what I was up against.