Finally I raised my eyes to meet hers, and decided not to say anything. A staredown developed; I could have laughed, but it was too serious.

“Who are you?” she said irritably.

I shrugged. “A dishwasher.”

“And I am a suspect in your little investigation? You can admit that much?”

“…You are a suspect, Ms. Holmes.”

She smiled. And leaned over to stare into the damned telescope again. I crossed my arms over my chest, feeling completely confused.

“Have you lived on Waystation long?” she asked.

“Not long,”

“And where did you come from?”

I tried to pull myself together and make a coherent story of my past — a difficult task under the best of circumstances — but my distraction must have been obvious.

Holmes cut me off. “Would you like to retire now, and continue this conversation later?”

Upon reflection I agreed that I would, and I left hastily, remembering as I returned to my room the calm smile she had given me when I told her she was a suspect. So strange! What did she want of me? I called up my bed and collapsed on it, and lay pondering her purposes, more than a little fearful. Much later one of the robots brought me a meal, and I picked at it. Afterwards, though I was sure I never would, I fell asleep.

“Tell me,” demanded Holmes, “is it true that Hjalmar Nederland is your great- grandfather?” Her face loomed over me.

I didn’t want to answer. “Yes.”

“How odd,” she said. Her hair was arranged on her head in a complex knot (like my mother used to have it). She was wearing earrings, three or four to an ear, and her eyebrows had been plucked to thin black arches. She was looking out a window, at the sun.

“Odd?” I said, though I did not want to say anything,

“Yes,” she said, annoyance lacing her voice. “Odd. All this marvelous work that you’ve done. If your theory is accepted, then Nederland’s theory — his lifework — will be destroyed.”

Her glare was fierce, and I had to struggle to reply. “But even if his theory was wrong,” I said, “his work was still necessary. It is always that way in science. His work is still good work.”

Her face was close to mine. “Would Nederland agree?” she cried. She pointed a finger at me. “Or are you just lying to yourself, trying to hide what will really happen?”

“No!” I said, and weakly tried to strike back at her: “It’s your fault, anyway!”

“So you say,” she sneered. “But you know it’s your fault. It’s your fault,” she shouted, looming over me, her face inches from mine. “You are the one destroying him, him and Icehenge as well, you—” A noise. I twisted around in my bed, looked down at my pillow, realized I was dreaming. My heart was hammering. I nibbed my eyes and looked up-

Holmes was standing over me, looking down at me with clinical interest (hair piled on top of her head)-

I jerked up into a sitting position, and she disappeared. Nobody there.

I tossed the bedsheets aside and leaned out of bed. I hurried to the door; it was locked on the inside, though I couldn’t remember locking it. In fact I was sure I hadn’t. The dark room reeked of sweat, it was filled with shadows. I ran to the control panel and switched on all the lights in the room. It blazed, white streaks everywhere on the polished wood. It was empty. I stood there for a long time, waiting for heartbeat and breathing to slow. I walked over and lifted the covers to search beneath the bed. Nothing there but a platform flush with the floor. The image I had seen over me, I thought, could have been a hologram. I began circling the room, inspecting the wood for apertures.

But the dream. Did she have a machine that created images within the mind, as a holograph created them without?

I didn’t sleep again that night.

“Mr. Doya.”

“What?” I had been drowsing.

“Mr. Doya.” It was Holmes’s voice, on the intercom.

“Yes?”

“The sun will rise over Saturn in thirty-five minutes, and I thought you might like to see it. It’s quite spectacular.”

“Thank you.” I tried to figure out what she was up to. “I would.”

“Fine. I’ll be in the dome room, then. Charles will show you the way.”

When Charles showed me in she was seated in the lotus position, staring out. The room was shoved out from the body of the satellite, so that the clear dome served as both floor and walls. Saturn was outside one wall, just clear of the surface of the torus. The planet was dark, but its polar cap glowed green, as though lit from within. To the sides the rings, thin now, shone like bright scimitars.

“Most of Saturn’s mass is at its core,” Holmes said without turning her head. “The upper atmosphere is very thin, enough so that the sun shines through it just before rising.”

“Is that what that glow is,” I said warily. The luminous green gained brilliance near the pole, and seemed even brighter contrasted with the dark side of the planet. Finally I could see the sun itself, a fiery green gem that flared to an intense white as it cleared Saturn. The green faded and became a crescent of reflected light: the sunward side of the planet. The rings broadened and separated into their multiple strands.

“Well,” said Holmes. “Good morning.”

“Good morning.” I stared at her closely. She ordered breakfast innocently enough, and we ate in silence. When we were done she said, “Tell me, am I your only suspect?”

I saw that she intended to have it out. I said shortly, “I think you put it there.”

“Genoa Ferrando fits the qualifications as well as I. So does Alice Waite, and a couple of others as well. Why do you think it was me?”

In a burst of impulsive anger I decided to show her how thoroughly she was found out. I told her the tale of the long search, gave her all the pieces of the puzzle she had left behind, put them together for her. It took quite a while.

At the end of it she smiled — again that calm, enigmatic smile. “That isn’t very much,” she said, and swiftly got up and left the room.

I took a long, deep breath, and wondered what was going on. “What do you want?” I shouted after her. No reply. My head was spinning, my vision was a field of pointillist dots. Had my breakfast been drugged? Was I full of some sinister truth serum, thus to tell her everything I had? But hadn’t I wanted to tell her? Oh, I was becoming confused, no doubt of it; confused and frightened. Yet I certainly did feel dizzy, and my vision was somehow altered. I tried to shrug off the thought, and failed. If she had drugged me — invaded my room — my dreams — what would she not do? Before me Saturn glowed, a huge crescent of swirled cream and green, wave patterns curling between every band of color. I watched for a long time, as the planet and its delicate minions continued to turn, in arcs and curves and ellipses of light, slow and inevitable and majestic, like the music Beethoven might have written had he ever seen the sea.

That night I couldn’t sleep for dreaming.

In the morning I dozed, then awoke cold and sober. I made my way up to the observatory.

She was there, working again with Charles. “Pay attention to what you’re doing,” she snapped at him as I opened the door.

She watched me enter, smiled politely. “Mr. Doya,” she said. She put her head down to the eyepiece, then pulled up; I am sure she never saw a thing. I was just below her. “Would you like to take a look?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Do you want to see the rings first?”

“Sure.”

She pushed buttons on a console beside her. The telescope and its containing strip in the ceiling shifted, and there was a low, vibrating whirrr; though I could barely sense it, clearly the entire chamber was revolving. Holmes leaned forward and looked into the eyepiece, pushed buttons with her eyes still to it.