And as I thought about it, I realized that this idea of a dream holograph was nonsense. Nobody has a machine that can violate your dreams. The idea had come to me because, in the first days after my arrival, Holmes’s behavior had definitely shaken me. And our interactions had been so charged that I dreamed about them at night, continuing our arguments; it was a simple case of day residue.

But I thought there was a very good chance that she had drugged me, that morning. I fell asleep again thinking about that, not quite so self-assured, so confident I was winning our bout, and safe. I wouldn’t be truly safe until — well… I wasn’t sure when.

The next day I was still thinking about a locked room. I wandered around the torus, looking methodically for any sections that were closed off. Many small rooms were locked, but there was one big section — an arc of the torus below the main hallway — that I couldn’t enter. It took a lot of wandering around that area to make sure, and when I was, my curiosity grew.

That night my dreams were particularly violent; though Holmes never appeared in them, my mother did, and my father was in several, always leaving for Terra, asking me to come along…

The following morning I decided to break into the closed arc. In a room down the hall from mine there was a console of the satellite’s computer; I sat before it and went to work. It only took me half an hour of sifting through satellite layout diagrams to find the locking codes I wanted, there in the original blueprints of the thing. I scribbled down a few numbers and left the console.

I checked to make sure Holmes and Charles were in the observatory — they were — Holmes seemed truly obsessed by those rings — then I went to the inoperative elevator above the closed arc. On the console beside it I punched out the command codes I had written down. When I was done the elevator doors slid open. I walked in.

I was on the third of seven floors, the interior control panel told me. I pushed seven. The doors closed and I felt the beginning of the elevator’s drop.

The elevator stopped, the doors opened and I walked out into another passageway. The floors were black tile, the walls and ceiling darkest wood. I walked up and down hallways. Aside from the walls and ceilings, nothing seemed to be different. Rooms I looked into were empty. (Where was Pada and her crew?) I had walked for some time (always staying aware of the location of my elevator), and was starting to feel disappointed, when I rounded yet another corner: there before me I saw a door that seemed to lead into the vacuum of black space; and in the center of that space was Icehenge.

It was small, and as I hurried toward it across a glass floor, I thought it was a holocube standing on a table. Then I saw that it was made instead of actual pieces of ice, standing in a big sphere of glass that rested on a white plastic cylinder.

The room itself was spherical, a tiny planetarium, with a clear bisecting floor. There were stars above and below, and the sun, just a few times brighter than Sirius, was just above floor level. It was Pluto’s sky.

The ice liths of the model were nearly transparent, but aside from that it looked like a perfect representation, even down to the little fragments of the Fallen Lith. After a time I circled it slowly, and found an unmarked control console on the other side of the plastic stand.

There were small colored buttons in a row on the console. I pushed a yellow one, and a long narrow beam of yellow laser light appeared in the room. It just touched the top of one of the triangular liths, on the flattened side of the ring, and the top of the shortest lith, on the southeast side… And aligned like this, the slender cylinder covered the sun and turned it yellow.

The other buttons produced laser beams of different colors, marking the sight lines that certain pairs of liths established. But these sight lines were not there for observers on the surface of Pluto, for they extended across lith tops in both directions into space. And the sight lines would be good for only a certain point in Pluto’s orbit — in fact, for only a certain moment in Pluto’s history. And one could only see them if an elaborate model such as this were constructed… It was a private reference, to a single moment. I pushed the other buttons, wondering if there were some way I could figure out what moment that had been. Or would be. Violet was Sirius. Orange was the Pleiades. Green was, I guessed, Pluto’s moon Charon. A blue beam extended straight up out of the tallest lith, and defined Kachab, Pluto’s pole star. And red, stretching across the two remaining triangular liths, turned Barnard’s Star — Davydov’s destination — into a Mars-red ruby.

“Mr. Doya?” Holmes was on the intercom again. “What?” In my dream my father had been telling me a story. “Captain Pada can leave for Waystation today, if you like.”

“Oh… all right.” All of a sudden I was furious. Sending me off like that! “Would you join me for breakfast?”

“…Sure. In an hour.”

She wasn’t in the dining room — that is, the first room we had eaten in — when I got there, so after a short wait I called the robots in and had them bring me a meal that I ate alone. I looked out at Saturn. It was hard to chew the pastries, because I was grinding my teeth with anger.

When I was done with breakfast, an image of Holmes, seated in a chair, popped into being across from me.

“Excuse me for saying good-bye to you like this,” she said. “You are in a holo field yourself, so we can converse—”

“The hell we can,” I said. “What’s the meaning of this? You come out here where I can see you in the flesh!”

“We will talk this way—”

“We will not talk this way—”

“Or not at all.”

“That’s what you think,” I exclaimed, and ran from the room. Something about it just made me furious. I pulled my way up to the hub and barged into the observatory. Empty. Back in the torus’s main hall. I began to realize I was going to have a problem confronting her. The satellite was too big — I didn’t even know where her quarters were. When a bulkhead-like partition dropped down and blocked off the hallway ahead of me, I knew I was beaten. I returned to the dining room. The image of Holmes still sat in the image of a chair, watching me as I entered.

“What’s the meaning of this?” I burst out, and went over and stepped right into the image of her. “Don’t you have the nerve to confront me in person?”

“Mr. Doya,” she said icily. Over the intercom her voice rang a bit. “Quit being stupid. I prefer to speak to you this way.”

I stepped back out of her semitransparent image, so that our faces were just a few centimeters apart. “Speak, then,” I said. “Can you see me well enough? Am I looking directly at you? Can you hear me?”

“I hear you all too well. Let me speak. I want you to understand that my desire not to be associated with Icehenge is very serious.”

“You shouldn’t have built it, then.”

“I didn’t.”

“You did,” I said, and hoped my image’s eyes met hers. “You built it and then built the false explanation that went with it — and all for naught! All for naught.” I swung a hand through her head, then tried to control myself. “Why did you do it? With all that money, Ms. Holmes, why did you build nothing but a hoax? Why construct nothing but the story of a starship when you could have made it real? You could have done something great,” I said, and my voice hurt in my throat. “And instead you’ve done nothing but make a fool of an old man on Mars.”

“Not if the Davydov story holds true—”

“But it won’t! It hasn’t! And the sooner it falls the less foolish he appears.” I turned and walked toward the door, too angry to look at her a moment longer.

“Mr. Doya!”

I stopped, half turned, enough to see she was standing. “Icehenge… was not my idea.”