“But that’s crazy!” Hana said.

“I know! Why do you think I ran over here shouting and all?” Bill sat on the ground, dialed up his oxygen flow.

“It is crazy,” Xhosa said. “Somebody must have…”

“Come back to the tents and see,” Bill said. “They sent pictures.”

So we dropped our work as if it were nothing, and followed him back to camp. The main tent was already filled with people, and the clamor of voices assaulted us as we entered; it had never been so loud in there. I barged through the crowd and wedged into the group surrounding the largest table. Several photos were being passed from hand to hand; abruptly I reached out and snatched one as it was held across the table. “Hey!” my victim yelled, but I turned my back on her and plunged out of the crowd, into the dining room.

It was a small photo and it looked as though it had been taken in black and white. Black sky, a gray regolith plain marked by the low superimposed rings of ancient craters, and in the middle distance, a ring of tall upright white blocks, some slender, others thick and massive. They were lit by searchlights set off to one side, and five or six of the columns’ faces were brilliantly white, as if they were mirrors catching the light. Human figures in bulky whitish suits were a quarter or a fifth of the height of the columns; they stood on the outside of the circle, heads craned back as they looked up at the closest block to them. The ring appeared to be about two hundred meters in diameter, maybe half again more, I couldn’t be sure. A little stone circle (white stone?) on Pluto.

I must have stood hunched over that photo for half an hour. I don’t know what I thought in that time; I was a blank. The photo seemed out of a dream. It was just the son of thing I would dream. And I am always stunned to blankness in my dreams. Yet here my colleagues milled about the next room chattering, announcing the real.

Petrini banged on the table. “Please, people. I have more news. Listen here. Pretty clearly the group that recently arrived there was not the first to visit Pluto, as they thought they were. It must have been quite a shock! Anyway, they’ve sent back some information with these photos. The object is located at the geographical north pole. The towers in the ring are made of water ice. There are sixty-six of them, and one has fallen over and shattered. Another has an inscription on it.”

This brought complete silence.

“Jefferson at the university library in Alexandria has identified the inscription as Sanskrit. I know, I know! Don’t ask me to explain it. I suppose someone has been up to games out there. The inscription is a couple of verbs and a series of slashmarks. The verbs both mean roughly ‘to push farther away.’ The slashes make a simple arithmetical progression, two then two, then four then eight.”

“Twenty-two forty-eight,” I said. “The year of the Unrest.” And immediately a certain passage in Emma Weil’s journal came to mind. She had visited Davydov’s cabin, found him sleeping, found plans on his desk…

Petrinin shurgged. “If you assume the slashes are a date in our calendar. But with this I don’t think it’s safe to assume anything.”

I scarcely heard him. “Where are the expedition’s transmissions coming to?”

“Burroughs. The university’s space center.”

“I’m going to go there and send up some questions, and monitor everything they send down.”

“But why?”

“I’ll be back as soon as I can. “I excused myself and left. Some curious looks were given me, but I didn’t care. Let them think what they liked.

…They were diagrams, several versions of the same thing… all circular, or near it… a circle slightly flattened on one side. Around this faint circumference were little rectangles, set at different angles, blackened by pencil… “Something to leave a mark on the world, something to show we were here at all—” Perhaps, I thought, perhaps this discovery on Pluto, which had given me such a shock, and made me so uneasy, might be turned to advantage after all. Perhaps it was not the disaster it had felt to me down in that cellar.

Ejecta

The Planetary Survey refused me permission to leave New Houston, so I called Shrike. “You need help,” he observed.

“Yes.”

“Did you see my press conference?”

“Yes. Did you write the speech yourself?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. Do you know how many lies there were in it? Or do you care?”

“Were there lies in it?”

“You don’t care. You’d read anything you were given, wouldn’t you. That’s the fate of the new man on the Committee. It’s disgusting.”

“I thought you were calling for a favor?”

“…I am.”

“I’ll think about it. But I’m disappointed you didn’t like my performance.”

“A performance is just what it was.” I couldn’t contain myself. “But it won’t wash, you know. Lebedyan and the rest are already poking holes in what you said, and in all the other statements made by the Survey on the find. You can’t pretend there wasn’t a false history, Shrike. There are too many contradictions. What we’ve found here plain contradicts what Shay said about the assault on New Houston. Check it out in the Aimes Report.”

“I’ll do that, Hjalmar,” he said with a smile.

“You’d better! Aside from the gall of it, which is disgusting, it makes you look foolish to get sent out there to spout obvious lies. It weakens your position because as the spokesman you get associated with the lies, and the clumsiness behind them. It’s bad for you. And you aren’t going to be able to lie your way out of this, one. You’d better tell your bosses that, and start figuring out something else.”

“Thanks for the statecraft lesson, Hjalmar,” he said, mocking me.

“I’ll trade it for a trip to Burroughs,” I said roughly. “I want to find out more about that thing on Pluto.”

“Fascinating, isn’t it? It’s the talk of Burroughs. What is it, do you think?”

“More trouble for you.” But I saw his upper lip lift a touch, and I let off. “But good for Mars, my Shrike; you can bet on that.”

“Hmph.” And he made me sweat and plead for a while. But I said the right things, and he agreed to help.

Riding the train to Burroughs, forehead pressed to the window glass: copper clouds shredded under a dark brown sky. Sometimes I feel like those clouds, torn east and scattered in the gales of Time. I knew that with this trip another life of mine was ending. Around me in the train car voices discussed the marvel of the day, the mysterious monument on Pluto. Did it mean the Atlanteans had actually lived? And developed space flight too? In my mind’s voice, so much more mellifluous than my own, I groaned and lectured the speakers severely. No crackpot theories, please! This is difficult enough as it is! But of course crackpot theories would spring up around this discovery like a ring of daughter mushrooms around one of those spore-exploding kinds. No avoiding it. Out on the rock-stubbled expanse of Sinus Sabaeus someone had cleared an area and lined up the collected rocks to spell REPENT. I stared at the message through the faint reflection of my head: tufted black hair, close-set eyes, grim little mouth. How could Shrike stand me.

I knew that my distress at this Pluto discovery was personal; it disrupted my habits. I had been in a situation I could predict, in a little society I could understand. I worked hard to create such nests of habit, as everybody does, for without habit life would be too abrasive and too long to live. And for a decade or two I would have been peacefully at work in the heart of the most important excavation in Martian history. The dig itself would have been Martian history. Now this Pluto monument had arrived like a meteor through the roof, knocking everything apart and thrusting me into the new. Now I wandered in new terrain, in the bare interregnum between successive exfoliations of life, completely exposed to the danger of the new.