In neither building could I find any mention of a Mars Starship Association. Three months after I came to Alexandria I hadn’t found a thing. And there was still no response to my letter in Marscience.

Emma searched; We research.

The city pulled at me. The smooth face of a young man, in a bathhouse door. On a sidewalk cafe table, lying in coffee stains face down: the Martian translation of Cavafy’s poems. How well the old poet’s work fit this namesake city. I saw the collected edition everywhere — on trolley seats, on the leaf-strewn paths of the parks, in libraries misshelved under Astronomy or Polynesia; and from the back of every dog-eared copy, Cavafy’s sad weird bespectacled gaze, which said: the scholar melts in Alexandria. I tried to ignore it. Same with the white handprint, glowing out of every dark alley. Mornings and afternoons I spent in the archives; evenings I ate in the plaza cafes, watching the poor who lived in great crowds around the big public buildings, eking a living from those inside. Nights I stayed in my apartment, blank as a computer screen turned off.

One night I glanced at my kitchen calendar and understood that I had lived a week without knowing it. If the thalamus breaks down, we are incapable of laying down new memories. Fearfully I dressed and took a late trolley downtown. I stood on the curb of the broad sidewalk before the skyscraper containing Shrike’s apartment. Up there were his big rooms with all their windows, above the dome. I wanted to go into the foyer and ring his bell, I wanted him to be home, to ask me up. I went into the foyer and stood before the console. Alexander Selkirk, 8008. But he wouldn’t want me calling him from the building, would he? If he were in town, he would have someone else with him. He wouldn’t care what shape I was in; he wouldn’t want to know I needed him. The idea would make him very polite — as unlike Shrike as it was possible to be. I couldn’t stand the thought of it.

Under the curious eye of a policeman I left the building and walked around the corner into the nearest bathhouse. I paid my fee, shed my clothes and stuffed them into a locker, walked out into the tight network of red hallways, to one of the steam-rooms. Sat in the hot water and tried to calm myself and feel sensually. In the dim red light bodies moved languorously, skin wet and gleaming, ruddy and smooth. Muscle definition of male backs. Smooth curves of female legs. Breasts and cocks, wet hair, parted lips. I took one of the hoses snaking about the bottom of the bath, ran the cold stream over my body. Across the room two lithe bodies tangled, slid together in a slow rhythm. They sloshed off, seeking one of the niches in the hallway corners. Another pair coupled in the corner of the steaming pool; blind eyes stared through me. I ran the cold spurt from the hose over my cock, felt nothing. Leaving the bath I wandered the halls, looking into niches. In one a woman straddled a man, slid up and down on him; she looked up and saw me, smiled, leaned forward to cover him; I felt a faint stir in my pelvis.

In a distant niche beyond the last bath Emma sat cross-legged, alone. She gestured to me — she crooked a finger at me. I knelt beside her in the niche, heart pounding. Up close I saw she only looked like Emma, but I banished the thought and kissed her. Our hands explored each other, I slid into her and we copulated right there where passers-by would trip over my feet. When we were spent she rolled me to one side, got to her knees; she put a finger to my lips, kissed my forehead, left.

So I added a new component to my life. Every night I visited bathhouses. Sometimes I met my Emma-partner, and we made love with ever-increasing facility. Most nights our paths didn’t cross, and I merely soaked and watched, or found another partner. But what happened with her was different. We never said a word; that was what created the passion, we knew. Days now passed when I read Emma’s journal and thought only of her, and on some nights I walked from bathhouse to bathhouse, searching for her. Once in front of the Physical Annex we crossed paths; neither of us acknowledged the other by more than a meeting of the eye. But that night, in the bathhouse where we had met, we almost fused in our mute passion. We understood.

And I felt I was coming to life: when actually I was only coming to Alexandria.

We lead our lives as if perpetually waking from a long coma. What really happened to me in my first lives, to lead me to Alexandria? Some midnights on the streets, with all the poor, I would stop and ask myself that. How had I gotten to this strange state? What had my life been like? I knew I had been a child, a student, a driver for the Planetary Survey — but what had happened, what had it been like? “I only know it got me here, and here I am.”

During the long days in the Archives I chatted with the people who worked there, solicited their help and their opinions, and told them about my task and my theory concerning the Pluto megalith and the Unrest. I am a very social person, you see; I need to talk to people every day, perhaps more than I have ever gotten a chance to. One day over an after-lunch Turkish coffee I asked an archivist I had just met, Vadja Sandor, if he knew of any records for the mining subcommittee that had been labelled confidential, and hidden in the data banks by a secret code. “Especially records for the years between the Committee takeover and the Unrest.”

Sandor was a respected historian of that period; it was said he had sixty papers waiting for the approval of Publications Review. “I know of such records,” he said in his musical Russian. “But they’re still classified, and I don’t have access. My requests for the entry codes have been denied.”

I got out my notebook. “Tell me which ones they are. I’ll make my own requests.” And I sent off the forms that very day, wondering if I would have to ask Shrike for help again. If I could bring myself to it.

But I didn’t have to. Perhaps Shrike helped without being asked. The codes were sent to me with letters from the police, loyalty oaths, etc. I threw them out and hurried to the Archives to type in the codes.

One of the many confidential files for that period was the Subcommittee on Mining’s records on missing asteroid mining ships.

Five asteroid miners had been lost in the years 2150 to 2248. Wreckage of the first had been found, but not of the last four. And the last three had been commanded by Oleg Davydov, Olga Borg, and Eric Swann.

I called Sandor over to my console to take a look. He saw the list and nodded. “Yes, I’ve heard of those before. The Committee declassified a general report on mining history forty years ago that mentioned these.”

“You didn’t tell me about them?”

“But you knew they disappeared. No one denies it. Besides, I figured you had seen that stuff — it’s right there in the public record.”

“Damn it! I went back to the primary sources, and never looked in that report! You knew I was looking for something like this—”

He looked nonplussed, and I tried to calm down. I said, “The Committee must have been worried by these disappearances.”

“Probably. But the report I read claimed that such disappearances weren’t a complete mystery. If an explosion destroyed a miner and propelled a wreck out of the planetary plane, there would be little chance of finding it.”

“But three of the five disappearances came in the five years before the Unrest! And now we’ve found the New Houston material, and the Pluto monument.”

“Yes.” Sandor smiled. “You’ve got something here, you should write it up.”

“I need more.”

“Maybe so, but that shouldn’t keep you from writing this up and getting it out there. You might get some help.” So I wrote it up: a full article outlining the revisionist account of the Unrest, detailing what I knew of the MSA. I proposed that the Unrest included the mutiny and starship construction revealed in Emma’s journal, and that the starship crew had built the Pluto monument to mark its departure from the solar system. I sent the article to Marscience, and they published it. My explanation of the monument was now out there competing with the Atlantean theory, the alien theory, the natural coincidence theory, and all the rest. No one seemed very impressed. Letters were sent to Marscience complaining about the sparseness of my evidence compared to the largeness of my conclusions; and then there was silence. It was like dropping a rock through the ice of a canal. I began to understand that there was jealousy among my colleagues. They thought that I was being given preferential access to classified sites and records — and I couldn’t very well deny it — so naturally they disliked my work and snubbed it.