Read Online Icehenge by Kim Stanley Robinson - Free Book Online Page A

the point where the accumulations would imbalance the system enough to break it down. I got about seventy years.
    It was an impressive achievement, given what they were given, but the universe is a big place, and they needed to do better.
    One day while thinking about this problem of closure, a week or more after the fly-by, Andrew Duggins, Al Nordhoff, and Valenski stopped me in the hall. Duggins looked fat and unhealthy, as if the situation were taking its toll on him.
    â€œWe hear that you helped the mutineers evade a Committee police fleet that came near here,” he accused.
    â€œWho told you that?” I said.
    â€œIt’s the talk of the ship,” he said angrily.
    â€œAmong whom?” I asked.
    â€œThat doesn’t matter,” Valenski said in his clipped, accented English. “The question is, did Committee police pass us by while we three were incarcerated last Friday?”
    â€œYes, they did.”
    â€œAnd you were instrumental in making the plans to hide from them?”
    I considered it. Well, I had done it. And I wanted to be known for what I was. I stared Valenski in the eye. “You could say that, yes.” A strange feeling, to be in the open—
    â€œYou helped them escape capture!” Duggins burst out. “We could have been free by now!”
    â€œI doubt it,” I said. “These people would have resisted. The police would have blown us all to dust. I saved your lives, probably.”
    â€œThe point is,” said Valenski, “you aided the mutineers.”
    â€œYou’ve been helping them all along,” Duggins said. The animosity flowing from him was almost tangible, and I couldn’t understand it. “Your part in the attack on the radio room was a sham, wasn’t it? Designed to get you into our confidence. It was you who told them about our plans, and now you’re helping them.”
    I refrained from pointing out the lack of logic in his indictment. As I said, paranoia on spaceships is common. “What do you think, Al?” I said flippantly.
    â€œI think you’re a traitor,” quiet Al Nordhoff said, and I felt it.
    â€œWhen we return to Mars,” Valenski pronounced, “your behavior will have to be reported. And you will have no part in commanding the return flight. If you return.”
    â€œI’m going back to Mars,” I said firmly, still shaken by Al’s words.
    â€œAre you?” Duggins sneered. “Are you sure you’re going to be able to jump out of Oleg Davydov’s bed when the time comes?”
    â€œAndrew,” I heard Al protest; by that time I was taking an alternative route to the dining commons, walking fast, rip rip rip.
    â€œDamned treacherous woman, ” Duggins shouted after me. His two companions were remonstrating with him as I turned a corner and hurried out of earshot.
    Upset by this confrontation, aware of the pressures that were steadily mounting on me from all sides (when would I be compressed to a new substance, I wondered?), I wandered through the complex of lounges outside the dining area. The autumn colors were getting closer to winter: torpid browns, more silver and white. In the tapestry gallery, among the complicated wall hangings, there was a bulletin screen filled with messages and games and jokes. I stopped before it, and a sentence struck my eye. “Only under the stresses of total social emergencies do the effectively adequate alternative technical strategies synergetically emerge.” Jeez, I thought, what prose artist penned that? I looked down—the ascription was to one Buckminster Fuller. The quote continued: “Here we witness mind over matter and humanity’s escape from the limitations of his identity with some circumscribed geographical locality.” That was for sure.
    Part of the bulletin screen was reserved for suggestions for the name of the starship. Anyone could pick his color and typeface, and tap a name onto the