Against Infinity (10 page)

The party that set out from Sidon was larger than usual, louder, high-spirited with anticipation and smeerlop. During the long ride down to the Prometheus Plateau, Manuel felt a weight lift from him. The routine months of labor had been relentless and grinding. To him the dulling months had smudged the sureness of the things he had experienced out beyond the insulated human-scale pocket that bounded them on every side. Their superconductors made possible the thin wedges of vacuum that insulated them from the awful cold, and only plain hard work would make of Ganymede a human place, but under its unending hammer they lost the flavor of the open, endless plains that they so seldom crossed now. The early explorers had truly lived here, where treads now ground across the melt-sloped craters. The dome-hemmed farmers had a smaller compass. He was glad to stop being a farmer and take on some fraction of the explorer’s role again, tingling as he suited up in the morning for the biting chill only centimeters away.

On the morning they reached the Plateau, six strangers met them. They were from the territory near Nelson Settlement and Fujimura Settlement, a full thousand klicks away, and had been traveling for days. They had a job order from Bio, but what had drawn them was the story of Eagle, now well circulated, and the prospect of a real hunt. They were swarthy and dirty, not the best. Most did not have solid contracts with a Settlement at all. They were stragglers and outbackers, men who worked in their own patched-together domes in river valleys, or else outpost agents (old, most of them, hermits almost, with ancient grudges);—all came with their bore-guns and one even with a heavy e-beam emplacement, towed by a rundown old crawler. They were the kind of men who never fit well in the enclosed Settlements. They were there to settle a debt: “Wonder if we could run wi’ yer after it”—none even imagining that they should deal with the Aleph in the TwenCen way: one sunburst of fusion and be done with it. That was unthinkable. Old Earth and Luna had gone through hell to make that a horrifying idea, and so they came as always, yet hopeful, with the same ineffectual weapons their fathers had willed them, the beams and missiles the thing had withstood or brushed aside countless tunes before. What drew them was Eagle.

The six of them squatted in a cold slow-falling drizzle outside the camp, ready before the bigger party had even finished a breakfast of hot sour corn and lurkey steak. “Thought we might just come along; won’t even shoot if you say not to. Providing it doesn’t come after one of us, that is.”

Colonel López nodded. He could scarcely turn down a team that Bio had rubber-stamped. “You seen much of it?”

“It busted up my first ’ponics dome,” a wiry man said, thumbing his bore-gun.

Another said, “Killed my wife, th’ty years ago.”

The Colonel studied them and said clearly, “We’re here to clean out the muties.”

“You want to do that, send some of these boys you got,” the wiry one said.

“We’re not freezing our asses out here to get run over by the Aleph,” Major Sánchez put in. “You got that idea,
mierda,
you can go home.”

“Maybe you soft Settlement guys don’ see ’nuff a it,” said the man who had lost a wife. “It don’ come ’round the big places much any more. But us”—he gestured—“we’re contract farmers. It dunno we’re there, even.”

The Colonel squinted at them and said, “You’re here on a job order from Bio,
sí?
You see rockjaw-warps, scooters, you get as many as you can. No good stuff, though. You see something else, you shoot—
sí.
But that’s not the job.”

The men grumbled, but it didn’t matter anyway. Nobody got a shot at the Aleph that day, or even that week. It came and went on its own strange routes deep in the ancient moon, and the odds were against even seeing it in a whole season. Manuel found trenches and gorges that might have been marks of its passing, though with the endless melting and refreezing it was impossible to tell. He could not find anywhere the delta-print. But in the second week one of the animals heard something, it seemed, toward the south, and the main party headed that way. Eagle would not stay with the file of men and animals, and so Old Matt gave it the sign that it could stray off farther to the south and try to find something. Neither he nor Manuel had been able to tell Eagle much about the Aleph, though they had shown it pictures.

They were tramping stolidly down a ravine where a big gray slab of ice butted against an iron mountain, forming a kind of waffleboard of alternately stretched and compressed rock. There was no premonition, no tremor of intent. The ravine wall just buckled, showering the lead animals with shards of ice and lumps of snow, and there it was: lean this time, snakelike and undulant, streaming with soft amber light, alabaster chunks bobbing under its rough hide like bergs afloat in some interior fluid. It churned out of the massive ice cleft as if unaware of any resistance—much less of the men and animals that scattered before it, yelling and scrambling in all directions, none taking aim or even looking for a potential vulnerable spot to shoot. All except the boy. He was in the rear of the party when the ice wall ripped open and boulders crashed down. He stood very still. The debris rained around him or tumbled past, crunching over snowbanks or smacking near his boots, and he was the only constant point in all this motion. He studied it. The Aleph twisted its long form as it descended to the ravine floor, ponderous, sheets of ice creaking and splitting under its weight—
wiry this time,
the boy thought,
like it’s swimming—
and helical waves pulsed along it, watery amber light refracting from the peaks of the ripples as it crossed the ravine with a liquid writhing grace—
only it’s not touching the ground
—and with a huge unconcern slammed into an iron bluff, the blunt head (now without features) entering the rusty cliffs with a grinding noise, the whole side of the mountain seeming to flinch at the attack, shock waves fanning out from the contact. With indifference it nosed in, dust and pebbles spewing out from the hole it made, and then the boy saw the spots. They formed and re-formed along the snaky body, some bigger than a man, not mere floating blue spots but actual openings that shifted and deepened—
that hexagonal again, sure enough
—and gave forth a somber blue-black glow, like looking far down into an ice mountain and seeing through it the pale glow of the sun rising on the other side.

Eagle rushed by him. The Aleph was almost buried now in its oval tunnel, and Eagle rushed on, never breaking stride as it dodged among the fleeing men and rushing animals, not slowing as it passed Old Matt—who was bent over, squinting—and leaped ahead, so fast Manuel could hardly follow it. The nub end of the Aleph was bone-white, coiling with a kind of muscular surge, hanging a meter above the ground, as if held aloft by magnetic fields—and Eagle jumped on it. It clawed at the surface and managed to get a toehold on some minute break in the otherwise smooth-seeming skin. Its sharp hand-servos slashed at the glossy sheen, and Manuel thought he saw a red, searing mark spring from the hide, but before he could be sure one of the amber ripples coursed down to the tip of the body, reflected, and on its way back toward the head caught Eagle by a foot and deftly, effortlessly tumbled it off. Manuel rushed toward Eagle and while running saw that it had left a scar, a definite scar, turning deep red as he watched. Then the white tip of the thing slipped into the tunnel and was gone.

Eagle shook and pawed at the ice, a little dazed. Old Matt came trotting forward fast as he could and gradually other men came up, talking to each other and looking at the tunnel—some even bravely venturing into it, shining lamps upon the walls that were bored out with a screw-like pitch—and relating the way they’d seen it (no one had taken a fax picture) and what Eagle had done or tried to do. The boy did not hear them. He tasted the metallic liquid scent that swarmed up, prickling, into his nostrils—not fear this time, but something stronger, because it settled into him and would stay: a certainty, a sense of things coming, a foreknowledge of what could be—acrid and final and uncompromising in its ferocity, claiming him.

T
HE NEXT YEAR
stragglers came into the camp, some because they were out of work and wanted to get out into the territory, and others for bigger reasons. Four months earlier the Aleph had popped open a dome merely by brushing against it, killing more than a dozen, and there was talk of nuking it for the protection of everybody. The Luna science council overruled Hiruko, saying the Aleph was like an archeological site on Earth, to be kept for future generations who might be able to learn more from it. None of this mattered to the lean, silent men who pitched their own tiny domes near Colonel López’s shacks. They had a debt to get paid, and though they knew it was hopeless and had been hopeless for their own fathers, they kept on. This time there were two men from the McKenzie asteroids, fresh down into Hiruko—to learn ammonia farming, they said—but knowing about the Aleph and even of the mutie hunts that struck it now and then. One had heard in Hiruko of Colonel López and the great gunmetal-blue Eagle. He came without even a laser gun, and the insulated suit he wore had been in an expensive fitter’s stock three days before. The Sidon men ignored all these people as best they could.

The McKenzie men were even less welcome, because to the farmers they were the first of a new era.

“I say we not associate with them,” Petrovich said one evening over supper. He had as usual tried to talk the Colonel into letting them shoot crawlies, and just as usual the Colonel had slapped him down. Now he wanted to change the subject. “They come here, look around, take our ideas.”

Major Sánchez, always quick to contradict, said, “Treaty with Earth says we got to share knowledge.”

“Earth!” Petrovich snorted. “Always siding with the ’roids ’cause the rockhoppers, they have them by throat.”

The Colonel said soberly, “Earth has enough troubles without getting into our squabbles.”

The table fell silent. A new War of Redistribution had flared up in Asia again, and Sydney had gone in the first few hours. It was impossible to be indifferent to Earth’s old disease even this far away. Manuel could not understand the fatalism of the way everyone talked of the Wars, steadily raging between the historically poor and the relatively wealthy. He wondered how you could know you were in a period of history, all bracketed and figured out by the metasociologists as if you were dead already—and knowing it, still go on in the grip of history’s laws, futile and predetermined, following the same zero-sum game down to a remorseless end. Maybe being able to see Earth and all its blood-steeped riddles as a mere blue glimmer made it easy to misunderstand; or maybe he too was like a shuttle gliding down a smooth and utterly fixed orbit he could not see, and was just as laughable. He shrugged a boy’s shrug and listened to Petrovich again.

“—it’d tear their hearts out if they came over to where it sleeps and laid on it for warmth.” He was discussing Eagle, which always slept alone, often tunneled into a snowdrift. The animals invariably piled atop one another.

“It’s not an animal,” the Colonel observed.

“Not a man, either,” Petrovich said adamantly. “Hiruko, they brought that brain lobe up to max capacity, yes. Access all the neural connections left. But not a man, still.”

“Why not?” Old Matt said casually.

“More to a man than connections.”

“What is there?”

“Half a man isn’t a man.”

Major Sánchez slapped his palm on the hard-fiber table. “Ha! The neurophilosopher will now tell us how he knows a man.”

“Well, humans have bigger, bigger aims.”

“Like what?”

“Aleph! To animals, to Eagle, it’s just a big rockjaw. Something to hunt, if only they had guts.”

The Colonel said, “And to us?”

“Well…” Petrovich chewed his lip, cornered. “To us, it’s something to learn from.”

Major Sánchez said slyly, “You’ve never been so strong on learning before now, Petrovich.”

“I learned something this last year. Something you don’t know. Systemwide has a bounty on it.”

The Colonel said, “What? For killing it?”

Petrovich grinned, having deflected the talk where he wanted it. “No killing. Capture.”

Major Sánchez frowned, outflanked. “You sure?”

“Found it in the old records. Ought to scan those sometime yourself, my friend.” He added, deadpan, “Learn a little.”

“You have hard copy?” the Colonel asked.

Beaming, Petrovich produced a stack of slick sheets. “Reading for the long nighttime.”

It was there. The men passed the records around, calling out snatches of official directives nearly a century old, laughing at the stiff Earther terms and mush-mouthed way of talking. Few of them ever wrote anything down, so anything in hard form was fancy and fussy and unnecessary. Old Matt got hold of the original directive and showed it to Manuel. “Made up about the time the scientists discovered the stuff on the outer moons,” he pointed out.

“When they gave up here?”

“Approx’ly, yes. Guess they figured somebody might find a way to slow it down or stop it so they could study it safely. I seem to remember something like that—I mean, why people started hunting it down.”

“You were around then?”

Old Matt grinned; his metal cheek creased and rasped faintly. “Still up in the orbital labs, and then out at Titan—but around, sure.”

“Madre.”
To the boy, the old man and the Aleph both came out of a faceless time before anything he knew for certain, both from origins lost forever to him, and with the conserving blinkered concentration of humans, he was blissfully secure and at peace in his ignorance.

“See in this one?” Manuel pointed at an old fastframe picture. “The text says they had to go real fast to see the spots on the side.”

“Ummm.”

“
I
can see them easy.”

“Right.”

“It must be slowing down.”

“We saw it take its time, is all.”

“Maybe it’s getting weaker.”

Old Matt laughed. “Chew up a mountain in a minute, if you think that’s weak.”