Against Infinity (19 page)

“And therein lies the true comedy,” Gutiérrez went on, picking up the thread as if there had been no interruption. “You see, the Marxists always assumed the next step would complete the cycle of contradiction and change. It is so amusing! Because they could imagine no further change beyond socialism, they assumed—without thinking—that there would
be
none. They didn’t notice that the dialectical model predicts
no
Final Revolution. From a materialist perspective, there need never be a Final Revolution. There is instead an equilibrium between the two forms. So we get humankind—with refined, humanitarian socialism in the older, crowded core. And capitalism sprouting up like weeds at the edge.”

“So to fix that, punks hold me up in the street.”

“Not if you anticipate them!” Gutiérrez swept his cape in a half-arc, smiling and showing fine, even white teeth. “This I made, totally. The only market clothes I wear are undergarments.” He laughed merrily. “You must learn to swim with the currents, Manuel.”

Just then a gaunt man, dark-skinned and with angular cheekbones, passed on the walkway below. He was with two other similar men. They all wore flowing robes of somber green, of a kind Manuel had not seen before. The man glanced up at the veranda and their table and then waved, lifting his arm halfway. Then he looked away and the three kept walking.

“Did you see me brush him off?” Gutiérrez asked. “Did you
see
that?”

“No. Who did you brush off?”

“That one, that new Earthen Piet Arnold.” He laughed. “
Did
I snub him.”

“I saw him wave.”

“Yes! I glanced at him, so he would know I had seen him—”

“And then looked away. Without waving.”

“
Sí
. So you did catch it.”

“Why snub him?” Manuel started on the rum.

“My, you Settlement types do drink a lot.”

“Sometimes. When it’s rougher than usual. Why did you snub him?”

“He comes from a political faction—the Codonzenites—that opposes the existence of men on Ganymede at all.”

“How come?”

“The artifacts. They want to preserve any world where an artifact exists, to keep it intact and unblemished until the artifact is completely understood.”

“Huh. Sounds crazy. So you ignore him because you disagree with him?”

“Only if he is a figure of comparable stature.”

“Stature?”

“
Sí.
What is the point of snubbing someone you would not ordinarily acknowledge? The point goes unnoticed.”

“I see. You have to know them first.”

“Indeed. And by the way, you do not simply ignore them. You deliberately refuse to recognize them.”

“An important difference. So you know him.”

“I met him at a state reception yesterday. He is in charge of an Earther team. They are here to add to the staff studying that artifact, the one that you—”

“I see. An important man.”

Gutiérrez showed the brilliant white teeth again and drank. His mustache dripped with mulled wine. “I spend time only with important people.”

“Then why are you drinking with me?”

He blinked. “You are better known than you may think. After all, you are doing well in the petrofacs. Now that we have lost our edge over the ’roids on food, it is doubly important to mechanize, make our own lubricants. You chose a good field.”

“I didn’t choose it. I had to come here in a hurry. There was a job. I took it.”

“Well, for whatever reason. Of course, I might never have noticed you if it had not been for your earlier exploit, the—”

“It’s pleasant to be recognized by such a person as yourself, Señor Gutiérrez. I am scarcely even a member of the
lumpen intelligentsia,
after all. Ummm…” Manuel made a show of looking at his fingernail. “Getting late. I’d better go see if something’s wrong.”

“You always meet her here, don’t you? I see you on my way home.”

“I didn’t think you had a home. People in your section, they voted to make their apartments—”

“Living units.”

“Okay, living units—make them communal. So you don’t have a home. You shift around every day.”

Manuel had guessed right. He had gotten the conversation away from the Aleph without being nasty—it had taken him a long time to learn how to do that, in the first years—and then away from whom he was meeting, and now onto something Gutiérrez liked to talk about. If he let the man run on for a few minutes Gutiérrez would forget the earlier subjects and then Manuel could look at his watch again and leave without any trouble.

“I stick to the same half-dozen living units, for convenience—the ones near the locker containing my clothes and so on. Mind, I’m not speaking against the idea. It’s a wonderful way to break down the territorial instincts. In time, those instincts will be transferred from individual property to the Hiruko community as a whole. Just as they’ve done Earthside. We’re even making progress in getting families to participate.”

“Why bother them?”

“Because we’ve got to start developing ways of bringing up children that don’t depend on the family. Because the family in modern times is rooted in romantic love.”

“So?” Another few minutes and he could go. The slanting light among the jacaranda now dimmed into a ruddy glow like smoldering embers as the eclipse came on. He had been watching the subtle changes, enjoying them despite the talk.

“It is now easy to see, in historical perspective, that the stress on romantic love came about to make a refuge for the psyche—a shelter from the strains of competition under capitalism. And the capitalists knew this—if not consciously, at least by shrewd guess. To take attention from the inequities of capitalism, what could be better than to focus everyone on internal problems?—defining yourself by your relationship to
one
other person. Wrapped up in ‘love,’ you forgot about your place in the pyramid of capital. And if romantic love dims, there is always the torrent of entertainments—gaudy distractions, another hallmark of the past. But take away the competition, introduce socialism—and suddenly”—he spread his hands, grinning, confident—“you find you see women as they are. As economic and political entities, without a false aura.”

A soft but determined voice said, “Falseness is in the eye of the beholder.”

Gutiérrez jumped, startled. Belinda stood beside him, her full mouth cocked in a wry grin.

“Please do not mistake me. I did not mean…”

Belinda smiled, forgiving and dismissing the man in one glance, her black hair tumbling across her shoulders. She plainly did not listen to the rest of Gutiérrez’s explanation, but instead walked around the table and put a hand on Manuel’s shoulder. He saw a small line of concern between her eyes, but ignored it. He was full of relief that she was here and they could leave. He began a sentence that would allow them to exit, but she cut him off:

“I am late because there was a call for you. To me. From your mother.”

“What? I told you, I don’t want to hear anything—”

“She knows that. I spoke to her, I heard things in her voice—”

“I don’t want to discuss it here.” He got up, knocking over the chair.
She’s like the others,
he thought.
Talking, babbling of such things, in front of anybody, anywhere
—

“No! Listen! It was not like the other calls she made. Those stopped years ago. She—”

His face was hot with rage. “No!” He started to walk away.

“Manuel! She called me because she knew you would hang up. She had to get word to you that—your father, he is dead.”

M
ANUEL SURVEYED THE
train station. He felt an echo of half-forgotten emotions as he watched the crowd waiting for the sleek liners, remembering the only other time he had been here; coming into Hiruko six years ago, with only a pack on his back, silent and intense, smoldering with anger and defiance. Then, the laser-polished stone columns had seemed to taper away into infinity, far higher than any building he had ever seen, even taller than an agro dome. Dust motes of considerable size had floated high up among the glassy struts, catching the amber beams of light that refracted through the serene pillars. Thick air had gathered in his chest like fine warm fleece, the first tangible sign of Hiruko’s opulence. The ladies nimbly climbing stairs in their lacy fashions, the men clean-shaven and slim—all had seemed exotic, compared with the heavy, parka-clothed figures he was so used to at Sidon. Here no one carried a few extra kilos of fat at the waist or in the shoulders, as protection against cold or exhaustion. Here a coat or vest was fashioned for the eye, not the metabolism.

He had left the station reluctantly, still awed by its majesty. The crowds bore him off, and he had spent hours in the endlessly intertangling passageways and corridors, ashamed to knock on a door and ask directions. The impossibly broad boulevards and avenues he at first mistook for temporarily empty assembly areas, since they wasted so much space. At each major intersection, elegant, periodically spaced crystalline rhomboids towered over the passing throng; it had taken him another hour to realize that these were the computer interfaces he sought. Their grandeur seemed extravagant, and he had hesitated to ask for a map display. Only after he had found the Labor Coordinator and made his availability known had he felt relaxed enough to stop and timidly order a drink and then a bowl of soup at one of the sidewalk cafés. Then, finished, he had tried to pay, and been the butt of laughter. He still felt a twinge of the helpless young man’s tongue-tied rage. It all seemed so long ago.

“I still believe you should have said something more to your mother,” Belinda murmured, shutting off his memories.

“I told her I was coming back to Sidon. That’s what she asked for, isn’t it?”

“She seemed so shaken.”

“It wasn’t a pretty thing.”

“No. Did you
have
to call up those coroner’s pictures?”

He grimaced. “
Sí
, I did. I had to know.”

“Know that he died in pain? An icequake knocking him down in front of that laser beam? See him torn open like that?”

“It’s something a son has to do.”

“A son who…” and she bit off the words. He knew full well what she had nearly said:
A son who had not spoken to his father for six years? A son who refused all their calls, their letters? Who brushed aside the friends from Sidon who casually dropped by and tried to bring the subject up?

“Right All that is finished now. There was a thing between us. Now it’s gone. When he is dead you treat him as the father who brought you into the world. You don’t let the last trouble count for everything.”

She said softly, “I see.”

A train shrieked into the station, rattling the tracks. Electromagnetic propulsors caught it, sucked away its momentum, and stored the power. Porters grunted, levering up the ice-breaking frames around each exit, shattering the shiny cloak, releasing the passengers. The rest of the sheath would melt from the train before departure time.

“You forgive him, then?”

He stared at her with flat incomprehension. She was the only person he had ever talked with about it. That was part of what bound him to her, he knew. To find she still understood so little…

“There was nothing to forgive. I didn’t wrong him, he didn’t wrong me.”

She frowned. Beneath the filtered, watery light her dusky skin still held a magic quality for him. He put both hands to her face and then around, burying his fingers in her glossy black hair. Her full mouth, never far from a smile, registered uncertainty.

He said, “We disagreed. He…couldn’t see it any differently. I couldn’t either. So we each knew it was better if we kept our distance.”
Strange,
he thought,
to be able to put it so coolly now. The Manuel who came into this station, big-eyed and angry, would never have said it like that.

“I…are you sure you don’t want me to go?”

“No. My mother… One thing at a time.”

“I’ll have to, someday.”

“This first. When I’ve gotten things settled…”

“All right. Goodbye.”

She kissed him fervently and then let him go, stepped back, gave him up. He grinned at her, feeling a return of the old awkward boyishness, an embarrassment at private things made public. Then the porters barked the departure call and he swung aboard. The slender passenger car was nearly filled. He stowed his pack and found a seat and waved to Belinda, who stood looking oddly alone and vulnerable on the platform. Only then did he notice that across from him sat the three Earthers he had seen from the veranda yesterday.

They went out from Hiruko Station with a rapid surge, and then a lethargic clashing of slack couplings traveling backward among the cars. The pulsers thumped, boosting them up with deep, long thrusts. Loading platforms streamed by; open yards; mills half completed; stacks of nickel cubes with McKenzie emblems stamped in their gray faces; immense pulse-forming circuits laid out for the new flinger that would hurl cargo directly into orbit; parabolic antenna fields; a raw slash of strip-mined rock. The jumbled, sprawling petro factory rose, loomed and dwindled; Manuel glimpsed the neon yellow of his prefractory tower, responsible for high-temperature bearing lubricants, made directly from Ganymede’s raw ices. Then they brushed aside the last confused edge of Hiruko and ahead the track made a wide swooping curve. Manuel watched the train’s head vanish into the expanses, dragging its length like a picture he remembered of a snake—a creature he had never seen, not even in the Hiruko Zoo, and thought of as mythical, like a unicorn—wriggling smoothly into the distance.

Their speed built with a clattering energy as they shot down from Hiruko Mountain and across a barren plain where the robot orbiters were parked at the end of long purple skid lines. They climbed now amid rumpled hills, and startled a flock of gippers—the new bioforms Central had designed to help keep down the bewildering profusion of mutated rockjaws. The gippers were nuzzling at the crossties of the rails, sniffing and pawing, and the train came up on them nearly soundlessly in the thin air. It turned the slow ones to pasty spots on the nearby boulders where they landed, and sent the rest in cawing frenzy down the gullies, legs kicking uselessly in their panic. Manuel wondered why Central always produced such stupid and repellant animals, and decided it was because they regarded these hapless things as throwaways, soon to be replaced by other animated chemical processors.