Against Infinity (3 page)

“The lead one’s closer.”

“Sure. And when they see it fall they’ll scatter. Always work from their rear.”

Manuel brought the little popper up slowly, so as not to startle them. He aimed, squinted, and got the form in the sights as it ducked and bobbed, snatching at each morsel of excretion. It was disgusting to watch, the boy thought, but when you thought about it everything alive was eating the shit of something else, in the long run.

He fired. The warpscooter crumpled. He shifted to the next and saw it disintegrate as Old Matt got it. Then the group must have heard or felt something because they dodged this way and that, skipping along on their fast little legs, scrambling into the blue shadows. Manuel led one of them and fired three times, kicking up a quick jet of vapor from the ice each time where he missed. He caught the thing just as it got into the shadow of a boulder. The bolt went clean through its brown armor.
Good,
he thought. He swung the gun back and there was nothing left to shoot at. Old Matt had hit the rest.

He felt proud on the long march back to the camp. They got another flock in late afternoon, surprising muties in a gully, but then the mutants ran and got in among the regular scooters and Old Matt pushed the boy’s popper aside before he could shoot any more.

“Bio’s strict about killing the reg’lars.”

“Okay.” Manuel walked on, cradling the gun, watching the dumb forms scuttle for cover.

“Safety.”

Manuel replied, “I might get a squint at one if it breaks cover.”

“It’s then, when you’re trying for the one extra, that bellies get sliced and feet blowed off.”

Meekly he powered down and slipped on the safety, deliberately looking away from the jittering, mindless flock still seeking shadow. He sloughed on, a half step behind the man, through the glinting Ganymede morning, homing on the endlessly beeping directional for the camp.

It was more than a week before he and Old Matt heard the animals. They were out on their own, running flocks of scooters when they could find them, the man teaching Manuel how to move and where the crusted-over deadfalls were that had been hollowed out years before by the fusion caterpillars and how a man could fall through the thin ice and break a leg even in the fractional gravity of this moon. A flock of scooters had sprung up in front of them and the boy had got two of the warped ones—discolored things, ugly, that lurched away and scrambled over the others to get away—before the mutations got in amongst the rest.

“Bad sign. They already know enough to do that.”

“Why doesn’t Bio program the reg’lars to turn on the muties?”

“Don’t want to give them highly developed survival traits. Be just that much harder to kill them off when we introduce the good lifeforms, the ones we want to make the stable ecology.”

“Ah, well,” Manuel said, full of himself and with an elaborate casualness, “that just makes for more huntin’ and—”

“Listen.”

Over their short-range came a. sputtering, a low murmur, almost blending with the static of Jupiter’s auroral belts. Yet Manuel caught the fervid yips and cries of the pack, a chorus blurred but with a high, running keening to it, each voice a distinct animal but each responding with its own fevered energy. He did not need to ask what drew cries from them. He reached down and thumbed on his gun, though he knew it was useless and a mere gesture. But it was important to make the gesture, just as it was to wait breathless and see in his mind’s eye what the yelps and grunts and chattering pursued: the thing that moved smokelike through the icefields, running with blind momentum, the shifting alabaster shape. Old Matt had taught him to tilt his gun high and wait, motionless, watching by using his peripheral vision, not moving his head. He stood and tried to sense an expectant tremor, a rumble, some twinkling of the light that would tell him, warn him. The animals were louder now, but not stronger—their cries had risen too high and had taken on a tone of confusion and submission to the inevitable, not tired yet but flagging in some way the boy could not name but felt.

He touched his helmet to the man’s and whispered, not awakening the suit radio, “It’s coming?”

The blended murmur of the cries peaked without ever resolving into a clear voice, and the sound dissolved as Manuel listened. Old Matt did not answer. He gradually turned his head so that Matt could see his face and he shook his head, no, with a look of quiet watchfulness. The animals were now a dull drone, defeated, fading. Old Matt smiled.

“It never noticed them. It didn’t even speed up this time.”

“It’s here, though! First sighting in—how long?—nearly a year.”

“First one we know of. Lots times nobody says anything.”

“It’s looking for something?”

“Could be. Some mineral it needs to supply itself, regenerate itself, I don’t know. Doesn’t seem to need energy. Unless it’s got a fusion burner inside and filters isotopes out of the ice.”

“Yeah, and if it needs something around here—”

“It doesn’t need anything that bad.” He surveyed the rough valley before them, inert and plain, and looked at Manuel. His worn ortho’d face held large, luminous eyes that moved liquidly. The replacement jaw and cheek were shiny even in the dim sunlight, and his original skin was wrinkled like an old piece of crumpled paper. It was the eyes that seemed most alive in him, least weathered by the long decades that face had endured, the century mark it had passed almost without noticing, the injuries and radiation and the sweat and ache of toil it had taken and survived.

“Truth is, it doesn’t need anything. It’s trapped here, far as I can tell. No boosters to take it off surface. Can’t get into orbit. Must have been hurt a long time ago and now it has to move through the waters under us and across the ice like a man pacing a cell will do, wearing a path in the stone of the floor but not stopping. I’ll bet it looks up at the stars and thinks and wants to go up there. But it can’t. It’s not complete, or else it would. So it wanders. Not because there’s anything it needs but because it wants to have a look. See who’s new. See what kind of men there are out here this year and what they can do and if there’s a servo’d animal or a machine we can put up against it this year that is any better than all the ones it outran or smashed or rolled over year after year before. It’s curious maybe, or just keeping track.” He shrugged. “But those are ways of talking about it that make sense to us, and one thing I’m sure of: it doesn’t make sense. And it won’t, ever.” The animals were gone now and there was nothing on short-range radio. “They’ll run on after it until it sees what they’re worth. Then it’ll burrow down, drive straight down seventy klicks or more if it wants to, directly into the slush and water that this ice is just the scum of—and that’s it. Gone. Until it wants to come back.”

When they reached the camp the animals were already there, huddled together as if to keep warm, bunched up against the wall of the shack. They had all come in an hour before, all except for Short Stuff. A gray rain came down and small puffball clouds swept overhead, blown from the warmer regions to the south where vast volumes of methane and ammonia were vaporizing beneath fusion caterpillars. Old Matt squatted beside the mound of animals and touched the yellow ceramic flank of one. They all stirred, scraping against each other, eyes rolling and flecked with blue, and a muttering came from them, growls and whimpers and a low persistent chippering that the boy could not place as coming from any particular animal. They trembled all the same way: Earthlife returned from meeting something it had not known. Two hours after supper, after the whiskey ration was already gone, Short Stuff came scuffling up to the lock entrance and scraped at it. It chattered weakly, forming words in no particular order, thick-tongued and droning:
hurt…fast big…fire…break…hurt
… Manuel and Petrovich and Old Matt led it into the service shack and stripped the crushed manifold in its left side where something had brushed by—just a glancing and casual blow, not intended to kill or else Short Stuff would not be here.

“Look, see. It tore the flesh,” Petrovich said. Blood oozed from beneath the crumpled steel.

“No bones broken,” Old Matt said, feeling along the animal’s ribs. The matted hair reeked with fear and sweat. Manuel saw that Short Stuff was a small ape, harnessed well into the transducers and servos that engulfed the lean form.

“Lucky to live,” Petrovich remarked as he applied locals and patched up the raked flesh, stemming the seeping, wiping away the cakes of dried blood.

Old Matt murmured, “It just got too close.”

Petrovich said, “I saw a fastfilm, once. It picked up animals, smashed them down. It will kill.”

“Not this time. Not without reason.”

The chimp kicked and howled softly, probably from pain, but perhaps also from the memory of running hard and fast at something it could not hope to catch.

Old Matt patted Short Stuff fondly. “He’s seen it before. Knew it. Just like a chimp, smarter than most of the rest and thinking himself to be more like a man. When he saw it he didn’t wait, or else he’d never got that close. He had to have thought about it a lot and known that one time or another he would have to run toward it and not away like the rest. To be like a man. Even though it was pointless and he would be paying a price.” He rubbed and soothed the animal, talking to it softly. The boy helped him fashion a replacement of curved sheet steel and insulation for the rib section.

It was dark when they left the service shack. Jupiter was eclipsing the sun. The small bright orange ball slipped behind the cloud tops of ammonia cirrus and a rosy halo slowly crept around the squat, watermelon-banded planet. Near the poles the boy could see a violet auroral glow, hanging curtains of gauzy light where atoms were excited by downrushing streams of energetic electrons. Across the slowly churning face of the dark world, lightning forked yellow and amber, strokes thousands of kilometers long, bridging clouds of ammonia and water far larger than Ganymede itself. The men stopped and peered upward at the passing of noon in the seven-day-long alternation of sun and shadow that Ganymede kept. The halo shifted slowly, rimming the huge world in diffused, ethereal amber and pink. The view was better here than among the lights of the Settlement and the men paused, watching the slow certain sway of worlds as gravity gently tugged each on its smooth, unhurried path. Then the glow broke free of the planet’s waist and became the fierce, burning dot of their sun, bringing a return of noon. They bent their heads back down then and began to think of other things, of rest before the hunting would begin again tomorrow, and scuffed their boots free of ice and dirt before going inside to the rank smell and buzzing talk and pungent cycled air of men.

T
HE BOY DID
not see Old Matt leave the next morning, early, while the cooking was still going on and Manuel was cutting onions for the broth.

“Madre.
That one goes off, says no word,” Colonel López said. His stern jaw clenched. “Thinks he is too old for rules.”

Petrovich said, “Get himself dead alone. He falls into a gully, no one to seal his suit if it holes.”

They hailed Old Matt on directional, but he would not answer. He was making slow but steady progress toward the west, into the rock hills called Halberstam’s.

“I could catch up to him,” Manuel pointed out, though he suspected that Old Matt could slip away from him in the hills easily enough.

Colonel López made a rough sound of exasperation. “Then we have two missing. No. He has done this before, I remember, on other hunting teams.”

“He may lose function in that arm of his,” Petrovich said. “Or the face. Could die before we get him back here for the medical.”

“That is his choice,” the Colonel said. He shrugged.

Later in the day the Colonel said to him, “You miss not going out with Old Matt, don’t you?”

“Sí.”

“You couldn’t show better taste, son. He’s the original.”

“Then why don’t you go after him?”

“I’ll do just about anything to keep a man or woman alive out here. Only I won’t smother them.”

Manuel said nothing. He had seen the hard edge in his father before, but this was the first time he understood it.

Manuel went out with the other teams for the next three days, each morning arising and hoping to find that the old man had returned in the night. Each day the pulsing orange dot of Old Matt’s indicator showed him moving in a sweeping pattern of arcs, pausing often, probably to rest. Manuel teamed with Petrovich and then his father and showed the Colonel how he could shoot. They got some variant scooters and on the second day found a new variety of rockeater, one that had taken to drinking from the ammonia streams and not digesting the more difficult stones as it should. The Colonel checked with Bio and they killed the thing. The animals went with the Colonel, so there was a lot of activity that Manuel was not used to on the hunt. The animals would scamper up the ridges and drive down scooters of all kinds, and the men would try to shoot the warped ones before they got away. The third day they nabbed a big bunch of them in a dead-end valley and shot twenty-two mutated forms and three more of the warped rockeaters. Manuel helped gut them for Bio samples. He had gotten five of them himself, and missed only twice. He felt high-spirited on the hike back.

He came clumping into the cabin, hungry, and flopped down on his bunk before he saw that Old Matt was squatting in a corner, passive and remote and spooning soup into his half-metal mouth, grave and thoughtful. Manuel talked to him, asked questions, but the old man answered only in short sentences, or not at all. The men did not bother with him. After supper Manuel was invited into a card game and forgot to talk to Old Matt again, and then got tired and went to his bunk.

The next morning was dim. Ganymede’s night was dominated by Jupiter, reflecting sunlight so that shadows were blurred and uncertain. The moon’s shadow crawled across the orange and brown bands. Without any discussion Old Matt took him out again. The old man got a two-seater cycle rider and they went sputtering and muttering their way across glassy-rimmed craters and into the Halberstam hills. Manuel had never seen them before. They were new, thrust up by ice tectonics, the great plates shifting and butting against each other like living gravid glaciers driven by the churn of currents deep within the moon. In places crags and jagged peaks of ice split the rock, and then scarcely a kilometer away the battle turned and iron-gray shoulders of an ancient meteorite ruptured a slick sheet of ammonia ice, ripping through to build new heights. There had been no time here yet for the sway of the seasons to freeze and unfreeze liquids in the cracks and cleave rock from rock, popping slabs of it free and then grinding it, pulverizing it through the centuries, down into dust.