Against Infinity (4 page)

Here and there the heat released by the clash had melted ice and now thin rivers carved snaky lines in the rising valley floors. In time there would be cañons and boulders and grit beneath the boots of men. They left the cycle and went on foot into a narrow, snow-choked ravine where icicles dripped and ammonia fog rose in wreaths about them. In the heavy gloom of night, Jupiter-light struck dull amber reflections from snowdrifts. Old Matt stopped, peered ahead. Then he gestured silently, and the boy saw a channel dug through the ten-meter-deep snow, big as a crawler and bottoming out in black-streaked gray rock, scraped and ravaged and bearing on its scoured face the large delta-shaped print. No ruts led away from the deep channel, and the boy could not see how the thing had come and gone and left no trace beyond this. The delta lay in the rock, mute, and he felt a trace of what he had heard in the murmur and cries of the animals as they met it, some of them too for the first time. He looked around the cramped white ravine and felt trapped. He turned uneasily, fighting the sudden leap of fear that there was something, some movement, just behind his back, where he could not see it in time.

“You found this?” he said unnecessarily, just to be saying something and not have the silence.

“No. I saw some ruts over in the next valley. Looked like they came this way. I was taking you there.”

Manuel nodded. He felt an anticipation and also a thick dread, a scent in his nostrils like hot copper in the metal-working shops. The smell swarmed up through him and brought a sensation in his stomach and bowels, a tightening, as he saw for the first time the sign that this was a mortal thing, living and actual, not a mere form that lumbered through his dreams and moved in the stories the men told when they were half-drunk and could not be trusted to get it right—not a fragment of his world but bigger than it.

“You think it’s still here?”

“Might. The scientists said it stays in a place for a while—searching, they think. Dunno. Maybe it comes to have a look at us, then it goes on.”

“Tomorrow, we can all come. Maybe corner it.”

He laughed. “Corner it? Might’s well trap a man in a box of fog.”

“We can
try
.”

“Sure. We can try.”

That night Petrovich fell into a political argument with Major Sánchez and the two men got loud, the whiskey doing most of the talking. The news had come through that Asteroid Conglomerate United wanted to push development of a petroleum-synthesizing capability on Ganymede, and the moon as a whole had to vote on the measure.

Major Sánchez said it was trouble enough to grow the food for the goddamn ’roids and what did Ganymede get out of the trade anyway except doodads nobody wanted except the townies, and they weren’t the ones who’d have to bust their butts building a goddamn petro plant.

Petrovich thought that was stupid and not forward-looking, or did the Major want to forever be buying petro from Luna or even, God-help-us, from Earth itself, paying percentage on percentage for every middleman between here and Brazil?

What-the-hell, Major Sánchez bellowed, there wasn’t a liter of petro in the Settlement that hadn’t been squeezed out of seeds or stems, it was sure enough all right for their purposes, and if the ’roids wanted higher-quality stuff they could buy it What’d they need it for anyway, when they used servo’d animals for their work mostly, and animals didn’t need lubricants like machines anyway—that was the reason for developing good servo animals in the first place, to save on lubricants out here, as any damn fool knew if he studied any history instead of pigging it up with the smeerlop every night to scramble his brains every minute he was off work—right?

Petrovich opened his mouth to shout back, but his eyes were glazed and he had trouble thinking as fast as Sánchez because of the smeerlop, and at that moment Colonel López stepped in and broke it up, telling them both to get to bed.

Petrovich sat on his bunk and shook his head for a while, muttering, knowing he should sleep but not wanting to seem to be following the orders from the Colonel, and then he saw Manuel and asked in a slurred, gravel voice, “You thinking you hit it tomorrow.” When the boy did not answer Petrovich prompted him with “Eh?”

“No point.”

“Sure is point. Learn to shoot. Maybe get lucky, hurt it.”

“Don’t know what to aim at.”

“Nobody does. It is round, like an egg. Nothing to fix eye on.”

“No, it isn’t!” Major Sánchez sprang up.
“Mierda!
It is blocks, three blocks stuck together. The legs they come down from the corners, each block with four—no, not at the middle, so there are eight legs.”

“Is round,” Petrovich said. “I saw it three, four times. Round and rolling.”

“There are pictures! We get back to Sidon, I show you fastframe; they—”

“It crawls, blind man. And on its belly, not on legs,” a voice drawled from the bunks far back. “I seen it drag itself up a sheer cliff using grapplers, just five years back.”

The Colonel stood up and waved the voice into silence. “There are many forms. You forget that the cameras showed different results from time to time.”

“Each time
I
see it,” Petrovich grumbled, “is the same.”

Major Sánchez said slyly, “Perhaps the good machine is simply trying to make things simple for you, my friend.”

Petrovich grunted in dismissal and rolled onto his bunk. Low talk continued among the bare pipe frames of the bunks, muted now, desultory, amid the stale, sour fumes left from supper. Old Matt had come into this part of the rambling shack to get closer to the burbling heaters, and he sat down beside Manuel. “They argue over nothing.”

“Seems to me it’s important to know what to look for,” Manuel said.

“It changes. Not to confuse us. For itself.”

“Should be some vulnerable spot, you’d think.”

Old Matt shrugged, his face wrinkling into a fine-threaded map as he chewed on a hemp slug. “There are holes sometimes. A mouth or an ass or nothing we have a name for. It doesn’t matter.”

“There’s got to be something we can do. Those scientists—”

“They are hunters of a different kind. They never knew.”

“With e-beams and all those traps—I looked at some of them when I was in Loki Patera—they sure gave it a try.”

“They never hemmed it in enough. Tomorrow, if it comes up on us sudden and we box it in—well, sometimes in the past it’s not taken the time to burrow down through the ice and get away. Don’t know why. So it might go right through us, fast as a bat out of hell. That’s when you got to watch.”

“What… You mean me in particular?”

“Right.”

“It would pick me out?”

“Might.”

“You mean, I never been here before, an’ it knows me anyway?”

“I don’t know. But there’ve been times before, people who were new, and it… Look, maybe it remembers everything, never forgets a man or a crawler or an animal or anything. So somebody new comes along, it gets interested.”

“Why?”

“It’s been here a long time. Millions of years, they say from dating the stuff on the outer moons. Maybe it’s bored.”

It seemed to the boy that boredom or any other simple pathetic human emotion was not the way to think about the huge shape, and that its indifference to them meant it shared none of their values or illusions. Old Matt would say no more about it. He just shook his head and told Manuel to get into his bunk early; to rest; and the next day would be soon enough to see.

T
HE LAND WAS
vast and empty beneath the storm that had moved in from the south again, bringing a slow drizzle of methane-cloaked and ammonia-steeped droplets, all swirling in the still-thin mongrel chemlab gas that was the new air. Hovering just above the ice point, the sluggish vapor rolled in—ruddy banks of fog that clung to the sheets of ice as if the wispy stuff longed to return to the original and stable existence it had known for billions of years, to sink down and freeze and rest, and not be tortured by the harsh warmth that men had brought to boil the elements into a blanket of gas, to cloak the old dead world now resurrected. There were thirty-nine men and women on the hunt that day, three having already gone back to Sidon to help with some hydro processing. (Or so they said. Petrovich and some others muttered over the steaming plates of breakfast that the three had been jumpy when they heard about the Aleph, and had discovered the rush job to be done at Sidon awful fast when they’d called home the night before. The Colonel told them to shut up talking about men behind their backs, and sent the two loudest out to flame the night’s ice off the crawler treads, a job nobody liked.)

The thirty-nine included some olders, though none who dated as far back as Old Matt, and some men out for a holiday who had never really hunted a lot and knew little more than the boy even now. Still, as they dismounted from the carriers at the foothills of the Halberstams, there was less of the hooting and high spirits and aimless moving about, less arguing over who would carry what and what routes to take into the craggy wastes that loomed above them all. Storm clouds swept the harsh faces of rock and stole warmth from their suits, making a temperature differential across a suit big enough to stress the multiple-ply insulators, so that their seams popped and creaked. They marched. The crawlers and walkers fell behind, waiting at the edge of the glassy, pitted plain as the men climbed up the rugged hills and split into parties that fanned through the skinny valleys and arroyos. Manuel went with Old Matt, the Colonel and nine others, the men tramping stolidly up the veiled valleys, watching for ruts in the snow or scrapings on the outcroppings of ice. They had six animals with them, frisking at the head and tail of the column, pouring forth more energy than the men in their spirited dashes and leaps and continual tangled games of chase and tag. Old Matt struggled to keep up. He puffed along, head up to the sky, face contracted with effort, listening to the light babble of the animals over short-range and the occasional muffled words of the men, and yet the boy could see that Old Matt was not paying attention to the words and yelps but instead was concentrating on something else, turning his head this way and that so that its steel and copper caught the dulled light. Above, stars were hazy jewels lingering above thin cirrus.

Colonel López tracked each party on his faceplate display, ordering them to drop a man into each promising branch valley as they came to it. The hail stopped and then the pall of rain fell below them. The teams made good time despite the deepening blue-green snow as they worked their way higher. In the light gravity they loped easily, hitting the ground in three-second-long strides, their boots clutching the ice or snow as they landed to ensure a purchase. Where an iceslide or crevasse blocked them and they could not leap it by themselves, they powered up their lower servos and, with some effort, made the jump with augmented muscles. The boy panted at the hard places and could not hear over short-range whether the others did too, but he was determined that they would not have to slow for him. The Colonel set the pace and kept a watchful eye on Old Matt, and the boy saw that his father was restraining the younger men so that they would not get straggled out and the old man would not push himself to keep up. His father was like that, gruff and hard and yet forgiving when you were up against your limits.

They surprised some scooters, slurping away with idiot persistence at the ammonia streams. The men picked off the deformed ones, everybody firing fast before they were all gone. There was not much life this high, and pretty soon they saw nothing but rockjaws munching stoically at pebbles and, higher still, crawlies searching out methane-rich ponds, their carcasses puffy and distended with the storage sacs where they would process the carbon-rich residues into better compounds when they hibernated.

The men dropped off singly at each branching of the valley, taking an animal with them, until there were four left. The Colonel waved Manuel forward as they came to a place where the valley wall split as though a huge hand had pried it apart with a stone wedge. Up that divide a shallow ravine worked back among some jagged peaks.

“Satellite time-step map shows that one is pretty clear of slide debris now,” the Colonel said. “Lot of rain here last few weeks. Washing it away.”

Old Matt caught up to them. “Where’s the pressure ridge around here?”

Colonel López glanced to his left, where his helmet flashed the needed plot in contour lines of green and crimson. “Runs down from that crag.”

“Think there’ll be any slippage?” the old man asked.

“Fracture fault lines fan out to the north. Don’t look like any on this side.”

“Satellites can’t see everything.”

“Sí.
You go with Manuel, eh? Up that cañon. Keep him from blowing his leg off and bringing down a slide on himself.”

“Sure.”

The two took Slicky with them and headed up the ravine. A small stream tinkled and chimed, echoing from the ice-crusted walls. Rosy ammonia vapor steamed from it. The boy sloughed along, thinking of the crushed steel plate of Short Stuff and of the high keening cries the animals had made before. Melting snow and ice fed the stream and squished under his boots. The man spoke to Slicky and let it romp a bit and then spoke again, and it stopped moving and quivering so much, and fell into step at their heels, the yellow ceramic sliding and clicking now and then as it leaped over a streamlet but otherwise without noise, patient and eager both. Blocks of shagged-off rock had tumbled into the ravine, and now, as they went on, slabs of ice covered the floor, shortening the ravine until it was a trough. Old Matt kept studying the steep snowdrifts and rock walls. He paused, puffing, and said, “Quiet from now on.”

“You think…?”

“There will be nothing, not even rockjaws, this high. Anything that moves means something, here.”

Manuel nodded. He stamped his feet to warm them. Old Matt popped a vent in his own suit and said, “Take care of this now.”

Urine jetted out and spattered on rock. Manuel did the same. He thought it was to save distraction later, but in the stillness of the cañon the crackling and sputtering of the urine as it froze boomed in his ears, and he saw it was to avoid noise at the wrong time.