Against Infinity (6 page)

He came in late that day. His father studied him as he clumped in from the lock, tired and chilled, stamping off the ice from his boots. The shack insulation was poor and the temperature gradient was steep; standing up, you could wipe sweat from your face while your feet went numb. Colonel López got his son a plate of the thick turkey stew with chunks of baked corn in it. Manuel went through the first plate without talking much, just eating with that intensity the young have when the body asserts its demands. He finished and clumped stolidly into the steamy kitchen and came back with a second. He was a few mouthfuls
in,
going slower now, hunkered down and head bowed over the table, when the Colonel said mildly, “If you’re going to look for it you should have some equipment.”

Manuel’s head jerked up. “How’d you…?”

“I know it is hard to credit, but I was a boy once.”

“Well…what’d you mean?”

“The thing’s got metal in it. The research reports from back thirty, forty years ago say it’s most likely iron and copper. Ferromagnetic, anyway.”

“Looks like rock.”

“Sometimes,
sí.
Others, not.” The Colonel’s eyebrows rose as he stared off into space, as if remembering. “No matter. Any big piece of iron moving, an antenna can detect it. Fast Fourier components in the magnetic field.”

Manuel nodded. He knew “Fourier” meant some kind of frequency analysis. That could pick up when the Aleph was moving. “They ever track it that way?”

“Sure. Never learned much, though. I looked at twenty years’ worth of maps once. Big three-dimensional ones, some from back before all the ridgelines and mountains were exposed by the melting. There—”

“Really? That old?”

“Sure. Two centuries ago, Ganymede was smooth. We been melting and gouging, making terrain. Thing is, the scientific types spent a lot of effort plotting where the Aleph went—figured it had a place to hide out maybe, down in the core or something.”

“What for?”

“Repair itself. Rest up, maybe. Any—”

“Ha!
Qué gente estúpida
! It doesn’t need—”

“I’ll thank you to not interrupt your father again,” the Colonel said precisely, each word carrying its own weight. He paused, and between the two flashed a challenge, a hint of the tension that was coming into their talk more as the years advanced, but that neither wanted to acknowledge. The boy twisted his mouth and looked away.

“To continue. I studied their maps. The Aleph goes everywhere, lingers seldom. The trajectory, it filled the moon’s volume like spaghetti in a bowl, all through. Up to the crust, down to the core, swimming sometimes and running others. No sense to it.”

Manuel’s expression tightened. “No help in knowing that.”

“My point is the method, not the results. They followed its movements with satellite triangulation. Detecting the ripples of magnetic fields as it passed.”

“I don’t know as I want to track it.”

“No, but I want you to know when it’s around.”

“How?” Manuel went back to chewing, more pensively now, thinking.

“Carry some loop antennas with you.”

“Weigh much?”

“Five kilos, maybe.”

“How’ll an antenna tell the difference between me, walking, and anything else?”

His father nodded with grudging respect for the boy’s technical sense. “You have to stand still and take a reading. Squirt it up to Satellite; they’ll process it.”

“Uh-huh.” He went to get more coffee. When he came back, his father had unpacked a locker from the equipment room and was laying out some rifle antennas on a mess table.

“You had this all ready.”

“
Por cierto
. Brought it out from Sidon.”

“I’m that easy to read, huh?”

“At times.”

“Goddamn, I can’t do a single thing without—”

“Son, you talked of little else these months. I do not want you to think you must sneak off and do it. And your mother, she is very concerned.” He patted Manuel on the shoulder gingerly, defusing the tension between them with the gesture, reminding them both of the short time ago when they had wrestled on the living-room carpet, when physical contact between them had none of the edge it carried now. He smiled, his lush black moustache catching the light. “Every boy knows he is immortal, but his parents, they are not so sure.”

Manuel nodded. His irritation at sharing this dissipated. He listened carefully to the description of how the directional antennas worked, how you had to keep the impedance matched when you took them from the warm cabin into the cold of the plains, how the induction coils could freeze up on you if you kept them on the shaded side of your body for a while. Petrovich volunteered some advice, and some other men picked up the antennas idly, as if remembering something they had felt and done long ago, and then put them back down and returned to their card games or arguments or simply to drinking their throat-searing ration around the heater, staring at the blue-white filaments that glowed like the center of a star.

He went out with the gear the next day, and the next He ranged to the south, where he surprised a flock of mutant crawlies and got most of them before they could scatter. The antennas worked all right, and Satellite Relay gave him two-second response. But he detected nothing moving under the wrinkled hills. He was learning the small tricks and lore of stalking, absorbing it without thinking. He could tell now at a great distance if a small, skittering form was a mutant, or if a blur of tracks made by passing rockjaws was an hour old or a week, or whether something was hiding in the lee of a rock outcropping, where the ruddy snow gathered. His suit made little noise, and so he became used to the eternal silence of the moon’s rawness, marred only by the thin whisper of winds that were slowly claiming the land. A week passed. He returned to camp later and later, knowing the men were watching him with a certain nostalgic affection, seeing him shuffle in each time with a report of how many scooters or crawlies sighted, how many slam, all for the Bio update, though knowing that the central fact would go unmentioned because there was nothing to say about failure. Decades of research had shown that the Aleph might come to a hunting zone because of the increased activity, but it was a weak correlation and many doubted it. The boy might go the rest of his life without his luck turning.

One late afternoon he came in early for the first time, toting the antennas listlessly, and passed by a walker where Old Matt was replacing a blowoff valve. Manuel waved to him silently and had turned away when the man said quietly, “I don’t think that’s the way.”

Manuel whirled, something unleashed inside him, and said, “How come? Just the looking can’t change what it does.”

“Maybe so. I’m not so sure.”

“Well, my father says he picked it up three times this way, when he was trying. Three times.”

“And saw it, too.”

“
Sí
,” Manuel said, his conclusion stolen.

“Those antennas, they’ve got resonant frequencies themselves, you know. Something wants to find out if they’re around, it can send out a little signal. If your circuit starts to ring, that’s a giveaway.”

“Why’d it do that?”

“Why
isn’t the right question. No point in asking that. Maybe it got used to those scientists poking at it with those antennas and beams and so on. Got tired of it, even. So it’s not interested in that.”

“You don’t know that.”

The man’s tips formed a wry expression Manuel could not read, with some amusement in it and a certain strange sadness too. “You’re dead right. I sure don’t.”

Old Matt said nothing more, and the boy stood there awkwardly, not wanting to go on inside. The man did not go back to the valve job either, so the two of them just waited, the boy staring down at his boots and tucking his hands into his pouchpockets. When he saw Old Matt was not going to say anything no matter how long the silence went on, he looked up and murmured, “You think maybe it’s watching anyway.”

“Could be.”

“I don’t…don’t know…”

The man said firmly, “I don’t want to tell a boy to go against his father’s advice. You know that.”

“Sure.”

“And you’re right. Nobody’s sure of anything in this and never will be.” He leaned against the big legs of the walker, bracing his bootheels on the waffled stepping pads slick with ice. Ganymede was coming out of its long murky night, and the camp—the big rambling shack, the walkers and cycles and crawlers parked every which way, the discarded manifolds and cowlings from repairs, the stunted prickly antenna tower, all collected here in a clump against the spreading cold wilderness that stretched to all horizons—seemed flat and insubstantial in the twilight, unreal.
Resonant frequencies. Ringing circuit coils,
the boy thought.

The man pursed his lips, metal shining. “Your choice, m’boy.”

“Guess so.” He squinted at the old man, who seemed now to seep into the dusky seamless wilderness and smile fondly out from it, leaving for the boy the next step.

He was one of the first ones out the next morning, loping into a light, misty dawn as the sun broke over the far range of hills, stretching blue shadows on the mathematically fiat plain below the cabin. He went twenty kilometers without needing to consult his faceplate map to find a way through the rutted valleys and fresh gorges of the continually working land. He left the antennas in a hollow, a dark depression on an otherwise unblemished blue-white mesa. He felt freer as he loped steadily along, coasting on his long parabolic arcs which gave him a good view of the terrain ahead, making better time without the long rifle antennas. He moved with graceful speed but quietly, landing solidly well free of rocks that could turn beneath him and start a clattering slide. He surprised flocks of scooters and bunches of the stolid rockjaws, picking out the muties as he skimmed over their confused flight, aiming and firing by well-learned habit now, almost casually. He had worried once, back at Sidon, about the ethical matter of killing, especially considering how many people had strong views on vegetarianism (including his mother, who sniffed and obviously withheld comment whenever he ate real meat). He had finally settled his mind when he realized that these beings were inventions pure and simple, not things brought out of the matrix of a world on equal terms with man, with equal ancient origins, but made fresh and sometimes badly in a test tube, engineering miracles on a par with walkers or shuttleships, running well for a while and then breaking down, for that was the way the boy thought of mutation.

The leaving of the antennas was an act of surrender to the emptiness of this world and what it had to yield of itself. He went forward, carrying his fear—for his father was wrong, and his mother; he now felt fear as a presence which should be endured, and in that had left behind the essential state of boyhood. Yet he was without real hope.

He went that way for three days. Each was the same, and he fell into a kind of rhythm of searching, potting at the muties when he saw them but not now seeking them out with craft. By noon of the third day he was further from the camp than he had ever been. He had taken a cycle for the first fifty klicks, both because the area was pretty well picked clean of muties and because he wanted to get free of the chance encounters with other parties. He knew there was no place more likely for the Aleph to turn up than any other, but he felt that fresh terrain was better, somehow. He had already relinquished what he could, and now it was a matter of patience, the running out of the odds. He loped steadily through cañons and river valleys, over low mesas studded with boulders, across kilometer-wide sheets of ice as markless and fresh as if made yesterday. The rhythm of his running absorbed him and he gave himself over to an endless course of ice and snow and rock, all flooding beneath him as he soared and landed, perpetually in an onward-pressing tilt. He stopped only when a comfortable fatigue came into his legs. He found himself in a gorge that played out into an alluvial fan of pebbles and ice chunks, newly swept down from a jagged ridgeline. He recognized nothing around him that corresponded to the faceplate map. He took a leap as high as he dared, but saw no prominent landmarks that would help. It was a matter of pride that he should learn the land, because satellite systems could not always be doing location fixes for each person on the surface. Old Matt had taught him that, and had talked about the days when men first moved on Ganymede and you could wait an hour for a directional fix from the overloaded systems. He started to backtrack, then, to learn this new territory, pay more attention, not let himself get caught up in the endless hypnotic rhythm of the open vastness and his progress through it. Yet in that lay his own transition, for it was in the slow backward trek that he sensed something he could not name and which caused him to slow his pace, to pause in his loping and look out over the yawning vistas of plain and ridgeline. At one outthrust arm of rock he stopped, panting, blinking back sweat. He vented his urine sac, the thin yellow stream sputtering and foaming green as it struck a slab of ammonia ice. He looked down, muzzy-minded, and saw a few meters away in faceless rock the sunken delta print. He did not move. He looked up, slowly and without hope, and saw ten meters beyond another delta impressed upon the pitted iron-gray stone. Looking beyond, he saw the next one and with it a rut carved deeply, slicing down a meter into the rock and scooping out a boulder-sized volume. He went forward, counting—three, four, two together, another—and each had a burnished brown scar around it, as if cut by flame only a moment before, the marks seeming to come out of nothing as he trotted after them, panting, pulled forward, gasping almost as though his suit yielded no more air, up a fan of slide ice and onto a slope—where he slipped in gravel and almost lost the trail. He struggled up and onto a ledge, then over that into a clear spot of barren rock and purple ice, rushing now, breathless and aware of the utter silence around him, his isolation, a black infinity above and no shelter anywhere; and that was when he saw it.

The thing came out of a sheer cliff of stone. It was alabaster in parts and in others oozing an amber, watery light that refracted through his helmet. The ground trembled and the cliff face fractured into thousands of facets as the thing worked its way out, turning by some unimaginable means and groaning, working against the rock that did not confine it but only supported. Splinters of light broke from it, and a harsh rasping rattled up through his boots. It was big—how big he could not say, because here perspective was lost, and he could not pull his eyes away to compare it with anything as shards broke from the cliff and rained down before him, sharp flakes glinting as they turned in the yellow sunlight. It moved up the vertical face and outward at the same time, not struggling but coming steadily, without haste, now suspended above the drop by means he could not see, its form still hard to make out because it reflected the new biting sun into his eyes and carried in its bulk a restless blue glow that fogged the air nearby. It stopped. He had the distinct feeling that it was looking at him, had meant to study him in just this way. This lasted only an instant. Then, so quick his eyes overshot and he could not be sure how it happened, the Aleph was gone. A blue steam churned the air, crackling with phosphorescent orange flakes. He thought it turned and reentered the pitted rock, but a moment later when he tried to recall the act, it seemed that perhaps it had simply faded into the gray mute face, gliding backward into parting rock, with a final crack and groan of weight released. The damaged cliff remained, its oval wound like a screaming mouth. Stirrings trembled up through his boots. He began to breathe again. Only after a long moment in the absolute silence did the boy realize that he had not even raised his gun to it.