Against Infinity (7 page)

T
HEY RETURNED TO
Sidon Settlement four days later. The boy was glad of it. He needed time to think and feel his way through that momentary but powerful contact, coming the way he had always known it would, with him alone and confronting the thing without moving, riveted in that single arching instant when it revealed itself, as it had shown itself before to countless men and then gone on, unconcerned, oblivious of the puny attempts to even momentarily deflect it from its unknown course. Manuel needed time, and his father understood that, just as he understood why his son had discarded the antennas. Manuel had forgotten that his calls for interpretation to the satellite system would be billed to his family’s account. The Colonel saw the falloff in use and knew, without mentioning it, why it was necessary to the boy. This was a time to ease up, let go, in the rearing of a boy, and from now on the loosening would be more important than the constraints. “Don’t let it go to your head,” he told Manuel one evening over supper, after his wife had gone to her work shift. “That thing doesn’t care about you. It won’t reward you when you take risks. It is simply indifferent. That’s the fact about it that most never learn. They hate it and fear it and finally ignore it. Because of that. It would be easier if it hated us. Maybe even if it hunted us. But it doesn’t care. Remember.”

Manuel knew his father was right, but that did not change how he thought about the hunt, or about the huge chunky shape that still swam and towered, absolute and luminous, in his dreams. The form would return to him in sleep every few weeks. He would waken early, sweaty sheets twisted about him in his narrow bunk, the ventilator whirring patiently, and drift up from muzzy lands where the shape always waited, knowing he would come again. Lying there, halfway into the world, he could not fix the form of it in his memory. He relived the momentary brush, and at the center of it was a blank, a space filled with color and sound but no residual image. He knew now the reason Petrovich and Major Sánchez and the others quarreled over this, for he too had only an impression, a faint memory of darker places in the sides and a muscular, ponderous weight. This puzzled him, and he finally went to Old Matt to ask about it.

The old man lived in back of a machine shop on Tunnel D, in an old storage room he had claimed because nobody wanted it. He did odd jobs around the Settlement now, light manual labor, and when his ortho’d arm kicked up he made up his labor increment by contracting himself out, or putting in time at computer inventory.

The room was cluttered and dim, packed with equipment older than anything Manuel had ever seen. He wondered if any of it worked. Old Matt sat Manuel on a creaking cot and poured cups of strong tea. “It looked long, kind of tube-shaped to me, all the times I saw it.”

“Petrovich said it was like an egg.”

“Petrovich says lots of things.”

“Some of the men, Flores and Ramada, say they saw it like a tortilla, flat and saucer-shaped.”

“They had been at the smeerlop, I remember that time. Lucky they didn’t blow off a leg, the way they were.”

“The scientists, their pictures—they show it in chunks. But long, as you said.”

“They would know more than I. They had the cameras.”

“Were there any mouths or ears on it?”

“Why? What does it matter?”

“We should know as much as we can,” Manuel said indignantly, his voice rising.

“Pointless knowledge, unless there is a way to use it.” The man slurped at his tea and smacked his lips, relishing it. Manuel had noticed that he always took a long time over his food and concentrated on the flavor of it. Now Old Matt’s coppery, grainy eye squinted at Manuel, as if sizing him up. “We haven’t got the tools to make use of what we already know, I’d say.”

“Like what?”

“It’s too fast for a man. Too big, too. Only servo’d things could stay with it, catch it.”

Manuel asked wonderingly, “Use the animals?”

“That’s what dogs used to be
for
, boy.”

“Do the dogs know that?”

“Somewhere back in the brain they must. Far back, after what we’ve done to ’em.”

“We could train them!”

“Maybe.”

“What about The Barron?”

“Maybe.”

“Next pruning operation, we’ll go out and—”

“If they let me.”

“Why wouldn’t they? And who’s ‘they,’ anyway? You can do what you like. It’s a free Settlement.”

“I can’t keep up the way I used to. The others, they don’t like hanging back, waiting for me.”

“You can help me train The Barron. That’ll do more good than just fast running.”

Old Matt smiled. “Sure. Might help.”

“Good!”

They worked with the animal in the hills beyond Sidon. The Barren had a lot of the old instinct left, buried deep in the genes, locked into a time-honored arrangement of long chains of enduring carbon and phosphates and hydrogen. It fetched sticks and chased little servo’d imitation rabbits Old Matt made up for it. Manuel found from the old file on The Barren that it had been a bloodhound—a piece of good luck—and within a week he had it baying as it scrambled over rocks and snow after the fleeing cottontail rabbit-robo. When it caught the thing it bit down and yelped in surprise at the metal and ceramic, expecting juicy flesh well laced with a prey’s adrenaline. It became, through Old Matt’s patient training and the boy’s energetic urgings, a fleet-footed dart that careered round the hills in a steady, almost automatic lope, scattering rocks as it veered, doggedly—Manuel had to look up the word; it was ancient and long out of use—baying and wailing and claiming dominion over the vacant lands and all the mechanical rabbits they served up to it.

Colonel López viewed this with a distant amusement, until it occurred to him that Bio might like a way to delegate the pruning operations to animals, especially the servo’d hounds. He did not like the idea. He was glad to find that there were few hounds among the animals, not nearly enough to turn over pruning to them alone. Still, the next year Hiruko Central mandated that they use The Barren and a few others; in league with men.

Manuel didn’t like it. The Barron was his now, his and Old Matt’s, in the old sense that dogs belonged forever to the men who trained them, and nobody was going to change that. Hiruko Central had ordered the pruning, this time from a cabin seven hundred klicks from Sidon. The boy was grateful to get out again so soon, to spend weeks in the wild beyond the grinding labor of the Settlement. The base camp was much like any of them, crude and hastily thrown up, first as an emergency station a century before and then as an occasional layover spot for prospectors and now finally as a temporary set of rambling shacks barely able to withstand the pressure differential, with wheezing pumps and sparking generator and a fusion tank that shuddered and burped and kept you awake unless you were pretty tired. He was glad of the chance, and doubly glad that The Barren gave Old Matt a new leverage with the other men, who now grumbled to themselves but held their peace when the old man was the last in the column to climb a ridge or finish shucking off his ice-caked leggings. They scared up big flocks of rockjaws and scooters. There were even a fair number of crawlies, still living on the now-vanishing methane in the swollen streams. The crawlie flocks followed the big, lumbering fusion caterpillars, sucking up the methane that burbled and effervesced from their exhausts. There was a goodly fraction of muties among them, and the men laid ambushes for them, waiting in box canyons, knowing the muties would be the first to run. Evolution had already taught them that they were different, vulnerable, mercilessly tracked and killed—and as always, the hunters credited themselves with a prowess and valor they had not earned in this wasteland, for in the end they were challenging only their own products, their own genetic legacy to the barren moon; there was no deep and natural antagonism between them and the scuttling spawn they had engendered, no fine-honed instincts of hunter and hunted that might have made even the huge advantage of firearms indecisive, as it had once been back in an old lost time on Earth.

The boy hung back from this and used The Barron whenever he could. The dog that was buried far down in the mechanical augmentation and intelligence-modification could sense his steady hand, his reassuring voice—deepening now, becoming more nearly a man’s—and gave itself over to the pursuit of the muties, following the old knowledge that came welling up within it. Manuel had gone to Bio, interrogated its compfiles, and worked, under Old Matt’s tutelage, to find the patterns in the foraging of the muties. From the data came likely sites to find them, clustering points where the warped and evolving forms met to mate or feed or be together, for mutual defense or simple dim comradeship.

The dogs did well, particularly The Barron. They ran with a taut eagerness and never tired. The old man and the boy, with The Barron and two other servo’d hounds, surprised flocks of muties in arroyos, streambeds, gorges, and water-hollowed caves, killing them with quick hot bolts that cracked in the thin stillness, taking no pleasure in the act of finality but firmly asserting their dominion over what they had made. Manuel tolerated this, learned from it, and bided his time. It was for him training, an exercising for the bigger things which would come in time. He found the new territory far from Sidon no different: vacant and demanding, yielding itself to the same skills he had wrested from the land. He was now as competent as many men in the party. He could track the blurred markings of the flocks, pick up over his micromikes the distant hum and murmur of their feeding, know which calls they made in the mating and which odd
chirrup
or
screee
was that of a mutie and not a norm.

He knew, too, the small scratchings and snow ruts of the Aleph. He would never forget the delta-print, but it was the telltale collection of repeating ruts and scrapes that told more about the movements of the thing. He learned the deep incision it made before lofting itself up onto a sheer rock face, the long, skinny, wavering trail it left in ice, the splashes of brown where it burned its way through rock, the way it gouged the land in trenches where it feasted on some mineral it wanted. (The moon was acne-pocked with such marks. An old statistical paper he found used the frequency of such scars to judge how long the thing had been mining and scouring the wounded face of Ganymede, and came to a conclusion that was obviously wrong: 3.9 billion years, a number pressing on the very age of the solar system itself, older than Earth’s own biosphere. The alien artifacts buried deep in the outer Jovian moons were scarcely a billion years old. Occam’s razor led many to reject this method of dating. The Aleph was too similar to the other artifacts—except for the fact of its movement, its life, its motivating power and response. They dismissed the doubtful dating method. Until something could blast a fragment from the Aleph to test its isotopic abundance, its age would remain a conjecture.)

It occurred to the boy that the Aleph had known this moon far longer than man had even had a rudimentary self-awareness, and yet had left the land intact all this time, merely taking from the terrain what it needed and letting the ceaseless butting of iceplate tectonics replace and heal the scars, never trying to convert it into something it was not, as men did. Whether this made the Aleph better or worse than mankind was not a question to him; it was the simple, immense fact of the difference that mattered. He found the delta mark twice in the new territory, once on a rock wall and again in a crevasse where a scooter had fled. He had assumed now, lacking much true experience, that he would see it only by himself, in some catechism between them. This was an arrogance of youth. His father, sensing without concretely knowing, saw that the boy would have to go on believing it for a while. He let his son have more slack, allowed him to go out on two- and even three-day treks with the old man and the dogs, sleeping overnight in their suits with a generator lugged along to keep their reserves high, seeking the flocks of muties in nominal fashion but, every man knew, waiting solemnly and without great hope for something more.

It came fleetingly at first. The two of them were resting, panting after a pursuit of scooters across a dry plain, at the funnel mouth of a cañon. Old Matt saw it first, crossing three klicks to the north across a narrow neck of the cañon. It did not ride over the jumble of boulders and jagged ice that jammed the point, but instead tunneled through the tangle as if a straight line were to it no trouble, unmindful of the grinding rasp of immense wrenching that it brought and that ran up the legs of the two even at this remove, a rattling of rock giving away and splintering with a thousand small crackings as the shape passed through. Old Matt had shouted—the boy had not expected that—and they set off, the servo’d dogs speeding ahead, crisscrossing cañons and ravines and arroyos in pursuit, clattering and tumbling down slopes, leaping high over outcroppings of rusty rock, feeling the shuddering slow vibrations the Aleph made as it crashed through obstructions, pausing to cut a trench and devour some lode of mineral and then lumbering on, not fast but deliberate, leading the yelping dogs and sweating, panting men as though it knew how to pull them in its wake, always seeking. The other parties were too far away to call in time, and the boy did not want to, anyway; in fact, he was even then sure that with Old Matt present the thing would elude them. He still unconsciously assumed his solitude was necessary, and so was astounded when, as he loped along a ravine, an ice floe exploded with a roar, showering fragments that tumbled glinting in the piercing sun, and the snout of the thing thrust out, turned away from them. He had to tell himself it was not a face—the jagged lines, the sawtoothed mark like a shark’s smile—and he saw clearly the holes aft, a full two meters across. He memorized it this time, ready despite his shock. The dogs surged forward at the first dull splintering of ice and leaped after it. It labored away from them, the shape of it shifting in the mind of the boy and of the old man as well, and Manuel thought,
Big. Too big,
even as he ran flat out after it, drawn forward. It turned. This was a recognition that only later struck the boy, but it stopped the dogs dead still for an instant to see the thing grind against shattered ice and swerve, rising. The boy put on a burst of speed and caught up to the dogs, all but The Barren, which had paused only an instant and now, the boy saw, was not going to stop or even slow down. It rushed straight at the thing without plan or true anger, but with ancient instinct, sure of its master behind it, running out of old imperatives born on dusty plains billions of miles beyond. The boy cut in his augmentation. He ran with aching legs after The Barren’s high keening cry, into the face of it—beneath the blocks of glowing alabaster and depthless amber. He rushed under bulky, ridged things like enormous treads.