Against Infinity (9 page)

“Sonabitch!” Manuel cried.

“Still got spirit. Learning, but keeping the spirit” The man grinned, creasing his face deeply so that the radiation-born blotches stood out as blue-black scars.

“You’d think it’d be grateful.”

“No. Grateful would mean it was ours. Mean—bone-deep mean—then it still can hold its head up. To anything.”

Colonel López heard of the incident, not through his son but from a crop-tender who had seen it happen at a distance. He came out to look at the thing, now strong again and prowling the modular cage, glaring out hot-eyed and unbroken. It reared up when the Colonel came close to the bars, not to leap but to display its huge belly—groined in scarlet ceramic and molybdenum, cracked and pitted—as challenge, exposing its weakest point to invite attack. The Colonel pursed his lips. “You two have invested considerable time in this creature.”

“It’s coming along.” Old Matt stood with hands in his pouchpockets, his suit catching the slanting sunlight, showing its creases and stains and mended rips.

“It escaped.”

“He let it go,” Manuel put in. “And it came back on its own.”

The Colonel shook his head, not taking his eyes off the cage. “A lot of work.”

“Could be a good return, too,” Old Matt said.

“You’ll never get it to follow orders.”

“Slaves follow orders, Colonel. You want something done a slave can’t, you don’t ask for a slave to do it.”

“What we need now is grunt labor. If we don’t keep the price down on our wheat, our soy, our corn, the Settlement will have to mortgage out to the Luna brokers first, and then some Earthsiders later. What we don’t need is things like this with mouths big as buckets, trying to chew up one of my best men.”

Old Matt said quietly, “Let me run him.”

“What for?”

“Keep down the rockjaw muties.”

“Got ordinary dogs can do that.”

“This one’ll be cheaper. Don’t have to feed it.”

The Colonel nodded, still looking at the big ponderous thing as it padded monotonously around the enclosure, puffing, its breath an orange steam that crackled and fell to the ground, depositing a thin snow. “I heard about its feeding.
That’s
the thing you want me to let run loose?”

Manuel said quickly, “We’ve got to take a
chance
on it, Dad.”

“Man doesn’t have to take a gamble just ’cause it’s there. You got to learn that.”

Manuel felt a stab of irritation and started to talk fast: “Damn, that’s a swole-headed—” but Old Matt interrupted, began giving the Colonel some specs on the creature. Manuel saw what the old man was doing, shunting the talk aside for a moment before the Colonel got into one of his moods and took a stand and then couldn’t back down from it. Okay. Manuel turned away, muttering to himself, the lukewarm anger in his chest like a physical presence, a smoldering he got when he had to skate around the Colonel. He grasped the bars and leaned forward, cooling off. The creature came over to him as Manuel listened to the glow, almost casual way Old Matt drained the hard-nosed stand-fast part out of the Colonel’s voice. His mouth twisted. It irked him somehow to see his father being soothed like that; and then he noticed the hunched-down form tapping against the bars with its head,
ding, dingding,
a pattern that varied but seemed intentional. Manuel frowned.
Ding, ding, dingding…
He saw suddenly that it was a code, maybe a way for the thing inside to talk. He rapped his glove against the bars in response. It answered,
dingdingding, ding.
Manuel reached down and knocked a patient rhythm on the burnished steel skull. The huge head tilted up, peering out for a stilled moment. Manuel felt something pass between them, something that tightened his throat. If there was still a human fragment left in there, if he could talk to it… He knocked on the skull again. Suddenly it reared up. It smacked against the bars with fierce energy, snarling. Manuel jumped back. Arms clawed at him, missing but snatching out again, jerking with lightning-quick anger. Manuel blinked, dazed. For an instant a small trapped part of it had broken to the surface. Only an instant. Now the muscled form prowled the cage again—glaring, snorting.

The two men noticed the momentary eruption. Colonel López grunted. “I’ve got gangs putting up more domes. Teams outside, working the whole twenty-four.”

Old Matt nodded. “It’ll have to operate a long way out. No rockjaws near Sidon now, anyway. What I thought was, we put a tractor sting on it. It comes inside a five-klick perimeter, it gets a jolt.”

Colonel López grimaced. “Risky.”

Manuel noticed for the first time that the corners of his father’s set lips were a grid of fine dry wrinkles. He looked from one man to the other and found a similar tone, skin like paper crumpled and then smoothed out. He softened his voice and said, “Dad, it won’t be that way when it’s loose. It didn’t jump anybody when it had a chance, out there.”

“I see.” The Colonel smiled at his son despite his continuing frown, the learned look of a parent allowing himself to be talked into something. “You think it is merely objecting to being penned up.”

Manuel answered crisply, “Right.”

“That’s so now,” Old Matt said. “Earlier, it had things to work off. We let it do that.”

The Colonel pointed between the bars at the left buttress of the thing. It oozed green pus from the tractor rod’s wound. “Some still working out, I gather?” He smiled. “But I take your point. You can try the scheme—provisionally. Only provisionally.”

Manuel beamed. He forgot the passing moment before, the fleeting connection. His father was right: the thing was dangerous. But it could be controlled. He was not sure why he felt a sense of accomplishment and anticipation, but like a boy, he did not puzzle over it.

The Colonel nodded, still studying the big shadowy form in constant motion, and began walking back toward the bright stretching bulk of the Settlement. Ultraviolet from distant domes reflected off his helmet, darting rainbows of color into Manuel’s eyes. “By the way,” his father called, “what you call it?”

“Uh…nothing.”

“Even animals get names,” the Colonel said.

“We’ll find one,” Old Matt said. “You give them a chance, most things name themselves.”

“T
HE WAY WE
want him is like he came to us,” the old man said to the boy.

“Mean?” Manuel asked. It seemed to him you needed more than that, but he was willing to believe.

“Yes, mean, but all the rest—proud, and mad as all hell, and confused enough to want to make something out of that anger and find out who he—or she, or it—is.”

“Uh-huh.” Manuel looked doubtful.

“Still, to teach it to use the anger, the madness—it has to learn the rod, sure ’nuff.” Old Matt nodded to himself, somber and distant, as if recalling something. “It’s not really human any more, but it has to learn—or relearn—some human things. Not be just a crazy thing. But not too human, no. Not too.”

They ran it. It would be gone for days, even weeks, and then come lumbering back to the five-klick boundary, and send a mournful long bass note over the comm the way Old Matt had showed it. It preyed only on the muties; Old Matt had taught it the differences, and something told it that the deviant forms were proper game. The boy never discovered how the old man had done the training, but it worked. Bio reported a slow but steady drop in the mutie population near Sidon. Colonel López was guardedly pleased with the result, since the Settlement received transfer credits from Hiruko for work done “in the general interest.” The dogs alone could not have done it without humans to keep them to the task.

When it came in from a run, Old Matt or, later, Manuel would fetch it in from the perimeter. There was an increasing work load, and the two of them fell into a routine, tending to the thing when necessary and counting on time to wear it down some. It never attacked Old Matt, though it made a rush at Manuel one time. The boy jabbed the rod at it, missed, and swung full force into the yawning face that seemed to fill his vision, making no sound. The rod hummed with unlocked energy and jolted the thing back, stunning it without doing real damage, and the boy poked it, just enough to keep it backing away, and too late saw the trap the thing had laid for him. He was too far into the cage to reach the door in one long bound, so he had to stand as the thing rounded on him, slewed to the left, and came in low, under Manuel’s raised guard. It hit him. He was on the ground and rolling before it registered that anything had happened. He twisted and looked up and it was towering over him, hot-eyed and massive and immobile, merely studying him.
Enjoying it,
the boy thought,
getting the most out of this before it
—and he struck upward hard, turning the rod so its point caught the thing in the right nerve nexus. It howled and jerked away, eyes glaring and mouth gaping. Manuel scrambled up, rod held ready, and backed out, already recovered enough to think of his pride so that he did not hasten, but solemnly stared the thing down even as he retreated.

Later, he was not sure what the thing had been trying to do. The attack might have been a way for it to come even with him. He would never be certain. He hoped no one had seen the incident and after a week was pretty sure Old Matt knew nothing of it. Only months later would the old man refer to it in passing as merely another matter Manuel and the thing had to go through. He learned that Old Matt and even his father had known. They had said nothing, because no talk would underline the point better. It took even longer before he saw that the lesson’s point was indeed its ambiguity, and talk could take away from that, too.

After the attack, Manuel walked nearly even with it as he escorted the heavy form out on its runs. He felt himself able to handle it better now; the brush with extinction (so he thought of it) had proved he could move as fast and well as he needed to. There had been a fear in him—not the coppery fear he knew would never leave him, but a milder one that could be banished and now was slowly seeping away. It was after Old Matt saw him walking beside it, still wary but with a jaunty lift to his step, that the old man said, “We should call it Eagle.”

“What does that mean?”

“A large bird. Lived on Earth long ago.”

“Huh? It’s no animal; it’s—”

“We should name it Fred? Elizabeth? Carmelita?”

The boy said nothing for a while. Then,
“Sí, sí,
I suppose you’re right. But Eagle? It can’t fly. Not even with air could it fly.”

“The important thing with the eagle was not its flight, but its heart. That was why it died out, I remember. It would not give in, become a barnyard thing.”

Manuel shrugged. He did not care much about the ancient past. He accepted the name because in the end one name was as good as another. It meant nothing to him until some weeks later when he returned with Eagle—it was difficult to remember to think of it that way—from the perimeter, across the glassy plain of gaudy splash-landing pits. They loped over blotches of burnt gold, crusty crimson, searing orange. Eagle paced beside him, and Manuel kept the tractor rod cradled easily, casually. Some animals were working on a hot-water feed line, laying it on supports above the ice between two looming gray domes. They chattered among themselves as they labored, hoisting struts and tape-fusing joints with the bright blue arcs, and then caught sight of Eagle. They hailed the two and then broke from the work gang as men shouted after them, five animals clanking and rolling across the purple sheen of ice, glad of a break in their work, chattering loudly. Four of them slowed and then stopped as they got a better look at the thing that walked with the boy, but the youngest had never been beyond the Settlement before and in its fuzzy world knew no enemies, so it came on. It ran up to Eagle, yipping. Eagle hardly took notice of it. It didn’t even break stride or engage its treads. It simply smacked the animal in the side and kept on, sending it rolling, tumbling and nailing across the slick surface and down an incline, where it slewed to a stop. Eagle went on, indifferent to the silent wake it left among animals and men alike. They stared after Eagle as it ambled lazily homeward, yawning. The young whined and mewed and sulked. The men muttered amongst themselves, stunned and with a grudging admiration. It was not the act—which was no more cruel than the day-to-day wrestlings of the animals at play—but the way it was done, without anger but with a lofty sense of what Eagle was and what the animals were.

Manuel started to think of it as his own. That ended when again it jumped him. He had left Eagle in the cage for two days when he was busy and did not have time to let it out for another run. This time Manuel clubbed it right away, not allowing himself to be drawn in. The attack was swift, but without the great power the boy knew Eagle could muster. A complaint, then—nothing more. But it served to relieve the boy of the sentimental notion that he had made Eagle his own, as submissive as any of the animals, or as friendly. Old Matt smiled gently when he heard of it and said nothing, but Manuel knew what he thought.

There was more labor to do now that the Settlement was thrusting up more domes, filling them with hard-won soil, blending human waste with cornstalks and old plant fiber (“the honey-bucket brigade,” Major Sánchez called it), and extending the tunnels back into the neighboring hillsides for access to more lodes of water and ammonia-saturated ices. There was less time for recreation now, fewer communal dances and meetings, more of the small card games and drinking bouts snatched from time between shifts. Worse, the new works took energy, so the heating budget got cut back. Men and women stayed close to their homes carved out of the ice floes, bundled up. To cut down on drafts, blankets hung in the connecting corridors. The younger kids, including Manuel, spent long hours adding thick gray insulation to the pipe networks, all in the eternal battle against the cold that seeped in, despite magnetic insulation and the steady gurgle of hot, fusion-runoff water in the walls. But the Colonel knew the limits of the community and arranged with Bio for a new expedition out to distant regions, to cull the muties and give everyone a break. It had been some years since a woman had gone on one of the hunts, not from any design but from simple preference. While the men and boys were gone, the women too felt a curious release that brought some renewal. They worked at private gardens and other projects, made entertainment holos to exchange with the other Settlements—not imitations of the slick senso-dramas from Earth, but storytelling, tales of Ganymede itself or the asteroids, people like themselves—and dreamed of the day when the families could begin to split off from the Settlements and make their own way in the new land, safe from the deadly proton sleet beneath a shielding blanket of air, owing no one a tribute of taxes or indentured labor. That time would not come soon; probably would not come at all in their generation; but that did not matter: they could see the promise unfolding, and for the moment, leaning forward always on the promise, that was enough.