Against Infinity (11 page)

Undaunted, the boy stuck a finger at the print. “What’re the spots? They don’t show on many frames.”

“Holes.”

“Anybody know what kind?”

“They change all the time.”

Manuel nodded. Old Matt was tired from a day of potting at sleppers, the new bioform introduced to fill in a step in the biochem chain that led toward an oxygen atmosphere. They were efficient, big and bulky and ugly as sin. They mutated easily and were hard to chase down. Manuel stayed up long after the old man had slumped into his sleeping bag. He peered at the old prints, read the data. It had not occurred to him to study up on the Aleph. Studying was to learn pipe fitting or thermodynamics and the Aleph was like none of those—no formulas or procedures: just a fervent running wildness that could be claimed only by sensing it and feeling your way. But as he frowned down at the frozen images of amber and alabaster he nodded to himself, concentrated and intent. The next morning he spoke to Eagle, not knowing if he was understood, but trying anyway. And each morning thereafter trying again.

For eleven days they ran down slepper-muties, with Eagle making the most kills, always far faster than the animals and always quick and remorseless in the killing. The McKenzie man had a partial insulator breakdown from his own ineptness and within five minutes got frostbite in a leg, the skin frozen to the suit wall so that it tore off when they dragged him out of it.

Eagle was leading them all now, with an instinct made sure by time, so that without discernible sign it knew which cañon to choose, which purple-shadowed pocket sheltered the growing communities of muties, where the scattered and warring lifeforms preyed and mated and died. Eagle ran with an unthinking ferocity that daunted some of the men. The kindly and condescending affection that evolution had forged between men and the domesticated animals surely did not apply to a thing like Eagle, and the men stayed away from it.

Eagle found the Aleph alone this time. It was in the last days of the expedition, and Manuel was ten klicks to the west of the main group, scouting out a nest of slepper-muties that were chasing down and eating the normal rockjaws and crawlies. He heard the excited shouts and cries over short-range. Eagle had run onto the Aleph on an open plain. Manuel listened, loping in the general direction of the party, imagining: the men and animals after it, the huge thing surging over the ice, its passage blowing up a fine dry dust of crystal ammonia, and Eagle pacing it, not leaping this time but biding its time, careful and yet growling with a pent-up rage. The boy ran flat out, expending his servo’d energy, gasping. He heard Major Sánchez swearing, Petrovich whooping, animals chattering and mewing in mixed fear and blood-lust. He heard the sudden sharp crack as Colonel López fired two laser bolts at it point-blank. Manuel climbed a bluff and looked down on the plain where the darting black motes swarmed about the huge thing, pursuing, lunging in and then pulling back, although the liquid moving shape had done nothing to stop them. Then one came too close and the Aleph moved over it and onward and left behind a mashed stain of red and steel. The Barron hurled itself at the shape, but slow, uncertain. Something caught it in midair, and the animal twisted in pain and then fell, broken in half.

And Eagle: running alongside, snarling, watching the shifting blue-black opportunities until in a blur it shot in, up the alabaster flank, plunging on and leaping from some unseen purchase, up, to the lip of a triangular hole, and then in, swallowed, gone in an instant, so that the yelping and shouting from the black dots around stopped suddenly and a strange silence descended. The boy felt his heart thump once, twice, and on the third the side of the thing contorted, turning ruddy, and Eagle struggled out from the triangular spot which shrank even as it wriggled free, snarling and spitting and chopping at the Aleph with puny servo’d human hands. Struggling. Then falling. Eagle hit the ice solidly, starring it, and rolled. The boy gasped and leaped downhill, letting his shocks absorb his clumsy, hasty jolting falls. By the time he had reached the plain, Eagle was on its feet, wobbling but fundamentally unhurt, and the Aleph had vanished, burrowing into a rock flat in a blur of energy.

“Hit it both times,” Colonel López said as his son approached. “Both times, and not a puncture, not a mark.”

Old Matt stood with his hand on the back of Eagle. The men milled around it, though the animals stayed back. Eagle puffed and stood silent, haggard, its ceramics and manifolds rasping hollowly. The boy saw it held something in one hand.

“Piece of the thing,” Old Matt said. “Tore it out, somehow. Way back in that hole, I guess.”

Major Sánchez stared at the thin shard like rosy sheet metal. “First time I see that. Ever.”

“The records have nothing like that,” Petrovich said.

In camp that night Petrovich called into Sidon and confirmed: no trace of the thing had ever been recovered. “So the secret all along,” Old Matt said, “was in those spots. Goddamn.”

The men laughed and slapped one another with a fervent relief that surprised even them, and drank more, and even invited in the straggly bunch from the contract farms, still terrified and subdued, who in the end had fallen behind and never come close to the Aleph. Two of the animals dead and a fragment won: a price paid. The boy knew that night, as he fell into exhausted sleep, that he would not see it again this year. That was just as well; they were all worn down, despite the temporary euphoria. Yet they had done what the scientists could not, and they had done it without fine instruments or a lot of money. He smiled to himself in the warm, musty smell of the bedclothes. It was the end of one time and the beginning of something greater, though he could not know exactly what, and did not care.

I
T WAS WELL
more than a year before they returned to the wild territories again. The party was larger but no more expert, being larded out with men from Fujimura and Zanatkin Settlements. There were three from Hiruko who had to be watched or else would pop their tanks wrong and freeze their lungs solid (an expensive replacement, and sometimes fatal), or fall into a crusted-over crevasse, or walk alongside Eagle and put a casual hand on it, thinking it was another animal. The extras were useful, because the Colonel and Major Sánchez, by being formal and forthright and simply expecting it, got them to do a lot of the drudge jobs around the camp. Manuel appreciated that part of it, because as a boy he always drew more dull grunt labor than the men—in the fourteen-percent Earth-norm gravity, even he could lift and manhandle huge crates—and now it was pleasant to graduate up a notch and watch somebody else hustle at it. Still, the ferret-faced interest and comic ineptitude and plain ignorance of these others robbed the long journey out from Sidon of some of its joyous release. The boy did not like it any different than it was before, and in this early disgruntlement, this stand to block the path of change, lost one more piece of his boyhood.

“Hope you don’t expect me to go out shooting with ’em,” he said to his father the first day in camp.

“We’ll share jobs, as usual,” Colonel López said. “Share out the new men into our teams, too.”

“They’re not even from Sidon!”

“Bio gives us the credit for their task-hours, though.”

“A measly dab of credit.”

“We need it,” the Colonel said mildly. He was less stern with his boy now, relied less on discipline and more on a quiet display of steadiness. “We’re selling less ammonia-mix to Mars-General. Have to scrape by somehow.”

“Not this way. There’s plenty—”

“Plenty is exactly what there’s none of. Now you go help unshank those treads, same as the rest.”

Manuel did as he was told and inside of an hour had put away most of his resentment. It helped that the Fujimura men took to admiring Eagle—its size and strangeness, and its graceful intricate lope as it cleared the hills nearby, going out on its first run. They had never seen anything like it, a thing that resembled a servo’d animal and yet bristled with energy and nervous, repressed intelligence, eyeing everyone and everything with a straight, unafraid, assessing gaze. The new men had felt nervous when they sensed it watching them, as though the hot-eyed intensity found them wanting.

The first night in camp was always cause for more drinking and sniffing than usual, and the new men fitted into that fine, some even passing out from the smeerlop early and having to be given a dose of oxy to bring their cardio systems back up to full. The Major toured casually through the connected quonsets, keeping an eye on the more raucous and checking to be sure the oxy didn’t ignite anything and burn them out.

Manuel sat on his bunk and watched, drinking a little of the brown liquor that the Settlements made easily as sourmash sideproduct and shipped, with a hefty tax, across the solar system. As usual, the best went for export, but the Settlements had gotten used to the harsher, throat-scraping variety and now even preferred it. The boy sipped and talked to whoever came by and then, tiring of the stories of improbable marksmanship and endless near-fatal accidents and discovered-but-now-lost metal lodes, went looking for Old Matt. He found the old man already asleep, stretched out and looking smaller than a man, his clothes loose on the body, worn and filthy in spots where chemicals had dried and collected the dust from metalwork. He breathed shallowly and his face seemed dried out, burned deeply by UV, the nose blistered and reblistered, the seam where flesh joined to metal warped and lined like old reused paper. Manuel studied the thin, loose-jointed form for a moment and was turning away when a whispery voice said, “You’ve been thinking.”

Surprised, the boy said, “Tomorrow, I’ll show you.”

“No, tonight. I’m never sure I’ll be here tomorrow.”

“Hey, you can march half these jokers straight into the ground.”

“Maybe. Maybe.” Old Matt sat up smoothly, without carrying much weight on his arms, even though one was syntho’d and the other servo’d. “I had to be humble and a little sly, even, to come out here this time.”

“Huh? Anybody can come so long’s they want.”

“The Undue Risk Rule, you know it? If I get injured again, need a new leg or whole abdomen, who’s to pay? Sidon can’t do major overhauls. Has to come from Hiruko, maybe even Luna.”

“They’d keep you back at the Settlement? For that?”

“I told them, cost less if I prang out here, considering the chances aren’t good I’d get back in time anyway.”

This talk made the boy uncomfortable and the man saw it, so he said, “It’s that spectrograph stuff, eh?”

Manuel nodded. “That fragment. Hard to believe they could get so much information out of it.”

“The dating? That’s a nonresult, you ask me.”

“I don’t see how the Hiruko labs could come up with no date at all.”

Old Matt shrugged. “The ratio of various isotopes—that’s the only handle they ever get on the age of a thing. That little piece had all kinds of isotopes in it, but they all give contradictions—different ages for each ratio. Sometimes even impossibilities—more of the decay product than could be, ever, if it was just coming from the parent radioactive atoms in the material.”

“So it’s something they haven’t seen before. So? They have such big heads,
al norte,
they think that’s impossible?”

Old Matt smiled lightly. “It means the thing is not made up of naturally occurring stuff. It must keep reshuffling its own atoms all the time, to keep them so scrambled.”

The old man seemed to regard this as important, but to Manuel it was a detail. “Thing is, the
big
thing is,” he said, “it’s not made of rock, even if it looks like it is.”

“Yes?”

“There’s a lot of metal. I added up all the elements in it that’re good conductors, from the mass spectrograph printout they sent us. Then I figured how much other atoms there are.” He leaned forward earnestly. “That fragment, it’s a good conductor?”

“Ummmm. That piece was from inside. We know the Aleph is not a conductor on the skin. So it must be different inside.”

“Right! And a conductor, it can be a channel.”

“Channel?”

“The man from Hiruko last time—like the one this year, too—he fired an e-beam at it.”

“Sure. Just bounced off. Always does.”

“Right! The Aleph knows how to defend its outside. Its skin does the whole job.”

“Not always. It picked up The Barron.”

“The Barren was a dog. It came too close. Could be it was sucked into the Aleph, the fields tore it open.”

Old Matt studied the far end of the shack, as if listening to the background talk, or the wheezing of the pumps, or the gurgle of pipes. His liquid brown eyes seemed to absorb light from the shadowy, dank bunkroom. “It was studying The Barren, I’d guess. Turning it over, like a man looking at a funny-shaped pebble, and by accident he dropped it and it broke.”

The boy went on, impatient: “Something like that, sure, but the point is, an electron beam carries an electrical current. Conductors are like mirrors—a current comes by them, they make an image current, only reversed. Same as when you look in an ordinary mirror, you’re left-handed.”

“I’m left-handed already.”

“Then in the mirror you’re right-handed. What I mean is, one thing you learn early in power engineering is, a current’s repulsed by another current of opposite sign. Right? That means an e-beam bolt, running by a conductor, kind of sees a repulsive current in the conductor. Its own image pushes it away.”

Old Matt sat back, eyeing the boy with mingled amusement and new respect. “So the e-beam stays away.”

“Right!”

“Which means e-beams aren’t much good against the Aleph.”

“Not if you fire it point-blank, the way that Hiruko guy does. The way everybody has, near as I can tell from what my dad says. But suppose you get the beam into one of those openings.”

“Then it’s in a kind of metal pipe. It gets pushed away from the walls. So? Still does you no good.”

Manuel gestured and waved with his hands. “No,
no.
The e-beam, it’s flying through the hole, nearly fast as light. It can’t run into a wall, because every time it gets close to some bend or fork in the tube, it sees its own image.”