Against Infinity (12 page)

“Which it finds repulsive.” Old Matt smiled, his face crinkling.

“So it goes on! See? It turns corners, it twists—all to get away from those images of itself. Beautiful!”

Old Matt closed his eyes for a long moment, his nostrils collapsing and expanding with each slow breath, the face masklike. Then he opened them again and his expression was different, as if a moment had arrived which he had expected without knowing he was waiting for it. “The e-beam works its way into the Aleph.”

“And when the metal plays out—
if
it plays out—the beam smacks—zap!”—Manuel clapped his hands, making heads turn in the bunkroom—“into whatever’s there. Anything nonmetal.”

“Into whatever’s there.”

“Right. Far back into the thing.”

Old Matt closed his eyes again. He nodded sleepily. “A man, then an animal, then a gun. Now we have all three. Either it is enough or it will never be enough.”

Manuel was excited by his inner pictures of the e-beam jetting powerfully into the thing, snaking and finding its way, darting and striking at the soft, vulnerable things deep inside, things no one could even guess, and he scarcely heard what the old man said, or thought about what man Old Matt had meant.

O
LD
M
ATT WOKE
him early. Ganymede’s dun night would later give way to dawn, a process stretching on for hours, as though all things here must be of larger-than-human scale. It was Manuel’s turn to connect power cables to the crawlers and walkers, and fire up the fusion generator. He dressed sluggishly, still halfway into sleep and its foggy shapes that ran and loomed and roared against a slate-black background, a dream he knew so well now that the meaning seemed obvious, like a fact, more real than daylight. His lungs and heart felt leaden, reviving, and he shivered as he dressed in the thin but inert layers they all wore, even inside, against the perpetual sucking cold. In the bunkroom men yawned and grunted. Some stumbled to the back and urinated loudly into the open-mouthed cyclers. Shucked of their suits, their flesh was porcelain white, rubbed red where the insulating layers bunched or wrinkled. Some showed blotchy calluses and big blue veins where pressure flaws had sucked the blood to the surface. Others had patches of glossy frostbite replacements. Not a man was without mark. Their insulating sheaths fended off the brutal facts of this world, the cold and dark and scalding chemicals of the melting mountains—but shielded imperfectly, so that the men wore their ugly mottlings with a pride, a sign of having gone beyond the warm, comfortable Settlements.

He suited and left the gathering heat of the cabin. Jupiter overhead cast blurred shadows everywhere, and the moons gleamed beneath their ancient scars. He crossed the field to the fusion dome, threading among vehicles parked this way and that, dark boxy shapes on a plain glowing with a wan blue. The world lay inert beneath a rigid night, and he tasted already the coppery hot, his mind racing ahead of this slow climb out of sleep. The fusion generator’s mindless
whump whump whump
seemed like an eager animal greeting him. He dragged the cables to the vehicles and socketed them and watched the black ice begin to melt from the chunky treads and wheels as the kiloAmps surged through, restoring life.

When he clumped back into the embrace of the cabin it was stirring too, the heaters cracking and spitting, men swearing at clothing damp with yesterday’s undiscovered ice, their breaths already fogging the windows, pipes rattling as heat came to them again, the swarming smell of frying meat layered in the air. Old Matt sat at a table, hunkered down over a steaming bowl, chewing meditatively.

“Want to try the aim again before we put it in the crawler?” Manuel said, sitting down beside him.

“No. It’s good, doesn’t stray. The beam spreads a little, but you can’t help that. You should try firing one—we used to use them for welding—without any air around at all. Electrons all rush away from each other; charge density just blows the beam apart. Like firing a shotgun. Worse, even.”

Manuel nodded. He had never known Ganymede without some atmosphere—a thin whisper when he could barely walk, now a light cloak that could carry clouds, buoy up snow, drop the piercing acid rains. Generations would pass before a human sucked in a first good lungful. Now it was still thin stuff, little better than drawing on hard vacuum, but enough for an e-beam to fork through like lightning: breaking down atoms, clutching the newborn positive ions and ejecting the unwanted electrons, neutralizing the beam charge and enabling it to propagate in a thin, deadly stream. They were used for seating dome exteriors now, enabling a man to zip shut a break from fifty meters away, if he had a good aiming eye.

Old Matt’s jaws worked steadily, without hunger: food as fuel. Manuel took a bowl of broth and a corn slab from the loaded tray that arrived. “I was kind of surprised he did that,” he said.

“Who?”

“The Hiruko fellow. Thought he’d ask for more money, once he saw we wanted the beam. Next-nearest one’s in Fujimura.”

“I only offered him the money to be polite. Always give Hiruko people a chance to be generous. They like it. That’s not why he handed it over, though.”

“Uh?”

“He’s seen Eagle. He watches us, the ones who’ve been coming out here for so long nobody’s kept track, even. He knows we can use it and he can’t. Even though we told him about the conductivity and all. So he gave it.”

They had taken two days to modify the long, magnet-ringed barrel of the e-beam projector, narrowing the darting stream down at the cost of losing some flux. Power that spattered against the invulnerable and still unanalyzed flanks of the thing would be worthless anyway; accuracy was more important than aimless force. The projector was an awkward thing, with its bulky power pack and evil-looking snout, and the two of them cradled it carefully out to the crawler, lashing it to the foredeck and covering it from the soft pink snow that had begun. The boy lashed down equipment and topped off pressure heads and then looked up from the work, at a circle of silent steady faces. Some he had never seen before. He realized this was the biggest party they had ever fielded, a motley crew squatting in the open near the scruffy vehicles: worn-out Agency shuttles, with plates stove in and antennas long since ripped away; crawlers missing steering treads and patched up with steel belts of the wrong gauge; walkers missing whole legs, scarred and pitted and with passenger domes starred so badly nobody could see out—equipment nearly as bad as their suits themselves, which wheezed as they moved, gushing air from pop-lines that their organic sealants flowed into and filled up, only to open again on the next step, their sour suit air snapping as it gushed out and froze and fell at their feet. They watched him steadily, without comment amongst themselves. Some worked and some rested. They stayed a good distance away from the big blue-and-red Eagle, which paced at the brow of the hill, watching the plain beyond and ignoring the milling men at its back.

“Today I think three parties,” Petrovich said to the Colonel. “That parallel set of valleys—Major will take the left, I the right. Simple—”

“I think not,” Colonel López said. “This is not a military maneuver. If it comes when we are nearby it will not attack a flank or bother with which way we are deployed. It doesn’t care.”

“I mean to—”

“We will proceed in parallel valleys. I will take the left. Keep pace.”

Petrovich had been telling the new men what to do and it had gone to his head. He turned red but said nothing.

Major Sánchez put in, “The boy and Old Matt, they’ll be slower with that e-beam on foot. I could stay with ’em, take—”

Colonel López said, “They stay in the main party. There are a lot of us. We’ll give the thing plenty of confusion, all us helling around. Maybe help those two make a shot.”

Petrovich cut in abruptly, “Are we pruning muties out here or—”

“Of course,” the Colonel said. “Of course we are. You had something else in mind?” He grinned at Major Sánchez, and Petrovich swallowed his anger, seeing it was no use.

And so they set out as usual, though no one believed this was an ordinary day. The Hiruko man had checked with Central and found a report of the Aleph a good fifteen hundred kilometers from them, five days before, and since then nothing. But the odds were meaningless out here, and each man who rode or walked in the clanking, rumbling column felt that this day would be long and would leave them different from what they had been. None of them expected to succeed, to change the balance between men and Aleph.

Manuel watched Eagle running out ahead of them all, eager, head down as if listening to the ground, the powdery snow melting off it from the heat, its intricate articulating legs and treads scrambling and surging over black ice, shattering stubs and outcroppings as it passed, leaving a track almost as if it were a smaller version of what it hunted. Inside Eagle were heart and blood and perhaps lungs, maintained by the machines which also served to exaggerate and amplify its movements, so that in essence the soft inner zone was a fulcrum from which came the single intent focus of the thing, a concentration unlike a man’s or an animal’s but more consuming, purer, filled with the will to endure and strain and carry on until it could overtake and strike and slay. It was not Old Matt’s or his own or anybody’s, never could be, for it had been launched into a space beyond humanity, so far that it could not even report back and would forever now be silent, known only by its passion and remorseless desire. The boy felt a terror then, sitting in the cab of the crawler and watching Eagle. It was then that he understood what Old Matt had made in order to come this far: a thing between them and the Aleph, possessed of qualities both had but at bottom a thing strange and new, bereft of the Aleph’s seasoned age and rising, deformed, from the churn of life.

The emptiness claimed them. They explored stark fresh gorges, flushed scooters and rockjaws and jackrabs, cutting out the muties and flaming them, or Eagle running them down, or the men potting at the scattering, panicky forms with their lasers and stunners. Old Matt rode on the side deck of the crawler and watched. Manuel paced alongside, worried at the placid fatigue of the old man, wanting to take a few shots with the e-beam but cautioned, when he picked it up, to save the bolts for when they alone would have a chance. Their crawler was the first, instead of the Colonel’s or the Major’s. In effect Old Matt led the party, peering forward at the gradually lightening ravines and peaked hills as the sun broke over the far ridgeline and cut blue shadows across the land.

An hour out, a mutie rockjaw did not scatter with its pack but instead jumped one of the new men. It tripped him and leaped onto his helmet as he fell. The man shouted and struck at it and rolled sideways to get it off. Somehow the thing pried open a helmet port. Vapor spurted from the helmet, blinding the man for a moment. Major Sánchez tore the rockjaw off and stomped it and beat it with his stunner. By the time they killed it the man had got the vent closed himself, but the insulator had broken down. His eyelids were frozen shut. That meant somebody had to lead him back to camp for treatment. It sobered a few of the new ones who had never seen a mutie turn like that before.

“Goddamn bad splice, you ask me, if just a li’l change an’ the sonbitch goes for you. Some genetic drift, you ask me.” The man who said this sat beside Manuel and the old man for the next few klicks, resting his weapon on the iron runners and trying to look as if he were surveying the terrain ahead for game, but too jittery to keep his eyes on the horizon for long.

“Got to happen,” Old Matt murmured.

“How’s ’at?”

“Hiruko tunes them to spread out, go for the right chemicals, breed. Determined, single-minded little inventions. Armored against the radiation. Bound to happen, now that some of the chemicals in the melt are running out. Competition. Natural selection’s awful fast here.”

“That keeps up, won’t be safe to walk aroun’ alone.”

“It was us jumped them, remember.”

“Huh. Huh.” The man moved uneasily, as if just catching on to the idea that this was different from an amusement sim. After a few more klicks he got off and went back to find a friend near the rear of the column.

Beyond the far ridgeline an orange glow grew brighter. It was the ionized blowoff from a fusion heater. The crawler moved only a kilometer a day, but the stream of gas and liquid it vented washed out gullies and flooded the plains below. The Colonel moved the columns down a side ravine and into another system of valleys, to keep away from the mess. Rockjaws and scooters fled the floods as well, and the men spotted muties among them in the herds that poured out of the ravines and into the broad open land beyond. They ploughed forward, the excitement seizing the men so that in pursuit of the single fleeing forms they spread out, firing rapidly at the targets that dodged into the temporary shelter of craters or scrambled, panicky, into box cañons and dead-end ravines. They scrabbled frantically and mindlessly at the ice walls, dragging malformed limbs, eyes rattling in their wedge-shaped heads, shrieking and dying even as mere meters away the normal rockjaws and scooters browsed among the ponds of melt, some so dumb they did not even notice the drama, at turns both comic and tragic, that swirled around them.

The animals raged among the muties as well, running them down and crushing them beneath clanking treads. Eagle was far out in front, leading without thinking of it, following the game as the muties heard the thin cries of their fellows down the valley and began to run away, some even back toward the higher ravines where now flash floods came down, gushing out onto the plain. Foam frothed on the surface of the grimy torrent as it carried ice chunks and stones fanning out over sheets of purple ice. The men stayed ahead of the surging streams easily, loping steadily, guns at the ready, watching the shadows for the deformed shapes. Eagle never made a mistake, never ran down or clubbed a norm. Some of the animals in their high spirits did, though, and the Colonel would see it even in the midst of the enrolling chaos—the best day they had had in a long while, rich with game and enough to make the blood sing—and would send a sharp rebuke to the offending animal, which days later would mean a day without food or sexsenso or some other punishment.