Against Infinity (13 page)

Manuel left the crawler and took part, not trying to outdistance the others, taking what clean shots he could. Old Matt stayed behind with the e-beam and so got nothing beyond a panicky stray that would have run under the crawler treads out of pure fear-blindness anyway. The old man was content to sit and watch as the crawler made its sluggish way down the broad valley, a slow bulk amid the dotlike figures of men who swarmed like bees, first on one target and then on another, their excited calls and shouts coming to the boy and blending with the higher keening yelps and clicks of the animals, all the voices layering and overrunning one another until the comm rang and clamored.

Manuel waded through rivulets of the dirty water. It steamed away or gurgled into cracks. Some muties were so addled that they kept slurping at the runoff even though the hunt was storming past, the thumps and snaps of men firing clear in the air. Manuel shot a few of these. He felt a current surge and suck at his ankles and moved to his left, toward higher ground, to get out of the main channel, but it got worse, and when he paused to look up the nearest ravine, puzzled, he saw the whole sweep of water turning toward him, gathering momentum, deepening, sheets of the evaporating grime-shot foam sliding off a rising mound of ice and rock that, as he watched it, split along a seam with a dull thunder that pulled his feet from under him and slammed his shoulder hard against a boulder, pitching him face forward into the sludge.

“Jesus Christos!” someone shouted.

The boy got to his knees, smearing the filth from his faceplate, and peered upward toward the still-rising bulge of splintering, groaning rock, the cracks spreading out from the high ground like a black spiderweb. Boulders tumbled into the yawning jagged openings.

Old Matt called, “Manuel! Here!” amid a rising jumble of noises as the animals yipped and the men shouted and the ground surged again, throwing the boy down as he took his first step toward the crawler a full two kilometers away across the buckling ice.

“Slide!” someone shouted. “Whole mountain’s coming down!” but the boy got up and began to run toward the crawler, which was at higher ground, rather than away, down the valley. Old Matt was already unlashing the e-beam snout and wrestling with the long manifold. Manuel leaped high to keep above the creaking, surging land, landing and jumping again as fast as he could, pushing his servos to their maximum, running to reach the old man and the weapon, not even taking time to look down the valley and check for his father, nor especially to look behind him at the sudden roar of something breaking to the surface, ripping the ice, for he knew already what he would see.

M
ANUEL SCRAMBLED UP
onto the deck of the crawler. Old Matt had the e-beam projector powered up and calibrated, his worn face intent upon the dials in the stock of the weapon, ignoring the buckling and heaving of the ground nearby. Manuel picked up the e-beam gun, hefting it, still not looking back at the source of the wrenching that he could feel through his boots, even standing on the crawler. Instead he gazed out over the plain, looking downvalley at the fleeing and now-ignored forms of the scooters and rockjaws. The frantic mindless stream swept past the men, who came loping back toward the slower crawlers and walkers, unshouldering weapons, and some already taking a practice aim during the long arcs of their strides, squinting through telescopic sights. Then the boy turned.

It was huge this time. The amber flanks crushed boulders as big as men as a long rhomboid section of the Aleph surged out of the erupted ice. It wallowed, pulling buttressed ribs free of the hole it bored. Groinwork appeared, rasping and screeching against slabs of nickel-iron from ancient meteorites. The rust-laced layers held, resistant for a long moment, and then crumbled with a muffled boom.

The Aleph jutted abruptly into the air, turning as the boy watched, and from the highest buttressed shoulder sprouted a twisted thing, moist like a stalagmite—angular, jade-green, writhing; first a knifelike blade that refracted the pinpoint sun into a splash of colors, and then swiftly becoming something gnarled and seething, sopping the light into dark crevices; and just as suddenly the angles of it smoothed and the projection had a bloblike head, a waving stump that might be an arm, a scooped-out cavity that might be a mouth except that as it grew it consumed the head and ate the neck, turning the thing into a body that vainly, hopelessly grew short thick legs and began to make slow sluggish motions as if it were running in a thick resistant fluid, even as its upper half was chewed and gnawed away—and abruptly, electrically, crystal facets shot through the whole of it, long tracings of embedded glinting silver that centered on the chest and fanned out into struggling, fresh-forming arms. The chest-centered web extended as the body fought, flailing, and the thin lines sank into the legs, glowing with inner light. Just then the Aleph moved, bending down toward the ground as it freed itself from the last clasp of dark ice. This movement carried the writhing extrusion out of the boy’s sight.

He had seen all this in one quick glimpse, scarcely the space between two heartbeats. He blinked, and the shouting, milling voices came flooding in on him again, the comm choked with hoarse orders and exclamations and a radio hiss and swearing in three languages, “Goddamn shoulda knowed it’d come up on us just when” and
“schiessen Sie mit”
and “Over to the left it’s goin’ that way” and “Christos, safety’s jammed on this thing” and “Get yer butt in close it’ll flatten you out Lefkowitz I’m tellin’ ya” and “Isn’t a safety on that stunner at all you’re pullin’ out the
re
flex coil you jackass” and “That thing’s bigger than the pictures for sure it musta growed” and “Damned if I’m gonna get any closer” and “You Hiruko guys so hard-ass let’s see you corner it” and “Goddamn! Lookit! Goddamn!” and “Circle round on it give it a taste of this see how it likes a double-bore hey” and more, all blending into a babble the boy cut off sharp by punching off his comm line. He stared up at the Aleph, now fully exposed in the clear thin air, soaring above the tossed and tortured ice. It jerked free, the huge alabaster blocks of it working against each other with a deep-bass groaning. Then it simply hung a full meter above the jumbled land, unmoving, supported invisibly.

“Taking its time,” Old Matt said matter-of-factly, touching helmets with the boy.

“Why doesn’t it
do
something?” Manuel whispered.

“Doesn’t have to.”

“It should
run
.”

“From us?”

“No, no, but… Before, it was always going. Moving.”

“So? Just ’cause we hunt it, doesn’t mean it’s agreed to be hunted.”

The boy had always dreamed of it in motion, ceaseless and yet stationary, like a running river that changes and is still always the same. Moving, and big, and now it seemed larger by far than when he had first seen it years before. He thumbed on his magneto detectors and saw overlaid on his viewplate the corona of arcing magnetic fields, a halo around the thing that—the scientists said—supported the bulk and gave off the soft curling spatters of radio noise that hissed on the comm lines.

“Nothing to shoot at,” Manuel said.

“No openings, yes. Bad range from here, anyway. Let’s get closer.”

They jumped down from the crawler—the driver had stopped the treads and come up to the foredeck, staring—and began to walk, taking the curious long strides possible in low gravity. Manuel cradled the e-beam projector, deliberately keeping his pace slow so the old man could keep up, never taking his eyes from the hovering presence ahead. All down the valley the teams came closer, cautiously, weapons at the ready. Along the flanks of the Aleph more extrusions worked out of the amber blocks, writhing. Manuel tried to make sense of the forms, but they came too fast, being born and dying with a restless energy that played and rippled across the inert floating immensity. They caught and swallowed and warped the sunlight that struck them. Some seemed momentarily human, while others became like misshaped animals or deformed creatures or perhaps machines, all coming into being and giving forth a burst of animated life and then sinking back into the stony surface, lost.

Manuel eyed the hulk as they got closer. He switched on his comm again and heard louder static and a few scattered weak voices. To his left, Petrovich and Major Sánchez approached, and looking back, the boy saw knots of figures in the valley—men walking beside others, without the random directionless talk so usual on the comm, unconsciously coming together (as threads in a spiderweb converge as they near the focus), drawn by the slumbering mass that hung above the shattered plain.

“Hey!” someone shouted. It began to move. Manuel started running, bringing the muzzle up but finding no true target, leaving Old Matt behind.

The hulking, shadowy form began to drift, like a thing blown by an unfelt wind. The nervous darting extrusions subsided, muddied, blurred, and were gone. Manuel ran faster. He heard a laser bolt crash. The ruby-red beam glanced off an alabaster hexagonal edge and hissed into the ice. It spewed up a dirty gout of steam where it struck, leaving a near-perfect rounded hole. Manuel opened his servos and went fast, blotting out the rising clamor and shouts over the comm. There were now only a few men closer than he, and he passed the one who had fired—a Fujimura mechanic, a still-frozen arm pointing where the bolt had gone, a face with skin stretched tight by a yawning black mouth, open and soundless and studded with dark crooked teeth.

He hit the ground and gathered for a high jump to get a better look. He was watching to see which way the Aleph would go, and then without any transition at all he was skidding over the ice, face down. He smacked into a boulder and stopped, his right hip numb. Something had hit him from the side and bowled him over. He stood and saw it was Eagle, churning on, oblivious of the momentary obstruction that it had brushed aside. The boy glanced at the e-beam—the system diagnostics still winked green—and set off after Eagle, panting now.

The Aleph glided downslope, angling toward the distant valley walls, not toward or away from the gathering clumps of men but at an angle that selected no advantage, and ignored the hooting, shouting specks that converged on the wrecked land beneath it. It coasted, ghostlike. Eagle reached it then and drove in without pausing. The running thing looked slight and insubstantial as it leaped at the ponderous mass above. Eagle’s claws grasped at the alabaster ribbing, scratching—and a chunk came away, turning pink at the fracture points, tumbling down with Eagle and striking the ice in a tangle with it. The boy. stopped. He had never seen that before—seen a mere mortal thing rip the Aleph that way. He switched to his magneto detectors and saw what Eagle must have sensed: a fitful waxing and waning of the magnetic fields as the thing glided over the irregular ground, the fields seeking a grip on the iron beneath.

Eagle gathered itself and leaped again, arcing into a gap that had not been there when it left the ground but opened as Eagle flew up, a flickering weakness which the churning muscular form shot through. It snatched at a ribwork and again tore off a fragment. The fields shifted again and slapped Eagle down, driving it into the ice. But it sprang up again without a pause, this time a little too late to exploit a momentary ebbing in the fluxlines that hung in the air—and the Aleph slowed. Turned. Set off downvalley, turning an amber flank to Eagle. The boy gasped, sucking in air—he had been holding his breath—and Petrovich shouted, “Look at! Made it change its mind!” and the men ran faster.

The Aleph picked up speed and moved away from Eagle. An animal—Manuel saw it was a servo’d dog—coming from the side, made bold perhaps by Eagle’s attack, leaped at the moving mass. It too cut through a flickering ebb in the flux—it was impossible to tell whether by accident or by design—but halfway to the Aleph a knot of magnetic turbulence struck it in the belly. The animal doubled over, and the belly blew open in a spew of tubes and rods and blood-spattered parts. It sent out a brief startled yelp in the radio spectrum and fell and sprawled loosely on the ice beneath the still-moving silent bulk.

Eagle was after it and leaped again and again at the Aleph as the two of them sped down a low slope. This time the attacks had no effect, as if the Aleph had learned better how to defend against this new thing. The men were coming at it from all sides now. Manuel still looked for an advantage, a target in the blank amber cubes. He breathed in the hot coppery taste strongly as he loped and squinted, panting heavily, his right hip now painful where Eagle had struck him. He heard the chorus of cries and orders and shouts over the comm build and surge as the men caught the meaning of Eagle’s charge and the Aleph’s continuing glide, spiritlike, over the hummocked terrain. It was not burrowing into the ice to elude them; no, it was running—not away from the men, or toward them, but clearly in reaction to the thing that men had wrought, Eagle. They began to swarm and hack at it now, firing their bolts and double-bores at whatever piece of it they fancied, whooping and yelling to each other as they ran and milled and exclaimed and reloaded and laughed in newly released, unacknowledged fear.

Another animal came at the Aleph, going
chip-chip-chip,
loud and lunging, off balance. It leaped, and something caught it partway and held it for just an instant. It broke apart in the air. The men did not notice the body fall. They came in closer, their weapons booming and crashing, potting at the alabaster slabs. Deep inside the blocks a mottled green now flowed. The shots inflicted no damage.

The Aleph was nearly to the valley wall, and the men fired faster, knowing they would lose it soon. Manuel still saw no target and held back, not sure it was going to be of any use at all to wait, but still unwilling to expend himself pointlessly the way the others did. He looked around for Old Matt. He had forgotten the old man and expected to see him far back, tired. He was surprised when his faceplate overlay showed Old Matt’s pulsing blue dot close by. He waved, and the dry, sandy voice called over the comm, “Up here. Follow.”