Against Infinity (16 page)

“Uh, what? Finite?”

“
Finito
.” The man drew a finger across his neck.

“Finished?” Manuel gazed at the hulking inert mass. “I…guess so.”

Another man broke in with “Uh, ’at thing—it’s got some systems up, but most of ’em are hopeless.”

“What? What thing?” Manuel looked to where the man was gesturing. The animal lying nearby was badly mangled. He walked unsteadily over to it, halfway knowing what he would find.

Eagle’s head was intact, but the neck turned at a wrong angle. The strong steel-jacketed trunk was mashed and leaking pus-colored fluid. Something had shredded and ripped its treads.

“We got to get it back to camp,” Manuel said.

Petrovich had followed him. “Now, Eagle, it did come out—
poof,
like you. Maybe that’s what you saw in there?”

Manuel shook his head.

Petrovich said, “Not good chance for this one.”

“Animal like this, you can save it if you don’t let the cold get into it or the systems lose minimum power.” Manuel wasn’t talking to Petrovich. He stared at the crushed Eagle and didn’t seem to notice when other men came up and said something, marveling at the damage and how long Eagle had lived in there.

Major Sánchez said, “Look at it, all that time, and being carried along and all.”

“Where’s a crawler?” Manuel said abruptly. He went over to his father. “We need two, three crawlers.”

The Colonel said, “I sent Fuentes back. Already radioed them.”

“He, he’s bleeding in there.” Manuel stood and watched the bright red seep out of Old Matt. Without a pressure dome there was nothing any of them could do but stand there and watch it.

Petrovich said, “No leaks—I checked. But don’t like his temperature.”

“He’s bleeding.”

“Not so bad.”

“Not so bad,
goddamn.
He hasn’t got much in him. He’s worn out already.”

“Shock is worst. Worse than bleeding.” Petrovich said it flatly, not coloring the facts with the sound of his voice.

Manuel paced restlessly between the two clusters of men. The bulk of the Aleph loomed over them like a ridge of rock thrust up from the ice. Motionless, it seemed a piece of the broken terrain. Manuel looked at it for a moment, not thinking of anything but merely trying to take in the enormity of the great bulk now still and dead, free at last of its duty. He tried to think of what had happened, but could not There was a deadness in him. Then the harsh sounds of the men yelling and scrambling over the Aleph brought him back from the empty part of him and he went to his father. “Which way the crawlers coming?”

“They have to go around through some ravines,” the Colonel said. He showed his son the route on the map overlay.

“That’ll take too long.”

“Two hours, I’d say. Petrovich thinks—”

“I’ll carry him. Go up over this ridgeline here. Meet them down where the cañon necks. Cut the time in half.”

“Carry him? Son, you’re tired out. I can’t—”

“Let’s ask Petrovich if it’ll hurt him.”

“You’ll do as I…” Colonel López paused, looking at his son for a moment while the boy gazed off at the crumpled form of the old man. Then he went and asked, and Petrovich thought about it and said maybe so, if Manuel took it easy, no jumps, just climbing the ridge and then coming down the far side easy, nothing fast—

“Good. Good,” Manuel said.

Major Sánchez got him a power reserve pack from one of the Hiruko men who had a spare. The man argued for a while about giving it up until he saw the scowls around him. The boy did not think badly of the man; without that reserve the march back would be a long labor of sweat and ache. He ignored everyone and concentrated on slinging a harness to carry the body in his arms. He secured it against jolts with a strap around his neck. His father watched and knew with a mild surprise that it would do no good to say anything. In that moment of letting go of his son he passed into a new time, and began to accumulate a sadness and an anger fueled by loss that he would not feel consciously for months to come.

Manuel picked up the old man carefully. He glanced at the circle of faces without recognition, saying nothing in reply to the advice and warnings, already turned inward and preparing himself, and then turned and set off at a steady pace, taking each step with a rolling gait to cushion the body. He stopped once, a kilometer away, to look back and get his bearings. It seemed he was gazing back over a great distance. The men were shrunken dots, random specks milling about the flanks of an enormous carcass.

He started up the slopes of loose gravel and rock shelves. As he rose and could see further he realized how far they had run. He did not think about what had happened but just kept on, concentrating on the gently swaying loose-limbed body. Once Old Matt opened his eyes and looked up at the black sky for a time, and then shifted himself minutely, the eyes gazing out at Manuel, liquid and glistening in the pale yellow sunlight.

Manuel tramped stolidly along the rocky ridgeline. He watched clouds boiling up from the south where a fusion aura glowed, yellowing the vapors. The banks of moisture roiled and tumbled over each other and grew blue-bellied. They soared over the ridge, rising, and then a rain came down, bringing a false dusk that made the boy go slower so as to be sure of his footing. The first hour passed. The body creaked in his arms. He covered sixteen klicks on the level ridge and then started down, which was the hardest part. The gravel and moist soil gave suddenly and unpredictably, making him lurch to keep the swaying body from feeling the full shock. Old Matt’s eyes opened momentarily and then the face descended into a kind of collapsed sleep.

It was into the third hour, and he could not feel his arms anymore. He went on through the gathering dull dusk, across a slumbering landscape tit by breaks in the clouds, hearing in his helmet the regular
ping ping
of the directional signal the crawler sent. He angled downward to meet it. Innumerable times he slipped and caught himself and slipped again, starting small slides and avoiding the rattling showers of gravel that cascaded down. Through the streaming gloom the spaced signals came to him like a constant calling of a mindless thing, the only presence besides the crunch of his boots on snapping ice.

He found the lead crawler making good time down a streambed. It stopped, and he put the body through the lock. Two crawlers and a walker passed by in the sleeting darkness, going on to the main party. By the time he cycled through, the body was hooked into the small medical monitor. He sat with three men and watched the diagnostics flicker and resolve. “He’s holdin’ on,” one of the men said. “Have to get him back to camp to do any fixin’ up, though.”

So the crawler reversed and backed out of the valley until it could turn around without risking getting stuck in the ponds and melting ice. The falling rain carried energy stored in it by a fusion-reactor robot southward, and in recondensing now released the heat, spreading change across the face of the land.

It was a long ride back. Manuel found the men studying him and realized he had exhausted himself. His suit was on the red marker at the bottom of the dial. He sat in a sling chair and let the swaying lull him but did not sleep. Hailstones clattered on the hull. The men here had dropped out of the main party, mostly from fatigue, and did not ask much about what had happened. He was glad of that.

They covered the last distance into camp as the rain and hail lifted and the sun cut through the remaining pink fog that hugged the gullies and ice arroyos. The crawler speeded up then, growing, toward the
bip bip bip
of the ranging beacon that seemed to Manuel like one long calling, each pulse lingering in his mind until the next joined it and blended in, a hollow ringing as formless and remorseless as the fog. A dozen men waited in a little clump as they came into camp. A medical tech had come out from Sidon on Colonel López’s orders. He was a thin man with uncertain, always-moving green eyes. The men helped bring Old Matt inside, carefully turning the stretcher to get it through the crawler lock without jarring. When they got his suit off, the walnut-brown body lay inert, nearly hairless, seeming smaller than the boy remembered.

The medical machinery and the tech did things to the body, patching and splicing in replacements, cleaning and disinfecting where suit fluids might have gotten into the body cavity, working on the main problems and leaving the rest for later.

“God, lookit him,” the med tech exclaimed.

Manuel asked, “Exhaustion? The wound doesn’t look so deep.”

“Exhausted, sure,” the med tech said. “Shock pretty bad too. But mostly it’s the cardiovascular. Seized up somehow. Lot of neural damage, too. Can’t figure how that happened. Just wore out, maybe. Doesn’t respond to the usual stuff.”

Manuel asked quietly, “How many functions can you save?”

“Most. For sure, most.”

“Replace the rest?”

“I’d say prob’ly. Some of the organs died, though. Liver, kidneys, some smaller stuff. And the small blood vessels—they’ve broken down all through him. Costs a lot to replace that.”

“How much?”

“Dunno. I don’t see many cases like this, guys this old. Most of ’em are in Hiruko.”

“They’ll have to take him there?”

“Prob’ly. Those blood vessels, it’s not the parts, it’s the labor. Lotta bench time.”

Old Matt opened his eyes then. He looked out as though from far back in a hidden place, and his eyes moved slowly over the faces of the men gathered around. His face was dry and chalky, but the eyes seemed to brim with a moist fullness. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Then he closed it without his face showing any expression of concern.

“Some kind of control function is out,” the med tech said. “Not surprising, with a spine injury.”

“Can you fix it?”

“Look, I told you. Funny neural damage in there. That’s not field-type work.”

Manuel nodded numbly.

They let the medmonitor work on the body then, humming and sloshing and snuffling and clacking to itself. Manuel sat up watching it and then slumped over on his side and slept for a few hours. He woke when the main party hauled into camp and some men called into the cabin for help getting Eagle off the deck of a crawler. Manuel went outside and saw his father and the others dismounting, all pale and with that careful slow-moving way of men working in suits that are drained of power. He joined the gang of men on the nearest crawler. They got the lip of a forklift under one end of Eagle and worked it onto a makeshift ramp and pushed Eagle down, aided by the slippery ice that the hail had left on the ramp. They hooked it to the crawler and towed it over to the outside medical and hydraulic station for the animals.

Eagle lifted its head and tried to turn it. Steel screeched and sparks jumped. The great head crashed to the side, dangling. It shuffled its hands, and its treads clashed and jammed against each other. It struggled deep inside itself, Manuel could see that, and after a moment it shuddered and the hands relaxed and it went still again. He thought he could see a slight regular motion, as if from lungs laboring far down in there.

The med tech came out, looking harassed by the men who’d come piling into the cabin, men with pulled muscles and sprains and a few broken bones. He ran a series check on the crushed and mangled thing. He cut away Petrovich’s clumsy patches and sealed on new ones, stopped fluid loss, and gave voltage boosts to the internal systems that still had life. Then he shook his head. “Can’t work miracles,” he muttered.

“You can goddamn try,” Manuel said harshly.

“I done what I can. Got no equipment for more. Not outside stuff, anyway.”

“I could take it back to Sidon.”

“Don’t think you should move it, not anymore.”

“You going to just let it lie there?”

“Look, that’s deep internal injuries there. Either the living part’s going to pull through or not. Only way to help it is to pry open the shell and take it out and keep it alive until you get it to Hiruko. They know this kind of work. I don’t. So I say we just leave it rest, see if it pulls through.”

“How long?”

“Day, two days.”

“Then?”

“Take it to Hiruko if it looks strong enough.” The med tech’s mouth twisted in irritation. “Look, I got men to work on. Animals come last, you know that.”

“This’s no animal.”

“Yeah, okay, you read the regs, kid. You just read the regs.” The man went back inside, fidgeting at his tools. He was having to deal with more injuries than he’d ever seen before on just a little pruning jaunt and he didn’t like it.

Inside the sprawling cabin the men were eating or boozing or else lying across their bunks half-undressed, already sunk into sleep, mouths open, some of them snoring, faces dark with week-old beards and dirt. The boy sat awhile, not saying much to anybody or listening to the wandering, tired talk around him. Old Matt lay still, and his diagnostics held steady. The boy fell asleep again; but when he woke, tangled in his bunk with a blanket wrapped around his head and nothing on the lower half of him, he felt no lifting of the slow fatigue and ache in his arms and legs.

He went out then to look at Eagle. It was near noon in the long Ganymede day, and the sun had burned through the layers of mist that formed high up, where the new atmosphere was boiling out into pure dead vacuum. The dot of a sun cast sharp shadows among the men and women who were coming in now—pipefitters and agro hands from Sidon and further-away Settlements, miners from one-dome places yet unnamed, contract laborers, women widowed years before—all with a debt real or imagined that had now been paid. They came in walkers or on foot, following the same incessant
bip bip bip
and coming into the big clearing where Eagle lay facing outward, toward the distant line of slumped and folded ice hills. There must have been a hundred of them sitting in amongst the vehicles when Manuel came out. He watched them as they went up to the big crushed thing and stared at the caved-in carapace, never daring to reach out and touch it, speaking to each other in low voices that didn’t carry on comm line, making their own private ritual of it. They asked to go inside and see Old Matt, too, but Petrovich wouldn’t let them. They asked about Manuel, but nobody among them recognized the boy—they had only heard of him—so Manuel stayed close to Eagle and they did not bother him.