Against Infinity (21 page)

Manuel leaped. He gave it full power and shot up fifty meters. Below, most of the others jumped too, rising above the tumbling tide. Not all. Some dashed to the side. But one—Manuel watched a crate catch the woman full in the chest, throwing the body backward, rolling over it without pause, and finally fetching up against a rise in the ice. He changed his gyros and came down near the body.

She was an Earther. The chest was caved in, and she stared up glassily at nothing.

“Erika!” Piet cried, kneeling beside her.

“Get her into a med stabilizer!” the captain called.

Amid the shouting the Earthers gathered silently. Each took a portion of her weight. They lifted her high and carried her down the long line of cars, toward the lead car where the medical unit was. Manuel followed. He watched the Earthers and listened to their low, murmurous song that came faintly over the comm.

They got her into the freezer, but it didn’t look good. There was a lot of massive, expensive damage. She had gone down to Ganymede temperature pretty fast, and that was a help, but the systemic shock effects registered near the top of the indicator. Manuel studied the Earthers as they heard all this, crowded into the little cabin at the front of the train. He walked back with them. They said little and showed no obvious signs of grief.

Maybe they were holding it all in, or maybe they had just had it trained out of them by their years on Earth, he thought. It was hard to tell. He rummaged back through his education for a comparison. With a mild shock he realized,
They came here out of duty. Not from a yearning, but because their commonweal decided. They’re like priests, not explorers. Priests.

There was a stoic, grim side to them he had never seen before, a kind of stolid acceptance. In a way he envied it, without wanting to be that way himself. It did put you beyond the terrible things that happened in the world.

But—he felt this without thinking it—it put something between you and the high, grand moments, too. That was a big price.

T
HE FUNERAL WAS
held in the oldest agro dome. Manuel waited stiffly beside his mother and concentrated on the heavy musk that filled the air, and how it settled in his lungs with every breath.

“It is lovely,” his mother said, “how they built it to look out over the valley.”

“
Sí,
it is.” He scuffed his toe in the rich loam. The two of them stood a little apart from the main party. Around them, like a stubby forest, were the white markers of laborers hopelessly ground up in machines, cancer-riddled cases caught too late, outbackers who had not reached a freezing unit in time, malformed children left to die at birth, old men beyond repair. And his father: the slab of rough-edged stone stood directly before them, across the yawning grave. Its flat face was mirror-smooth, glossy with a careful e-beam polish. The precise letters would notify the world for millennia that here lay remnants of Colonel Francisco León López. It seemed odd to have such a mathematically exact tribute to a man who had been wrinkled and leathery, smiling, smelling always of dirt and sweat and grease.

The ceremony had been as bad as he had feared. Some relatives had come, people remembered from Sunday afternoon reunions long ago. He remembered them: vague presences who sipped beer while he played outside with his cousins. They had been with his mother by the time he arrived. They had contrived to make of the funeral a solemn, sweet-smelling ceremony, like the ones he had known as a child. He had never seen a complete one before, because he had always twitched and whispered and finally had to be sent out of the room. This time he had sat stiff-faced through the whole thing: suffocating wreaths of flowers (a rare sight, quite expensive; some of the family had money, somehow); aunts in black lace that rustled as they knelt; candles; gleaming satin; incense; even a priest, brought from Zanakin Settlement, swarthy, red-nosed and unsteady from midmorning wine, sprinkling holy water randomly.

Now the last part. Men and women from Sidon made up the big crowd, slightly further away than the relatives. Four of them carried the cellulose box forward. It had a brown polish like walnut. The priest said some more things. Manuel tried to concentrate on the words, but the steady drone kept slipping away from him and he would find his eyes roving over the valley beyond.

Slides had covered some of the pipes, but otherwise the quake had not hurt Sidon much. Most of the damage had been in the south. The cracked domes and popped sluice lines there were nearly fixed already. The magnetorail beds would take longer. He would have to stay at Sidon until normal runs were resumed.

“…into that great reward that comes to us all in…”

Manuel shut his ears to it and tried to think of the man inside the cellulose box. That was the hard part, had been hard all the years at Hiruko. To see your father finally as a man, bound on his own path. The rage had boiled between the two of them and finally spilled out, souring everything in the family. Even now he did not fully understand it. He did know, though, that it had to be put away now. It would be only a burden from here on. The Colonel—he still thought of his father with the title, unused for decades except to lend a certain authority to his father among the men of Sidon—had never been able to understand that moment outside the cabin. He had seen only one principle, a human one, life as precious beyond all else.

And Manuel had never been able to show the Colonel anything else. They had not gone back into the wastes again together. There was no time for that. The two of them had learned fast enough that they could no longer live in the same apartment, nor even in the same Settlement. His mother’s tearful attempts at reconciliation had failed within days, every one.

So Manuel had finally cut it off and fled to Hiruko. If he had been thinking about his career, it would have been the smart thing to do, anyway. Most people had assumed he was merely following his own interests, since Sidon’s trade was dropping off and shares in the Settlement were not going to be worth earning until things got back in order, a few years further on. Publicly, there was never any reason to think otherwise. Neither man had spoken to anyone else about what had happened out at the camp. Old Matt was entered in the log as “accidental death while deranged.” So this crowd around the grave knew nothing of why the son had never been back to Sidon. They genuinely mourned the Colonel and the era he had stood for in their minds: the hard decades of raising domes, and triple shifts, and horrifying accidents, and the slow-earned, grudging return from the land that at last had begun to yield something resembling prosperity.

Now the Colonel was in amongst all the crosses and carved angels that Manuel now watched through a hazy dim light. He had not noticed the slow gathering of his tears. He could not make out who was plucking at his sleeve. It was his mother. She led him, mute and stiff-legged, to the graveside. He took the shovel that Major Sánchez put in his hand. The Major stood ramrod-straight and looked at Manuel with concern.

Manuel bent and took a spadeful and tossed it in. It scattered over the cellulose with a hollow thump. In a few days the cellulose would decompose and let the body begin to seep into the rich loam. Within a year the slow downward convection of this dome’s soil would begin to cycle the materials into the terraces and the farm domes. In the first days of the Settlement they had buried their dead in the ice. The heat of the buildings had gradually caused some slippage and the bodies sometimes surfaced, un-decayed, unnatural, grotesque—skin stretched taut and ice-blackened over a cage of bones, the faces silent, grimacing in reproach, exiled in an alien land. So as soon as the Settlement could afford it they had dedicated one dome for the processing of their own. About it had accumulated the thirst for ceremony that humans carried with them everywhere, so that nearly every cross or sculpted angel had a wreath of grass or flowers, regularly renewed. Each time he stood up to pitch dirt into the hole, he glimpsed those colorful spots among the bleached white markers.

At last someone took the shovel from him. He turned, found his mother. They walked away, down a blurred corridor lined with faces he knew but had not seen in years. Next would come the small reception; the low murmuring talk with the relatives; the business of his father’s estate to settle; and finally, some days with his mother. Whenever he thought of her there was some pain, but he would not face the question of her yet. He would get through that too, but not now.

M
ANUEL PACED BESIDE
the towering iron-webbed building. High overhead, the pressure dome diffused yellow sunlight over the irregular, slanted roofs of homes and workshops. Originally the Settlement had been laid out in a maddeningly rigid geometrical plan, but as soon as families could afford separate homes they broke the pie-slice pattern of the districts. Near the center the streets were radial or circular, but further away they began to meander into loops and tangled cul-de-sacs, until near the perimeter of the dome the avenues had a spaghetti sprawl the eye could not follow. Immigrants, unpersuaded by promises of efficiency, had made their neighborhoods convoluted and comfortable. Patches of green marked unplanned parks. Homes varied from steel-ribbed spires to crouching bungalows of stone and plaster. Manuel liked the effect. Hiruko’s sensible rectangular streets had bored him.

He teetered back on his heels and peered up at the rising strutwork of the Council Hall. It had a solemn mass, unnecessary and plainly intended to give the effect of weighty matters being looked after inside. The riveted iron made black diagrams of elementary geometry across pearly organic walls.

Impatiently he paced again. A young woman passed in a purple cape and long white dress. She eyed him slightly longer than was proper. Her shoes clacked on rusty paving stones. Low gravity allowed steepness and ornamentation; her minareted heels slid and torqued with each swivel of hips, engineered to attract first the ear, then the eye with their impossible angles. They led the eye inevitably up to the line of seamed blue stockings. Manuel watched her until she turned a far corner, thinking not of her but of Belinda back in Hiruko. He pondered for a moment, then grimaced in irritation.

He returned to the large arched doorway and asked the woman there, “How much longer?”

The short, swarthy attendant grunted. “No limit on discussion. Your business comes last.”

“Look, it’s just a formality.”

“Syndicate has to approve it as a body, Manuel.”

Manuel blinked, surprised that this woman he didn’t remember recognized him, even recalled his name. “Uh, maybe during a break in—”

“No breaks. They’ve been jawing about the new hydro plant for ten hours now. The families who’ll run it want a better in-house overhead, an’—”

“They’ve got to stop sometime.”

“Never went to a syndicate meeting before, did you?” The dark lined face screwed up, remembering. “Shoulda come with your father, saints preserve him.”

“I was too young.”

“Kids can come in. Can’t talk, is all.”

“My father took care of all that.”

“Now it’s up to you, handling the inheritance. Don’t worry, the syndicate’ll take their half, sure—and then they’ll issue a proclamation and send flowers to your mother and issue her extra work vouchers for a year, you watch. They all remember the Colonel.”

Manuel slapped his hand against the iron girders in irritation. “
Sí,
I won’t argue. I just want it
done.
”

The short woman shrugged. “Going to be a Settlement man, you got to learn to wait people out. Hear what they got to say. Not enough to have a majority rule, y’know. Otherwise, the minority won’t be convinced and they won’t support the plan. No point havin’ people at your elbow who’re against what you’re doin’. So we just got to talk it out Quaker-style till ever’body agrees. More efficient in the long run.”

Manuel snorted. “They take much longer, I’ll go back to Hiruko.”

A new voice said, “Not soon, I hope.”

It was Piet Arnold. Manuel glanced at him warily. “Soon’s I finish up family business.”

“I would like to buy you a drink while you wait.”

“I’ve got to stick around.”

The short attendant put in, “No big rush here.”

“Don’t want to miss my turn.”

“I’ll hold ’em. They like to trade gossip after, anyway.”

Piet said, “I heard on the comm that there’ll be rain in three minutes.”

Manuel looked up at the layer of purple clouds crowded into the crown of the dome. “I forgot. Well—
sí, sí.
One drink. Then I either get in to see the almighty syndicate or else I leave. I’ve still got things to look after for my mother.” He glowered at the attendant as they left, even though he knew it wouldn’t do any good.

Dollops of rain spattered them as they clumped down an alley. Each day the insulation at the dome crown was relaxed, chilling the air so that droplets would form in the clouds. It was an easy way to clean the Settlement and it gave a semblance of real weather. In Hiruko, Manuel remembered, there was an amusement park where you could walk through rain, nude or clothed, any time of day. He had gone there once and nearly gotten the flu.

They found a small, greasy bar nearby. It was run out of the back room of a house, mostly for neighborhood types, with a zinc counter and warm beer on tap. There was a tiny restaurant, featuring fresh food displayed for selection before cooking. Piet stared at the small yellow animals like miniature pigs, glassy-eyed in death; strings of red sausages; root vegetables for salads; cross-cut slabs of lurkey; ribbed chest and flanks of some anonymous creature; peppered sections of meat; even an incredibly expensive side of beef. Piet gulped and moved quickly away to a booth. Manuel remembered that the man was a vegetarian, like nearly all Earthers.

“Odd little place,” was all Piet would say. The room was crowded and noisy. A man sat nearby, cadaverous and silent, methodically pouring a brown liquid down himself. Manuel hailed the bar. A waitress came bearing dark bottles and freed them from wire tresses, uncorking them with the same gesture. She smirked at Piet’s odd clothes as she was paid, then made an obvious show of counting the money. Piet frowned at this. “It’s all there,” he said formally. The waitress nodded and moved away.