Against Infinity (23 page)

By now Manuel had a standard description of life-in-Hiruko. He slipped in mention of Belinda without giving much away and went on to his job.

“Good, good,” Petrovich interrupted. “But when you come back for good?”

“Well, maybe later. When things look better.”

Petrovich spread his hands warmly. “Things are already good. In certain areas.”

“He means the Earthers. They’re hiring.” The Major leaned back, hands clasped behind his neck, enjoying Petrovich’s momentary vexed look.

“Yes, they are. A little. I think, Manuel, they would be interested in you.”

“Why?”

“You know a good deal about it.”

“So do you. And the Major, here.”

“The Major is busy. I work as I can around the site, true—but there is much to do.”

“I’ve got a good career going in the petrofac.”

“I realize that. We are all very proud of you, m’boy. To do well in Hiruko—not easy! How-ev-er”—he drew the word out—“I believe the Earthers can top that, yes.”

“No. Not interested.”

Petrovich cast a look of appeal toward Major Sánchez. “You have turned him against the idea already?”

“Not at all.”

“Look,” Manuel said, exasperated, “I make up my own mind.”

“Of course,” Petrovich said soothingly. “Let me make a simpler offer. We forget about jobs, about coming back to Sidon—okay?”

Grimly: “Right.”

“And you come out with me for one last trip. As in the old days. The days with the Colonel.”

Manuel’s lip compressed, but he said nothing.

Petrovich hesitated, wiped a bead of sweat from his brow, and went on: “No pruning, no. A simple ride. That is all. An outing.”

“Look, I’m…” Manuel began, and then stopped, mouth open. He suddenly felt an emotion, dimly remembered, coming to him strongly, the way a scent not smelled for decades will abruptly bring back a place, a time. He blinked. “I…”

The two men were studying him closely. He felt dizzy with the impact of the feelings, stored up for so long and welling up now fresh and brimming. He turned and saw the Major’s pictures of the wastes stretching away, bleak and slumbering. He said slowly, as though surprised at the words, “I might like that.
Sí,
I might.”

T
HEY WENT OUT
from Sidon Settlement in one lone crawler this time, clanking and crunching over the splotched purple plain. There were new domes abuilding on the plain now, and pyramids of waste from the fermentation and harvesting terraces that marched up the hills on either side. No animals yipped and chippered beside the crawler. Teams of them labored in the distance, though, and the thin, chilled air carried the loud
rruuurrr
and heavy booms of their work. He wondered if the people back in Hiruko were right, and the animals were a kind of new class in society, a new source of surplus value, yet another source for the forward tilt of capitalism, yet another revolution simmering on the back burner. Manuel thought of names he had not recalled for years—Short Stuff, The Barren, Slicky. Of Eagle he had thought many times, and did not put that name in amongst the others.

In the crawler with Petrovich were five laborers from Sidon who worked at the site. They kept to themselves, playing cards and sleeping in the hours the trip took. Petrovich talked about Settlement gossip and the new money crops blooming on the terraces—luxury foods, an attempt to speed-grow exotic guavas and artichokes and crisp apples—and commonweal troubles and politics (the wage-labor referendum) and back to gossip again, practically carrying on both sides of the conversation by himself. Manuel nodded and smiled on cue but mostly just stared out the big clear canopy on the crawler. It was a better view than he had ever had from the caked and scratched viewports of the craft they’d used for the prunings. This one had an Earther emblem on the side, fresh and stark blue-and-white. The seats inside still had some nap on them, and the control panels didn’t have their insignia rubbed off where men had leaned against them. The pan-fry rig in the back had the usual layers of grease on it, but to Manuel it did not seem to smell so bad as when he was a boy. He ate some lurkey from it, but that didn’t taste as good as he remembered, either; he guessed there was a kind of trade-off, or else that to a boy all things were exaggerated. There was something about this last thought that bothered him, but he could not say what.

“See,” Petrovich called out. “Europa rising now.”

Manuel followed the crescent as it rose above a mountain peak. On Europa’s cracked and cratered face he could make out tiny ruby dots of fusion-busters. The busters were crawling along the cracks that wrapped the moon, melting the walls away, hoping to open the old channels below the cracks, through which the churning slush below would give forth rich minerals. Jove itself, hanging eternally at the top of the sky, was now the only face unmarked by man.

Io swam at the edge of the giant planet. Each moon shone with a diffused light, a halo bright enough to smother the nearby flecks of stars. Petrovich gestured. “See, already the cap goes on.”

Manuel was surprised. “The monolayer?”

“See that blurring around Io? Light scattering. They’ve laid the northern hemisphere already. Spun out whole monolayer from orbit, let it fall, come to pressure balance with the atmosphere. You didn’t watch?”

“In Hiruko, y’know,” Manuel said sheepishly, “you lose track of what’s going on in the biosphere.”

“They left the big holes, for the orbital craft to come in. Looks to be stable.”

“Think it’ll help with the warming as much as they say?”

Petrovich shrugged. “Worked on Luna. Here—maybe. To put a cork on a whole atmosphere—incredible, hey? Things changing fast, these days.”

Manuel gazed at the gauzy halo around Europa for a moment, trying to remember what it had looked like before. He couldn’t. Something about that made him uneasy. “Which route we following?” he asked suddenly.

“Here, to the west. Faster than the old way.”

“Uh-huh.” Manuel glanced at the relief map and it came back to him immediately. He could see in his mind’s eye the way the ridges and gullies would be. “Look, what say we take this side detour?”

“There? What for?”

“That’s where the camp is.”

“Was. Haven’t been back there since—since—well, you remember.”

“Me either.”

Petrovich looked at him strangely, puzzled. “That time, just the few of you left out there when he…” A shake of the head. “He was oldest man in the Settlement. I…cried when I heard.”

“Yeah.” Manuel gazed out at the once-jagged ramparts of an ancient crater, now slumping and melting. In the lee of a southerly wind, pink snowdrifts still clung to shards of rock. “Well? You willing?”

Again the puzzled expression. “I… Okay.” Petrovich clapped his hands, breaking his pensive mood. “I know a cut through a gorge, there”—a fat finger stabbed the map. “Not existing even five years ago.”

They worked through the narrow, stream-gutted gorge and came out beneath a waterfall. The cascading ammonia-rich river steamed when it hit their canopy, sending up geysers that caught the sun. Rainbows formed high up, hanging tenuously against the face of Jupiter and then dissolving. They rocked on, lurching over fresh out-washes. One of the men sat on the deck outside and potted away at muties that wandered into range. There were a fair number of them, and Manuel asked about keeping the population down.

“
Da,
we have to do that soon. Hiruko is griping. But they do not pay enough, is the fact. We wait a little more, get their price up.”

Manuel asked, “What’ve they been doing with the development money?”

Petrovich shrugged. “Putting out seismos. Tilt meters. Creep gauges.”

“How come?”

“Still like the old days. They dumped a new animal into the biosphere, not tell us a thing—remember? Till we got to go out and prune away their mistakes.
Then
we get the specs. Same with them now—they hire gangs to put out the meters, they smile, they pay okay, they tell us zero.”

Manuel grinned. “Good to see not everything’s changed.”

Manuel found the camp using merely the sun’s position and memory, just letting the crawler follow its nose. He was not thinking of anything in particular when the land began its slight rise, and so the ramshackle profile of the camp came up out of the horizon without any twinge of anticipation in him. The north wall of the cabin had been staved in by something and patched up with a garish yellow gummy stuff. There were broken boxes scattered around, and wind-scoured old equipment, and the fusion generator was on minimum, racheting along with a
pock pock pock,
providing power for the cluster of seismos and other odd-shaped devices driven into the ice nearby.

He and Petrovich got out and walked to the hill that overlooked the vacant, neglected sprawl. Manuel found the spot not by pacing off from the crown of the hill but by feel, remembering the way the big boulders formed a nexus that pointed downslope to the little flat area.

“They wondered about this, back Sidon,” Petrovich said.

“Good,” Manuel said with a sudden flash of anger that surprised him.

The ice here was crusted with old snow. Manuel scraped it clear with his hands, kneeling and letting the heat of his suit sweep away the cloudiness in the top layer of ice.

Far down, surrounded by small bubbles, was a dark shape. He could barely make out the arms and legs. It was still face up.

“Ice hasn’t moved any,” he murmured.

“It will. Creep meter over there I looked at. It flows, hundred meters under here.”

“Uh-huh.” He peered into the ice as if he could see the face.

“Could still take it in for funeral,” Petrovich said quietly.

“No. Sidon’s not so poor it can’t go without one more corpse for fertilizer.”

“You know that is not why.”

“Sure I know. They wanted a little ceremony, like the one a few days ago. Community’s built on ceremony.” He stood up abruptly.

“They have a point.”

“This is one that didn’t need their ritual. He wanted to stay out here.”

Petrovich nodded silently. He scuffed his boot and turned back to the camp. Manuel followed after a moment. The cabin seemed smaller now, and the stanchions had sunk beyond view in the ice, as if this place, neglected by men for a while as they fretted about other, passing matters, was taking up its natural course again, blending into the generality of the wilderness, absorbed in the deep motions of the ice.

As he tramped down the hillside, the crunch of his boots on old snow faded away into the encasing silence of the place. He could squint his eyes and still see his father standing outside the lock, angry and yet letting his son take the body up the rise and lay it out carefully, and in the hour following chop out a grave in the ice, the myriad glinting chips and crystals billowing up around the bent, steadily digging figure. The Colonel had buried his anger for that hour because his son had told him a lie, the only lie that had ever passed between them, a lie that had held until they got back to Sidon: that Old Matt had said he wanted this, to be buried out here, under the progression of dark and dawn and dark and dawn again, not held fast in the ice but free in the ice. It was a lie in strict fact, but not in essence; Manuel knew what the old man had wanted, and the fact that there had not been time to say it, or the right time, did not matter. But the small, niggling deception had eaten at the son, and within a week he had told the father, and that in the end had tipped the scales somewhere in the Colonel’s mind, had made it impossible for the two of them to go on as they had before. So the sudden sparking rages had gotten worse between them and this cold flat space in the side of a hill had driven a wedge between them;
No son of mine would do such a thing;
and finally it was not over the death but, as can happen between men who have loved each other, it was over the tiny matter of the burial that they had seen the last of each other.

Manuel came stiff-legged into the field, eyes watery and aimless, and the first shock knocked him off his feet. One moment he was halfway through a step and the next he was on his back, the wind knocked out of him, feeling the ground shake. He got to his knees and the second shock came. He saw this one coming as a dark line sweeping in from the horizon, rippling the snow so that facets of sunlight struck from the crest. The seismic wave shot up the rise without pause, inexorable and swift, and jolted up through his boots like a physical blow. The cabin lurched, its metal shrieked—and it collapsed, the roof caving in first and then the walls one at a time as the stresses warped through their planes and shattered the ports, spraying transparent shards into the field, sending up showers of dust and gushes of air that froze into puffs of cloud. A girder came flying out, tumbling end over end and narrowly missing Petrovich, who was balled up on the ground. It gouged out a strip in the snow and stopped.

The crawler slewed around and rocked, but did not overturn. Hoarse shouts came over the comm. Petrovich overrode them with a harsh “Quiet!—Any hurt? Count out!”

Manuel watched the horizon as the men called out their names. No major injuries, though one fellow had sprained a shoulder falling. No more waves came over the horizon. He trotted down to Petrovich and asked, “You’re tapped into Hiruko, aren’t you? What’s happening?”

Petrovich was staring off into space, listening intently. “Confusion. Lot of damage.”

“How about Sidon?”

“Some tunnels fell in. Some injuries.”

“My mother?”

“No. Nobody I know.”

“I should call her.”

“Comm is packed.” He shook his head. “Damn, was big one.”

“What’s going on? Two quakes in a week.”

“Don’t understand. These moons, they’re stable.”

“The melting—it’s supposed to be symmetric, not cause ice-plate tectonics.”

Petrovich thought, nibbling absently at his lip. “Supposed to be, yes. I heard of some cave-ins downslope from here, in the mines…”

“Let’s get back to Sidon.”

“No. They don’t need help, is being done okay.”

“I think we should check. Call somebody.”