Against Infinity (24 page)

“Can do that on way to the site.”

Manuel gritted his teeth, but nodded. “Okay, okay. Dump these men off at the site. Then we go back.”

Petrovich checked the tilt meters and frowned. “Lot of slippage down there. Come on. Let us get off this gradient.”

The big man started toward the crawler. Manuel paused. The cabin whose interior he had memorized was now a rubble of beams and sheet metal and plastaform. He had missed seeing the inside again by only moments. He had wanted to walk through it, see if anything had changed. Of course, if he had been inside when—

“Manuel! Come on!” Petrovich waved out at him from the pilot’s couch. “We have to move. The site—no answer. But their emergency hailer is on. Putting out Mayday.”

T
HE VOLCANO ROSE
through banks of black dust and streaming orange plumes of erupting, howling gas.

“Big bastard. Blocks the way,” Petrovich said, wrestling with the controls. The crawler swerved to avoid a tumbling boulder.

“We can dogleg around it.” Manuel pointed. “Through that gully—there.”

A rattling vibration came up through the crawler’s treads. The Sidon men clustered in the rear of the cabin and muttered to each other. Petrovich brought them clanking and roaring into the gully, swerving around a caved-in rampart of rock. Vapor poured from cracks in the gully floor. Steam hissed beneath them. The crawler’s lights winked on, cones of white opening to a dimmed infinity.

“This thing’s big,” Manuel said. “Maybe there’s erupting all along the mountain range.”

Petrovich thumbed on a satellite overview. In the visible spectral range the whole area was awash in smoke and clouds. He clicked to infrared: pinpricks of bright, violent activity all along their route. “Damn.”

“Look there. The ice—moving.”

The infrared image displayed velocity vectors in the valley floor. Arrows clustered at the center, snaking southward. “Pretty damn fast, too,” Petrovich murmured.

They lurched out of the gully into the open, caterpillar treads slipping in mud. Green vapor steamed from cracks ahead. For a moment a chance wind cleared the air down the valley. Silently the men watched a slow churning motion sweep rocks along. Blue-gray blocks of ice slid into view out of the low ground haze, sank, rose—and cracked apart with muffled crashes. Splinters speared upward and toppled. Crevasses groaned open and abruptly slammed shut. The ice heaved and thrust and was swallowed in turn by more ice sliding down from the far hills.

“
Madre de Dios
.”

“The whole region is out of balance,” Petrovich whispered.

He angled them along the valley wall, away from the grinding march of the ice. Above, the new volcano was wrapped in mist against a black sky. Through shifting clouds they saw ribbons of white water turn brown as they gathered up dust, and then plunge down to roaring rivers. The fluids ran off the hills and into yawning cracks in the fractured, shifting ice.

They topped a rise and crossed over into a side arm of the central valley system. “This way, we can try. See? No velocity vectors along this line.”

“Maybe it’s stationary?”

Petrovich raised his eyebrows. “Maybe.”

On a distant flank of the volcano the ice was pressing upward, driven by pressures in the valley below. It jutted up the raw black stone slopes, melted, vaporized, and then froze again as it rose, wreathing the peak in fog. Manuel could see the red flare of the cone’s summit, pulsing like rich arterial blood and bright enough beneath the pall of dust to throw crimson blades of luminescence down the shadowy, smoking slopes.

“I am afraid our Hiruko friends, they have miscalculated.”

“The fusion crawlers?”

“
Da.
It is a delicate game. To build the atmosphere, but at same time keep land in balance.”

“Maybe they made air too fast.”

“Is not the air, is water. This world is one spherical glacier, with nowhere to go, no place to run downhill. The ice cap, it rests on rock beds—rock from meteors, that sank partway down as the crust was freezing. Melt the ice, it relieves pressure on the rock. Rock then expands, opens up pores. Fine, Extra water from the melting, water that did not turn to gas, seeps into the rock. Rock acts like sponge. Hiruko was counting on the rock sopping up this water.”

“What if it didn’t?”

“You fill up the sponge, the extra water moves into the joints between rock slabs. Into fault lines. That much water moving down deep, the mass pressure, plus it lubricates the fault lines… Zip! Old cartoon of man stepping on a banana peel. Ice on top skids along on the water below.”

“Hiruko was doing it too fast.”

“A very difficult calculation. Many uncertainties.”

“Any more word from Sidon?”

“They are not bothering with us. They will not bother about the site either, for a while.”

Manuel said grimly, “I wonder what the Earthers make of all this.”

Outside, the volcano roared and fumed and sent its lancing crimson into the thickening shroud of dust.

They approached carefully across the broad plain. The ice mesa reared in the distance, its steep sides cut by slides and slumped terraces. Deep cracks laced across it. But the ice plain was firm and the crawler made good time. Behind the tiny speeding figure, an ebony volcanic dust cloud flattened as it rose into altitudes where the buoyancy of the thin air would not carry the particles. Soon it stretched from horizon to horizon, an immense black anvil.

“Don’t see anybody,” Manuel said.

“Probably inside the housing.”

Petrovich pointed to seven half-cylinders arranged in neat rows, their walls a crimped bronze. Two had caved in. Beyond them was a tall structure of girders, rods, beams, struts, and cross-supports. Shocked, Manuel realized that this was an outer frame for the Aleph. Through the web of metal he could see cool alabaster. He compared it with the last time, when he was hurrying and had turned and looked back, carrying Old Matt. It was in the same place, as near as he could tell, but the long shape seemed broader.

They throttled down and stopped beside the half-cylindrical huts. A lock opened and two figures came out, waving, beckoning them inside. Manuel carried in the medical pack. The first person he saw inside was Piet Arnold.

“I am so grateful that you have come on,” the man said, “rather than turning back to Sidon.”

“Your comm is out, except for the Mayday.”

“Ah, good—we did not even know if that worked. Of all our huts, the two that collapsed were the most vital. Terrible luck. Two died.”

“You got them cooled down okay?”

“Yes. You can take them back as well?”

“What happened to
him
?” Manuel gestured toward an Earther inserted halfway into the hut’s medmonitor, feet first.

“A broken leg, some blood loss. I am afraid the blow drove bone fragments into the muscle.”

“Painful. How’d it happen?”

“He fell from the scaffolding around the Aleph.”

“A monitor that size, not enough,” Petrovich put in. “Cannot remove deep fragments.”

“I’m aware you will have to take him back to Sidon. He should rest a bit first, however. And you will need to study the route back, I should imagine.” Piet spread his hands in smiling welcome. “You can surely spend a day or two here. We appreciate the company.”

Manuel studied the man. “We’ll be leaving tomorrow,” he said flatly.

“I am sorry your arrival has been in such dreadful circumstances. These events…” He shook his head.

Manuel grimaced. “Don’t worry about anything but setting up your comm again. That’s vital. Whole damn crust’s shifting, near as I can tell. You’ve got to stay in touch with Hiruko. Come on—I’ll start on it now.”

In the morning there was a hovering silence in the hut. No one was awake. Manuel got out of the fiber blankets as quietly as he could, dressed, ate a bar of food, and suited up. The lock made a lot of hydraulic noise as he went out, so he was not surprised to see another figure emerge from the hut ten minutes later. The man came trotting toward him, where he stood in the shadow of the Aleph.

Piet said nothing as he approached. The two simply eyed each other, and at last Manuel said severely, “Why’d you talk to me on the train?”

“You were a fellow passenger. You seemed lonely.”

“You knew who I was.”

“That does not change anything. You still appeared lonely.”

“You, Petrovich—I’m not going to tell you anything, you know.”

“Have I asked?”

“Look, it’s
dead.
Let it alone. Or at least let
me
alone.”

“Why are you so sure?”

Manuel blinked. “Sure?”

“That it is dead.”

“
Look
at it. We killed it, Old Matt and me.”

Piet smiled broadly. “Yes, do look at it.”

Manuel turned and studied the strutwork. “You’ve boxed it in.”

“To make precise measurements.”

Manuel sniffed. “I took its measure.”

“In a way, yes. One measure of it.”

“Nobody ever knew what to do about it. You read the records, right? It killed a lot of people in its time.”

“Yes. By accident, apparently.”

“Accident or not, we had to stop it.”

“Was that it?”

“Huh? Protecting people? I don’t know. I just came out here; it was… Ever’body… Every year we came out, the guys always talked about it…”

“Why? Why did you kill it?”

Manuel gazed at him without understanding. “Why? It… Look, you don’t know anything about this.”

Piet said, “You set about that comm repair like a demon. It took you nearly the whole night.”

“So?”

“As if you were avoiding something. Talking to me. Or coming out here to the artifact.”

Manuel glowered. “I came out here on my own just now.”

“Yes, alone.”

“Wanted to have a look at it. Got to be heading back soon. Want to start early. Could be a lot of trouble getting through, what with—”

“There will be time, I expect. From what I gather from Hiruko, these quakes are temporary phenomena.”

“Listen, don’t take that Hiruko flak for gospel.” Manuel moved restlessly back and forth. He paced in the shadow of the Aleph, a cooler zone cast down sharp and clear on the mottled, boot-trod ice.

Piet smiled again. “Shall we go in?”

“
In?
”

“You really should have kept up with the reports, you know.”

“You can go inside?”

Piet spread a palm toward the hulk inside the webbing of rods. “Four years ago a scientist from Hiruko found a peculiar wedge-shaped formation near the tail. Irradiated with neutrons, it yielded a high return flux. A method of resonance absorption—using neutrons of high energy—made the structure break down. The entire object unfolded. As if on command.”

Manuel frowned. “Thought it looked fatter.”

Piet raised a gloved finger. “There’s the point. It unfolded—the big blocks came crashing down on the ice—but as nearly as we can tell, the net volume of the thing did
not
increase.”

“Uh-huh. So?”

“The Hiruko people ventured in. Not far—but they retrieved a great deal.”

“Enough to get you to come out here from Earth.”

Piet nodded. “Yes. More than enough.” He extended his arm toward an opening in the rodwork. “Come inside. You, of all people, should.”

They walked in, stooping to get through the enclosure. “You wanted me out here all the time,” Manuel said. He was still confused and uncertain, and yet…and yet…however much he distrusted the man, Piet Arnold seemed to have a sense of the thing that he had not found in Major Sánchez or in Petrovich or even in his father.

He stopped abruptly at this thought. His father—and up from some recess came an outwelling of emotion that took him by surprise, filling his throat, choking off his breath. Emotions swirled in him, blotting out the present. It was grief and something beyond grief, a yawning abyss of loss and failed opportunity that could never be undone, a sense of passing, of moving finally beyond—

He gulped, and gave no sign of this, but walked on, following the bent-over form ahead of him.

They passed through a wedge formed of two huge alabaster blocks. A luminescence churned in the blocks, casting shadows on the taut tanned skin of his face. His boots went
chunk, chunk
into the ice.

“Damn big,” he said uselessly.

“You would know,” Piet replied, turning back, smiling.

They came out into a chamber of hexagonals. Here the light glinted from moving shards like mica. The ice floor was littered with equipment. Probes studded the smooth surfaces of the room. Meters and analyzers registered data with blue and green dials.

“We have made a thorough study here. The Hiruko data were of course essential. We knew what to prepare for. Thus, only a few days of more sophisticated observation have confirmed their results, and added a great deal.”

“Uh-huh.” Manuel stood, arms folded, looking at the dim patterns that formed in the deep slabs of the thing.

“It is, in a sense, mere stone. The lattice structure near the surface confirms that… But below…” Piet touched a control and the worn rock seemed to Manuel to peel away, revealing a mottled design.

“Below, it constantly remakes itself. The molecular composition changes. The blocks are always mechanically strong, surely—but constantly in flux. New compounds, new lattices. The basic crystalline design is none of the usual ones. It is a ragged, shifting thing of points and angles.”

“A machine that makes its own parts?” Manuel shrugged. “So?”

“But to remake its own molecular structure! Actually, if it were only that, perhaps you would be right—a truly sophisticated machine, an advanced technology, might very well do just that. But the molecular forms, we have found, readjust because the
atomic
structure alters. And the atoms change because the particles constantly shift and move and change identity. That is it—the steady conversion of matter into other forms, like something restlessly remaking itself, forever discontented—”

Piet broke off. “I can see you are bored by such findings. Perhaps it is best to simply let you witness.” With a gesture he dimmed the lights from the analyzers, and the walls gained new life. Manuel could see the shifting lights beyond the stone surface better now, and—