Against Infinity (25 page)

—fiery pinpricks wheeling—

—a warped mass of quivering lines, a silvery coiling, thrusting out toward him—

—dissolving suddenly into a billowing softness, green clouds scratching a ruby sky with a shriek—

—bright, quick, shiny surfaces—

—a scribble of sound, blurred—

—something running, so fast there was only the impression of size and speed and relentless desire—

—rotting pinks and greens, a stench of age—

—rasping, encrusted, heavy light—

—hair like snakes—

—explosion—

“Ah!”

Manuel wrenched away, covering his eyes. Yet many of the things he’d felt had come not through sight but through the other senses, taste and smell and sound and touch, stretching fine and firm as though he was experiencing them for the first time.

Piet said softly. “You see. I am sorry, but… You see.”

“I…”

“The endless change manifests itself at every level. To produce effects at our level of perception that, frankly, I cannot understand or even fully describe. What you cannot see is what this apparatus reports.” He waved his hands to take in the racks of equipment. “Down at the nuclear level, and even below that, the forces
themselves
alter. There is a thing called the electro-weak interaction. Several numerical parameters describe it—parameters we thought fixed since time began, since the big bang started the universe. We now know, because of Aleph, that they are not fixed. Here, they change. Always. Nothing remains, nothing is held constant.”

“How’s it hold together?”

“I honestly do not know. The artifact is like a Rosetta stone—you know some Earth history?—which recapitulates all the laws of the universe. Somehow, it knows how to
make
laws. There is a scheme to it, of course. As I interpret the data, the artifact seems to be saying that the physical laws were not always the same. When the universe was young, the laws were young. Now they are somewhat aged. Our fundamental constants of today will not always remain so. So natural evolution does not apply only to life—it applies to the laws of the universe as well. The
laws.
” Piet clasped his hands together. “I hope you understand what a profoundly unsettling notion this is.”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Perhaps you do not fully grasp the point.” Piet leaned forward earnestly. “You see, physics holds that particles are created by fields—the electric field, the nuclear fields, and so on. But suppose that there was something that created
laws.
What does that? How“—he seized Manuel’s arm—”how do you store the information that contains the laws? In the particles? But they are made by the fields, and thus by the laws themselves! Circular! How do you convey the information?
What makes the laws?
”

Manuel gazed at the walls, still flashing with color and light. “Well… I don’t…”

“Suppose the artifact is
in
this universe, but is not
of
the universe?”

Manuel shook his head, disturbed by the thoughts this man brought up. Piet at once saw his confusion and relented, backing away. “I am sorry.”

To cover his uncertainty Manuel assumed the gruffness he had used outside. “Look, why’d you show me this? I can’t help you understand anything about—”

Piet held up a hand, palm outward. “Come.”

On they went, through narrow passages of somber rock, up tight corridors, crawling through odd-shaped holes, down slides slick with ice. It seemed to Manuel that the Aleph could not possibly be as big as this, as complicated. The walls were dead cold stone and they stretched on, seamless, without end.

They reached an open corridor where Manuel could stand. Piet said conversationally, “Do you know who named it Aleph?”

“No.”

“Some Jew, I gather. An interesting choice. You know what it means?”

“First letter of the Hebrew alphabet, an uncle of mine said. He’s Jewish.”

“Correct. The interesting point is that it means quite a few things in the sciences. For instance, in geometry, it is written so”—he fetched a pad from a pocket and drew on it the sign
א
—“and means a point in space that contains all other points. All angles, all perspectives. And in another branch of mathematics, the number denoted by aleph null”—he wrote the sign
א
_o
—“is the basic transfinite number from Cantor’s
Mengenlehre
—a number which has the curious property that any part of it is as large as the whole.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps. Come along.”

They had to crawl again, and then inch up a cleft that seemed to be metallic. Manuel slipped on the slick mirror surfaces. Other rounded passages opened along the sides. A memory tugged at him. The walls reflected back his frowning, drawn face. The tube narrowed, and a glow from ahead grew diffuse and white.

“Here—get in front.” Piet pushed him ahead.

Manuel stood in a narrow space and looked around. Weak fields clutched at him, but could find no grasp. Ahead—

Something spun in a halo of light.

“Matt!”

He stumbled forward and hit cushiony air that yielded softly and then resisted. He fought at it but could not get closer.

The head was shadowed somehow, despite the white glow around it. He could not read anything in the face. One arm was upraised—in salute or greeting, he thought. Old Matt was not in helmet and suit, the way Manuel had seen him inside the Aleph before, but rather in loose-fitting coveralls. The body spun very gradually to the left, and then the shadows on the face lifted a little and he could see the lips were moving with aching slowness. Manuel tried to make out what the words were, but before the parched lips could fully close and define the movement, the shadows—
But shadows of what?
Manuel wondered—fell again on the solemn face that peered out, unblinking, pale and uncreased as though relaxed and pensive. Manuel remembered that dry voice saying,
Watch for me
as they had walked toward the Aleph with the e-beam, that last time.
Watch for me.

The body turned further. The diffuse halo glow was cast on the shoulders and back. Was the hand moving, a fraction of a centimeter? He strained to see.

Beyond it was something more. A vague figure of about the same size turned even more slowly, arms halfway raised at the elbows, dark running and swirling through the body so that only the outline was clear. In the fog of light he could tell this form was less detailed, blurred like a hazy image from only a fraction of a holographic print. It was helmeted, legs apart as though captured while walking, head turned—Manuel gasped. The light seeped into the veiled helmet and he saw just enough to catch the half-smiling mouth, the eyes—

“What”—he backed away—“what are these?”

“We were hoping you might know.”

“Me?”

“You saw something like this before? Petrovich reports that—”

“
Sí,
something. After we shot the Aleph, while I was inside it, I thought I saw Old Matt, but when I got outside… I…” He stepped back again, mouth rigid, grimacing. “That other thing. That’s
me
.”

“I believe so. That is why we so wanted to speak with you, to learn how these…copies…came into being.”

“I don’t know.” Manuel began to tremble.

“You felt nothing that time? Something holding you, extracting information somehow…?”

“No!” He retreated again, squinting, eyes fixed on the far figure. “Nothing.”

Piet said soothingly, “I urge you to think of this again, once you are through this first reaction. Consider—you are a Christian, are you not? Our files indicate so. Consider how closely linked the idea of preservation, of arising again in a similar but transmuted form—how closely linked this is in your culture. It is the Christian vision of resurrection and salvation. Also, it is the image of horror at the walking dead, the zombie. Try to think of it in the positive sense, if you can. I—”

“Let’s get out of here.”

Manuel stumbled away. Piet rushed after him, down another passageway lit by a flickering green glow. Manuel stopped suddenly.

“My God, what’s that?”

The bulbous, distended shape beyond had things like arms and a slanted head and long, spiky things jutting out from the eyes.

“Don’t go near it!” Piet called.

Manuel stepped closer against spongy resistance—and the thing turned abruptly. The huge head seeming to click forward in the harsh, blinking light. Sudden terror filled Manuel. He turned and fled, running straight into Piet.

“Come on!”

“No need. It is a bit of a shock at first. Here, this way.”

“What’s it doing here?”

“Staying where it is,” Piet said mildly. “Men are not the only beings preserved, apparently.”

“But that thing, where’s it from?”

Piet shrugged. “The classical definition of aleph, a thing that contains all other things…”

“In a place this size?” They were making their way back along a route he knew, and Manuel was calmer, beginning to think.

“Ah, but what is its size? That which appears to us from the outside? Or what we measure on the inside? A geometry containing other geometries…” Piet chuckled. “We have not yet counted all the passageways. There are many of them—or at least, it
appears
that way.”

.Manuel said nothing. He frowned and grimly forged ahead, his face unreadable. He was nearly to the next turn when the wall began to shake violently. With a loud crack the ice split under him. He fell through.

T
HE SPLIT WAS
deep. He grabbed at a jutting shard of ice and hung on. The stonework walls cast dim light down into the break, and he could see after a moment that it went down twenty more meters.
It’s started,
he thought. It was natural for the ice to split first under the greatest weight. The whole plain outside would go next.

“Here, let me help you,” Piet called. Manuel looked up. Piet was eight meters above. But the man was still judging heights with his Earth reflexes.

“Back away!” Manuel shouted. He swung up onto the ice shard. He gathered himself and then leaped the distance, even clearing the edge to land on his feet in the passageway. “Come on, we’ve got to break camp.”

“I’ll get the equipment in here,” Piet said, turning back.

“Leave it! This rock will be the first thing to go.”

Piet said firmly, “People invested immeasurable effort to make it and bring it here. I am obliged to see that their labor is conserved.”

Manuel put a hand on Piet’s shoulder. “Look, be sensible—” Piet brushed it off and walked away, not looking back. “All right, dammit—crucify yourself for your goddamn commonweal!” But Piet was gone before he finished the curse.

He found his way out alone. The ground was shaking steadily now, and the rock buttresses groaned and creaked. He had to crawl over a mound of ice in the last passageway. When he looked up, the plain beyond was a vast jumble of broken white and blue masses.

He stood up slowly, blinking, shocked. Every hut had collapsed. The crawler was gone. Three Earthers were picking at the wreckage of the bunk hut.

He ran to where the crawler had been. It lay at the bottom of a crevasse. It was on its back and the treads were broken, the chain parts scattered all down the thirty-meter drop. “Hey!” he called on general comm. Nobody answered. He switched to suit radio.

“—five of them under there. They had no suits on. Inbody medical reads negative on all of them,” an Earther voice said.

Manuel ran over to the bunk hut. “Where’s Petrovich?”

The nearest one looked up. “He was moving the crawler.”

“Damn. Probably unconscious. I can’t get in the hatch with it overturned.”

“Help us here.”

“Sure. Where’s your full medical equipment?”

“In the third hut, there.”

“I’ll start digging it out. You’ll have to cool all these guys down fast.”

So began a blurred, deadening time of hard labor. He helped uncover the bodies. They got several of the medical stations back in operating order. He saw Piet appear at the entrance of the Aleph, hauling equipment out and safely beyond. Manuel found working with the Earthers frustrating; they moved methodically but without imagination, meticulously removing the debris in an orderly way, not usually the fastest and most effective way. The huts had split and vented their atmospheres, pinning the inhabitants until they died, sucking vacuum. The three Earthers had been outside when the quake hit. Petrovich was outside too, heading for the Aleph after Manuel and Piet. He had tried to move the crawler away from a spreading crack, and failed.

Beyond, the valley churned with shifting ice. The shelf was beginning to flow southward.

They got the bodies sealed up all right, but some of them were badly damaged—snapped spines, guts spilled onto the ground, convulsive lung hemorrhage from the vacuum. Once that was done the Earthers themselves collapsed, not so much from fatigue as from the shock of it. They just sat down on the ice and refused to move, glassy-eyed, staring off into space. Manuel shouted at them, but it did no good.

He had to climb down into the crevasse by himself. He rapped on the crawler hull, but there was no answer. He figured a way to tip over the crawler body, using a hydraulic jack from the scaffolding around the Aleph. By this time he was working at fever pitch, taking each problem as it came and hearing or seeing nothing outside of it. He didn’t even notice when a good piece of the scaffolding folded up and collapsed, just after he’d pulled the jack out from under it. He wouldn’t have given a damn if he had. He had never liked Petrovich a hell of a lot, but if the man was dead you did what you could to save the body in time, before the damage from oxygen loss got too great. The biting Ganymede cold would help. If Petrovich had known he was dying, he could have vented his suit the right way, gradually, and chilled himself down without too much cell damage. Then the cold would stop the oxygen-loss damage. So Manuel worked with the jack and tried to turn the crawler over.

Twice the crevasse walls caved in. Snow engulfed him. Blocks of ice thumped by in the white swirl. He clawed his way out, tossing the blue ice chunks aside, chest heaving, sweating so much his faceplate fogged and he couldn’t read the angle and pressure settings on the jack. He got it wedged under the body of the crawler and turned up the power to full. That was enough to tilt it thirty degrees over. Manuel worked his way under it, knowing that if the ground shook again and threw the jack off balance the crawler would come down on him. He popped the hatch and crawled up through it. Petrovich was hanging upside down from the pilot’s chair. Manuel didn’t even look in the helmet, just pulled him down and threw the body out through the hatch. He jumped after it. Another quake started as he dragged the body away, and the crawler bucked over on its side and made a complete roll, coming after them. Manuel picked up Petrovich and jumped. He got halfway up the steep walls, hanging in air for a long moment, trying to figure what to do. The crawler tumbled over again below him and he had nowhere to go but back down. He landed on the turret as the crawler rocked over and tipped further and then settled down, nearly throwing him. He kept his balance and jumped again, this time getting a better purchase, and cleared the lip of the crevasse as big blocks of ice split off the walls with cracking, booming reports.