Against Infinity (8 page)

The Aleph moved. The Barren barked and leaped against a crystalline slab, smacking into it, falling and floundering and rising again, furious but aimless. Manuel felt magnetic fields seize at him. Diffuse forces clutched and tugged, seeming to thicken the air in his chest. He ran after the yelping dog, head low, and the ground wrenched under his feet Above, a hexagonal pit in the side dilated. In its blue depths he saw movement, deliberate and carrying weight, like huge stones moving inside. It moved. Chunky blocks came smacking down, groaning, sending out forking white ray patterns in the ice under the boy. Cracks tripped him. The hexagonal opening turned abruptly black and squeezed down to fist-sized. He snatched at the dog and caught it, then lost it, then snagged a leg again, and was under the shadow of the thing now as it reared up—smelling, he sensed, of burning brass—towering as he had dreamed and thus familiar, any sound it made lost in the hysterical cries and yelps of the dogs. He closed his eyes and pulled back on The Barron. When he opened them, it was…gone. It had moved in a blur, into a bank of pink snow, Old Matt told him, faster than an eye could follow.

Again the boy thought,
I didn’t raise the muzzle of my gun to it,
and this time he knew why. If he did that, it would put him in the same class as the other legions who had gone up against it, generations that had plucked and shot to no effect. The Aleph would think of him that way; and worse, he would too.

The Barren wailed and struggled against the boy. Old Matt talked to it, and after a while the dogs quieted down and they could go on.

“That dog’s got everything a dog can have,” Old Matt said, “but maybe this needs more than a dog can give. Even a hyped-up dog that can do arithmetic.”

He shook his head, and the boy remembered that Old Matt came from a time when animals weren’t like this and lived only on Earth, where they had their old roles and were being squashed down into extinction, before the augmentation came along.

Manuel saw then that he had not found the quality that would make these times different, and single him and the dogs out from all the scientists and hunters who had gone before. There was something more needed. The Barren and, in fact, any dog would need a certain foolish bravery, yes—but more too; and the boy did not know what that thing was.

F
IVE MONTHS AFTER
Manuel’s second encounter with the Aleph, a rockhopper changed the fundamental economic balance of the outer worlds. She had been drifting from chunk to chunk in the asteroids, checking known sites to see if she could turn up traces of indium or platinum. She was a marginal operator. There was no prior claim on the rocks she visited, because they were worthless—jumbles of iron and other cheap metals. She found a cleft on asteroid MKX 349 that ran deep, and, curious, worked her way down it. She took her core sample there, boring farther in. Less than a hundred meters in, she found pure carbonaceous chondrite.

MKX 349 was moderate-sized, 9.6 kilometers mean radius. By some quirk of its formation, it had a sheath of low-grade ore wrapped completely around a core. That was why the immensely valuable center had gone undetected. There was enough carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen there to supply all the asteroid community for decades. They would no longer have to pay to have it shipped slowboat from Ganymede. They still needed food, but the loss to Ganymede was about 30 percent of their total export.

The Settlements were big farms which had made a steady profit from food, selling their already-separated fluids as a lucrative sideline. That trade trickled to nothing within a year of the MKX 349 discovery. Along with it went the little extras the Settlements bought to soften their lot They still ate well, but did without the latest 3D programs, Lunatic fashions for the women, and carbide-stressed additions to their tunnel-homes.

The long-term prospects were worse. With MKX 349 to mine, the McKenzie asteroids planned to begin large, whole-world farming. Whether they could compete with the Settlements would hinge on economies of scale and how well the Ganymede biosphere worked. Economists predicted a protracted struggle, decades long. The Settlements had the early advantage, and there were fair odds that they might be able to knock the McKenzies out of business if they improved their own profit margins quickly. Everyone knew this, and prepared.

“It’s not a matter of working harder,” Colonel López told his son, “it’s working smarter.”

“Don’t see why that means deffies.”

His mother looked up from her threading. “I do not like to hear that word in our home.”

The Colonel said sternly, “They are
not
deformed. They are men, women, children who have been unlucky. They were badly injured. Some even died for a while.”

“They’re in boxes,” Manuel said sullenly.

“Servo’d, yes.”

“Like animals.”

His mother said, “I do not want my boy to think of animals when he sees them. Suppose it was your sister—remember when she broke her leg on the tractor? Suppose it had been worse? She might be servo’d. And you would call her that name?”

Manuel pressed his lips together and said nothing. His mother spoke quietly, but for her to say that much meant a lot. He had better cut his losses and not mention the deffies again. Anyhow, he didn’t have to work with them. They were better than animals, faster too, and worked by themselves, the Major had said. He resolved to ignore them.

As it turned out, he couldn’t. One drew assignment in the same tunnel. That was not so bad, even though when it worked inside there was a rank smell from it unlike any animal he had ever known, and far worse. Even that he got used to. Then he got a call on his morning shift and was told to help out with a special job, this time outside, on the surface.

There was a carry-module standing on a splash-melted landing grid, the last of a cargo run from Hiruko Central. Old Matt was there. He waved Manuel over to the side of the module. The boy said, “We got to move that; I’ll get the forklift from—”

“Come here.”

There was a network of bars on the far side of the module. Manuel bent down and peered in and saw something red and gunmetal blue and coming at him fast. It was already in the air when he bent down, and it crashed into the bars. The whole module rocked. The bars of the lattice—which the boy saw were of steel, and a good idea, too—rang with the impact. Then it was down, scrabbling, and abruptly smashed into the bars again, without seeming to have taken any time to gather itself. It growled or spoke—he could not tell—and thrashed against the bars. Two blue servo’d hands gripped the steel and tried to tear it free. The thing grunted and heaved against it for a moment and then abruptly let go and crashed into the bars again, furious without letup.

“Back off,” Old Matt said. “Give it a rest.”

They walked away, followed by the steady, heavy thumps, the module shaking each time. “What
is
it?”

“Human. Badly damaged in some accident—up there.” Old Matt gestured toward the pinpoints of orbiting stations. “Been years getting it this far.”

“A
man
! I don’t—”

“Human. Could be a woman. Nobody at Hiruko said. He, she,
it
lost a lot of the left brain in the accident. Can’t talk. Sure can move, though.”

“What’s it like
that
for?”

“How’d you like to wake up, find out you’re going to be a side of meat inside a box all the rest of your days?”

Manuel grimaced. “Why in hell’s it here?”

The old man shrugged. “The Colonel made a deal. Traded some equipment we hardly use anymore, or can’t fix. Got back from Hiruko a bunch of work animals, and this.”

“
That’s
not going to work. Kill, maybe, not work. And a human. I—”

“Don’t try to think it through just yet. Make out like it’s an animal and you won’t be so far from the truth.”

“Why’d they let it live?”

“Don’t know. Medicine does a lot of funny things. I do know you can’t let a man die just because he’s not got enough of a brain to suit your taste. They do that back on Earth, but not out here.”

“Maybe we should too.” The crashing had slowed but not stopped.

“Not when they’re useful. The Colonel, he thinks we need all the hands we can get. Boost productivity.”

“That thing’s not useful.”

Old Matt’s face crinkled and his eyes moved liquidly, studying the boy. “I figure it may be important to us.”

“How? You’ll never get the murder out of that thing.”

“Maybe. Your father gave me the job because he feels it’s a long shot. Could be. But I figure the two of us can do it.”

“How?”

“Watch.”

Each day for three weeks they suited up and went out to the module and fed it. Manuel would climb up on the top and slap open the little door there and throw the thing’s food down. It couldn’t jump that high, but each day it tried, and when it failed would commence slamming itself against the bars again, adamant and tireless. It growled less as time went on, but it never let up its hammering at the walls. After three weeks it stopped leaping at him. It still stood watching, as if trying to figure out a way to get up there but knowing that it should save its energy when it would do no good. But then it would crash again and again into the bars as soon as the door clicked shut, as if to say,
See. See.
Manuel peered down at it in the brief moments when it stood still, glaring up with two wide-spaced black eyes. It was a hodgepodge of parts attached to a gunmetal-gray carapace, bigger than any servo’d animal he had ever seen and powerfully made, bristling with heavy motors and big treads and bulging manifolds. He could not imagine a man or woman deep down inside the thing, tapped into the metal world that had swallowed it whole, raging in an awful silent pocket somewhere. He waved to it once, and for the first time in a week it jumped then, stretching itself, arms tearing at the air, black eyes glaring. Yet after he had hastily—despite himself—slammed the door shut, the thing did not throw itself against the bars. It stood, staring out as the two men walked away.

Old Matt started to starve it then. He cut the ration to half and then a third. After two weeks it lay on its side and did not get up right away even when the food and water came. A week more, and Old Matt took a tractor beam in his best hand and made as if to go inside.

“Wait!” Manuel said. “I’ll get my father and some of the men—”

“If it hits me that’ll be too late already. Just slam the door after me and get back.”

Manuel did as he was told. The old man stepped into the big module from a side portal. The thing studied him but did not move. The black eyes followed Old Matt, gazing with an impersonal opposition to everything, silent. Old Matt approached and tapped the ice-crusted carapace with the tractor rod. No answering rustle from inside. But the thing ground its treads into the ice, shattering a crusted stump, letting the sound speak for it.

The next day Old Matt put his gloved hand on the carapace, closer to the thing. On the third day he beckoned the boy inside. They rested hands on it and Manuel felt a faint tremor, a curiously high kind of vibration without words or form to it but going on, making a cadence that was not that of some machine part but instead carried a feeling of sorrow and anger and yet wanting, too.

It was useless to try to talk to it. The medicos at Hiruko had tried. It wouldn’t answer. One of the Sidon specialists did a tap on it—Old Matt had to implant the probes; the specialist wouldn’t even go into the module—and shook her head, muttering. There was a strange kind of neural and cerebral activity, but she couldn’t make much out of it. “Obvious patho,” she said, and gave up. The file on the thing said nothing about what the complex tracings meant. Old Matt sucked at his teeth, thinking, watching the wavy lines on their scope. “I’ve seen men come apart when they lose a piece of themselves. This one’s not like that. This is something different.”

“Yeah, crazy.”

“Crazy like a fox, maybe.”

“What’s a fox?”

Old Matt just sucked at his teeth some more, the sound reverberating in his metallic face. Manuel persisted, “You think you can make it so it’ll work?”

“Don’t want it to work.”

“Well, then, let’s tell my dad and we’ll get rid of it.”

“Nobody’ll take it.”

“
Some
body’s got to. Hiruko can’t just stick us with—”

“There are things better than working, anyhow.”

The next day Manuel went out to see if the thing had enough liquids and power to run, which was one of his chores now, and it was gone. The cage was empty. He ran to tell Old Matt, but the man already knew.

“I let it go.”

“
Go?
It’ll run back to Hiruko or somewhere, we’ll never see it.”

“Maybe so.”

“It’ll kill somebody.”

“Maybe.” The old man would not say anything more.

But five days later it came back. It was worn out. The days in the open had run down its power reserves, and it was chilled. The life-support index showed the mass of flesh inside was healthy, though, and in fact had a better pulse rate.

“It’s fair rundown,” the old man said, “but gained a little body mass.”

“How’d it…” Then the boy understood.

“Scooters, prob’ly. Maybe jackrabs.”

“But that, that’s a
human
in there. Nobody’d stoop to eating
that
.”

“It doesn’t give a damn about human or not. Been too long by itself, sealed up in there.”

“Still, I… Jesus, how’s it digest that slimy stuff?”

“The techs insert a universal biotract in most of these. Simplifies the work. Just drop in a standard unit, hook it up, you don’t have to worry about what the animal’s supposed to live on.”

“It’s not an animal.”

Old Matt studied the form behind the bars, his face half-shadowed and sagging and folded with age, except where the timeless metal moved. “I don’t see a whole lot of distinction any more,” he said softly.

He took food into it and hooked up the charging leads to its back terminals. The black eyes followed him as he pushed the food closer, glinting and intelligent eyes that did not change or give warning before it sprang. It was weak, and the power leads popped free as it leaped, so there was not much energy in the attack. Old Matt brought the tractor rod around from the harness on his back, where it had been concealed. He caught the thing in midair. The rod mashed in its left buttress, and Old Matt turned to the side, almost like a matador, to let the shape rush past him, still in the air but now twisting and already doubling up with pain. It struck the ice heavily, landing wrong, and cried out—a strangled grunt of surprise and dismay. Old Matt stumbled out the door and slid it shut before Manuel could reach him, and the module rocked again with a heavy thump and right after it a crash and more thumps, rhythmic and shuddering, the way it was on the first day.