Against Infinity (27 page)

A geyser burst in front of him, spewing steam and hurling chunks of rock. He circled around, over slumped hills and folded ruins of mountains. He gasped, tasting the reek of hot bearings. It was hard to fall on Ganymede, but when a slab turned under him he did, twisting, stunned by the impact.
Bip bip bip,
they called to him, and he remembered the plaintive
ding dingding
that Eagle had tapped against its bars, a momentary reaching out that he had not had the sense or judgment to meet, to answer in the right way, and thus had lost the chance he would always remember—

He lurched up, blotting out the memory.
No.
The past was gone. He looked around him for bearings.

A towering mountain range had flattened, as if stamped down, into a shattered plain. From the edge of it he peered through shifting banks of fog and dust.

There—Sidon.

Cracks cut the eggshell domes. Dashing rapids crisscrossed the terraces. Wheat fields wore a pallor of gray, frozen. A column of oily smoke climbed from a reduction factory.

He hailed them for five minutes before they answered. The suit comm faded in and out amid a rustle of static, against a background of animal bellowings, wails, tight-voiced cries for help, and steady, mournful Maydays. The pockets of damp, flowering life sent their chorus across the cold and brittle vastness. A choked Sidon Central voice answered Manuel, took the coordinates of the site and the description of what they needed, and promised to relay word to Hiruko. In the chaos, no one knew when drones could reach the site and drop supplies, much less make a pickup from the splintered land.

“Come on in,” the voice said. “We need help. You’re twenty klicks out. Most of the way’s stable.”

Manuel remembered the bulging domes he had played under as a boy: the fat leafy greens that towered three meters high, and that you could pluck off and fold over, exposing the leathery spines that would slip free easily, leaving a floppy rich plate that, eaten last, would bring a sweet, heavy taste into the mouth. And the fruit hanging ripe and ready, bathed by crisp ultraviolet and gusts of fertilizing vapors, force-grown for Sidon’s own consumption, sought after by Hiruko but never shipped. And the rank musk of fat-marbled flesh, grown in vats. And the swarming aroma of fresh grains…

He thought of Sidon. Of moist, enveloping humanity.

“No. No.”

“What? Listen, I’m telling you—”

“They need me back at the site. They don’t know scat-all how to handle themselves.”

“We’re your people here! You get yourself—”

He turned his back on Sidon. The choked voice called out to him, but he kept on going—into the land that moved with a flux of its own, casting off with an immense shrug the hand of man.

The end was coming, and he should be at the site. A deadening emptiness formed in him. He had lost most of his past. Many of the hands that had guided him were now stilled forever. He was weary beyond the point where he could assess his own fatigue, yet kept on, fording streams and stamping heavily under waterfalls that broke over him in rainbows, scrambling up arroyos and down spreading fans of fresh-turned gravel and soil, little noting in the rush and roar the crumpled bodies of crawlies and rock-jaws strewn everywhere.

The land ruled now, not men. Its casual rippling had cast down his father into a laser’s path, and by so doing had begun Manuel’s own journey back to this place. Was it possible that, once the Aleph had stopped boring through the ice crust years ago, the gathering stresses were no longer relieved? So that killing it had brought all this on?

Manuel shook himself. That was crazy. Crazy.

Out here, forging some understanding was not a matter of guessing and then testing, like a scientist, but of listening; waiting; witnessing the slow, certain sway of worlds, the rhythms of gravity and ice, of warming and moisture and then ice again, thin onrushing air and dimmed burnt-golden sunlight, blunt masses and cold equations, smooth and unhurried motion—an old, necessary weariness that Piet had begun to sense. The Earthers around Piet were obsessed with death, with freezing themselves down and reaping the only reward a secular Earth had vouchsafed to them, the sole promise that society had to hold against the grave. But coming out here, seeing the revolving, shimmering things inside the Aleph, perhaps Piet had sensed another kind of promise, and without thinking of it clearly had allowed that to rule him at the end—had gone back into the Aleph to fetch some equipment, so he said, when something in the man had really been returning to a sensed completion, and so he had decided to take his stand there: a fervent hope that seemed to Manuel a blindness, a wish for translation, for Manuel wanted no refuge from this world of eternal cold, or from any other world—he had plans and ideas still, moored in the land and following its same hard destiny, unforgiving and irreducible.

He came down wrong on some gravel and twisted something in his knee. It began to swell up as he went on, and each kilometer became a torment. By the time he could see the site he shambled with a groggy, uneven pace.

He stopped several kilometers away and called over radio, “You look okay. Ice shifting any?”

“No. Not yet. The corpses are safe. I—”

“Good. Better not move.”

“We were afraid you would not return. I want to thank you for—”

“Yeah. Look, I’m going to scout the valley. See where it’s breaking loose.”

They were safe for a while. The floe would smash up soon, though.

He didn’t want to go into the camp just yet, didn’t want to talk. He was bone-tired, but he felt better out here. He walked, limping, trying to clear his head.

At first he did not feel the silent pressure underfoot. He stopped, knowing something was wrong.

Great ice cakes beneath his boots rose, creaking. Rock groaned. The whole mountain range was tilting.

There was no place to run to. The hill bulged more.

His own musky smell flooded his suit, sour and defeated. He sank to his knees.

Then it stopped. A sudden silence fell upon the wild and endless territory that stretched quietly in all directions: Ganymede as it had been in the formless time before, crumpled, fresh, without encrustations of man, barren and without life, a stage waiting for the ceaseless struggle between the slumbering, inert wilderness and the endlessly chewing chains of life—all witnessed by a thing that knew everything, contained everything, perhaps had made everything, yet went on mutely amid all the clash and clamor, immersed in its creation, running, perhaps pausing but never quitting, leaving a wake of wreckage that was tragedy to men but mere passing drama to it: a huge, undeflected, ghostly shape—

The swelling ice rose again.

He was on his feet now as he understood, and watched cracks forced wider at the center of the bulge. His mouth was open, breathing rapidly, a weight lifting from him and his filmed eyes grown brighter. Cracks forked from the tortured upthrusting mound. Ice fell away with loud crashes.

Manuel smiled.

Watch for me.

All those years, the men and animals running out here, roiling and heedless and joyful, and they never thought maybe it was drawing them out.

It was a different shape this time.

And as the first of the immense alabaster blocks broke free of the restraining land, showering stones into the air, he knew he would carry this, carry it on with him in the long decades of rebuilding and pain that must come now, through the heavy years of toil out in the territory, beyond the ever-reaching hand of man; the thought would come to him each day as he worked for his own undiminished destiny, or in the soft night when he lay with Belinda, or at dark moments when memory alone was all he had to sustain him—he would carry the certain sense that it was there, eternally, somewhere in the vastness, and he would remember.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

G
REGORY
B
ENFORD
has an established international audience for his articles, short stories and novels. Perhaps his best known work is the novel
Timescape
(1980), which won the Nebula Award, the British Science Fiction Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Australian Ditmar Award for International Novel. Other highly regarded works are
In the Ocean of Night
(1976) and
If the Stars Are Gods
(1975). Dr. Benford is Professor of Physics at the University of California, Irvine. He writes entries on Physics for the
Encyclopedia Britannica
, principally on his research interests, relativistic plasma physics and astrophysics.