Against Infinity (5 page)

He asked, “What about suit sound?”

“Nothing for it. Reverse osmosis is as quiet as you can get. Only thing we could do would be turn off the warmer, and this high your lungs would freeze solid in half an hour.”

Manuel nodded. They went on, walking now rather than loping, to keep down the clatter of rocks beneath their boots. Every few minutes his suit would exhale excess carbon dioxide it could not handle and the gas puff would snap loudly as it froze and fell to the ground. Otherwise a strange silence descended over the boy and he heard only his own breathing. His external micromikes did not pick up even a murmur of a breeze; the atmosphere was too thin here to carry enough. He toted on his back a new gun, given him by his father this morning: a double-bore fan laser, used for engineering back at Sidon. He had fired it only once, at a boulder, to learn the recoil and that it pulled to the left a little, as the Colonel had said.

They went two klicks, until the ravine gave out at a tilted sheet of ice, studded with red-gray rock. Old Matt said, “No point going more. Here’s where we separate.”

“How come? Won’t we be safer if we stick—”

“There’s no safe or not safe to this. It’ll run down two just as easy as one. You go over near that gorge, where the ice turns purple. Keep your back to the gorge. Not likely it’d come at you from that way. It’d have to come out of the gorge itself, and why should it go to that trouble when there’s softer stuff up here?”

“All right.” The boy hefted the double-bore.

“I’ll be a few hundred meters upslope. That way we get two angles on it, probably.”

“And if one of us gets hurt, the other likely won’t.”

“Yeah.” The old man peered at him, bunked with the copper eye, and smiled. “Turn off the short-range, too. Sometimes the Aleph, it gives off a lot of electromagnetic stuff. Just noise, the scientists said. I dunno. It’ll overload your set, though.”

“Okay.”

“And stay still.”

“And Slicky?”

“He’s a porpoise. Wrong instincts for this, never mind what they say about IQ-boosting making them the same.”

“He can distract it.”

“I kind of think that’s what we’re all doing, distracting it. At best. All right…” He bent down and told Slicky to take a position downslope of the two of them.

Manuel liked the first hour. It gave him rest and he became used to the utter silence. An occasional faint
ping
came as a grain of dust, falling in from some askew orbit around Jupiter, struck his suit, making it ring. The unending hail of high-energy protons could not reach him, though, through the tight-wound magnetic fields that blanketed his suit, the superconducting coils with their eternal currents brushing aside the deadly sleet. Old Matt had taught him how moving would in turn make magnetic ripples in the iron-rich rock nearby, faint surges that the Aleph could pick up, and so he stood absolutely still. Ganymede was swinging more into the sun now, and as he waited the dawn came on with infinitesimal slowness, gradually brightening the blue drifts of snow and pushing back the shadows. Above, the dark sky absorbed everything and would not yield. This high the atmosphere that man and his machines labored to bring had no effect and the land was as it had been for billions of years, inert and cold beyond any human sensing, yet with slow inevitable forces of its own that thrust up mountains and tortured the ice. It was in the third hour now and he was becoming tired, even though he had his knee servos on lock and was not carrying his weight at all. The boy felt he could sense the potential in the bulging rock beneath him, and the gathering strength it brought to even this high a place.

Only slowly did it come to him that the tremor and silent pressure was not from his thinking but was real, steady. He blinked and the rock was rising, shifting. Old Matt was a distant figure that had long ago blended into the terrain but now was waving, pointing at the bulge that grew in the ice sheet, and Slicky moved nervously, one foot forward and another back as the first crack came, a jagged line drawn quickly across the purple ice, widening even as it spread, snow tumbling in, and then a second crack and a third, as fast as he could see. Rock groaned under him and he brought up the double-bore, but there was nothing to aim for. The land had risen a full meter now. Pebbles and then boulders began to roll, slowly and then faster and then crashing down, smacking the ice and keeping on, some falling into the spreading web of cracks that split and popped and split again, boulders now tumbling into the fissures and wedging there. The growing yawning blackness echoed the emptiness of the dark sky. Manuel turned, holding the useless gun. He leaped out of the way as the rock split under him with a deep-bass snapping sound. Old Matt was struggling down the slope, trying to keep his balance. The boy yearned for a target, something to act against. Slicky yelped and chippered and began to run, away from the growing bulge that centered on the triangle made by the three of them.

Manuel stepped cautiously forward, toward the bulge. The land groaned and heaved, nearly throwing Manuel from his feet. He smelled the hot, coppery scent. Fresh gaps raked across the ice sheet and he leaped to avoid one. Slicky ran, its back to them, and did not see the crack coming. Blackness rushed under the slipping, frantic form and in one instant had consumed it, swallowing the steel and ceramic as though it were nothing and then moving on, the cracks stretching down the shallow ravine like ever-lengthening arms. And then—stopped. The grinding hollow noise that the boy had not separated from the other sounds now abruptly faded, and the ice ceased its motion, pausing, and with aching slowness then began to settle, subside, stones crashing again as it tilted, gaps narrowing, the bulge sinking back.

In a few moments it was gone. Manuel stood with his gun high and ready and waited, breathless, but there was nothing more. The fissures did not close up fully. He was still wary, studying the ground near him, when Old Matt picked his way to him and touched helmets.

“No short-range, not yet,” the man said.

“What… It, it never showed itself…just…”

“Sometimes it’s that way. It came to have a look.”

“But it never came out, never…”

“Doesn’t need to, I guess. It could tell we were up here and it let us know we had been looked at.”

“Slicky.”

“It got a morsel. I don’t think it came for that. Could be that’s what made it break off, even.” The old man shook his head. “No, that’s probably wrong. The worst thing is to start thinking about it the way we think about everything else. The worst.”

“Slicky was trying to get away.”

“Right.”

They went back down the ravine in silence, the boy’s mind aswarm with mingled thoughts and emotions and confusions of the two. Next time he would act differently, do something, find a way—but he could not think of anything he could have done otherwise, and the flat hardness of that fact itself made him feel better. Whether or not he did anything different, at least he was sure there would be a next time. It might come tomorrow or sometime beyond, but it would come, and in thinking of it he discovered something that absolved him of his fear, for there was no guilt in fearing what was beyond you and ran, blind and remorseless down through the years, shrugging off the mortal weight that a human had to carry. He tasted the coppery scent in his nostrils and knew it and was no longer afraid of that itself.

The reports came in from the other men and animals: plenty of scooters potted at and a rumble felt here and there, but nothing sighted, nothing engaged. He felt good about that too. It was arrogant to think he had been singled out, but he had been lucky—the dumb luck of the beginner. From now on he would not depend on luck. Someday he would see the thing, of that he was now sure. If it could be done by keeping on, then he would see it. Perhaps tomorrow and perhaps next week.

As it turned out, it was more than a year.

B
UILDING THE BIOSPHERE
was a long-term task, almost an act of devotion performed for the generations to come, and so it had an ebb and surge ruled by the abrupt necessities of the present. The asteroid economy was expanding and demanded ever-greater supplies of water, food, nitrogen, carbon. The asteroids were rich in metals, but had few of the carbonaceous-chondrite chunks that could make the simple compounds for life. Ganymede supplied those and food, ferried in huge robot freighters on minimum-energy orbits. The Settlements melted ice, separated it into usable fluids, and grew food, all in exchange for industrial goods from the asteroids and beyond. They also supported the labs and outposts around Jupiter and Saturn. So the work was always piling up, there were rush allotments and long hours, and Manuel was of an age now that meant he had to put in a full man’s hours even though he didn’t have the strength of a grown man. He learned pipe fitting and thermonuclear-hydro plumbing and worked just behind the construction gangs as they raised the new vapor domes. There was little time for potting at scooters, especially since the things were learning to avoid humans and were seldom seen now near the Settlements. The constant proton sleet made the mutation rate high; the rockeaters started showing big inflamed warts, and some began to prey on the jackrabs, finding some chemical addiction to the stringy jackrab flesh, and in turn working mischief with the delicately balanced and still experimental biosphere.

More than a year after his first time, the boy got to go out again on a pruning operation.

Petrovich and Major Sánchez led two separate parties, and they spent a good fraction of their time sitting at a makeshift metal table and playing cards and arguing over which territory to hunt the next day. Manuel realized that it was their arguing, a kind of comfortable trading of insults and timeworn political clichés, that bound them together, and that despite the occasional flare-ups they were good friends. The Colonel just smiled when their sudden arguments flared up. Petrovich had started to develop a potbelly, the kind of protrusion that on a strongly muscled man almost seems to be another source of strength, bulging down and resting on his belt. Major Sánchez made this a point of fun, and the two men spent themselves trying to outmarch or outshoot the other. They made a pair of hand pistols using plumber’s lasers and on the hunt would go off together to find scooters or rockjaw-muties and then would pot away at them, betting on the score.

Manuel was glad this kept them occupied, because he wanted little to do with the parties who went after the rockjaws. He had his own ends in mind and the parties made top much noise, were rowdy with the freedom of living under the empty black sky and not having to work, and got a goodly number of rockjaws only because the dumb things could hardly hear and ran only
if
they picked up the metallic slap and scraping of boots on rock. He told the Colonel and Petrovich that he would rather go after the scooters. There were far fewer of them this year. Fatal mutations had killed many, as Bio had predicted, and there was less ammonia in the runoff now. The theory behind Bio’s plan was that the atmosphere and ice fields would change more rapidly than the scooters and crawlies and rockjaws and the rest could adapt. They were temporary, self-liquidating species, designed for transitional jobs. The changing atmosphere and the greenhouse-induced rise in temperature would eliminate them before they became a problem. The final stage, when the atmosphere changed over to oxygen-carrying, would wipe the entire bioslate clean, leaving room for new species, quasi-Earth-like but able to tolerate the low temperatures. Then the entire moon would be farmed, with engineered fauna capable of withstanding high radiation and other threats.

The boy left each morning right after breakfast, shouldering the single-bore laser his father had given him. He would own it all his life and fire it nearly every year (with only one major six-year interruption), because the biosphere always needed pruning, and would replace the stock twice (once because he dropped it to save himself on a ledge of a crevasse) and the lasing tube five times, each time with a higher-power bolt-generating mechanism. For now the gun felt heavy and awkward in his hands, but he knew he would have to master it to have any appreciable firepower at all, though in truth he did not expect that for his ends mere power would make any difference. What he needed now was knowledge. He set out the first day with a cycle rider and went into the Halberstam Hills. He had not told them he would go that far, because he knew his father would not let him, not without more experience. He shot two ugly, mutated scooters that morning. The slowly rising temperatures had scalped the hills of their snow, leaving iron-gray massifs to poke at the banded crescent of Jupiter. He hiked into the hills, loping in long easeful strides, landing smoothly and navigating by the satellite-guide program he had bought for his suit. It took him three hours to find the narrow ravine where he and Old Matt had found the deep gouge in the snow. The ravine was hard to identify now because nearly all the snow and even some of the ice had been drained off by a stream that clattered with stones and had already cut a deep gorge. The rock here was mostly nickel-iron from some ancient meteorite, and it colored the stream a lurid rust. Slides now clogged the ravine. He walked through it three times before he found a slab of rock that looked somehow familiar. Near the base of it he saw the delta-print pressed deeply in, mute and indomitable, a testament to what was a mere passing moment in the movements of the Aleph but which would be here, sunken in hard rock and testifying, he knew, when he was bones and ashes.

On the second day he ranged in the region south of the hills, among the flow plains of purple-orange ice. He was learning the land without knowing quite how, simply by immersing himself in it and getting the feel of the vast flat plains, the hummocked and water-carved terrain, the stress-torn troughs and gorges and cañons where the melting of snow and ice had shifted weight and brought disruption. In one hollow where the thin winds twisted in a perpetual breeze, he found thin sculptures of blue-black ice, taller than a man, wind-carved, spindly, glinting in the wan sunlight.