Against Infinity (14 page)

Manuel hesitated, wanting to follow the swarming, shouting crowd that pursued. Old Matt did not wait for him but went bounding up a hillside. Manuel ran after him. The old man moved slower, but chose his short leaps well and made good progress. The boy saw that this way took them through an easy pass, then over a ridgeline and along rumpled shelves of ice. Within moments he could no longer look back and see the valley floor. The e-beam threw him off balance as he ran through a clogged narrow gully. Then the two of them were headed down again, landing in slide cones where the dirt and gravel cushioned their falls. They plunged on, slipping on half-thawed ground, splashing across a brook of water with cakes of frozen ammonia in the shallows, then scrabbling up the bank and on. Manuel heard Old Matt’s long, rattling gasping over the comm. They came out at the base of a long, high cliff. It was mostly rock, streaked with rusty seams and patches of conglomerate—pebbles, ice chips, lumps of gray metallic ore.

They stopped there. Old Matt bent over, hands on his knees, coughing: slow, dry barks from deep in his chest.

“You, you want to go on? Maybe ease up, wait for the crawler? I can—”

“No. Wait. Wait here.”

The old man would say no more, just bent over and waited for the wracking cough to pass. Manuel cursed himself for giving up a chance at a shot, a last minute or two of opportunity, to come here. Probably Old Matt had meant to get a better angle on the Aleph as it neared the hills, to be able to shoot down on it where it might be less protected. But they’d got mixed up in these ravines and gullies and couldn’t even see the plain. The Aleph was gone from the valley now for sure, vanished, so even if he went back it would be too—

The cliff shuddered. Stones fell and dust billowed. A tremor. The cliff exploded, showering them with pebbles. The tubular snout came first, grinding stone, extending out into empty space and then flexing down. The huge body followed, snaking, carrying fragments of the rusty rock. Its skin swirled now, patchy with blurred blues and greens deep in the amber. It erupted from the cliff in a last cascade of dirt and ice, and descended to the flat plateau, still riding an insulating meter above the land.

“Je—I—How’d you know it was comin’ through to here? I thought—”

Old Matt waved the question aside. “Different,” he said hoarsely, still panting heavily. He pointed. “It’s different now.”

“You mean the colors? I don’t see…”

One of the patches resolved, solidified, darkened. It became a hole and the hole widened and something moved in it, and abruptly the boy saw that the thing coming out was Eagle. The head worked free and then the hulking shoulders. Eagle struggled against the irising lip, silent, and the wide-set black eyes locked on the men, not to ask for aid but as a remorseless mute statement it chose to make even at the moment when it surely felt what the men could see—the suddenly constricting grip that folded its left shoulder, buckled the main housing and the steel manifold, breaking the spinal reinforcement, crushing Eagle’s big treads that ground against the amber walls. Only near the end did Eagle’s hands stretch out and flail against the side, futilely, without hope but without surrender. Manuel stepped forward. Old Matt put a hand on his shoulder. Eagle struggled on. The great neck snapped. The eyes went blank. Eagle’s head lolled, and Manuel again stepped forward. The opening convulsed once, twice, and then the third time, with a slithering sound, it swallowed Eagle’s body whole.

“I—I—Damn! It just—” The boy shook with rage, crying out to no one but himself. “Eagle—got in—It didn’t have to—Damn! To just—Damn!”

The Aleph moved, coasting toward the south, still floating a blithe distance from the ground.

“Eagle got in, had time to do some damage, maybe,” Old Matt said. “That’s what made the colors, made it open up those spots again.”

“Yeah—yeah—” the boy gasped, mind churning. “To, to kill Eagle for, for—”

“Don’t you worry about that end of it. Eagle didn’t. You saw the look of him right there, the last second. Looked the same as ever. Mean as he ever was and not regretting it.”

“I don’t see…”

Old Matt gestured. “It’s moving off down that way. Look.”

Manuel studied the massive blocky shape, working its wedge-shaped collars and buttresses against each other as it glided, soundless and unhurried. Its surface still roiled with blue-black marks that came and went, and as he watched, one irised open.

“Still not done,” Old Matt said. “Let’s go.”

They began to run again.

O
LD
M
ATT WENT
slower now. As they loped down a ravine the boy could see the lines of strain in the old, worn face. Their slick suits bunched and stretched with amplified strength, and Manuel saw the power gauge on Old Matt’s back register nearly two-thirds gone. They scrambled over outcroppings of layered stone—rock laid down in the first days when Ganymede’s raw crust was melting and freezing and remelting under the long hammering, when Jupiter glowed with its own accreting fires, and on the moons brief waters flowed to form fast-dying, steaming seas. They had to go slow on the slippery hillsides. The Aleph steadily widened the gap between them. Manuel checked his overlay and saw they were running parallel to the main valley. The blue shotgun pattern of dots told him the main party was spreading through the neighboring arroyos and cañons.

“Funny it doesn’t burrow in,” he called to Old Matt. “Never saw it aboveground this long before.”

“I have. Twice.”

“Figure it’s having fun with us?”

“Doubt if it knows what we are, even.”

“It knew Eagle, all right,” he said with sharp pride.

The old man panted into his suit mike. “That it did. That it did.”

He watched Old Matt as they loped after the serenely coasting ghostlike form. There was something in the old face now. It was neither excitement nor eagerness nor hope. Years later, when he was a man, the boy would realize finally what it had been: a blend of foreknowledge and a certain deliberate, grim determination. Old Matt had known something unspoken, back then when he first saw Eagle, and had made of the furious burning anger in Eagle something that, fashioned, could reach farther and strike at something in the Aleph. He had known and been pulled forward by the knowing, giving himself each year to learn a little more.
He had no share, no fraction of a Settlement,
Manuel would think then.
There were children, his own from decades before, but all of them scattered to other outposts or even back Earthside. That part of him was dispersed. He had spent his time and his substance in the orbital labs or on explorer teams or at Titan and Saturn when they were just opening it up out there. So he had never posted a bond or filed a term agreement and affidavit of intention, and so had no part of the land that he could nail down or lay claim to. He could live and work and earn in Sidon, at fill-in jobs; he even had a vote, but still was not a commune member and in sum had nothing of the territory other than what he sensed of it. He had known it before a foot had fallen on every hill, before centuries of brawling humanity wrote their name across it with Settlements and Centrals. But despite all that, he returned again and again to the land beyond man’s enclaves, still felt its emptiness and unresolved potentiality.

Manuel called to his father, got an answer he could not understand, and ran on. Then the Aleph dove into a hillside. It did not pause or even slow, just necked into a wall of ice and through it, boring on with a grinding and a booming.

“Hell! It’s going under!” Manuel shouted, and slowed, but Old Matt said nothing, just kept running down the cañon. Manuel paused, panting, watching the last of the Aleph disappear into the still-splintering ice, tumbling boulders from the hillside, making the ground tremble and buck.

He heaved a sigh of defeat and slapped his side in irritation. He had lugged the e-beam this far and never fired it. He swore at his stupidity. He was starting to tire, and the best chance yet, the best chance he had ever heard of, had dribbled away, with never the right angle or distance for a decent shot. Maybe he should have fired anyway. Then at least he could have said he had done something, given it a try. But even as he thought it he knew that was bullshit, that shooting not for the target but for the talking afterward about it was wrong and would make the whole thing taste cheap in his mouth for a long time after. So he just stood there and swore.

When he looked around after a minute, the old man was clean gone. He checked the overlay and set out after him, feeling even more stupid than before. Old Matt’s blue dot was angling around a bunch of low hills. Manuel set off and ran hard. He took long, high leaps, depending on his gyros to get him oriented right before he landed. Once he came down amongst a pack of rockjaws. They scattered in mad flight, though the boy hardly saw them. In five minutes he had nearly caught up with the figure, was only a few hundred meters behind, when a hillside broke open and the Aleph erupted from it, moving as before with that constant, indifferent gliding velocity.

“Manuel!” It was his father. He looked to the north and picked out the swift figures of the main party, converging. “We guessed you were following it. Last we saw, Eagle—”

“I know. Eagle’s dead.”

There was talk from the men as they came loping across the broad flat land. Manuel automatically waited for his father, loping a little to the west to keep near the Aleph, which was speeding on. More than ten klicks away an ice mesa reared up in its path, sunlight catching the ruddy peaks. The Aleph might be heading for it or the mesa might just be in the way, but if the Aleph bored through it the men would have to take a long route around, and Manuel knew Old Matt was not up to that. He was getting tired now too. Over the comm he could hear panting from the running men.

“It’s movin’ pretty damn fast,” a voice called.

Another said, “Yeah, looks to be pickin’ up speed.”

“Too fast. You,
los ricos
wi’ your extra servos, maybe you keep up wi’ it but we can’t—”

Petrovich shouted, “You wanting to drop out, go back get crawlers!”

Some swearing.

“You guys been jawing while this boy’s been runnin’ down the damn thing.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Uh-huh, just a kid.”

“The old man too.”

“
Sí
, they been showin’ us their heels all day.”

“Come on, you bastards!”

“It’s only got a klick on us.”

“Not gonna let that old man run you inna ground are ya? Ha?”

And the straggled-out bunches of men pulled together and began to run again in earnest, filling the comm with their harsh taunts to each other, their heavy gasping breaths as some sped out in front, spilling pellmell across the plain, their clamor and din swelling as ceramic and steel scraped and joined, propelling them on in a wedding of man, machine, and movement.

“Don’t let the animals near it,” Colonel López shouted. “They’ll get snapped in pieces.”

A voice grunted, “Damn sure I’m not goin’ ’at close either,” and a chorus of agreement came.

Major Sánchez called out, “Try to turn it!” though how anyone could do that he did not say, and no one asked.

By now the boy had caught up with Old Matt and saw the leathery face turn toward him, eyes bright, a thin, dry smile on the lips, the copper of his cheek flecked with sweat. “You’ll have to…hit it…on the run,” the old man called out.

“How? I—I—Those openings are small. I—”

“Get up close,” was all Old Matt said, and then they both landed at the end of a leap and were off again, coming up alongside the smoothly gliding form. Manuel watched the crackling magnetic flux fork and dance around it, and studied it for advantage. Pockets opened and closed, but too fast for him to do anything about them. Eagle had been faster. Eagle had known the vulnerable warpings and had used them instantly, without the numbing fear that came on him now, a spreading chill that robbed nerves and muscle of vital split-seconds.

“Stay back from it, son!” But he pressed forward as he saw a blue whirlpool-like splotch form near a tangle of arcing red magnetic field lines. He raised the snout of the beam projector and as the blue melted into greenish dabs he fired. The bolt cut a slim, impossibly straight line through the thin air, landed with a shower of orange sparks, a full three centimeters wide of the mark, and flew off to the right, harmless.

“Ah!
Ah!
” he spat out in self-disgust. And fired again. This shot came nearer but still richocheted off in a flower of sparks, some of them glancing off the boy’s arm, he was that close.

The Aleph was like a moving building to the boy, and he jumped back as it turned first toward him, as if to shrug him off one of the huge shoulders, and then away, rising a meter more from the ice. It towered over him, and the blue-green vortex faded. He refused to give ground. It accelerated away and the boy was after it in three fast leaps, eyes searching, Old Mart’s voice in his ear: “We got to turn him more!”—and the boy saw the old man was on his left, craning his neck to look at the underbelly of the thing. The grainy amber roiled with flecks and seams of washed-out colors, as if something liquid churned just inside the skin, but the ponderous blocks looked solid and hard like deep rock too.

“One’s starting over here!” Old Matt called, and lunged forward, pointing at a vortex swirl of mottled colors. A condensing magnetic knot came out of the whirlpool and struck him in the chest, and he went down. It laced up his chest and around his head, a snakelike swarming tangle of interthreading ruby flux lines, arcing and licking at him. Manuel saw him slump and go on his knees. But the boy also caught the vortex colors deepening and swung the snout toward them. He fired. Missed. Thumbed the stock to recharge the capacitors. And looked for Old Matt. The magnetic knot had started to ebb, withdrawing into the Aleph. Old Matt was still down, not moving. The boy leaped forward, further under the vast weight that worked and labored, and raised the projector again and shot directly into the thing at close range, the quick yellow stream crackling as it found the entrance. The churning dark colors sopped it up. It was swallowed, gone, the whole bolt sucked in. Manuel backed off, gasping, and the Aleph smoothly kept on. He saw he had done nothing. He dropped the projector and bent over Old Matt, who was on hands and knees and gasping, eyes closed, mouth open and salivating.