Against Infinity (2 page)

To Manuel it rose above the wilderness of ice and stone and became bigger than the barren blankness, more significant than this slate-gray moon that men had begun to scratch at. He had seen the ruts in the ice and even, once, clearly cut into the hard rock, a delta-shaped print the Aleph sometimes left, where an appendage that might be a foot or might be a kind of feeder—no one knew—bit down and took something from the soil wherever it went, moving by means that even high-speed cameras could not fix, gliding at times and at others just lumbering, seeming to shift the huge weight from side to side of the irregular chipped and scoured body, grainy and yet unlike rock in that its color changed through the years, so that the old prints showed a custard-colored wedge of fast-moving luminescence, and then as the men tracked it better and brought faster optical instruments and the scientific teams came down from the research satellites nearer in to Jupiter, they got it more firmly fixed. It was bigger than five walkers together and used many things to move: quick, strong leglike extrusions; electromagnetic repulsors that sank fields into iron-rich meteor fragments and hurled them behind it; hole-borers for traversing the ice; a thing like a propeller that would carry it into the deep slush and liquid that lay beneath the seventy kilometers of sheet ice that encased Ganymede; treads on one side; levitating fields—all used when needed, carrying the thing stolidly through gangs of hooting men and packs of servo’d but useless animals, through metal and rock as though they were butter, through teams of scientists with carefully wrought deadfalls and immobilizing streams of electricity, through generations of futile plans and expeditions that tried to study it, slow it, stop it, kill it. Revenge was a part of the legend, debts that needed payment for Settlements ruined and limbs severed and lives wrecked and torment suffered, human misery spreading endless in its wake. But after generations the scientists discovered more interesting artifacts on the moons far out from Jupiter—or at least less dangerous ones—and they went there to study things that did not move or hurt or shrug them off. The Aleph was beyond them and they invented a theory that it was a mindless marauding thing, damaged but still dangerous, fulfilling no function beyond naked existence, left over from the millennia when the still-unknown aliens came. The aliens had built a mechanism for seeding Jupiter with simple, edible life—reworking whole moons, laying down a foundation for some future use that had not yet come. Once labeled, the inert artifacts could be forgotten by the men and women who struggled to live on the moons. They were alone at the rim of the human universe, pressed against an infinity that did not bear contemplation. The scientists left the Aleph for a later time, perhaps hoping it would simply wear down and die and become a safe numb object for study, like the rest.

Petrovich called out to him, “Hey there, little López! Let’s us see some frittins, hey?”

Manuel went to help with the food. He didn’t mind work. He knew that was a quality which would get him through times when merely being clever would not, so he bore down on that and made it his own. Hail rattled on the hull of the crawler. He watched the landscape as he worked at cutting the stock tubes of vegetables, feeling the warm kitchen blower while outside a slow drizzle came in from the north. This was the way he would later remember going into the wilderness for the first time: an endless oncoming wall of water, hail and ammonia drops—less ammonia now than years back, now that the scooters were eating it and farting out water-soluble compounds less hostile to man. The sun was rising, only twelve hours into the week-long extension of Ganymede’s “day,” stretching blue shadows across a flat vast crater bottom. He was in the lead crawler, which except for its creaking seemed suspended, as a sole boat hangs alone on a placid sea and awaits the tide. The crawler rocked the way he imagined ships did, though he had not seen an ocean and never would. Old Matt came forward to get some soup and saw him watching the far rim of the crater come nearer, seeming to rise up out of a blank flatness and throw arms out to embrace the small party.

“You brought the potshotter.” Old Matt did not make it a question. He had the quality of knowing the way things would be, no matter how small, so that his questions were just statements that you acknowledged with a nod.

“No good against it,” Manuel murmured. “Don’t know why I brought it.”

“Practice. Always you need practice. The shot will be no use, but the aim is.”

Petrovich overheard and called, “Don’t tell us you think you get a chance so soon? I am laughing. Only I should be crying.”

Manuel said, “Come on. I didn’t mean—”

“Sure you did! Ever’ boy comes out here, he means to
kill
it. Only, you lissen to me.” Petrovich leaned forward, bottle on his knee, the air rank with him. “You’ll freeze solid as iron when you see it. Which won’t be for long.”

“Microsec, maybe,” Major Sánchez murmured.

“Right! But lissen. Be lucky if you even
see
it.”

“I know.”

“It comes,
zap
, it’s gone.”

Old Matt said softly, “Not always.”

“Oh, sure! Sometimes it takes its time, tramples somebody.”

“Not what I meant.”

“Not true, anyway,” Colonel López put in. “It doesn’t hurt people on purpose. The statisticians showed that.”

“Lissen, it’s a lot smarter than those statis—statis—” The green-and-brown liquid had hold of his tongue. Petrovich blinked and closed his mouth and let the smeerlop work on him.

“No sign it’s smarter, none at all,” Manuel said.

“I think the point is that we are not out here to settle the question,” Manuel’s father said clearly. He was the leader and it was up to him to put a stamp on the conversation. “We are to test the new mutations, prune them, and perhaps to take some live samples.”

“Or dead ones,” Major Sánchez said.

“True. Or dead ones. But you all know the Survey does not permit hunting for sport.”

“Plenty crawlies,” Major Sánchez whispered, so that the words could be heard but did not have to be acknowledged by the Colonel.

“Crawlers are still needed. There is a lot of rock for them to break down.” The Colonel turned to Sánchez. “We shoot only muties,
sí?
Not good crawlies.”

“Hey no, I was just thinkin’—”

“Think otherwise,” Colonel López growled, and the talk was over for a while.

They went on. Over the ruined, once-jagged ramparts of the ancient crater. Through a wrinkled valley of tumbled stone caught in russet snowdrifts. Across a jumbled plain, still pitted with craters that the thin, warming atmosphere had not yet erased. And finally to the first camp, the boy passing through the wastes as though they were opening momentarily to accept him and then closing behind him, sealing the lip of the world so that in all directions there was only the splotched ice, rocks nested in the hills, and the steady hail and rain that brought to this moon the first hint of what having air would mean, when the humans were through. None of this was strange to Manuel, since he had often thought of it and sensed what it must be like. The camp was a rambling shack, with seams welded crudely and compressors that grunted and whined into life. It took hours to warm it up, and he labored with the rest to patch fresh leaks and fix circuitry, all with the odd seeping sensation of foreknown acts, of living something he already knew. He ate the field provisions the men swore over, but he found them tasty, different from the Settlement ration, gamy with spices the Cong cook put in. He slept in rough-fiber bedrolls left over from the days when they had killed the heat at night to save ergs, and found them warmer than his bed at home. The shack snapped and popped with the cold relentlessly seeping in. He felt it as a weight trying to crush and break through the thin layers men carried with them. It kept waking him. A thin wind moaned at the corners, and he listened for the sound of something else beyond it, and while he strained to hear he fell asleep. After a timeless interval morning came. The men began to grunt and cough and started to finally get up and stamp their feet to bring the circulation back.

F
OR BREAKFAST THEY
had sharp-root and coffee and lurkey. The heavy smells mingled, stirring Manuel’s stomach until it growled. The lurkey was good—thick slices cut from the old slab at Sidon, meat that still had cells in it from the first turkey to survive the voyage out. For years the original Settlement families from old Mexico had lived on it and very little else.

The men ate with concentration, smacking their lips and hardly talking, until the Colonel started outlining the day’s jobs.

Petrovich murmured, “I rather throw sights down on crawlie mutations, Colonel.”

Before Colonel López could reply, Major Sánchez said irritably, “You heard what he said last night.”

“Uh. Cannot remember it.”

“You remember pouring smeerlop down that gullet, eh?”

“Best Swedish stuff. Trivial alcohol content.”

Major Sánchez grunted. “Nice word, ‘trivial.’ Means you got it—
cojones
—you got no worry. If you don’t—”

“Lay off him,” the Colonel said mildly.

“I don’t want Hangover Head here shooting at crawlies around
me
.”

“I say it again, for last time.” The Colonel’s voice had a firm edge to it. “Scooters we’re paid to prune; scooters we do.”

Petrovich muttered, “Ugly things. Centipede with armor, color of pile of shit.”

Major Sánchez said, “Hiruko makes ’em to work, not for pets.”

“Ever smell one? Get some on your suit, come back inside, make you puke—”

“You can get sick on your own time,” the Colonel said. “We’re not paid to criticize.”

Major Sánchez laughed.
“Sí,
or we might remember those street cleaners you wanted Sidon to adopt, eh Petrovich?” There was low chuckling around the table. “Big as bear, knock over people to get trash—”

“We can get started now?” Petrovich said abruptly, standing up. “Too much dumb talk.”

They spread out from camp, into the territory south of Angeles Crater. The Colonel supervised the sample-taking, which was fine by the men because that was the worst job, dull and methodical, and they got enough of that kind of work at the Settlement. They went after the scooters. BioEngineering had put out a Spec Report on the long crawly things five months back. Scooters had been designed to soak up ammonia-based compounds and digest them into oxy-available ones. They searched out their foul-smelling foods in streams and pools, or chewed ice if they got desperate, and then shat steady acrid streams that Bio said would be good for plants and even animals in the long run. Trouble was, the scooters’ long-chain DNA didn’t make good copies of itself. They mated furiously. Half of the broods lately were deformed, or demented, or didn’t eat the right compounds. Bio was picking up variant, unwanted varieties living off the shit of the others, like pigs rooting through cowflop.

There were two ways to counter that. Bio could make a new third animal that would compete with the warped scooters. That would introduce a further complication into the biosphere, with further unforeseen side effects. On the other hand, Bio could hire the Settlements to knock off the mutations by hunting. The Colonel had gone through negotiations with Hiruko, the central authority on Ganymede. The bookkeeping between Sidon and Hiruko was complicated. Manuel could remember his father staying up nights at the terminal, frowning and pulling at his mustache and swearing to himself. When the boy saw his father that way it was hard to think of him as the Colonel, a distant figure who commanded an automatic respect in the Settlement. Manuel unconsciously felt that it was his father who fretted and worried late at night, and another figure entirely, the Colonel, who finally made the deal with Hiruko Central. He had gotten a fair price for Sidon to go out and hunt down the muties. The hunting won because it was cheaper than engineering a third animal.

That morning Manuel went with Old Matt, who was slow and had the patience to teach. A walker dropped them off fifteen klicks from the base shack. They got out in an ice arroyo. They bent over to secure their vacuum seals, and a fog rose around them as the walker thumped away. The thin air was thick with rising orange fumes as the midget sun struck the far wall. There was not much life here, only some rockjaws scraping at gravel. They were like four-legged birds with chisel beaks, pecking away at ice, swallowing automatically, animals like engines, beyond the time-locked dictates of Darwin. They had few defenses against predators; the awkward gray forms did not even look up as the humans clumped by. They scattered, though, when Old Matt scuffed up pebbles; they were blind but could hear dimly through their feet.

Manuel saw the first scooter, but it was all right—normal, a low, flat thing with crab legs and a mouth that was a blur as it slurped at a runoff stream. It ignored them. They marched for an hour without seeing more than gray sheets of rock and ice and a gully scraped out by a fusion crawler years before and now run dry. The hills slumped down and the valley bled away into a plain and there they found a flock of scooters, all furiously sucking at the ponds of condensed vapor far back in the blue shadows. It was a quiet, placid scene. Old Matt pointed. Far away, skittering among the hummocks, Manuel saw pale yellow flat shapes.

“Bring up that potter gun slow. Slant it up and stand fast.”

“Pretty far off. I don’t think I can hit ’em.”

“They’ll come to us. Following the normal ones, so they got to pass by over to left. Stand still and they won’t skit off.”

Sure enough, the low fast forms came, dodging among the normal forms, eager amid the rocks and ice bulges. There were five, all marked a little differently with red and black stripes and dots. They jerked with energy and random momentum.

“Fast evolving,” Old Matt murmured softly. “Got their own mating crests—see, on the first one?—and look at the steam rise from that shit of theirs.”

It was a pearly pink vapor. “Converting the scooter crap back into ammonia-based?” Manuel asked.

“Or worse.” Old Matt eyed them. “You take the last one.”