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  Praise for

  AGAINST INFINITY…

  “ENGROSSING…typical Benford virtues…a gritty, three-dimensional future, a believable hero, and a real flair for the alien… Benford evokes the mystique of the hunt and the link with the prey—an element of American literary tradition rare in SF.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A confident grasp of the workings and consequences of biotechnics, a gift for action scenes, and an ability to conceive of a creature as awesome and wondrous as his Aleph. A WORTHY SUCCESSOR TO TIMESCAPE AND A MUST FOR THE SF COLLECTION.”

  —ALA Booklist

  AGAINST INFINITY

  “GLOWS WITH A RARE IMMEDIACY AND REALISM, WITH SPARKLING DESCRIPTIONS, VIVID DANGERS, AND A CONVINCING ALIEN-FRONTIER CAST AND AMBIANCE.”

  —Kirkus

  “Not since Ahab thrust his lance at the lightning and swore the white whale’s doom have I read anything much like it… BENFORD HAS JUST BEEN GETTING BETTER AND BETTER.”

  —Algis Budrys

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Sections of Against Infinity appeared in the February and April 1983 issues of Amazing Science Fiction Stories.

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020

  Copyright @ 1983 by Abbenford Associates, Inc.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 82-19324

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Timescape Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020

  ISBN: 0-671-45901-5

  First Pocket Books printing March, 1984

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  To

  JAMES ALTON BENFORD

  Contents

  Part I – BEYOND SIDON

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Part II – ALEPH

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  Part III – LONG PURSUIT

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  Part IV – HIRUKO – Six Years Later

  1

  Part V – COMING HOME

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Part VI – ALEPH NULL

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Part I

  * * *

  BEYOND

  SIDON

  1

  THEY WENT OUT from Sidon Settlement in a straggling band, clanking and crunching over the hard-packed, worn-down purple plain. The ice near Sidon had been melted and frozen and remelted again and again by orbit shuttle landings and by the heater exhausts of passing crawlers, so that now it was speckled and mottled with rainbow splashes and big blotches of contaminants. Out over this crusty trampled ice they went, carrying the boy Manuel. Inside their wheezing and huffing machines they sang and shoved each other and early got into the smeerlop and whiskey, as they always did.

  The boy was thirteen. He watched it all with wide eyes. For five years now he had waited and listened to the talk of the ice ridges and ammonia rivers of the melting land, quick and treacherous under the feet. Hunkered down around a heater, evening after evening, he had listened, not knowing how much to believe but wanting to trust it all for fear of forgetting anything he might need later, for he knew even then that everything you learned came to use if you waited. What he knew most deeply was the bigness of the wilderness they now crawled into, bigger than any of the puny human Settlements, vast and powerful and with a reason and logic to itself. Ganymede—the biggest moon in the solar system, with nearly as much land and ice as old worn Earth, but fresh and unmarked by man until the last two centuries. Manuel heard the talk and thought of the big trackless wastes and knew the talk was empty, no matter whom it came from—from the new Earthers who’d swarmed in a few years back, eager to hack and chip away at the vast ice mountains in search of metals and seams of rare elements; from the biotechnicians who brought the metaformed animals, sure the beasts would find here a new place to yip and labor and take the burden from the humans; from the older settlers (like Petrovich), who had heaved up the big hydroponics domes and now hummed away inside them, growing the food and weaving the organics, and were fatuous enough to believe they had any more hold on the huge cold wilderness than the ones brand new off the shuttle; from the olders, men and women who’d sent out the first fusion-busters to put the land to rake and fire; from the survivors older still, of whom Manuel knew only Old Matt Bohles, with his gravel voice and slow, stooped walk, who talked little but whose eyes were liquid and rheumy with tales; from all the waves of humans who had washed over the face of Ganymede and then seeped away, most of them, leaving behind only those who had the strength to endure and the humility to learn the skills and to fight the awful and unforgiving cold.

  In the first hours the wise-ass veneer rubbed away from him. He watched the smeerlop going down and even tried a drab, grinning, but it was not to his liking yet and he thought with some relief that that was about right anyway. In the thick, close air of the cabin the stench and sweat of the men seemed to tighten around him, and he contented himself with watching out the big ports, where the augmented and servo’d animals rumpused about on the pocked plain. A dime-sized sun struck colors from their carapaces, steels gleaming blue-green, the ceramics a clammy yellow. They frolicked at being out of Sidon Settlement again, beyond the domes where they bent their backs at agro work, their reward being the blunt pleasures of food and sex and cartoon stories and senses in the off-hours. But none of that gave the zest of romping free in the thin air outside, scampering around the lumbering crawler treads, whistling and chattering and sending their clipped cries to each other in the stinging cold. They had been in their multiplex servo’d pods so long that Manuel could hardly remember what their basic bodies were. Short Stuff was a chimp, maybe, and The Barren a kind of thoroughbred dog as near as he could make out. The others were pigs or dolphins or something else. Often the animals themselves did not know. With their truncated bodies and regrown cerebella and cerebra ballooned into a nearly human 40 IQ, they were confused, yet far smarter than before, eager to use their abilities. They had been Skinnered into mild, subservient behavior. They gladly did jobs a robot couldn’t or a man wouldn’t, and were taintless in their ardor for the work.

  “Good to let them come,” Manuel said to his father, Colonel López.

  “Ay. Watch they don’t get seized up in the treads. Or trip one of the walkers.”

  Up the crumpled ridge they went, rising with a wrenching sway above the big plain so that, looking back, they could make out the sprawl and glimmer of Sidon Settlement like a jeweled handkerchief thrown down by a passing giant. The talk began again. It was, as usual, about policing the jackrabs and rockeaters and the ammonia-soaked scooters and the crawlies that processed methane, for that was the ostensible purpose of this annual expedition. But soon the talk drifted, as though drawn by the same current that ran through all of them, to the best game of all, the best subject for listening and the best for thinking as the blue-white wastes tilted by outside. He had heard it before, the voices at first quiet and filled with weight and with a deliberate easing up on the subject as the Settlement fell behind, recollection floa
ting up in them like bubbles breaking on the surface of a deep pond. Even though still a boy, he had heard the tales in squatters’ shacks hardly able to hold their pressure; and in agro domes; in work sheds rank with metal shavings and sour spit; in living rooms where the women who had been on the hunt in the past would talk too, but not the same way; and in growing tanks where men chopped at the ever-expanding mass of inert turkey meat as big as a walker and steaming with fat-glazed ooze—had heard the frightful stories and seen the occasional well-thumbed fax photos and known that what came down to him was from an age long before anything he could know. He sensed that something was waiting for him when he would at last be allowed to come out from the small and insignificant encrustations that man had spattered over the mute face of Ganymede, come out to take part in the pruning of the small creatures and find in the vast wastes the thing that waited, that was a part of what Ganymede held for humans. Because he was born here, he had inherited more than the Earthers who had come late. He had left to him, without ever seeing it, the big luminous artifact with the jagged beam-cut slash and the V-shaped runners that in the millions of square kilometers of Ganymede had earned a name that held respect and some terror, for it was not like the other ruined and timeworn pieces of alien handiwork that were strewn through the whole Jovian satellite system. They called it Aleph. Some Jew had given it that, a blank name that was the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet: a neutral vowel that bespoke the opaque nature of the blocky, gravid thing, the bulk that humans had tried to write upon with their cutters and tractors and on which they had left no mark. A neutral name, and yet it was the source of a long legend of domes cracked open and rifled, of walkers and crawlers and even whole outposts caught up and crushed and trampled as it moved forward on its own oblivious missions, or else homes and sheds ripped apart as the thing rose up out of the ice where it dwelt, walls split by the heaving of the land as it broke free of ice and poked its angular face—eyeless, with only saw-toothed openings to mark what men chose in their ignorance to call a face and so to take away some fragment of its strangeness—breaking freshly again into the dim sunlight, seeking, always seeking materials men also needed and had compacted into their homes and factories, and thus were forced to futilely defend against the legend that came for the metals and rare rock, the Aleph making no distinction between what men held and what the bare plains offered, so that it took where it found and thus engendered the continuing legend of alarms ignored and traps brushed aside and servo’d armaments smashed and animals mangled and men and women injured and laser and even electron-beam bolts delivered at point-blank range as though into nothing, the alien absorbing all and giving nothing, shrugging off the puny attempts of men to deliver death to it, and without pause it kept going—down a corridor of ruin and destruction starting back before Manuel’s birth and even before Old Matt, the massive thing lumbered, not swift but with a ruthless determination, like a machine and yet like a man too; moving onward eternally on some course humans could not guess, it ran forever in the boy’s dreams, a vast immemorial alabaster shape.

  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.