Against Infinity Read online

  2

  FOR 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.”

  “The lead one’s closer.”

  “Sure. And when they see it fall they’ll scatter. Always work from their rear.”

  Manuel brought the little popper up slowly, so as not to startle them. He aimed, squinted, and got the form in the sights as it ducked and bobbed, snatching at each morsel of excretion. It was disgusting to watch, the boy thought, but when you thought about it everything alive was eating the shit of something else, in the long run.

  He fired. The warpscooter crumpled. He shifted to the next and saw it disintegrate as Old Matt got it. Then the group must have heard or felt something because they dodged this way and that, skipping along on their fast little legs, scrambling into the blue shadows. Manuel led one of them and fired three times, kicking up a quick jet of vapor from the ice each time where he missed. He caught the thing just as it got into the shadow of a boulder. The bolt went clean through its brown armor. Good, he thought. He swung the gun back and there was nothing left to shoot at. Old Matt had hit the rest.

  He felt proud on the long march back to the camp. They got another flock in late afternoon, surprising muties in a gully, but then the mutants ran and got in among the regular scooters and Old Matt pushed the boy’s popper aside before he could shoot any more.

  “Bio’s strict about killing the reg’lars.”

  “Okay.” Manuel walked on, cradling the gun, watching the dumb forms scuttle for cover.

  “Safety.”

  Manuel replied, “I might get a squint at one if it breaks cover.”

  “It’s then, when you’re trying for the one extra, that bellies get sliced and feet blowed off.”

  Meekly he powered down and slipped on the safety, deliberately looking away from the jittering, mindless flock still seeking shadow. He sloughed on, a half step behind the man, through the glinting Ganymede morning, homing on the endlessly beeping directional for the camp.

  It was more than a week before he and Old Matt heard the animals. They were out on their own, running flocks of scooters when they c
ould find them, the man teaching Manuel how to move and where the crusted-over deadfalls were that had been hollowed out years before by the fusion caterpillars and how a man could fall through the thin ice and break a leg even in the fractional gravity of this moon. A flock of scooters had sprung up in front of them and the boy had got two of the warped ones—discolored things, ugly, that lurched away and scrambled over the others to get away—before the mutations got in amongst the rest.

  “Bad sign. They already know enough to do that.”

  “Why doesn’t Bio program the reg’lars to turn on the muties?”

  “Don’t want to give them highly developed survival traits. Be just that much harder to kill them off when we introduce the good lifeforms, the ones we want to make the stable ecology.”

  “Ah, well,” Manuel said, full of himself and with an elaborate casualness, “that just makes for more huntin’ and—”

  “Listen.”

  Over their short-range came a. sputtering, a low murmur, almost blending with the static of Jupiter’s auroral belts. Yet Manuel caught the fervid yips and cries of the pack, a chorus blurred but with a high, running keening to it, each voice a distinct animal but each responding with its own fevered energy. He did not need to ask what drew cries from them. He reached down and thumbed on his gun, though he knew it was useless and a mere gesture. But it was important to make the gesture, just as it was to wait breathless and see in his mind’s eye what the yelps and grunts and chattering pursued: the thing that moved smokelike through the icefields, running with blind momentum, the shifting alabaster shape. Old Matt had taught him to tilt his gun high and wait, motionless, watching by using his peripheral vision, not moving his head. He stood and tried to sense an expectant tremor, a rumble, some twinkling of the light that would tell him, warn him. The animals were louder now, but not stronger—their cries had risen too high and had taken on a tone of confusion and submission to the inevitable, not tired yet but flagging in some way the boy could not name but felt.

  He touched his helmet to the man’s and whispered, not awakening the suit radio, “It’s coming?”

  The blended murmur of the cries peaked without ever resolving into a clear voice, and the sound dissolved as Manuel listened. Old Matt did not answer. He gradually turned his head so that Matt could see his face and he shook his head, no, with a look of quiet watchfulness. The animals were now a dull drone, defeated, fading. Old Matt smiled.

  “It never noticed them. It didn’t even speed up this time.”

  “It’s here, though! First sighting in—how long?—nearly a year.”

  “First one we know of. Lots times nobody says anything.”

  “It’s looking for something?”

  “Could be. Some mineral it needs to supply itself, regenerate itself, I don’t know. Doesn’t seem to need energy. Unless it’s got a fusion burner inside and filters isotopes out of the ice.”

  “Yeah, and if it needs something around here—”

  “It doesn’t need anything that bad.” He surveyed the rough valley before them, inert and plain, and looked at Manuel. His worn ortho’d face held large, luminous eyes that moved liquidly. The replacement jaw and cheek were shiny even in the dim sunlight, and his original skin was wrinkled like an old piece of crumpled paper. It was the eyes that seemed most alive in him, least weathered by the long decades that face had endured, the century mark it had passed almost without noticing, the injuries and radiation and the sweat and ache of toil it had taken and survived.

  “Truth is, it doesn’t need anything. It’s trapped here, far as I can tell. No boosters to take it off surface. Can’t get into orbit. Must have been hurt a long time ago and now it has to move through the waters under us and across the ice like a man pacing a cell will do, wearing a path in the stone of the floor but not stopping. I’ll bet it looks up at the stars and thinks and wants to go up there. But it can’t. It’s not complete, or else it would. So it wanders. Not because there’s anything it needs but because it wants to have a look. See who’s new. See what kind of men there are out here this year and what they can do and if there’s a servo’d animal or a machine we can put up against it this year that is any better than all the ones it outran or smashed or rolled over year after year before. It’s curious maybe, or just keeping track.” He shrugged. “But those are ways of talking about it that make sense to us, and one thing I’m sure of: it doesn’t make sense. And it won’t, ever.” The animals were gone now and there was nothing on short-range radio. “They’ll run on after it until it sees what they’re worth. Then it’ll burrow down, drive straight down seventy klicks or more if it wants to, directly into the slush and water that this ice is just the scum of—and that’s it. Gone. Until it wants to come back.”

  When they reached the camp the animals were already there, huddled together as if to keep warm, bunched up against the wall of the shack. They had all come in an hour before, all except for Short Stuff. A gray rain came down and small puffball clouds swept overhead, blown from the warmer regions to the south where vast volumes of methane and ammonia were vaporizing beneath fusion caterpillars. Old Matt squatted beside the mound of animals and touched the yellow ceramic flank of one. They all stirred, scraping against each other, eyes rolling and flecked with blue, and a muttering came from them, growls and whimpers and a low persistent chippering that the boy could not place as coming from any particular animal. They trembled all the same way: Earthlife returned from meeting something it had not known. Two hours after supper, after the whiskey ration was already gone, Short Stuff came scuffling up to the lock entrance and scraped at it. It chattered weakly, forming words in no particular order, thick-tongued and droning: hurt…fast big…fire…break…hurt… Manuel and Petrovich and Old Matt led it into the service shack and stripped the crushed manifold in its left side where something had brushed by—just a glancing and casual blow, not intended to kill or else Short Stuff would not be here.

  “Look, see. It tore the flesh,” Petrovich said. Blood oozed from beneath the crumpled steel.

  “No bones broken,” Old Matt said, feeling along the animal’s ribs. The matted hair reeked with fear and sweat. Manuel saw that Short Stuff was a small ape, harnessed well into the transducers and servos that engulfed the lean form.

  “Lucky to live,” Petrovich remarked as he applied locals and patched up the raked flesh, stemming the seeping, wiping away the cakes of dried blood.

  Old Matt murmured, “It just got too close.”

  Petrovich said, “I saw a fastfilm, once. It picked up animals, smashed them down. It will kill.”

  “Not this time. Not without reason.”

  The chimp kicked and howled softly, probably from pain, but perhaps also from the memory of running hard and fast at something it could not hope to catch.

  Old Matt patted Short Stuff fondly. “He’s seen it before. Knew it. Just like a chimp, smarter than most of the rest and thinking himself to be more like a man. When he saw it he didn’t wait, or else he’d never got that close. He had to have thought about it a lot and known that one time or another he would have to run toward it and not away like the rest. To be like a man. Even though it was pointless and he would be paying a price.” He rubbed and soothed the animal, talking to it softly. The boy helped him fashion a replacement of curved sheet steel and insulation for the rib section.

  It was dark when they left the service shack. Jupiter was eclipsing the sun. The small bright orange ball slipped behind the cloud tops of ammonia cirrus and a rosy halo slowly crept around the squat, watermelon-banded planet. Near the poles the boy could see a violet auroral glow, hanging curtains of gauzy light where atoms were excited by downrushing streams of energetic electrons. Across the slowly churning face of the dark world, lightning forked yellow and amber, strokes thousands of kilometers long, bridging clouds of ammonia and water far larger than Ganymede itself. The men stopped and peered upward at the passing of noon in the seven-day-long alternation of sun and shadow that Ganymede kept. The h
alo shifted slowly, rimming the huge world in diffused, ethereal amber and pink. The view was better here than among the lights of the Settlement and the men paused, watching the slow certain sway of worlds as gravity gently tugged each on its smooth, unhurried path. Then the glow broke free of the planet’s waist and became the fierce, burning dot of their sun, bringing a return of noon. They bent their heads back down then and began to think of other things, of rest before the hunting would begin again tomorrow, and scuffed their boots free of ice and dirt before going inside to the rank smell and buzzing talk and pungent cycled air of men.

  3

  THE BOY DID not see Old Matt leave the next morning, early, while the cooking was still going on and Manuel was cutting onions for the broth.

  “Madre. That one goes off, says no word,” Colonel López said. His stern jaw clenched. “Thinks he is too old for rules.”