Against Infinity (26 page)

He kicked one of the Earthers into alertness and got him to help with Petrovich. The body seemed all right but Petrovich was in a coma. They inserted him into a medmon. It gave a good prognosis. It was a utility monitor, though, unable to do delicate reviving work. That would have to wait for equipment at Sidon.

Another quake hit then, throwing the monitor around. The ice mesa on the horizon slumped. The square profile broke, fractured, and let go with a roar, showering the plain with tumbling, roiling avalanches. Manuel thought then of Piet. He ran toward the Aleph.

It had fallen over. The equipment from inside was safe, strewn over the landscape, but Piet had been coming out when the scaffolding gave way. It had caught him and held him while the Aleph rolled over. He lay pinned under beams and pipes now, nearly touching the Aleph. As Manuel trotted toward him, the helmet came up and pain-squeezed eyes peered out.

“I got…it all.”

“The equipment? I suppose you did, you damn fool.”

“Please…”

The thin, weak voice made Manuel bite his lip at his own anger. “Where’s it hurt?”

“Legs. Below the knees, I can’t feel anything.”

“Lie flat.”

Manuel pushed him gently down. Piet gasped. There were medical inputs in the lower back of the suit, but they were Earther design and Manuel didn’t have lock-ins for them.

“Goddamn. Where can I—”

“The…living quarters.”

He ran back to the huts and scrabbled around in the medmonitors for parts. When he came back the ground was rumbling again. The Aleph seemed to have sunk a little into the ice. It was closer to Piet.

“I… I’d have been done sooner,” Piet said apologetically as Manuel worked on his back. Piet’s breath came in long, wheezing gasps. Manuel clicked the lock-ins around the right number of turns and then worked them into the sockets. Piet sighed as his pain centers shut down. His body lost its rigidity.

“Took me…longer…to get out. Something…like syrup…slowed me.”

“I’m going to have to drag you out from under this stuff.”

“That same…soft…light…”

“Shouldn’t hurt too much.”

Manuel eyed the tangled, wrecked web of pipes and struts that hung over them. If it fell wrong it would trap Piet even more. He started pulling the pipes out of the way, and the whole structure rattled and clattered. Falling in weak gravity, it couldn’t hurt Piet badly, but it would be a mess to undo. He decided to cut it away.

“I’m going after a cutter. Everything’s okay. The bodies are sealed up. You just rest.”

He had to rummage around in the wreckage. It took him a while, and as he came trotting back toward the hulking wreck a shock wave threw him down. He started to get back up and another knocked him over. The Aleph tipped over toward Piet, and the scaffolding came down with a crash. It didn’t fall on Piet. Manuel could see him clearly. Piet’s head came up, and the calm, clear eyes peered out, directly at Manuel, as the Aleph toppled over further, crunching, sinking fast now as cracks split the ice beneath it. Black jagged lines forked out from it. One widening crack passed only a few meters from Manuel as Piet cried out, not in terror but with a plaintive, resigned quality—screamed just once as the Aleph rolled over on him in a sudden fog, a hazy shower of glinting light that Manuel took to be ice and snow tossed up by the settling weight.

Then Piet was gone, and the enormous bulk settled further into the broken ice and the ground trembled. Manuel could not tell whether the deep, shuddering vibration came from the sinking ruin of the Aleph or from a distant quake.

The Aleph shifted, and Manuel stared at the place where Piet had been. The man he had known so little would lie now in this place far beyond the moon of Islam and the cross of Rome and the hammer of Marx, in a territory open and without plan, beyond man and his encasing theories, his filters, beyond the closed rooms of the civilized mind.

He walked slowly back to the crumpled huts. Behind him the Aleph slipped further into the yawning, groaning crevasses. He ignored the rumbling and the slow, gravid movement. The Earthers were laboring over the medical units. They clustered around each monitor, attaching temporary power packs. To Manuel they seemed like priests again, devoted to the sacred icons of their state-provided immortality. He felt a sour dislike for them, not for any reason he could identify, and decided it must be his fatigue.

The nearest one saw him approach. “We…watched Piet. That was terrible.”

“Yeah.”

“We were afraid to go near, afraid—”

“I know.”

“There is no hope he is perhaps pinned in the ice below, that—”

“No. Forget it.”

“Very well. I, I must report that the situation is quite serious.”

“No kidding.”

“I have tried calling Sidon and Hiruko. Our gear is not working.”

“We can’t raise them on suit comm at this range. We’ll have to use the crawler’s.”

They went looking for it. The ice was moving and thrusting and murmuring in the distance, confusing his bearings. Several minutes passed before Manuel realized that the opening he sought was gone. “Closed up,” he muttered. “Crawler’s prob’ly a hundred meters down by now.”

The Earther looked around at the steadily working ice plain. At the valley center the ice flow was perceptible. Blocks sprang up and flopped down, carried by greater pressures below. The huts were on a more slowly drifting section of the plain.

“How long until our area is torn loose?”

“No telling. We could be safe here. Could be this piece is hung up on a rock base and won’t get carried along much.”

The Earther brightened cautiously. “Do you think so?”

“No. Damned unlikely. Look how the Aleph’s sinking.”

“What should we do, then?”

Manuel stood with hands on hips, bent over, testing his muscles to see if he had pulled any. He said nothing. Then he sat down on the ice and stretched out. It felt good. He was tired, but not badly. On the other hand, only a fool doesn’t take a rest when he can get it. “Could try to get up into the hills, but things are giving way up there too. That’s where some of this stuff is coming from.”

“What
can
we do?”

“Not much. Wait for Sidon to notice we’re not calling. I’d bet they’ve got their hands full, though. Prob’ly too busy to listen for suspicious silences.”

“If the monitors run out of power…”

“Right.”

“Perhaps the satellites will see our predicament.”

Manuel shook his head. These men were used to insulating, overlapping backups. Safety nets.

He got up and walked toward the rubble of the huts. The clashing ice was a continuous murmur in the valley.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for a reserve power pack.”

“Over in number five there is one. I’ll show you.”

The other figures looked up from their labors to watch Manuel. He got the pack and swung it onto his back. As he did so, he chanced to look toward the Aleph and was startled to find that the ice had already swallowed it. The crevasses there did not seem to be widening any more. As he watched, restless motion sealed over some of the big hole where the stonework had sunk. He thought sadly for a moment, breathed deeply, and turned away.

“What is the pack for?” the Earther asked.

“You people hold out here. Move only if the ice breaks up right around you. I’m going to Sidon.”

S
O HE BEGAN
to run. He ignored the shouted farewells and wishes of good luck from the few Earthers; he was already turning inward and preparing himself. The churning chunks of broken ice made footing difficult as he crossed the plain. It was like running across the tossing waves of a streaming river, and he took each long, loping step with enough altitude to see where he could land, coming down with a rolling gait to cushion himself in case the shelf shattered under him and he had to spring clear.

He looked back once. The caved-in huts and lonely still-waving figures were dots on a rumpled expanse of white. The area around them looked smoother than the rest, but it could break up any time, he knew, if the slab jarred free or the undersole got scraped by passing rocks. He shook his head to clear it and turned to the hills above.

The slopes were raked free of loose gravel, scoured by sliding slabs of ice, and that made the footing easier. He went up the hills fast, hydraulics wheezing, and reached a ridgeline that looked stable. Fresh black shoulders of stone poked through aged ice. In time, the iron would tinge with rust and the nearby snows would turn purplish from the runoff. Now the dark nickel-iron made good footing, and he chose his leaps to come down there. From the north came roiling clouds, steaming up from the new melt. The clouds darkened as they rose, swooping along the ridgeline so that his high, long jumps took him into the underbellies of cloying moisture. Droplets peppered his faceplate, and he nearly tumbled once from the disorientation. Flashes of orange raked the western mountains: more volcanoes, smoldering fires cutting through the murk.

He picked up the incessant
bip bip bip
of the Sidon hailer at the top of a steep hill. Sidon was still over the horizon, but the hailer gave him a fix. He was still too far away to reach them with suit comm. A dull ache was settling into his legs now and he took shorter leaps. He cut in the reserve pack. The valleys below were choked with muttering, moving ice. New gullies and arroyos gnawed at the hills. The ringing
bip bip bip
was the only perceptible sign of man in this rumbling wilderness—
bip bip bip,
patient and artificial and puny beside the huge forces working everywhere. He remembered returning to camp with his father each year, when he had accepted the benign landscape beyond the ports, transfixed by it and yet knowing that men ruled there, could pass through it with only incidental danger.

He had learned this, without being told, from his father. The Colonel had inherited an attitude, a stance, that said with every gesture:
We’ll put our stamp here and it will remain.
The outward-pushing domes, the machine-sheathed animals, the crawlers, the muties which scoured the wilderness, chewing and digesting and mindlessly carrying out man’s work—they had all been agents of the remorseless roll of humanity, of the bootheel, of an end to mysteries.

As Manuel worked his way down a broken terrace of tumbled gray rock he felt the ache in his legs seeping up through him and began to pant harder, and saw that he would have had to leave Sidon anyway those years ago, even without the bitter anger he had felt. For at the camp in that dusky morning of Old Matt’s death he had joined forever the other side—the wilderness, the opening-outward, the undomesticated, the country of the old dead time. Perhaps the Colonel had understood that too. Something had drawn the man, had made him lead the prunings and forge the ledgers that made them seem profitable. Something had drawn him out into the vastness, an unvoiced urging. But in the end when the Colonel saw what it meant, where it led, that death and loss were a part of it, seamless and undeniable—Old Matt’s face swam before Manuel, the dry voice sounded in his ears—then the Colonel had rejected it.

Manuel now sensed a fraction of what his father had felt, that unendurably long moment outside the cabin, staring down at the stiff body. The Colonel’s words still hung in the space between them:
killing everything that’s old
—for his father had never truly meant to kill the Aleph, he had merely wanted to hunt it, to be drawn out by it from the cozy pockets of an insulated life, out from humanity. And in the death of the thing the Colonel had seen, with foreboding, his own end…

He landed among a cowering bunch of rockjaws. They shrieked and fled, their asymmetric bodies lurching, their many-jointed legs going
clack clack clack
with frantic energy. Perhaps they too would be erased by the shifting ices and river torrents. But they would be back, inevitably.
Clack clack clack. Bip bip bip.
Once introduced into this world, life would never leave—there was no end to the explosive, consuming, voracious lust of long chain molecules to link and match and make of themselves yet more and more and again more.

Running stolidly now, puffing, sweat soaking him, Manuel watched the land dissolve into shifting planes of light. He shook his head. The world was moving restlessly now as ice parted and slammed, with only the distant crags fixed and reliable. He struggled across washed-out cañons. Creatures raced over the hills, panicked. In his gathering fatigue, Manuel looked out upon the fleeing forms as though from a great height. Life was growing and spreading here the way a disease propagates and eats and in the eating must kill.
There should be something more,
he thought. A kind of being might come into the universe that did not want to finally eat everything or to command all or to fill every niche and site with its own precious self. It would be a strange thing, with enough of the brute biology in it to have the quick, darting sense of survival. But it would also have to carry something of the machine in it, the passive and accepting quality of duty, of waiting, and of thought that went beyond the endless eating or the fear of dying. To such a thing the universe would be not a battleground but a theater, where eternal dramas were acted out and it was best to be in the audience. Perhaps evolution, which had been at the beginning a blind force that pushed against everything, could find a path to that shambling, curiously lasting state.

Manuel stumbled, picked himself up, and ran on. He felt himself now in that same detached state. The
bip bip bip
drew him on. Its steady call echoed in his helmet and to take away the seeping pain in his legs he thought of the time before, when he had struggled, cradling Old Matt, and the beacon had called—long, ringing, reassuring, each pulse carrying through the thick and streaming silence, volleying out and echoing, waiting until the next joined it, each note piling upon the last, hammering, forming a human presence in the face of the blank void. Yet now he did not find the mindless ringing
bip bip bip
a comfort. It was just an idiot wail, as irritating as the easy theories and cheap wisdom of Hiruko, as pointless as the bland understanding of the Earthers. Piet and the rest—they had not been made for the brawling raw edge, beyond their social certainties, confronting real chance and risk and death eternal, pitted against an infinity they worshiped but did not understand—