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 floating 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.
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 could 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 halo 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.
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.”
Petrovich said, “Get himself dead alone. He falls into a gully, no one to seal his suit if it holes.”
They hailed Old Matt on directional, but he would not answer. He was making slow but steady progress toward the west, into the rock hills called Halberstam’s.
“I could catch up to him,” Manuel pointed out, though he suspected that Old Matt could slip away from him in the hills easily enough.
Colonel López made a rough sound of exasperation. “Then we have two missing. No. He has done this before, I remember, on other hunting teams.”
“He may lose function in that arm of his,” Petrovich said. “Or the face. Could die before we get him back here for the medical.”
“That is his choice,” the Colonel said. He shrugged.
Later in the day the Colonel said to him, “You miss not going out with Old Matt, don’t you?”
“Sí.”
“You couldn’t show better taste, son. He’s the original.”
“Then why don’t you go after him?”
“I’ll do just about anything to keep a man or woman alive out here. Only I won’t smother them.”
Manuel said nothing. He had seen the hard edge in his father before, but this was the first time he understood it.
Manuel went out with the other teams for the next three days, each morning arising and hoping to find that the old man had returned in the night. Each day the pulsing orange dot of Old Matt’s indicator showed him moving in a sweeping pattern of arcs, pausing often, probably to rest. Manuel teamed with Petrovich and then his father and showed the Colonel how he could shoot. They got some variant scooters and on the second day found a new variety of rockeater, one that had taken to drinking from the ammonia streams and not digesting the more difficult stones as it should. The Colonel checked with Bio and they killed the thing. The animals went with the Colonel, so there was a lot of activity that Manuel was not used to on the hunt. The animals would scamper up the ridges and drive down scooters of all kinds, and the men would try to shoot the warped ones before they got away. The third day they nabbed a big bunch of them in a dead-end valley and shot twenty-two mutated forms and three more of the warped rockeaters. Manuel helped gut them for Bio samples. He had gotten five of them himself, and missed only twice. He felt high-spirited on the hike back.
He came clumping into the cabin, hungry, and flopped down on his bunk before he saw that Old Matt was squatting in a corner, passive and remote and spooning soup into his half-metal mouth, grave and thoughtful. Manuel talked to him, asked questions, but the old man answered only in short sentences, or not at all. The men did not bother with him. After supper Manuel was invited into a card game and forgot to talk to Old Matt again, and then got tired and went to his bunk.
The next morning was dim. Ganymede’s night was dominated by Jupiter, reflecting sunlight so that shadows were blurred and uncertain. The moon’s shadow crawled across the orange and brown bands. Without any discussion Old Matt took him out again. The old man got a two-seater cycle rider and they went sputtering and muttering their way across glassy-rimmed craters and into the Halberstam hills. Manuel had never seen them before. They were new, thrust up by ice tectonics, the great plates shifting and butting against each other like living gravid glaciers driven by the churn of currents deep within the moon. In places crags and jagged peaks of ice split the rock, and then scarcely a kilometer away the battle turned and iron-gray shoulders of an ancient meteorite ruptured a slick sheet of ammonia ice, ripping through to build new heights. There had been no time here yet for the sway of the seasons to freeze and unfreeze liquids in the cracks and cleave rock from rock, popping slabs of it free and then grinding it, pulverizing it through the centuries, down into dust.
Here and there the heat released by the clash had melted ice and now thin rivers carved snaky lines in the rising valley floors. In time there would be cañons and boulders and grit beneath the boots of men. They left the cycle and went on foot into a narrow, snow-choked ravine where icicles dripped and ammonia fog rose in wreaths about them. In the heavy gloom of night, Jupiter-light struck dull amber reflections from snowdrifts. Old Matt stopped, peered ahead. Then he gestured silently, and the boy saw a channel dug through the ten-meter-deep snow, big as a crawler and bottoming out in black-streaked gray rock, scraped and ravaged and bearing on its scoured face the large delta-shaped print. No ruts led away from the deep channel, and the boy could not see how the thing had come and gone and left no trace beyond this. The delta lay in the rock, mute, and he felt a trace of what he had heard in the murmur and cries of the animals as they met it, some of them too for the first time. He looked around the cramped white ravine and felt trapped. He turned uneasily, fighting the sudden leap of fear that there was something, some movement, just behind his back, where he could not see it in time.
“You found this?” he said unnecessarily, just to be saying something and not have the silence.
“No. I saw some ruts over in the next valley. Looked like they came this way. I was taking you there.”
Manuel nodded. He felt an anticipation and also a thick dread, a scent in his nostrils like hot copper in the metal-working shops. The smell swarmed up through him and brought a sensation in his stomach and bowels, a tightening, as he saw for the first time the sign that this was a mortal thing, living and actual, not a mere form that lumbered through his dreams and moved in the stories the men told when they were half-drunk and could not be trusted to get it right—not a fragment of his world but bigger than it.
“You think it’s still here?”
“Might. The scientists said it stays in a place for a while—searching, they think. Dunno. Maybe it comes to have a look at us, then it goes on.”
“Tomorrow, we can all come. Maybe corner it.”
He laughed. “Corner it? Might’s well trap a man in a box of fog.”
“We can try.”
“Sure. We can try.”
That night Petrovich fell into a political argument with Major Sánchez and the two men got loud, the whiskey doing most of the talking. The news had come through that Asteroid Conglomerate United wanted to push development of a petroleum-synthesizing capability on Ganymede, and the moon as a whole had to vote on the measure.
Major Sánchez said it was trouble enough to grow the food for the goddamn ’roids and what did Ganymede get out of the trade anyway except doodads nobody wanted except the townies, and they weren’t the ones who’d have to bust their butts building a goddamn petro plant.
Petrovich thought that was stupid and not forward-looking, or did the Major want to forever be buying petro from Luna or even, God-help-us, from Earth itself, paying percentage on percentage for every middleman between here and Brazil?
What-the-hell, Major Sánchez bellowed, there wasn’t a liter of petro in the Settlement that hadn’t been squeezed out of seeds or stems, it was sure enough all right for their purposes, and if the ’roids wanted higher-quality stuff they could buy it What’d they need it for anyway, when they used servo’d animals for their work mostly, and animals didn’t need lubricants like machines anyway—that was the reason for developing good servo animals in the first place, to save on lubricants out here, as any damn fool knew if he studied any history instead of pigging it up with the smeerlop every night to scramble his brains every minute he was off work—right?
Petrovich opened his mouth to shout back, but his eyes were glazed and he had trouble thinking as fast as Sánchez because of the smeerlop, and at that moment Colonel López stepped in and broke it up, telling them both to get to bed.
Petrovich sat on his bunk and shook his head for a while, muttering, knowing he should sleep but not wanting to seem to be following the orders from the Colonel, and then he saw Manuel and asked in a slurred, gravel voice, “You thinking you hit it tomorrow.” When the boy did not answer Petrovich prompted him with “Eh?”
“No point.”
“Sure is point. Learn to shoot. Maybe get lucky, hurt it.”
“Don’t know what to aim at.”
“Nobody does. It is round, like an egg. Nothing to fix eye on.”
“No, it isn’t!” Major Sánchez sprang up. “Mierda! It is blocks, three blocks stuck together. The legs they come down from the corners, each block with four—no, not at the middle, so there are eight legs.”
“Is round,” Petrovich said. “I saw it three, four times. Round and rolling.”
“There are pictures! We get back to Sidon, I show you fastframe; they—”
“It crawls, blind man. And on its belly, not on legs,” a voice drawled from the bunks far back. “I seen it drag itself up a sheer cliff using grapplers, just five years back.”
The Colonel stood up and waved the voice into silence. “There are many forms. You forget that the cameras showed different results from time to time.”
“Each time I see it,” Petrovich grumbled, “is the same.”
Major Sánchez said slyly, “Perhaps the good machine is simply trying to make things simple for you, my friend.”
Petrovich grunted in dismissal and rolled onto his bunk. Low talk continued among the bare pipe frames of the bunks, muted now, desultory, amid the stale, sour fumes left from supper. Old Matt had come into this part of the rambling shack to get closer to the burbling heaters, and he sat down beside Manuel. “They argue over nothing.”
“Seems to me it’s important to know what to look for,” Manuel said.
“It changes. Not to confuse us. For itself.”
“Should be some vulnerable spot, you’d think.”
Old Matt shrugged, his face wrinkling into a fine-threaded map as he chewed on a hemp slug. “There are holes sometimes. A mouth or an ass or nothing we have a name for. It doesn’t matter.”
“There’s got to be something we can do. Those scientists—”
“They are hunters of a different kind. They never knew.”
“With e-beams and all those traps—I looked at some of them when I was in Loki Patera—they sure gave it a try.”
“They never hemmed it in enough. Tomorrow, if it comes up on us sudden and we box it in—well, sometimes in the past it’s not taken the time to burrow down through the ice and get away. Don’t know why. So it might go right through us, fast as a bat out of hell. That’s when you got to watch.”
“What… You mean me in particular?”
“Right.”
“It would pick me out?”
“Might.”
“You mean, I never been here before, an’ it knows me anyway?”
“I don’t know. But there’ve been times before, people who were new, and it… Look, maybe it remembers everything, never forgets a man or a crawler or an animal or anything. So somebody new comes along, it gets interested.”
“Why?”
“It’s been here a long time. Millions of years, they say from dating the stuff on the outer moons. Maybe it’s bored.”
It seemed to the boy that boredom or any other simple pathetic human emotion was not the way to think about the huge shape, and that its indifference to them meant it shared none of their values or illusions. Old Matt would say no more about it. He just shook his head and told Manuel to get into his bunk early; to rest; and the next day would be soon enough to see.
THE LAND WAS vast and empty beneath the storm that had moved in from the south again, bringing a slow drizzle of methane-cloaked and ammonia-steeped droplets, all swirling in the still-thin mongrel chemlab gas that was the new air. Hovering just above the ice point, the sluggish vapor rolled in—ruddy banks of fog that clung to the sheets of ice as if the wispy stuff longed to return to the original and stable existence it had known for billions of years, to sink down and freeze and rest, and not be tortured by the harsh warmth that men had brought to boil the elements into a blanket of gas, to cloak the old dead world now resurrected. There were thirty-nine men and women on the hunt that day, three having already gone back to Sidon to help with some hydro processing. (Or so they said. Petrovich and some others muttered over the steaming plates of breakfast that the three had been jumpy when they heard about the Aleph, and had discovered the rush job to be done at Sidon awful fast when they’d called home the night before. The Colonel told them to shut up talking about men behind their backs, and sent the two loudest out to flame the night’s ice off the crawler treads, a job nobody liked.)
The thirty-nine included some olders, though none who dated as far back as Old Matt, and some men out for a holiday who had never really hunted a lot and knew little more than the boy even now. Still, as they dismounted from the carriers at the foothills of the Halberstams, there was less of the hooting and high spirits and aimless moving about, less arguing over who would carry what and what routes to take into the craggy wastes that loomed above them all. Storm clouds swept the harsh faces of rock and stole warmth from their suits, making a temperature differential across a suit big enough to stress the multiple-ply insulators, so that their seams popped and creaked. They marched. The crawlers and walkers fell behind, waiting at the edge of the glassy, pitted plain as the men climbed up the rugged hills and split into parties that fanned through the skinny valleys and arroyos. Manuel went with Old Matt, the Colonel and nine others, the men tramping stolidly up the veiled valleys, watching for ruts in the snow or scrapings on the outcroppings of ice. They had six animals with them, frisking at the head and tail of the column, pouring forth more energy than the men in their spirited dashes and leaps and continual tangled games of chase and tag. Old Matt struggled to keep up. He puffed along, head up to the sky, face contracted with effort, listening to the light babble of the animals over short-range and the occasional muffled words of the men, and yet the boy could see that Old Matt was not paying attention to the words and yelps but instead was concentrating on something else, turning his head this way and that so that its steel and copper caught the dulled light. Above, stars were hazy jewels lingering above thin cirrus.
Colonel López tracked each party on his faceplate display, ordering them to drop a man into each promising branch valley as they came to it. The hail stopped and then the pall of rain fell below them. The teams made good time despite the deepening blue-green snow as they worked their way higher. In the light gravity they loped easily, hitting the ground in three-second-long strides, their boots clutching the ice or snow as they landed to ensure a purchase. Where an iceslide or crevasse blocked them and they could not leap it by themselves, they powered up their lower servos and, with some effort, made the jump with augmented muscles. The boy panted at the hard places and could not hear over short-range whether the others did too, but he was determined that they would not have to slow for him. The Colonel set the pace and kept a watchful eye on Old Matt, and the boy saw that his father was restraining the younger men so that they would not get straggled out and the old man would not push himself to keep up. His father was like that, gruff and hard and yet forgiving when you were up against your limits.
They surprised some scooters, slurping away with idiot persistence at the ammonia streams. The men picked off the deformed ones, everybody firing fast before they were all gone. There was not much life this high, and pretty soon they saw nothing but rockjaws munching stoically at pebbles and, higher still, crawlies searching out methane-rich ponds, their carcasses puffy and distended with the storage sacs where they would process the carbon-rich residues into better compounds when they hibernated.
The men dropped off singly at each branching of the valley, taking an animal with them, until there were four left. The Colonel waved Manuel forward as they came to a place where the valley wall split as though a huge hand had pried it apart with a stone wedge. Up that divide a shallow ravine worked back among some jagged peaks.
“Satellite time-step map shows that one is pretty clear of slide debris now,” the Colonel said. “Lot of rain here last few weeks. Washing it away.”
Old Matt caught up to them. “Where’s the pressure ridge around here?”
Colonel López glanced to his left, where his helmet flashed the needed plot in contour lines of green and crimson. “Runs down from that crag.”
“Think there’ll be any slippage?” the old man asked.
“Fracture fault lines fan out to the north. Don’t look like any on this side.”
“Satellites can’t see everything.”
“Sí. You go with Manuel, eh? Up that cañon. Keep him from blowing his leg off and bringing down a slide on himself.”
“Sure.”
The two took Slicky with them and headed up the ravine. A small stream tinkled and chimed, echoing from the ice-crusted walls. Rosy ammonia vapor steamed from it. The boy sloughed along, thinking of the crushed steel plate of Short Stuff and of the high keening cries the animals had made before. Melting snow and ice fed the stream and squished under his boots. The man spoke to Slicky and let it romp a bit and then spoke again, and it stopped moving and quivering so much, and fell into step at their heels, the yellow ceramic sliding and clicking now and then as it leaped over a streamlet but otherwise without noise, patient and eager both. Blocks of shagged-off rock had tumbled into the ravine, and now, as they went on, slabs of ice covered the floor, shortening the ravine until it was a trough. Old Matt kept studying the steep snowdrifts and rock walls. He paused, puffing, and said, “Quiet from now on.”
“You think…?”
“There will be nothing, not even rockjaws, this high. Anything that moves means something, here.”
Manuel nodded. He stamped his feet to warm them. Old Matt popped a vent in his own suit and said, “Take care of this now.”
Urine jetted out and spattered on rock. Manuel did the same. He thought it was to save distraction later, but in the stillness of the cañon the crackling and sputtering of the urine as it froze boomed in his ears, and he saw it was to avoid noise at the wrong time.
He asked, “What about suit sound?”
“Nothing for it. Reverse osmosis is as quiet as you can get. Only thing we could do would be turn off the warmer, and this high your lungs would freeze solid in half an hour.”
Manuel nodded. They went on, walking now rather than loping, to keep down the clatter of rocks beneath their boots. Every few minutes his suit would exhale excess carbon dioxide it could not handle and the gas puff would snap loudly as it froze and fell to the ground. Otherwise a strange silence descended over the boy and he heard only his own breathing. His external micromikes did not pick up even a murmur of a breeze; the atmosphere was too thin here to carry enough. He toted on his back a new gun, given him by his father this morning: a double-bore fan laser, used for engineering back at Sidon. He had fired it only once, at a boulder, to learn the recoil and that it pulled to the left a little, as the Colonel had said.
They went two klicks, until the ravine gave out at a tilted sheet of ice, studded with red-gray rock. Old Matt said, “No point going more. Here’s where we separate.”
“How come? Won’t we be safer if we stick—”
“There’s no safe or not safe to this. It’ll run down two just as easy as one. You go over near that gorge, where the ice turns purple. Keep your back to the gorge. Not likely it’d come at you from that way. It’d have to come out of the gorge itself, and why should it go to that trouble when there’s softer stuff up here?”
“All right.” The boy hefted the double-bore.
“I’ll be a few hundred meters upslope. That way we get two angles on it, probably.”
“And if one of us gets hurt, the other likely won’t.”
“Yeah.” The old man peered at him, bunked with the copper eye, and smiled. “Turn off the short-range, too. Sometimes the Aleph, it gives off a lot of electromagnetic stuff. Just noise, the scientists said. I dunno. It’ll overload your set, though.”
“Okay.”
“And stay still.”
“And Slicky?”
“He’s a porpoise. Wrong instincts for this, never mind what they say about IQ-boosting making them the same.”
“He can distract it.”
“I kind of think that’s what we’re all doing, distracting it. At best. All right…” He bent down and told Slicky to take a position downslope of the two of them.
Manuel liked the first hour. It gave him rest and he became used to the utter silence. An occasional faint ping came as a grain of dust, falling in from some askew orbit around Jupiter, struck his suit, making it ring. The unending hail of high-energy protons could not reach him, though, through the tight-wound magnetic fields that blanketed his suit, the superconducting coils with their eternal currents brushing aside the deadly sleet. Old Matt had taught him how moving would in turn make magnetic ripples in the iron-rich rock nearby, faint surges that the Aleph could pick up, and so he stood absolutely still. Ganymede was swinging more into the sun now, and as he waited the dawn came on with infinitesimal slowness, gradually brightening the blue drifts of snow and pushing back the shadows. Above, the dark sky absorbed everything and would not yield. This high the atmosphere that man and his machines labored to bring had no effect and the land was as it had been for billions of years, inert and cold beyond any human sensing, yet with slow inevitable forces of its own that thrust up mountains and tortured the ice. It was in the third hour now and he was becoming tired, even though he had his knee servos on lock and was not carrying his weight at all. The boy felt he could sense the potential in the bulging rock beneath him, and the gathering strength it brought to even this high a place.
Only slowly did it come to him that the tremor and silent pressure was not from his thinking but was real, steady. He blinked and the rock was rising, shifting. Old Matt was a distant figure that had long ago blended into the terrain but now was waving, pointing at the bulge that grew in the ice sheet, and Slicky moved nervously, one foot forward and another back as the first crack came, a jagged line drawn quickly across the purple ice, widening even as it spread, snow tumbling in, and then a second crack and a third, as fast as he could see. Rock groaned under him and he brought up the double-bore, but there was nothing to aim for. The land had risen a full meter now. Pebbles and then boulders began to roll, slowly and then faster and then crashing down, smacking the ice and keeping on, some falling into the spreading web of cracks that split and popped and split again, boulders now tumbling into the fissures and wedging there. The growing yawning blackness echoed the emptiness of the dark sky. Manuel turned, holding the useless gun. He leaped out of the way as the rock split under him with a deep-bass snapping sound. Old Matt was struggling down the slope, trying to keep his balance. The boy yearned for a target, something to act against. Slicky yelped and chippered and began to run, away from the growing bulge that centered on the triangle made by the three of them.
Manuel stepped cautiously forward, toward the bulge. The land groaned and heaved, nearly throwing Manuel from his feet. He smelled the hot, coppery scent. Fresh gaps raked across the ice sheet and he leaped to avoid one. Slicky ran, its back to them, and did not see the crack coming. Blackness rushed under the slipping, frantic form and in one instant had consumed it, swallowing the steel and ceramic as though it were nothing and then moving on, the cracks stretching down the shallow ravine like ever-lengthening arms. And then—stopped. The grinding hollow noise that the boy had not separated from the other sounds now abruptly faded, and the ice ceased its motion, pausing, and with aching slowness then began to settle, subside, stones crashing again as it tilted, gaps narrowing, the bulge sinking back.
In a few moments it was gone. Manuel stood with his gun high and ready and waited, breathless, but there was nothing more. The fissures did not close up fully. He was still wary, studying the ground near him, when Old Matt picked his way to him and touched helmets.
“No short-range, not yet,” the man said.
“What… It, it never showed itself…just…”
“Sometimes it’s that way. It came to have a look.”
“But it never came out, never…”
“Doesn’t need to, I guess. It could tell we were up here and it let us know we had been looked at.”
“Slicky.”
“It got a morsel. I don’t think it came for that. Could be that’s what made it break off, even.” The old man shook his head. “No, that’s probably wrong. The worst thing is to start thinking about it the way we think about everything else. The worst.”
“Slicky was trying to get away.”
“Right.”
They went back down the ravine in silence, the boy’s mind aswarm with mingled thoughts and emotions and confusions of the two. Next time he would act differently, do something, find a way—but he could not think of anything he could have done otherwise, and the flat hardness of that fact itself made him feel better. Whether or not he did anything different, at least he was sure there would be a next time. It might come tomorrow or sometime beyond, but it would come, and in thinking of it he discovered something that absolved him of his fear, for there was no guilt in fearing what was beyond you and ran, blind and remorseless down through the years, shrugging off the mortal weight that a human had to carry. He tasted the coppery scent in his nostrils and knew it and was no longer afraid of that itself.
The reports came in from the other men and animals: plenty of scooters potted at and a rumble felt here and there, but nothing sighted, nothing engaged. He felt good about that too. It was arrogant to think he had been singled out, but he had been lucky—the dumb luck of the beginner. From now on he would not depend on luck. Someday he would see the thing, of that he was now sure. If it could be done by keeping on, then he would see it. Perhaps tomorrow and perhaps next week.
As it turned out, it was more than a year.