OLD MATT WOKE him early. Ganymede’s dun night would later give way to dawn, a process stretching on for hours, as though all things here must be of larger-than-human scale. It was Manuel’s turn to connect power cables to the crawlers and walkers, and fire up the fusion generator. He dressed sluggishly, still halfway into sleep and its foggy shapes that ran and loomed and roared against a slate-black background, a dream he knew so well now that the meaning seemed obvious, like a fact, more real than daylight. His lungs and heart felt leaden, reviving, and he shivered as he dressed in the thin but inert layers they all wore, even inside, against the perpetual sucking cold. In the bunkroom men yawned and grunted. Some stumbled to the back and urinated loudly into the open-mouthed cyclers. Shucked of their suits, their flesh was porcelain white, rubbed red where the insulating layers bunched or wrinkled. Some showed blotchy calluses and big blue veins where pressure flaws had sucked the blood to the surface. Others had patches of glossy frostbite replacements. Not a man was without mark. Their insulating sheaths fended off the brutal facts of this world, the cold and dark and scalding chemicals of the melting mountains—but shielded imperfectly, so that the men wore their ugly mottlings with a pride, a sign of having gone beyond the warm, comfortable Settlements.
He suited and left the gathering heat of the cabin. Jupiter overhead cast blurred shadows everywhere, and the moons gleamed beneath their ancient scars. He crossed the field to the fusion dome, threading among vehicles parked this way and that, dark boxy shapes on a plain glowing with a wan blue. The world lay inert beneath a rigid night, and he tasted already the coppery hot, his mind racing ahead of this slow climb out of sleep. The fusion generator’s mindless whump whump whump seemed like an eager animal greeting him. He dragged the cables to the vehicles and socketed them and watched the black ice begin to melt from the chunky treads and wheels as the kiloAmps surged through, restoring life.
When he clumped back into the embrace of the cabin it was stirring too, the heaters cracking and spitting, men swearing at clothing damp with yesterday’s undiscovered ice, their breaths already fogging the windows, pipes rattling as heat came to them again, the swarming smell of frying meat layered in the air. Old Matt sat at a table, hunkered down over a steaming bowl, chewing meditatively.
“Want to try the aim again before we put it in the crawler?” Manuel said, sitting down beside him.
“No. It’s good, doesn’t stray. The beam spreads a little, but you can’t help that. You should try firing one—we used to use them for welding—without any air around at all. Electrons all rush away from each other; charge density just blows the beam apart. Like firing a shotgun. Worse, even.”
Manuel nodded. He had never known Ganymede without some atmosphere—a thin whisper when he could barely walk, now a light cloak that could carry clouds, buoy up snow, drop the piercing acid rains. Generations would pass before a human sucked in a first good lungful. Now it was still thin stuff, little better than drawing on hard vacuum, but enough for an e-beam to fork through like lightning: breaking down atoms, clutching the newborn positive ions and ejecting the unwanted electrons, neutralizing the beam charge and enabling it to propagate in a thin, deadly stream. They were used for seating dome exteriors now, enabling a man to zip shut a break from fifty meters away, if he had a good aiming eye.
Old Matt’s jaws worked steadily, without hunger: food as fuel. Manuel took a bowl of broth and a corn slab from the loaded tray that arrived. “I was kind of surprised he did that,” he said.
“Who?”
“The Hiruko fellow. Thought he’d ask for more money, once he saw we wanted the beam. Next-nearest one’s in Fujimura.”
“I only offered him the money to be polite. Always give Hiruko people a chance to be generous. They like it. That’s not why he handed it over, though.”
“Uh?”
“He’s seen Eagle. He watches us, the ones who’ve been coming out here for so long nobody’s kept track, even. He knows we can use it and he can’t. Even though we told him about the conductivity and all. So he gave it.”
They had taken two days to modify the long, magnet-ringed barrel of the e-beam projector, narrowing the darting stream down at the cost of losing some flux. Power that spattered against the invulnerable and still unanalyzed flanks of the thing would be worthless anyway; accuracy was more important than aimless force. The projector was an awkward thing, with its bulky power pack and evil-looking snout, and the two of them cradled it carefully out to the crawler, lashing it to the foredeck and covering it from the soft pink snow that had begun. The boy lashed down equipment and topped off pressure heads and then looked up from the work, at a circle of silent steady faces. Some he had never seen before. He realized this was the biggest party they had ever fielded, a motley crew squatting in the open near the scruffy vehicles: worn-out Agency shuttles, with plates stove in and antennas long since ripped away; crawlers missing steering treads and patched up with steel belts of the wrong gauge; walkers missing whole legs, scarred and pitted and with passenger domes starred so badly nobody could see out—equipment nearly as bad as their suits themselves, which wheezed as they moved, gushing air from pop-lines that their organic sealants flowed into and filled up, only to open again on the next step, their sour suit air snapping as it gushed out and froze and fell at their feet. They watched him steadily, without comment amongst themselves. Some worked and some rested. They stayed a good distance away from the big blue-and-red Eagle, which paced at the brow of the hill, watching the plain beyond and ignoring the milling men at its back.
“Today I think three parties,” Petrovich said to the Colonel. “That parallel set of valleys—Major will take the left, I the right. Simple—”
“I think not,” Colonel López said. “This is not a military maneuver. If it comes when we are nearby it will not attack a flank or bother with which way we are deployed. It doesn’t care.”
“I mean to—”
“We will proceed in parallel valleys. I will take the left. Keep pace.”
Petrovich had been telling the new men what to do and it had gone to his head. He turned red but said nothing.
Major Sánchez put in, “The boy and Old Matt, they’ll be slower with that e-beam on foot. I could stay with ’em, take—”
Colonel López said, “They stay in the main party. There are a lot of us. We’ll give the thing plenty of confusion, all us helling around. Maybe help those two make a shot.”
Petrovich cut in abruptly, “Are we pruning muties out here or—”
“Of course,” the Colonel said. “Of course we are. You had something else in mind?” He grinned at Major Sánchez, and Petrovich swallowed his anger, seeing it was no use.
And so they set out as usual, though no one believed this was an ordinary day. The Hiruko man had checked with Central and found a report of the Aleph a good fifteen hundred kilometers from them, five days before, and since then nothing. But the odds were meaningless out here, and each man who rode or walked in the clanking, rumbling column felt that this day would be long and would leave them different from what they had been. None of them expected to succeed, to change the balance between men and Aleph.
Manuel watched Eagle running out ahead of them all, eager, head down as if listening to the ground, the powdery snow melting off it from the heat, its intricate articulating legs and treads scrambling and surging over black ice, shattering stubs and outcroppings as it passed, leaving a track almost as if it were a smaller version of what it hunted. Inside Eagle were heart and blood and perhaps lungs, maintained by the machines which also served to exaggerate and amplify its movements, so that in essence the soft inner zone was a fulcrum from which came the single intent focus of the thing, a concentration unlike a man’s or an animal’s but more consuming, purer, filled with the will to endure and strain and carry on until it could overtake and strike and slay. It was not Old Matt’s or his own or anybody’s, never could be, for it had been launched into a space beyond humanity, so far that it could not even report back and would forever now be silent, known only by its passion and remorseless desire. The boy felt a terror then, sitting in the cab of the crawler and watching Eagle. It was then that he understood what Old Matt had made in order to come this far: a thing between them and the Aleph, possessed of qualities both had but at bottom a thing strange and new, bereft of the Aleph’s seasoned age and rising, deformed, from the churn of life.
The emptiness claimed them. They explored stark fresh gorges, flushed scooters and rockjaws and jackrabs, cutting out the muties and flaming them, or Eagle running them down, or the men potting at the scattering, panicky forms with their lasers and stunners. Old Matt rode on the side deck of the crawler and watched. Manuel paced alongside, worried at the placid fatigue of the old man, wanting to take a few shots with the e-beam but cautioned, when he picked it up, to save the bolts for when they alone would have a chance. Their crawler was the first, instead of the Colonel’s or the Major’s. In effect Old Matt led the party, peering forward at the gradually lightening ravines and peaked hills as the sun broke over the far ridgeline and cut blue shadows across the land.
An hour out, a mutie rockjaw did not scatter with its pack but instead jumped one of the new men. It tripped him and leaped onto his helmet as he fell. The man shouted and struck at it and rolled sideways to get it off. Somehow the thing pried open a helmet port. Vapor spurted from the helmet, blinding the man for a moment. Major Sánchez tore the rockjaw off and stomped it and beat it with his stunner. By the time they killed it the man had got the vent closed himself, but the insulator had broken down. His eyelids were frozen shut. That meant somebody had to lead him back to camp for treatment. It sobered a few of the new ones who had never seen a mutie turn like that before.
“Goddamn bad splice, you ask me, if just a li’l change an’ the sonbitch goes for you. Some genetic drift, you ask me.” The man who said this sat beside Manuel and the old man for the next few klicks, resting his weapon on the iron runners and trying to look as if he were surveying the terrain ahead for game, but too jittery to keep his eyes on the horizon for long.
“Got to happen,” Old Matt murmured.
“How’s ’at?”
“Hiruko tunes them to spread out, go for the right chemicals, breed. Determined, single-minded little inventions. Armored against the radiation. Bound to happen, now that some of the chemicals in the melt are running out. Competition. Natural selection’s awful fast here.”
“That keeps up, won’t be safe to walk aroun’ alone.”
“It was us jumped them, remember.”
“Huh. Huh.” The man moved uneasily, as if just catching on to the idea that this was different from an amusement sim. After a few more klicks he got off and went back to find a friend near the rear of the column.
Beyond the far ridgeline an orange glow grew brighter. It was the ionized blowoff from a fusion heater. The crawler moved only a kilometer a day, but the stream of gas and liquid it vented washed out gullies and flooded the plains below. The Colonel moved the columns down a side ravine and into another system of valleys, to keep away from the mess. Rockjaws and scooters fled the floods as well, and the men spotted muties among them in the herds that poured out of the ravines and into the broad open land beyond. They ploughed forward, the excitement seizing the men so that in pursuit of the single fleeing forms they spread out, firing rapidly at the targets that dodged into the temporary shelter of craters or scrambled, panicky, into box cañons and dead-end ravines. They scrabbled frantically and mindlessly at the ice walls, dragging malformed limbs, eyes rattling in their wedge-shaped heads, shrieking and dying even as mere meters away the normal rockjaws and scooters browsed among the ponds of melt, some so dumb they did not even notice the drama, at turns both comic and tragic, that swirled around them.
The animals raged among the muties as well, running them down and crushing them beneath clanking treads. Eagle was far out in front, leading without thinking of it, following the game as the muties heard the thin cries of their fellows down the valley and began to run away, some even back toward the higher ravines where now flash floods came down, gushing out onto the plain. Foam frothed on the surface of the grimy torrent as it carried ice chunks and stones fanning out over sheets of purple ice. The men stayed ahead of the surging streams easily, loping steadily, guns at the ready, watching the shadows for the deformed shapes. Eagle never made a mistake, never ran down or clubbed a norm. Some of the animals in their high spirits did, though, and the Colonel would see it even in the midst of the enrolling chaos—the best day they had had in a long while, rich with game and enough to make the blood sing—and would send a sharp rebuke to the offending animal, which days later would mean a day without food or sexsenso or some other punishment.
Manuel left the crawler and took part, not trying to outdistance the others, taking what clean shots he could. Old Matt stayed behind with the e-beam and so got nothing beyond a panicky stray that would have run under the crawler treads out of pure fear-blindness anyway. The old man was content to sit and watch as the crawler made its sluggish way down the broad valley, a slow bulk amid the dotlike figures of men who swarmed like bees, first on one target and then on another, their excited calls and shouts coming to the boy and blending with the higher keening yelps and clicks of the animals, all the voices layering and overrunning one another until the comm rang and clamored.
Manuel waded through rivulets of the dirty water. It steamed away or gurgled into cracks. Some muties were so addled that they kept slurping at the runoff even though the hunt was storming past, the thumps and snaps of men firing clear in the air. Manuel shot a few of these. He felt a current surge and suck at his ankles and moved to his left, toward higher ground, to get out of the main channel, but it got worse, and when he paused to look up the nearest ravine, puzzled, he saw the whole sweep of water turning toward him, gathering momentum, deepening, sheets of the evaporating grime-shot foam sliding off a rising mound of ice and rock that, as he watched it, split along a seam with a dull thunder that pulled his feet from under him and slammed his shoulder hard against a boulder, pitching him face forward into the sludge.
“Jesus Christos!” someone shouted.
The boy got to his knees, smearing the filth from his faceplate, and peered upward toward the still-rising bulge of splintering, groaning rock, the cracks spreading out from the high ground like a black spiderweb. Boulders tumbled into the yawning jagged openings.
Old Matt called, “Manuel! Here!” amid a rising jumble of noises as the animals yipped and the men shouted and the ground surged again, throwing the boy down as he took his first step toward the crawler a full two kilometers away across the buckling ice.
“Slide!” someone shouted. “Whole mountain’s coming down!” but the boy got up and began to run toward the crawler, which was at higher ground, rather than away, down the valley. Old Matt was already unlashing the e-beam snout and wrestling with the long manifold. Manuel leaped high to keep above the creaking, surging land, landing and jumping again as fast as he could, pushing his servos to their maximum, running to reach the old man and the weapon, not even taking time to look down the valley and check for his father, nor especially to look behind him at the sudden roar of something breaking to the surface, ripping the ice, for he knew already what he would see.
MANUEL SCRAMBLED UP onto the deck of the crawler. Old Matt had the e-beam projector powered up and calibrated, his worn face intent upon the dials in the stock of the weapon, ignoring the buckling and heaving of the ground nearby. Manuel picked up the e-beam gun, hefting it, still not looking back at the source of the wrenching that he could feel through his boots, even standing on the crawler. Instead he gazed out over the plain, looking downvalley at the fleeing and now-ignored forms of the scooters and rockjaws. The frantic mindless stream swept past the men, who came loping back toward the slower crawlers and walkers, unshouldering weapons, and some already taking a practice aim during the long arcs of their strides, squinting through telescopic sights. Then the boy turned.
It was huge this time. The amber flanks crushed boulders as big as men as a long rhomboid section of the Aleph surged out of the erupted ice. It wallowed, pulling buttressed ribs free of the hole it bored. Groinwork appeared, rasping and screeching against slabs of nickel-iron from ancient meteorites. The rust-laced layers held, resistant for a long moment, and then crumbled with a muffled boom.
The Aleph jutted abruptly into the air, turning as the boy watched, and from the highest buttressed shoulder sprouted a twisted thing, moist like a stalagmite—angular, jade-green, writhing; first a knifelike blade that refracted the pinpoint sun into a splash of colors, and then swiftly becoming something gnarled and seething, sopping the light into dark crevices; and just as suddenly the angles of it smoothed and the projection had a bloblike head, a waving stump that might be an arm, a scooped-out cavity that might be a mouth except that as it grew it consumed the head and ate the neck, turning the thing into a body that vainly, hopelessly grew short thick legs and began to make slow sluggish motions as if it were running in a thick resistant fluid, even as its upper half was chewed and gnawed away—and abruptly, electrically, crystal facets shot through the whole of it, long tracings of embedded glinting silver that centered on the chest and fanned out into struggling, fresh-forming arms. The chest-centered web extended as the body fought, flailing, and the thin lines sank into the legs, glowing with inner light. Just then the Aleph moved, bending down toward the ground as it freed itself from the last clasp of dark ice. This movement carried the writhing extrusion out of the boy’s sight.
He had seen all this in one quick glimpse, scarcely the space between two heartbeats. He blinked, and the shouting, milling voices came flooding in on him again, the comm choked with hoarse orders and exclamations and a radio hiss and swearing in three languages, “Goddamn shoulda knowed it’d come up on us just when” and “schiessen Sie mit” and “Over to the left it’s goin’ that way” and “Christos, safety’s jammed on this thing” and “Get yer butt in close it’ll flatten you out Lefkowitz I’m tellin’ ya” and “Isn’t a safety on that stunner at all you’re pullin’ out the reflex coil you jackass” and “That thing’s bigger than the pictures for sure it musta growed” and “Damned if I’m gonna get any closer” and “You Hiruko guys so hard-ass let’s see you corner it” and “Goddamn! Lookit! Goddamn!” and “Circle round on it give it a taste of this see how it likes a double-bore hey” and more, all blending into a babble the boy cut off sharp by punching off his comm line. He stared up at the Aleph, now fully exposed in the clear thin air, soaring above the tossed and tortured ice. It jerked free, the huge alabaster blocks of it working against each other with a deep-bass groaning. Then it simply hung a full meter above the jumbled land, unmoving, supported invisibly.
“Taking its time,” Old Matt said matter-of-factly, touching helmets with the boy.
“Why doesn’t it do something?” Manuel whispered.
“Doesn’t have to.”
“It should run.”
“From us?”
“No, no, but… Before, it was always going. Moving.”
“So? Just ’cause we hunt it, doesn’t mean it’s agreed to be hunted.”
The boy had always dreamed of it in motion, ceaseless and yet stationary, like a running river that changes and is still always the same. Moving, and big, and now it seemed larger by far than when he had first seen it years before. He thumbed on his magneto detectors and saw overlaid on his viewplate the corona of arcing magnetic fields, a halo around the thing that—the scientists said—supported the bulk and gave off the soft curling spatters of radio noise that hissed on the comm lines.
“Nothing to shoot at,” Manuel said.
“No openings, yes. Bad range from here, anyway. Let’s get closer.”
They jumped down from the crawler—the driver had stopped the treads and come up to the foredeck, staring—and began to walk, taking the curious long strides possible in low gravity. Manuel cradled the e-beam projector, deliberately keeping his pace slow so the old man could keep up, never taking his eyes from the hovering presence ahead. All down the valley the teams came closer, cautiously, weapons at the ready. Along the flanks of the Aleph more extrusions worked out of the amber blocks, writhing. Manuel tried to make sense of the forms, but they came too fast, being born and dying with a restless energy that played and rippled across the inert floating immensity. They caught and swallowed and warped the sunlight that struck them. Some seemed momentarily human, while others became like misshaped animals or deformed creatures or perhaps machines, all coming into being and giving forth a burst of animated life and then sinking back into the stony surface, lost.
Manuel eyed the hulk as they got closer. He switched on his comm again and heard louder static and a few scattered weak voices. To his left, Petrovich and Major Sánchez approached, and looking back, the boy saw knots of figures in the valley—men walking beside others, without the random directionless talk so usual on the comm, unconsciously coming together (as threads in a spiderweb converge as they near the focus), drawn by the slumbering mass that hung above the shattered plain.
“Hey!” someone shouted. It began to move. Manuel started running, bringing the muzzle up but finding no true target, leaving Old Matt behind.
The hulking, shadowy form began to drift, like a thing blown by an unfelt wind. The nervous darting extrusions subsided, muddied, blurred, and were gone. Manuel ran faster. He heard a laser bolt crash. The ruby-red beam glanced off an alabaster hexagonal edge and hissed into the ice. It spewed up a dirty gout of steam where it struck, leaving a near-perfect rounded hole. Manuel opened his servos and went fast, blotting out the rising clamor and shouts over the comm. There were now only a few men closer than he, and he passed the one who had fired—a Fujimura mechanic, a still-frozen arm pointing where the bolt had gone, a face with skin stretched tight by a yawning black mouth, open and soundless and studded with dark crooked teeth.
He hit the ground and gathered for a high jump to get a better look. He was watching to see which way the Aleph would go, and then without any transition at all he was skidding over the ice, face down. He smacked into a boulder and stopped, his right hip numb. Something had hit him from the side and bowled him over. He stood and saw it was Eagle, churning on, oblivious of the momentary obstruction that it had brushed aside. The boy glanced at the e-beam—the system diagnostics still winked green—and set off after Eagle, panting now.
The Aleph glided downslope, angling toward the distant valley walls, not toward or away from the gathering clumps of men but at an angle that selected no advantage, and ignored the hooting, shouting specks that converged on the wrecked land beneath it. It coasted, ghostlike. Eagle reached it then and drove in without pausing. The running thing looked slight and insubstantial as it leaped at the ponderous mass above. Eagle’s claws grasped at the alabaster ribbing, scratching—and a chunk came away, turning pink at the fracture points, tumbling down with Eagle and striking the ice in a tangle with it. The boy. stopped. He had never seen that before—seen a mere mortal thing rip the Aleph that way. He switched to his magneto detectors and saw what Eagle must have sensed: a fitful waxing and waning of the magnetic fields as the thing glided over the irregular ground, the fields seeking a grip on the iron beneath.
Eagle gathered itself and leaped again, arcing into a gap that had not been there when it left the ground but opened as Eagle flew up, a flickering weakness which the churning muscular form shot through. It snatched at a ribwork and again tore off a fragment. The fields shifted again and slapped Eagle down, driving it into the ice. But it sprang up again without a pause, this time a little too late to exploit a momentary ebbing in the fluxlines that hung in the air—and the Aleph slowed. Turned. Set off downvalley, turning an amber flank to Eagle. The boy gasped, sucking in air—he had been holding his breath—and Petrovich shouted, “Look at! Made it change its mind!” and the men ran faster.
The Aleph picked up speed and moved away from Eagle. An animal—Manuel saw it was a servo’d dog—coming from the side, made bold perhaps by Eagle’s attack, leaped at the moving mass. It too cut through a flickering ebb in the flux—it was impossible to tell whether by accident or by design—but halfway to the Aleph a knot of magnetic turbulence struck it in the belly. The animal doubled over, and the belly blew open in a spew of tubes and rods and blood-spattered parts. It sent out a brief startled yelp in the radio spectrum and fell and sprawled loosely on the ice beneath the still-moving silent bulk.
Eagle was after it and leaped again and again at the Aleph as the two of them sped down a low slope. This time the attacks had no effect, as if the Aleph had learned better how to defend against this new thing. The men were coming at it from all sides now. Manuel still looked for an advantage, a target in the blank amber cubes. He breathed in the hot coppery taste strongly as he loped and squinted, panting heavily, his right hip now painful where Eagle had struck him. He heard the chorus of cries and orders and shouts over the comm build and surge as the men caught the meaning of Eagle’s charge and the Aleph’s continuing glide, spiritlike, over the hummocked terrain. It was not burrowing into the ice to elude them; no, it was running—not away from the men, or toward them, but clearly in reaction to the thing that men had wrought, Eagle. They began to swarm and hack at it now, firing their bolts and double-bores at whatever piece of it they fancied, whooping and yelling to each other as they ran and milled and exclaimed and reloaded and laughed in newly released, unacknowledged fear.
Another animal came at the Aleph, going chip-chip-chip, loud and lunging, off balance. It leaped, and something caught it partway and held it for just an instant. It broke apart in the air. The men did not notice the body fall. They came in closer, their weapons booming and crashing, potting at the alabaster slabs. Deep inside the blocks a mottled green now flowed. The shots inflicted no damage.
The Aleph was nearly to the valley wall, and the men fired faster, knowing they would lose it soon. Manuel still saw no target and held back, not sure it was going to be of any use at all to wait, but still unwilling to expend himself pointlessly the way the others did. He looked around for Old Matt. He had forgotten the old man and expected to see him far back, tired. He was surprised when his faceplate overlay showed Old Matt’s pulsing blue dot close by. He waved, and the dry, sandy voice called over the comm, “Up here. Follow.”
Manuel hesitated, wanting to follow the swarming, shouting crowd that pursued. Old Matt did not wait for him but went bounding up a hillside. Manuel ran after him. The old man moved slower, but chose his short leaps well and made good progress. The boy saw that this way took them through an easy pass, then over a ridgeline and along rumpled shelves of ice. Within moments he could no longer look back and see the valley floor. The e-beam threw him off balance as he ran through a clogged narrow gully. Then the two of them were headed down again, landing in slide cones where the dirt and gravel cushioned their falls. They plunged on, slipping on half-thawed ground, splashing across a brook of water with cakes of frozen ammonia in the shallows, then scrabbling up the bank and on. Manuel heard Old Matt’s long, rattling gasping over the comm. They came out at the base of a long, high cliff. It was mostly rock, streaked with rusty seams and patches of conglomerate—pebbles, ice chips, lumps of gray metallic ore.
They stopped there. Old Matt bent over, hands on his knees, coughing: slow, dry barks from deep in his chest.
“You, you want to go on? Maybe ease up, wait for the crawler? I can—”
“No. Wait. Wait here.”
The old man would say no more, just bent over and waited for the wracking cough to pass. Manuel cursed himself for giving up a chance at a shot, a last minute or two of opportunity, to come here. Probably Old Matt had meant to get a better angle on the Aleph as it neared the hills, to be able to shoot down on it where it might be less protected. But they’d got mixed up in these ravines and gullies and couldn’t even see the plain. The Aleph was gone from the valley now for sure, vanished, so even if he went back it would be too—
The cliff shuddered. Stones fell and dust billowed. A tremor. The cliff exploded, showering them with pebbles. The tubular snout came first, grinding stone, extending out into empty space and then flexing down. The huge body followed, snaking, carrying fragments of the rusty rock. Its skin swirled now, patchy with blurred blues and greens deep in the amber. It erupted from the cliff in a last cascade of dirt and ice, and descended to the flat plateau, still riding an insulating meter above the land.
“Je—I—How’d you know it was comin’ through to here? I thought—”
Old Matt waved the question aside. “Different,” he said hoarsely, still panting heavily. He pointed. “It’s different now.”
“You mean the colors? I don’t see…”
One of the patches resolved, solidified, darkened. It became a hole and the hole widened and something moved in it, and abruptly the boy saw that the thing coming out was Eagle. The head worked free and then the hulking shoulders. Eagle struggled against the irising lip, silent, and the wide-set black eyes locked on the men, not to ask for aid but as a remorseless mute statement it chose to make even at the moment when it surely felt what the men could see—the suddenly constricting grip that folded its left shoulder, buckled the main housing and the steel manifold, breaking the spinal reinforcement, crushing Eagle’s big treads that ground against the amber walls. Only near the end did Eagle’s hands stretch out and flail against the side, futilely, without hope but without surrender. Manuel stepped forward. Old Matt put a hand on his shoulder. Eagle struggled on. The great neck snapped. The eyes went blank. Eagle’s head lolled, and Manuel again stepped forward. The opening convulsed once, twice, and then the third time, with a slithering sound, it swallowed Eagle’s body whole.
“I—I—Damn! It just—” The boy shook with rage, crying out to no one but himself. “Eagle—got in—It didn’t have to—Damn! To just—Damn!”
The Aleph moved, coasting toward the south, still floating a blithe distance from the ground.
“Eagle got in, had time to do some damage, maybe,” Old Matt said. “That’s what made the colors, made it open up those spots again.”
“Yeah—yeah—” the boy gasped, mind churning. “To, to kill Eagle for, for—”
“Don’t you worry about that end of it. Eagle didn’t. You saw the look of him right there, the last second. Looked the same as ever. Mean as he ever was and not regretting it.”
“I don’t see…”
Old Matt gestured. “It’s moving off down that way. Look.”
Manuel studied the massive blocky shape, working its wedge-shaped collars and buttresses against each other as it glided, soundless and unhurried. Its surface still roiled with blue-black marks that came and went, and as he watched, one irised open.
“Still not done,” Old Matt said. “Let’s go.”
They began to run again.
OLD MATT WENT slower now. As they loped down a ravine the boy could see the lines of strain in the old, worn face. Their slick suits bunched and stretched with amplified strength, and Manuel saw the power gauge on Old Matt’s back register nearly two-thirds gone. They scrambled over outcroppings of layered stone—rock laid down in the first days when Ganymede’s raw crust was melting and freezing and remelting under the long hammering, when Jupiter glowed with its own accreting fires, and on the moons brief waters flowed to form fast-dying, steaming seas. They had to go slow on the slippery hillsides. The Aleph steadily widened the gap between them. Manuel checked his overlay and saw they were running parallel to the main valley. The blue shotgun pattern of dots told him the main party was spreading through the neighboring arroyos and cañons.
“Funny it doesn’t burrow in,” he called to Old Matt. “Never saw it aboveground this long before.”
“I have. Twice.”
“Figure it’s having fun with us?”
“Doubt if it knows what we are, even.”
“It knew Eagle, all right,” he said with sharp pride.
The old man panted into his suit mike. “That it did. That it did.”
He watched Old Matt as they loped after the serenely coasting ghostlike form. There was something in the old face now. It was neither excitement nor eagerness nor hope. Years later, when he was a man, the boy would realize finally what it had been: a blend of foreknowledge and a certain deliberate, grim determination. Old Matt had known something unspoken, back then when he first saw Eagle, and had made of the furious burning anger in Eagle something that, fashioned, could reach farther and strike at something in the Aleph. He had known and been pulled forward by the knowing, giving himself each year to learn a little more. He had no share, no fraction of a Settlement, Manuel would think then. There were children, his own from decades before, but all of them scattered to other outposts or even back Earthside. That part of him was dispersed. He had spent his time and his substance in the orbital labs or on explorer teams or at Titan and Saturn when they were just opening it up out there. So he had never posted a bond or filed a term agreement and affidavit of intention, and so had no part of the land that he could nail down or lay claim to. He could live and work and earn in Sidon, at fill-in jobs; he even had a vote, but still was not a commune member and in sum had nothing of the territory other than what he sensed of it. He had known it before a foot had fallen on every hill, before centuries of brawling humanity wrote their name across it with Settlements and Centrals. But despite all that, he returned again and again to the land beyond man’s enclaves, still felt its emptiness and unresolved potentiality.
Manuel called to his father, got an answer he could not understand, and ran on. Then the Aleph dove into a hillside. It did not pause or even slow, just necked into a wall of ice and through it, boring on with a grinding and a booming.
“Hell! It’s going under!” Manuel shouted, and slowed, but Old Matt said nothing, just kept running down the cañon. Manuel paused, panting, watching the last of the Aleph disappear into the still-splintering ice, tumbling boulders from the hillside, making the ground tremble and buck.
He heaved a sigh of defeat and slapped his side in irritation. He had lugged the e-beam this far and never fired it. He swore at his stupidity. He was starting to tire, and the best chance yet, the best chance he had ever heard of, had dribbled away, with never the right angle or distance for a decent shot. Maybe he should have fired anyway. Then at least he could have said he had done something, given it a try. But even as he thought it he knew that was bullshit, that shooting not for the target but for the talking afterward about it was wrong and would make the whole thing taste cheap in his mouth for a long time after. So he just stood there and swore.
When he looked around after a minute, the old man was clean gone. He checked the overlay and set out after him, feeling even more stupid than before. Old Matt’s blue dot was angling around a bunch of low hills. Manuel set off and ran hard. He took long, high leaps, depending on his gyros to get him oriented right before he landed. Once he came down amongst a pack of rockjaws. They scattered in mad flight, though the boy hardly saw them. In five minutes he had nearly caught up with the figure, was only a few hundred meters behind, when a hillside broke open and the Aleph erupted from it, moving as before with that constant, indifferent gliding velocity.
“Manuel!” It was his father. He looked to the north and picked out the swift figures of the main party, converging. “We guessed you were following it. Last we saw, Eagle—”
“I know. Eagle’s dead.”
There was talk from the men as they came loping across the broad flat land. Manuel automatically waited for his father, loping a little to the west to keep near the Aleph, which was speeding on. More than ten klicks away an ice mesa reared up in its path, sunlight catching the ruddy peaks. The Aleph might be heading for it or the mesa might just be in the way, but if the Aleph bored through it the men would have to take a long route around, and Manuel knew Old Matt was not up to that. He was getting tired now too. Over the comm he could hear panting from the running men.
“It’s movin’ pretty damn fast,” a voice called.
Another said, “Yeah, looks to be pickin’ up speed.”
“Too fast. You, los ricos wi’ your extra servos, maybe you keep up wi’ it but we can’t—”
Petrovich shouted, “You wanting to drop out, go back get crawlers!”
Some swearing.
“You guys been jawing while this boy’s been runnin’ down the damn thing.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Uh-huh, just a kid.”
“The old man too.”
“Sí, they been showin’ us their heels all day.”
“Come on, you bastards!”
“It’s only got a klick on us.”
“Not gonna let that old man run you inna ground are ya? Ha?”
And the straggled-out bunches of men pulled together and began to run again in earnest, filling the comm with their harsh taunts to each other, their heavy gasping breaths as some sped out in front, spilling pellmell across the plain, their clamor and din swelling as ceramic and steel scraped and joined, propelling them on in a wedding of man, machine, and movement.
“Don’t let the animals near it,” Colonel López shouted. “They’ll get snapped in pieces.”
A voice grunted, “Damn sure I’m not goin’ ’at close either,” and a chorus of agreement came.
Major Sánchez called out, “Try to turn it!” though how anyone could do that he did not say, and no one asked.
By now the boy had caught up with Old Matt and saw the leathery face turn toward him, eyes bright, a thin, dry smile on the lips, the copper of his cheek flecked with sweat. “You’ll have to…hit it…on the run,” the old man called out.
“How? I—I—Those openings are small. I—”
“Get up close,” was all Old Matt said, and then they both landed at the end of a leap and were off again, coming up alongside the smoothly gliding form. Manuel watched the crackling magnetic flux fork and dance around it, and studied it for advantage. Pockets opened and closed, but too fast for him to do anything about them. Eagle had been faster. Eagle had known the vulnerable warpings and had used them instantly, without the numbing fear that came on him now, a spreading chill that robbed nerves and muscle of vital split-seconds.
“Stay back from it, son!” But he pressed forward as he saw a blue whirlpool-like splotch form near a tangle of arcing red magnetic field lines. He raised the snout of the beam projector and as the blue melted into greenish dabs he fired. The bolt cut a slim, impossibly straight line through the thin air, landed with a shower of orange sparks, a full three centimeters wide of the mark, and flew off to the right, harmless.
“Ah! Ah!” he spat out in self-disgust. And fired again. This shot came nearer but still richocheted off in a flower of sparks, some of them glancing off the boy’s arm, he was that close.
The Aleph was like a moving building to the boy, and he jumped back as it turned first toward him, as if to shrug him off one of the huge shoulders, and then away, rising a meter more from the ice. It towered over him, and the blue-green vortex faded. He refused to give ground. It accelerated away and the boy was after it in three fast leaps, eyes searching, Old Mart’s voice in his ear: “We got to turn him more!”—and the boy saw the old man was on his left, craning his neck to look at the underbelly of the thing. The grainy amber roiled with flecks and seams of washed-out colors, as if something liquid churned just inside the skin, but the ponderous blocks looked solid and hard like deep rock too.
“One’s starting over here!” Old Matt called, and lunged forward, pointing at a vortex swirl of mottled colors. A condensing magnetic knot came out of the whirlpool and struck him in the chest, and he went down. It laced up his chest and around his head, a snakelike swarming tangle of interthreading ruby flux lines, arcing and licking at him. Manuel saw him slump and go on his knees. But the boy also caught the vortex colors deepening and swung the snout toward them. He fired. Missed. Thumbed the stock to recharge the capacitors. And looked for Old Matt. The magnetic knot had started to ebb, withdrawing into the Aleph. Old Matt was still down, not moving. The boy leaped forward, further under the vast weight that worked and labored, and raised the projector again and shot directly into the thing at close range, the quick yellow stream crackling as it found the entrance. The churning dark colors sopped it up. It was swallowed, gone, the whole bolt sucked in. Manuel backed off, gasping, and the Aleph smoothly kept on. He saw he had done nothing. He dropped the projector and bent over Old Matt, who was on hands and knees and gasping, eyes closed, mouth open and salivating.
“You—Can you—Can I get you—”
“I’m…okay. Okay. Keep after it.”
Manuel studied the creased, tired face for a long moment and then nodded and got to his feet, sighed, picked up the projector, checked the winking diagnostics, looked up—
The Aleph was down. It was on the ice, barely moving. The aura of magnetic flux faded and flickered out as the boy watched.
He yelped in sheer exuberance. The Aleph looked even bigger on the ground, cracking the ice where its great ribwork slid and stopped, slid and stopped.
A hand clapped him on the shoulder and he turned, expecting Old Matt, but it was his father. “Jesucristo,” the Colonel said. “Something inside, some electromagnetic thing must have failed.”
“It’s crawling!” Petrovich broke in. “You got it crawling! The foot thing, see? Treads on other side too.”
The long cone came down sluggishly, stolidly, stamping its blunted point into the ice. As the Aleph turned the men could see the treads bite in and push it forward, smacking and splitting the ice and rock in rhythm with the conical extrusion that struck and punched, struck and punched, leaving the delta-shaped print. Manuel felt the ground shake as the Aleph inexorably shoved itself forward, no longer serenely skating above the rough raw land that was the province of mere men and their lanky, scrambling, awkward legs. He stared. It was as massive as he had ever dreamed, and now that he saw it wounded and still struggling on with the same deliberate immemorial energy, as ruthless with itself as it had been with others, he knew it was undiminished by mere injury and still possessed the thing he sought.
Old Matt stood shakily. He merely gave one nod, abrupt and final, a thin drawn smile slowly spreading until it reached the metal of him.
The men were yelling and pounding Manuel on the back and raising their stunners and lasers into the air, and in his ears the human voices rang and clamored like the yips and cries of the animals, echoing on themselves and filling the air of the caked plain, seeming to reflect and re-form and amplify, until the rousing volley of noise fed and built and a shot boomed, then another, now more—lasers and stunners and double-bores all raking the sides of the laboring thing that kept on, oblivious, as now bits and pieces of it began to fly off where the stronger laser bolts hit, alabaster chips spinning away into the clear air, stunners rippling the space between the milling, shouting men and their target, shots steaming off the ice and vaporizing rock and splashing against the intricate groining where colors pinwheeled still. In a moment Manuel stood alone and the fifty-odd men of the party had spread out, firing and running, circling around it.
“Stop! Cease fire!” Colonel López shouted, once, then again, then a third time as his words began to have effect.
“It’s still movin’,” a man called.
“You’re just chippin’ away at it,” Old Matt said weakly. “Do no good. Won’t even slow it down.”
A man shouted, “Ha! Chippin’, he says! We’ll see ’bout that,” and he made to raise his stunner.
Colonel López was on the man before he could fire, slapping the weapon down. “We’ll see, eh? You on this, you follow what’s good for us all, use your head, sí?”
“Well I don’t see as—”
“Quiet!” somebody shouted.
“It’s not going fast,” Major Sánchez said. “We got time to think.”
“Think what? Shooting it’s all we can do,” a man from Hiruko said.
“Yeah,” another man put in, “us all shootin’, maybe we wear it down.”
“No,” Petrovich said. “E-beam in the dark spots, that works. Nothing else has, ever.”
“Right,” Old Matt said.
“Those spots, there aren’t many of them,” Major Sánchez said, gesturing. There were few of the deeper mottled patches now. They moved in a slow whirlpool churn, deep in the blocks and collars and buttresses of it.
“Hard to hit,” a man said. Others murmured and grumbled. None of them had e-beams. They were poor agro laborers, mostly, minimum-share men, and they wanted to be able to say they had shot the thing on this day and maybe even done something important. “We could sit here forever, waitin’ for a—”
“Manuel’s hit it already,” Major Sánchez said.
Petrovich said, “Yes, too much risk he’s taken. Enough for one day. I do the next.”
“I’d say I know more about projectors,” Major Sánchez said mildly.
Colonel López said, “Knowing projectors isn’t it.”
“Yes,” Petrovich said. “Is hitting at right time that is important. You saw the boy.”
“Sí,” Major Sánchez said.
A Fujimura Settlement man demanded, “Seems like that e-beam oughtta be shared out.”
“Yeah, common property, like.”
“Only one, seems like should take turns.”
“Come all this way, don’ get a chance ’less they give us turns at—”
“Quiet!” the Colonel shouted. “You’re not getting anything by whining for it.” He glowered at the men and some steam went out of the discussion.
Someone said quietly, “Still, we got to decide.”
Petrovich said, “The boy, he has whole rest of life to hunt.”
“So what?” an agro man put in. “He’s earned it. Him an’ the old one.”
Major Sánchez said, “Could be. Dangerous, though.”
Manuel had been quiet, waiting to see which way the talk would go, but now sensing what his father felt, he spoke up: “Old Matt deserves a try. It’s already hurt him some.”
Heads nodded; the crowd murmured agreement.
Old Matt said nothing, just took the projector and hefted it and ran the winking diagnostics through their cycle. The men watched the Aleph as it labored across the hummocked ground, making fair speed but still a long way from the jutting mesa.
“Why didn’t it burrow?” Major Sánchez asked.
“Hurt,” Petrovich said. “Needs time to fix self, maybe.”
“Crawl away like an animal?” Colonel López said. “No. It’s no kind of creature at all.”
But the thing did have a valiant look to it now, wounded and still keeping on with its same remorseless energy, its deep drive to be forever moving.
Old Matt started forward, moving too with a slow, indomitable certainty, almost ceremonial, but hampered by the awkward bulk he carried. “I’ll help him with that,” Manuel called out, and ran after him.
The men spread out instinctively, forming a sweeping line as their ancestors had a million years before—a good way to flush game from thickets and run it where they wanted. They overtook the lumbering Aleph easily and the ragged line wrapped around, surrounding it. The pile-driving conical thing shook the ground, stamping furiously, and the great body swayed and creaked and groaned with its gravid immemorial momentum.
“Have to get in close,” the old man said.
Manuel followed, carrying the projector. He watched for the blue-green motes that flickered across the flat faces. The motes swam as though the men were seeing them projected on a screen by some interior source of brilliant light, so strong it could illuminate through rock. His mouth filled with the hot coppery taste, now laced with an oily fatigue.
The two of them walked cautiously into the shadow of it. A hexagonal segment rocked from side to side. The land shook and heaved. Manuel gravely gave the projector to Old Matt and saw the deep creases in his dark face, saw the haggard resolve there, and did not understand the thin, quiet smile.
“One good bolt will do it,” the boy said, and felt absurd, giving advice. The old man nodded, still smiling, as bare meters away a great flat side like a wall hammered at the land and to the rear the cone jabbed and a fresh delta-print appeared, sunk deep in the rock, steaming.
“Watch for me,” Old Matt said.
The boy flicked his eyes across the long profile of the Aleph, trying to anticipate where the next blue-green swirl would come, and for a while rested his hand on Old Matt’s shoulder, as if restraining him from going closer, encased in the extended moment, sure that if they waited until the right glancing instant—
Blue-green flecks united just above, at a corner; rapidly grew; split into two larger mottled round, dark openings—
“There!” Manuel shouted.
Old Matt got the snout up and fired at a forming spot The yellow bolt lashed at the edge of it, showering gaudy orange sparks down on them.
“Get it?” Manuel cried. Old Matt shook his head. He fired again. The discharge boomed in the thin air. Another near miss, the boy thought, but he could not tell exactly, and a green electric aura now flickered at the mouth of the opening.
The shaking, struggling mountain rocked harder, shuddered, boomed, and leaned over toward them. “It’s…”—and the boy tried to pull Old Matt back, away, seeing the Aleph tip further, the laboring blocks struggling all along its length. Old Matt lurched away, intent, and raised the projector toward the teetering wall. The boy shouted, “Wait—Get out—”
Too late. The Aleph fell. Half-turned to run, Manuel saw the spreading dark blue patch plunge toward him and at the last instant felt a spongy clasp around him as he cringed, braced hopelessly against the weight—
And was encased in a muffled silence, utterly black, even as he felt the shattering crash of the Aleph’s impact through his boots, which still stood on the ice while the rest of him had entered this cottony blank emptiness. He was inside the blue portal; it had fallen on him. He reached out for support and found nothing but a slickness, a resistance that brushed his grip aside and imparted some momentum to him.
He felt his boots leave the ice. Lifted—
He called out, but his comm gave nothing but a hornet’s buzz of static. Ahead—he knew he moved, but could not tell how—a green glow rippled and forked into the mouths of tunnels. He was gliding down a tube. Something dark scissored regularly in the diffuse light and he saw it was a pair of legs, a human form turning in the glow, and as he came closer he saw it was Old Matt, one arm up in what might be a wave, the helmet lit only by the wan green luminescence.
As Old Matt turned, the boy saw the face for an instant, uncreased and pale, smiling, looking straight at him with eyes unblinking. Old Matt said something, his lips moving slowly, silent, and the boy tried to make out the words, but a dull roar came into the tunnels then and disturbed his concentration. He was now smoothly passing by Old Matt in the glow, so he raised a hand and waved in a timeless gliding moment, and then he felt a push, a gathering acceleration, and with rushing speed fell away from the still-turning silent form. He blinked, struggled against unseen forces, and heard random crisp noises swelling as if he were coming closer, yells, swearing—
Dark ice rushed at him and he hit solidly, painfully, rolling, pinwheeling, arms flailing, voices shouting as pandemonium burst in on him. He fetched up against a boulder, slamming his shoulder into it, purpling his vision—gasped, and for a moment could not get his hands and feet under him to get up.
He clutched against the boulder and stood. He was a dozen meters away from the Aleph and could make out the gouge in the ice where he had hit, falling straight down from a yawning green opening in a hexagonal collar. He’d left skid marks. The Aleph lay absolutely still and silent. It rested on ice that had cracked beneath it. The conical delta-puncher was cocked halfway up in the air, pointing at the horizon.
Men ran back and forth around the Aleph, hooting and jabbering and yelling to each other all sorts of claims—“Didja see ’at one I got it smack inna head” despite the fact that the Aleph had nothing you could call a head, and “Shot it three times three good uns” and “—figure it was me an’ Raul did it, see, we timed our bolts so they hit together on that big rib cage up ’ere” and “Damned if I did’n know it, soon’s we opened fire when it was buckin’ aroun’, the sucker just gives up, that’s all it took was some more shootin’—” and “just wore it out is all, nobody’s run it down the way we have, kept after it steady” and so on, the boy standing dazed as this washed over him and the throbbing ache spread in his shoulder. A Hiruko man jumped up on the gray flank of it and stamped down as if to test how solid it was, and yelled, “One small step for a man!” and laughed and climbed on up to the top of the buttress, toting his stunner and jabbing down with his boots. Manuel gazed around. It looked to him as if he had been dropped about a hundred meters from where he and Old Matt had been. He started walking back that way, and that was when he saw the crowd. They were standing around two figures on the ground. One of them was large, an animal. The other was a man, lying face down on the ice and not moving. It was Old Matt.
MANUEL STUMBLED FORWARD and pushed his way through the men crowded around. A jagged tear ran down Old Matt’s suit from shoulder to hip. Somebody had slapped an instant patch on it, and through the translucent gauze Manuel could see blood oozing out. The suit was raked all down one side, too, with shreds of h hanging out and insulation showing and fluids dripping. Gingerly Petrovich rolled Old Matt partway over. There was no damage to the front of the suit. The face was leached of color and the eyes were closed. His backpack showed life functions weak but steady.
“Did he hit on something when he came out?” Manuel asked.
Major Sánchez stared at him. “Came out? It crushed him when it rolled over.”
“No, we both got picked up by it. It fell over on us. The openings, they sucked us in. Madre. That must be how Eagle got trapped inside too.”
The men looked at him without comprehension. Colonel López said, “Old Matt’s been here all the time.”
“No! I saw him inside. Then the thing, it spat us out again.”
Petrovich shook his head rapidly. “It started rolling over, we shot. I saw. Aleph hit the old man”—he smacked two fists together—“threw like rag doll.”
“No, it had us both. Inside. It must’ve carried me longer, that’s all. I saw him in there.”
The men stared at him again blankly. His father said, “Look, son, you’re shaky. Sit down, take a stim pack. I got to deal with this right now.”
Manuel peered down at Old Matt and tried to remember just what the old man had looked like inside. The same, only not hurt. He was going to say something more when a man came up to him and said emphatically, “Finito!”
“Uh, what? Finite?”
“Finito.” The man drew a finger across his neck.
“Finished?” Manuel gazed at the hulking inert mass. “I…guess so.”
Another man broke in with “Uh, ’at thing—it’s got some systems up, but most of ’em are hopeless.”
“What? What thing?” Manuel looked to where the man was gesturing. The animal lying nearby was badly mangled. He walked unsteadily over to it, halfway knowing what he would find.
Eagle’s head was intact, but the neck turned at a wrong angle. The strong steel-jacketed trunk was mashed and leaking pus-colored fluid. Something had shredded and ripped its treads.
“We got to get it back to camp,” Manuel said.
Petrovich had followed him. “Now, Eagle, it did come out—poof, like you. Maybe that’s what you saw in there?”
Manuel shook his head.
Petrovich said, “Not good chance for this one.”
“Animal like this, you can save it if you don’t let the cold get into it or the systems lose minimum power.” Manuel wasn’t talking to Petrovich. He stared at the crushed Eagle and didn’t seem to notice when other men came up and said something, marveling at the damage and how long Eagle had lived in there.
Major Sánchez said, “Look at it, all that time, and being carried along and all.”
“Where’s a crawler?” Manuel said abruptly. He went over to his father. “We need two, three crawlers.”
The Colonel said, “I sent Fuentes back. Already radioed them.”
“He, he’s bleeding in there.” Manuel stood and watched the bright red seep out of Old Matt. Without a pressure dome there was nothing any of them could do but stand there and watch it.
Petrovich said, “No leaks—I checked. But don’t like his temperature.”
“He’s bleeding.”
“Not so bad.”
“Not so bad, goddamn. He hasn’t got much in him. He’s worn out already.”
“Shock is worst. Worse than bleeding.” Petrovich said it flatly, not coloring the facts with the sound of his voice.
Manuel paced restlessly between the two clusters of men. The bulk of the Aleph loomed over them like a ridge of rock thrust up from the ice. Motionless, it seemed a piece of the broken terrain. Manuel looked at it for a moment, not thinking of anything but merely trying to take in the enormity of the great bulk now still and dead, free at last of its duty. He tried to think of what had happened, but could not There was a deadness in him. Then the harsh sounds of the men yelling and scrambling over the Aleph brought him back from the empty part of him and he went to his father. “Which way the crawlers coming?”
“They have to go around through some ravines,” the Colonel said. He showed his son the route on the map overlay.
“That’ll take too long.”
“Two hours, I’d say. Petrovich thinks—”
“I’ll carry him. Go up over this ridgeline here. Meet them down where the cañon necks. Cut the time in half.”
“Carry him? Son, you’re tired out. I can’t—”
“Let’s ask Petrovich if it’ll hurt him.”
“You’ll do as I…” Colonel López paused, looking at his son for a moment while the boy gazed off at the crumpled form of the old man. Then he went and asked, and Petrovich thought about it and said maybe so, if Manuel took it easy, no jumps, just climbing the ridge and then coming down the far side easy, nothing fast—
“Good. Good,” Manuel said.
Major Sánchez got him a power reserve pack from one of the Hiruko men who had a spare. The man argued for a while about giving it up until he saw the scowls around him. The boy did not think badly of the man; without that reserve the march back would be a long labor of sweat and ache. He ignored everyone and concentrated on slinging a harness to carry the body in his arms. He secured it against jolts with a strap around his neck. His father watched and knew with a mild surprise that it would do no good to say anything. In that moment of letting go of his son he passed into a new time, and began to accumulate a sadness and an anger fueled by loss that he would not feel consciously for months to come.
Manuel picked up the old man carefully. He glanced at the circle of faces without recognition, saying nothing in reply to the advice and warnings, already turned inward and preparing himself, and then turned and set off at a steady pace, taking each step with a rolling gait to cushion the body. He stopped once, a kilometer away, to look back and get his bearings. It seemed he was gazing back over a great distance. The men were shrunken dots, random specks milling about the flanks of an enormous carcass.
He started up the slopes of loose gravel and rock shelves. As he rose and could see further he realized how far they had run. He did not think about what had happened but just kept on, concentrating on the gently swaying loose-limbed body. Once Old Matt opened his eyes and looked up at the black sky for a time, and then shifted himself minutely, the eyes gazing out at Manuel, liquid and glistening in the pale yellow sunlight.
Manuel tramped stolidly along the rocky ridgeline. He watched clouds boiling up from the south where a fusion aura glowed, yellowing the vapors. The banks of moisture roiled and tumbled over each other and grew blue-bellied. They soared over the ridge, rising, and then a rain came down, bringing a false dusk that made the boy go slower so as to be sure of his footing. The first hour passed. The body creaked in his arms. He covered sixteen klicks on the level ridge and then started down, which was the hardest part. The gravel and moist soil gave suddenly and unpredictably, making him lurch to keep the swaying body from feeling the full shock. Old Matt’s eyes opened momentarily and then the face descended into a kind of collapsed sleep.
It was into the third hour, and he could not feel his arms anymore. He went on through the gathering dull dusk, across a slumbering landscape tit by breaks in the clouds, hearing in his helmet the regular ping ping of the directional signal the crawler sent. He angled downward to meet it. Innumerable times he slipped and caught himself and slipped again, starting small slides and avoiding the rattling showers of gravel that cascaded down. Through the streaming gloom the spaced signals came to him like a constant calling of a mindless thing, the only presence besides the crunch of his boots on snapping ice.
He found the lead crawler making good time down a streambed. It stopped, and he put the body through the lock. Two crawlers and a walker passed by in the sleeting darkness, going on to the main party. By the time he cycled through, the body was hooked into the small medical monitor. He sat with three men and watched the diagnostics flicker and resolve. “He’s holdin’ on,” one of the men said. “Have to get him back to camp to do any fixin’ up, though.”
So the crawler reversed and backed out of the valley until it could turn around without risking getting stuck in the ponds and melting ice. The falling rain carried energy stored in it by a fusion-reactor robot southward, and in recondensing now released the heat, spreading change across the face of the land.
It was a long ride back. Manuel found the men studying him and realized he had exhausted himself. His suit was on the red marker at the bottom of the dial. He sat in a sling chair and let the swaying lull him but did not sleep. Hailstones clattered on the hull. The men here had dropped out of the main party, mostly from fatigue, and did not ask much about what had happened. He was glad of that.
They covered the last distance into camp as the rain and hail lifted and the sun cut through the remaining pink fog that hugged the gullies and ice arroyos. The crawler speeded up then, growing, toward the bip bip bip of the ranging beacon that seemed to Manuel like one long calling, each pulse lingering in his mind until the next joined it and blended in, a hollow ringing as formless and remorseless as the fog. A dozen men waited in a little clump as they came into camp. A medical tech had come out from Sidon on Colonel López’s orders. He was a thin man with uncertain, always-moving green eyes. The men helped bring Old Matt inside, carefully turning the stretcher to get it through the crawler lock without jarring. When they got his suit off, the walnut-brown body lay inert, nearly hairless, seeming smaller than the boy remembered.
The medical machinery and the tech did things to the body, patching and splicing in replacements, cleaning and disinfecting where suit fluids might have gotten into the body cavity, working on the main problems and leaving the rest for later.
“God, lookit him,” the med tech exclaimed.
Manuel asked, “Exhaustion? The wound doesn’t look so deep.”
“Exhausted, sure,” the med tech said. “Shock pretty bad too. But mostly it’s the cardiovascular. Seized up somehow. Lot of neural damage, too. Can’t figure how that happened. Just wore out, maybe. Doesn’t respond to the usual stuff.”
Manuel asked quietly, “How many functions can you save?”
“Most. For sure, most.”
“Replace the rest?”
“I’d say prob’ly. Some of the organs died, though. Liver, kidneys, some smaller stuff. And the small blood vessels—they’ve broken down all through him. Costs a lot to replace that.”
“How much?”
“Dunno. I don’t see many cases like this, guys this old. Most of ’em are in Hiruko.”
“They’ll have to take him there?”
“Prob’ly. Those blood vessels, it’s not the parts, it’s the labor. Lotta bench time.”
Old Matt opened his eyes then. He looked out as though from far back in a hidden place, and his eyes moved slowly over the faces of the men gathered around. His face was dry and chalky, but the eyes seemed to brim with a moist fullness. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Then he closed it without his face showing any expression of concern.
“Some kind of control function is out,” the med tech said. “Not surprising, with a spine injury.”
“Can you fix it?”
“Look, I told you. Funny neural damage in there. That’s not field-type work.”
Manuel nodded numbly.
They let the medmonitor work on the body then, humming and sloshing and snuffling and clacking to itself. Manuel sat up watching it and then slumped over on his side and slept for a few hours. He woke when the main party hauled into camp and some men called into the cabin for help getting Eagle off the deck of a crawler. Manuel went outside and saw his father and the others dismounting, all pale and with that careful slow-moving way of men working in suits that are drained of power. He joined the gang of men on the nearest crawler. They got the lip of a forklift under one end of Eagle and worked it onto a makeshift ramp and pushed Eagle down, aided by the slippery ice that the hail had left on the ramp. They hooked it to the crawler and towed it over to the outside medical and hydraulic station for the animals.
Eagle lifted its head and tried to turn it. Steel screeched and sparks jumped. The great head crashed to the side, dangling. It shuffled its hands, and its treads clashed and jammed against each other. It struggled deep inside itself, Manuel could see that, and after a moment it shuddered and the hands relaxed and it went still again. He thought he could see a slight regular motion, as if from lungs laboring far down in there.
The med tech came out, looking harassed by the men who’d come piling into the cabin, men with pulled muscles and sprains and a few broken bones. He ran a series check on the crushed and mangled thing. He cut away Petrovich’s clumsy patches and sealed on new ones, stopped fluid loss, and gave voltage boosts to the internal systems that still had life. Then he shook his head. “Can’t work miracles,” he muttered.
“You can goddamn try,” Manuel said harshly.
“I done what I can. Got no equipment for more. Not outside stuff, anyway.”
“I could take it back to Sidon.”
“Don’t think you should move it, not anymore.”
“You going to just let it lie there?”
“Look, that’s deep internal injuries there. Either the living part’s going to pull through or not. Only way to help it is to pry open the shell and take it out and keep it alive until you get it to Hiruko. They know this kind of work. I don’t. So I say we just leave it rest, see if it pulls through.”
“How long?”
“Day, two days.”
“Then?”
“Take it to Hiruko if it looks strong enough.” The med tech’s mouth twisted in irritation. “Look, I got men to work on. Animals come last, you know that.”
“This’s no animal.”
“Yeah, okay, you read the regs, kid. You just read the regs.” The man went back inside, fidgeting at his tools. He was having to deal with more injuries than he’d ever seen before on just a little pruning jaunt and he didn’t like it.
Inside the sprawling cabin the men were eating or boozing or else lying across their bunks half-undressed, already sunk into sleep, mouths open, some of them snoring, faces dark with week-old beards and dirt. The boy sat awhile, not saying much to anybody or listening to the wandering, tired talk around him. Old Matt lay still, and his diagnostics held steady. The boy fell asleep again; but when he woke, tangled in his bunk with a blanket wrapped around his head and nothing on the lower half of him, he felt no lifting of the slow fatigue and ache in his arms and legs.
He went out then to look at Eagle. It was near noon in the long Ganymede day, and the sun had burned through the layers of mist that formed high up, where the new atmosphere was boiling out into pure dead vacuum. The dot of a sun cast sharp shadows among the men and women who were coming in now—pipefitters and agro hands from Sidon and further-away Settlements, miners from one-dome places yet unnamed, contract laborers, women widowed years before—all with a debt real or imagined that had now been paid. They came in walkers or on foot, following the same incessant bip bip bip and coming into the big clearing where Eagle lay facing outward, toward the distant line of slumped and folded ice hills. There must have been a hundred of them sitting in amongst the vehicles when Manuel came out. He watched them as they went up to the big crushed thing and stared at the caved-in carapace, never daring to reach out and touch it, speaking to each other in low voices that didn’t carry on comm line, making their own private ritual of it. They asked to go inside and see Old Matt, too, but Petrovich wouldn’t let them. They asked about Manuel, but nobody among them recognized the boy—they had only heard of him—so Manuel stayed close to Eagle and they did not bother him.
Eagle was holding steady. Every few hours it would lift its head and wrench the neck around painfully, each turn of angle like a rachet jumping forward a notch. The black eyes peered out at the gathering people and gave no sign of its inner torment. It studied the far hills, not with the ferocity it had shown before, but as if it wanted to be sure the broad, stretching wastes were still there, still lying beyond the ring of human faces. Manuel watched it then, sensing its adamant refusal to compromise, to give any sign of what lay wounded inside. Eagle was not of man and could not be reconciled with man, but was out of Earth and knew that, too. It had done its job, a task in the end self-imposed, and was now free. It died at noon.
MAJOR SÁNCHEZ WAS the first to leave. “Got to get back. Work to do. I stayed too long already,” he told Manuel.
“Most of us’ll be hauling out tomorrow,” a Sidon man said.
An engineer from another Settlement put in, “My men are kind of drug out. No more for us.”
Colonel López nodded. “A few should stay with Old Matt until he’s ready to be moved. I’ll do it.”
Manuel watched the people disperse from around the cabin. Most were going back to their Settlements. Some were mounting up to go out to where the Aleph was, though there wasn’t much they could do besides stare at it. “I’ll stay, too,” he said.
“Sí, we got it, eh?” Major Sánchez said, slapping Manuel on the back. “After all this time.”
“We’ll have celebration, back at Sidon,” Petrovich said jovially. “We wait for you to come in, though.”
“Fine,” Colonel López said, watching his son. “I imagine it won’t be more than a few days. The med tech says Old Matt’ll pull through.”
Major Sánchez said, “Sí, sí. He is a tough old one.” He stamped his boots to warm up, and waved at a nearby crawler. “I want to get going. Need some help getting Eagle back up on the deck and lashed down.”
Manuel asked, “What’ll you do with it?”
“Recycle. It’s Sidon property. Lot of scrap. Some good motors ’n’ servos left for sure.”
“What about the body?” Manuel asked sharply.
Major Sánchez glanced at Colonel López. “Body? Animals, well…”
“Animals, they get organic recycle,” Petrovich said.
Manuel said, “It’s no animal—you don’t know that.”
Colonel López nodded. “As I remember, Hiruko said something about its maybe being human. Or part human.”
“But Dad—”
The Colonel turned to Manuel. “When they open it up, we’ll see. Sure didn’t act human, did it?”
“That’s not the point.”
Colonel López smiled. “You know we value human life over everything. We’re going to do all we can for Old Matt. But there was just no way to help Eagle. It was too embedded in the machinery.”
Manuel said nothing. His father had always taken a lot of care with medical monitors. It was part of New Catholicism—that people should be kept alive in whatever form possible.
Major Sánchez shrugged. “A small matter. Probably very little of anything in there. Big machine, was what it was, sí. Now, who’s to help? Eh?”
They got Eagle onto the crawler, and by the time the job was finished the field was nearly cleared of people. Most of the main party mounted up then, calling to one another about things they didn’t want left behind and things already lost and who would beat who back to Sidon. The boy heard little of it. He worked at the loading and watched the clear sky. The sun slid behind Jupiter’s rosy clouds, haloing the planet, and then the gloom of eclipse descended. He watched the crawlers roar and buck and start out of camp, Major Sánchez leading. Eagle’s body shook with the vibration as the crawler clattered over an outcropping, and to Manuel the body seemed reduced, loose, a heap of parts. He watched until it was out of sight.
The party left their bedding all rolled on the bunks, ready for next year. The cabin would freeze up solid while they were gone and take a full day to thaw out when they returned, but with everything sealed or rolled tight not much moisture would get in and things would be dry when the next party came to do some pruning. They left some supplies and scraps of past meals, all ready to go on the fire. Manuel helped here and there, always keeping an eye on the grizzled body encased in the gently buzzing medical monitor. The med tech was finishing up the minor injuries and telling them to stay off the gimpy legs and sore backs they had accumulated.
“That was some run you had out there,” Manuel heard the man say to a patient. “All to turn a moving artifact into a dead one, hey?” He chuckled, shaking his head. “Bang yourself up just to add one more. We got plenty artifacts strewed all ’round the moons. Can’t understand a one of ’em. Won’t figure out this one either, I’ll bet.”
Manuel didn’t say anything to that, didn’t even know what he would have said. He just kept hauling and cleaning up and loading and not thinking about much of anything. He helped tamper down the fusion plant, listening to the stutter of it die to a slow chugg chugg. The eclipse was deepening as he went back inside. Five Sidon men were staying over until the morning, resting up, and with the med tech and his father, Manuel and Old Matt were all that were left. They had a silent, weary supper and turned in without anybody mentioning smeerlop or liquor. Manuel had scarcely pulled a blanket over himself before he was asleep.
Much later, he heard the dry voice. It called him. At first he thought it was a dream, but then it came again. He got up, feeling aches in his legs still, and moved through the corridors of pipe-framed bunks, feeling his way in the dark. Old Matt called again, and Manuel reached out in the blackness and found the cool hand, the fingers callused and the palm worn to a glassy hardness.
“How long since…since…”
Manuel answered, “Two days, almost.”
“Eagle?”
“Dead.”
“So…it…gave him back too.”
“Just like us.”
“Like…me.”
“Sure scared me, in there.”
“You saw me?”
“Sure I did. The others don’t—”
“Stayed in there long enough… I could tell…feel…you were scared.”
“Sí, the ones outside, they think—”
“Stay long enough…scared…it’ll learn you.”
“Won’t be so dangerous next time, though. It’s dead, we got it—you knew that, didn’t you?”
“I know it stopped.”
“Soon’s we get you back to Sidon and move you to Hiruko, get you patched up, you and me can go out there again and have a real look at it.”
A rasping laugh came. It turned into a ragged, choking cough.
Manuel whispered, “Go up in those holes, y’know, see what’s in it, what made it.”
“Not me. You, maybe. If they let you.”
“Let me? What the hell, you and me, we got the thing, we—But hey, what you mean, not you?”
“I been lying here…feeling…what’s left of this body. Not much.”
“You got your voice back. Other stuff’ll come back too, once they—”
“No, it won’t. I heard the med tech talking…to the Colonel. Too much deterioration. Nerves…muscles in the arms and legs all shot… I’ll never get enough back to run servos, even.”
“Look, if it’s money…”
“That’s part of it. Always is, somebody my age. Sidon can’t sink a big investment into a hanger-on. Times are hard. And I got no shares to sell.”
All Manuel could think to say was “You shouldn’t think that way. Let ’em try at least.”
“And end up a stomach and a brain and not much else.”
Manuel’s hand followed down the old man’s arm until it met the ceramic and metal of the chest.
“That’s right,” Old Matt said. “You’re thinking I’m part replacements already, right? Sure enough. But there’s a point…you don’t want any more.”
“Look, the money part, I can talk—”
“You thought much about what happened, Manuel? Why you figure it let us come back?”
“The others, they were firing at it. Hurt it, must’ve. It couldn’t handle all of us.”
“I figure…it had enough of me. It’s you I’m wondering about.”
Manuel smiled. “We’re both too mean, is all.”
Again the dry laugh. Then the hand Manuel was holding moved, and the voice came, relaxed and solemn: “Think you could fix me something from the kitchen?”
Surprised, for he knew the medmonitor was feeding the body, Manuel said, “Sure. Sure.”
He made little noise in the kitchen, putting together some cold meat and cornbread. He came out with it on a tray and picked his way among the bunks to the wall where the medmonitor was. He put down the tray and was going to click on a small light nearby when he sensed that the monitor was empty. He felt, and the pallet was still warm. A strange foreboding filled him. He should turn on the lights, he knew, but instead he found his way in the near-perfect darkness to the lock at the far end of the cabin. There, by the safety lights, he saw a figure lying on the floor, nearly finished with putting on an emergency suit.
“What the hell are you—”
“The eclipse. I want to see it again.”
“That’s crazy! How’d you get here?”
“Crawled. Legs nearly worthless. Arms not much better.”
“Hold on, now; I’m going to lift you up…”
As Manuel raised the surprisingly light body, Old Matt got the seals aligned on the suit and closed them. The helmet pophole was still open, though, and through it the gravel voice said, “I’m going to ask you now. I want you to think before you do anything. Before you take me…back in there.”
“Listen, I can’t—”
“I’m telling you I want to see the eclipse one more time, from outside. Not on some damned screen, which is the way I’ll be looking at it once they patch me up.”
“But that’s just, just…”
“I…you remember back there, when we went up to it for the last time? Remember what I said? I needed help then. ‘Watch for me,’ I said.”
“Right. Watch for you. I don’t see—”
“Think about that later. When you have time.”
“Yeah, okay, but look, I—”
“Right now I want you to watch for me and be sure nobody stops me when they hear the lock cycle. I can crawl out and down the ramp okay without you. But I’m going to need somebody to stall them if they come looking. For a few minutes, is all.”
Manuel studied the old face in the dim ruby light. The eyes still had that quality of seeming to catch more light, of moving with a refracting, watery intensity. He knew what the old man was saying. He said aloud, but to himself, “Watch for me.”
Old Matt smiled. “That’s it.” The strain showed in his creased cheeks.
“Go on, now,” Manuel said.
He helped the old man get into the lock and put him on the automatic conveyor used to carry goods outside. Then he went back inside and cycled the lock at a low rate, to keep the throb of the pumps down. The outer door opened. The conveyor whined. He waited long moments, facing the control panel, thinking about nothing, and then heard footsteps coming, ringing on the metal deck.
“What—Were you outside?” His father.
He turned. “No. Old Matt’s out there.”
“Old Ma—and you let him? Where’s your head, boy?” Colonel López snatched at the control lever. He yanked the outer door to and started a high-speed fill. “Goddamn if I ever—What—why’d you let him? You know he’s…” and then he snatched a suit off the rack and stepped into it, his mouth compressing into a thin line.
Manuel suited up silently. The lock popped open and the two of them went in. Pumpdown started. Colonel López flushed it at fractional pressure to save time. The lock swung open. A wind blew dust past them onto the shadowed plain, howling as it died. The Colonel stepped out first.
The body was sprawled at the base of the conveyor belt, face up, the eyes still glistening, the pophole open, the ice of Ganymede already settling on the ruined face. Old Matt had unzipped the whole front, too, letting in the full dead breath of Ganymede. Coming that suddenly, the awful cold would pop open cells as they froze, riddle him with ruin.
“Mierda! Vacced like that, we’ll never get him back!” The Colonel whirled on his son. “Dead! He’s dead! And you helped him!”
Colonel López stopped, eyes suddenly wild. He jerked back to look at the body, stooped to pick it up. Both of them heard it snap as he lifted it, cracking the frozen skin, opening fresh cuts into the body so that a plume of vapor escaped out the pophole, and the ice of this world invaded Old Matt more.
The father stared at the son. “You killed him. For good. Eternal death. You know that, don’t you?”
“I…” He blinked, but the wetness seemed to be coming from everywhere, like sweat. His chest heaved and had no air in it. “I did…” He sobbed.
“You killed him. Just as sure as if you blew him open yourself! An old man, not knowing what he was doing, crazy from being sick. And you helped him!”
Manuel’s body shook and trembled, and the sureness he had carried in him dissolved. “I—Father, I—”
“Killing, that’s it, sí? Killing everything that’s old…” He gasped, congested with words. “Yesterday wasn’t—wasn’t enough, uh? You had to—”
“What? Kill—you mean Aleph? I was just—”
“We hunt it, sí, but to—to—” The Colonel shook off the thought with a physical gesture, pushing it away with his hands. “But to—Old Matt!—”
His jaw muscles bunched. “No son of mine does a thing like that! None of mine!” The eyes were wild and hard, showing too much white, flashing with a rage that once come would not depart. “No son of mine!”