<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="no"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en-US" xmlns:xml="http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace"> <head> <title>Gregory Benford - Against Infinity</title> <meta content="" name="description" /> <meta content="" name="keywords" /> <link href="../Styles/stylesheet.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> </head> <body style=""> <h2 id="p05">Part V<br /><hr /><br />COMING<br />HOME</h2> <p class="pagebreak"> </p> <h3 id="p05c01">1</h3> <p class="First">M<span class="smallcaps">ANUEL SURVEYED THE</span> train station. He felt an echo of half-forgotten emotions as he watched the crowd waiting for the sleek liners, remembering the only other time he had been here; coming into Hiruko six years ago, with only a pack on his back, silent and intense, smoldering with anger and defiance. Then, the laser-polished stone columns had seemed to taper away into infinity, far higher than any building he had ever seen, even taller than an agro dome. Dust motes of considerable size had floated high up among the glassy struts, catching the amber beams of light that refracted through the serene pillars. Thick air had gathered in his chest like fine warm fleece, the first tangible sign of Hiruko’s opulence. The ladies nimbly climbing stairs in their lacy fashions, the men clean-shaven and slim—all had seemed exotic, compared with the heavy, parka-clothed figures he was so used to at Sidon. Here no one carried a few extra kilos of fat at the waist or in the shoulders, as protection against cold or exhaustion. Here a coat or vest was fashioned for the eye, not the metabolism.</p> <p class="Indent">He had left the station reluctantly, still awed by its majesty. The crowds bore him off, and he had spent hours in the endlessly intertangling passageways and corridors, ashamed to knock on a door and ask directions. The impossibly broad boulevards and avenues he at first mistook for temporarily empty assembly areas, since they wasted so much space. At each major intersection, elegant, periodically spaced crystalline rhomboids towered over the passing throng; it had taken him another hour to realize that these were the computer interfaces he sought. Their grandeur seemed extravagant, and he had hesitated to ask for a map display. Only after he had found the Labor Coordinator and made his availability known had he felt relaxed enough to stop and timidly order a drink and then a bowl of soup at one of the sidewalk cafés. Then, finished, he had tried to pay, and been the butt of laughter. He still felt a twinge of the helpless young man’s tongue-tied rage. It all seemed so long ago.</p> <p class="Indent">“I still believe you should have said something more to your mother,” Belinda murmured, shutting off his memories.</p> <p class="Indent">“I told her I was coming back to Sidon. That’s what she asked for, isn’t it?”</p> <p class="Indent">“She seemed so shaken.”</p> <p class="Indent">“It wasn’t a pretty thing.”</p> <p class="Indent">“No. Did you <i>have</i> to call up those coroner’s pictures?”</p> <p class="Indent">He grimaced. “<i>Sí</i>, I did. I had to know.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Know that he died in pain? An icequake knocking him down in front of that laser beam? See him torn open like that?”</p> <p class="Indent">“It’s something a son has to do.”</p> <p class="Indent">“A son who…” and she bit off the words. He knew full well what she had nearly said: <i>A son who had not spoken to his father for six years? A son who refused all their calls, their letters? Who brushed aside the friends from Sidon who casually dropped by and tried to bring the subject up?</i></p> <p class="Indent">“Right All that is finished now. There was a thing between us. Now it’s gone. When he is dead you treat him as the father who brought you into the world. You don’t let the last trouble count for everything.”</p> <p class="Indent">She said softly, “I see.”</p> <p class="Indent">A train shrieked into the station, rattling the tracks. Electromagnetic propulsors caught it, sucked away its momentum, and stored the power. Porters grunted, levering up the ice-breaking frames around each exit, shattering the shiny cloak, releasing the passengers. The rest of the sheath would melt from the train before departure time.</p> <p class="Indent">“You forgive him, then?”</p> <p class="Indent">He stared at her with flat incomprehension. She was the only person he had ever talked with about it. That was part of what bound him to her, he knew. To find she still understood so little…</p> <p class="Indent">“There was nothing to forgive. I didn’t wrong him, he didn’t wrong me.”</p> <p class="Indent">She frowned. Beneath the filtered, watery light her dusky skin still held a magic quality for him. He put both hands to her face and then around, burying his fingers in her glossy black hair. Her full mouth, never far from a smile, registered uncertainty.</p> <p class="Indent">He said, “We disagreed. He…couldn’t see it any differently. I couldn’t either. So we each knew it was better if we kept our distance.” <i>Strange,</i> he thought, <i>to be able to put it so coolly now. The Manuel who came into this station, big-eyed and angry, would never have said it like that.</i></p> <p class="Indent">“I…are you sure you don’t want me to go?”</p> <p class="Indent">“No. My mother… One thing at a time.”</p> <p class="Indent">“I’ll have to, someday.”</p> <p class="Indent">“This first. When I’ve gotten things settled…”</p> <p class="Indent">“All right. Goodbye.”</p> <p class="Indent">She kissed him fervently and then let him go, stepped back, gave him up. He grinned at her, feeling a return of the old awkward boyishness, an embarrassment at private things made public. Then the porters barked the departure call and he swung aboard. The slender passenger car was nearly filled. He stowed his pack and found a seat and waved to Belinda, who stood looking oddly alone and vulnerable on the platform. Only then did he notice that across from him sat the three Earthers he had seen from the veranda yesterday.</p> <p class="Indent">They went out from Hiruko Station with a rapid surge, and then a lethargic clashing of slack couplings traveling backward among the cars. The pulsers thumped, boosting them up with deep, long thrusts. Loading platforms streamed by; open yards; mills half completed; stacks of nickel cubes with McKenzie emblems stamped in their gray faces; immense pulse-forming circuits laid out for the new flinger that would hurl cargo directly into orbit; parabolic antenna fields; a raw slash of strip-mined rock. The jumbled, sprawling petro factory rose, loomed and dwindled; Manuel glimpsed the neon yellow of his prefractory tower, responsible for high-temperature bearing lubricants, made directly from Ganymede’s raw ices. Then they brushed aside the last confused edge of Hiruko and ahead the track made a wide swooping curve. Manuel watched the train’s head vanish into the expanses, dragging its length like a picture he remembered of a snake—a creature he had never seen, not even in the Hiruko Zoo, and thought of as mythical, like a unicorn—wriggling smoothly into the distance.</p> <p class="Indent">Their speed built with a clattering energy as they shot down from Hiruko Mountain and across a barren plain where the robot orbiters were parked at the end of long purple skid lines. They climbed now amid rumpled hills, and startled a flock of gippers—the new bioforms Central had designed to help keep down the bewildering profusion of mutated rockjaws. The gippers were nuzzling at the crossties of the rails, sniffing and pawing, and the train came up on them nearly soundlessly in the thin air. It turned the slow ones to pasty spots on the nearby boulders where they landed, and sent the rest in cawing frenzy down the gullies, legs kicking uselessly in their panic. Manuel wondered why Central always produced such stupid and repellant animals, and decided it was because they regarded these hapless things as throwaways, soon to be replaced by other animated chemical processors.</p> <p class="Indent">Electromagnetic fists seized them and flung them on with an impatient <i>snick-snick-snick,</i> between twin walls of impervious slumbering emptiness. Ice began to creep from the corners of the big windows. Manuel thumbed on the embedded web of heaters and the scum cleared. He watched the silent unfolding land, his eyes automatically surveying for darting movement, for some sign of recent passage of something huge and land-gouging, doing this while his mind was blank and preparing him for the days ahead. Slowly a pressure, unnoticed until now, began to ease in him.</p> <p class="Indent">A quiet voice asked, “You know this area?”</p> <p class="Indent">He looked at the Earther who had spoken. “Some.”</p> <p class="Indent">“I am Piet Arnold. I gather you are from Sidon?”</p> <p class="Indent">“Was.”</p> <p class="Indent">“I am of Earth.”</p> <p class="Indent">“I know.”</p> <p class="Indent">“It is that obvious?”</p> <p class="Indent">“Your clothes.”</p> <p class="Indent">“I purchased them, thinking… Ah, they are too opulent, is that it?”</p> <p class="Indent">“Could be. What is that stuff, the pants?”</p> <p class="Indent">“Corduroy.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Never saw it before.”</p> <p class="Indent">“I am sorry. My friends”—he swept a hand to include thirteen of them, all identically dressed, seated down one side of the car, their eyes on Manuel—“are here under my guidance. I judged badly in selecting, I see that. We do not mean to place ourselves apart from you who live here. It would have been kinder to requisition clothing at Hiruko and discard our—”</p> <p class="Indent">“No, look, I don’t care.”</p> <p class="Indent">“We are hoping for full-hearted cooperation from the people of Sidon.”</p> <p class="Indent">“You’ll get it.”</p> <p class="Indent">“We are here to study the artifact.”</p> <p class="Indent">Manuel kept his face blank. “Uh-huh.”</p> <p class="Indent">“The Aleph. Do you know much of it?”</p> <p class="Indent">“You’ll be out at the site, right, not at Sidon?”</p> <p class="Indent">“Yes. The preliminary survey is done. We have studied carefully the borings and unfoldings of the structure.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Unfoldings?”</p> <p class="Indent">“Yes. You do not follow the reports? There have been many.” Piet spoke with a mild, reassuring cadence. He studied Manuel, undistracted by movement in the car or by the passing land outside.</p> <p class="Indent">“I don’t get much time.”</p> <p class="Indent">“You should take the trouble. The artifact that once moved is perhaps the most important discovery of our time.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Uh-huh.”</p> <p class="Indent">“We must know more of it.”</p> <p class="Indent">“How much do you need to know?”</p> <p class="Indent">“One cannot know too much.”</p> <p class="Indent">Manuel fidgeted. He reached for something to lighten this conversation. “Like sex, huh?”</p> <p class="Indent">Piet’s face went blank. “What do you mean?”</p> <p class="Indent">“Like a friend of mine says, only too much is enough.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Oh. I see.” A thin, joyless smile crossed Piet’s still-solemn face and, once the gesture had been made, vanished suddenly, like something collapsing.</p> <p class="Indent">Manuel saw he had offended the man. “So you’re here to study,” he said lamely.</p> <p class="Indent">“Yes. Study without harming. We mounted this expedition at great cost. We on Earth can ill afford many such explorations, I assure you.”</p> <p class="Indent">“I guess it’s not like the glory days.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Glory?”</p> <p class="Indent">“When Earth had lots to spend. You know—the Americans and Russians and Chinese and all. Spreading out here, measuring everything. Pretty rich times for you.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Ah.” Piet’s face became stony. “The high-bourgeois culture.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Yeah, I guess.”</p> <p class="Indent">“An unhappy time. Rootless, with the false consciousness of late capitalism—”</p> <p class="Indent">“I thought it was pretty good for you. The movies—”</p> <p class="Indent">“I assure you, we do not regret the loss of those times. Just as no one now envies the self-indulgences of the courts of monarchical Europe, or the Saturnalia of Rome.”</p> <p class="Indent">Manuel didn’t know enough Earth history to tell what the man was talking about. He frowned. “Uh-huh. You, ah, going to be here long?”</p> <p class="Indent">Manuel looked around the car, but there were no empty seats. He didn’t remember Piet’s being across from him when he sat down, but maybe the man had moved while he was looking out the window.</p> <p class="Indent">“Perhaps for the rest of our lives.”</p> <p class="Indent">“What? How come?”</p> <p class="Indent">“The return is expensive. We can transmit our findings. Samples, once we dare to take some, can be shipped. There is no need to return us bodily to Earth. We can remain here, to undertake the long-term investigations.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Never go <i>home</i> again?”</p> <p class="Indent">Piet smiled wanly. “It is the price a scientist must pay.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Uh-huh.” Manuel had no idea what to say next. It was the worst damn luck in the world to run into this. If he had to spend the hours of the trip talking—</p> <p class="Indent">An expression crossed Piet’s face. The man smiled again and said softly, “You must excuse me. We are still not adjusted to your time schedule here. I am tired, and need to rest a moment.”</p> <p class="Indent">Manuel nodded. Piet folded his hands, closed his eyes, and was at once deeply relaxed, the lines of his face disappearing. The other Earthers also leaned back in their seats, faces going slack, and in a moment their silence isolated Manuel in an island of calm. He decided they had some kind of implanted command that Piet had activated. He had heard of such things: economical ways to stretch out food resources in times of famine—a common Earthside need.</p> <p class="Indent">He was relieved to be freed from conversation. It did not occur to him that perhaps Piet had seen this, and had withdrawn. The on-marching land beyond held his attention as the pulsors thumped regularly, keeping up their speed. He let himself think about what lay ahead for him. His thoughts were as directionless as the unplumbed wastes outside, unwilling to focus themselves, and that is why he did not notice the first sideways lurch of the car. The next one came suddenly, wrenching the couplings so they screeched and people stirred, exclaiming. Manuel felt it solidly shove him against the arm of the seat. His head jerked up, searching for a cause, and his eyes met the blue, still eyes of Piet Arnold for an instant. Then the big one hit.</p> <p class="Indent">The crash came through his boots first and then threw him across the aisle, against a row of seats. He felt the car tilt far over. The air was filled with flying stuff and a huge, rolling noise like grinding.</p> <p class="Indent">He held onto the seat back near him. Somebody slammed into him and fell away. Shouts, cries. A high-pitched, piping alarm signal rose and abruptly shut off. The car shook, turned on its axis, rattled—and screeched to a dead stop.</p> <p class="Indent">Manuel got to his feet. He found he was standing on one of the Earthers. He stepped away, finding a place among the jumble of people crying out and struggling to get up, clothes and luggage strewn all among them. He ignored the noise and listened. No high hiss of escaping air, no pressure drop. Another trembling came, making some people fall again. A woman screamed. Manuel held on to a seat and waited. Another, just barely noticeable. Then nothing.</p> <p class="Indent">“Hey! Quiet!” he shouted. He did it again and the ones in the back shut up. “Somebody back there, pick up the comm phone!”</p> <p class="Indent">White faces turned but nobody did anything. “You!” He pointed to a tall man at the other end of the car. “Pick it up.”</p> <p class="Indent">The tall man did. He looked at Manuel. “Is it live?” Manuel asked. The man nodded. “Wait for the lead car to come on. They’ll tell us the situation. The rest of you, shut up.”</p> <p class="Indent">It took a long time to find out. The Earthers helped put a woman’s broken arm in a sling and they all waited tensely. The lights stayed on, but no air came through the vents. When they got word, it was as Manuel had suspected: the ground shocks had thrown two freight cars clean off the tracks. Nobody was badly hurt in the two passenger cars. To get the train moving again they would have to pull the freight cars off the tracks.</p> <p class="Indent">Something was blocking the air feed. The heaters also were running at low power. Until they got the passenger cars back in alignment on the tracks, it would be hard to tell if the trouble was serious.</p> <p class="Indent">There was never any talk about waiting for help. It would take hours to get crawlers out from Hiruko. If there was damage to the life-support systems, it was better to be moving, even at reduced speed, toward Sidon.</p> <p class="Indent">Nor was there any question about who would do the work. The train captain walked through both passenger cars, picking people at random. One of the women chosen was married, and her husband jumped up, angry, protesting. So the captain let the husband stand in for her. Otherwise, there was no trouble. It would take most of the passengers to do the job, and everyone knew time might be important.</p> <p class="Indent">Manuel had trouble finding an emergency suit that fit him. He was late getting out the lock. He stumbled down a gravel grade, moving clumsily with the suit’s unfamiliar power amplifiers. Five cars ahead, the grade had shifted and slumped. Manuel studied it, trying to see what had happened. He gazed down the valley that the magnetorail line ran through. Raw dirt and ice had spilled down into the plain. Slopes were cut and cracked by dislocations.</p> <p class="Indent">“What caused all this? Is it typical?”</p> <p class="Indent">Manuel turned to find Piet Arnold standing nearby, looking uncertain.</p> <p class="Indent">“I don’t know. But you shouldn’t be out here. You don’t know how to work in this gravity.”</p> <p class="Indent">“We do our part,” Piet said simply.</p> <p class="Indent">Manuel saw six more of the Earthers moving awkwardly among the work gang. “Damn stupid,” he said gruffly, but with some grudging respect.</p> <p class="Indent">The two freight cars were a hundred meters ahead. The grade had slumped under them. The sag wasn’t bad enough to permanently disrupt the superconducting fields; Manuel could see the magnetic aura running firm and true. The ramrod-straight, reddish halo held the freight cars in midair over the slumped gray grade.</p> <p class="Indent">“Fields musta rippled when that shake came through,” a voice said over comm. “Let go the cars for a second, then grabbed ’em again.”</p> <p class="Indent">The freight cars looked strange, hovering, caught in the act of tumbling out of the magnetic depression that cradled the train. They hung over the slope at seemingly impossible angles, frozen above the heads of the laboring men and women. In the pale light the work gang shoveled gravel and fashioned supports for the superconducting web that lay along the magnetorail bed.</p> <p class="Indent">“How shall we free them?” Piet asked.</p> <p class="Indent">“Have to pulse the fields again,” Manuel said, taking a shovel from the pile. “Weaken them so’s they drop the cars.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Why dig?”</p> <p class="Indent">“Got to realign the bed some. When the fields collapse at one spot, that sets up a strain all along the line. We’ll have to support this part of the train mechanically for two, three seconds.”</p> <p class="Indent">Piet nodded and went to explain to his men and women. The captain was giving orders, telling people where to dig and how to wedge the steel bars into place on the slippery, unstable slope. Manuel began digging, glad of something to do, feeling the muscles in his back pull and ache. Working in the petrofac had softened him some. He started sweating heavily. He worked with concentration, forgetting everything, slinging the stones into piles with a steady, swinging rhythm. His breath echoed and roared in the narrow helmet. Around him the braces and wedged rock foundations took form. Engineers worked to make sure the stresses would be right, that angles and vectors were aligned. He preferred to leave the planning to them, to simply dig where he was told and think about nothing other than keeping his footing on the loose slope. Some of the Earthers worked alongside him, but he paid them no mind, did not even speak except to answer orders.</p> <p class="Indent">An hour passed. Then another. The maintenance crew could not get the air system back to normal. Carbon dioxide buildup in the passenger bubble could be controlled, but only by venting. That put a deadline on everything. Hiruko had dispatched three crawlers, but nobody on board wanted to go back to Hiruko and wait until the line was repaired. That would take a while, anyway—the seismic shocks had done damage everywhere, and all available labor was going to be scarce.</p> <p class="Indent">At last the frame was ready. A crude cage of rods, stripped from the freight cars themselves, held the superconducting web from below. They uncoupled the freight cars. The local current monitors were downtrack, and the captain unlocked them. He gingerly inspected the panel and then waved the work gang away. The party clustered on the other side of the grade, away from the teetering cars.</p> <p class="Indent">Manuel was tired and uncomfortable in the ill-fitting power suit. He sat down on a boulder that had tumbled from the hills beyond the rail grade. The slippage here was worse than any he had ever seen. He wondered vaguely where the epicenter had been. He said nothing when Piet sat nearby. Together they watched the last preparations.</p> <p class="Indent">“You think it will work?”</p> <p class="Indent">“Should. Always trouble to fool with big magnetic fields like this, though.”</p> <p class="Indent">“On Earth, we would wait for help.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Might die, waiting.”</p> <p class="Indent">“I suppose so.” Piet looked doubtful.</p> <p class="Indent">The captain checked with Hiruko and called a warning over comm. Figures backed further away from the grade. From where he sat, Manuel could barely see the two cars poised in midair, slanted toward the other side of the slope. A dozen meters away five Earthers clumped together, as if for security.</p> <p class="Indent"><i>“Ready! Flux change of five kiloGauss, duration of ten seconds. One, two, three</i>—<i>on!”</i></p> <p class="Indent">The pulse came rippling down from both directions. Manuel could see it rock the cars, sweeping by them, leaving the big, sleek compartments bobbing like boats under a gentle swell. The two waves met exactly at the center of the jury-rigged frame—</p> <p class="Indent">And the freight cars spun apart. One tumbled down the far slope and was gone in an instant. Through some reaction, its mate tilted backward. The silvery car rebounded off some unseen fluctuation. It spun lazily in the fields, end over end, then faster—</p> <p class="Indent">Manuel jumped to his feet. The car shot out of the magnetic trap like a richochet. It plunged down the gravel slope toward the work gang. The field lost it then and it fell heavily, cracking open. It spilled crates, skidding across the ice.</p> <p class="Indent">To Manuel it happened with a liquid slowness. The sleek skin of the car wrinkled and split and the crates crashed out and the thing came toward them, skating on the ice, and he gathered his feet under him, arms out for balance, waiting for the right instant—</p> <p class="Indent">The car smacked into a boulder, split in half; burst open, slinging crates; but kept on coming, now a mass of flying bits, a wall like a breaking wave—</p> <p class="Indent">Manuel leaped. He gave it full power and shot up fifty meters. Below, most of the others jumped too, rising above the tumbling tide. Not all. Some dashed to the side. But one—Manuel watched a crate catch the woman full in the chest, throwing the body backward, rolling over it without pause, and finally fetching up against a rise in the ice. He changed his gyros and came down near the body.</p> <p class="Indent">She was an Earther. The chest was caved in, and she stared up glassily at nothing.</p> <p class="Indent">“Erika!” Piet cried, kneeling beside her.</p> <p class="Indent">“Get her into a med stabilizer!” the captain called.</p> <p class="Indent">Amid the shouting the Earthers gathered silently. Each took a portion of her weight. They lifted her high and carried her down the long line of cars, toward the lead car where the medical unit was. Manuel followed. He watched the Earthers and listened to their low, murmurous song that came faintly over the comm.</p> <p class="Indent">They got her into the freezer, but it didn’t look good. There was a lot of massive, expensive damage. She had gone down to Ganymede temperature pretty fast, and that was a help, but the systemic shock effects registered near the top of the indicator. Manuel studied the Earthers as they heard all this, crowded into the little cabin at the front of the train. He walked back with them. They said little and showed no obvious signs of grief.</p> <p class="Indent">Maybe they were holding it all in, or maybe they had just had it trained out of them by their years on Earth, he thought. It was hard to tell. He rummaged back through his education for a comparison. With a mild shock he realized, <i>They came here out of duty. Not from a yearning, but because their commonweal decided. They’re like priests, not explorers. Priests.</i></p> <p class="Indent">There was a stoic, grim side to them he had never seen before, a kind of stolid acceptance. In a way he envied it, without wanting to be that way himself. It did put you beyond the terrible things that happened in the world.</p> <p class="Indent">But—he felt this without thinking it—it put something between you and the high, grand moments, too. That was a big price.</p> <p class="pagebreak"> </p> <h3 id="p05c02">2</h3> <p class="First">T<span class="smallcaps">HE FUNERAL WAS</span> held in the oldest agro dome. Manuel waited stiffly beside his mother and concentrated on the heavy musk that filled the air, and how it settled in his lungs with every breath.</p> <p class="Indent">“It is lovely,” his mother said, “how they built it to look out over the valley.”</p> <p class="Indent">“<i>Sí,</i> it is.” He scuffed his toe in the rich loam. The two of them stood a little apart from the main party. Around them, like a stubby forest, were the white markers of laborers hopelessly ground up in machines, cancer-riddled cases caught too late, outbackers who had not reached a freezing unit in time, malformed children left to die at birth, old men beyond repair. And his father: the slab of rough-edged stone stood directly before them, across the yawning grave. Its flat face was mirror-smooth, glossy with a careful e-beam polish. The precise letters would notify the world for millennia that here lay remnants of Colonel Francisco León López. It seemed odd to have such a mathematically exact tribute to a man who had been wrinkled and leathery, smiling, smelling always of dirt and sweat and grease.</p> <p class="Indent">The ceremony had been as bad as he had feared. Some relatives had come, people remembered from Sunday afternoon reunions long ago. He remembered them: vague presences who sipped beer while he played outside with his cousins. They had been with his mother by the time he arrived. They had contrived to make of the funeral a solemn, sweet-smelling ceremony, like the ones he had known as a child. He had never seen a complete one before, because he had always twitched and whispered and finally had to be sent out of the room. This time he had sat stiff-faced through the whole thing: suffocating wreaths of flowers (a rare sight, quite expensive; some of the family had money, somehow); aunts in black lace that rustled as they knelt; candles; gleaming satin; incense; even a priest, brought from Zanakin Settlement, swarthy, red-nosed and unsteady from midmorning wine, sprinkling holy water randomly.</p> <p class="Indent">Now the last part. Men and women from Sidon made up the big crowd, slightly further away than the relatives. Four of them carried the cellulose box forward. It had a brown polish like walnut. The priest said some more things. Manuel tried to concentrate on the words, but the steady drone kept slipping away from him and he would find his eyes roving over the valley beyond.</p> <p class="Indent">Slides had covered some of the pipes, but otherwise the quake had not hurt Sidon much. Most of the damage had been in the south. The cracked domes and popped sluice lines there were nearly fixed already. The magnetorail beds would take longer. He would have to stay at Sidon until normal runs were resumed.</p> <p class="Indent">“…into that great reward that comes to us all in…”</p> <p class="Indent">Manuel shut his ears to it and tried to think of the man inside the cellulose box. That was the hard part, had been hard all the years at Hiruko. To see your father finally as a man, bound on his own path. The rage had boiled between the two of them and finally spilled out, souring everything in the family. Even now he did not fully understand it. He did know, though, that it had to be put away now. It would be only a burden from here on. The Colonel—he still thought of his father with the title, unused for decades except to lend a certain authority to his father among the men of Sidon—had never been able to understand that moment outside the cabin. He had seen only one principle, a human one, life as precious beyond all else.</p> <p class="Indent">And Manuel had never been able to show the Colonel anything else. They had not gone back into the wastes again together. There was no time for that. The two of them had learned fast enough that they could no longer live in the same apartment, nor even in the same Settlement. His mother’s tearful attempts at reconciliation had failed within days, every one.</p> <p class="Indent">So Manuel had finally cut it off and fled to Hiruko. If he had been thinking about his career, it would have been the smart thing to do, anyway. Most people had assumed he was merely following his own interests, since Sidon’s trade was dropping off and shares in the Settlement were not going to be worth earning until things got back in order, a few years further on. Publicly, there was never any reason to think otherwise. Neither man had spoken to anyone else about what had happened out at the camp. Old Matt was entered in the log as “accidental death while deranged.” So this crowd around the grave knew nothing of why the son had never been back to Sidon. They genuinely mourned the Colonel and the era he had stood for in their minds: the hard decades of raising domes, and triple shifts, and horrifying accidents, and the slow-earned, grudging return from the land that at last had begun to yield something resembling prosperity.</p> <p class="Indent">Now the Colonel was in amongst all the crosses and carved angels that Manuel now watched through a hazy dim light. He had not noticed the slow gathering of his tears. He could not make out who was plucking at his sleeve. It was his mother. She led him, mute and stiff-legged, to the graveside. He took the shovel that Major Sánchez put in his hand. The Major stood ramrod-straight and looked at Manuel with concern.</p> <p class="Indent">Manuel bent and took a spadeful and tossed it in. It scattered over the cellulose with a hollow thump. In a few days the cellulose would decompose and let the body begin to seep into the rich loam. Within a year the slow downward convection of this dome’s soil would begin to cycle the materials into the terraces and the farm domes. In the first days of the Settlement they had buried their dead in the ice. The heat of the buildings had gradually caused some slippage and the bodies sometimes surfaced, un-decayed, unnatural, grotesque—skin stretched taut and ice-blackened over a cage of bones, the faces silent, grimacing in reproach, exiled in an alien land. So as soon as the Settlement could afford it they had dedicated one dome for the processing of their own. About it had accumulated the thirst for ceremony that humans carried with them everywhere, so that nearly every cross or sculpted angel had a wreath of grass or flowers, regularly renewed. Each time he stood up to pitch dirt into the hole, he glimpsed those colorful spots among the bleached white markers.</p> <p class="Indent">At last someone took the shovel from him. He turned, found his mother. They walked away, down a blurred corridor lined with faces he knew but had not seen in years. Next would come the small reception; the low murmuring talk with the relatives; the business of his father’s estate to settle; and finally, some days with his mother. Whenever he thought of her there was some pain, but he would not face the question of her yet. He would get through that too, but not now.</p> <p class="pagebreak"> </p> <h3 id="p05c03">3</h3> <p class="First">M<span class="smallcaps">ANUEL PACED BESIDE</span> the towering iron-webbed building. High overhead, the pressure dome diffused yellow sunlight over the irregular, slanted roofs of homes and workshops. Originally the Settlement had been laid out in a maddeningly rigid geometrical plan, but as soon as families could afford separate homes they broke the pie-slice pattern of the districts. Near the center the streets were radial or circular, but further away they began to meander into loops and tangled cul-de-sacs, until near the perimeter of the dome the avenues had a spaghetti sprawl the eye could not follow. Immigrants, unpersuaded by promises of efficiency, had made their neighborhoods convoluted and comfortable. Patches of green marked unplanned parks. Homes varied from steel-ribbed spires to crouching bungalows of stone and plaster. Manuel liked the effect. Hiruko’s sensible rectangular streets had bored him.</p> <p class="Indent">He teetered back on his heels and peered up at the rising strutwork of the Council Hall. It had a solemn mass, unnecessary and plainly intended to give the effect of weighty matters being looked after inside. The riveted iron made black diagrams of elementary geometry across pearly organic walls.</p> <p class="Indent">Impatiently he paced again. A young woman passed in a purple cape and long white dress. She eyed him slightly longer than was proper. Her shoes clacked on rusty paving stones. Low gravity allowed steepness and ornamentation; her minareted heels slid and torqued with each swivel of hips, engineered to attract first the ear, then the eye with their impossible angles. They led the eye inevitably up to the line of seamed blue stockings. Manuel watched her until she turned a far corner, thinking not of her but of Belinda back in Hiruko. He pondered for a moment, then grimaced in irritation.</p> <p class="Indent">He returned to the large arched doorway and asked the woman there, “How much longer?”</p> <p class="Indent">The short, swarthy attendant grunted. “No limit on discussion. Your business comes last.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Look, it’s just a formality.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Syndicate has to approve it as a body, Manuel.”</p> <p class="Indent">Manuel blinked, surprised that this woman he didn’t remember recognized him, even recalled his name. “Uh, maybe during a break in—”</p> <p class="Indent">“No breaks. They’ve been jawing about the new hydro plant for ten hours now. The families who’ll run it want a better in-house overhead, an’—”</p> <p class="Indent">“They’ve got to stop sometime.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Never went to a syndicate meeting before, did you?” The dark lined face screwed up, remembering. “Shoulda come with your father, saints preserve him.”</p> <p class="Indent">“I was too young.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Kids can come in. Can’t talk, is all.”</p> <p class="Indent">“My father took care of all that.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Now it’s up to you, handling the inheritance. Don’t worry, the syndicate’ll take their half, sure—and then they’ll issue a proclamation and send flowers to your mother and issue her extra work vouchers for a year, you watch. They all remember the Colonel.”</p> <p class="Indent">Manuel slapped his hand against the iron girders in irritation. “<i>Sí,</i> I won’t argue. I just want it <i>done.</i>”</p> <p class="Indent">The short woman shrugged. “Going to be a Settlement man, you got to learn to wait people out. Hear what they got to say. Not enough to have a majority rule, y’know. Otherwise, the minority won’t be convinced and they won’t support the plan. No point havin’ people at your elbow who’re against what you’re doin’. So we just got to talk it out Quaker-style till ever’body agrees. More efficient in the long run.”</p> <p class="Indent">Manuel snorted. “They take much longer, I’ll go back to Hiruko.”</p> <p class="Indent">A new voice said, “Not soon, I hope.”</p> <p class="Indent">It was Piet Arnold. Manuel glanced at him warily. “Soon’s I finish up family business.”</p> <p class="Indent">“I would like to buy you a drink while you wait.”</p> <p class="Indent">“I’ve got to stick around.”</p> <p class="Indent">The short attendant put in, “No big rush here.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Don’t want to miss my turn.”</p> <p class="Indent">“I’ll hold ’em. They like to trade gossip after, anyway.”</p> <p class="Indent">Piet said, “I heard on the comm that there’ll be rain in three minutes.”</p> <p class="Indent">Manuel looked up at the layer of purple clouds crowded into the crown of the dome. “I forgot. Well—<i>sí, sí.</i> One drink. Then I either get in to see the almighty syndicate or else I leave. I’ve still got things to look after for my mother.” He glowered at the attendant as they left, even though he knew it wouldn’t do any good.</p> <p class="Indent">Dollops of rain spattered them as they clumped down an alley. Each day the insulation at the dome crown was relaxed, chilling the air so that droplets would form in the clouds. It was an easy way to clean the Settlement and it gave a semblance of real weather. In Hiruko, Manuel remembered, there was an amusement park where you could walk through rain, nude or clothed, any time of day. He had gone there once and nearly gotten the flu.</p> <p class="Indent">They found a small, greasy bar nearby. It was run out of the back room of a house, mostly for neighborhood types, with a zinc counter and warm beer on tap. There was a tiny restaurant, featuring fresh food displayed for selection before cooking. Piet stared at the small yellow animals like miniature pigs, glassy-eyed in death; strings of red sausages; root vegetables for salads; cross-cut slabs of lurkey; ribbed chest and flanks of some anonymous creature; peppered sections of meat; even an incredibly expensive side of beef. Piet gulped and moved quickly away to a booth. Manuel remembered that the man was a vegetarian, like nearly all Earthers.</p> <p class="Indent">“Odd little place,” was all Piet would say. The room was crowded and noisy. A man sat nearby, cadaverous and silent, methodically pouring a brown liquid down himself. Manuel hailed the bar. A waitress came bearing dark bottles and freed them from wire tresses, uncorking them with the same gesture. She smirked at Piet’s odd clothes as she was paid, then made an obvious show of counting the money. Piet frowned at this. “It’s all there,” he said formally. The waitress nodded and moved away.</p> <p class="Indent">Manuel said, “She was making sure you hadn’t given her a tip.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Well, I would have, but the sight of those—that dead animal flesh—”</p> <p class="Indent">“No, look. Here nobody takes tips. It’s a point of honor. They know Earthers leave something extra, so she was checking.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Ummm. Curious idea.” Piet sipped his beer cautiously and wrinkled his nose. “On Earth the bars are large, the seats far apart. A thousand customers, perhaps. Economies of scale.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Cheaper this way.”</p> <p class="Indent">“A passing phenomenon,” Piet said. “Like the Settlements themselves.”</p> <p class="Indent">Manuel avoided that with “Uh-huh. Beer’s not bad here. Lot of malt.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Quite.” Piet pursed his lips and said carefully, “I wanted to inquire about a man named Matthew Bohles.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Yeah?”</p> <p class="Indent">“You knew him?”</p> <p class="Indent">“Some.”</p> <p class="Indent">“I came across some material on him in my investigations. On Earth we received only the scientific reports, you understand. The people behind the facts…that is another matter.”</p> <p class="Indent">“You been a scientist all your life?”</p> <p class="Indent">“Yes, of course. I conducted the original laboratory study of many of the outer-system artifacts. My isotopic analysis gave the first reliable dating of them. Also, my team discovered the inlaid circuits that allowed the artifacts to function whenever the sun struck them. I am Chairman of the Institute now, but I keep up my research. Lately I have been interested in certain mathematical properties of the artifacts. Aspects bearing on pure number theory.”</p> <p class="Indent">“You came out here to have a firsthand look?”</p> <p class="Indent">“Yes. Someone with the proper credentials had to lead. It was also useful in acquiring funding. My wife died two years ago, and I had few ties remaining. My life’s work is actually centered out here. All my research had been done secondhand, so to speak.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Uh-huh.” Manuel was drinking his big mug of beer steadily, trying to finish it off quickly without being obvious. “How do you live down there, in all those crowds?”</p> <p class="Indent">“Easier than you do here, in these extreme conditions.”</p> <p class="Indent">“They’re not so tough.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Life seems difficult for some. For Bohles, I would say it was.”</p> <p class="Indent">Manuel took a long pull of beer and said nothing.</p> <p class="Indent">“You are waiting to get approval of the Settlement for the inheritance of your father’s estate, correct?”</p> <p class="Indent">“<i>Sí</i>.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Why should you get anything at all?”</p> <p class="Indent">“My father wanted us to.”</p> <p class="Indent">“This dynasty-forming—it is not allowed on Earth.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Dynasty! Spare equipment, tools, some shares in the machine shop where he worked part-time, the apartment—”</p> <p class="Indent">“Private wealth in the long run will—”</p> <p class="Indent">“You don’t hand down anything, how you going to remember who the hell you <i>are</i>?”</p> <p class="Indent">Piet raised his hands, palms out. “I assure you, I meant no offense. Truly. Ah, would you like more of this beer?”</p> <p class="Indent">Manuel shook his head.</p> <p class="Indent">Piet said carefully, “I noted in my researches that Matthew Bohles had no estate.”</p> <p class="Indent">“He never bought into the Settlement.”</p> <p class="Indent">“So he did not share in the profits? Inexcusable.”</p> <p class="Indent">“His choice, Dr. Arnold.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Surely no one chooses to die in poverty.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Old Matt just spent his money different.”</p> <p class="Indent">“On what?”</p> <p class="Indent">“I don’t know. Spent time out on the ice by himself a lot. Contract hunting for muties, I guess.”</p> <p class="Indent">“That paid adequately?”</p> <p class="Indent">“He never poormouthed.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Never protested?”</p> <p class="Indent">“Wasn’t his way.” Manuel noticed that these few days in Sidon had restored to his sentences a cagey slowness, a stubborn calm which withdraws before the rapid rhythms of the city.</p> <p class="Indent">“You did not exclude him from your, your hunts. Even though he was not of your class.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Never thought of it.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Perhaps his age? A sort of elder of the tribe? At any rate, there are a few details in the reports from the early sightings of the Aleph, suggestions that Bohles was there. I gather you relied on his knowledge?”</p> <p class="Indent">“Sure.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Did he tell you of his past?”</p> <p class="Indent">“He taught me things, that’s all. Look—”</p> <p class="Indent">“I found records of him from long ago—more than a century old. He grew up on one of the first Jovian orbiting stations—did you know that? After that, few traces. I surmise he came here. I must say you keep rather poor records in the Settlements.”</p> <p class="Indent">“We’re not clerks.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Still, the evidence suggests that Bohles knew a great deal. Nothing quantifiable, nothing of direct scientific use, but perhaps if we could pinpoint—”</p> <p class="Indent">“Look, I got to go. Thanks for the beer.”</p> <p class="Indent">“I see. You Settlement men drink quickly.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Part of the diet.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Yes, the cold requires many calories in your intake.”</p> <p class="Indent">“No, we just enjoy it.” Manuel grinned nervously.</p> <p class="Indent">“Matthew Bohles was an interesting person. Perhaps sometime I can ask you further about him.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Lots of people knew him.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Fewer than you might imagine. Or so they say.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Plenty here in Sidon.”</p> <p class="Indent">“I won’t be in Sidon. We are working out in the field. I’m going back there today.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Good luck, then. I’ll be back at Hiruko in a few days. Got a woman waiting for me,” he said with hollow heartiness. He murmured goodbye quickly, awkwardly, and left the bar.</p> <p class="Indent">The rain was ebbing into drizzle outside. It had drained the clouds so that now no haze collected in the crown. Following the winding avenue back to the Council building, he noticed a large mottled brown animal shuffling along, patiently sweeping the slick street. As Manuel watched, the bearlike thing upended a garbage can into a cart it pulled. It had a stolid, earnest drive to it, oblivious of the passersby. It sniffed noisily, as though it had a perpetual head cold. <i>Looks like Petrovich’s old idea,</i> Manuel thought. <i>Wonder if it still knocks people out of its way. No, they’ve probably worked the bugs out of it by now.</i> He went on.</p> <p class="Indent">Beneath the wrought-iron bulk of the Council building the attendant sat on a stool, reading a manifesto. As Manuel approached she held up a crimson admittance pass.</p> <p class="Indent">“You’re lucky. The Schlickeiser family finally gave in. Got a unanimous vote two minutes ago. You can go on in.”</p> <p class="Indent">Manuel took the pass and pushed open the massive door. He swallowed, still tasting the dark beer, and walked into the strong, enameled light of the Council chamber, already feeling the weight of the past beginning to lift from him as he prepared to end in a formal way the echoes of his father.</p> <p class="pagebreak"> </p> <h3 id="p05c04">4</h3> <p class="First">M<span class="smallcaps">ANUEL KNOCKED ON</span> Major Sánchez’s door. He heard slow bootsteps coming and then the familiar bronzed face appeared, lighting up when the Major saw who was there. The Major slapped Manuel on the back and offered him a drink, and they talked the slightly loud, boisterous way men do when they are not totally at ease with each other but know they should be.</p> <p class="Indent">They had another drink of the concentrated brown whiskey that made the breath warm and burned the back of the throat. The Major took him away from the living area, after Manuel had paid his respects to the women and answered the usual questions and eaten something although he wasn’t hungry, and nodded and smiled. The two of them went back into the Major’s own office—the big, airy, picture-lined space Manuel remembered playing on the floor of when he was a small boy. His father, out for a walk with him in the terraces, had often stopped by for a talk on the long summer afternoons and, of course, for some of the whiskey. Beyond the curtained windows, he knew, lay a railed balcony overlooking O’Hara Square; he had discovered the fact while crawling back there one day, when he was scarcely able to walk. Why the Major kept the curtains drawn he never knew. This time he asked. The Major shrugged.</p> <p class="Indent">“I like to look at the pictures there”—he gestured, mouth twisted into a grin—“and the people outside, always at my back, it disturbs my concentration.” Then he gave a little laugh. “Crowds. You see them all day. Seems there should be a place where you don’t have to.”</p> <p class="Indent">Manuel nodded. The Major asked the questions he had expected about how his mother was doing and what he planned, and Manuel got through them all right. Then he said, “I’ve been going over my father’s accounts.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Good. Try to keep the Settlement from getting it all.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Not much I can do about that. They get half of the property, my mother the other half. She gets to live in the ’partment.”</p> <p class="Indent">“How they expect a man to feel he’s done anything when at the end they snatch it all away from his widow…” The Major’s face clouded, and his eyes glinted.</p> <p class="Indent">“Can’t allow private property to accumulate,” Manuel said mechanically. “You should see what they take in Hiruko. And back Earthside—”</p> <p class="Indent">“I know, it’s incredible. We had some of those passed through last week, you know. Earthers. Funny-dressed.”</p> <p class="Indent">Manuel nodded again. “They came out with me from Hiruko.”</p> <p class="Indent">“They talk to you any?”</p> <p class="Indent">“Some.”</p> <p class="Indent">“About the Aleph?”</p> <p class="Indent">“Not much.”</p> <p class="Indent">“They sure talked a lot <i>about</i> you while they were here.”</p> <p class="Indent">Manuel blinked. “They did?”</p> <p class="Indent">“I heard them.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Why?”</p> <p class="Indent">“I don’t know. I suppose they want testimony from everybody who was there.”</p> <p class="Indent">“They come to see you?”</p> <p class="Indent">“No.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Who’d they talk to, then?”</p> <p class="Indent">“Some of the guys who were there. Petrovich, mostly. With the Colonel and Old Matt gone, he knows more than the rest of us. I was way back in the rear most of the time, y’know.”</p> <p class="Indent">“You know plenty.”</p> <p class="Indent">Major Sánchez smiled. “Well, I must admit I wasn’t home a few times when they called.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Ha! I’d do the same.”</p> <p class="Indent">They drank some more. “I talked to one of them on the train,” Manuel said. “They think we’re a bunch of uncivilized capitalists.”</p> <p class="Indent">“<i>Mierda.</i> Earthers, so pious about their social justice. Wouldn’t know a syndicalist if they saw one.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Thought we were capitalists.”</p> <p class="Indent">The Major shrugged. “<i>Sí.</i> We have a few regs, like not letting inheritance build up—not that I think it should apply to your father, y’understand. But the Earthers would rather think we’re throwbacks than admit somebody doesn’t love their bureaucracy. No”—he slapped his knee—“we’re small-scale anarchists, like the old Spanish syndicalists of Barcelona.”</p> <p class="Indent">Manuel didn’t know where Barcelona was, or even if it was a city or a country. All these old names and places, cultures exploded out from old Earth—they confused him. Pieces of a continent separated by mere hundreds of kilometers were projected out into the solar system, enlarged into whole worlds.</p> <p class="Indent">“You should come to the <i>bourse du travail,</i> Manuel. You’re old enough. The syndicate, it needs—”</p> <p class="Indent">“Yeah, maybe after things settle down…”</p> <p class="Indent">The Major nodded. He let it go. He had known Manuel long enough to see what was possible with him and what was not. They talked for a while and gradually the older man’s face grew somber. After a pause he said, “I guess you heard they’ve been working on the carcass.”</p> <p class="Indent">“An Earther told me. Who’s been doing it?”</p> <p class="Indent">“A team out of Hiruko. They hired some local people, too.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Huh. Who?”</p> <p class="Indent">“Petrovich, for one.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Goddamn. What’s he do for them?”</p> <p class="Indent">“Works out at the site. He’s a pretty fair engineer.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Huh. You and him arrange any more pruning trips?”</p> <p class="Indent">The Major sighed. Manuel noticed that Sánchez was getting a little plump in the middle. The man he was used to seeing in stained overalls or a pressure suit, unshaven, two weeks from his last bath, was wearing a handsome broadcloth shirt woven in Hiruko, and pants with a crease. “No. Not really. We had a few, after you left, sure. But we all got pretty busy then. It’s been a tough go around here, what with the McKenzies revving up.”</p> <p class="Indent">“I was looking over the accounts my father kept on the prunings. Big file on it.”</p> <p class="Indent">“<i>Sí.</i> He ran them all. Don’t know what the communality will do without that man, putting himself out the way he did for ever’body.”</p> <p class="Indent">“He kept good books, too. I checked them over. Did you know the Settlement lost money on every pruning?”</p> <p class="Indent">“It did?”</p> <p class="Indent">“Every year. Hiruko paid us some, sure. But by the time it worked through all the off-shift time for the men, and the supplies, the Settlement lost.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Well, I’ll be.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Sure you didn’t know?”</p> <p class="Indent">The Major paused. “Well… I might have suspected, sometimes. It took a lot of time.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Why do you suppose he did it, then?”</p> <p class="Indent">Major Sánchez leaned forward in his chair. “I figure, he thought we needed it.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Needed what?”</p> <p class="Indent">“The going out. Out there. You can’t just sit in a hole in the ground all your life. Or under a dome.”</p> <p class="Indent">“That was all?”</p> <p class="Indent">“No. No, it was the thing itself. It was…” The Major rubbed his jaw, distracted, staring off into space. “So the Colonel ran it at a loss all that time, eh, over forty years? And the Settlement never caught on, eh? Damn!”—he slapped, his knee, face suddenly bright—“I like that!”</p> <p class="Indent1">They had taken several more tumblerfuls of the dark brown whiskey when Madam Sánchez came in and whispered, embarrassed, in the Major’s ear. Her dress crinkled as she bent over the big chair the Major filled. He muttered something to her, frowning. He gazed up at the pictures on his wall, big glossy ones of domes half-completed and crowds of workers and, nearer the heavy metal desk, lonely vistas of ice and rock framing the pink and white bands of Jupiter.</p> <p class="Indent">“It’s Petrovich.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Come to visit?”</p> <p class="Indent">“Not me. You. He found out from your mother where you were.”</p> <p class="Indent">Manuel was puzzled. He took another sip of the smoldering brown liquid and suddenly Petrovich was there, bigger than Manuel remembered him, his burly chest well defined by the well-fitting jump suit he wore. He was boisterous and beaming and more outgoing than Manuel remembered him. He laughed and clapped Major Sánchez on the shoulder.</p> <p class="Indent">“So I’ve tracked you down!” he cried, seizing Manuel’s hand and shaking it powerfully. “I was to the funeral, of course, but I hoped to be seeing you before you return.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Ah, sure. I’ve been busy.” Manuel noticed that Petrovich’s voice was deeper, more assured, and he did not have the same rough accent as before.</p> <p class="Indent">Petrovich became solemn. “I know. A terrible thing, to have to do all these business things so soon. But tell me, what have you been doing off at Hiruko? We hear reports, your mother says a few things…” He shrugged.</p> <p class="Indent">By now Manuel had a standard description of life-in-Hiruko. He slipped in mention of Belinda without giving much away and went on to his job.</p> <p class="Indent">“Good, good,” Petrovich interrupted. “But when you come back for good?”</p> <p class="Indent">“Well, maybe later. When things look better.”</p> <p class="Indent">Petrovich spread his hands warmly. “Things are already good. In certain areas.”</p> <p class="Indent">“He means the Earthers. They’re hiring.” The Major leaned back, hands clasped behind his neck, enjoying Petrovich’s momentary vexed look.</p> <p class="Indent">“Yes, they are. A little. I think, Manuel, they would be interested in you.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Why?”</p> <p class="Indent">“You know a good deal about it.”</p> <p class="Indent">“So do you. And the Major, here.”</p> <p class="Indent">“The Major is busy. I work as I can around the site, true—but there is much to do.”</p> <p class="Indent">“I’ve got a good career going in the petrofac.”</p> <p class="Indent">“I realize that. We are all very proud of you, m’boy. To do well in Hiruko—not easy! How-ev-er”—he drew the word out—“I believe the Earthers can top that, yes.”</p> <p class="Indent">“No. Not interested.”</p> <p class="Indent">Petrovich cast a look of appeal toward Major Sánchez. “You have turned him against the idea already?”</p> <p class="Indent">“Not at all.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Look,” Manuel said, exasperated, “I make up my own mind.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Of course,” Petrovich said soothingly. “Let me make a simpler offer. We forget about jobs, about coming back to Sidon—okay?”</p> <p class="Indent">Grimly: “Right.”</p> <p class="Indent">“And you come out with me for one last trip. As in the old days. The days with the Colonel.”</p> <p class="Indent">Manuel’s lip compressed, but he said nothing.</p> <p class="Indent">Petrovich hesitated, wiped a bead of sweat from his brow, and went on: “No pruning, no. A simple ride. That is all. An outing.”</p> <p class="Indent">“Look, I’m…” Manuel began, and then stopped, mouth open. He suddenly felt an emotion, dimly remembered, coming to him strongly, the way a scent not smelled for decades will abruptly bring back a place, a time. He blinked. “I…”</p> <p class="Indent">The two men were studying him closely. He felt dizzy with the impact of the feelings, stored up for so long and welling up now fresh and brimming. He turned and saw the Major’s pictures of the wastes stretching away, bleak and slumbering. He said slowly, as though surprised at the words, “I might like that. <i>Sí,</i> I might.”</p> </body> </html>