THEY WENT OUT from Sidon Settlement in one lone crawler this time, clanking and crunching over the splotched purple plain. There were new domes abuilding on the plain now, and pyramids of waste from the fermentation and harvesting terraces that marched up the hills on either side. No animals yipped and chippered beside the crawler. Teams of them labored in the distance, though, and the thin, chilled air carried the loud rruuurrr and heavy booms of their work. He wondered if the people back in Hiruko were right, and the animals were a kind of new class in society, a new source of surplus value, yet another source for the forward tilt of capitalism, yet another revolution simmering on the back burner. Manuel thought of names he had not recalled for years—Short Stuff, The Barren, Slicky. Of Eagle he had thought many times, and did not put that name in amongst the others.
In the crawler with Petrovich were five laborers from Sidon who worked at the site. They kept to themselves, playing cards and sleeping in the hours the trip took. Petrovich talked about Settlement gossip and the new money crops blooming on the terraces—luxury foods, an attempt to speed-grow exotic guavas and artichokes and crisp apples—and commonweal troubles and politics (the wage-labor referendum) and back to gossip again, practically carrying on both sides of the conversation by himself. Manuel nodded and smiled on cue but mostly just stared out the big clear canopy on the crawler. It was a better view than he had ever had from the caked and scratched viewports of the craft they’d used for the prunings. This one had an Earther emblem on the side, fresh and stark blue-and-white. The seats inside still had some nap on them, and the control panels didn’t have their insignia rubbed off where men had leaned against them. The pan-fry rig in the back had the usual layers of grease on it, but to Manuel it did not seem to smell so bad as when he was a boy. He ate some lurkey from it, but that didn’t taste as good as he remembered, either; he guessed there was a kind of trade-off, or else that to a boy all things were exaggerated. There was something about this last thought that bothered him, but he could not say what.
“See,” Petrovich called out. “Europa rising now.”
Manuel followed the crescent as it rose above a mountain peak. On Europa’s cracked and cratered face he could make out tiny ruby dots of fusion-busters. The busters were crawling along the cracks that wrapped the moon, melting the walls away, hoping to open the old channels below the cracks, through which the churning slush below would give forth rich minerals. Jove itself, hanging eternally at the top of the sky, was now the only face unmarked by man.
Io swam at the edge of the giant planet. Each moon shone with a diffused light, a halo bright enough to smother the nearby flecks of stars. Petrovich gestured. “See, already the cap goes on.”
Manuel was surprised. “The monolayer?”
“See that blurring around Io? Light scattering. They’ve laid the northern hemisphere already. Spun out whole monolayer from orbit, let it fall, come to pressure balance with the atmosphere. You didn’t watch?”
“In Hiruko, y’know,” Manuel said sheepishly, “you lose track of what’s going on in the biosphere.”
“They left the big holes, for the orbital craft to come in. Looks to be stable.”
“Think it’ll help with the warming as much as they say?”
Petrovich shrugged. “Worked on Luna. Here—maybe. To put a cork on a whole atmosphere—incredible, hey? Things changing fast, these days.”
Manuel gazed at the gauzy halo around Europa for a moment, trying to remember what it had looked like before. He couldn’t. Something about that made him uneasy. “Which route we following?” he asked suddenly.
“Here, to the west. Faster than the old way.”
“Uh-huh.” Manuel glanced at the relief map and it came back to him immediately. He could see in his mind’s eye the way the ridges and gullies would be. “Look, what say we take this side detour?”
“There? What for?”
“That’s where the camp is.”
“Was. Haven’t been back there since—since—well, you remember.”
“Me either.”
Petrovich looked at him strangely, puzzled. “That time, just the few of you left out there when he…” A shake of the head. “He was oldest man in the Settlement. I…cried when I heard.”
“Yeah.” Manuel gazed out at the once-jagged ramparts of an ancient crater, now slumping and melting. In the lee of a southerly wind, pink snowdrifts still clung to shards of rock. “Well? You willing?”
Again the puzzled expression. “I… Okay.” Petrovich clapped his hands, breaking his pensive mood. “I know a cut through a gorge, there”—a fat finger stabbed the map. “Not existing even five years ago.”
They worked through the narrow, stream-gutted gorge and came out beneath a waterfall. The cascading ammonia-rich river steamed when it hit their canopy, sending up geysers that caught the sun. Rainbows formed high up, hanging tenuously against the face of Jupiter and then dissolving. They rocked on, lurching over fresh out-washes. One of the men sat on the deck outside and potted away at muties that wandered into range. There were a fair number of them, and Manuel asked about keeping the population down.
“Da, we have to do that soon. Hiruko is griping. But they do not pay enough, is the fact. We wait a little more, get their price up.”
Manuel asked, “What’ve they been doing with the development money?”
Petrovich shrugged. “Putting out seismos. Tilt meters. Creep gauges.”
“How come?”
“Still like the old days. They dumped a new animal into the biosphere, not tell us a thing—remember? Till we got to go out and prune away their mistakes. Then we get the specs. Same with them now—they hire gangs to put out the meters, they smile, they pay okay, they tell us zero.”
Manuel grinned. “Good to see not everything’s changed.”
Manuel found the camp using merely the sun’s position and memory, just letting the crawler follow its nose. He was not thinking of anything in particular when the land began its slight rise, and so the ramshackle profile of the camp came up out of the horizon without any twinge of anticipation in him. The north wall of the cabin had been staved in by something and patched up with a garish yellow gummy stuff. There were broken boxes scattered around, and wind-scoured old equipment, and the fusion generator was on minimum, racheting along with a pock pock pock, providing power for the cluster of seismos and other odd-shaped devices driven into the ice nearby.
He and Petrovich got out and walked to the hill that overlooked the vacant, neglected sprawl. Manuel found the spot not by pacing off from the crown of the hill but by feel, remembering the way the big boulders formed a nexus that pointed downslope to the little flat area.
“They wondered about this, back Sidon,” Petrovich said.
“Good,” Manuel said with a sudden flash of anger that surprised him.
The ice here was crusted with old snow. Manuel scraped it clear with his hands, kneeling and letting the heat of his suit sweep away the cloudiness in the top layer of ice.
Far down, surrounded by small bubbles, was a dark shape. He could barely make out the arms and legs. It was still face up.
“Ice hasn’t moved any,” he murmured.
“It will. Creep meter over there I looked at. It flows, hundred meters under here.”
“Uh-huh.” He peered into the ice as if he could see the face.
“Could still take it in for funeral,” Petrovich said quietly.
“No. Sidon’s not so poor it can’t go without one more corpse for fertilizer.”
“You know that is not why.”
“Sure I know. They wanted a little ceremony, like the one a few days ago. Community’s built on ceremony.” He stood up abruptly.
“They have a point.”
“This is one that didn’t need their ritual. He wanted to stay out here.”
Petrovich nodded silently. He scuffed his boot and turned back to the camp. Manuel followed after a moment. The cabin seemed smaller now, and the stanchions had sunk beyond view in the ice, as if this place, neglected by men for a while as they fretted about other, passing matters, was taking up its natural course again, blending into the generality of the wilderness, absorbed in the deep motions of the ice.
As he tramped down the hillside, the crunch of his boots on old snow faded away into the encasing silence of the place. He could squint his eyes and still see his father standing outside the lock, angry and yet letting his son take the body up the rise and lay it out carefully, and in the hour following chop out a grave in the ice, the myriad glinting chips and crystals billowing up around the bent, steadily digging figure. The Colonel had buried his anger for that hour because his son had told him a lie, the only lie that had ever passed between them, a lie that had held until they got back to Sidon: that Old Matt had said he wanted this, to be buried out here, under the progression of dark and dawn and dark and dawn again, not held fast in the ice but free in the ice. It was a lie in strict fact, but not in essence; Manuel knew what the old man had wanted, and the fact that there had not been time to say it, or the right time, did not matter. But the small, niggling deception had eaten at the son, and within a week he had told the father, and that in the end had tipped the scales somewhere in the Colonel’s mind, had made it impossible for the two of them to go on as they had before. So the sudden sparking rages had gotten worse between them and this cold flat space in the side of a hill had driven a wedge between them; No son of mine would do such a thing; and finally it was not over the death but, as can happen between men who have loved each other, it was over the tiny matter of the burial that they had seen the last of each other.
Manuel came stiff-legged into the field, eyes watery and aimless, and the first shock knocked him off his feet. One moment he was halfway through a step and the next he was on his back, the wind knocked out of him, feeling the ground shake. He got to his knees and the second shock came. He saw this one coming as a dark line sweeping in from the horizon, rippling the snow so that facets of sunlight struck from the crest. The seismic wave shot up the rise without pause, inexorable and swift, and jolted up through his boots like a physical blow. The cabin lurched, its metal shrieked—and it collapsed, the roof caving in first and then the walls one at a time as the stresses warped through their planes and shattered the ports, spraying transparent shards into the field, sending up showers of dust and gushes of air that froze into puffs of cloud. A girder came flying out, tumbling end over end and narrowly missing Petrovich, who was balled up on the ground. It gouged out a strip in the snow and stopped.
The crawler slewed around and rocked, but did not overturn. Hoarse shouts came over the comm. Petrovich overrode them with a harsh “Quiet!—Any hurt? Count out!”
Manuel watched the horizon as the men called out their names. No major injuries, though one fellow had sprained a shoulder falling. No more waves came over the horizon. He trotted down to Petrovich and asked, “You’re tapped into Hiruko, aren’t you? What’s happening?”
Petrovich was staring off into space, listening intently. “Confusion. Lot of damage.”
“How about Sidon?”
“Some tunnels fell in. Some injuries.”
“My mother?”
“No. Nobody I know.”
“I should call her.”
“Comm is packed.” He shook his head. “Damn, was big one.”
“What’s going on? Two quakes in a week.”
“Don’t understand. These moons, they’re stable.”
“The melting—it’s supposed to be symmetric, not cause ice-plate tectonics.”
Petrovich thought, nibbling absently at his lip. “Supposed to be, yes. I heard of some cave-ins downslope from here, in the mines…”
“Let’s get back to Sidon.”
“No. They don’t need help, is being done okay.”
“I think we should check. Call somebody.”
“Can do that on way to the site.”
Manuel gritted his teeth, but nodded. “Okay, okay. Dump these men off at the site. Then we go back.”
Petrovich checked the tilt meters and frowned. “Lot of slippage down there. Come on. Let us get off this gradient.”
The big man started toward the crawler. Manuel paused. The cabin whose interior he had memorized was now a rubble of beams and sheet metal and plastaform. He had missed seeing the inside again by only moments. He had wanted to walk through it, see if anything had changed. Of course, if he had been inside when—
“Manuel! Come on!” Petrovich waved out at him from the pilot’s couch. “We have to move. The site—no answer. But their emergency hailer is on. Putting out Mayday.”
THE VOLCANO ROSE through banks of black dust and streaming orange plumes of erupting, howling gas.
“Big bastard. Blocks the way,” Petrovich said, wrestling with the controls. The crawler swerved to avoid a tumbling boulder.
“We can dogleg around it.” Manuel pointed. “Through that gully—there.”
A rattling vibration came up through the crawler’s treads. The Sidon men clustered in the rear of the cabin and muttered to each other. Petrovich brought them clanking and roaring into the gully, swerving around a caved-in rampart of rock. Vapor poured from cracks in the gully floor. Steam hissed beneath them. The crawler’s lights winked on, cones of white opening to a dimmed infinity.
“This thing’s big,” Manuel said. “Maybe there’s erupting all along the mountain range.”
Petrovich thumbed on a satellite overview. In the visible spectral range the whole area was awash in smoke and clouds. He clicked to infrared: pinpricks of bright, violent activity all along their route. “Damn.”
“Look there. The ice—moving.”
The infrared image displayed velocity vectors in the valley floor. Arrows clustered at the center, snaking southward. “Pretty damn fast, too,” Petrovich murmured.
They lurched out of the gully into the open, caterpillar treads slipping in mud. Green vapor steamed from cracks ahead. For a moment a chance wind cleared the air down the valley. Silently the men watched a slow churning motion sweep rocks along. Blue-gray blocks of ice slid into view out of the low ground haze, sank, rose—and cracked apart with muffled crashes. Splinters speared upward and toppled. Crevasses groaned open and abruptly slammed shut. The ice heaved and thrust and was swallowed in turn by more ice sliding down from the far hills.
“Madre de Dios.”
“The whole region is out of balance,” Petrovich whispered.
He angled them along the valley wall, away from the grinding march of the ice. Above, the new volcano was wrapped in mist against a black sky. Through shifting clouds they saw ribbons of white water turn brown as they gathered up dust, and then plunge down to roaring rivers. The fluids ran off the hills and into yawning cracks in the fractured, shifting ice.
They topped a rise and crossed over into a side arm of the central valley system. “This way, we can try. See? No velocity vectors along this line.”
“Maybe it’s stationary?”
Petrovich raised his eyebrows. “Maybe.”
On a distant flank of the volcano the ice was pressing upward, driven by pressures in the valley below. It jutted up the raw black stone slopes, melted, vaporized, and then froze again as it rose, wreathing the peak in fog. Manuel could see the red flare of the cone’s summit, pulsing like rich arterial blood and bright enough beneath the pall of dust to throw crimson blades of luminescence down the shadowy, smoking slopes.
“I am afraid our Hiruko friends, they have miscalculated.”
“The fusion crawlers?”
“Da. It is a delicate game. To build the atmosphere, but at same time keep land in balance.”
“Maybe they made air too fast.”
“Is not the air, is water. This world is one spherical glacier, with nowhere to go, no place to run downhill. The ice cap, it rests on rock beds—rock from meteors, that sank partway down as the crust was freezing. Melt the ice, it relieves pressure on the rock. Rock then expands, opens up pores. Fine, Extra water from the melting, water that did not turn to gas, seeps into the rock. Rock acts like sponge. Hiruko was counting on the rock sopping up this water.”
“What if it didn’t?”
“You fill up the sponge, the extra water moves into the joints between rock slabs. Into fault lines. That much water moving down deep, the mass pressure, plus it lubricates the fault lines… Zip! Old cartoon of man stepping on a banana peel. Ice on top skids along on the water below.”
“Hiruko was doing it too fast.”
“A very difficult calculation. Many uncertainties.”
“Any more word from Sidon?”
“They are not bothering with us. They will not bother about the site either, for a while.”
Manuel said grimly, “I wonder what the Earthers make of all this.”
Outside, the volcano roared and fumed and sent its lancing crimson into the thickening shroud of dust.
They approached carefully across the broad plain. The ice mesa reared in the distance, its steep sides cut by slides and slumped terraces. Deep cracks laced across it. But the ice plain was firm and the crawler made good time. Behind the tiny speeding figure, an ebony volcanic dust cloud flattened as it rose into altitudes where the buoyancy of the thin air would not carry the particles. Soon it stretched from horizon to horizon, an immense black anvil.
“Don’t see anybody,” Manuel said.
“Probably inside the housing.”
Petrovich pointed to seven half-cylinders arranged in neat rows, their walls a crimped bronze. Two had caved in. Beyond them was a tall structure of girders, rods, beams, struts, and cross-supports. Shocked, Manuel realized that this was an outer frame for the Aleph. Through the web of metal he could see cool alabaster. He compared it with the last time, when he was hurrying and had turned and looked back, carrying Old Matt. It was in the same place, as near as he could tell, but the long shape seemed broader.
They throttled down and stopped beside the half-cylindrical huts. A lock opened and two figures came out, waving, beckoning them inside. Manuel carried in the medical pack. The first person he saw inside was Piet Arnold.
“I am so grateful that you have come on,” the man said, “rather than turning back to Sidon.”
“Your comm is out, except for the Mayday.”
“Ah, good—we did not even know if that worked. Of all our huts, the two that collapsed were the most vital. Terrible luck. Two died.”
“You got them cooled down okay?”
“Yes. You can take them back as well?”
“What happened to him?” Manuel gestured toward an Earther inserted halfway into the hut’s medmonitor, feet first.
“A broken leg, some blood loss. I am afraid the blow drove bone fragments into the muscle.”
“Painful. How’d it happen?”
“He fell from the scaffolding around the Aleph.”
“A monitor that size, not enough,” Petrovich put in. “Cannot remove deep fragments.”
“I’m aware you will have to take him back to Sidon. He should rest a bit first, however. And you will need to study the route back, I should imagine.” Piet spread his hands in smiling welcome. “You can surely spend a day or two here. We appreciate the company.”
Manuel studied the man. “We’ll be leaving tomorrow,” he said flatly.
“I am sorry your arrival has been in such dreadful circumstances. These events…” He shook his head.
Manuel grimaced. “Don’t worry about anything but setting up your comm again. That’s vital. Whole damn crust’s shifting, near as I can tell. You’ve got to stay in touch with Hiruko. Come on—I’ll start on it now.”
In the morning there was a hovering silence in the hut. No one was awake. Manuel got out of the fiber blankets as quietly as he could, dressed, ate a bar of food, and suited up. The lock made a lot of hydraulic noise as he went out, so he was not surprised to see another figure emerge from the hut ten minutes later. The man came trotting toward him, where he stood in the shadow of the Aleph.
Piet said nothing as he approached. The two simply eyed each other, and at last Manuel said severely, “Why’d you talk to me on the train?”
“You were a fellow passenger. You seemed lonely.”
“You knew who I was.”
“That does not change anything. You still appeared lonely.”
“You, Petrovich—I’m not going to tell you anything, you know.”
“Have I asked?”
“Look, it’s dead. Let it alone. Or at least let me alone.”
“Why are you so sure?”
Manuel blinked. “Sure?”
“That it is dead.”
“Look at it. We killed it, Old Matt and me.”
Piet smiled broadly. “Yes, do look at it.”
Manuel turned and studied the strutwork. “You’ve boxed it in.”
“To make precise measurements.”
Manuel sniffed. “I took its measure.”
“In a way, yes. One measure of it.”
“Nobody ever knew what to do about it. You read the records, right? It killed a lot of people in its time.”
“Yes. By accident, apparently.”
“Accident or not, we had to stop it.”
“Was that it?”
“Huh? Protecting people? I don’t know. I just came out here; it was… Ever’body… Every year we came out, the guys always talked about it…”
“Why? Why did you kill it?”
Manuel gazed at him without understanding. “Why? It… Look, you don’t know anything about this.”
Piet said, “You set about that comm repair like a demon. It took you nearly the whole night.”
“So?”
“As if you were avoiding something. Talking to me. Or coming out here to the artifact.”
Manuel glowered. “I came out here on my own just now.”
“Yes, alone.”
“Wanted to have a look at it. Got to be heading back soon. Want to start early. Could be a lot of trouble getting through, what with—”
“There will be time, I expect. From what I gather from Hiruko, these quakes are temporary phenomena.”
“Listen, don’t take that Hiruko flak for gospel.” Manuel moved restlessly back and forth. He paced in the shadow of the Aleph, a cooler zone cast down sharp and clear on the mottled, boot-trod ice.
Piet smiled again. “Shall we go in?”
“In?”
“You really should have kept up with the reports, you know.”
“You can go inside?”
Piet spread a palm toward the hulk inside the webbing of rods. “Four years ago a scientist from Hiruko found a peculiar wedge-shaped formation near the tail. Irradiated with neutrons, it yielded a high return flux. A method of resonance absorption—using neutrons of high energy—made the structure break down. The entire object unfolded. As if on command.”
Manuel frowned. “Thought it looked fatter.”
Piet raised a gloved finger. “There’s the point. It unfolded—the big blocks came crashing down on the ice—but as nearly as we can tell, the net volume of the thing did not increase.”
“Uh-huh. So?”
“The Hiruko people ventured in. Not far—but they retrieved a great deal.”
“Enough to get you to come out here from Earth.”
Piet nodded. “Yes. More than enough.” He extended his arm toward an opening in the rodwork. “Come inside. You, of all people, should.”
They walked in, stooping to get through the enclosure. “You wanted me out here all the time,” Manuel said. He was still confused and uncertain, and yet…and yet…however much he distrusted the man, Piet Arnold seemed to have a sense of the thing that he had not found in Major Sánchez or in Petrovich or even in his father.
He stopped abruptly at this thought. His father—and up from some recess came an outwelling of emotion that took him by surprise, filling his throat, choking off his breath. Emotions swirled in him, blotting out the present. It was grief and something beyond grief, a yawning abyss of loss and failed opportunity that could never be undone, a sense of passing, of moving finally beyond—
He gulped, and gave no sign of this, but walked on, following the bent-over form ahead of him.
They passed through a wedge formed of two huge alabaster blocks. A luminescence churned in the blocks, casting shadows on the taut tanned skin of his face. His boots went chunk, chunk into the ice.
“Damn big,” he said uselessly.
“You would know,” Piet replied, turning back, smiling.
They came out into a chamber of hexagonals. Here the light glinted from moving shards like mica. The ice floor was littered with equipment. Probes studded the smooth surfaces of the room. Meters and analyzers registered data with blue and green dials.
“We have made a thorough study here. The Hiruko data were of course essential. We knew what to prepare for. Thus, only a few days of more sophisticated observation have confirmed their results, and added a great deal.”
“Uh-huh.” Manuel stood, arms folded, looking at the dim patterns that formed in the deep slabs of the thing.
“It is, in a sense, mere stone. The lattice structure near the surface confirms that… But below…” Piet touched a control and the worn rock seemed to Manuel to peel away, revealing a mottled design.
“Below, it constantly remakes itself. The molecular composition changes. The blocks are always mechanically strong, surely—but constantly in flux. New compounds, new lattices. The basic crystalline design is none of the usual ones. It is a ragged, shifting thing of points and angles.”
“A machine that makes its own parts?” Manuel shrugged. “So?”
“But to remake its own molecular structure! Actually, if it were only that, perhaps you would be right—a truly sophisticated machine, an advanced technology, might very well do just that. But the molecular forms, we have found, readjust because the atomic structure alters. And the atoms change because the particles constantly shift and move and change identity. That is it—the steady conversion of matter into other forms, like something restlessly remaking itself, forever discontented—”
Piet broke off. “I can see you are bored by such findings. Perhaps it is best to simply let you witness.” With a gesture he dimmed the lights from the analyzers, and the walls gained new life. Manuel could see the shifting lights beyond the stone surface better now, and—
—fiery pinpricks wheeling—
—a warped mass of quivering lines, a silvery coiling, thrusting out toward him—
—dissolving suddenly into a billowing softness, green clouds scratching a ruby sky with a shriek—
—bright, quick, shiny surfaces—
—a scribble of sound, blurred—
—something running, so fast there was only the impression of size and speed and relentless desire—
—rotting pinks and greens, a stench of age—
—rasping, encrusted, heavy light—
—hair like snakes—
—explosion—
“Ah!”
Manuel wrenched away, covering his eyes. Yet many of the things he’d felt had come not through sight but through the other senses, taste and smell and sound and touch, stretching fine and firm as though he was experiencing them for the first time.
Piet said softly. “You see. I am sorry, but… You see.”
“I…”
“The endless change manifests itself at every level. To produce effects at our level of perception that, frankly, I cannot understand or even fully describe. What you cannot see is what this apparatus reports.” He waved his hands to take in the racks of equipment. “Down at the nuclear level, and even below that, the forces themselves alter. There is a thing called the electro-weak interaction. Several numerical parameters describe it—parameters we thought fixed since time began, since the big bang started the universe. We now know, because of Aleph, that they are not fixed. Here, they change. Always. Nothing remains, nothing is held constant.”
“How’s it hold together?”
“I honestly do not know. The artifact is like a Rosetta stone—you know some Earth history?—which recapitulates all the laws of the universe. Somehow, it knows how to make laws. There is a scheme to it, of course. As I interpret the data, the artifact seems to be saying that the physical laws were not always the same. When the universe was young, the laws were young. Now they are somewhat aged. Our fundamental constants of today will not always remain so. So natural evolution does not apply only to life—it applies to the laws of the universe as well. The laws.” Piet clasped his hands together. “I hope you understand what a profoundly unsettling notion this is.”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Perhaps you do not fully grasp the point.” Piet leaned forward earnestly. “You see, physics holds that particles are created by fields—the electric field, the nuclear fields, and so on. But suppose that there was something that created laws. What does that? How“—he seized Manuel’s arm—”how do you store the information that contains the laws? In the particles? But they are made by the fields, and thus by the laws themselves! Circular! How do you convey the information? What makes the laws?”
Manuel gazed at the walls, still flashing with color and light. “Well… I don’t…”
“Suppose the artifact is in this universe, but is not of the universe?”
Manuel shook his head, disturbed by the thoughts this man brought up. Piet at once saw his confusion and relented, backing away. “I am sorry.”
To cover his uncertainty Manuel assumed the gruffness he had used outside. “Look, why’d you show me this? I can’t help you understand anything about—”
Piet held up a hand, palm outward. “Come.”
On they went, through narrow passages of somber rock, up tight corridors, crawling through odd-shaped holes, down slides slick with ice. It seemed to Manuel that the Aleph could not possibly be as big as this, as complicated. The walls were dead cold stone and they stretched on, seamless, without end.
They reached an open corridor where Manuel could stand. Piet said conversationally, “Do you know who named it Aleph?”
“No.”
“Some Jew, I gather. An interesting choice. You know what it means?”
“First letter of the Hebrew alphabet, an uncle of mine said. He’s Jewish.”
“Correct. The interesting point is that it means quite a few things in the sciences. For instance, in geometry, it is written so”—he fetched a pad from a pocket and drew on it the sign א—“and means a point in space that contains all other points. All angles, all perspectives. And in another branch of mathematics, the number denoted by aleph null”—he wrote the sign אo—“is the basic transfinite number from Cantor’s Mengenlehre—a number which has the curious property that any part of it is as large as the whole.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps. Come along.”
They had to crawl again, and then inch up a cleft that seemed to be metallic. Manuel slipped on the slick mirror surfaces. Other rounded passages opened along the sides. A memory tugged at him. The walls reflected back his frowning, drawn face. The tube narrowed, and a glow from ahead grew diffuse and white.
“Here—get in front.” Piet pushed him ahead.
Manuel stood in a narrow space and looked around. Weak fields clutched at him, but could find no grasp. Ahead—
Something spun in a halo of light.
“Matt!”
He stumbled forward and hit cushiony air that yielded softly and then resisted. He fought at it but could not get closer.
The head was shadowed somehow, despite the white glow around it. He could not read anything in the face. One arm was upraised—in salute or greeting, he thought. Old Matt was not in helmet and suit, the way Manuel had seen him inside the Aleph before, but rather in loose-fitting coveralls. The body spun very gradually to the left, and then the shadows on the face lifted a little and he could see the lips were moving with aching slowness. Manuel tried to make out what the words were, but before the parched lips could fully close and define the movement, the shadows—But shadows of what? Manuel wondered—fell again on the solemn face that peered out, unblinking, pale and uncreased as though relaxed and pensive. Manuel remembered that dry voice saying, Watch for me as they had walked toward the Aleph with the e-beam, that last time. Watch for me.
The body turned further. The diffuse halo glow was cast on the shoulders and back. Was the hand moving, a fraction of a centimeter? He strained to see.
Beyond it was something more. A vague figure of about the same size turned even more slowly, arms halfway raised at the elbows, dark running and swirling through the body so that only the outline was clear. In the fog of light he could tell this form was less detailed, blurred like a hazy image from only a fraction of a holographic print. It was helmeted, legs apart as though captured while walking, head turned—Manuel gasped. The light seeped into the veiled helmet and he saw just enough to catch the half-smiling mouth, the eyes—
“What”—he backed away—“what are these?”
“We were hoping you might know.”
“Me?”
“You saw something like this before? Petrovich reports that—”
“Sí, something. After we shot the Aleph, while I was inside it, I thought I saw Old Matt, but when I got outside… I…” He stepped back again, mouth rigid, grimacing. “That other thing. That’s me.”
“I believe so. That is why we so wanted to speak with you, to learn how these…copies…came into being.”
“I don’t know.” Manuel began to tremble.
“You felt nothing that time? Something holding you, extracting information somehow…?”
“No!” He retreated again, squinting, eyes fixed on the far figure. “Nothing.”
Piet said soothingly, “I urge you to think of this again, once you are through this first reaction. Consider—you are a Christian, are you not? Our files indicate so. Consider how closely linked the idea of preservation, of arising again in a similar but transmuted form—how closely linked this is in your culture. It is the Christian vision of resurrection and salvation. Also, it is the image of horror at the walking dead, the zombie. Try to think of it in the positive sense, if you can. I—”
“Let’s get out of here.”
Manuel stumbled away. Piet rushed after him, down another passageway lit by a flickering green glow. Manuel stopped suddenly.
“My God, what’s that?”
The bulbous, distended shape beyond had things like arms and a slanted head and long, spiky things jutting out from the eyes.
“Don’t go near it!” Piet called.
Manuel stepped closer against spongy resistance—and the thing turned abruptly. The huge head seeming to click forward in the harsh, blinking light. Sudden terror filled Manuel. He turned and fled, running straight into Piet.
“Come on!”
“No need. It is a bit of a shock at first. Here, this way.”
“What’s it doing here?”
“Staying where it is,” Piet said mildly. “Men are not the only beings preserved, apparently.”
“But that thing, where’s it from?”
Piet shrugged. “The classical definition of aleph, a thing that contains all other things…”
“In a place this size?” They were making their way back along a route he knew, and Manuel was calmer, beginning to think.
“Ah, but what is its size? That which appears to us from the outside? Or what we measure on the inside? A geometry containing other geometries…” Piet chuckled. “We have not yet counted all the passageways. There are many of them—or at least, it appears that way.”
.Manuel said nothing. He frowned and grimly forged ahead, his face unreadable. He was nearly to the next turn when the wall began to shake violently. With a loud crack the ice split under him. He fell through.
THE SPLIT WAS deep. He grabbed at a jutting shard of ice and hung on. The stonework walls cast dim light down into the break, and he could see after a moment that it went down twenty more meters. It’s started, he thought. It was natural for the ice to split first under the greatest weight. The whole plain outside would go next.
“Here, let me help you,” Piet called. Manuel looked up. Piet was eight meters above. But the man was still judging heights with his Earth reflexes.
“Back away!” Manuel shouted. He swung up onto the ice shard. He gathered himself and then leaped the distance, even clearing the edge to land on his feet in the passageway. “Come on, we’ve got to break camp.”
“I’ll get the equipment in here,” Piet said, turning back.
“Leave it! This rock will be the first thing to go.”
Piet said firmly, “People invested immeasurable effort to make it and bring it here. I am obliged to see that their labor is conserved.”
Manuel put a hand on Piet’s shoulder. “Look, be sensible—” Piet brushed it off and walked away, not looking back. “All right, dammit—crucify yourself for your goddamn commonweal!” But Piet was gone before he finished the curse.
He found his way out alone. The ground was shaking steadily now, and the rock buttresses groaned and creaked. He had to crawl over a mound of ice in the last passageway. When he looked up, the plain beyond was a vast jumble of broken white and blue masses.
He stood up slowly, blinking, shocked. Every hut had collapsed. The crawler was gone. Three Earthers were picking at the wreckage of the bunk hut.
He ran to where the crawler had been. It lay at the bottom of a crevasse. It was on its back and the treads were broken, the chain parts scattered all down the thirty-meter drop. “Hey!” he called on general comm. Nobody answered. He switched to suit radio.
“—five of them under there. They had no suits on. Inbody medical reads negative on all of them,” an Earther voice said.
Manuel ran over to the bunk hut. “Where’s Petrovich?”
The nearest one looked up. “He was moving the crawler.”
“Damn. Probably unconscious. I can’t get in the hatch with it overturned.”
“Help us here.”
“Sure. Where’s your full medical equipment?”
“In the third hut, there.”
“I’ll start digging it out. You’ll have to cool all these guys down fast.”
So began a blurred, deadening time of hard labor. He helped uncover the bodies. They got several of the medical stations back in operating order. He saw Piet appear at the entrance of the Aleph, hauling equipment out and safely beyond. Manuel found working with the Earthers frustrating; they moved methodically but without imagination, meticulously removing the debris in an orderly way, not usually the fastest and most effective way. The huts had split and vented their atmospheres, pinning the inhabitants until they died, sucking vacuum. The three Earthers had been outside when the quake hit. Petrovich was outside too, heading for the Aleph after Manuel and Piet. He had tried to move the crawler away from a spreading crack, and failed.
Beyond, the valley churned with shifting ice. The shelf was beginning to flow southward.
They got the bodies sealed up all right, but some of them were badly damaged—snapped spines, guts spilled onto the ground, convulsive lung hemorrhage from the vacuum. Once that was done the Earthers themselves collapsed, not so much from fatigue as from the shock of it. They just sat down on the ice and refused to move, glassy-eyed, staring off into space. Manuel shouted at them, but it did no good.
He had to climb down into the crevasse by himself. He rapped on the crawler hull, but there was no answer. He figured a way to tip over the crawler body, using a hydraulic jack from the scaffolding around the Aleph. By this time he was working at fever pitch, taking each problem as it came and hearing or seeing nothing outside of it. He didn’t even notice when a good piece of the scaffolding folded up and collapsed, just after he’d pulled the jack out from under it. He wouldn’t have given a damn if he had. He had never liked Petrovich a hell of a lot, but if the man was dead you did what you could to save the body in time, before the damage from oxygen loss got too great. The biting Ganymede cold would help. If Petrovich had known he was dying, he could have vented his suit the right way, gradually, and chilled himself down without too much cell damage. Then the cold would stop the oxygen-loss damage. So Manuel worked with the jack and tried to turn the crawler over.
Twice the crevasse walls caved in. Snow engulfed him. Blocks of ice thumped by in the white swirl. He clawed his way out, tossing the blue ice chunks aside, chest heaving, sweating so much his faceplate fogged and he couldn’t read the angle and pressure settings on the jack. He got it wedged under the body of the crawler and turned up the power to full. That was enough to tilt it thirty degrees over. Manuel worked his way under it, knowing that if the ground shook again and threw the jack off balance the crawler would come down on him. He popped the hatch and crawled up through it. Petrovich was hanging upside down from the pilot’s chair. Manuel didn’t even look in the helmet, just pulled him down and threw the body out through the hatch. He jumped after it. Another quake started as he dragged the body away, and the crawler bucked over on its side and made a complete roll, coming after them. Manuel picked up Petrovich and jumped. He got halfway up the steep walls, hanging in air for a long moment, trying to figure what to do. The crawler tumbled over again below him and he had nowhere to go but back down. He landed on the turret as the crawler rocked over and tipped further and then settled down, nearly throwing him. He kept his balance and jumped again, this time getting a better purchase, and cleared the lip of the crevasse as big blocks of ice split off the walls with cracking, booming reports.
He kicked one of the Earthers into alertness and got him to help with Petrovich. The body seemed all right but Petrovich was in a coma. They inserted him into a medmon. It gave a good prognosis. It was a utility monitor, though, unable to do delicate reviving work. That would have to wait for equipment at Sidon.
Another quake hit then, throwing the monitor around. The ice mesa on the horizon slumped. The square profile broke, fractured, and let go with a roar, showering the plain with tumbling, roiling avalanches. Manuel thought then of Piet. He ran toward the Aleph.
It had fallen over. The equipment from inside was safe, strewn over the landscape, but Piet had been coming out when the scaffolding gave way. It had caught him and held him while the Aleph rolled over. He lay pinned under beams and pipes now, nearly touching the Aleph. As Manuel trotted toward him, the helmet came up and pain-squeezed eyes peered out.
“I got…it all.”
“The equipment? I suppose you did, you damn fool.”
“Please…”
The thin, weak voice made Manuel bite his lip at his own anger. “Where’s it hurt?”
“Legs. Below the knees, I can’t feel anything.”
“Lie flat.”
Manuel pushed him gently down. Piet gasped. There were medical inputs in the lower back of the suit, but they were Earther design and Manuel didn’t have lock-ins for them.
“Goddamn. Where can I—”
“The…living quarters.”
He ran back to the huts and scrabbled around in the medmonitors for parts. When he came back the ground was rumbling again. The Aleph seemed to have sunk a little into the ice. It was closer to Piet.
“I… I’d have been done sooner,” Piet said apologetically as Manuel worked on his back. Piet’s breath came in long, wheezing gasps. Manuel clicked the lock-ins around the right number of turns and then worked them into the sockets. Piet sighed as his pain centers shut down. His body lost its rigidity.
“Took me…longer…to get out. Something…like syrup…slowed me.”
“I’m going to have to drag you out from under this stuff.”
“That same…soft…light…”
“Shouldn’t hurt too much.”
Manuel eyed the tangled, wrecked web of pipes and struts that hung over them. If it fell wrong it would trap Piet even more. He started pulling the pipes out of the way, and the whole structure rattled and clattered. Falling in weak gravity, it couldn’t hurt Piet badly, but it would be a mess to undo. He decided to cut it away.
“I’m going after a cutter. Everything’s okay. The bodies are sealed up. You just rest.”
He had to rummage around in the wreckage. It took him a while, and as he came trotting back toward the hulking wreck a shock wave threw him down. He started to get back up and another knocked him over. The Aleph tipped over toward Piet, and the scaffolding came down with a crash. It didn’t fall on Piet. Manuel could see him clearly. Piet’s head came up, and the calm, clear eyes peered out, directly at Manuel, as the Aleph toppled over further, crunching, sinking fast now as cracks split the ice beneath it. Black jagged lines forked out from it. One widening crack passed only a few meters from Manuel as Piet cried out, not in terror but with a plaintive, resigned quality—screamed just once as the Aleph rolled over on him in a sudden fog, a hazy shower of glinting light that Manuel took to be ice and snow tossed up by the settling weight.
Then Piet was gone, and the enormous bulk settled further into the broken ice and the ground trembled. Manuel could not tell whether the deep, shuddering vibration came from the sinking ruin of the Aleph or from a distant quake.
The Aleph shifted, and Manuel stared at the place where Piet had been. The man he had known so little would lie now in this place far beyond the moon of Islam and the cross of Rome and the hammer of Marx, in a territory open and without plan, beyond man and his encasing theories, his filters, beyond the closed rooms of the civilized mind.
He walked slowly back to the crumpled huts. Behind him the Aleph slipped further into the yawning, groaning crevasses. He ignored the rumbling and the slow, gravid movement. The Earthers were laboring over the medical units. They clustered around each monitor, attaching temporary power packs. To Manuel they seemed like priests again, devoted to the sacred icons of their state-provided immortality. He felt a sour dislike for them, not for any reason he could identify, and decided it must be his fatigue.
The nearest one saw him approach. “We…watched Piet. That was terrible.”
“Yeah.”
“We were afraid to go near, afraid—”
“I know.”
“There is no hope he is perhaps pinned in the ice below, that—”
“No. Forget it.”
“Very well. I, I must report that the situation is quite serious.”
“No kidding.”
“I have tried calling Sidon and Hiruko. Our gear is not working.”
“We can’t raise them on suit comm at this range. We’ll have to use the crawler’s.”
They went looking for it. The ice was moving and thrusting and murmuring in the distance, confusing his bearings. Several minutes passed before Manuel realized that the opening he sought was gone. “Closed up,” he muttered. “Crawler’s prob’ly a hundred meters down by now.”
The Earther looked around at the steadily working ice plain. At the valley center the ice flow was perceptible. Blocks sprang up and flopped down, carried by greater pressures below. The huts were on a more slowly drifting section of the plain.
“How long until our area is torn loose?”
“No telling. We could be safe here. Could be this piece is hung up on a rock base and won’t get carried along much.”
The Earther brightened cautiously. “Do you think so?”
“No. Damned unlikely. Look how the Aleph’s sinking.”
“What should we do, then?”
Manuel stood with hands on hips, bent over, testing his muscles to see if he had pulled any. He said nothing. Then he sat down on the ice and stretched out. It felt good. He was tired, but not badly. On the other hand, only a fool doesn’t take a rest when he can get it. “Could try to get up into the hills, but things are giving way up there too. That’s where some of this stuff is coming from.”
“What can we do?”
“Not much. Wait for Sidon to notice we’re not calling. I’d bet they’ve got their hands full, though. Prob’ly too busy to listen for suspicious silences.”
“If the monitors run out of power…”
“Right.”
“Perhaps the satellites will see our predicament.”
Manuel shook his head. These men were used to insulating, overlapping backups. Safety nets.
He got up and walked toward the rubble of the huts. The clashing ice was a continuous murmur in the valley.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for a reserve power pack.”
“Over in number five there is one. I’ll show you.”
The other figures looked up from their labors to watch Manuel. He got the pack and swung it onto his back. As he did so, he chanced to look toward the Aleph and was startled to find that the ice had already swallowed it. The crevasses there did not seem to be widening any more. As he watched, restless motion sealed over some of the big hole where the stonework had sunk. He thought sadly for a moment, breathed deeply, and turned away.
“What is the pack for?” the Earther asked.
“You people hold out here. Move only if the ice breaks up right around you. I’m going to Sidon.”
SO HE BEGAN to run. He ignored the shouted farewells and wishes of good luck from the few Earthers; he was already turning inward and preparing himself. The churning chunks of broken ice made footing difficult as he crossed the plain. It was like running across the tossing waves of a streaming river, and he took each long, loping step with enough altitude to see where he could land, coming down with a rolling gait to cushion himself in case the shelf shattered under him and he had to spring clear.
He looked back once. The caved-in huts and lonely still-waving figures were dots on a rumpled expanse of white. The area around them looked smoother than the rest, but it could break up any time, he knew, if the slab jarred free or the undersole got scraped by passing rocks. He shook his head to clear it and turned to the hills above.
The slopes were raked free of loose gravel, scoured by sliding slabs of ice, and that made the footing easier. He went up the hills fast, hydraulics wheezing, and reached a ridgeline that looked stable. Fresh black shoulders of stone poked through aged ice. In time, the iron would tinge with rust and the nearby snows would turn purplish from the runoff. Now the dark nickel-iron made good footing, and he chose his leaps to come down there. From the north came roiling clouds, steaming up from the new melt. The clouds darkened as they rose, swooping along the ridgeline so that his high, long jumps took him into the underbellies of cloying moisture. Droplets peppered his faceplate, and he nearly tumbled once from the disorientation. Flashes of orange raked the western mountains: more volcanoes, smoldering fires cutting through the murk.
He picked up the incessant bip bip bip of the Sidon hailer at the top of a steep hill. Sidon was still over the horizon, but the hailer gave him a fix. He was still too far away to reach them with suit comm. A dull ache was settling into his legs now and he took shorter leaps. He cut in the reserve pack. The valleys below were choked with muttering, moving ice. New gullies and arroyos gnawed at the hills. The ringing bip bip bip was the only perceptible sign of man in this rumbling wilderness—bip bip bip, patient and artificial and puny beside the huge forces working everywhere. He remembered returning to camp with his father each year, when he had accepted the benign landscape beyond the ports, transfixed by it and yet knowing that men ruled there, could pass through it with only incidental danger.
He had learned this, without being told, from his father. The Colonel had inherited an attitude, a stance, that said with every gesture: We’ll put our stamp here and it will remain. The outward-pushing domes, the machine-sheathed animals, the crawlers, the muties which scoured the wilderness, chewing and digesting and mindlessly carrying out man’s work—they had all been agents of the remorseless roll of humanity, of the bootheel, of an end to mysteries.
As Manuel worked his way down a broken terrace of tumbled gray rock he felt the ache in his legs seeping up through him and began to pant harder, and saw that he would have had to leave Sidon anyway those years ago, even without the bitter anger he had felt. For at the camp in that dusky morning of Old Matt’s death he had joined forever the other side—the wilderness, the opening-outward, the undomesticated, the country of the old dead time. Perhaps the Colonel had understood that too. Something had drawn the man, had made him lead the prunings and forge the ledgers that made them seem profitable. Something had drawn him out into the vastness, an unvoiced urging. But in the end when the Colonel saw what it meant, where it led, that death and loss were a part of it, seamless and undeniable—Old Matt’s face swam before Manuel, the dry voice sounded in his ears—then the Colonel had rejected it.
Manuel now sensed a fraction of what his father had felt, that unendurably long moment outside the cabin, staring down at the stiff body. The Colonel’s words still hung in the space between them: killing everything that’s old—for his father had never truly meant to kill the Aleph, he had merely wanted to hunt it, to be drawn out by it from the cozy pockets of an insulated life, out from humanity. And in the death of the thing the Colonel had seen, with foreboding, his own end…
He landed among a cowering bunch of rockjaws. They shrieked and fled, their asymmetric bodies lurching, their many-jointed legs going clack clack clack with frantic energy. Perhaps they too would be erased by the shifting ices and river torrents. But they would be back, inevitably. Clack clack clack. Bip bip bip. Once introduced into this world, life would never leave—there was no end to the explosive, consuming, voracious lust of long chain molecules to link and match and make of themselves yet more and more and again more.
Running stolidly now, puffing, sweat soaking him, Manuel watched the land dissolve into shifting planes of light. He shook his head. The world was moving restlessly now as ice parted and slammed, with only the distant crags fixed and reliable. He struggled across washed-out cañons. Creatures raced over the hills, panicked. In his gathering fatigue, Manuel looked out upon the fleeing forms as though from a great height. Life was growing and spreading here the way a disease propagates and eats and in the eating must kill. There should be something more, he thought. A kind of being might come into the universe that did not want to finally eat everything or to command all or to fill every niche and site with its own precious self. It would be a strange thing, with enough of the brute biology in it to have the quick, darting sense of survival. But it would also have to carry something of the machine in it, the passive and accepting quality of duty, of waiting, and of thought that went beyond the endless eating or the fear of dying. To such a thing the universe would be not a battleground but a theater, where eternal dramas were acted out and it was best to be in the audience. Perhaps evolution, which had been at the beginning a blind force that pushed against everything, could find a path to that shambling, curiously lasting state.
Manuel stumbled, picked himself up, and ran on. He felt himself now in that same detached state. The bip bip bip drew him on. Its steady call echoed in his helmet and to take away the seeping pain in his legs he thought of the time before, when he had struggled, cradling Old Matt, and the beacon had called—long, ringing, reassuring, each pulse carrying through the thick and streaming silence, volleying out and echoing, waiting until the next joined it, each note piling upon the last, hammering, forming a human presence in the face of the blank void. Yet now he did not find the mindless ringing bip bip bip a comfort. It was just an idiot wail, as irritating as the easy theories and cheap wisdom of Hiruko, as pointless as the bland understanding of the Earthers. Piet and the rest—they had not been made for the brawling raw edge, beyond their social certainties, confronting real chance and risk and death eternal, pitted against an infinity they worshiped but did not understand—
A geyser burst in front of him, spewing steam and hurling chunks of rock. He circled around, over slumped hills and folded ruins of mountains. He gasped, tasting the reek of hot bearings. It was hard to fall on Ganymede, but when a slab turned under him he did, twisting, stunned by the impact. Bip bip bip, they called to him, and he remembered the plaintive ding dingding that Eagle had tapped against its bars, a momentary reaching out that he had not had the sense or judgment to meet, to answer in the right way, and thus had lost the chance he would always remember—
He lurched up, blotting out the memory. No. The past was gone. He looked around him for bearings.
A towering mountain range had flattened, as if stamped down, into a shattered plain. From the edge of it he peered through shifting banks of fog and dust.
There—Sidon.
Cracks cut the eggshell domes. Dashing rapids crisscrossed the terraces. Wheat fields wore a pallor of gray, frozen. A column of oily smoke climbed from a reduction factory.
He hailed them for five minutes before they answered. The suit comm faded in and out amid a rustle of static, against a background of animal bellowings, wails, tight-voiced cries for help, and steady, mournful Maydays. The pockets of damp, flowering life sent their chorus across the cold and brittle vastness. A choked Sidon Central voice answered Manuel, took the coordinates of the site and the description of what they needed, and promised to relay word to Hiruko. In the chaos, no one knew when drones could reach the site and drop supplies, much less make a pickup from the splintered land.
“Come on in,” the voice said. “We need help. You’re twenty klicks out. Most of the way’s stable.”
Manuel remembered the bulging domes he had played under as a boy: the fat leafy greens that towered three meters high, and that you could pluck off and fold over, exposing the leathery spines that would slip free easily, leaving a floppy rich plate that, eaten last, would bring a sweet, heavy taste into the mouth. And the fruit hanging ripe and ready, bathed by crisp ultraviolet and gusts of fertilizing vapors, force-grown for Sidon’s own consumption, sought after by Hiruko but never shipped. And the rank musk of fat-marbled flesh, grown in vats. And the swarming aroma of fresh grains…
He thought of Sidon. Of moist, enveloping humanity.
“No. No.”
“What? Listen, I’m telling you—”
“They need me back at the site. They don’t know scat-all how to handle themselves.”
“We’re your people here! You get yourself—”
He turned his back on Sidon. The choked voice called out to him, but he kept on going—into the land that moved with a flux of its own, casting off with an immense shrug the hand of man.
The end was coming, and he should be at the site. A deadening emptiness formed in him. He had lost most of his past. Many of the hands that had guided him were now stilled forever. He was weary beyond the point where he could assess his own fatigue, yet kept on, fording streams and stamping heavily under waterfalls that broke over him in rainbows, scrambling up arroyos and down spreading fans of fresh-turned gravel and soil, little noting in the rush and roar the crumpled bodies of crawlies and rock-jaws strewn everywhere.
The land ruled now, not men. Its casual rippling had cast down his father into a laser’s path, and by so doing had begun Manuel’s own journey back to this place. Was it possible that, once the Aleph had stopped boring through the ice crust years ago, the gathering stresses were no longer relieved? So that killing it had brought all this on?
Manuel shook himself. That was crazy. Crazy.
Out here, forging some understanding was not a matter of guessing and then testing, like a scientist, but of listening; waiting; witnessing the slow, certain sway of worlds, the rhythms of gravity and ice, of warming and moisture and then ice again, thin onrushing air and dimmed burnt-golden sunlight, blunt masses and cold equations, smooth and unhurried motion—an old, necessary weariness that Piet had begun to sense. The Earthers around Piet were obsessed with death, with freezing themselves down and reaping the only reward a secular Earth had vouchsafed to them, the sole promise that society had to hold against the grave. But coming out here, seeing the revolving, shimmering things inside the Aleph, perhaps Piet had sensed another kind of promise, and without thinking of it clearly had allowed that to rule him at the end—had gone back into the Aleph to fetch some equipment, so he said, when something in the man had really been returning to a sensed completion, and so he had decided to take his stand there: a fervent hope that seemed to Manuel a blindness, a wish for translation, for Manuel wanted no refuge from this world of eternal cold, or from any other world—he had plans and ideas still, moored in the land and following its same hard destiny, unforgiving and irreducible.
He came down wrong on some gravel and twisted something in his knee. It began to swell up as he went on, and each kilometer became a torment. By the time he could see the site he shambled with a groggy, uneven pace.
He stopped several kilometers away and called over radio, “You look okay. Ice shifting any?”
“No. Not yet. The corpses are safe. I—”
“Good. Better not move.”
“We were afraid you would not return. I want to thank you for—”
“Yeah. Look, I’m going to scout the valley. See where it’s breaking loose.”
They were safe for a while. The floe would smash up soon, though.
He didn’t want to go into the camp just yet, didn’t want to talk. He was bone-tired, but he felt better out here. He walked, limping, trying to clear his head.
At first he did not feel the silent pressure underfoot. He stopped, knowing something was wrong.
Great ice cakes beneath his boots rose, creaking. Rock groaned. The whole mountain range was tilting.
There was no place to run to. The hill bulged more.
His own musky smell flooded his suit, sour and defeated. He sank to his knees.
Then it stopped. A sudden silence fell upon the wild and endless territory that stretched quietly in all directions: Ganymede as it had been in the formless time before, crumpled, fresh, without encrustations of man, barren and without life, a stage waiting for the ceaseless struggle between the slumbering, inert wilderness and the endlessly chewing chains of life—all witnessed by a thing that knew everything, contained everything, perhaps had made everything, yet went on mutely amid all the clash and clamor, immersed in its creation, running, perhaps pausing but never quitting, leaving a wake of wreckage that was tragedy to men but mere passing drama to it: a huge, undeflected, ghostly shape—
The swelling ice rose again.
He was on his feet now as he understood, and watched cracks forced wider at the center of the bulge. His mouth was open, breathing rapidly, a weight lifting from him and his filmed eyes grown brighter. Cracks forked from the tortured upthrusting mound. Ice fell away with loud crashes.
Manuel smiled.
Watch for me.
All those years, the men and animals running out here, roiling and heedless and joyful, and they never thought maybe it was drawing them out.
It was a different shape this time.
And as the first of the immense alabaster blocks broke free of the restraining land, showering stones into the air, he knew he would carry this, carry it on with him in the long decades of rebuilding and pain that must come now, through the heavy years of toil out in the territory, beyond the ever-reaching hand of man; the thought would come to him each day as he worked for his own undiminished destiny, or in the soft night when he lay with Belinda, or at dark moments when memory alone was all he had to sustain him—he would carry the certain sense that it was there, eternally, somewhere in the vastness, and he would remember.