Read Online Against Infinity by Gregory Benford - Free Book Online

lots of things.”
    “Some of the men, Flores and Ramada, say they saw it like a tortilla, flat and saucer-shaped.”
    “They had been at the smeerlop, I remember that time. Lucky they didn’t blow off a leg, the way they were.”
    “The scientists, their pictures—they show it in chunks. But long, as you said.”
    “They would know more than I. They had the cameras.”
    “Were there any mouths or ears on it?”
    “Why? What does it matter?”
    “We should know as much as we can,” Manuel said indignantly, his voice rising.
    “Pointless knowledge, unless there is a way to use it.” The man slurped at his tea and smacked his lips, relishing it. Manuel had noticed that he always took a long time over his food and concentrated on the flavor of it. Now Old Matt’s coppery, grainy eye squinted at Manuel, as if sizing him up. “We haven’t got the tools to make use of what we already know, I’d say.”
    “Like what?”
    “It’s too fast for a man. Too big, too. Only servo’d things could stay with it, catch it.”
    Manuel asked wonderingly, “Use the animals?”
    “That’s what dogs used to be for , boy.”
    “Do the dogs know that?”
    “Somewhere back in the brain they must. Far back, after what we’ve done to ’em.”
    “We could train them!”
    “Maybe.”
    “What about The Barron?”
    “Maybe.”
    “Next pruning operation, we’ll go out and—”
    “If they let me.”
    “Why wouldn’t they? And who’s ‘they,’ anyway? You can do what you like. It’s a free Settlement.”
    “I can’t keep up the way I used to. The others, they don’t like hanging back, waiting for me.”
    “You can help me train The Barron. That’ll do more good than just fast running.”
    Old Matt smiled. “Sure. Might help.”
    “Good!”
    They worked with the animal in the hills beyond Sidon. The Barren had a lot of the old instinct left, buried deep in the genes, locked into a time-honored arrangement of long chains of enduring carbon and phosphates and hydrogen. It fetched sticks and chased little servo’d imitation rabbits Old Matt made up for it. Manuel found from the old file on The Barren that it had been a bloodhound—a piece of good luck—and within a week he had it baying as it scrambled over rocks and snow after the fleeing cottontail rabbit-robo. When it caught the thing it bit down and yelped in surprise at the metal and ceramic, expecting juicy flesh well laced with a prey’s adrenaline. It became, through Old Matt’s patient training and the boy’s energetic urgings, a fleet-footed dart that careered round the hills in a steady, almost automatic lope, scattering rocks as it veered, doggedly—Manuel had to look up the word; it was ancient and long out of use—baying and wailing and claiming dominion over the vacant lands and all the mechanical rabbits they served up to it.
    Colonel López viewed this with a distant amusement, until it occurred to him that Bio might like a way to delegate the pruning operations to animals, especially the servo’d hounds. He did not like the idea. He was glad to find that there were few hounds among the animals, not nearly enough to turn over pruning to them alone. Still, the next year Hiruko Central mandated that they use The Barren and a few others; in league with men.
    Manuel didn’t like it. The Barron was his now, his and Old Matt’s, in the old sense that dogs belonged forever to the men who trained them, and nobody was going to change that. Hiruko Central had ordered the pruning, this time from a cabin seven hundred klicks from Sidon. The boy was grateful to get out again so soon, to spend weeks in the wild beyond the grinding labor of the Settlement. The base camp was much like any of them, crude and hastily thrown up, first as an emergency station a century before and then as an occasional layover spot for prospectors and now finally as a temporary set of rambling shacks barely able to withstand the pressure differential, with wheezing pumps and