Read Online Against Infinity by Gregory Benford - Free Book Online Page A

sparking generator and a fusion tank that shuddered and burped and kept you awake unless you were pretty tired. He was glad of the chance, and doubly glad that The Barren gave Old Matt a new leverage with the other men, who now grumbled to themselves but held their peace when the old man was the last in the column to climb a ridge or finish shucking off his ice-caked leggings. They scared up big flocks of rockjaws and scooters. There were even a fair number of crawlies, still living on the now-vanishing methane in the swollen streams. The crawlie flocks followed the big, lumbering fusion caterpillars, sucking up the methane that burbled and effervesced from their exhausts. There was a goodly fraction of muties among them, and the men laid ambushes for them, waiting in box canyons, knowing the muties would be the first to run. Evolution had already taught them that they were different, vulnerable, mercilessly tracked and killed—and as always, the hunters credited themselves with a prowess and valor they had not earned in this wasteland, for in the end they were challenging only their own products, their own genetic legacy to the barren moon; there was no deep and natural antagonism between them and the scuttling spawn they had engendered, no fine-honed instincts of hunter and hunted that might have made even the huge advantage of firearms indecisive, as it had once been back in an old lost time on Earth.
    The boy hung back from this and used The Barron whenever he could. The dog that was buried far down in the mechanical augmentation and intelligence-modification could sense his steady hand, his reassuring voice—deepening now, becoming more nearly a man’s—and gave itself over to the pursuit of the muties, following the old knowledge that came welling up within it. Manuel had gone to Bio, interrogated its compfiles, and worked, under Old Matt’s tutelage, to find the patterns in the foraging of the muties. From the data came likely sites to find them, clustering points where the warped and evolving forms met to mate or feed or be together, for mutual defense or simple dim comradeship.
    The dogs did well, particularly The Barron. They ran with a taut eagerness and never tired. The old man and the boy, with The Barron and two other servo’d hounds, surprised flocks of muties in arroyos, streambeds, gorges, and water-hollowed caves, killing them with quick hot bolts that cracked in the thin stillness, taking no pleasure in the act of finality but firmly asserting their dominion over what they had made. Manuel tolerated this, learned from it, and bided his time. It was for him training, an exercising for the bigger things which would come in time. He found the new territory far from Sidon no different: vacant and demanding, yielding itself to the same skills he had wrested from the land. He was now as competent as many men in the party. He could track the blurred markings of the flocks, pick up over his micromikes the distant hum and murmur of their feeding, know which calls they made in the mating and which odd chirrup or screee was that of a mutie and not a norm.
    He knew, too, the small scratchings and snow ruts of the Aleph. He would never forget the delta-print, but it was the telltale collection of repeating ruts and scrapes that told more about the movements of the thing. He learned the deep incision it made before lofting itself up onto a sheer rock face, the long, skinny, wavering trail it left in ice, the splashes of brown where it burned its way through rock, the way it gouged the land in trenches where it feasted on some mineral it wanted. (The moon was acne-pocked with such marks. An old statistical paper he found used the frequency of such scars to judge how long the thing had been mining and scouring the wounded face of Ganymede, and came to a conclusion that was obviously wrong: 3.9 billion years, a number pressing on the very age of the solar system itself, older than Earth’s own biosphere. The alien