Against Infinity by Gregory Benford Read Free Book Online

that despite the occasional flare-ups they were good friends. The Colonel just smiled when their sudden arguments flared up. Petrovich had started to develop a potbelly, the kind of protrusion that on a strongly muscled man almost seems to be another source of strength, bulging down and resting on his belt. Major Sánchez made this a point of fun, and the two men spent themselves trying to outmarch or outshoot the other. They made a pair of hand pistols using plumber’s lasers and on the hunt would go off together to find scooters or rockjaw-muties and then would pot away at them, betting on the score.
    Manuel was glad this kept them occupied, because he wanted little to do with the parties who went after the rockjaws. He had his own ends in mind and the parties made top much noise, were rowdy with the freedom of living under the empty black sky and not having to work, and got a goodly number of rockjaws only because the dumb things could hardly hear and ran only if they picked up the metallic slap and scraping of boots on rock. He told the Colonel and Petrovich that he would rather go after the scooters. There were far fewer of them this year. Fatal mutations had killed many, as Bio had predicted, and there was less ammonia in the runoff now. The theory behind Bio’s plan was that the atmosphere and ice fields would change more rapidly than the scooters and crawlies and rockjaws and the rest could adapt. They were temporary, self-liquidating species, designed for transitional jobs. The changing atmosphere and the greenhouse-induced rise in temperature would eliminate them before they became a problem. The final stage, when the atmosphere changed over to oxygen-carrying, would wipe the entire bioslate clean, leaving room for new species, quasi-Earth-like but able to tolerate the low temperatures. Then the entire moon would be farmed, with engineered fauna capable of withstanding high radiation and other threats.
    The boy left each morning right after breakfast, shouldering the single-bore laser his father had given him. He would own it all his life and fire it nearly every year (with only one major six-year interruption), because the biosphere always needed pruning, and would replace the stock twice (once because he dropped it to save himself on a ledge of a crevasse) and the lasing tube five times, each time with a higher-power bolt-generating mechanism. For now the gun felt heavy and awkward in his hands, but he knew he would have to master it to have any appreciable firepower at all, though in truth he did not expect that for his ends mere power would make any difference. What he needed now was knowledge. He set out the first day with a cycle rider and went into the Halberstam Hills. He had not told them he would go that far, because he knew his father would not let him, not without more experience. He shot two ugly, mutated scooters that morning. The slowly rising temperatures had scalped the hills of their snow, leaving iron-gray massifs to poke at the banded crescent of Jupiter. He hiked into the hills, loping in long easeful strides, landing smoothly and navigating by the satellite-guide program he had bought for his suit. It took him three hours to find the narrow ravine where he and Old Matt had found the deep gouge in the snow. The ravine was hard to identify now because nearly all the snow and even some of the ice had been drained off by a stream that clattered with stones and had already cut a deep gorge. The rock here was mostly nickel-iron from some ancient meteorite, and it colored the stream a lurid rust. Slides now clogged the ravine. He walked through it three times before he found a slab of rock that looked somehow familiar. Near the base of it he saw the delta-print pressed deeply in, mute and indomitable, a testament to what was a mere passing moment in the movements of the Aleph but which would be here, sunken in hard rock and testifying, he knew, when he was bones and ashes.
    On the second day he