Against Infinity by Gregory Benford Page A

him.
     
5
    T HE NEXT YEAR stragglers came into the camp, some because they were out of work and wanted to get out into the territory, and others for bigger reasons. Four months earlier the Aleph had popped open a dome merely by brushing against it, killing more than a dozen, and there was talk of nuking it for the protection of everybody. The Luna science council overruled Hiruko, saying the Aleph was like an archeological site on Earth, to be kept for future generations who might be able to learn more from it. None of this mattered to the lean, silent men who pitched their own tiny domes near Colonel López’s shacks. They had a debt to get paid, and though they knew it was hopeless and had been hopeless for their own fathers, they kept on. This time there were two men from the McKenzie asteroids, fresh down into Hiruko—to learn ammonia farming, they said—but knowing about the Aleph and even of the mutie hunts that struck it now and then. One had heard in Hiruko of Colonel López and the great gunmetal-blue Eagle. He came without even a laser gun, and the insulated suit he wore had been in an expensive fitter’s stock three days before. The Sidon men ignored all these people as best they could.
    The McKenzie men were even less welcome, because to the farmers they were the first of a new era.
    “I say we not associate with them,” Petrovich said one evening over supper. He had as usual tried to talk the Colonel into letting them shoot crawlies, and just as usual the Colonel had slapped him down. Now he wanted to change the subject. “They come here, look around, take our ideas.”
    Major Sánchez, always quick to contradict, said, “Treaty with Earth says we got to share knowledge.”
    “Earth!” Petrovich snorted. “Always siding with the ’roids ’cause the rockhoppers, they have them by throat.”
    The Colonel said soberly, “Earth has enough troubles without getting into our squabbles.”
    The table fell silent. A new War of Redistribution had flared up in Asia again, and Sydney had gone in the first few hours. It was impossible to be indifferent to Earth’s old disease even this far away. Manuel could not understand the fatalism of the way everyone talked of the Wars, steadily raging between the historically poor and the relatively wealthy. He wondered how you could know you were in a period of history, all bracketed and figured out by the metasociologists as if you were dead already—and knowing it, still go on in the grip of history’s laws, futile and predetermined, following the same zero-sum game down to a remorseless end. Maybe being able to see Earth and all its blood-steeped riddles as a mere blue glimmer made it easy to misunderstand; or maybe he too was like a shuttle gliding down a smooth and utterly fixed orbit he could not see, and was just as laughable. He shrugged a boy’s shrug and listened to Petrovich again.
    “—it’d tear their hearts out if they came over to where it sleeps and laid on it for warmth.” He was discussing Eagle, which always slept alone, often tunneled into a snowdrift. The animals invariably piled atop one another.
    “It’s not an animal,” the Colonel observed.
    “Not a man, either,” Petrovich said adamantly. “Hiruko, they brought that brain lobe up to max capacity, yes. Access all the neural connections left. But not a man, still.”
    “Why not?” Old Matt said casually.
    “More to a man than connections.”
    “What is there?”
    “Half a man isn’t a man.”
    Major Sánchez slapped his palm on the hard-fiber table. “Ha! The neurophilosopher will now tell us how he knows a man.”
    “Well, humans have bigger, bigger aims.”
    “Like what?”
    “Aleph! To animals, to Eagle, it’s just a big rockjaw. Something to hunt, if only they had guts.”
    The Colonel said, “And to us?”
    “Well…” Petrovich chewed his lip, cornered. “To us, it’s something to learn from.”
    Major Sánchez said slyly, “You’ve never been so strong on