Against Infinity Read Free Page A

were deformed, or demented, or didn’t eat the right compounds. Bio was picking up variant, unwanted varieties living off the shit of the others, like pigs rooting through cowflop.
    There were two ways to counter that. Bio could make a new third animal that would compete with the warped scooters. That would introduce a further complication into the biosphere, with further unforeseen side effects. On the other hand, Bio could hire the Settlements to knock off the mutations by hunting. The Colonel had gone through negotiations with Hiruko, the central authority on Ganymede. The bookkeeping between Sidon and Hiruko was complicated. Manuel could remember his father staying up nights at the terminal, frowning and pulling at his mustache and swearing to himself. When the boy saw his father that way it was hard to think of him as the Colonel, a distant figure who commanded an automatic respect in the Settlement. Manuel unconsciously felt that it was his father who fretted and worried late at night, and another figure entirely, the Colonel, who finally made the deal with Hiruko Central. He had gotten a fair price for Sidon to go out and hunt down the muties. The hunting won because it was cheaper than engineering a third animal.
    That morning Manuel went with Old Matt, who was slow and had the patience to teach. A walker dropped them off fifteen klicks from the base shack. They got out in an ice arroyo. They bent over to secure their vacuum seals, and a fog rose around them as the walker thumped away. The thin air was thick with rising orange fumes as the midget sun struck the far wall. There was not much life here, only some rockjaws scraping at gravel. They were like four-legged birds with chisel beaks, pecking away at ice, swallowing automatically, animals like engines, beyond the time-locked dictates of Darwin. They had few defenses against predators; the awkward gray forms did not even look up as the humans clumped by. They scattered, though, when Old Matt scuffed up pebbles; they were blind but could hear dimly through their feet.
    Manuel saw the first scooter, but it was all right—normal, a low, flat thing with crab legs and a mouth that was a blur as it slurped at a runoff stream. It ignored them. They marched for an hour without seeing more than gray sheets of rock and ice and a gully scraped out by a fusion crawler years before and now run dry. The hills slumped down and the valley bled away into a plain and there they found a flock of scooters, all furiously sucking at the ponds of condensed vapor far back in the blue shadows. It was a quiet, placid scene. Old Matt pointed. Far away, skittering among the hummocks, Manuel saw pale yellow flat shapes.
    “Bring up that potter gun slow. Slant it up and stand fast.”
    “Pretty far off. I don’t think I can hit ’em.”
    “They’ll come to us. Following the normal ones, so they got to pass by over to left. Stand still and they won’t skit off.”
    Sure enough, the low fast forms came, dodging among the normal forms, eager amid the rocks and ice bulges. There were five, all marked a little differently with red and black stripes and dots. They jerked with energy and random momentum.
    “Fast evolving,” Old Matt murmured softly. “Got their own mating crests—see, on the first one?—and look at the steam rise from that shit of theirs.”
    It was a pearly pink vapor. “Converting the scooter crap back into ammonia-based?” Manuel asked.
    “Or worse.” Old Matt eyed them. “You take the last one.”
    “The lead one’s closer.”
    “Sure. And when they see it fall they’ll scatter. Always work from their rear.”
    Manuel brought the little popper up slowly, so as not to startle them. He aimed, squinted, and got the form in the sights as it ducked and bobbed, snatching at each morsel of excretion. It was disgusting to watch, the boy thought, but when you thought about it everything alive was eating the shit of something else, in the long run.
    He fired. The