He was dead and in Limbo, waiting in darkness for the Day of Judgment.
He almost laughed at the thought—it was better than what the Catholic priest in the tiny adobe church in his little village in the mountains of northern Mexico had promised him; Father Ortega had often assured him that he'd go right to the flames and torments of Hell as soon as he died unshriven—but he could not push it away. He had died, and this emptiness—infinite darkness, infinite stillness, trapped alone with only his own mind—was what had always waited for him all his life, in spite of all the blessings and benedictions of the Church, in spite of all his sins and occasional semi-sincere repentances. None of it had made any difference.
But how had it happened? How had he died? His memory seemed sluggish, unresponsive as a tractor's engine on a cold winter morning—hard to start and hard to keep in motion without sputtering and stalling. He began with what was most familiar, imagining his room in Deigotown—the small window over his cot, the thick pounded-earth walls. The faucets in his sink, already rusting and ancient though humanity had hardly been on the planet for sixteen years. The tiny scarlet skitterlings that scurried across the ceiling, multiple rows of legs flailing like oars. The sharp smells of iceroot and ganja, spilled tequila and roasting peppers. The sounds of the transports flying overhead, grinding their way up through the air and into orbit.
Slowly, the recent events of his life took shape, still fuzzy as a badly aligned projection. He had been in Diegotown for the Blessing of the Fleet. He had eaten roasted fish and saffron rice from a street vendor and watched the fireworks. The smoke had smelled like a strip mine from all the explosions, and the spent fireworks had hissed like serpents as they plunged into the sea. But that was before … yes, before.
There had been a fight. He'd fought with Eleana. The sound of her voice—high and accusing and mean as a pitbull. He'd hit her. He remembered that. She'd screamed and clawed at his eyes and tried to kick him in the balls. And they'd made up afterwards like they always did. Afterward, she had run her fingers along the machete scars on his arm as he fell into a sated sleep.
He remembered now.
He'd left her before first light, sneaking out of a room heavy with the smell of sweat and sex while she was still asleep so he wouldn't have to talk to her, feeling the morning breeze cool against his skin. Flatfurs scurrying away from him as he walked down the muddy street, making their alarm cries like panicked oboes. He'd flown his van to the outfitter's station because he was going …
His mind balked. It was not the nauseating forgetfulness that seemed to have consumed his world, but something else. There was something his mind didn't want to recall. Slowly, gritting his teeth, he forced his memory to his will.
He'd spent the day realigning two lift tubes in the van. Someone had been there with him. Sanchez, bitching about parts. And then he had flown off into the wastelands, the outback, terreno cimarron …
Had his heart been beating, it would have stopped then in remembered terror. He had gone to the mountains—and he had seen it.
· · · · ·
Two
· · · · ·
"This going to be the big one?" Old Sanchez asked, the way he always did.
"Yes," Ramon said as he clamped down the cowl on his left-rear lift tube. "This time, I'm coming back with enough good claims to make the pinchelawyers start working for me."
The outfitters shop was a mix of junkyard and clean room—great scraps of the vans and transports Old Sanchez had gathered up over the years to strip for parts or else retool into cheap buys for people even more desperate than themselves lay among storage units of picocircuitry that it would have taken Ramon half his life to pay for. Old Sanchez himself waddled through the work bays with a glass of iced tea in his hand. When Ramon had first known him, it had been whiskey. Never say that times don't change.
"You better hope not," Old Sanchez said. "Too much money kills men like you and me. God meant us to be poor, or he wouldn't have made us so mean."
Ramon tested the tubes. The yields were balanced and good enough, and the hum from them was like a promise of escape.
"God meant you to be mean, Sanchito. He just didn't want me taking any shit."
"Eleana know you're going out? Last time she came here looking for you two days after you left. You're gonna have to do something about that bitch. Kill her or get married."
The knot in Ramon's belly went a notch tighter. He wasn't sure if it was dread at leaving her behind or the need to be gone. Both, maybe.
"She knows I'm going this time. And when I get back, she'll be happy to help me spend what I get. You watch. This is going to be the big one."
· · · · ·
It was a crisp clear day in Octember. He flew his beat-up old van north across the Fingerlands, the Greenglass country, the river marshes, theOcéano Tétrico, heading deep into unknown territory. North of Fiddler's Jump were thousands of hectares that no one had ever explored, or even thought of exploring, land so far only glimpsed from orbit during the first colony surveys.
The human colony on the planet of São Paulo was only a little more than ten years old, and the majority of its towns were situated in the subtropic zone of the snaky eastern continent that stretched almost from pole to pole. The colonists were mostly from the Brazilian Commonwealth, Mexico, Jamaica, and Hispaniola, and their natural inclination was to expand south, into the steamy lands near the equator—they were not effete norteamericanos, after all; they were used to such climates, they knew how to live with the heat, they knew how to farm the jungles, their skins did not sear in the sun. So they looked to the south and tended to ignore the cold northern territories, perhaps because of an unvocalized common conviction—one anticipated centuries before by the first Spanish settlers in the New World of the Americas—that life was not worth living any place where there was even a remote possibility of snow.
Ramon, however, was part Yaqui and had grown up in the rugged plateau country of northern Mexico. He liked the hills and white water, and he didn't mind the cold. He also knew that the Sierra Hueso chain in the northern hemisphere of São Paulo was a more likely place to find rich ore than the flatter country around the Hand or Nuevo Janeiro or Little Dog. The mountains of the Sierra Hueso had been piled up many millions of years before by a collision between continental plates, the colliding plates squeezing an ocean out of existence between them; the former seabottom would have been pinched and pushed high into the air along the collision line, and it would be rich in copper and other metals.
The Sierra Hueso had been mapped from orbit by the colony ramscoop, but no one Ramon knew had ever actually been there, and the territory was still so unexplored that the peaks of the range had not even been individually named. That meant that there were no human settlements within hundreds of miles, and no satellite to relay his network signals this far north; if he got into trouble he would be on his own.
It was probably better that way. Although he was reluctant to admit it, he'd finally come to realize that it was better if he worked someplace away from other prospectors. Away from other people. The bigger prospecting cooperatives might have better contracts, better equipment, but they also had more rum and more women. And between those two, Ramon knew, more fighting. He couldn't trust his own volatile temper, never had been able to. It had held him back for years, the fighting, and the trouble it got him into. No, it wasbetter this way—muleback prospecting, just himself and his van.
Besides, he was finding that he liked to be out on his own like this, on a clear day with São Paulo's big soft sun blinking dimly back at him from rivers and lakes and leaves. He found that he was whistling tunelessly as the endless forests beneath the van slowly changed from blackwort and devilwood to the local conifer-equivalents: iceroot, creeping willow, hierba. At last, there was no one around to bother him. His stomach had stopped hurting, for the first time that day.
Mountains made a line across the world before him: ice and iron, iron and ice.
"Good hunting, amigo," he called after it, and then smiled. Good hunting for both of them, eh? Quickly, he ate his dinner—briefly missing the tequila after all—and then sat by the fire for a few moments while the night gathered completely around him and the alien stars came out in their chill, blazing armies. He named the strange constellations the people of São Paulo had drawn in the sky to replace the old constellations of Earth—the Mule, the Cactus Flower, the Sick Gringo—and wondered (he'd been told, but had forgotten) which of them had Earth's own sun twinkling in it as a star. Then he went to bed and to sleep, dreaming that he was a boy again in the cold stone streets of his hilltop pueblo, sitting on the roof of his father's house in the dark, a scratchy wool blanket wrapped around him, trying to ignore the loud, angry voices of his parents in the room below, searching for São Paulo's star in the winter sky.
In the morning, he ate a small breakfast of cold tortillas and beans, consulted the survey maps, and started up the southern slopes, looking for the collision line. He didn't expect it would be hard to locate; ocean floor rocks were unmistakable—a mangled, kneaded layer of pillow lava, basalt, and gabbo. He found it before the sun had reached its zenith, and surveyed it almost with regret; he'd been enjoying the climb for its own sake, pausing frequently to enjoy the view or to rest in the watery sunlight. Now he'd have to get to work
With a sigh, Ramon unslung his backpack. It took him only minutes to rig the small charge for the coring sample. He had done it a thousand times before, it seemed. Still, he walked slowly, stringing out the det cord to a safe distance, finding a boulder that would shield him from the blast. He found himself, strangely, procrastinating about setting it off. It was so quiet here, so still, so peaceful! From up here, the forested slopes fell away in swaths of black and dead blue and orange, the trees rippling like a carpet of moss as the wind went across them—except for the white egg of his bubbletent on the mountain shoulder below, it was a scene that might not have changed since the beginning of time. For a moment, he was almost tempted to forget about prospecting and just relax and unwind this trip, but he shrugged the temptation away—he needed money, the van wouldn't hold together forever, and Eleana's scorn when he came back empty-handed again was something he wasn't anxious to face. Perhaps there will be no copper here anyway, he told himself reassuringly, and then wondered at the tenor of his thoughts. Surely it could not be a bad thing to be rich? His stomach was beginning to hurt again.
He rubbed his hand over the boulder in front of him, tracing the aquatic fossils, ancestors of the fatfins and butterfish that were the mainstay of the Nuevo Janeiro fishing industry, that were another indicator of the collision line; the fossils were grotesquely distorted, as though seen in a funhouse mirror—squeezed out of shape by the slow heat and pressure of the continental collision. How long had it taken for that to happen, for fish to turn to stone and be lifted from the bottom of the sea thousands of feet into the thinning air? The crash of stone and stone had taken an inconceivably vast time, pushing the mountains toward the sky at a rate of only a few inches per century, slowly enough so that the big river to the west had been able to saw its way through the range as it rose, keeping pace inch for inch. Millions of years. And what had taken millions of years to become as it was, he was about to change in an instant, and afterward, it could never be undone. The untouched vastness was about to be touched, altered irrevocably, by the hand of man. By his hand. There was regret in that, and a kind of melancholy—but also an oily sort of pride that swelled his heart even as it made his belly twinge.
He lit a cigaret and the det cord with the same match.
"All apologies, mi amigo," he said to the mountainside. "I'm just a man, not a hill, and I've got to eat somehow." Then he crouched behind the sheltering stone.
There was the expected blast; then the hillside shifted greasily under him, like a giant shrugging in uneasy sleep, and he heard the express-train rumble of sliding rock. He could tell from the sound alone that something had gone wrong. The coring blast shouldn't have set off a rockslide, let alone one that sounded that big …
When silence returned, Ramon stood up and walked carefully through the swirling cloud of dust, testing each step before he trusted his weight to it, squinting at the blast site. He moved slowly up the trail of rubble and scree left by the slide. The whole rockface had slid away, revealing a wall. A metal wall.
Ramon stood unmoving as the arid mist of rock dust thinned. It was, of course, impossible. It had to be some bizarre natural formation. He stepped forward, and his own reflection—pale as the ghost of a ghost—moved toward him. When he reached out, his blurred twin reached out as well, pausing when he paused. He stopped the motion before hand and ghostly hand could touch, noticing the stunned and bewildered expression on the face of his reflection in the metal, one no doubt matched by the expression on his own face. Then, gingerly, he touched the wall.
The metal was cool against his fingertips. The blast had not even scarred it. And though his mind rebelled at the thought, it was clearly unnatural. It was a made thing. Made by somebody and hiddenby somebody, behind the rock of the mountain, though he couldn't imagine by whom.
It took a moment more for the full implication to register. Something was buried here under the hill, something big, perhaps a building of some sort, a bunker. Perhaps the whole mountain was hollow.
A warning bell began to sound in the back of Ramon's mind, and he looked uneasily around him. Another man might not have reacted to this strange discovery with suspicion, but Ramon's people had been persecuted for hundreds of years, and he himself well remembered living on the grudging sufferance of the mejicanos, never knowing when they would find some pretext to wipe out the village.
If this was hidden, it was because someone didn't want it to be found. And might not be happy that it had been.
He flattened his palm against the metal, matching hands with his reflection. The cool metal vibrated under his hand, and, even as he waited, a deeper vibration went through the wall, boom, boom, low and rhythmic, like the beating of some great hidden heart, like the heart of the mountain itself, vast and stony and old.
This was no ancient artifact or age-old ruin. Whatever it was, this installation was alive.
Suddenly, the sunlight seemed cold on his shoulders. Again, he looked nervously around him, feeling much too exposed on the bare mountain slope. Another flapjack called, away across the air, but now its cries sounded to him like the shrill and batlike wailing of the damned.
Move, move.
He couldn't run back to his camp—the terrain was too rough. But he scrambled down the mountainside as recklessly as he dared, sliding on his buttocks d
own bluffs in a cloud of dust and scree when he could, jumping from rock to rock, bulling his way through bushes and tangles of scrub hierba, scattering grasshoppers and paddlefoots before him.
He moved so quickly that he was over halfway to his camp before the mountain opened behind him and the alien came out.
A rushing sound made him turn in time to see an opening high on the ridgeline iris shut. Something was moving through the air—a grotesque goblin-shape larger than a man, on a device that looked for all the world like a flying motorcycle. The thing spiraled up, gaining altitude.
Ramon threw himself flat and rolled under bushes, only vaguely aware of the thorns and twigs biting his flesh. High above, the thing had steadied and begun to fly in slow, concentric circles. He tried to estimate its distance and size. If he'd had his hunting rifle, Ramon thought, the thing would have been easily in range. But it was too far for his handgun. At a guess, the thing might have stood two full meters. If he had brought his binoculars from the camp …
Sick dread squeezed his chest. His camp. The thing was clearly searching for something, and Ramon hadn't done anything to conceal the white dome of the bubbletent or the van beside it. There had been no reason to. The thing might not see him down in the underbrush, but it would see his camp. He had to get there—get back to the van and into the air—before the thing from the mountain discovered it.
He waited until the thing had its back to him, then burst out from the brush, pelting wildly down the slope without bothering with cover. Speed was more important now than invisibility. His mind was already racing ahead—would his van outpace the thing's cycle? Just let him get it in the air. He could fly it low, make it hard to spot or attack. He was a good pilot. He could dodge between treetops from here to Fiddler's Jump if he had to …
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 125