Free Against Infinity by Gregory Benford

boy put on a burst of speed and caught up to the dogs, all but The Barren, which had paused only an instant and now, the boy saw, was not going to stop or even slow down. It rushed straight at the thing without plan or true anger, but with ancient instinct, sure of its master behind it, running out of old imperatives born on dusty plains billions of miles beyond. The boy cut in his augmentation. He ran with aching legs after The Barren’s high keening cry, into the face of it—beneath the blocks of glowing alabaster and depthless amber. He rushed under bulky, ridged things like enormous treads.
    The Aleph moved. The Barren barked and leaped against a crystalline slab, smacking into it, falling and floundering and rising again, furious but aimless. Manuel felt magnetic fields seize at him. Diffuse forces clutched and tugged, seeming to thicken the air in his chest. He ran after the yelping dog, head low, and the ground wrenched under his feet Above, a hexagonal pit in the side dilated. In its blue depths he saw movement, deliberate and carrying weight, like huge stones moving inside. It moved. Chunky blocks came smacking down, groaning, sending out forking white ray patterns in the ice under the boy. Cracks tripped him. The hexagonal opening turned abruptly black and squeezed down to fist-sized. He snatched at the dog and caught it, then lost it, then snagged a leg again, and was under the shadow of the thing now as it reared up—smelling, he sensed, of burning brass—towering as he had dreamed and thus familiar, any sound it made lost in the hysterical cries and yelps of the dogs. He closed his eyes and pulled back on The Barron. When he opened them, it was…gone. It had moved in a blur, into a bank of pink snow, Old Matt told him, faster than an eye could follow.
    Again the boy thought, I didn’t raise the muzzle of my gun to it, and this time he knew why. If he did that, it would put him in the same class as the other legions who had gone up against it, generations that had plucked and shot to no effect. The Aleph would think of him that way; and worse, he would too.
    The Barren wailed and struggled against the boy. Old Matt talked to it, and after a while the dogs quieted down and they could go on.
    “That dog’s got everything a dog can have,” Old Matt said, “but maybe this needs more than a dog can give. Even a hyped-up dog that can do arithmetic.”
    He shook his head, and the boy remembered that Old Matt came from a time when animals weren’t like this and lived only on Earth, where they had their old roles and were being squashed down into extinction, before the augmentation came along.
    Manuel saw then that he had not found the quality that would make these times different, and single him and the dogs out from all the scientists and hunters who had gone before. There was something more needed. The Barren and, in fact, any dog would need a certain foolish bravery, yes—but more too; and the boy did not know what that thing was.
     
3
    F IVE MONTHS AFTER Manuel’s second encounter with the Aleph, a rockhopper changed the fundamental economic balance of the outer worlds. She had been drifting from chunk to chunk in the asteroids, checking known sites to see if she could turn up traces of indium or platinum. She was a marginal operator. There was no prior claim on the rocks she visited, because they were worthless—jumbles of iron and other cheap metals. She found a cleft on asteroid MKX 349 that ran deep, and, curious, worked her way down it. She took her core sample there, boring farther in. Less than a hundred meters in, she found pure carbonaceous chondrite.
    MKX 349 was moderate-sized, 9.6 kilometers mean radius. By some quirk of its formation, it had a sheath of low-grade ore wrapped completely around a core. That was why the immensely valuable center had gone undetected. There was enough carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen there to supply all the asteroid community for decades. They would no longer have to