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helmets.
    “No short-range, not yet,” the man said.
    “What… It, it never showed itself…just…”
    “Sometimes it’s that way. It came to have a look.”
    “But it never came out, never…”
    “Doesn’t need to, I guess. It could tell we were up here and it let us know we had been looked at.”
    “Slicky.”
    “It got a morsel. I don’t think it came for that. Could be that’s what made it break off, even.” The old man shook his head. “No, that’s probably wrong. The worst thing is to start thinking about it the way we think about everything else. The worst.”
    “Slicky was trying to get away.”
    “Right.”
    They went back down the ravine in silence, the boy’s mind aswarm with mingled thoughts and emotions and confusions of the two. Next time he would act differently, do something, find a way—but he could not think of anything he could have done otherwise, and the flat hardness of that fact itself made him feel better. Whether or not he did anything different, at least he was sure there would be a next time. It might come tomorrow or sometime beyond, but it would come, and in thinking of it he discovered something that absolved him of his fear, for there was no guilt in fearing what was beyond you and ran, blind and remorseless down through the years, shrugging off the mortal weight that a human had to carry. He tasted the coppery scent in his nostrils and knew it and was no longer afraid of that itself.
    The reports came in from the other men and animals: plenty of scooters potted at and a rumble felt here and there, but nothing sighted, nothing engaged. He felt good about that too. It was arrogant to think he had been singled out, but he had been lucky—the dumb luck of the beginner. From now on he would not depend on luck. Someday he would see the thing, of that he was now sure. If it could be done by keeping on, then he would see it. Perhaps tomorrow and perhaps next week.
    As it turned out, it was more than a year.

Part II
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ALEPH
     
1
    B UILDING THE BIOSPHERE was a long-term task, almost an act of devotion performed for the generations to come, and so it had an ebb and surge ruled by the abrupt necessities of the present. The asteroid economy was expanding and demanded ever-greater supplies of water, food, nitrogen, carbon. The asteroids were rich in metals, but had few of the carbonaceous-chondrite chunks that could make the simple compounds for life. Ganymede supplied those and food, ferried in huge robot freighters on minimum-energy orbits. The Settlements melted ice, separated it into usable fluids, and grew food, all in exchange for industrial goods from the asteroids and beyond. They also supported the labs and outposts around Jupiter and Saturn. So the work was always piling up, there were rush allotments and long hours, and Manuel was of an age now that meant he had to put in a full man’s hours even though he didn’t have the strength of a grown man. He learned pipe fitting and thermonuclear-hydro plumbing and worked just behind the construction gangs as they raised the new vapor domes. There was little time for potting at scooters, especially since the things were learning to avoid humans and were seldom seen now near the Settlements. The constant proton sleet made the mutation rate high; the rockeaters started showing big inflamed warts, and some began to prey on the jackrabs, finding some chemical addiction to the stringy jackrab flesh, and in turn working mischief with the delicately balanced and still experimental biosphere.
    More than a year after his first time, the boy got to go out again on a pruning operation.
    Petrovich and Major Sánchez led two separate parties, and they spent a good fraction of their time sitting at a makeshift metal table and playing cards and arguing over which territory to hunt the next day. Manuel realized that it was their arguing, a kind of comfortable trading of insults and timeworn political clichés, that bound them together, and