Chapter 4
In the morning, Ramón poured water over the remains of the fire, then pissed on it just to be sure it was out. He ate a small breakfast of cold tortillas and beans, and disconnected his pistol from the van's power cells and tucked it into his holster, where it was a warm, comforting weight on his hip; out here, you could never be sure when you were going to run into a chupacabra or a snatchergrabber. He exchanged the soft flatfur slippers he wore in the van for his sturdy old hiking boots, and set out to hike to the discontinuity he'd spotted the night before; as always, his boots somehow seemed more comfortable crunching over the uneven ground than they had been on the city streets. Dew soaked the grasses and the leaves of the shrubs. Small monkeylike lizards leaped from branch to branch before him, calling to each other with high, frightened voices. There were millions of uncataloged species on S?o Paulo. In the twenty minutes it took him to make his way to a promising site at the base of a stone cliff, Ramón might have climbed past a hundred plants and animals never before seen by human eyes.
Before long, he found the discontinuity, and surveyed it almost with regret; he'd been relishing the effort 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.
The lichen that clung to the rock of the mountainside was dark green and grew in wide spirals that reminded Ramón of cave paintings. Up close, the discontinuity was less apparent. He could trace the striations from one face to the next without sign of a break or level change. Whatever Ramón had caught in the failing light of the day before, it was invisible now.
He took the field pack from his shoulders, lit a cigarette, and considered the mountain face before him. The stones around him appeared to be largely metamorphic-their elongated grain speaking to Ramón of the unthinkable pressure and heat near S?o Paulo's mantle. The glaciers, when they passed, would have carved this ground, strewing parts of any given field far from their origin. Still, the underlying stone was certainly igneous or metamorphic. The sedimentary layers, if there were any, would be higher up, where the ground was newest. It was the sort of place where a man might find the strike he'd hoped for. Uranium ore, possibly. Tungsten or tantalum, if he was lucky. And even if he only found gold or silver or copper, there were places he could still sell the data. The information would be worth more than the metals themselves.
The sad irony of his profession had not escaped Ramón. He would never willingly move off S?o Paulo. Its emptiness was the thing that made it a haven for him. In a more developed colony, the global satellites and ground-level networked particulates would have made solitude impossible. S?o Paulo still had frontiers, limits beyond which little or nothing was known. He and the others like him were the hands and eyes of the colony's industry; his love of the unknown corners and niches of the world was unimportant. His experience of them, the data and surveys and knowledge-those had value. And so he made his money by destroying the things that gave him solace. It was an evil scheme, but typical, Ramón thought, of humanity's genetic destiny of contradiction. He stubbed out his cigarette, took a hand pick from the field pack, and began the long, slow process of scouting out a good place for a coring charge.
The sun shone down benevolently, and Ramón stripped off his shirt, tucking it into the back of his pistol belt. Between the hand pick and his small field shovel, he cleared away the thin covering of plants and soil, finding hard, solid rock not more than a foot and a half below the surface. If it had been much more, he'd have gone back for the tools in the van-powered for minor excavations, but expensive, prone to breaking down, and with the whining electrical sound of civilization to argue against their use. Looking along the mountainside, he thought there would likely be other places that would require the more extensive labor. All the better, then, that he begin here.
The coring charge was designed to carve a sample out of the living rock the length of an arm. Longer, if it was a particularly soft stone. In the next week, Ramón would gather a dozen or so such cores from sites up and down the valley. After that, there would be three or four days while the equipment in the van sifted through the debris for trace elements and ores too slight to identify simply by looking. Once Ramón had that in hand, he could devise a strategy for garnering the most useful information in the cheapest possible way. Even as he set the first charge, he found himself fantasizing about those long, slow, lazy days while the tests ran. He could go hunting. Or explore the lakes. Or find a warm place in the sun and sleep while the breeze set the grasses to singing. His fingers danced across the explosives, tugging at wires and timing chips with the ease and autonomous grace of long practice. Many prospectors lost careers and hands-sometimes lives-by being too careless with their tools. Ramón was careful, but he was also practiced. Once the site was chosen and cleared, placing the charge took less than an hour.
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 blew 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 on this trip, as long as he was being forced to hide out in the hills anyway, but he shrugged the temptation away: once the fuss over the European had blown over, once he went back, he would still need money, the van wouldn't hold together forever, and he wasn't anxious to face Elena's scorn if he returned empty-handed again. Perhaps there will be no ore here anyway, he told himself, almost wishing it, 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 ache again.
He looked up at the mountain face. It was beautiful; rugged and untouched. Once he was done with it, it would never be the same.
"All apologies," he said to the view he was about to mar. "But a man has to make his money somehow. Hills don't have to eat."
Ramón took one last cigarette from its silver case and smoked it like a man at an execution. He walked down to the boulders he'd chosen for shelter stringing the powder-primed fuse cord, hunkered down behind the rocks, and lit the fuse with the last ember.
There was the expected blast; but while the sound should have been a single report echoing against the mountains and then fading, it grew louder and longer instead. The hillside shifted greasily under him, like a giant shrugging in uneasy sleep, and he heard the expresstrain rumble of sliding rock. He could tell from the sound alone that something had gone very wrong.
A great cloud of dust enveloped him, white as fog and tasting like plaster and stone. A landslide. Somehow Ramón's little coring charge had set off a landslide. Coughing, he cursed himself, thinking back to what he'd seen. How could he have missed a rock face that unstable? It was the kind of mistake that killed prospectors. If he had chosen shelter a little nearer than he had, he could have been crushed to death. Or worse, crippled and buried here where no man would ever find him-trapped until the redjackets came and stripped the flesh off his bones.
The angry, thundering roar quieted, faded. Ramón rose from behind the boulders, waving his hand before his face as if stirring the air would somehow put more oxygen in it or lessen the thick coating of stone dust that was no doubt forming in his nose and lungs. He walked slowly forward, his footing uncertain on the newly made scree. The stones smelled curiously hot.
A metal wall stood where the fa?ade of stone had fallen away; half a mountain high and something between twenty and twentyfive meters wide.
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 hidden by somebody, behind the rock of the mountain, though he couldn't imagine by whom.
It took another moment 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.
This was the big one, just the way he'd told Manuel it would be. But the find wasn't ore; it was this massive artifact. It couldn't be a human artifact, the human colony here wasn't old enough to have left ruins behind. It had to be alien. Maybe it was millions of years old. Scientists and archaeologists would go insane over this find; perhaps even the Enye would be interested in it. If he couldn't parlay this discovery into an immense fortune, he wasn't anywhere near as smart as he thought he was … .