"Come on, pendejo," Ramón said, grinning. His arms were raised and spread, as if he were ready to embrace the fighter. "You wanted power. Come have a taste of it."
The shifting LEDs of the bar's signs turned the night blue and red and amber in turn. Far above them all, the night sky shone with countless stars too bright and close for the lights of Diegotown to drown.
The constellation of the Stone Man stared down at them as they circled, a single star smoldering balefully like a red eye, as if it was watching, as if it was urging them on.
"I ought to do it, you ugly little greaser!" the European spat. "I ought to go ahead and kick your skinny ass!"
Ramón only bared his teeth and motioned the man nearer. The European wanted this to be a talking fight again, but it was too late for that. The voices of the crowd merged into a single waterfall roar. The European made his move, graceless as a falling tree; the great left fist made its slow way through the air, moving as though through molasses. Ramón stepped inside the swing, letting the gravity knife slip from his sleeve into his hand. He flicked the blade open in the same motion that brought his fist against the larger man's belly.
A look of almost comical surprise crossed the European's face. His breath went out of him with a whoof.
Ramón stabbed twice more, fast and hard, twisting the knife just to be sure. He was close enough to smell the nose-tingling reek of the flowery cologne the man wore, to feel his licorice-scented breath panting against his face. The crowd went silent as the European slipped to his knees and then sat, legs spread, in the filthy muck of the alley. The big, soft hands opened and closed aimlessly, slick with blood that turned pale when the LEDs were red, black when the light shifted blue.
The European's mouth gaped open, and blood gushed out over his teeth. Slowly, very slowly, seeming to move in slow motion, he toppled sideways to the ground. Kicked his feet, heels drumming the ground. Was still.
Someone in the crowd uttered an awed obscenity.
Ramón's shrill, self-satisfied pleasure faded. He looked at the faces of the crowd-wide eyes, mouths open in little surprised O's. The alcohol in his blood seemed to thin, sobriety floating to the top of his mind. A sinking sense of betrayal possessed him-these people had been pushing him on, encouraging the fight. And now they were abandoning him for winning it!
"What?" Ramón shouted to the other patrons of the El Rey. "You heard what he was saying! You saw what he did!"
But the alley was emptying. Even the woman who'd been with the European, the one who had started it all, was gone. Mikel Ibrahim, the manager of the El Rey, lumbered toward him, his great bearlike face the image of patient, saintly suffering. He held out his wide hand. Ramón lifted his chin again, thrust out his chest, as if Mikel's gesture was an insult. The manager only sighed and shook his head slowly back and forth, and made a pulling gesture with his fingers. Ramón curled his lip, half turned away, then slapped the handle of the knife into the waiting palm.
"Police are coming," the manager warned. "You should go home, Ramón."
"You saw what happened," Ramón said.
"No, I wasn't here when it happened," Mikel said. "And neither were you, eh? Now go home. And keep your mouth shut."
Ramón spat on the ground and stalked into the night. It wasn't until he began to walk that he understood how drunk he was. At the canal by the plaza, he squatted down, leaned back against a tree, and waited until he was sure he could walk without listing. Around him, Diegotown spent its week's wages on alcohol and kaafa kyit and sex. Music tumbled in from the rough gypsy houseboats on the canal; fast, festive accordion mixing with trumpets and steel drums and the shouts of the dancers.
Somewhere in the darkness, a tenfin was calling mournfully, a "bird" that was really a flying lizard, and sounded uncannily like a woman sobbing in misery and despair, something that had led the superstitious Mexican peasants who made up a large percentage of the colony's population to say that La Llorona, the Crying Woman, had crossed the stars with them from Mexico and now wandered the night of this new planet, crying not only for all the children who'd been lost and left behind on Earth, but for all the ones who would die on this hard new world.
He, of course, didn't believe in such crap. But as the ghostly crying accelerated to a heartbreaking crescendo, he couldn't help but shiver.
Alone, Ramón could regret stabbing the European; surely it would have been enough just to punch him around, humiliate him, slap him like a bitch? But when Ramón was drunk and angry, he always went too far. Ramón knew that he shouldn't have drunk so much, and that whenever he got around people, it always seemed to end like this. He'd begun his evening with the sick knot in his belly, which being in the city seemed to bring, and then by the time he'd drunk enough to untie that knot, as usual someone had said or done something to enrage him. It didn't always end with a knife, but it rarely ended well. Ramón didn't like it, but he wasn't ashamed of it either. He was a man-an independent prospector on a tough frontier colony world less than a generation removed from its founding. By God, he was a man! He drank hard, he fought hard, and anyone who had a problem with that would be wise to keep their pinche opinions to themselves!
A family of tapanos-small, raccoonlike amphibians with scales like a hedgehog's spikes-lumbered up from the water, considered Ramón with dark, shining eyes, and made their way toward the plaza, where they would scavenge for the dropped food and trash of the day. Ramón watched them pass, slick dark paths of canal water trailing behind them, then sighed and hauled himself to his feet.
Elena's apartment was in the maze of streets around the Palace of the Governors. It perched above a butcher's shop, and the air that came in the back window was often fetid with old gore. He considered sleeping in his van, but he felt sticky and exhausted. He wanted a shower and a beer and a plate of something warm to keep his belly from growling. He climbed the stairs slowly, trying to be quiet, but the lights were burning in her windows. A shuttle was lifting from the spaceport far to the north, tracking lights glowing blue and red as the vessel rose toward the stars. Ramón tried to cover the click and hiss of the door with the throbbing rumble of the shuttle's lift drive. But it was no use.
"Where the fuck have you been?" Elena yelled as he stepped inside. She wore a thin cotton dress with a stain on the sleeve. Her hair was tied back into a knot of black darker than the sky. Her teeth were bared in rage, her mouth almost square with it. Ramón closed the door behind him, and heard her gasp. In an instant, the anger had left her. He followed her gaze to where the European's blood had soaked the side of his shirt, the leg of his pants. He shrugged.
"We'll have to burn these," he said.
"Are you okay, mi hijo? What happened?"
He hated it when she called him that. He was no one's little boy. But it was better than fighting, so he smiled, pulling at the tongue of his belt.
"I'm fine," he said. "It was the other cabrón who took the worst of it."
"The police … will the police … ?"
"Probably not," Ramón said, dropping his pants around his knees. He pulled his shirt up over his head. "Still, we should burn these."
She asked no more questions, only took his clothes out to the incinerator that the apartments on the block all shared, while Ramón took a shower. The time readout in the mirror told him that dawn was still three or four hours away. He stood under the flow of warm water, considering his scars-the wide white band on his belly where Martín Casaus had slashed him with a sheet-metal hook, the disfiguring lump below his elbow where some drunken bastard had almost sheared through his bones with a machete. Old scars. Some older than others. They didn't bother him; in fact, he liked them. They made him look strong.
When he came out, Elena was standing at her back window, arms crossed below her breasts. When she turned to him, he was ready for the blast furnace of her rage. But instead, her mouth was a tiny rosebud, her eyes wide and round. When she spoke, she sounded like a child; worse, like a woman trying to be a child.
"I was scared for you," she said.
"You never have to be," he said. "I'm tough as leather."
"But you're just one man," she said. "When Tomás Martinez got killed, there were eight men. They came right up to him when he came out of his girlfriend's house, and … "
"Tomás was a little whore," Ramón said and waved a hand dismissively, as if to say that any real man ought to be able to stand up against eight thugs sent to even a score. Elena's lips relaxed into a smile, and she walked toward him, her hips shifting forward with each step, as if her pussy were coming to him, the rest of her trailing behind reluctantly. It could have gone the other way, he knew. They could as easily have passed the night as they had so many others, shouting at each other, throwing things, coming to blows. But even that might have ended in sex, and he was tired enough that he was genuinely grateful they could simply fuck and then sleep, and forget about the wasted, empty day that had just gone by. Elena lifted off her dress. Ramón took her familiar flesh in his arms. The scent of old blood rose from the butcher's shop below like an ugly perfume of Earth and humanity that had followed them across the void.