I will live, Ramón told himself. It's no worse than being sick from too much muscat. I can live through this … .
Another long needle dug into his neck. A cold fire sprang to life where the thing had pierced him; he felt the salivalike secretion running down his sides, then heat, like boiling water pouring into him.
What have you done to me? Ramón tried to scream. What did you put in me?
Suddenly, violently, his heart came to life-and, with a terrible shudder, he began to breathe.
The air he gulped cut like glass, and his heart thundered in his chest. The world went red. Pain drove away all thought, all sense of self, and then slowly abated.
Another wave of the sickness shook him. He voided his bowels, weeping with pain and shame when he wasn't coughing. It seemed to go on for hours, but the moments of peace between spasms gradually grew longer, and it seemed as if some of the strength was beginning to come back to his arms and legs. His heart ceased to race like a bird trying to free itself from a net. Tentatively, he sat up.
He was sprawled naked on the bottom of a metal tank not more than ten feet square. So much for his measureless midnight ocean! The walls were too high to see over, and the lights-blue-white and bitter-were too bright to see past and make out the ceiling beyond. He tried to stand up, but his muscles were putty. It was bitingly cold. He settled against the metal floor and shivered, feeling his teeth start to chatter. He tried lifting an arm, but the impulse was slow to reach his flesh, and the limb swayed drunkenly when it rose. Strong smells that he couldn't identify burned his nostrils.
A thing like a snake reared up above the rim of the tank-thick as a strong man's arm, it was a dead gray color, like old meat, and segmented like a worm's body. Pulsations seemed to travel along its length. Ramón saw it hesitate, as if considering him, and then stretch down toward him. Three long, thin tendrils split off where the head should have been. The gray snake brushed aside Ramón's clumsy parry and seized him by the shoulder. Ramón struggled weakly. But his strength was gone, and the snake's grip was as cold and pitiless as death. Another snake stretched down and wrapped itself around his waist.
The snakes lifted him smoothly out of the tank. He tried to scream, but the sound he made was more like a cough. He was high in the air now, above what seemed to be a vast, high-domed cavern full of noise and lights and motion and alien shapes. The cavern swarmed with activity that Ramón could not resolve into recognizable patterns, having no referents for it. His nose and mouth were filled with a biting, acrid odor, something like formaldehyde.
The two snakes set him down on a platform near one wall of the cavern, the surface solid but spongy, like a great dark tongue. He collapsed as soon as they released him, his legs too weak to bear his weight. He waited on his hands and knees, staring into the terrible bright lights, panting like a trapped animal, suddenly longing for the timeless darkness he'd left behind.
It was dimmer here, in the angle of the wall and the cavern floor. Inchoate shapes moved ponderously in the shadows; as they came forward, they were finished and fleshed by the light, but Ramón still could not make them out. His mind kept fighting to resolve them into the familiar aspects of humanity, and-terribly, terrifyingly- they would not. They were too big, and shaped wrong, and their eyes were a bright, glowing orange.
A needle slid out of the end of a hovering gray tentacle, thrust quickly into Ramón's arm, too quickly for him to move or protest. Another prickly wave of heat passed through him, and he suddenly felt much stronger. What kind of injection had it given him? Glucose? Vitamins? Perhaps there'd been a tranquilizer in it as well; his head was clear now, and he felt more alert, less frightened. He drew himself up to his knees, one hand instinctively covering his crotch.
The shapes had stopped a few feet away. There were three of them, all bipedal, one bigger than the others. Ramón could see them more clearly now. His mind accepted them by treating them as frauds; he thought of them now as men wearing grotesque costumes, and kept looking for some unconvincing detail that would betray the disguise.
Intellectually, he knew better, of course. They were not men in costume. They were not men at all. They were aliens, and not of any race he knew. Ramón had sailed among the stars on one of the great galley ships of the Silver Enye, and once he had glimpsed three of the furred, six-legged H'zhei on the back streets of Acapulco, exotic creatures that looked like a cross between a cat and a caterpillar. The Turu he had seen only on video, and even there they made his skin crawl. These aliens were not Turu, not Enye, not Cian, not members of any of the Great Races. They were not part of the universe as he knew it. They did not belong. A hundred questions, accusations, and pleas fought in his mind. Who are you? What do you want? Please don't kill me.
At least they were humanoid bipeds, not spiders or octopi or bigeyed blobs, although something about the articulation of their limbs was disturbingly odd. The smaller two were perhaps six and a half feet tall, the larger one seven feet, which made even the shortest of them far taller than Ramón. Their torsos were columnar, seemingly of uniform breadth at hip and waist and shoulder, and surely they must weigh more than three hundred pounds apiece, although somehow the dominant impression they created was one of grace and suppleness. Their skins were glossy, shining, but each had its own distinctive coloration: one was a mottled blue and gold, the second a pale amber, while the largest one had yellowish flesh covered with strange, swirling patterns in silver and black.
All wore broad belts hung with unknown objects of metal and glass, and nondescript halters of some ash-gray and lusterless material. Their arms were disproportionately long, the hands huge, the fingers-three fingers, two thumbs-incongruously slender and delicate. Their heads were set low in a hollow between the shoulders, and thrust a little forward on thick, stumpy necks, giving them a belligerent and aggressive look, like snapping turtles. Crests of hair or feathers slanted back from the tops of their heads at rakish angles. Quills protruded from their shoulders, the napes of their necks, and the tops of their spinal ridges, forming bristly ruffs. Their heads were roughly triangular, flattened on top but bulging out at the base of the skull, the faces tapering sharply to a point. And the faces were faces out of nightmare: large, rubbery, black snouts streaked with blue and orange, trembling and sniffing, mouths like raw, wet wounds, too wide and lipless, and small, staring eyes set too low on either side of the snout. Orange eyes, hot and featureless as molten marbles.
Staring at him.
They were staring at him as though he was a bug, and that fanned a spark of anger inside him. He got to his feet and glared back at them, still shaky but determined not to show it. Ramón Espejo knelt to nobody! Especially not to ugly, unnatural monsters like these!
"Which one," he croaked, coughed, and began again. "Which one of you pinche motherfuckers is paying for my van?"
The aliens didn't react to his words. The large one reached out a strangely articulated arm-a motion that reminded Ramón of seaweed stirred by some gentle oceanic current. Ramón frowned as the alien curled what he had to think of as its fingers back toward itself once, twice, three times. The thing paused and then repeated the movement. There was something studied about the motion, as though it had been learned by rote, as though its natural equivalent might be without meaning for humans. A low, thudding boom came from deep below them; a mountainous heart that beat twice and went silent. Ramón glanced around him. The alien repeated the curling gesture.
"You want me to come close to you?" Ramón demanded. The great thing's snout twitched, and the quills on its head rose and fell. Again, the strange curling motion. Ramón suddenly recalled a journalist who had come to S?o Paulo from Kigiake whose only word of Spanish had been gracias. The alien was the same-a single gesture repeated for every occasion; employed ubiquitously.
The alien turned away, took a few inhumanly graceful strides, then shifted its torso back toward Ramón and gestured again. Follow me. The other two aliens were still as stone except for the restless twitching of their snouts.
"I get taken captive by aliens, and they're too stupid to talk," Ramón said, bravado and anger filling him. "Hey, you. Pendejo. Why the fuck would I follow you, eh? Give me a good fucking reason."
The alien stood motionless. Ramón spat, the sputum vanishing as soon as it struck the black tongue-like platform, which seemed to absorb it with a slurping noise. Ramón shook his head in disgust; in fact, there didn't seem to be anything else for him to do but follow. He came forward slowly, his footing unreliable on the disturbingly wet, velvety ground, which gave under him with every step, looking warily all around him, wondering if he should try to run. Run to where, though? And some of the objects suspended from the alien's belt were almost certainly weapons …
Ahead was a door cut through the naked rock of the cavern wall, into which the alien disappeared, looking back once again to make its favorite gesture.
Trying to wear his nakedness like a suit of clothes, Ramón followed the alien into the darkness. The other two beasts fell in close behind.