Chapter 6
Afterward, Ramón could not clearly remember that trip. He was led through tunnels barely wide and tall enough to allow the alien to pass. The tunnels slanted steeply up and down, and doubled back on themselves, seemingly at random. The rock was slightly phosphorescent, providing just enough light to let him see his footing. He refused to look behind at the following shapes, although his nerves were crawling like worms.
The silence was heavy here in the belly of the hill, although occasionally a faraway hooting could be heard through many thicknesses of rock. It sounded to Ramón like the noise damned souls might make crying unheeded to a cold and distant God. Sometimes they passed through pockets of light and activity, rooms full of chattering noise and rich, rotten smells, rooms drenched in glaring red or blue or green illumination, rooms dark as ink but for the faint silver line of the path they followed. Once, they stood motionless for long moments in such a room, while Ramón's stomach dropped and he wondered if they could be in an elevator.
Each chamber they passed through seemed more surreal than the last. In one, things that looked like oversize spiders lay in a clump in the center of what looked like a sluggishly moving pool of glowing blue oil. Another high-ceilinged chamber teemed with aliens, swarming over terraced layers of strange objects on the cavern floor. Equipment, perhaps, machines, computers, although most things here were so unfamiliar that they registered only as indecipherable blurs, weird amalgams of shape and shadow and winking light. Far across the cave, two giant aliens-similar to his three companions but fifteen or twenty feet tall-labored in gloom, lifting and stacking what looked like huge sections of honeycomb, moving with ponderous grace, as unreal and hallucinatorily beautiful as stop-motion dinosaurs in old horror movies. To one side, a smaller alien was herding a flow of what looked like spongy molasses down a stairstep fall of boulders, touching the flowing mass occasionally with a long, black rod, as if to urge it along.
It was too much to take in. Ramón's conscious mind was spinning too fast in desperate attempts to make sense of what he saw. The nightmare walk became an interminable series of incomprehensibilities. A great gray tentacle reached out from one wall, caressing the alien before him, and then dropped to the ground and slithered away like a snake. A scent like cardamom and fried onions and rubbing alcohol filled the air and vanished. The deep throbbing booms that he had heard earlier filled the air at intervals that seemed to have no pattern, though Ramón found himself slowly learning to anticipate them.
Away from the chambers, in the tunnels, it was close and dark and silent. The lead alien's back gleamed pale and faint in the phosphorescent glow of the rock, like a fish in dark water, and, for a moment, it seemed to Ramón as if the markings on its flesh were moving, writhing and changing like living things. He stumbled, and instinctively clutched the alien's arm to keep from falling. Its skin was warm and dry, like snakeskin. In the enclosed space of the tunnel, he could smell the alien; it had a heavy, musky odor, like olive oil, like cloves, strange rather than unpleasant. It neither looked behind nor paused nor made a sound. The three aliens continued to walk on imperturbably, at the same steady pace, and Ramón had no choice but to follow after them or be left alone in the chilly darkness of this black alien maze.
At last, they came to a stop in another garishly lit chamber, Ramón almost walking into the wide back of the alien in front of him. To the human eye, there was something subtly wrong about the proportions and dimensions of the chamber: it was more a rhombus than a rectangle, the floor was slightly tilted, the ceiling tilted at another angle and not of uniform height, everything subliminally disorienting, everything off, making Ramón feel sick and dizzy. The light was too bright and too blue, and the chamber was filled with a whispering susurrus that hovered right at the threshold of hearing.
This place had not been made by human beings, nor was it meant for them. As he entered the chamber, he saw that the walls streamed with tiny crawling pictures, as though a film of oil was continuously flowing from ceiling to floor and carrying with it a thin scum of ever-changing images: swirls of vivid color, geometric shapes, mazy impressionistic designs, vast surrealistic landscapes. Occasionally, something recognizable would stream by: representations of trees, mountains, stars, tiny alien faces that would seem to stare malignly at Ramón out of the feverdream chaos as they poured down to be swallowed by the floor.
The alien who'd escorted him gestured him forward. Gingerly, Ramón crossed the chamber, feeling uneasy and disconcerted, unconsciously leaning to one side to correct the tilt of the floor and putting his feet down cautiously, as though he expected the chamber to pitch or yaw.
In the center of the chamber was a deep, circular pit, lined by metal, and at the bottom of the pit was another alien.
It was even taller than Ramón's guides, and much fatter, the lower part of its body bloated to four or five times the circumference of the other aliens, and its crest and quills were much longer. Its skin was maggot-white, and completely free of markings. White with age? Dyed white as an indication of rank? Or was it of a different race? Impossible to say, but as the alien's eyes turned upward, toward Ramón, he was seized and shaken by the force behind its gaze, by the harsh authority it exuded. He noticed, with another little shock, that the creature was physically connected to the pit-things that might have been wires or rods or cables emerged from its body and disappeared into the smooth metal walls, forming an intricate cat's cradle around it. Some of the cables were black and dull, some were luminescent, and some, glossy red and gray and brown, pulsed slowly and rhythmically, as if with an obscene life of their own.
The hot orange eyes considered him. Ramón felt his nakedness acutely, but refused to bend to this alien's will even to cover himself. The great pale head shifted.
"Noun," the alien said. "Verb form. Identifier. Semantic placeholder. Sense of identity."
Ramón stared at the alien, fighting to keep surprise from his face. It had spoken in Spanish (Ramón also spoke some English and Portuguese and French, as well as, of course, Portuglish, the bastard lingua franca of the colony), and quite clearly, though its voice was disturbingly rusty and metallic, as though it was a machine. How in hell had it learned a human language? "What the fuck are you saying?" Ramón said. "By Holy Jesus, what do you want?"
"Idiomatic vulgarity. Religious fear," the alien said, and then, with something that sounded like disappointment, "Unflowing." The great beast shifted in its web of wires and cables, its swollen abdomen rippling as if with a life of its own.
Ramón felt his gorge rise. "What do you want from me?" "You are man," the beast intoned.
"Yes, I'm a fucking man. What did you think I was?" "You lack tatecreude. You are a flawed thing. Your nature is dangerous and tends to aubre ."
Ramón spat on the ground. The arrogance of the harsh, unused voice and the steady gaze of those orange, unblinking eyes made him angry. In times of stress-when he had lost his first van in a drunken bet, when Lianna had finally left him, when Elena threatened to throw him out- Ramón's rage had never deserted him. Now it returned, flushing him with heat and certainty. "What are you, you creatures?" he said. "Where do you come from? From this planet? Somewhere else? What do you think you're doing, attacking me, keeping me here against my will? And what about my van, eh? Who's going to get me a new van?"
Suddenly, the absurdity of the situation struck him. Here he was, in an alien hive, locked away in the middle of a mountain, surrounded by demons. And he was bitching about his van! He had to fight down the urge to laugh, fearing that once he started he would be unable to stop.
The alien was staring at him wordlessly. "If you want to talk, talk sense," Ramón rasped. Anger gave him a sense of power and control that he knew was at odds with the truth. Any small thing that kept his mind his own, however, was precious. "You don't like what I am, you can show me the way out of this shithole."
The great pale alien seemed to take a moment to consider Ramón's words. Its snout lifted as if it was tasting the air. "Those are sounds, not words," the alien said after a long pause. "Discordances outside proper flow. You must not speak in meaningless sounds, or you will be corrected."
Ramón shivered and looked away; his rage had ebbed as quickly as it had flared, and now he felt tired, chilled by the alien's imperturbability. "What do you want from me?" he asked wearily.
"We do not ‘want' anything," the alien said. "Again, you speak outside the way of reality. You have a function: therefore, you exist. You will exercise that function because it is your purpose to do so, your tatecreude. No ‘wanting' is involved: all is inevitable flow. You are man. You will flow in the pathways in which a man would flow. As he is of you, our path to him will be carved clean. You will fulfill your function."