Hunter's Run(15)

"I don't eat fur."

"Ah," Maneck said. It moved up close behind Ramón and sank to the ground, its legs bending backward grotesquely. "It will be interesting to observe this function. Proceed."

"I need a knife," Ramón said. When Maneck said nothing, he added, "The man would have a knife."

"You will require one also?"

"Well, I can't do this with my teeth," Ramón said.

Wordlessly, the alien plucked a cylinder from its belt and handed it to Ramón. When Ramón turned it over in bafflement, Maneck reached across and did something to the cylinder, and a six-inch silver wire sprang out stiffly. Ramón took the strange knife and began gutting the gordita. The wire slid easily through the flesh. Perhaps it was the hunger that focused Ramón so intently on his task, because it wasn't until he had set the gordita on a spit and begun on the first grasshopper that he realized what the alien had done.

It had handed him a weapon.

The thing had made its mistake. Now it would die for it.

He fought the sudden rush of adrenaline, struggling to keep the blade from wobbling in his hands, to keep his hands from shaking. Bent over the careful task of digging out the grasshopper's rear gills, he glanced at Maneck. The alien seemed to have noticed nothing. The problem was, where to strike it? Stabbing it in the body was too great a risk; he didn't know where the vital organs were, and he couldn't be sure of striking a killing blow. Maneck was larger and stronger than he was. In a protracted fight, Ramón knew, he would lose. It had to be done swiftly. The throat, he decided, with a rush of exhilaration that was almost like flying. He would slash the knife as deep across the alien's throat as he could. The thing had a mouth and it breathed, after all, so there had to be an air passage in the neck somewhere. If he could sever that, it would only be a matter of remaining alive long enough for the alien to choke to death on its own blood. It was a thin chance, but he would take it.

"Look here," he said, picking up the body of the gordita. With its legs and scales cut away, its flesh was soft and pink as raw tuna. Maneck leaned closer, as Ramón had hoped, its eyes trained on the dead flesh in his left hand, ignoring the blade in his right. The heady elation of violence filled him, as if he was in the street outside a bar in Diegotown. The monsters didn't know that this thing they'd captured knew how to be a monster too! He waited until Maneck turned its head a little to the side to better squint at the gordita, exposing the mottled black-and-yellow flesh of its throat, and then he struck-

Abruptly, he was sprawled on his back on the ground, staring up into the violet sky. His stomach muscles were knotted, and he was breathing in harsh little gasps. The pain had hit him like a stone giant's fist, crumpled him and thrown him aside. It had been over in an eyeblink, too quick to be remembered, but his body still ached and twitched with the shock. He had dropped the knife.

You fool, he thought.

"Interesting," Maneck said. "Why did you do that? I pose you no danger, and so you need not defend yourself. I am not food for you, and so you need not kill me to eat. You have not declared war upon me. I have not gone to a bar, nor do I have money. I have not fucked your wife. And still you experience a drive to kill. What is the nature of that drive?"

Ramón would have laughed if he could; it was comic and tragic and deserving of his despairing rage. He levered himself up to sitting. Blood was smeared on his hands and chest from writhing on the corpse of the gordita.

"You  … " Ramón began. "You knew ."

Maneck's quills rose and fell. The evil, implacable orange of its eyes seemed to glow in the soft light that filtered through the forest canopy.

"The sahael participates in your flow," it said. "It will not permit actions on your part that would interfere with your tatecreude. You cannot harm me in any fashion."

"You can read my mind, then."

"The sahael can prevent action that is aubre before the action takes place. I do not understand ‘read my mind.'"

"You know what I am thinking! You know what I'm going to do before I do it."

"No. To drink from first intentions would disturb the flow and affect your function. It is only when your intention expresses aubre that you are corrected."

Ramón wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

"So you can't tell what I'm thinking, but you can tell what I'm going to do?"

Maneck considered him in silence, and then said, "Every movement is a cascade from intent to action. The sahael drinks from far up the cascade. The intention to act precedes the action, so you cannot act before I am aware of the action you are taking. Attempts to harm me cannot be completed, and will be punished. You are a primitive being not to know this." It tilted its head to stare more closely at him. "Please return to the issue at hand. What is the nature of that drive? Why do you wish to kill me?"

"Because a man is supposed to be free," Ramón said, pushing ineffectually at the thick, fleshy leash at his throat. "You're holding me prisoner!"

The alien shifted its head from one side to the other, as if the words meant nothing to it and were literally falling from its ears. Maneck lifted him easily and set him on his feet. To Ramón's shame and humiliation, the alien gently placed the wire knife back in his hand.

"Continue the function," Maneck said. "You were flaying the corpse of the small animal."

Ramón turned the silver cylinder slowly, shaking his head. He was unmanned. He could no more defeat this thing than an infant child could best his father. He was so little threat to it that it would hand him a weapon with total unconcern. He felt the urge to drive the knife into his own chest and end this humiliation, but he pushed the thoughts away before the sahael could exact its punishment.

He sharpened another small stick, using the alien knife, impaled the small bodies upon it, and held the raw meat over the flame. In the beginning, he kept the gordita and the grasshoppers far enough back that the cooking went slowly, but as the scent of grease and cooked meat woke his own belly, he let the branch dip.

The thin, stringy meat tasted better than Ramón had remembered-it was salty and had a rich, earthy taste. When he had stripped the small corpses to their thin, yellow bones, he wiped his hands on his robe and stood up.

"Let's go. I have to find fresh water."

"The seared flesh is not sufficient?"

Ramón spat.

"I can live for weeks without food," he said. "No water, and I'll die in days."

It rose and let Ramón lead the way through the forest to a cold rushing stream, foaming white as it broke over streambed rocks. This far north, the glaciers fed the streams and eventually the great river, the Río Embudo, that passed through Fiddler's Jump. As he squatted, cupping the numbing cold water to his lips, he imagined setting a message in a bottle to bob its way down to civilization. Trapped by monsters! Send help! He might as well plan to make a flock of flapjacks fly him back to Diegotown. Dreaming was no better than dreaming.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and sat back.

"This is all then?" Maneck said. "Consume dead flesh and water. Emit piss. These are the channels that constrain the man?"

"Well, he'll have to take a dump sometimes. Like pissing, sort of. And he'll sleep."

"You will do these things," Maneck said.

Ramón stood, turning back toward the camp and the flying box. The alien followed him.

"You can't just command those things," Ramón said. "It's not like I'm some kind of pinche machine that you can press a button and I fall asleep. Things come in their own time."

"And the dumping?"

Ramón felt a surge of rage. The thing was an idiot; he was enslaved by a race of morons.

"It comes in its own time too," Ramón said.

"Then we will observe the time," Maneck said.

"Fine."

"While we observe, you will explain ‘free.'"

Ramón paused, looking back over his shoulder. Light dappled the alien's swirling skin, an effect like camouflage.

"You will kill to be free," Maneck said. "What is ‘free'?"

"Free is not with a fucking thing sticking into my neck," Ramón said. "Free is able to do what I want when I want without having to dance to anyone's fucking tune."

"Is this dance customary?"

"Christ!" Ramón yelled, wheeling on his captor. "Free is being your own goddamn man! Free is not answering to anybody for anything! Not your boss, not your woman, not the pinche governor and his pinche little army! A man who's free makes his own path where he wants to make it, and no one can stand in the way. No one! Are you too fucking stupid to understand that?"

Ramón was breathing hard as if he'd been running, his cheeks hot with blood. The hot orange eyes shifted over him. The sahael pulsed once, and a shudder of fear ran through Ramón-the presentiment of pain that never came.

"Free is to be without constraint?"

"Yes," Ramón said, mincing the words as if he were speaking to a child he disliked. "Free is to be without constraint."