Hunter's Run(17)

As Ramón groaned and climbed to his feet, he saw that the alien's eyes were open, and said, "What, monster? You waiting for something?"

"Yes," it said. "You have returned to a functional state. Sleep is now complete?"

Ramón scratched his belly under the robe and yawned until he felt his jaw might dislocate. Twigs and scraps of leaf had found their way into the lean-to and knotted themselves in his hair. He combed them out with his fingers. Other than that, the shelter had been solid-well-crafted, dry, and just the right size. The policeman had even left a layer of iceroot fronds under the bedding to reflect up the heat of his body in the night. He'd spent some time in the wild.

"The sleep is now complete?" the alien repeated.

"I heard you the first time," Ramón said. "Yes, the sleep is fucking complete. Your kind, they do not sleep either, eh?"

"Sleep is a dangerous state. It takes you outside the flow. It is an unnecessary cessation of function. The need for sleep is a flaw in your nature. Only inefficient creatures need to be unconscious half their lives."

"Yeah?" Ramón said, yawning. "Well, you should try it sometime."

"The sleep is complete," Maneck said. "It is time to start fulfilling your function."

"Not so fast. I've got to piss."

"You made piss before."

"Well, I'm an ongoing fucking process," Ramón said, misquoting a priest he'd heard once preaching in the plaza at Diegotown. The sermon had been about the changing nature of the soul, the man who was delivering it red-faced and sweaty. Ramón and Pauel Dominguez had thrown sugared almonds at him. It wasn't something he'd thought of in years, and yet he could recall it now as clearly as if it had happened moments before. He wondered whether the alien goo in which he'd been incarcerated might have done something to his memory. He had heard that men waking from stasis sometimes suffered episodes of amnesia or powerful dislocation.

Now, standing before a mesh-barked pseudo-pine and pissing at its base, Ramón found more strange rushes of memory returning to him. Martín Casaus, his first friend when he'd come to Diegotown, had lived by the port, in a two-room apartment with butter-yellow bamboo flooring that peeled up at the corners. They'd gotten drunk there every night for a month, singing and sucking down beer. Martín had told him stories about being out in the forest working as a trapper, tricking a chupacabra into a spear pit with fresh meat, and Ramón had made up sexual exploits from his time in Mexico, each one more lurid and improbable than the last. Martín's landlady had come once and threatened to have them both arrested, and Ramón had exposed himself. He remembered the old woman's shocked expression, the way her hands had fluttered, unsure whether his penis was an insult to her or a threat. It was like seeing a recording of it: a flashback as powerful as the experience, and then gone again and only a memory.

Ramón scratched his belly idly, fingertips moving over the smooth curve of his skin. Poor old Martín. He wondered what had happened to the bastard. Nothing, he had to imagine, worse than what he himself was going through now.

"You don't piss either, do you?" Ramón said, shaking the last drops from his penis.

"The voiding of waste is necessary only because you ingest improper foods," Maneck replied. "Oekh provides nourishment without waste. It is so designed, in order to increase efficiency. Your food is full of poisons and inert substances that your body cannot absorb. This is why you must make piss and dump. This is primitive and unnatural."

Ramón chuckled. "Primitive, maybe," he said, "but you are the one who goes against nature! We are animals, both of us. Animals sleep, and eat other animals, and shit, and fuck. You do none of those things. So who is the unnatural one, eh?"

Maneck looked down on him. "A being possessed of retehue has the capacity to be more than an animal," it said. "If an ability exists, it must be used. Therefore you are unnatural, because you cling to the primitive although you possess the ability to transcend that state."

"Clinging to the primitive can be a lot of fun," Ramón started to say, but Maneck, who seemed to be growing impatient, cut him off. "We have begun with making piss," it said, "and we have returned to this place in the cycle. We are now prepared. You will enter the yunea. We will proceed."

"Yunea?"

Maneck paused.

"The flying box," it said.

"Oh. But I need to eat still. You can't have a man go without breakfast."

"You can continue for weeks without food. This is what you reported in the night."

"Doesn't mean I'd want to," Ramón said. "You want me working at my best, I've got to eat. Even machines need to be refueled to work."

"No more delays," Maneck said, fingering the sahael ominously. "We go now."

Ramón considered objecting, claiming that there was some further biological function that humanity required-he could spit for an hour or two, just to take more time. But Maneck seemed resolute, and he didn't want it to resort to the sahael in order to get him to obey.

"Okay, okay, I'm coming. Just wait a second."

Ramón had done what he could for the policeman. Any bastard who'd come out to arrest him should be fucking grateful for what he'd done so far! Ramón snatched up the leaf-wrapped strips of smoked fish he'd prepared the night before and followed the alien back to its bone-white box. A cold breakfast in transit would have to do.

His belly lurched as the strange ship took to the air. They flew south and west. Behind them, to the north, were the tall peaks of the Sierra Hueso, their upper slopes now obscured by wet, churning gray cloud-it was snowing back there, behind, above. South, the world flattened into forested lowland, then tilted down toward the southern horizon, steaming and slopping like a soup plate, puddled with marshes on the edge of sight. Also on the edge of sight, from up here only a thin silver ribbon in a world of green and blue and orange trees and black stone, was the Río Embudo, the main channel of the great river system that drained the Sierra Hueso and all the north lands. Hundreds of kilometers to the southwest, Fiddler's Jump sat high on its rocky, red-veined bluffs above the same river, its ramshackle wooden hotels and houses full of miners and trappers and lumberjacks, its docks crowded with ore barges and vast log floats soon to be launched downstream to Swan's Neck. It was there, to the safety and lights and raucous humanity of Fiddler's Jump, that the policeman was almost surely headed.

How would he do it? Anybody who could construct a lean-to as well as the policeman had would have no trouble constructing a raft out of the materials ready to hand. Once he reached the Río Embudo and built his raft, he'd be off down the river to Fiddler's Jump; much easier and faster than walking through the thick, tangled forest. It was where he would have gone and what he would have done had he been stranded out here without a van, desperate and alone. And he was sure that the policeman would do the same. The aliens had been smart to use him as their hunting dog after all-he did know what the policeman would do, where he would go. He could find him.

How long would he have to stall to give the policeman time to get away? Could he have reached the river yet? From the foothills of the Sierra Hueso, it was a long way on foot through rough terrain. On the other hand, a number of days had gone by  …  It would be close.

Below them now was another thick forest of iceroot-tall, gaunt trees with translucent blue-white needles like a million tiny icicles. They flew on. Here a great tower-of-Babel hive had pushed up through the trees, the strange, metallic-looking insects, like living jewelry, swarming up to menace them in defense of their queen as they passed. A clearing empty but for the wide, six-legged carcass of a vaquero-the horselike body half eaten by a chupacabra and left to rot. The iceroots again. They were circling. How did Maneck intend to find the policeman?

"What are we looking for?" Ramón called over the sound of the wind rushing past them. "You can't see anything from up here. You got sensors on this thing?"

"We are aware of much," Maneck said.

"We? I'm not aware of a fucking thing."

"The yunea participates in my flow, the sahael participates. It is your nature that you must fail to participate. That is why you are an occasion of great sorrow. But it is your tatecreude, and therefore it is to be accepted."

"I don't want to participate in your goddamn flow," Ramón said. "I just asked if you had some kind of sensors on this thing. I wasn't asking if you put out on the first date."

"Are these noises needed?" Maneck asked. If Ramón had had any faith that the aliens experienced emotions a human being might comprehend, he would have said that the thing sounded annoyed. "The search is the expression-"

"Of your tatecreude, whatever the fuck that is," Ramón said. "Whatever you say. Since I'm not able to do this flow thing, maybe this is the best thing I can do, eh? Make some friendly conversation?"

The quills on Maneck's head rose and fell rapidly. Its thick head jounced from one side to another. It turned to him, and the slats of the bone-pale box thickened, the sound of wind lessening. "You are correct," Maneck said. "This spitting of air is the primary communication available to you. It is right that I should attempt to engage your higher functions to aid you in avoiding aubre. And if I better understand the mechanism of an uncoordinated self, the nature of the man will also become clearer."