Hunter's Run(18)

"That half sounded like an apology, monster," Ramón said.

"This is a strange term. I have not fallen into aubre. I have no reason to express regret."

"Yeah, fine. Be like that."

"But if you wish to speak, I will participate in this fashion. I do indeed have sensors. They are of the nature of the yunea as the drinking of your flow is of the nature of the sahael or the management and direction of this form," and the alien gestured at itself, "is mine. The man, however, is much like the other creatures, and discovering the channels which he has been bound into is subtle."

Ramón shrugged.

Their best bet of catching the policeman was to head west for the Río Embudo, get well south of where he could have reached on foot, and then wait there by the riverside until the bastard came floating by on his raft, but if the alien didn't see it that way, Ramón felt no particular impulse to enlighten his captor. If the alien wanted to swing uselessly back and forth all day like a missionary's balls, Ramón was fine with that.

"What are you going to do with the poor fucker when you catch him?"

"Correct the illusion of his existence," Maneck said. "To be observed cannot happen. The illusion that it has happened is prime contradiction, gaesu, the negation of reality. If we were to be seen, we would not be what we are, we would never have been what we are. That which cannot be found cannot be found. This is contradiction. It must be resolved."

"That doesn't make sense. The man, he's already seen you."

"He is still within illusion. If he is prevented from reaching his kind, the information cannot diffuse. He will have been corrected. The illusion of his existence will have been denied. If he is real, however, we cannot be."

Ramón unwrapped the hierba leaf, sucked the meat from his strip of smoked fish, then dropped the empty bone on the slats at his feet.

"You know, monster, to make as little sense as you, I have to drink for half a night."

"I do not understand."

"That's the point, cabrón ."

"Your consumption of liquid affects your communication? Was your time at the camp insufficient to express this?"

"That was river water," Ramón said impatiently. "Liquor. I mean, drink liquor. I've got the only devil in hell that's never heard of hard drink!"

"Explain to me ‘hard drink.'"

Ramón scratched his belly. The smooth skin under his fingertips seemed momentarily odd. How could he explain drinking-really drinking-to a thing with a half-crazed devil's mind?

"There's a thing. It's a liquid," Ramón said. "It's called alcohol. You get it from things fermenting. Fermenting. Breaking down. Potatoes make vodka, and grapes make wine, and grain makes beer. And when you drink it, when a man drinks it  …  it lifts him up out of himself. You understand? All the things he's supposed to be, they don't bother him so much anymore. All the petty fucking shit that ties him up, it lets loose a little. Piss. I don't know. This is like telling a virgin what it's like to fuck."

"It loosens bindings," Maneck said. "It makes you free."

Memory assaulted Ramón again; the world vanished.

He was fourteen, two long years stretching out before him until he would elect to join a job gang and get off Earth. August brought thunderstorms to the mountains of Mexico, great white clouds that went gray-black at the base. Having come down from his tiny clifftop pueblo, Ramón was living in an older boy's shack in a squatters' village on the north slope of a mesa near Mexico City.

The day of his memory, he'd been sitting on the misshapen mass of rotten wood and worn plastic that he and the older boy jokingly called their front porch, watching the clouds form and rise toward the sky. The storm would reach them by night, Ramón had guessed. He was trying to judge whether the shack could withstand another hard storm or if it would collapse under wind and water when the older boy appeared, sauntering down the thin street of mud and rocks that separated one line of hovels from the next. He had a girl with him, his arm around her waist. He had a bottle in the other.

Ramón didn't ask where he'd found either of them. He remembered the astringent fire of the gin, the fascination and repulsion of listening to the older boy and the girl fuck while he sat outside drinking and counting the seconds between lightning flashes and thunder. By the time the rain came, the older boy had passed out, and Ramón, drunk, had split the last of the gin with the girl and she'd let him fuck her too. The wind had rattled the walls. Rain leaked in, running down the windows in rivulets while he bent over her, thrusting, and she looked away.

It was the best night Ramón remembered having on Earth. Possibly the best night he'd had since. He couldn't remember the older boy's name now, but he could see the mole on the girl's neck, just above her collarbone, the scar on her lip where it had split badly once and healed strangely. He only ever thought of her when he was drinking gin, and he preferred whiskey.

Maneck's arm touched his shoulder, steadying him. Ramón batted it away without thinking. "There was turbulence," Maneck said. "You gained focus, but its reference was obscure."

"I remembered something," Ramón said. "That's all. One time when I was drinking. When it made me free."

"Ah. Fidelity continues to increase. This is an excellent thing. Your tatecreude gains focus. But you are still unflowing."

"Yeah, well, and you're still fucking ugly. You wanted to know about drinking hard liquor. Here. Hard liquor makes a man able to stand the things he can't stand. It makes him free the way nothing else can. When a man's drunk, it's like being alone. Everything's possible. Everything's good. It's like having lightning in your hands. There's nothing that makes a man feel so complete."

"So hard drink is good. It increases flow pathways and focuses intention. It makes freedom, and this is among the man's central desires. To drink is to express virtue."

In the alleyway, the European sat down, hand to his belly. The crowd drew back. Ramón felt again the cold sense of having been betrayed by them.

"It's got its good points," he said. "Why are you asking me all these damn questions? Aren't you supposed to be hunting someone down?"

"I wish to participate in you," the alien said. "You cannot sense flow. These words are your only channel." The thing sounded like the ship psychiatrist from Ramón's jump out. Ramón lifted his hands, palms-out, pushing the thing's attention away.

"I'm tired of talking," Ramón said. "Leave me the fuck alone."

"You may require a period of assimilation," Maneck agreed, as if they were talking about a lift tube that needed tuning. The alien turned away. Ramón leaned against the thin white slats of the box, peering out over the shimmering orange-and-black sea of leaves below them. If he hadn't been drunk, he probably wouldn't have killed the European. He would never have come out so far, the constabulary silently on his heels.

But to be in Diegotown and not be drunk was unthinkable. As well tell him to fly a van without fuel or dig a mine by hand. It was how he could stand people. Ramón was a drinker, and a good one, but the bottle didn't control him. When he was here, out in the world, alone and away from the press of humanity, he didn't need the whiskey, so he didn't drink it. A single bottle could last him a month in the field, and half a night in the city. He wasn't a drunk. That was his proof of it.

The first sign he had that something had changed came when the flying box stopped suddenly, hovering silently in the air as if they'd been hung there by a rope from heaven. Ramón looked down, squinting against the early evening sun, but the trees below them seemed no different from any of the other hundred thousand trees they'd flown over.

"There's something?" Ramón demanded.

"Yes," Maneck answered, but said nothing more. The flying box descended.

This new camp was larger than the one they'd left. The lean-to was larger-big enough to sit up in-and a fire pit made of stones and sand held the remains of several fires. The fugitive might have remained here for a day if he'd kept the fire going the whole time, or several if he'd only used it to cook. Maneck led the way, moving slowly across the small clearing, its head swaying back and forth, keeping time to some slow internal music. Ramón trotted behind, led by his neck. A pile of sug beetle shells glittered in the dapples of sunlight. A pile of flatfur pelts lay abandoned, one of them gnawed at and then ignored by some small, toothy scavenger. The gray-blue butt of a cigarette lay withered beside the lean-to.

How far, Ramón wondered, had the policeman traveled? Three days the man had been running before Maneck had led Ramón into the hunt. Another day since. If the man had spent a single night at the first campsite and two here, that meant he now had only one day's lead on them. Ramón silently cursed the cop for dawdling. Everything depended on the bastard getting to the river, floating away to the south, and bringing back help. The governor, the police, maybe even the Enye and some alien security force from the Enye ships that would be arriving any day now. That would be best-humanity's great alien patron species rolling through like moss-covered boulders and licking Maneck to death.