Hunter's Run(19)

Ramón chuckled, but the alien ignored him, continuing its inspection.

There were several places, Ramón saw, where the policeman had ventured out into the forest, and several where he had returned. Broken branches and scuffed, turned litter showed it as clearly as if he'd left signs. This was a base of operations, then. The man had some plan or thought deeper than simple flight. Perhaps something he was searching for. Could the constabulary have an emergency beacon hidden somewhere nearby? It seemed too great a coincidence, but the thought alone was enough to make Ramón's heart beat faster. Or perhaps the man was an idiot, and still thought himself the hunter and Ramón the game. In which case, Maneck would surely find him, kill him, and return Ramón to the sickening darkness and noise of the alien hive, never to be heard from again.

Maneck stopped at the lean-to and reached down, stirring the leaves the man had used as bedding. Something among the green and blue leaves tumbled-dirty white and the black-red of old blood. Maneck leaned forward and made a rapid clicking sound that Ramón interpreted as pleasure. Ramón scratched his elbow, vaguely uneased by the sense that something had gone wrong.

"Qué es?" he asked.

The alien lifted a scrap of cloth-a shirt sleeve soaked in blood. The cloth was wrinkled and bunched where it had been tied as a bandage or tourniquet and then hardened as the blood dried.

"Looks like you hit the poor pendejo pretty good," Ramón said, trying to sound pleased.

Maneck didn't reply, only dropped the bandage back into the disturbed litter. It paced off toward the fire pit, the sahael extending and narrowing, but still pulling Ramón to follow. Something glittered in the dirt beside the rough, gathered stones of the pit. Silver and blue. The alien paused, considering it. Ramón walked up to the thing's side, and then, divided between wonder and fear, he knelt and put the tips of his fingers on the cigarette case that Elena had given him.

"This is mine," he said softly.

"It is the artifact of the man," Maneck said, as if agreeing.

"No," Ramón said. "No, this is mine. This belongs to me. The police, they couldn't have got this unless they found  … "

He half scrambled back to the lean-to, scooping up the bloodsoaked sleeve. The cloth was rough canvas, designed to last for months in the field. The button at the sleeve's end was half shattered.

"This is my shirt. The pendejo's wearing my shirt!"

Ramón turned to Maneck, a sudden towering rage roaring in his ears. He waved the bloody cloth in his clenched fist.

"Why does that fucking sonofabitch have my shirt?"

The quills rose and fell on the huge alien's crest; its oil-sheened skin swirled. Only the knowledge that the sahael would visit him with unimaginable pain kept Ramón from attacking it.

"Answer me!"

"I do not understand. The garment with which you were provided-"

"Is your shirt," Ramón shouted, plucking at the alien robe. " Yo u fucking devils made this. You make me wear it. This is my shirt. Mine. I wore it from Diegotown. I bought it. I wore it. It's mine, and some  …  some  … "

Martín Casaus appeared suddenly before his mind's eye, a memory as powerful and transporting as a drug flashback. Her name had been Lianna, the one he'd told Griego about. She'd been a cook at the Los Rancheros Grill down by the river. Martín had thought he was in love with her, and for a week he'd made up poems that started by comparing her eyes to the stars and ended near dawn and after a bottle of cheap whiskey, talking about what it would be like to fuck her. Ramón had seen her in the sleazy all-night bar they all called Rick's Café Americain even though there was some other name on the alcohol license.

Ramón had been drunk. He saw her again, black hair pulled back from an oval face. The lines at the corners of her mouth. The deep, saturated red of the wallpaper behind her. He'd seen her, and he'd remembered all the images he'd endured, all the fantasies Martín had spun of her body. When she'd looked up, caught his eye, it was like water flowing downhill. He hadn't had a choice. He'd just gone to her.

Martín, before him now, had the sheet metal hook in his hand. Ramón dropped the bloody rag at Maneck's feet, his hand going to his belly. Martín's hand had looked flayed and skinless, but the blood had been Ramón's. The pain had been hideous, the bleeding so bad Ramón had felt it in his crotch and thought he'd pissed himself. He opened the alien robe, half expecting the Martín of his memory to swing again, to cut him further, though when it had actually happened, the man had broken down weeping.

Ramón's fingers touched a smooth, almost unblemished belly. The thick, knobby scar was gone, only a hairline of white in its place. He realized now that he'd known it, his fingers had kept straying to the missing wound, his body knowing better than his mind that something was missing. The roughness of the alien cloth against his skin, the calluses gone from his fingertips and feet. Slowly, he pulled back his sleeve. The scar he'd gotten in the machete fight with Chulo Lopez at the bar outside Little Dog, the trails of puckered white flesh that Elena's fingertips opened and reopened when they tore at each other during half-crazed sex were gone. There were no cigarette stains on his fingers. None of the small nicks and discolorations and calluses that were the legacy of a lifetime working with one's hands. Over the years, his arms had been burned almost black by the sun, but now his skin was smooth and unblemished and pale brown as an eggshell. An awareness half-buried rose in him, and he went cold.

He had not been breathing in that tank. His heart had not been beating.

"What did you do to me?" Ramón whispered, horror-struck. "What the fuck did you do to me? To my body?"

"Ah! Interesting," Maneck said. "You are capable of kahtenae. This may not serve us well. I doubt the man is capable of multiple integration, and even if he were, it would not produce this disorientation. You must take care not to diverge. It will not focus your tatecreude if you become too much unlike the man."

"What are you talking about, monster?"

"Your distress," Maneck said. "You are becoming aware of who you are."

"I am Ramón Espejo!"

"No," the alien said, "you are not."

                       
       
           



       Chapter 9

Ramón-if he was Ramón-squatted, his elbows resting on his knees, hands wrapped around his bowed head. Maneck, looming beside him, explained in its deep, sorrowful voice. The man who had discovered the alien hive had been Ramón Espejo. There had been no one following him; no constable, no other van from the south. The discovery of the nest in itself had constituted contradiction, and in order to correct the illusion that the man existed, he had been attacked. He had escaped, but not uninjured. An appendage-a finger-had been torn from him in the attack. That flesh had acted as the seed for the creation of a made thing-ae euth'eloi-that had participated in the original being's flow, and woken with Ramón's memory and knowledge. Maneck had to explain twice before Ramón truly understood that it meant him.

"You participate in his flow," Maneck said. "All of the whole is present in the fragment, and the fragment may express the whole. There was some loss of fidelity, and the decision was made to favor functional knowledge and immediate recall over precise physical approximation. As you progress, you collapse into the form that shaped the fragment."

"I am Ramón Espejo," Ramón said. "And you are a lying whore with breath like a Russian's asshole."

"Both of these things are incorrect," Maneck said patiently.

"You're lying!"

"The language you use is not a proper thing. The function of communication is to transmit knowledge. To lie would fail to transmit knowledge. That is not possible."

Ramón's face went hot, then cold. "You're lying," he whispered.

"No," the alien said sadly. "You are a made thing."

Ramón surged to his feet, but Maneck didn't step back. The great orange eyes flickered.

"I am Ramón Espejo!" Ramón shouted. "I flew that van out here. I set the charges. Me! I am the one that did that! I'm not some fucking finger grown in a fucking vat!"

"You are becoming agitated," Maneck said. "Contain your anger, or I will use the pain."

"Use it!" Ramón shouted. "Go on, you coward! Are you afraid of me?" He gathered saliva in his mouth and spit full into Maneck's face.

The glob of spittle struck the alien beneath one eye and ran slowly down the side of its face. Maneck seemed more puzzled than offended, displaying none of the normal human revulsion. It wiped the spit away carefully and stared at the wetness of its fingers. "What is the meaning of this action?" it asked. "I sense that this substance is not venomous. Does it have a function?"