Hunter's Run(20)

All the fight went out of Ramón, like air rushing from a pricked balloon. "Wipe your face, pendejo," he whispered, and then sank to a crouch, wrapping his arms around his knees. It was true. He was an abomination. Cold sweat broke out on his forehead, his armpits, the back of his knees. He was coming to believe what Maneck had said: he was not the real Ramón Espejo, he wasn't even really human, he was some monster born in a vat, an unnatural thing only three days old. Everything he remembered was false, had happened to some other man, not to him. He'd never been out of the mountain before, never broken heads in a bar fight, never fucked a woman. He'd never even met a real human being, in spite of his memories of all the people he thought he knew.

How he wished he had never come here, never set that fateful charge! And then he realized that he had not done any of those things. It had been the other who had done them. All of the past belonged to the other. He had nothing but the present, nothing but Maneck and surrounding forest. He was nothing. He was nobody. He was a stranger to the world.

The thought was vertiginous, almost unthinkable, and deliberately, with an enormous effort of will, he put it aside. To think deeply about it would lead to madness. Instead, he concentrated on the physical world around him, the cold wind in his face, the clouds scuttling through an ominous indigo sky. Whoever or whatever he was, he was alive, out in the world, reacting to it with animal intensity. The iceroot smelled as good as his false memories said it should, the wind felt as cool and refreshing as it swept across the meadow; the immense vista of the Sierra Hueso on the far horizon, sun flashing off the snowcaps on the highest peaks, was as beautiful as it ever was, and the beauty of it lifted his heart, as it always did. The body keeps on living, he thought bitterly, even when we do not wish it to.

He forced the thought from his mind. He couldn't afford despair, if he was going to survive. Nothing had changed, regardless of his origin, whether he'd been grown in a pot like a chili pepper or popped bloody and screaming out of his mother's womb. He was Ramón Espejo, no matter what the alien said, no matter what his hands looked like. He had to be, because there was no one else to be. What difference did it make if there was another man out there that also thought that he was him? Or a hundred such? He was alive, right here and now, in this instant, whether he was three days old or thirty years, and that was what mattered. He was alive-and he intended to stay that way.

He looked up at the alien, who was waiting with surprising patience. "How can what you say be true?" Ramón said through tight lips. "I'm not an ignorant peasant-I know what a clone is. It's just a baby that has to grow up, like every baby. It wouldn't have my memories. It doesn't work like that."

"You know nothing of what we can and cannot do," Maneck chided, "and yet you assert otherwise. You refer to the creation of a novel individual from a similar gross molecular template. That process would be development. You are the expression of recapitulation. The two are dissimilar." Maneck paused. "The thought fits poorly in your language, but if you were to gain enough atakka to understand it fully, you would diverge further from the model. It interferes with our tatecreude ."

"My belly. My arm. The scars I had  … "

"Perfect fidelity was sacrificed. As time progresses, they will tend toward the forms that express the whole."

"I'll get my scars back?"

"All of your physical systems will continue to approximate the source form. The information retrieval is similarly progressing."

"My memory? You're saying that all this is fucking with my memory too?"

"To better approximate is to better approximate," it said. "This is self-evident."

Ramón stared at Maneck. All at once, he realized why the aliens didn't have sex. They were grown in vats too, just like he had been. Maybe they'd been created in the same one! He and this ugly sonofabitch were brothers, more alike than either of them were like the real Ramón Espejo.

"You've made me a monster, just like you," he said bitterly, feeling himself beginning to shake again. "I'm not even human anymore!"

The sahael pulsed once, as if in warning, and Ramón's belly went cold and tight with fear, but the pain didn't come. Instead, to Ramón's great surprise, Maneck extended one long, oddly jointed arm and placed its hand awkwardly on Ramón's shoulder, like a gesture of comfort copied from a bad description. "You are a living creature possessed of retehue," it said. "Your origin is of no consequence, and you should not concern yourself with it. You may still fulfill your tatecreude by exercising your function. No living being can aspire to more than that."

This was close enough to his earlier thoughts to give him pause. He pushed the thing's arm away and stood up. The sahael thinned and extended, letting him walk some distance away. Surprising Ramón again, Maneck made no attempt to follow. At the fire pit, Ramón sat, taking the cigarette case from the ground, flipping it open. It was the nearest thing he'd had to a mirror since he'd been lifted from the vat. His face was smoother than the one he was accustomed to, fewer lines at the corners of his eyes. The moles and scars were gone. His hair was finer and lighter. He looked different, unformed. He looked young. He looked like himself, but also not.

The world threatened to whirl around him again, and he steadied himself with his hands, his palms against the solid ground of S?o Paulo, anchoring himself in reality, anchoring himself in the present. If what Maneck had revealed was true, if there was another Ramón Espejo out there, that changed everything. There was no advantage to stalling anymore. If the other Ramón returned to Fiddler's Jump, there might be a reaction to his story of a secret alien base, sure, but neither that other Ramón nor anyone else would have any idea that he existed. An armed party might come to follow up, or even attack the aliens, but they wouldn't be looking for him. Maybe if he could actually find that other Ramón, though, together they could somehow turn the tables on the alien. He knew what he himself would have done if he knew he were being hunted. He would have found a way to kill his hunters. And that now was Ramón's only chance. If he could alert the other Ramón that he was being pursued and trust him to take the right action, together they might destroy the alien that held his leash. For a moment, he hoped deeply that what Maneck had said was the truth, that there was another mind like his own out free in the wilderness. He felt an odd surge of pride in that other Ramón-in spite of these monsters and all the powers at their command, he had gotten away from them, fooled them, showed them what a man could do.

But would the other Ramón help him, or would he be as horrified by him as he was by the alien? If he helped the other Ramón escape from his pursuers, surely the other Ramón would be grateful. Ramón tried to imagine himself turning away someone who had come to his aid when he was most in need. He didn't believe it was a thing he would do. He would embrace this new man like a brother, hide him, help him. Set him up in business, maybe go into business with him  …

Ramón spat.

That was bullshit. No, instead he'd put a knife between the other Ramón's-his-ribs, and laugh while the alien abomination died. And yet, what other choice did he have? The other Ramón was Maneck's enemy too. It was a common ground for now, and if there was a way to kill Maneck and free himself from the sahael, then he could handle the rest later. The questions of who and what he was, how he'd fit into a world with another Ramón in it, they'd have to wait. Survival came first. Freedom from this slavery came first. And the first thing to do was to earn Maneck's trust, make it think that he was wholeheartedly cooperating, lull it into a sense of false security until he could find the chance to put a blade in the alien's throat.

The plan, amorphous as it was, steadied him. If he had a scheme, there was at least a way to move forward …  .

"You have calmed yourself," Maneck said. Ramón hadn't heard it approach.

"Yes, demon," Ramón said. "I suppose I have."

He flipped open the cigarette case. It was empty, save for the engraved Mi Corazón that Elena had had etched in the silver. My heart. Here, my heart, smoke yourself to death. Ramón chuckled.

"I do not understand your reaction," the alien said. "You will explain it."

"I just wanted a cigarette," Ramón said, keeping his tone friendly. See how safe I am? See how ready I am to cooperate with you? "Looks like that greedy fuck out there smoked them all. Too bad, eh? Ah! I would enjoy a good smoke." He thought wistfully of the cigarette he'd used to light the fuse all that time ago. Or that the other had used. The cigarette he had smoked with other lungs, in another lifetime.

"What is a ‘smoke'?" Maneck said.

Ramón sighed. When it wasn't like speaking to a foreigner, it was like speaking to a child.

He tried to describe a cigarette to the creature. Maneck's snout began to twitch in revulsion before Ramón had half finished.