Hunter's Run(21)

"I do not comprehend the function of smoking," Maneck said. "The function of the lungs is to oxygenate the body. Does not filling the lungs with the fumes of burning plants and the waste products of their incomplete combustion interfere with this function? What is the purpose of smoking?"

"Smoking gives us cancer," he said, repressing a grin. The alien seemed so solemn, and puzzled, that he could not resist the impulse to have a little fun with it.

"Ah! And what is ‘cancer'?"

Ramón explained.

"That is aubre!" Maneck said, its voice harsh and grating in its alarm. "Your function is to find the man, and you will not be permitted to interfere with this purpose. Do not attempt to thwart me by contracting cancer!"

Ramón chuckled, then laughed. One wave of hilarity seemed to overrush the next, and soon he was holding his side and coughing with the strength of the laughter shaking him. Maneck moved nearer, its crest rising and falling in a way that made Ramón think it was questioning-like a child who has to ask her parents what she has said to amuse them.

"Are you having a seizure?" Maneck demanded.

It was too much. Ramón howled and kicked his feet, pointing at the alien in derision. He couldn't speak. The absurdity of his situation and the powerful strain his mind had been under amplified the humor of Maneck's confusion until he was helpless before it. The alien moved forward and then back, agitated and uncertain. Slowly, the fit faded, and Ramón found himself spent, lying on the ground.

"You are unwell?" Maneck asked.

"I'm fine," Ramón said. "I'm fine. You, though, are very funny."

"I do not understand."

"No. No, you don't! That's what makes you funny. You are a funny, funny, sad little devil."

Maneck stared solemnly at him. "You are fortunate that I am not in cohesion," it said. "If I were, we would destroy you at once and start again with another duplicate, as such fits indicate that you are a defective organism. Why did you undergo this seizure? Is it a symptom of cancer?"

"Stupid cabrón," Ramón said. "I was laughing ."

"Explain ‘laughing.' I do not comprehend this function."

He groped for an explanation the alien would understand. "Laughter is a good thing," he said weakly. "Pleasurable. A man who cannot laugh is nothing. It is part of our function."

"This is not so," Maneck replied. "Laughing halts the flow. It interferes with proper function."

"Laughing makes me feel good," Ramón said. "When I feel good, I function better. It's like food, you see."

"That is an incorrect statement. Food provides energy for your body. Laughing does not."

"A different kind of energy. When something is funny, I laugh."

"Explain ‘funny.'"

He thought for a minute, then recalled a joke he had heard the last time he was in Little Dog. Eloy Chavez had told it to him when they went drinking together. "Listen, then, monster," he said, "and I will tell you a funny story."

The telling did not go very well. Maneck kept interrupting with questions, asking for definitions and explanations, until Ramón finally said irritably, "Son of a whore, the story will not be funny if you do not shut up and let me tell it to you! You are ruining it with all your questions!"

"Why does this make the incident less funny?" Maneck asked.

"Never mind!" Ramón snapped. "Just listen."

The alien said nothing more, and this time Ramón told it straight through without interruption, but when he was finished, Maneck twitched its snout and stared at him from expressionless orange eyes.

"Now you are supposed to laugh," Ramón told it. "That was a very funny story."

"Why is this incident funny?" it said. "The man you spoke of was instructed to mate with a female of his species and kill a large carnivore. If this was his tatecreude, he did not fulfill it. Why did he mate with the carnivore instead? Was he aubre? The creature injured him, and might have killed him. Did he not understand that this might be the result of his actions? He behaved in a contradictory manner."

"That's why the story is funny! Don't you understand? He fucked the chupacabra!"

"Yes, I comprehend that," said Maneck. "Would the story not be more ‘funny' if the man had performed his function properly?"

"No, no, no! It would not be funny at all then!" He glanced sidelong at the alien, sitting there like a great, solemn lump, its face grave, and couldn't help but start to laugh again.

And then the pain came-world-rending, humiliating, abasing. It lasted longer than he had remembered; hellish and total and complex as nausea. When at last it ended, Ramón found himself curled tight in a ball, his fingers scrabbling at the sahael, which pulsed with his own heartbeat. To his shame, he was weeping, betrayed as a dog kicked without cause. Maneck stood over him, silent and implacable, and, in that moment, to Ramón, a figure of perfect evil.

"Why?" Ramón shouted, ashamed to hear the break in his voice. "Why? I didn't do anything!"

"You threaten to contract cancer to avoid our purpose. You engage in a seizure that impairs your functioning. You take pleasure in contradictions. You take pleasure in the failure to integrate. This is aubre. Any sign of aubre will be punished thus."

"I laughed," Ramón whispered. "I only laughed!"

"Any laughter will be punished thus."

Ramón felt something like vertigo. He had forgotten. He had forgotten again that this thing on the far end of his tether was not a strangely shaped man. The mind behind the opaque orange eyes was not a human mind. It had been easy to forget. And it had been dangerous.

If he was to live-if he was to escape this and return to the company of human beings-he had to remember that this thing was not like him. He was a man, however he had been created. And Maneck was a monster. He had been a fool to treat it otherwise. "I will not laugh again," Ramón said. "Or get cancer."

Maneck said nothing more, but sat down next to him. Silence stretched between them, a gulf as strange and dark as the void between stars. Many times Ramón had felt estranged from the people he was forced to deal with-norteamericanos, Brazilians, or even the full-blooded mejicanos to whom he was related courtesy of rape; they thought differently, those strangers, felt things differently, could not wholly be trusted because they could not wholly be understood. Often women, even Elena, made him feel that way too. Perhaps that was why he had spent so much of his life by himself, why he was more at home alone in the wilderness than he had ever been with the others of his kind. But all of them had more in common with him than Maneck ever could. He was separated from a norteamericano by history, culture, and language-but even a gringo knew how to laugh, and got mad when you spat on him. No such common ground united Ramón and Maneck; between them lay light-years, and a million centuries of evolution. He could take nothing for granted about the thing at the other end of the sahael. The thought made him colder than the breeze from the mountains.

It was something Mikel Ibrahim, the manager of the El Rey, had said more than once: If lions could speak, we still wouldn't understand them. His only chance was to never let himself forget that he was tethered to a lion.

Maneck nudged him. "Time to resume our functioning."

"Give me a minute," Ramón said. "I don't think I can walk yet."

Maneck was silent for a time, then turned and began pacing between the abandoned lean-to and the trees. The sahael tugged and stretched as the alien moved. Ramón tried to ignore it. Somewhere in the blindness that was the sahael's punishment, Ramón had bit his tongue. His mouth tasted of blood. Not alien ichor: coppery human blood. When he spat, it was red. If he had harbored any doubt or fears that he might have been something inhuman after Maneck and his fellow demons had done whatever it was they had done to him, they were gone now. Maneck had shown how far removed it was from humanity, and so it had also shown how much Ramón was indeed a man.

"There's something," Ramón said. "The plan you have-watching me and then searching. If I'm really the same as the pendejo that's out there now, I can tell you some things that he'd do. Specific things. Not just something any man might think of."

Maneck strode back to Ramón's side as he stood and brushed ashes and litter from his alien robes.

"You have insight into the man's probable flow," Maneck said. "You will express this insight."

"The river," Ramón said. "He'll head toward the river. If he can make it there and build a raft, he can ride it down to Fiddler's Jump. There are fish to eat, and the water's safe to drink. He could travel day and night both and he wouldn't have to rest. It would be the best thing for him to do."

Maneck was silent, its snout moving as if tasting the idea. And why not, Ramón thought. Tasting ideas was no stranger than anything else about the creature that controlled him.

"The man was here," Maneck said at last. "If it is his function to approach the river, it becomes a better expression of our tatecreude. You have functioned well. To avoid aubre is better than funny."