Hunter's Run(22)

"If you say so."

"We will proceed," Maneck said and led Ramón back to the flying box.

As they swooped over the forest, he began to think more carefully about the campsite they had left behind. Small things tugged at his attention. Why had the other Ramón left the camp and returned to it so many times? Why had he gone to the trouble of catching and skinning animals when there were perfectly good sug beetles to eat? Where was the spit he'd used to roast the little animals? Slowly it occurred to Ramón that his double out there in the bush was up to something. There was a plan forming besides his own, and he couldn't quite make out its shape.

And if he was Ramón Espejo remade from a bit of flesh by unthinkable alien technology, if he was truly identical to the man out there, the man he remembered being, shouldn't he already know what it was? Perhaps his simple acceptance of his identity wasn't as straightforward as he'd thought. He found himself wondering whether the sahael could do more than humiliate him with pain. Perhaps it could slide some sort of drug into his blood that made him calmer, more accepting, more likely to ignore the questions that arose from his curious situation. Now that he considered it, this was not how he would have expected himself to react.

The alien had instructed him not to diverge from his identity as Ramón Espejo, and he had followed that order. Was that really how a man would react? Was that how he would have reacted, if his route to this moment hadn't been through the vat?

There was no way to know. All he could do was dismiss these doubts from his mind and pin his hopes on that other Ramón Espejo, who was lurking somewhere out there in the forest. He was probably close. Three days, Maneck had said, the other had been running. It was almost five now. He guessed that he could cover thirty kilometers in a day, especially with all the demons of Hell on his heels. That would put his twin almost to the river by day's end. Unless his wounds had slowed him. Unless he had become septic and died alone in the woods, far from help. Ramón shuddered at the thought, but then dismissed it. That was Ramón Espejo out there. A tough-ass bastard like that wasn't going to die easy!

Jesus God, he better not!

                       
       
           



       Chapter 10

Ramón had never intended to leave Earth. It was one of those accidents of circumstance, and little more. At fifteen, he'd taken work in the open pit mines of southern Mexico. One of the operators had fallen sick-too much dust in his lungs-and Ramón had taken his place. The overseer had shown him how to drive the old lift, warned him that the three-story-tall earthmovers weren't going to slow down if he got in the way, and his career had begun. Sixteen-hour days in sun hot enough to melt and crack the plastic seals around his pitted windshield, moving and smoothing slag and gravel according to the shouted orders. The rags he tied over his mouth began the morning in any number of bright colors-blue and red and orange-and ended the gray of dirt. After one of the older workers had kicked the shit out of him, he joined a work gang under Palenki-old Palenki who was queer and crazed, mean as a rat and ruthless as the cancer that finally killed him. But he made sure no one fucked with his team. He was the one who'd shown Ramón how to stick a woman's sanitary pad in his hard hat to keep the sweat out of his eyes.

Those had been terrible days, working the mines. He'd slept on a company cot in a wood shack hardly better than the squatters' holes he'd grown up in. The food had tasted of grit. It was a grinding, endless exhaustion, and the money he made was hardly enough to get drunk with on Saturday night. And still, it was work.

Palenki had been his ticket. The old bastard had made his crew learn. In the nights, when no one wanted anything more than to sleep and try to forget the day, Palenki made them all watch tutorials on mining technology and industrial geology. Ramón had hated it, but he didn't want to get cut from the work gang. So, half against his will, he'd learned. And though he would never have said it, he found himself enjoying it. Stone made sense to him, the way that land formed, folding ancient histories into itself until someone like him came along and cracked it open. The half-hour tutorial sessions were the best part of his day, almost worth losing the sleep for.

And perhaps Palenki had seen it in him. Because the time came when the Silver Enye ships arrived at the platforms above Mexico City. Huge beyond imagining, they hung in the sky like hawks riding an updraft. There was a contract. A colony planet. The first wave had left thirty years before, and now the Enye wanted to sling a ship after them to bring the industrial infrastructure that the planet would need. The first colonists wouldn't reach the planet for another several centuries, according to the clocks sitting on Earth, but with the effects of relativity and the stuttering reality of the Enye drive engines, Ramón could be there in little more than a year of ship's time. Anyone who took a contract to go out into the black carrying the questionable fruits of human industry would by definition outlive everyone who stayed behind. That alone seemed enough to convince Palenki. He accepted a contract and signed his whole work gang up with him.

Ramón remembered taking the orbital shuttle up to the platform, gliding twice around Earth and ending practically right above where he'd started. He was sixteen, and leaving his world behind. The only regret he'd felt at the prospect was when he'd looked down from the Enye ship. The blue of the ocean, the white of the clouds, the industrialized land masses glittering in the crescent nighttime like a permanent fire; Earth was prettier when you were away from it. If you backed up far enough, it was even beautiful.

Palenki had died on the trip. The tumor had been pressing on his heart for months. Ramón and the others of the work gang had scrambled to reorganize themselves, fearing that the Enye wouldn't honor the contract without Palenki, and they were right. The agreement was voided, and when the great ships reached the S?o Paulo colony, the excess boys were sent out into the strange world as generalized laborers. He'd gone from being nothing on Earth to being nothing on a colony world. There was no way to return to Earth; everyone he'd known there was already dead. But he knew what Palenki had taught him, he found more tutorials, apprenticed himself to a prospecting outfit that went bankrupt after a few years. He'd bought one of the old vans just before the foreclosure and set himself up as an independent.

That first run out into the terreno cimarrón had been like winning the lottery, like coming back to a place he'd forgotten. The great, empty sky, the forests and the ocean, the great fissures in the south, the towering mountains in the north. Empty. It was the first time in his memory that he'd been truly alone, and he'd wept. He remembered now how he'd sat in the driver's seat, letting the autopilot carry him, and wept like a man who'd seen Jesus.

"You are suffering the effects of recapitulation," Maneck said. "As the structures of your brain complete their formation, the memories will become less intrusive."

Ramón looked over at the thing, wondering if it was trying to reassure him or scold him or if its agenda in speaking was comprehensible in human terms.

"What the fuck are you talking about?"

"As your neural paths conform to their proper flow, older patterns will command temporary inappropriate prominence."

"Thanks," he said. "I wasn't worried about it." And then, a moment later, "So if I try real hard, I can make a memory grow back?"

"No," Maneck said. "The process would be impeded by will. You are not to try to remember specific events. To do so will decrease your function. You will refrain."

"Kind of like picking at scabs means they won't heal," Ramón said, then shrugged and changed the subject. "Hey. How was it you got here, anyway?"

"We participate in flow. Our presence is inevitable."

"Yeah, whatever. But you monstrosities, you don't come from here, right? You can't. There aren't any cities or factories or those bug-tower things like the Turu use. You don't eat the animals or plants here the way you would if you fuckers had evolved here with them. This isn't your planet. So how was it you got here?"

"Our presence was inevitable," Maneck said again. "Given the constraints upon the flow of what your flawed language would call my people, this outcome was required."

"You hide inside a mountain," Ramón said, looking out between the thinned slats of the flying box to the green-and-orange smudge of the treetops three meters below. "You're all hot and bothered to stop this other version of me so no one finds out about you. You know what I think?"

Maneck didn't respond. A thin, transparent membrane slipped over its eyes, dulling the orange color. Ramón thought there were birds who did something like that-had eyelids they could see through. Or perhaps it was fish. Ramón grinned and leaned back.

"I think you were out there for the same reason I was. I think you're hiding from something."

"From what was the man hiding?" Maneck asked. Ramón felt a stab of unease; he hadn't meant to tell the thing about the European. But how could it matter now?