"Is he like this as well?" the alien asked.
"Like what?"
"You are not coordinated in your thoughts," the alien said. "Your tatecreude is unfocused, and your nature is prone to aubre. You comprehend killing and will, but not niedutoi. You are flawed at your core, and if you were a kii hatchling, you would be reabsorbed. You attempt to separate and also to rejoin. Your flow is always in conflict with itself, and the violence of this confuses your proper function but also overcomes boundaries that would otherwise restrict you. Is this what the man is like, or are you continuing to deviate?"
Ramón looked into the alien's uninjured eye, trying to make sense of what it had said. Flow and conflict, violence and restriction. Belonging and not belonging. Or maybe he was the one who'd brought that up.
"No, monster," he said at last. "It's not deviation. I've always been like this."
Chapter 12
After an hour, the alien heaved itself to its feet, with a ratcheting sigh that sounded like a length of chain being dropped through a hole. "We proceed," it said grimly, and gestured to Ramón to take the lead.
It took a little more than an hour of pacing slowly around the meadow's edge to find the other man's trail. Through the long hours of the morning and into the afternoon, Ramón took point, the sahael trailing behind him to Maneck's slow, steady plodding. It would have been a harder thing if Ramón hadn't known the kind of tricks he himself would have employed to create a false trail. Twice they came upon what looked like a mistake on the other man's part-a muddy footprint leading up onto a stony ridge, a length of roughened ground where he might have lost control as he went down a slope. Ramón guided them past the red herrings easily.
The nature of the forest changed as they walked. On the higher ground near the mountains, the trees were all iceroot and pine analogs. The farther they moved toward the river, the more exotic the foliage became. Wide-branched perdida willows with black trunks shaped like half-melted women; towering pescados blancos, named for the paleness of their leaves and the oceanic scent of their sap; halfmobile colonies of coral moss with bright pink skeletons peeking out from beneath the rich green flesh. The weariness and the throbbing of his knee seemed to fall away from Ramón as he caught his stride. It felt almost as if he knew beforehand where he was going, where the other Ramón had gone before him. He almost forgot Maneck's lumbering form walking behind him, matching his path perfectly to avoid catching the sahael on two different sides of the same tree.
A flatfoot blatted at him as he passed, scolding him with a noise like an annoyed oboe. The thin, gnawed bones of a kyi-kyi lay scattered at the base of a small cliff, pale as the slats of the yunea. The other Ramón was roughly following the creek that had run by the meadow where he'd set his trap. The water was an infallible guide, and though there was no trail beside it, Ramón found they were rarely out of earshot of its chuckling flow. A sense of peace infused him, and he found himself smiling. The sun rose, the temperature inched up. If he'd been wearing a shirt, Ramón would have been tempted to take it off and tuck it into his belt, not because he was overheated but only because the air would feel good against his skin. At last, untypically, Maneck called for a halt. Its skin was ashen gray, and it seemed almost unsteady on its feet.
"We will rest here," it said. "It is necessary to recuperate." "For a little while," Ramón said. "We can't let him get too far ahead. If he gets to the river … well, if he gets to the river, he'll have to take the time to build some kind of raft. And with a fucked-up hand, so I guess that could take him a while. But if he does get out on the river, we'll never catch him. We should have just used your flying box to get downstream. We could have just waited for him to drift by."
"This suggestion is of no effect. We did not, therefore there can be no previous shall. Your language violates the nature of time. We must rest, here."
It was a good site. The brook pooled here into a tiny lake. The afternoon sun glittered silver on its surface. A low, gray-green ground cover made a wide, soft place to rest. When Ramón lay back, the bruised leaves smelled like basil, like nutmeg, like nothing he had a name for. Maneck trundled to the water's edge and looked out before closing its eyes. The red, wounded one still had a bright slit where the lid no longer entirely closed.
From where he lay, Ramón could turn his head and put one eye level with top of the ground cover and see how the patterns of sun and wind on the lake mirrored the waving of the tiny silver leaves. It took him a few minutes to spot the hidden grave.
It was at the edge of the clearing, near a small waterfall where the lake once again became a brook. A swath of the ground cover stood higher than the surrounding plants. It was no longer than Ramón's forearm, no wider than his spread hand. He walked to the anomaly, the sahael tugging at his throat. The ground, he saw, had been dug up, the plants removed and then laid back on top of the tiny excavation when it was done. Ramón felt a moment's unease. It seemed like the thing a man would do-the other Ramón. As if there was something buried here he wanted to hide, but what would that be? There hadn't been anything in his field pack precious enough to preserve. Maybe a note? Some written record that would expose the aliens? But who would ever find it here?
With only a moment's hesitation-might he have forgotten how many coring charges had been in the pack or might the trap in the meadow have only used two?-Ramón dug his fingers into the soft soil. Hardly an inch beneath the surface, he touched flesh. When he pulled his hand back in disgust, his fingertips were red with blood. A flatfur, skinned and raw and buried hardly deep enough to make any difference from leaving the little body openly on the ground. He considered the corpse, and remembered the skins at the other Ramón's first camp. Whatever the man was doing, it was intentional, and he'd planned it back that long ago, when traps were on his mind. Ramón lifted the thing with a branch broken from the nearest tree. There seemed to be no mechanism associated with it-no sharpened sticks or knives. He might have poisoned the meat, but it seemed unreasonable that he might expect the alien to eat it. What was the man-his other self-thinking?
Ramón took the dead animal by its thin legs, walked it to the lake, and flung it out into the water. The body sank like a stone. Maneck's eyes remained closed, its stance still as a statue and as unresponsive. Ramón debated for a moment. He could wake the thing and tell it what he had found, or else keep the other Ramón's secret. The strange animal offering made him uncomfortable; his first impulse was to talk about it. But if it was part of his twin's plot to defeat the aliens, perhaps it would be better to hold back.
Maneck's eyes flickered open. "I can go on no more today," it said. It actually sounded apologetic, perhaps even ashamed. "I am too weak. I must recuperate further."
"That's okay," Ramón said. He felt almost sorry for it. How badly injured was it? Was it dying? "It'll be dark soon anyway. We might as well camp for the night."
Maneck remained quiescent through the rest of the day and into the night. Ramón broke branches and fronds to make himself a leanto, the sahael stretching to accommodate his movements. When night fell, he roused Maneck long enough to scoop water from a tiny creek and find a double handful of sug beetles. The alien didn't ask about his change in diet, and Ramón didn't volunteer any information.
When the beetles were reduced to their empty, colorful shells, Ramón lay back on the soft ground, looking up into the vast starscape of night. The small fire he'd made to boil water for washing out his wound and cooking had fallen to coals and ashes. In other circumstances, it would have been a perfect night. In the distance, something called-an animal or bird or insect that might never have been seen by human eyes. The sound was high and fluting, and a moment after it came, two more answered it. Another memory filled his awareness. Elena in her apartment. They had had one of their first fights over his habit of camping outside the van. She had been certain that a wild animal would find him and kill him in the darkness. She'd had a friend taken by redjackets, and she claimed to suffer nightmares. He'd been sleeping with her for a month and hadn't seen evidence of it, but when he said so, she only got angrier.
The argument had ended with her throwing a kitchen knife at him. He'd slapped her. Afterward they'd screwed.
Far above him, a meteor streaked across the sky, burning and vanishing in the space of a heartbeat. The Sick Gringo peered down on them from the stars, and, on the horizon, the Stone Man was beginning to rise.
He knew she was crazy. Elena was the kind of woman who wound up killing herself or her lover or her children, and he didn't love her any more than she loved him. It was all perfectly clear to him, and also totally unimportant. People, he decided, didn't come together from love or hatred. They came together because they were the kind of people who fit. She was a crazed bitch. He was a drunk and a killer. They deserved each other.