Hunter's Run(26)

Except he wasn't a drunk when he was here. In the field, he was sober as a priest. He was a better man out here. His mind was growing muzzy and losing itself in sleep when the alien jerked to attention. Ramón sat up.

"What is it?" he whispered.

"Something is observing us," Maneck said.

A chill went up Ramón's spine. There were enough real monsters waiting out here in the bush that S?o Paulo featured relatively few myths about duppies and mothmen and mysterious unknown creatures. Ghosts were a different story, though. There were plenty of ghosts here-from the ghost of Ugly Pete, a prospector who wandered the night looking for a replacement for the head he'd lost in a mine accident, to Black Maria, who appeared to men at the moment of their deaths. One cult in Little Dog believed that S?o Paulo was where the dead of Earth went when they died. So the night here swarmed with ghosts, like moths around a light, and out here in the dark wilderness, that was not a good thing to think about-although, of course, he didn't believe in such things. Whatever was out there in the dark, it was more likely to be a real physical creature than a ghost.

With that thought, Elena's terror of redjackets and chupacabras abruptly returned to Ramón, and he rose, moving closer to the huge alien. He closed his eyes for the space of twenty breaths, adapting them to darkness, then scanned the meadow's edge. It was dark enough that he couldn't see anything directly. Only his peripheral vision would pick out movement from the gloom beneath the trees.

"There," he whispered. "Just to the right of the white-barked tree. In that bush."

Maneck did something complex with its arm. A flash of light extended from its hand, and the bush exploded in a ball of fire. Ramón jumped back.

"Come," Maneck said, and began moving forward. Ramón hung back half a pace, struggling between curiosity, fear of whatever was in the trees, and unease at his alien captor's weapon. He had thought the thing was unarmed after the yunea's crash. It was the sort of mistake that would get him killed if he wasn't more careful.

The corpse at the foot of the tree, twisted in sudden agony and scorched black on its spine, was a jabali rojo, something like a boar that had decided to be a fox instead halfway through its evolution; the ornate tusks at the sides of its open, lifeless mouth were better suited for impressing female jabali than attacking men or aliens.

"It's nothing," Ramón said. "It was no danger to us."

"It might have been the man," Maneck said. Was there regret in its tone? Relief ? Fear? Who could say?

When they returned to the modest camp, Ramón lay back down, but found it hard to sleep. His mind worked variation after variation on his new circumstances. Maneck was still well-armed. The other Ramón didn't have a pistol or any more coring charges. He tried to imagine ways in which he might be able to give his other self an edge-some chance that would make his own freedom possible.

And what then?

He found himself staring at Maneck, his strange alien shape silhouetted against the cold stars like some pagan idol dedicated to unimaginable gods. Before long, he found himself beginning to drift. In his torpor, he realized that the alien had been the one learning all this time-how a man ate, how he pissed, how he slept. Ramón had learned nothing. For all his strategy and subterfuge, he knew hardly more about the alien than when he'd first woken in darkness.

He would learn. If he had been created as the thing said, then, in a way, Ramón was part alien himself-the product of an alien technology. He was a new man. He could learn new ways. He would come to understand the aliens, what they believed, how they thought. He would leave no tool unused.

Sleep stole into him, taking him gently down below consciousness, his determination to know still locked in his mind like a rat in a pit terrier's teeth. Ramón Espejo felt dreams lapping at his mind like water at the bank of a river, and at last let them come. They were strange, dreams such as Ramón Espejo had never dreamed before.

But, after all, he was not Ramón Espejo.

                       
       
           



       Chapter 13

In his dream, he was within the river. He had no need to breathe, and moving through the water was as simple as thinking. Weightless, he inhabited the currents like a fish, like the water itself. His consciousness shifted throughout the river as if it were his body. He could feel the stones of the riverbed where the water smoothed them, and the shift, far ahead, where the banks turned the flow one way and then another. And farther, past that, to the sea.

The sea. Vast as a night sky, but full. The flow shifting throughout, alive and aware. Ramón floated down through the waters until he came near the dappled bottom and it swam away, the back of a leviathan larger than a city and still insignificant in the living abyss.

And then he was also the abyss.

Ramón dreamed of flow. Meaningless syllables took on significance and passed back into nonsense. Insights as profound as love and sleep moved through him, and left him filled with a terrible awe. The sky was an ocean, and the flow filled the space between stars. He followed the flow for hundreds or thousands of years, swimming between the stars, his belly heavy with generations yet unborn, searching for refuge, for someplace safe, away from pursuit, where he could hide and fulfill his destiny. And behind him, relentlessly pursuing, was something black and ominous, calling out to him in a voice at once terrible and seductive. Ramón tried not to listen to that terrible voice, tried not to let it pull him back. The beauty of the flow, the power of it, the deep and wordless promise; he fought to fill his mind with this and not think of the thing behind him, the thing that was reaching out toward him, dead tendrils still stinking with blood. Only the act of thinking itself gave the thing power; awareness of it, even in the act of repudiation, gave it reality.

Then, while he was still dreaming, something caught him. A powerful eddy threw him in a direction he could not name, back to the dim, hellish place from which he had struggled to escape.

Abruptly, there was a dead sun above him, hanging gray in an ashen sky. This was his home, the place of his hatching, his source, as rivers sprang from a glacier. His heart was tight with dread; he knew what was coming and also did not.

Around him were alien forms, as familiar as lovers. The great pale beast in the pit that had counseled him before this desperate hunt began. The small, bluish forms of kait eggs, now destined never to hatch. Yellow-fringed mahadya and half-grown ataruae still bent at the spine. (These were not words that Ramón knew, and yet he knew them.) All of the young beyond redemption, crushed, lifeless. He was Maneck, athanai of his cohort, and these dead that touched him, that polluted the flow, were his failing. His tatecreude was unfulfilled, and each of these beautiful things had fallen into illusion because he had failed to bear the weight of truth.

With a sorrow as profound as any Ramón had ever felt-more than the loss of his mother and his Yaqui father, more than the heartbreak of first love-he began to eat the dead, and with every corpse that he took into himself, he became less real, more lost in aubre and sin, more fully damned.

But there was no end of them. With every tiny body he consumed, they killed a thousand more. The screaming blackness that had followed him in flight began here, opened here like a box whose lid lifted forever, continually revealing the horror that would never end. The eaters, the flowless ones, the enemy. They saw the great bouldershaped bodies, heard the strange, piping voices raised in praise of the slaughter, saw the hatchlings lifeless and crushed beneath the vast machines. Ships hung in the air like birds of prey.

I know that ship, Ramón thought. Ramón only, and not Maneck. I've been on that ship.

With a shriek that was both his and Maneck's, Ramón awoke.

Maneck crouched beside him, its long arms lifting him with something between tenderness and anger.

"What have you done?" the alien whispered, and, as it did, it seemed somehow less alien, lost and frightened and alone.

"Yes, gaesu," Ramón mumbled, hardly knowing what he was saying. "Prime contradiction! Very bad."

"You should not have been able to use the sahael this way," Maneck said fretfully. "You should not have been able to drink of my flow. You are diverging from the man. It threatens our function. You will not do this again, or I will punish you!"

"Hey," Ramón said, shaking his head, coming back to himself with a start. "You're the one who put this fucking thing in my neck! Don't blame me ."

Maneck blinked its strange orange eyes and seemed to settle back, subtly defeated. "You are correct," Maneck said after a long pause. "Your language allows for deception, but your participation in my flow was not willed. The failure is mine. I am sick and injured, or I would not have lost control of the sahael. Still, the fault is mine."

Its voice surprised and confused Ramón. It was still deep and sorrowful, but there was something else in it-a sense of regret and dread that couldn't have come entirely from Ramón's imagination. He wondered whether the sahael was still leaking some signal from the alien's mind into his own. Ramón felt as if he'd walked in on a weeping man. In his own discomfort, he shrugged.