Hunter's Run(27)

"Don't let it bother you," he said. "It wasn't something you meant to have happen either."

"You must not diverge any further," Maneck said, almost pleadingly. "Your mind is twisted and alien. And that is as it should be. You will cease to diverge from the man. You will not integrate with me any further. We will wait here and hunt him. If he does not reach his hive, there will be no gaesu. You must not diverge any further."

"I won't, then. Don't worry. I'm still plenty twisted and alien."

Maneck didn't reply.

Around them, the sounds of night slowly began to come back as the animals and insects frightened by their raised voices began tentatively to return to their songs and courtships and hunts. It occurred to Ramón to wonder whether the other Ramón had heard, if he was close enough to know now that the coring charges hadn't finished off his pursuers. But for that to be true, he would have to be very close, yet Ramón and Maneck had slept through most of the night unmolested by anything other than jabali and ugly dreams. The other Ramón would not have missed a chance to attack them in their sleep-he would not have-and so he must not be that close. He was still out there in the forest somewhere, and the job of hunting him down was still ahead of them. But, as he now knew, theirs was not the only hunt.

"The Silver Enye," Ramón said tentatively. "The big, ugly, bouldershaped things."

"The eaters-of-the-young," Maneck said.

"They're what you're hiding from."

"It is better if this does not affect your function," Maneck said. "It must not inform your action."

"Don't fucking diverge, I got it. But I'm the guy who can tell you about being a man, and I say that if you tell me, it'll help."

"There has been too much participation already," Maneck began, but Ramón cut it off.

"I know enough that I'll be spending all my time guessing. Men, they make sense of the universe. They make stories about it and then see if they are right. It's what we do. Like I thought there was something interesting about that mountain, and I was fucking right, wasn't I? So if you tell me, I can stop wondering. If you don't, it's all I'll do."

Maneck's quills fluttered in a pattern that Ramón recognized as akin to resignation.

"They came to us, to the planet that spawned the first of us. For many generations, they appeared to be siyanae; their proper function appeared to flow in channels compatible with our own. We were not aware of the divergence until  … "

"Until they started killing you," Ramón said.

"Their tatecreude expressed in crushing the hatchlings. Of the ten billion of our kii, fewer than a hundred thousand survived. The eaters-of-the-young would enact rituals with the bodies. It seemed to offer them pleasure. We saw no function in it. It is necessary to our function that we exist, and so those that remained followed the channels which did not include the eaters-of-the-young. Of the six hundred ships, we are aware of three hundred and sixty-two that failed to isolate themselves from the flow of the enemy. Four came here and engaged in stillness. The others we cannot speak to. Their function has entered a place of nietudoi. If it is part of their tatecreude, it will be made clear once we have achieved conjugation. If it is not, then the illusion of their existence will not be acknowledged."

Ramón sat on the ground at Maneck's feet. Tiny leaves tickled the palms of his hands as he leaned back. The soup of alien thought and terminology had been less disturbing when he had been able to comprehend none of it. Now, with every idea half making sense, every untranslatable word on the verge of familiarity, it was worse than a headache.

"They'll kill you if they find you," Ramón said. "The Enye. They'll kill you."

"It would be consistent," Maneck said.

"You know they're coming. The galley ships. They're coming here ahead of schedule."

"This is known. They have no need for stillness. Their flow is  …  compelling."

"So that's why you have to stop the man. Ramón. The other Ramón. If he goes to Fiddler's Jump, he tells everyone where you are, and the Enye  …  fuck! Those pendejos will come down and eat you!"

"It would be consistent," Maneck said again.

A thousand questions swarmed in Ramón's mind. Were the human colonies sponsored by the Enye all secretly hunting missions designed to flush out hives like Maneck's? Were the Silver Enye going to turn on humanity one day, as they had with these poor alien sons of bitches? If the hive were discovered, would the S?o Paulo colony have accomplished its mission-fulfilled its function-and if it had, would the Enye suffer it to continue? And what had the sahael done to him that these things were even thinkable, these feelings possible? Where did Maneck end and he, Ramón, begin? In his turmoil, he grabbed at a single question, clinging to it as if everything hinged on its answer.

"Why did they do it?" he asked. "Why did they turn on you?"

"The nature of their function is complex. Their flow has properties unknown to us. They were like us until they were not. It had been our hope that you would reveal this to us."

"Me?" Ramón coughed. "I didn't know it had happened until just now. How would I be able to tell you what those mad pendejos were thinking?"

"The man is of them," Maneck said. "He participates in their function. You possess an understanding of killing and of purpose. You kill as they kill. Understanding what drives your killing would explicate the drive of theirs. The freedom of hard drink."

"We aren't like that. I'm not part of their fucking holocaust! I'm a prospector. I look for minerals."

"But you kill," Maneck insisted.

"I do, but-"

"You kill your own kind. You kill those who are most like you in function."

"That's different," Ramón said.

"In what manner does the difference come?"

"It wasn't about being drunk. That lets it get out of hand, maybe. It was something between the other guy and me. But I didn't eat his fucking kids ."

"If we were to understand the nature of the eaters-of-the-young and the expression of their tatecreude, we might channel their flow back to its previous path," Maneck said, and Ramón heard desperation in its tone. Even despair. "It might be possible to find a new method of fulfilling their function. But I cannot find a plausible reason."

Ramón sighed.

"Don't try," he said. "You'll only make yourself crazy. There's no way to understand them. They're fucking aliens."

                       
       
           



       Chapter 14

Ramón surprised himself by going back to sleep, and was even more surprised in the morning when he woke up and actually found himself leaning against Maneck, who had sat stoically, unmoving, throughout the rest of the night.

Before then, though, three times before the sun rose, Ramón was assaulted in his dreams by memories. One was a card game he'd played on the Enye ship during his flight out, away from Earth. Palenki had been having a good day-there were fewer and fewer of those-and had insisted that his crew come together and play poker. Ramón felt the strangely soft, limp cards in his hands again. He smelled the high, acidic reek of the Enye's huge bodies and the ever-present undertone of overheated ceramic, like a pan left empty in a heated stove. He'd beaten Palenki's full house with a straight flush. He remembered seeing the sick man's delight falter and fail when the cards came down, disappointment filling the old prospector's eyes like dry tears. Ramón regretted that he hadn't folded without showing.

That was the only memory that seemed related to his strange interaction with the alien's mind. The other two were mundane moments-first, bathing in a hotel in Mexico City before going off to a brothel, and second, a meal of river fish encrusted in black pepper he'd eaten shortly after his arrival on S?o Paulo. In each case, the memory was so vivid that it was as if he had momentarily stopped living in the present and begun to live again in the past, as if he was actually there rather than here, sitting on his butt on the grass in the middle of a chilly night next to an alien monstrosity. Each time he woke for a second to see Maneck sitting next to him, as still as a statue, and he got the impression that it knew what was happening to him, but it offered no advice on how best to accommodate this intrusive blooming of the past. Ramón didn't ask. It was his mind coming back to the way it should be, and that was all. Still, he wondered how many years it had been since the other Ramón had thought of that card game.

The daymartins were singing their low, throbbing song as the eastern sky lightened from star-filled blackness to a dimmer charcoal, and then at last to the cool light of morning. Something squawked and fled when Ramón rose to go for water. Whatever it was, it had snuck in and gnawed silently on the corpse of the jabali rojo in the night. Tenfin birds and whirlygigs flew through the trees, shouting at one another and fighting over places for their nests, food, mates to bear their children. The same petty struggles of all life, everywhere. Larger beasts, hoppers and fatheads, came to the stream's edge, glanced incuriously at him, and drank from the water. Fish leaped and fell back. He felt himself relax as he watched it all, able to forget for a moment what he was, what his forced mission was, and how bleak were his hopes.