Hunter's Run(28)

Then back to the camp, to eat more sug beetles, make the usual review of his biological functions for the alien, and prepare himself for the hunt. Maneck's skin was still ashy, but the oil-swirls were beginning to reappear. Its stance remained low to the ground, its movements careful and pained. Ramón wished he knew enough to judge how serious the alien's injuries were-if it was just going to keel over at some point, there was no need to make elaborate plans to escape. On the other hand, suppose he found he couldn't free himself from the sahael after Maneck was dead? How horrible, to be shackled to the alien's rotting corpse until he starved to death himself! Or perhaps if Maneck died, he would die-they shared physical impulses through the sahael, after all. He'd never thought of that before, and it was unsettling. Still, given the opportunity, he'd take his chances  …

When it had grown light enough, Ramón and Maneck rose without consulting each other and set off again, moving downstream. The other Ramón's path tracked toward the north, though Fiddler's Jump was far to the south. Perhaps he hoped to throw off the pursuit by taking the less likely route. Or perhaps he expected to find better wood for a raft there. Or perhaps there was some other reason that Ramón had not yet fathomed.

They walked in silence, only the crackling of old leaves and needles under their feet to compete with the whooping calls of anaranjada, the scolding of flatfurs, the chittering chorus of vinegar crickets. It was midmorning before they came to a game path running through the trees. The soft, fibrous spoor of the kyi-kyi told Ramón that the antelope-like beast had been by within the last day, and likely the last few hours. These would have been good hunting grounds, he thought, and felt a stir of unease, the source of which he couldn't quite identify.

Ramón guessed that they would reach the river itself before nightfall. The other Ramón was bound to be close. He guessed that it would have taken him three days to make a decent raft, if he had the right tools: ax, wood, rope. And all his fingers, of course. The other Ramón was going to be working at a disadvantage, but  …

But the smart thing would be to slap together something thirdrate-a raft barely strong enough to float-and use it to flee farther downriver. Once he had more distance, the man could afford to spend the time to make something sturdy. It would be a balancing act: speed against the danger of trusting himself to something so flimsy that it could come apart in the water. Ramón walked, trying to remain silent, and wondered what risks he would have taken in the other man's place. It was a tug deep in the flesh of his neck that brought his mind back to Maneck.

The alien had stopped. Its hot orange eye looked dull. The red, swollen eye had darkened like congealing blood. Its skin, neither ashen nor displaying the slick dancing patterns it had first had, was the matte texture of drawing paper and the color of charcoal.

"We must pause," Maneck said. "We must regain our strength."

Ramón felt a stab of annoyance. There wasn't time for this. But it was also a sign that Maneck was weak. The devil wasn't shrugging off the injuries from the other Ramón's trap. That, at least, was a good sign. Maneck might still be armed, but it wasn't invulnerable. If the other Ramón could only find a way to break the alien's hold on him, then together they could destroy it.

Ramón pursed his lips. There was a tightening in his chest that he didn't like. Not illness, but regret. The memory of the kii crushed beneath the powerful Enye returned to him. As the hours passed, the memory of the dream he'd had the night before was fading, the sadness becoming not an emotion but the memory of one. The conviction he had felt that any price would be justified if it turned aside the horror of gaesu also faded, but did not vanish. It was Maneck's thought, not his, and he knew it. That didn't stop him from feeling the urgency of it, though.

"All right, monster," Ramón said. "We rest. But only for a few minutes. We don't have much time."

The alien considered Ramón, its quills stirring in a way that made Ramón think it was both amused and exhausted, then trudged to the wide, thick trunk of a fire-oak with leaves as wide as Ramón's two hands together and bark that collapsed with a sound like packing foam when Maneck leaned against it. Ramón hunkered down beside the game path, rubbing his chin and staring out into the forest. It was strange to have gone so long without a shave. Normally by now his whiskers would have been getting almost long enough to go from prickly to nearly soft. Instead, his neck and chin sprouted a kind of weak fuzz, like he was twelve years old again. He opened his robe and considered the scar where Martín Casaus had sliced him with the sheet metal hook. The pale line was wider now than it had been, but still not the ropy, puckered scar that it had been before the aliens got hold of him. The machete scar on his elbow was still hardly more than a lump under the skin. It was growing, though. He was becoming the man that he remembered being. And at least he could still grow whiskers. The pinche aliens hadn't turned him into a woman.

I'm still going to kill you fuckers for this, Ramón thought. But even though he had the intent and the focus, his rage seemed more distant; like something he had chosen to feel rather than something that actually possessed him. It felt like being in love with Elena. Familiar but hollow.

"What are you going to do with me?" Ramón asked. "When this is over. When you kill the man, what happens to me?"

"Your tatecreude will be complete," Maneck said.

"So what happens to someone when their tatecreude is complete?"

"Your language is flawed. To have completed tatecreude is to return to the flow."

"I don't know what that means," Ramón said.

"Once our function is fulfilled, we will return to the flow," it said.

Suddenly, with a flash of insight intense enough that he wondered if it partook of the two-way flow through the sahael, he knew what would happen to them both: they would die. They would be reabsorbed into the "flow," whatever that was. Once they had fulfilled their tatecreude, they would have no reason for existing anymore, like tools that were disposed of once the job they were needed for was done.

Perhaps Maneck was content to submit to that fate, perhaps the alien even welcomed it, but, as far as Ramón was concerned, that was another good reason to escape as soon as possible. "Whatever you say," he said wearily.

Ramón found that resting was more pleasant than he'd expected. He was more tired than he thought he'd be. But then, he had marched all the previous day after nearly being killed in an explosion. He'd slept poorly. And perhaps Maneck's distress was carried over in some alien fashion through the still-bruise-colored sahael.

The connection between Maneck's people and the Enye haunted him, but he found it difficult to wrap his mind around it in any meaningful way. A war that crossed stars, that lasted through centuries, possibly millennia. A vendetta against Maneck's kind, which had no discernible reason, which employed the human race as a tool.

They had always been hunting dogs for demons. Mikel Ibrahim, Martín Casaus, Ramón himself. Everyone, always. Dogs sent into the bush to flush out Maneck and beings like it. It was as deep a change of his view of the world as the curious fact of his twinning, but this time he didn't have the alien injunction not to diverge. He was free to think anything of this that he saw fit, and discovered that a smalltime independent prospector fleeing from the governor's constabulary wasn't the right man to make sense of it all. It only made his head ache.

Instead, he wondered what Elena was doing now. It had to be near noon, and  …  how many days since he'd snuck out of her apartment before dawn? A week? More than that? He wasn't even certain of the day anymore. He wasn't religious. Sunday mostly meant that the bars were closed. So perhaps this was a weekday, and she'd risen with the sun, showered, pulled on her dress, and gone to work.

He noticed with detachment that he had never fucked around on Elena. He'd killed men, he'd lied, he'd stolen. He'd beaten Elena and been attacked by her, but he hadn't frequented the whores down by the port when they were together. Even when they'd had a fight, he hadn't taken up with other women.

Elena would have killed him and any woman he slept with, for one thing. And also, the prospect of finding a woman who would think Ramón worthy of her attention, much less of her body, filled him with either a sick dread that came from years of rejections or the quiet aloofness that sprang from the anticipation of refusal. But besides all that, and to his surprise, Ramón found that it was simply not something that a real man did. Fuck women who were for hire, yes. Tempt your friend's woman away from him, certainly. See more than one woman, yes-if you were the kind of lucky sonofabitch who could juggle girlfriends that way. But cheat on your woman once she'd become your woman? That, somehow, was crossing the line. Even when the woman was a crazed weasel in human skin like Elena. Even when you didn't love her, or even like her very much, it wasn't something a real man did.

Ramón coughed out a laugh. Maneck's turtle head rose and swung toward him, but apparently there wasn't enough mirth in Ramón's laugh to bring the wrath of the sahael.