Hunter's Run Read online

  Memory assaulted Ramón again; the world vanished.

  He was fourteen, two long years stretching out before him until he would elect to join a job gang and get off Earth. August brought thunderstorms to the mountains of Mexico, great white clouds that went gray-black at the base. Having come down from his tiny cliff-top pueblo, Ramón was living in an older boy’s shack in a squatters’ village on the north slope of a mesa near Mexico City.

  The day of his memory, he’d been sitting on the misshapen mass of rotten wood and worn plastic that he and the older boy jokingly called their front porch, watching the clouds form and rise toward the sky. The storm would reach them by night, Ramón had guessed. He was trying to judge whether the shack could withstand another hard storm or if it would collapse under wind and water when the older boy appeared, sauntering down the thin street of mud and rocks that separated one line of hovels from the next. He had a girl with him, his arm around her waist. He had a bottle in the other.

  Ramón didn’t ask where he’d found either of them. He remembered the astringent fire of the gin, the fascination and repulsion of listening to the older boy and the girl fuck while he sat outside drinking and counting the seconds between lightning flashes and thunder. By the time the rain came, the older boy had passed out, and Ramón, drunk, had split the last of the gin with the girl and she’d let him fuck her too. The wind had rattled the walls. Rain leaked in, running down the windows in rivulets while he bent over her, thrusting, and she looked away.

  It was the best night Ramón remembered having on Earth. Possibly the best night he’d had since. He couldn’t remember the older boy’s name now, but he could see the mole on the girl’s neck, just above her collarbone, the scar on her lip where it had split badly once and healed strangely. He only ever thought of her when he was drinking gin, and he preferred whiskey.

  Maneck’s arm touched his shoulder, steadying him. Ramón batted it away without thinking. “There was turbulence,” Maneck said. “You gained focus, but its reference was obscure.”

  “I remembered something,” Ramón said. “That’s all. One time when I was drinking. When it made me free.”

  “Ah. Fidelity continues to increase. This is an excellent thing. Your tatecreude gains focus. But you are still unflowing.”

  “Yeah, well, and you’re still fucking ugly. You wanted to know about drinking hard liquor. Here. Hard liquor makes a man able to stand the things he can’t stand. It makes him free the way nothing else can. When a man’s drunk, it’s like being alone. Everything’s possible. Everything’s good. It’s like having lightning in your hands. There’s nothing that makes a man feel so complete.”

  “So hard drink is good. It increases flow pathways and focuses intention. It makes freedom, and this is among the man’s central desires. To drink is to express virtue.”

  In the alleyway, the European sat down, hand to his belly. The crowd drew back. Ramón felt again the cold sense of having been betrayed by them.

  “It’s got its good points,” he said. “Why are you asking me all these damn questions? Aren’t you supposed to be hunting someone down?”

  “I wish to participate in you,” the alien said. “You cannot sense flow. These words are your only channel.” The thing sounded like the ship psychiatrist from Ramón’s jump out. Ramón lifted his hands, palms-out, pushing the thing’s attention away.

  “I’m tired of talking,” Ramón said. “Leave me the fuck alone.”

  “You may require a period of assimilation,” Maneck agreed, as if they were talking about a lift tube that needed tuning. The alien turned away. Ramón leaned against the thin white slats of the box, peering out over the shimmering orange-and-black sea of leaves below them. If he hadn’t been drunk, he probably wouldn’t have killed the European. He would never have come out so far, the constabulary silently on his heels.

  But to be in Diegotown and not be drunk was unthinkable. As well tell him to fly a van without fuel or dig a mine by hand. It was how he could stand people. Ramón was a drinker, and a good one, but the bottle didn’t control him. When he was here, out in the world, alone and away from the press of humanity, he didn’t need the whiskey, so he didn’t drink it. A single bottle could last him a month in the field, and half a night in the city. He wasn’t a drunk. That was his proof of it.

  The first sign he had that something had changed came when the flying box stopped suddenly, hovering silently in the air as if they’d been hung there by a rope from heaven. Ramón looked down, squinting against the early evening sun, but the trees below them seemed no different from any of the other hundred thousand trees they’d flown over.

  “There’s something?” Ramón demanded.

  “Yes,” Maneck answered, but said nothing more. The flying box descended.

  This new camp was larger than the one they’d left. The lean-to was larger—big enough to sit up in—and a fire pit made of stones and sand held the remains of several fires. The fugitive might have remained here for a day if he’d kept the fire going the whole time, or several if he’d only used it to cook. Maneck led the way, moving slowly across the small clearing, its head swaying back and forth, keeping time to some slow internal music. Ramón trotted behind, led by his neck. A pile of sug beetle shells glittered in the dapples of sunlight. A pile of flatfur pelts lay abandoned, one of them gnawed at and then ignored by some small, toothy scavenger. The gray-blue butt of a cigarette lay withered beside the lean-to.

  How far, Ramón wondered, had the policeman traveled? Three days the man had been running before Maneck had led Ramón into the hunt. Another day since. If the man had spent a single night at the first campsite and two here, that meant he now had only one day’s lead on them. Ramón silently cursed the cop for dawdling. Everything depended on the bastard getting to the river, floating away to the south, and bringing back help. The governor, the police, maybe even the Enye and some alien security force from the Enye ships that would be arriving any day now. That would be best—humanity’s great alien patron species rolling through like moss-covered boulders and licking Maneck to death.

  Ramón chuckled, but the alien ignored him, continuing its inspection.

  There were several places, Ramón saw, where the policeman had ventured out into the forest, and several where he had returned. Broken branches and scuffed, turned litter showed it as clearly as if he’d left signs. This was a base of operations, then. The man had some plan or thought deeper than simple flight. Perhaps something he was searching for. Could the constabulary have an emergency beacon hidden somewhere nearby? It seemed too great a coincidence, but the thought alone was enough to make Ramón’s heart beat faster. Or perhaps the man was an idiot, and still thought himself the hunter and Ramón the game. In which case, Maneck would surely find him, kill him, and return Ramón to the sickening darkness and noise of the alien hive, never to be heard from again.

  Maneck stopped at the lean-to and reached down, stirring the leaves the man had used as bedding. Something among the green and blue leaves tumbled—dirty white and the black-red of old blood. Maneck leaned forward and made a rapid clicking sound that Ramón interpreted as pleasure. Ramón scratched his elbow, vaguely uneased by the sense that something had gone wrong.

  “Qué es?” he asked.

  The alien lifted a scrap of cloth—a shirt sleeve soaked in blood. The cloth was wrinkled and bunched where it had been tied as a bandage or tourniquet and then hardened as the blood dried.

  “Looks like you hit the poor pendejo pretty good,” Ramón said, trying to sound pleased.

  Maneck didn’t reply, only dropped the bandage back into the disturbed litter. It paced off toward the fire pit, the sahael extending and narrowing, but still pulling Ramón to follow. Something glittered in the dirt beside the rough, gathered stones of the pit. Silver and blue. The alien paused, considering it. Ramón walked up to the thing’s side, and then, divided between wonder and fear, he knelt and put the tips of his fingers on the cigarette case that Elena had given him
.

  “This is mine,” he said softly.

  “It is the artifact of the man,” Maneck said, as if agreeing.

  “No,” Ramón said. “No, this is mine. This belongs to me. The police, they couldn’t have got this unless they found…”

  He half scrambled back to the lean-to, scooping up the blood-soaked sleeve. The cloth was rough canvas, designed to last for months in the field. The button at the sleeve’s end was half shattered.

  “This is my shirt. The pendejo’s wearing my shirt!”

  Ramón turned to Maneck, a sudden towering rage roaring in his ears. He waved the bloody cloth in his clenched fist.

  “Why does that fucking sonofabitch have my shirt?”

  The quills rose and fell on the huge alien’s crest; its oil-sheened skin swirled. Only the knowledge that the sahael would visit him with unimaginable pain kept Ramón from attacking it.

  “Answer me!”

  “I do not understand. The garment with which you were provided—”

  “Is your shirt,” Ramón shouted, plucking at the alien robe. “You fucking devils made this. You make me wear it. This is my shirt. Mine. I wore it from Diegotown. I bought it. I wore it. It’s mine, and some…some…”

  Martín Casaus appeared suddenly before his mind’s eye, a memory as powerful and transporting as a drug flashback. Her name had been Lianna, the one he’d told Griego about. She’d been a cook at the Los Rancheros Grill down by the river. Martín had thought he was in love with her, and for a week he’d made up poems that started by comparing her eyes to the stars and ended near dawn and after a bottle of cheap whiskey, talking about what it would be like to fuck her. Ramón had seen her in the sleazy all-night bar they all called Rick’s Café Americain even though there was some other name on the alcohol license.

  Ramón had been drunk. He saw her again, black hair pulled back from an oval face. The lines at the corners of her mouth. The deep, saturated red of the wallpaper behind her. He’d seen her, and he’d remembered all the images he’d endured, all the fantasies Martín had spun of her body. When she’d looked up, caught his eye, it was like water flowing downhill. He hadn’t had a choice. He’d just gone to her.

  Martín, before him now, had the sheet metal hook in his hand. Ramón dropped the bloody rag at Maneck’s feet, his hand going to his belly. Martín’s hand had looked flayed and skinless, but the blood had been Ramón’s. The pain had been hideous, the bleeding so bad Ramón had felt it in his crotch and thought he’d pissed himself. He opened the alien robe, half expecting the Martín of his memory to swing again, to cut him further, though when it had actually happened, the man had broken down weeping.

  Ramón’s fingers touched a smooth, almost unblemished belly. The thick, knobby scar was gone, only a hairline of white in its place. He realized now that he’d known it, his fingers had kept straying to the missing wound, his body knowing better than his mind that something was missing. The roughness of the alien cloth against his skin, the calluses gone from his fingertips and feet. Slowly, he pulled back his sleeve. The scar he’d gotten in the machete fight with Chulo Lopez at the bar outside Little Dog, the trails of puckered white flesh that Elena’s fingertips opened and reopened when they tore at each other during half-crazed sex were gone. There were no cigarette stains on his fingers. None of the small nicks and discolorations and calluses that were the legacy of a lifetime working with one’s hands. Over the years, his arms had been burned almost black by the sun, but now his skin was smooth and unblemished and pale brown as an eggshell. An awareness half-buried rose in him, and he went cold.

  He had not been breathing in that tank. His heart had not been beating.

  “What did you do to me?” Ramón whispered, horror-struck. “What the fuck did you do to me? To my body?”

  “Ah! Interesting,” Maneck said. “You are capable of kahtenae. This may not serve us well. I doubt the man is capable of multiple integration, and even if he were, it would not produce this disorientation. You must take care not to diverge. It will not focus your tatecreude if you become too much unlike the man.”

  “What are you talking about, monster?”

  “Your distress,” Maneck said. “You are becoming aware of who you are.”

  “I am Ramón Espejo!”

  “No,” the alien said, “you are not.”

  Chapter 9

  Ramón—if he was Ramón—squatted, his elbows resting on his knees, hands wrapped around his bowed head. Maneck, looming beside him, explained in its deep, sorrowful voice. The man who had discovered the alien hive had been Ramón Espejo. There had been no one following him; no constable, no other van from the south. The discovery of the nest in itself had constituted contradiction, and in order to correct the illusion that the man existed, he had been attacked. He had escaped, but not uninjured. An appendage—a finger—had been torn from him in the attack. That flesh had acted as the seed for the creation of a made thing—ae euth’eloi—that had participated in the original being’s flow, and woken with Ramón’s memory and knowledge. Maneck had to explain twice before Ramón truly understood that it meant him.

  “You participate in his flow,” Maneck said. “All of the whole is present in the fragment, and the fragment may express the whole. There was some loss of fidelity, and the decision was made to favor functional knowledge and immediate recall over precise physical approximation. As you progress, you collapse into the form that shaped the fragment.”

  “I am Ramón Espejo,” Ramón said. “And you are a lying whore with breath like a Russian’s asshole.”

  “Both of these things are incorrect,” Maneck said patiently.

  “You’re lying!”

  “The language you use is not a proper thing. The function of communication is to transmit knowledge. To lie would fail to transmit knowledge. That is not possible.”

  Ramón’s face went hot, then cold. “You’re lying,” he whispered.

  “No,” the alien said sadly. “You are a made thing.”

  Ramón surged to his feet, but Maneck didn’t step back. The great orange eyes flickered.

  “I am Ramón Espejo!” Ramón shouted. “I flew that van out here. I set the charges. Me! I am the one that did that! I’m not some fucking finger grown in a fucking vat!”

  “You are becoming agitated,” Maneck said. “Contain your anger, or I will use the pain.”

  “Use it!” Ramón shouted. “Go on, you coward! Are you afraid of me?” He gathered saliva in his mouth and spit full into Maneck’s face.

  The glob of spittle struck the alien beneath one eye and ran slowly down the side of its face. Maneck seemed more puzzled than offended, displaying none of the normal human revulsion. It wiped the spit away carefully and stared at the wetness of its fingers. “What is the meaning of this action?” it asked. “I sense that this substance is not venomous. Does it have a function?”

  All the fight went out of Ramón, like air rushing from a pricked balloon. “Wipe your face, pendejo,” he whispered, and then sank to a crouch, wrapping his arms around his knees. It was true. He was an abomination. Cold sweat broke out on his forehead, his armpits, the back of his knees. He was coming to believe what Maneck had said: he was not the real Ramón Espejo, he wasn’t even really human, he was some monster born in a vat, an unnatural thing only three days old. Everything he remembered was false, had happened to some other man, not to him. He’d never been out of the mountain before, never broken heads in a bar fight, never fucked a woman. He’d never even met a real human being, in spite of his memories of all the people he thought he knew.

  How he wished he had never come here, never set that fateful charge! And then he realized that he had not done any of those things. It had been the other who had done them. All of the past belonged to the other. He had nothing but the present, nothing but Maneck and surrounding forest. He was nothing. He was nobody. He was a stranger to the world.

  The thought was vertiginous, almost unthinkable, and deliberately, with an enormous eff
ort of will, he put it aside. To think deeply about it would lead to madness. Instead, he concentrated on the physical world around him, the cold wind in his face, the clouds scuttling through an ominous indigo sky. Whoever or whatever he was, he was alive, out in the world, reacting to it with animal intensity. The iceroot smelled as good as his false memories said it should, the wind felt as cool and refreshing as it swept across the meadow; the immense vista of the Sierra Hueso on the far horizon, sun flashing off the snowcaps on the highest peaks, was as beautiful as it ever was, and the beauty of it lifted his heart, as it always did. The body keeps on living, he thought bitterly, even when we do not wish it to.

  He forced the thought from his mind. He couldn’t afford despair, if he was going to survive. Nothing had changed, regardless of his origin, whether he’d been grown in a pot like a chili pepper or popped bloody and screaming out of his mother’s womb. He was Ramón Espejo, no matter what the alien said, no matter what his hands looked like. He had to be, because there was no one else to be. What difference did it make if there was another man out there that also thought that he was him? Or a hundred such? He was alive, right here and now, in this instant, whether he was three days old or thirty years, and that was what mattered. He was alive—and he intended to stay that way.

  He looked up at the alien, who was waiting with surprising patience. “How can what you say be true?” Ramón said through tight lips. “I’m not an ignorant peasant—I know what a clone is. It’s just a baby that has to grow up, like every baby. It wouldn’t have my memories. It doesn’t work like that.”

  “You know nothing of what we can and cannot do,” Maneck chided, “and yet you assert otherwise. You refer to the creation of a novel individual from a similar gross molecular template. That process would be development. You are the expression of recapitulation. The two are dissimilar.” Maneck paused. “The thought fits poorly in your language, but if you were to gain enough atakka to understand it fully, you would diverge further from the model. It interferes with our tatecreude.”