Hunter's Run Read online

  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 boulder-shaped 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.

  “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, boulder-shaped 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 São 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 São 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.

  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 third-rate—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.