Hunter's Run Read online

  “Music,” Maneck said. “Ah. Ordered sound. I comprehend. You derive pleasure from the sequencing of certain patterns. We don’t have music, but it is an interesting mathematical function. To order that which is random enhances the flow. You may resume whistling music, man.”

  Ramón did not accept the alien’s invitation. He pulled in his line and threw it in again. The first cast brought up something Ramón had never seen. That wasn’t odd—there were new creatures caught in the nets at Diegotown and Swan’s Neck every week, so little yet was known about São Paulo. This was a bloated, gray bottom dweller whose scales were dotted by white, vaguely pustulant nodules. It hissed at him as he pulled the hook free, and, with a sense of disgust, he threw it back into the water. It vanished with a plop.

  “Why did you throw the food away?” Maneck asked.

  “It was monstrous,” Ramón said. “Like you.”

  He found another beetle, and they resumed their watch on the river as night slowly gathered around them. The sky above the forest canopy shifted toward the startling violet of the São Paulo sunset. Auroras danced green and blue and gold. Watching them, Ramón felt for an instant the profound peace that the open wilderness always gave him. Even captive and enslaved, even with his flesh pierced by the sahael, the immense, dancing sky was beautiful and a thing of comfort.

  A few minutes later, Ramón finally caught a fat, white bladefish with vivid scarlet fins. As he hauled it out of the water, he caught sight of Maneck’s curiously watching face, and shook his head. “You don’t have music and you don’t eat real food,” he mused. “I think you are a very sad sort of creature. What about sex? Do you have that much, at least? Do you fuck, what about that? Are you a boy or a girl?”

  “Boy,” the alien said, “girl. These concepts do not apply to us. Sexual reproduction is primitive and inefficient. We have transcended this.”

  “Too bad,” Ramón said. “That’s taking transcendence too far! Still, at least I suppose that means I don’t have to worry about you sneaking into the lean-to with me tonight, eh?” He grinned at the look of incomprehension on the alien’s face, and walked back to camp, Maneck pacing silently at his side. There, he quickly rebuilt the cook fire, and roasted the fish gently, briefly wishing he had some garlic or habanero powder to rub on it. Still, the flesh was warm and succulent, and when he had eaten his fill, and smoked some strips of the fish and wrapped them in hierba leaves for the next day, he sat back on his heels and yawned. He felt very full and oddly contented despite his perilous situation and inhuman companion.

  There were no more questions, no more obscure demands. When at last his body began to feel heavy, he pulled himself into the rough lean-to that the policeman had made, cradled his head on his arms, and let himself drift, always half aware that the thing was nearby and watching.

  Let it watch him. Every hour it spent here with him was another chance for the stranger who had been Ramón’s pursuer and was now his prey. The man who the aliens hadn’t made into a puppet. Who hadn’t killed the European.

  The one who was still free.

  Chapter 8

  The next day dawned cold and clear. Ramón woke slowly, drifting into consciousness so gradually that he was never quite sure when he passed the dividing line between sleep and wakefulness. Even when he had come fully awake, he remained very still, wrapped in his cloak, savoring the sounds and smells of morning. It was snug and warm within the folds of his alien garment, but the outside air was crisp and chilly on his face, and fragrant with the distinctive cinnamon-tang scent of the iceroot forest. Ramón could hear the rush and gurgle of the nearby stream, the whistling calls of small “birds” up with the sun, and, off in the distance, the odd, booming cry of a descamisado returning to its lair in the trees after a long night of hunting.

  Although his body ached from sleeping on the hard, stony ground and his bladder was full enough to be painful, Ramón was reluctant to stir. It was peaceful lying there; peaceful and familiar. The discomforts were old friends. How many times had he woken alone in the forest like this, after a hard day of prospecting? Many, he thought. Too many to count, too many to recall.

  It was almost possible to pretend that this was just another morning like all those others, that nothing had changed, that it had all been a bad dream. He held that thought closely for a while, reluctant to release it. It was a lie, but it was a comforting lie, so he took his time in waking. He opened his eyes carefully, and found himself staring off through the opening of the lean-to toward the west. The tall iceroots seemed to have an azure glow playing about their tops, where dawn had broached them. Beyond them, to the far southwest, he saw a handful of bright stars, fading now as the sun came up: Fiddler’s Bow, the distinctive northern constellation from which Fiddler’s Jump took its name, since that was the southernmost point from which the Bow could be seen. He watched until the last bright star had been swallowed by the sky, then he stirred, and the illusion of safety and normality died as he felt the sahael pull against the soft flesh of his throat. Ramón pushed himself reluctantly to a sitting position. Maneck still stood outside the lean-to, beads of dew on its swirling, oil-sheen skin. Its quills were stirring in the morning wind; seemingly, it hadn’t moved since he had gone to sleep, standing still as a stone, watching him throughout the night. Ramón suppressed a shiver at the thought.

  As Ramón groaned and climbed to his feet, he saw that the alien’s eyes were open, and said, “What, monster? You waiting for something?”

  “Yes,” it said. “You have returned to a functional state. Sleep is now complete?”

  Ramón scratched his belly under the robe and yawned until he felt his jaw might dislocate. Twigs and scraps of leaf had found their way into the lean-to and knotted themselves in his hair. He combed them out with his fingers. Other than that, the shelter had been solid—well-crafted, dry, and just the right size. The policeman had even left a layer of iceroot fronds under the bedding to reflect up the heat of his body in the night. He’d spent some time in the wild.

  “The sleep is now complete?” the alien repeated.

  “I heard you the first time,” Ramón said. “Yes, the sleep is fucking complete. Your kind, they do not sleep either, eh?”

  “Sleep is a dangerous state. It takes you outside the flow. It is an unnecessary cessation of function. The need for sleep is a flaw in your nature. Only inefficient creatures need to be unconscious half their lives.”

  “Yeah?” Ramón said, yawning. “Well, you should try it sometime.”

  “The sleep is complete,” Maneck said. “It is time to start fulfilling your function.”

  “Not so fast. I’ve got to piss.”

  “You made piss before.”

  “Well, I’m an ongoing fucking process,” Ramón said, misquoting a priest he’d heard once preaching in the plaza at Diegotown. The sermon had been about the changing nature of the soul, the man who was delivering it red-faced and sweaty. Ramón and Pauel Dominguez had thrown sugared almonds at him. It wasn’t something he’d thought of in years, and yet he could recall it now as clearly as if it had happened moments before. He wondered whether the alien goo in which he’d been incarcerated might have done something to his memory. He had heard that men waking from stasis sometimes suffered episodes of amnesia or powerful dislocation.

  Now, standing before a mesh-barked pseudo-pine and pissing at its base, Ramón found more strange rushes of memory returning to him. Martín Casaus, his first friend when he’d come to Diegotown, had lived by the port, in a two-room apartment with butter-yellow bamboo flooring that peeled up at the corners. They’d gotten drunk there every night for a month, singing and sucking down beer. Martín had told him stories about being out in the forest working as a trapper, tricking a chupacabra into a spear pit with fresh meat, and Ramón had made up sexual exploits from his time in Mexico, each one more lurid and improbable than the last. Martín’s landlady had come once and threatened to have them both arrested, and Ramón had exposed himself. He remembered
the old woman’s shocked expression, the way her hands had fluttered, unsure whether his penis was an insult to her or a threat. It was like seeing a recording of it: a flashback as powerful as the experience, and then gone again and only a memory.

  Ramón scratched his belly idly, fingertips moving over the smooth curve of his skin. Poor old Martín. He wondered what had happened to the bastard. Nothing, he had to imagine, worse than what he himself was going through now.

  “You don’t piss either, do you?” Ramón said, shaking the last drops from his penis.

  “The voiding of waste is necessary only because you ingest improper foods,” Maneck replied. “Oekh provides nourishment without waste. It is so designed, in order to increase efficiency. Your food is full of poisons and inert substances that your body cannot absorb. This is why you must make piss and dump. This is primitive and unnatural.”

  Ramón chuckled. “Primitive, maybe,” he said, “but you are the one who goes against nature! We are animals, both of us. Animals sleep, and eat other animals, and shit, and fuck. You do none of those things. So who is the unnatural one, eh?”

  Maneck looked down on him. “A being possessed of retehue has the capacity to be more than an animal,” it said. “If an ability exists, it must be used. Therefore you are unnatural, because you cling to the primitive although you possess the ability to transcend that state.”

  “Clinging to the primitive can be a lot of fun,” Ramón started to say, but Maneck, who seemed to be growing impatient, cut him off. “We have begun with making piss,” it said, “and we have returned to this place in the cycle. We are now prepared. You will enter the yunea. We will proceed.”

  “Yunea?”

  Maneck paused.

  “The flying box,” it said.

  “Oh. But I need to eat still. You can’t have a man go without breakfast.”

  “You can continue for weeks without food. This is what you reported in the night.”

  “Doesn’t mean I’d want to,” Ramón said. “You want me working at my best, I’ve got to eat. Even machines need to be refueled to work.”

  “No more delays,” Maneck said, fingering the sahael ominously. “We go now.”

  Ramón considered objecting, claiming that there was some further biological function that humanity required—he could spit for an hour or two, just to take more time. But Maneck seemed resolute, and he didn’t want it to resort to the sahael in order to get him to obey.

  “Okay, okay, I’m coming. Just wait a second.”

  Ramón had done what he could for the policeman. Any bastard who’d come out to arrest him should be fucking grateful for what he’d done so far! Ramón snatched up the leaf-wrapped strips of smoked fish he’d prepared the night before and followed the alien back to its bone-white box. A cold breakfast in transit would have to do.

  His belly lurched as the strange ship took to the air. They flew south and west. Behind them, to the north, were the tall peaks of the Sierra Hueso, their upper slopes now obscured by wet, churning gray cloud—it was snowing back there, behind, above. South, the world flattened into forested lowland, then tilted down toward the southern horizon, steaming and slopping like a soup plate, puddled with marshes on the edge of sight. Also on the edge of sight, from up here only a thin silver ribbon in a world of green and blue and orange trees and black stone, was the Río Embudo, the main channel of the great river system that drained the Sierra Hueso and all the north lands. Hundreds of kilometers to the southwest, Fiddler’s Jump sat high on its rocky, red-veined bluffs above the same river, its ramshackle wooden hotels and houses full of miners and trappers and lumberjacks, its docks crowded with ore barges and vast log floats soon to be launched downstream to Swan’s Neck. It was there, to the safety and lights and raucous humanity of Fiddler’s Jump, that the policeman was almost surely headed.

  How would he do it? Anybody who could construct a lean-to as well as the policeman had would have no trouble constructing a raft out of the materials ready to hand. Once he reached the Río Embudo and built his raft, he’d be off down the river to Fiddler’s Jump; much easier and faster than walking through the thick, tangled forest. It was where he would have gone and what he would have done had he been stranded out here without a van, desperate and alone. And he was sure that the policeman would do the same. The aliens had been smart to use him as their hunting dog after all—he did know what the policeman would do, where he would go. He could find him.

  How long would he have to stall to give the policeman time to get away? Could he have reached the river yet? From the foothills of the Sierra Hueso, it was a long way on foot through rough terrain. On the other hand, a number of days had gone by…It would be close.

  Below them now was another thick forest of iceroot—tall, gaunt trees with translucent blue-white needles like a million tiny icicles. They flew on. Here a great tower-of-Babel hive had pushed up through the trees, the strange, metallic-looking insects, like living jewelry, swarming up to menace them in defense of their queen as they passed. A clearing empty but for the wide, six-legged carcass of a vaquero—the horselike body half eaten by a chupacabra and left to rot. The iceroots again. They were circling. How did Maneck intend to find the policeman?

  “What are we looking for?” Ramón called over the sound of the wind rushing past them. “You can’t see anything from up here. You got sensors on this thing?”

  “We are aware of much,” Maneck said.

  “We? I’m not aware of a fucking thing.”

  “The yunea participates in my flow, the sahael participates. It is your nature that you must fail to participate. That is why you are an occasion of great sorrow. But it is your tatecreude, and therefore it is to be accepted.”

  “I don’t want to participate in your goddamn flow,” Ramón said. “I just asked if you had some kind of sensors on this thing. I wasn’t asking if you put out on the first date.”

  “Are these noises needed?” Maneck asked. If Ramón had had any faith that the aliens experienced emotions a human being might comprehend, he would have said that the thing sounded annoyed. “The search is the expression—”

  “Of your tatecreude, whatever the fuck that is,” Ramón said. “Whatever you say. Since I’m not able to do this flow thing, maybe this is the best thing I can do, eh? Make some friendly conversation?”

  The quills on Maneck’s head rose and fell rapidly. Its thick head jounced from one side to another. It turned to him, and the slats of the bone-pale box thickened, the sound of wind lessening. “You are correct,” Maneck said. “This spitting of air is the primary communication available to you. It is right that I should attempt to engage your higher functions to aid you in avoiding aubre. And if I better understand the mechanism of an uncoordinated self, the nature of the man will also become clearer.”

  “That half sounded like an apology, monster,” Ramón said.

  “This is a strange term. I have not fallen into aubre. I have no reason to express regret.”

  “Yeah, fine. Be like that.”

  “But if you wish to speak, I will participate in this fashion. I do indeed have sensors. They are of the nature of the yunea as the drinking of your flow is of the nature of the sahael or the management and direction of this form,” and the alien gestured at itself, “is mine. The man, however, is much like the other creatures, and discovering the channels which he has been bound into is subtle.”

  Ramón shrugged.

  Their best bet of catching the policeman was to head west for the Río Embudo, get well south of where he could have reached on foot, and then wait there by the riverside until the bastard came floating by on his raft, but if the alien didn’t see it that way, Ramón felt no particular impulse to enlighten his captor. If the alien wanted to swing uselessly back and forth all day like a missionary’s balls, Ramón was fine with that.

  “What are you going to do with the poor fucker when you catch him?”

  “Correct the illusion of his existence,” Maneck said. “To be observe
d cannot happen. The illusion that it has happened is prime contradiction, gaesu, the negation of reality. If we were to be seen, we would not be what we are, we would never have been what we are. That which cannot be found cannot be found. This is contradiction. It must be resolved.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. The man, he’s already seen you.”

  “He is still within illusion. If he is prevented from reaching his kind, the information cannot diffuse. He will have been corrected. The illusion of his existence will have been denied. If he is real, however, we cannot be.”

  Ramón unwrapped the hierba leaf, sucked the meat from his strip of smoked fish, then dropped the empty bone on the slats at his feet.

  “You know, monster, to make as little sense as you, I have to drink for half a night.”

  “I do not understand.”

  “That’s the point, cabrón.”

  “Your consumption of liquid affects your communication? Was your time at the camp insufficient to express this?”

  “That was river water,” Ramón said impatiently. “Liquor. I mean, drink liquor. I’ve got the only devil in hell that’s never heard of hard drink!”

  “Explain to me ‘hard drink.’”

  Ramón scratched his belly. The smooth skin under his fingertips seemed momentarily odd. How could he explain drinking—really drinking—to a thing with a half-crazed devil’s mind?

  “There’s a thing. It’s a liquid,” Ramón said. “It’s called alcohol. You get it from things fermenting. Fermenting. Breaking down. Potatoes make vodka, and grapes make wine, and grain makes beer. And when you drink it, when a man drinks it…it lifts him up out of himself. You understand? All the things he’s supposed to be, they don’t bother him so much anymore. All the petty fucking shit that ties him up, it lets loose a little. Piss. I don’t know. This is like telling a virgin what it’s like to fuck.”

  “It loosens bindings,” Maneck said. “It makes you free.”