For a moment, he was back in the El Rey. He couldn’t recall anymore what precisely it was the European had said that started things. The details were all misty and uncertain, like a half-remembered dream. There had been a pachinko machine, its tiny steel balls bouncing crazily against the network of pins. And a woman with straight, black hair. It hadn’t been anything the man had said to Ramón. No one had liked the pendejo. Everyone had wanted to crack the man’s ass the other way, but Ramón had been the one to do it.
Why did you kill him?
Ramón shivered. Maneck’s steady gaze seemed to peer into his soul, as if every truth and lie in Ramón’s long, sorry life were written on his face. A sudden rush of shame possessed him.
“You have declared war on the food-thing,” Maneck intoned and Ramón’s sudden guilt vanished. Maneck no more understood him than a dog could read a news feed. With an act of will, he refrained from laughing.
“No,” Ramón said. “It’s just an animal. I need food. It is food. It’s not killing, only hunting.”
“The food-thing is not killed?”
“Yes, okay. Fine. You kill animals to eat them if you need food,” Ramón said. Then, a moment later: “And also if they’re fucking your wife.”
“I understand,” the alien said and lapsed into silence.
They waited as the sun rose higher in the perfect blue sky. Maneck ate some of his oekh, which turned out to be a brown paste the consistency of molasses with a thick, vinegary scent. Ramón scratched at the place in his neck where the sahael anchored in his flesh, and tried to ignore the emptiness of his belly. The hunger grew quickly, though, and, in spite of his good intentions about stalling as long as he could, it was less than two hours later that he rose and walked out to check his catch—two grasshoppers (almost identical to the locusts of Earth, but warm-blooded and able to nurse their young from tiny, fleshy nipples at the joints of their carapace), and a gordita, one of the fuzzy round marsupials that the colonists called “the little fat ones of the Virgin.” The gordita had died badly, biting itself in its frenzy. Its spiky fur was already black with thick, tarry blood. Maneck looked on with interest as Ramón removed the animals from the snares.
“It is difficult to think of this as having anything to do with food,” it said. “Why do the creatures strangle themselves for you? Is it their tatecreude?”
“No,” Ramón said as he strung the bodies on the length of carrying twine. “It’s not their tatecreude. It’s just something that happened to them.” He found himself staring at his hands as he worked, and, for some reason, his hands made him uneasy. He shrugged the feeling away. “Don’t your people hunt for food?”
“The hunt is not for food,” Maneck said flatly. “The hunt is wasted on creatures such as these. How can they appreciate it? Their brains are much too small.”
“My stomach is also too small, but it will appreciate them.” He stood up, swinging the dead animals over his shoulder.
“Do you swallow the creatures now?” Maneck asked.
“First they must be cooked.”
“Cooked?”
“Burned, over a fire.”
“Fire,” Maneck repeated. “Uncontrolled combustion. Proper food does not require such preparation. You are a primitive creature. These steps waste time, time which might be better used to fulfill your tatecreude. Ae euth’eloi does not interfere with the flow.”
Ramón shrugged. “I cannot eat your food, monster, and I cannot eat these raw.” He held the carcasses up for inspection. “If we are to get on with me exercising my function, I need to make a fire. Help me gather sticks.”
Back at the clearing, Ramón improvised a bow-starter and started a small cook fire. When the flames were crackling well, the alien turned to look at Ramón. “Combustion is proceeding,” it said. “What will you do now? I wish to observe this function ‘cooking.’”
Was that an edge of distaste in the alien’s voice? He suddenly had a flash of how odd the process must seem to Maneck: catching and killing an animal, cutting its pelt off and pulling out its internal organs, dismembering it, toasting the dead carcass over a fire, and then eating it. For a moment, it seemed a grotesque and ghoulish thing to do, and it had never seemed like that before. He stared down at the gordita in his hand, and then at his hand itself, sticky with dark blood, and the subtle feeling of wrongness he’d been fighting off all morning intensified once again. “First I must skin them,” he said resolutely, pushing down the uneasiness, “before I can cook them.”
“They have skin already, do they not?” Maneck said.
Ramón surprised himself by smiling. “I must take their skin off. And their fur. Cut it off, with a knife, you see? Way out here, I’ll just throw the pelts away, eh? Waste of money, but then grasshopper pelts aren’t worth much anyway.”
Maneck’s snout twitched, and it prodded at the grasshoppers with a foot. “This seems inefficient. Does it not waste a large portion of the food, cutting it off and throwing it away? All of the rind.”
“I don’t eat fur.”
“Ah,” Maneck said. It moved up close behind Ramón and sank to the ground, its legs bending backward grotesquely. “It will be interesting to observe this function. Proceed.”
“I need a knife,” Ramón said. When Maneck said nothing, he added, “The man would have a knife.”
“You will require one also?”
“Well, I can’t do this with my teeth,” Ramón said.
Wordlessly, the alien plucked a cylinder from its belt and handed it to Ramón. When Ramón turned it over in bafflement, Maneck reached across and did something to the cylinder, and a six-inch silver wire sprang out stiffly. Ramón took the strange knife and began gutting the gordita. The wire slid easily through the flesh. Perhaps it was the hunger that focused Ramón so intently on his task, because it wasn’t until he had set the gordita on a spit and begun on the first grasshopper that he realized what the alien had done.
It had handed him a weapon.
The thing had made its mistake. Now it would die for it.
He fought the sudden rush of adrenaline, struggling to keep the blade from wobbling in his hands, to keep his hands from shaking. Bent over the careful task of digging out the grasshopper’s rear gills, he glanced at Maneck. The alien seemed to have noticed nothing. The problem was, where to strike it? Stabbing it in the body was too great a risk; he didn’t know where the vital organs were, and he couldn’t be sure of striking a killing blow. Maneck was larger and stronger than he was. In a protracted fight, Ramón knew, he would lose. It had to be done swiftly. The throat, he decided, with a rush of exhilaration that was almost like flying. He would slash the knife as deep across the alien’s throat as he could. The thing had a mouth and it breathed, after all, so there had to be an air passage in the neck somewhere. If he could sever that, it would only be a matter of remaining alive long enough for the alien to choke to death on its own blood. It was a thin chance, but he would take it.
“Look here,” he said, picking up the body of the gordita. With its legs and scales cut away, its flesh was soft and pink as raw tuna. Maneck leaned closer, as Ramón had hoped, its eyes trained on the dead flesh in his left hand, ignoring the blade in his right. The heady elation of violence filled him, as if he was in the street outside a bar in Diegotown. The monsters didn’t know that this thing they’d captured knew how to be a monster too! He waited until Maneck turned its head a little to the side to better squint at the gordita, exposing the mottled black-and-yellow flesh of its throat, and then he struck—
Abruptly, he was sprawled on his back on the ground, staring up into the violet sky. His stomach muscles were knotted, and he was breathing in harsh little gasps. The pain had hit him like a stone giant’s fist, crumpled him and thrown him aside. It had been over in an eyeblink, too quick to be remembered, but his body still ached and twitched with the shock. He had dropped the knife.
You fool, he thought.
“Interesting,” Maneck said. “Why did you
do that? I pose you no danger, and so you need not defend yourself. I am not food for you, and so you need not kill me to eat. You have not declared war upon me. I have not gone to a bar, nor do I have money. I have not fucked your wife. And still you experience a drive to kill. What is the nature of that drive?”
Ramón would have laughed if he could; it was comic and tragic and deserving of his despairing rage. He levered himself up to sitting. Blood was smeared on his hands and chest from writhing on the corpse of the gordita.
“You…” Ramón began. “You knew.”
Maneck’s quills rose and fell. The evil, implacable orange of its eyes seemed to glow in the soft light that filtered through the forest canopy.
“The sahael participates in your flow,” it said. “It will not permit actions on your part that would interfere with your tatecreude. You cannot harm me in any fashion.”
“You can read my mind, then.”
“The sahael can prevent action that is aubre before the action takes place. I do not understand ‘read my mind.’”
“You know what I am thinking! You know what I’m going to do before I do it.”
“No. To drink from first intentions would disturb the flow and affect your function. It is only when your intention expresses aubre that you are corrected.”
Ramón wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
“So you can’t tell what I’m thinking, but you can tell what I’m going to do?”
Maneck considered him in silence, and then said, “Every movement is a cascade from intent to action. The sahael drinks from far up the cascade. The intention to act precedes the action, so you cannot act before I am aware of the action you are taking. Attempts to harm me cannot be completed, and will be punished. You are a primitive being not to know this.” It tilted its head to stare more closely at him. “Please return to the issue at hand. What is the nature of that drive? Why do you wish to kill me?”
“Because a man is supposed to be free,” Ramón said, pushing ineffectually at the thick, fleshy leash at his throat. “You’re holding me prisoner!”
The alien shifted its head from one side to the other, as if the words meant nothing to it and were literally falling from its ears. Maneck lifted him easily and set him on his feet. To Ramón’s shame and humiliation, the alien gently placed the wire knife back in his hand.
“Continue the function,” Maneck said. “You were flaying the corpse of the small animal.”
Ramón turned the silver cylinder slowly, shaking his head. He was unmanned. He could no more defeat this thing than an infant child could best his father. He was so little threat to it that it would hand him a weapon with total unconcern. He felt the urge to drive the knife into his own chest and end this humiliation, but he pushed the thoughts away before the sahael could exact its punishment.
He sharpened another small stick, using the alien knife, impaled the small bodies upon it, and held the raw meat over the flame. In the beginning, he kept the gordita and the grasshoppers far enough back that the cooking went slowly, but as the scent of grease and cooked meat woke his own belly, he let the branch dip.
The thin, stringy meat tasted better than Ramón had remembered—it was salty and had a rich, earthy taste. When he had stripped the small corpses to their thin, yellow bones, he wiped his hands on his robe and stood up.
“Let’s go. I have to find fresh water.”
“The seared flesh is not sufficient?”
Ramón spat.
“I can live for weeks without food,” he said. “No water, and I’ll die in days.”
It rose and let Ramón lead the way through the forest to a cold rushing stream, foaming white as it broke over streambed rocks. This far north, the glaciers fed the streams and eventually the great river, the Río Embudo, that passed through Fiddler’s Jump. As he squatted, cupping the numbing cold water to his lips, he imagined setting a message in a bottle to bob its way down to civilization. Trapped by monsters! Send help! He might as well plan to make a flock of flapjacks fly him back to Diegotown. Dreaming was no better than dreaming.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and sat back.
“This is all then?” Maneck said. “Consume dead flesh and water. Emit piss. These are the channels that constrain the man?”
“Well, he’ll have to take a dump sometimes. Like pissing, sort of. And he’ll sleep.”
“You will do these things,” Maneck said.
Ramón stood, turning back toward the camp and the flying box. The alien followed him.
“You can’t just command those things,” Ramón said. “It’s not like I’m some kind of pinche machine that you can press a button and I fall asleep. Things come in their own time.”
“And the dumping?”
Ramón felt a surge of rage. The thing was an idiot; he was enslaved by a race of morons.
“It comes in its own time too,” Ramón said.
“Then we will observe the time,” Maneck said.
“Fine.”
“While we observe, you will explain ‘free.’”
Ramón paused, looking back over his shoulder. Light dappled the alien’s swirling skin, an effect like camouflage.
“You will kill to be free,” Maneck said. “What is ‘free’?”
“Free is not with a fucking thing sticking into my neck,” Ramón said. “Free is able to do what I want when I want without having to dance to anyone’s fucking tune.”
“Is this dance customary?”
“Christ!” Ramón yelled, wheeling on his captor. “Free is being your own goddamn man! Free is not answering to anybody for anything! Not your boss, not your woman, not the pinche governor and his pinche little army! A man who’s free makes his own path where he wants to make it, and no one can stand in the way. No one! Are you too fucking stupid to understand that?”
Ramón was breathing hard as if he’d been running, his cheeks hot with blood. The hot orange eyes shifted over him. The sahael pulsed once, and a shudder of fear ran through Ramón—the presentiment of pain that never came.
“Free is to be without constraint?”
“Yes,” Ramón said, mincing the words as if he were speaking to a child he disliked. “Free is to be without constraint.”
“And this is possible?” it asked.
Thoughts and memories flickered through Ramón’s mind. Elena. The times he’d had to scrape by without liquor in order to make the payment on his van. The police. The European.
“No,” Ramón said. “It’s not. But you aren’t a real man if you don’t try. Come on. You’re holding me back. If you’re going to keep this fucking thing in me, the least you can do is keep up when I walk.”
At the camp, Ramón lapsed into silence, and the alien allowed him that. It seemed thoughtful and introspective itself, as far as one could judge that in a creature that looked the way it did. As the day shifted toward night, Ramón did indeed feel the call to relieve himself, and was humiliated as the alien looked on.
“How about dinner, eh?” Ramón said briskly afterward, trying to shake off his shame. “More food? It’s too late to go on today anyway.”
“You’ve just emptied your bowels,” Maneck said. “Now you will fill them up again?”
“That’s what it is to be alive,” Ramón said. “Eating and shitting, they never stop until you’re dead. Dead men don’t shit, or eat, but living men have to, or they soon stop living.” A thought struck him, and he glanced slyly at the alien. “The man will have to eat too. The man you’re chasing. You may as well learn how he’ll do it. I’ll show you how to fish.”
“He will not set snares? As you did earlier?”
“He will,” Ramón said. “But he’ll set them in the water. Here. I’ll show you.”
Once the alien understood what Ramón needed, it cooperated. They rigged a crude fishing pole from a thin, dry limb snapped off a nearby iceroot and—after a tedious consultation with Maneck, who took a long time to understand what Ramón wanted—a length of pal
e, soft, malleable wire supplied by the alien. A stiffer sort of wire was shaped into a hook, and Ramón stamped along the shore, turning over rocks until he found a fat orange gret beetle to use for bait. Maneck’s snout twitched with sudden interest as Ramón impaled the insect.
Ramón led the alien to a likely-looking spot on the side of the stream and dropped the line. As he fished, Ramón stole glances at Maneck from time to time. The alien stood and watched the water. For all the impatience it sometimes showed about getting on with their task, it seemed perfectly content to stand there, immobile and untiring, for as long as it might take. Halfway across the stream, Ramón glimpsed a flash of blue as a fish leaped from the water, but nothing took his bait. Never the most patient of men, he began to grow restive. To occupy the time, he began to whistle a silly little tune that Elena had taught him early in their time together, before the fighting had grown so bad. He could not remember the words that went with it, but that didn’t matter. The song made him think of Elena, her long, dark hair and her quick hands, callused by endless hours in her little vegetable garden. She was a small, dark woman, very pretty, though her face was dotted with the craters left by some childhood disease. Sometimes Ramón would trace the marks with his fingertips, unconsciously, and then Elena would look away. “Stop,” she would say, “stop, you remind me of how ugly I am.” And then, if he hadn’t had too much to drink, he would say, “No, no, they’re not so bad, you are very beautiful.” But Elena would never believe him.
“What is that sound you are making?” Maneck demanded, shattering Ramón’s reverie.
He frowned. “I was whistling, monster. A little song.”
“‘Whistling,’” the alien repeated. “Is this another language? I do not understand, although I hear a structure, an ordering. Explain the meaning of what you were saying.”
“I wasn’t saying anything,” Ramón said. “It was music. Your people, they don’t have music?”
Hunter's Run Page 8