“My belly. My arm. The scars I had…”
“Perfect fidelity was sacrificed. As time progresses, they will tend toward the forms that express the whole.”
“I’ll get my scars back?”
“All of your physical systems will continue to approximate the source form. The information retrieval is similarly progressing.”
“My memory? You’re saying that all this is fucking with my memory too?”
“To better approximate is to better approximate,” it said. “This is self-evident.”
Ramón stared at Maneck. All at once, he realized why the aliens didn’t have sex. They were grown in vats too, just like he had been. Maybe they’d been created in the same one! He and this ugly sonofabitch were brothers, more alike than either of them were like the real Ramón Espejo.
“You’ve made me a monster, just like you,” he said bitterly, feeling himself beginning to shake again. “I’m not even human anymore!”
The sahael pulsed once, as if in warning, and Ramón’s belly went cold and tight with fear, but the pain didn’t come. Instead, to Ramón’s great surprise, Maneck extended one long, oddly jointed arm and placed its hand awkwardly on Ramón’s shoulder, like a gesture of comfort copied from a bad description. “You are a living creature possessed of retehue,” it said. “Your origin is of no consequence, and you should not concern yourself with it. You may still fulfill your tatecreude by exercising your function. No living being can aspire to more than that.”
This was close enough to his earlier thoughts to give him pause. He pushed the thing’s arm away and stood up. The sahael thinned and extended, letting him walk some distance away. Surprising Ramón again, Maneck made no attempt to follow. At the fire pit, Ramón sat, taking the cigarette case from the ground, flipping it open. It was the nearest thing he’d had to a mirror since he’d been lifted from the vat. His face was smoother than the one he was accustomed to, fewer lines at the corners of his eyes. The moles and scars were gone. His hair was finer and lighter. He looked different, unformed. He looked young. He looked like himself, but also not.
The world threatened to whirl around him again, and he steadied himself with his hands, his palms against the solid ground of São Paulo, anchoring himself in reality, anchoring himself in the present. If what Maneck had revealed was true, if there was another Ramón Espejo out there, that changed everything. There was no advantage to stalling anymore. If the other Ramón returned to Fiddler’s Jump, there might be a reaction to his story of a secret alien base, sure, but neither that other Ramón nor anyone else would have any idea that he existed. An armed party might come to follow up, or even attack the aliens, but they wouldn’t be looking for him. Maybe if he could actually find that other Ramón, though, together they could somehow turn the tables on the alien. He knew what he himself would have done if he knew he were being hunted. He would have found a way to kill his hunters. And that now was Ramón’s only chance. If he could alert the other Ramón that he was being pursued and trust him to take the right action, together they might destroy the alien that held his leash. For a moment, he hoped deeply that what Maneck had said was the truth, that there was another mind like his own out free in the wilderness. He felt an odd surge of pride in that other Ramón—in spite of these monsters and all the powers at their command, he had gotten away from them, fooled them, showed them what a man could do.
But would the other Ramón help him, or would he be as horrified by him as he was by the alien? If he helped the other Ramón escape from his pursuers, surely the other Ramón would be grateful. Ramón tried to imagine himself turning away someone who had come to his aid when he was most in need. He didn’t believe it was a thing he would do. He would embrace this new man like a brother, hide him, help him. Set him up in business, maybe go into business with him…
Ramón spat.
That was bullshit. No, instead he’d put a knife between the other Ramón’s—his—ribs, and laugh while the alien abomination died. And yet, what other choice did he have? The other Ramón was Maneck’s enemy too. It was a common ground for now, and if there was a way to kill Maneck and free himself from the sahael, then he could handle the rest later. The questions of who and what he was, how he’d fit into a world with another Ramón in it, they’d have to wait. Survival came first. Freedom from this slavery came first. And the first thing to do was to earn Maneck’s trust, make it think that he was wholeheartedly cooperating, lull it into a sense of false security until he could find the chance to put a blade in the alien’s throat.
The plan, amorphous as it was, steadied him. If he had a scheme, there was at least a way to move forward….
“You have calmed yourself,” Maneck said. Ramón hadn’t heard it approach.
“Yes, demon,” Ramón said. “I suppose I have.”
He flipped open the cigarette case. It was empty, save for the engraved Mi Corazón that Elena had had etched in the silver. My heart. Here, my heart, smoke yourself to death. Ramón chuckled.
“I do not understand your reaction,” the alien said. “You will explain it.”
“I just wanted a cigarette,” Ramón said, keeping his tone friendly. See how safe I am? See how ready I am to cooperate with you? “Looks like that greedy fuck out there smoked them all. Too bad, eh? Ah! I would enjoy a good smoke.” He thought wistfully of the cigarette he’d used to light the fuse all that time ago. Or that the other had used. The cigarette he had smoked with other lungs, in another lifetime.
“What is a ‘smoke’?” Maneck said.
Ramón sighed. When it wasn’t like speaking to a foreigner, it was like speaking to a child.
He tried to describe a cigarette to the creature. Maneck’s snout began to twitch in revulsion before Ramón had half finished.
“I do not comprehend the function of smoking,” Maneck said. “The function of the lungs is to oxygenate the body. Does not filling the lungs with the fumes of burning plants and the waste products of their incomplete combustion interfere with this function? What is the purpose of smoking?”
“Smoking gives us cancer,” he said, repressing a grin. The alien seemed so solemn, and puzzled, that he could not resist the impulse to have a little fun with it.
“Ah! And what is ‘cancer’?”
Ramón explained.
“That is aubre!” Maneck said, its voice harsh and grating in its alarm. “Your function is to find the man, and you will not be permitted to interfere with this purpose. Do not attempt to thwart me by contracting cancer!”
Ramón chuckled, then laughed. One wave of hilarity seemed to overrush the next, and soon he was holding his side and coughing with the strength of the laughter shaking him. Maneck moved nearer, its crest rising and falling in a way that made Ramón think it was questioning—like a child who has to ask her parents what she has said to amuse them.
“Are you having a seizure?” Maneck demanded.
It was too much. Ramón howled and kicked his feet, pointing at the alien in derision. He couldn’t speak. The absurdity of his situation and the powerful strain his mind had been under amplified the humor of Maneck’s confusion until he was helpless before it. The alien moved forward and then back, agitated and uncertain. Slowly, the fit faded, and Ramón found himself spent, lying on the ground.
“You are unwell?” Maneck asked.
“I’m fine,” Ramón said. “I’m fine. You, though, are very funny.”
“I do not understand.”
“No. No, you don’t! That’s what makes you funny. You are a funny, funny, sad little devil.”
Maneck stared solemnly at him. “You are fortunate that I am not in cohesion,” it said. “If I were, we would destroy you at once and start again with another duplicate, as such fits indicate that you are a defective organism. Why did you undergo this seizure? Is it a symptom of cancer?”
“Stupid cabrón,” Ramón said. “I was laughing.”
“Explain ‘laughing.’ I do not comprehend this function.”
&nbs
p; He groped for an explanation the alien would understand. “Laughter is a good thing,” he said weakly. “Pleasurable. A man who cannot laugh is nothing. It is part of our function.”
“This is not so,” Maneck replied. “Laughing halts the flow. It interferes with proper function.”
“Laughing makes me feel good,” Ramón said. “When I feel good, I function better. It’s like food, you see.”
“That is an incorrect statement. Food provides energy for your body. Laughing does not.”
“A different kind of energy. When something is funny, I laugh.”
“Explain ‘funny.’”
He thought for a minute, then recalled a joke he had heard the last time he was in Little Dog. Eloy Chavez had told it to him when they went drinking together. “Listen, then, monster,” he said, “and I will tell you a funny story.”
The telling did not go very well. Maneck kept interrupting with questions, asking for definitions and explanations, until Ramón finally said irritably, “Son of a whore, the story will not be funny if you do not shut up and let me tell it to you! You are ruining it with all your questions!”
“Why does this make the incident less funny?” Maneck asked.
“Never mind!” Ramón snapped. “Just listen.”
The alien said nothing more, and this time Ramón told it straight through without interruption, but when he was finished, Maneck twitched its snout and stared at him from expressionless orange eyes.
“Now you are supposed to laugh,” Ramón told it. “That was a very funny story.”
“Why is this incident funny?” it said. “The man you spoke of was instructed to mate with a female of his species and kill a large carnivore. If this was his tatecreude, he did not fulfill it. Why did he mate with the carnivore instead? Was he aubre? The creature injured him, and might have killed him. Did he not understand that this might be the result of his actions? He behaved in a contradictory manner.”
“That’s why the story is funny! Don’t you understand? He fucked the chupacabra!”
“Yes, I comprehend that,” said Maneck. “Would the story not be more ‘funny’ if the man had performed his function properly?”
“No, no, no! It would not be funny at all then!” He glanced sidelong at the alien, sitting there like a great, solemn lump, its face grave, and couldn’t help but start to laugh again.
And then the pain came—world-rending, humiliating, abasing. It lasted longer than he had remembered; hellish and total and complex as nausea. When at last it ended, Ramón found himself curled tight in a ball, his fingers scrabbling at the sahael, which pulsed with his own heartbeat. To his shame, he was weeping, betrayed as a dog kicked without cause. Maneck stood over him, silent and implacable, and, in that moment, to Ramón, a figure of perfect evil.
“Why?” Ramón shouted, ashamed to hear the break in his voice. “Why? I didn’t do anything!”
“You threaten to contract cancer to avoid our purpose. You engage in a seizure that impairs your functioning. You take pleasure in contradictions. You take pleasure in the failure to integrate. This is aubre. Any sign of aubre will be punished thus.”
“I laughed,” Ramón whispered. “I only laughed!”
“Any laughter will be punished thus.”
Ramón felt something like vertigo. He had forgotten. He had forgotten again that this thing on the far end of his tether was not a strangely shaped man. The mind behind the opaque orange eyes was not a human mind. It had been easy to forget. And it had been dangerous.
If he was to live—if he was to escape this and return to the company of human beings—he had to remember that this thing was not like him. He was a man, however he had been created. And Maneck was a monster. He had been a fool to treat it otherwise.
“I will not laugh again,” Ramón said. “Or get cancer.”
Maneck said nothing more, but sat down next to him. Silence stretched between them, a gulf as strange and dark as the void between stars. Many times Ramón had felt estranged from the people he was forced to deal with—norteamericanos, Brazilians, or even the full-blooded mejicanos to whom he was related courtesy of rape; they thought differently, those strangers, felt things differently, could not wholly be trusted because they could not wholly be understood. Often women, even Elena, made him feel that way too. Perhaps that was why he had spent so much of his life by himself, why he was more at home alone in the wilderness than he had ever been with the others of his kind. But all of them had more in common with him than Maneck ever could. He was separated from a norteamericano by history, culture, and language—but even a gringo knew how to laugh, and got mad when you spat on him. No such common ground united Ramón and Maneck; between them lay light-years, and a million centuries of evolution. He could take nothing for granted about the thing at the other end of the sahael. The thought made him colder than the breeze from the mountains.
It was something Mikel Ibrahim, the manager of the El Rey, had said more than once: If lions could speak, we still wouldn’t understand them. His only chance was to never let himself forget that he was tethered to a lion.
Maneck nudged him. “Time to resume our functioning.”
“Give me a minute,” Ramón said. “I don’t think I can walk yet.”
Maneck was silent for a time, then turned and began pacing between the abandoned lean-to and the trees. The sahael tugged and stretched as the alien moved. Ramón tried to ignore it. Somewhere in the blindness that was the sahael’s punishment, Ramón had bit his tongue. His mouth tasted of blood. Not alien ichor: coppery human blood. When he spat, it was red. If he had harbored any doubt or fears that he might have been something inhuman after Maneck and his fellow demons had done whatever it was they had done to him, they were gone now. Maneck had shown how far removed it was from humanity, and so it had also shown how much Ramón was indeed a man.
“There’s something,” Ramón said. “The plan you have—watching me and then searching. If I’m really the same as the pendejo that’s out there now, I can tell you some things that he’d do. Specific things. Not just something any man might think of.”
Maneck strode back to Ramón’s side as he stood and brushed ashes and litter from his alien robes.
“You have insight into the man’s probable flow,” Maneck said. “You will express this insight.”
“The river,” Ramón said. “He’ll head toward the river. If he can make it there and build a raft, he can ride it down to Fiddler’s Jump. There are fish to eat, and the water’s safe to drink. He could travel day and night both and he wouldn’t have to rest. It would be the best thing for him to do.”
Maneck was silent, its snout moving as if tasting the idea. And why not, Ramón thought. Tasting ideas was no stranger than anything else about the creature that controlled him.
“The man was here,” Maneck said at last. “If it is his function to approach the river, it becomes a better expression of our tatecreude. You have functioned well. To avoid aubre is better than funny.”
“If you say so.”
“We will proceed,” Maneck said and led Ramón back to the flying box.
As they swooped over the forest, he began to think more carefully about the campsite they had left behind. Small things tugged at his attention. Why had the other Ramón left the camp and returned to it so many times? Why had he gone to the trouble of catching and skinning animals when there were perfectly good sug beetles to eat? Where was the spit he’d used to roast the little animals? Slowly it occurred to Ramón that his double out there in the bush was up to something. There was a plan forming besides his own, and he couldn’t quite make out its shape.
And if he was Ramón Espejo remade from a bit of flesh by unthinkable alien technology, if he was truly identical to the man out there, the man he remembered being, shouldn’t he already know what it was? Perhaps his simple acceptance of his identity wasn’t as straightforward as he’d thought. He found himself wondering whether the sahael could do more than humiliate him with pain.
Perhaps it could slide some sort of drug into his blood that made him calmer, more accepting, more likely to ignore the questions that arose from his curious situation. Now that he considered it, this was not how he would have expected himself to react.
The alien had instructed him not to diverge from his identity as Ramón Espejo, and he had followed that order. Was that really how a man would react? Was that how he would have reacted, if his route to this moment hadn’t been through the vat?
There was no way to know. All he could do was dismiss these doubts from his mind and pin his hopes on that other Ramón Espejo, who was lurking somewhere out there in the forest. He was probably close. Three days, Maneck had said, the other had been running. It was almost five now. He guessed that he could cover thirty kilometers in a day, especially with all the demons of Hell on his heels. That would put his twin almost to the river by day’s end. Unless his wounds had slowed him. Unless he had become septic and died alone in the woods, far from help. Ramón shuddered at the thought, but then dismissed it. That was Ramón Espejo out there. A tough-ass bastard like that wasn’t going to die easy!
Jesus God, he better not!
Chapter 10
Ramón had never intended to leave Earth. It was one of those accidents of circumstance, and little more. At fifteen, he’d taken work in the open pit mines of southern Mexico. One of the operators had fallen sick—too much dust in his lungs—and Ramón had taken his place. The overseer had shown him how to drive the old lift, warned him that the three-story-tall earthmovers weren’t going to slow down if he got in the way, and his career had begun. Sixteen-hour days in sun hot enough to melt and crack the plastic seals around his pitted windshield, moving and smoothing slag and gravel according to the shouted orders. The rags he tied over his mouth began the morning in any number of bright colors—blue and red and orange—and ended the gray of dirt. After one of the older workers had kicked the shit out of him, he joined a work gang under Palenki—old Palenki who was queer and crazed, mean as a rat and ruthless as the cancer that finally killed him. But he made sure no one fucked with his team. He was the one who’d shown Ramón how to stick a woman’s sanitary pad in his hard hat to keep the sweat out of his eyes.
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