Maneck listened as he poured out his theory, or most of it. Satisfied, the alien straddled the cycle and gestured to the sidecar with a careful, studied motion. Ramon obeyed. The seat had not been fashioned for a human anatomy, but Maneck didn't bind him this time, and it was not too uncomfortable. They lifted, tilted, and angled into the sky, away from the upland plain in the shadow of the alien mountain. Ramon craned his head around for one last look. Soon the scorched mark where his van and tent had been was little more than a black thumbprint on the landscape. How he wished he had never come here, never set that fateful charge! And then he remembered 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 the cycle, the cold wind in his face, the clouds scuttling through an ominous indigo sky.
The cycle 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 widened and 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. As they passed over the barren black jumble of the foothills, Ramon heard a thin chittering squeak from below them. He peered over the rim of the sidecar. A flapjack, trilling in alarm, was diving away from them. He wondered if it might be the same one he'd seen days ago, and smiled to encounter an old friend again. And then remembered, with a chill, that he hadn't been the one who'd seen it. It was a stranger after all. As was all the rest of the world.
After a long, cold, silent time, Maneck staring wordlessly ahead as they flew, Ramon lost in his troubled thoughts, he realized that they must be nearing the river. Below them was a thick forest of iceroot, tall, gaunt trees with translucent blue-white needles like a million tiny icicles. And then it came into sight, from up here only a thin silver ribbon in the world of green and blue and orange trees and black stone—the Rio 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 other was almost surely headed.
Which meant that he might be somewhere below them now.
Ramon shifted his weight and leaned nearer the alien, shouting to him over the rush of the wind.
"Move down! We can't see him from so high up! Go lower!"
"But proximity would create a greater opportunity to alert the man to our presence. He must be near."
That was exactly what Ramon had been thinking, but now he scowled and made an impatient gesture toward the wide landscape below them.
"We can be seen from anywhere if we're all the way up here," Ramon said, and then embellished with a small lie. "Human beings are very attuned to the skies. We look up all the time. Get low, and we won't be visible from so many places. Besides, I sure as shit can't see him through the trees. Can you?"
Maneck seemed to consider this, and, in answer, the cycle slowed and dropped until they were skimming lightly over the top branches of the trees like a fly over the surface of a pond. And somewhere beneath those shifting leaves was the other. His twin. His best hope of freedom.
See us, Ramon thought, as if by pushing with his mind he might reach through space and leaf-green obscurity. See us, you stupid pendejo! See us!
The river was wide—what had been a thin ribbon seen from afar had stretched into a clear expanse of glacier-cold water. Trees pressed up to the banks, exposed roots trailing into the flow like thick fingers. Maneck swept along the river, traveling south until they found a clearing at the water's edge where an old sandbar had been abandoned by a shift in the river. There they set down. To judge from the angle of the sun, it was nearing the middle afternoon. Another two or three hours still before nightfall. Maneck, ignoring him, pulled a series of spheres and rods from the compartments of the cycle. Tools, but for what purpose Ramon couldn't guess.
"What are you doing?" Ramon asked.
"Preparing. The man is within the forest. We will find him there."
Images passed through Ramon's mind—the spheres shifting through the air, sniffing out the other man, the other him. He kept the dread from his voice when he spoke.
"That's stupid. The forest is huge. We know he will pass by on the river. We're far more south than he could possibly have gotten on foot in this time, so he's still above us somewhere. If you go poking through the trees, he can slip by. Wait here, and let him come to us. Instead of looking through the whole terreno, you only need to look from here"—Ramon pointed across the wide swath of slow water to the distant bank—"to there."
And we will be in one place, where he can find us,Ramon thought but did not say. Maneck shifted, his sinuous arms shifting for a moment like a sea creature in an unseen current.
"If the man has come further south than you think he could, he may have already passed us," Maneck said.
"So fly down the river at night. You can go faster than he can. He'll only have a raft."
Again, the seemingly boneless arms shifted, and then fell.
"This is not the way proper flow dictates, but if it is as the man would behave, we will do as you suggest."
"Good," Ramon said. "In the meantime, I'll show you how to fish. The man, he'll need to eat. You may as well see how."
"He will not set snares? As you did earlier?"
"He will," Ramon said. "But he'll set them in the water. Here. I'll show you."
Once the alien understood what Ramon needed, it cooperated. They rigged a crude fishing pole from a thin, dry limb snapped off a nearby iceroot pine and a length of pale, soft, infinitely malleable alien wire. A different sort of wire was shaped into a hook, and Ramon 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 Ramon impaled the insect.
Ramon led the alien to a likely looking spot and dropped the line. The Rio Embudo was cold to be near, and the alien clothing wasn't as thick as his own had been, but Ramon didn't complain. His thoughts were on cooking the catch, once he had it. With a bit of green wood, he could build a fire that smoked badly. Something to act as a guide for the other …
The first bite brought up something Ramon 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 Sao Paolo. This was a bloated, gray bottom dweller whose scales were dotted by white, vaguely pustulent 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," Ramon 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 canopy shifted toward the startling violet of the São Paulo sunset. Auroras danced green and blue and gold. Watching them, Ramon 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, even though he was an abomination himself, the immense, dancing sky was beautiful and a thing of comfort.
Maneck chirruped and shifted, uneasily, staring up as if searching for something in the darkening sky. Ramon glanced at it. Its eyes had shifted again to the hot orange he had first seen, and its crest had risen and bristled like a animal sensing threat.
"What?" Ramon demanded.
"You have seen something. The sahael detects a change in your flow. And yet I find nothing to trigger this effect. You will tell me what you have seen!"
"The sky," Ram
on said.
"Ah! Yes. And the man is very attuned to the sky. I recall this."
The alien shifted back to its motionless waiting, as if satisfied. Another hour or so later, Ramon finally caught a fat, white bladefish with vivid scarlet fins. It was too dark by then for fire smoke to be of use, so Ramon simply built a large cookfire and roasted the fish gently. The flesh was warm and succulent, and when he had eaten his fill, he leaned back against the cycle and yawned. He felt very full and oddly contented despite his perilous situation and inhuman companion.
"Now, if we only had something to drink, eh?" he said expansively. "And a smoke. Ah! I would enjoy a good smoke." He thought wistfully of the cigaret he'd used to light the fuse all that time ago. Or that the other had used. The cigaret he had smoked with other lungs, in another lifetime.
The alien sat a few feet away, taking its own nourishment. The sahael stretched between them.
"There is river water to drink," Maneck pointed out. "Your biology requires that you drink. But what is a 'smoke'?"
Ramon tried to describe a cigaret to the creature. Maneck's snout began to twitch in revulsion before he 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, and tossed a stone side-arm into the Rio Embudo. 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?"
Ramon 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!"
Ramon 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 Ramon think it was questioning—like a child who has to ask her parents what she has said to amuse them.
"You are having a seizure," Maneck said. "And yet the sahael suggests it is pleasurable …"
It was too much. Ramon 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 Ramon found himself spent, lying on the ground, the stars of São Paulo impassive above him.
"You are unwell?" Maneck asked.
"I'm fine, monster," Ramon said. "I'm fine. You, though, are very funny."
"I do not understand."
"No. No, you don't! That's what makes you funny."
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 monster," Ramon said. "I was laughing."
"Explain laughing. I do not comprehend this function."
He groped for an explanation the monster 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," Ramon 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 Ramon finally said irritably, "Son of a whore, the story will not be funny if you do not shut and let me tell it to you. You are ruining it with all these questions!"
"Why does this make the incident less funny?" Maneck asked.
"Never mind!" Ramon snapped. "Just listen."
The alien said nothing more, and this time he 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," Ramon 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 its species and kill a large carnivore. If this was histatecredue, 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 raped the bear."
"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, Ramon 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 Ramon, a figure of perfect evil.
"Why?" Ramon shouted, ashamed to hear the break in his voice. "Why? I did nothing to you!"
"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," Ramon said. "I only laughed!"
"Any laughter will be punished thus."
In the darkness, Ramon 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 him otherwise.
"I will not laugh again," Ramon said.
Maneck said nothing more, but sat down to watch the river. Silence stretched between them, a gulf as strange and dark as the void between stars. Many times Ramon 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 by 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 Eleana, 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 his others of his kind. But all of them had more to do with him than Maneck ever could. He was separated from anorteamericano by history, culture, and language—but even a gringo knew how to laugh. No such common ground untied Ramon 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 thesahael. The thought made him colder than the breeze from the river.
"I need to sleep," Ramon said at last.
"That is well," Maneck replied. "I will watch the river."
Ramon spread his cloak on the ground and rolled himself in it as well as he could with the sahael in the way. Before long, he found himself beginning to drift. In his torpor, he realized that the alienhad been the one learning all this time—how a man ate, how he pissed, how he slept. Ramonhad learned nothing. For all his strategy and subterfuge, he knew hardly more about the monster than when he'd first woken in darkness.
He would learn. If he had been created as the thing said, then in a way Ramon 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 knowstill locked in his mind like a rat in a pit terrier's teeth. Ramon Espejo felt the 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 Ramon Espejo had never dreamed before.
But after all, he was not Ramon Espejo.
· · · · ·
Six
· · · · ·
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. Ramon 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.
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