Four

In the privacy of his mind, Ramon searched for hope. Eleana would notice he was missing. Maybe. Given enough time. Or she might think he'd gone off again, down to Neuvo Janiero without her, to file his reports and collect his fees. Or run off on a drunken spree with some other woman. He weighed the probabilities; she might call for help and start a search, or she might wait, getting angrier and angrier until she worked herself into a blind rage over his absence. No. Eleana couldn't be trusted to search for him. Maybe Old Sanchez would start an inquiry when he didn't bring the van back. Or that bastard Javier in Diegotown might notice that no one was staying in his rooms. Rent would come due in two weeks …

There was no one. That was the truth. He had lived his life on his own terms—always on his own terms—and here was the price of it. He had no one to rescue him. He was on his own, hundreds of miles from the nearest human settlement, captured and enslaved. So he would have to find his own way out. Escape. If only there was a way to avoid the pain that his slick, pulsing, fleshy leash could mete out.

Maneck tugged at the sahael and Ramon looked up, aware for the first time that they had stopped. The alien thing pushed a bundle into his arms. Clothes.

The clothes were a sleeveless one-piece garment, something like pajamas, a large cloak, and hard-soled slipper-boots, all made from a curious lusterless material. He pulled them on with fingers stiff from cold. The aliens were obviously not used to tailoring for humans; the clothes were clumsily-made and ill-fitting, but at least they afforded him some protection against the numbing cold. It wasn't until his nakedness was covered and warmth began to return to his limbs that his teeth began to chatter.

Maneck tugged him brusquely along into another high-ceilinged chamber. The place teemed with aliens, swarming over terraced layers of objects on the cavern floor. Equipment, perhaps, machines, computers, although most things here were so unfamiliar that they registered only as indecipherable blurs, weird amalgams of shape and shadow and winking light. Far across the cave, two giant aliens—similar to Maneck and the others, but fifteen or twenty feet tall—labored in gloom, lifting and stacking what looked like huge sections of honeycomb, moving with ponderous grace, as unreal and hallucinatorily beautiful as stop-motion dinosaurs in old horror movies. To one side, a smaller alien was herding a flow of spongy molasses down over a stairstep fall of boulders, touching the flowing mass occasionally with a long black rod, as if to urge it along.

On the other side of the room, up against the cavern wall, was a rank of the flying motorcycles. One had been fitted out with a sidecar. Ramon waited leadenly while Maneck examined the cycle, running its long slender fingers carefully over the controls. He could feel himself becoming dazed and passive, numbed by weariness and shock—he'd been through too much, too fast. And he was tired, more tired than he could remember being before; perhaps the shot they'd given him was wearing off. He was almost asleep on his feet when Maneck seized him, lifted him into the air as if he was a little child, and stuffed him into the sidecar. He struggled to sit up, but Maneck seized his arms, drew them behind his back, and bound them with a thin length of wire-like substance, then hobbled his legs, before turning and straddling the operator's saddle. Maneck touched a pushplate, and the cycle rose smoothly into the air.

Acceleration pushed Ramon's head against the rim of the sidecar, pinning it at an uncomfortable angle. In spite of the terror of his situation, he realized that he was not able to stay awake any longer. Even as they rose up toward the high-domed cavern roof, his eyes were squeezing shut, as though the mild g-forces that pulled with mossy inevitability on his bones were also drawing him inexorably into sleep.

Above them, the rock opened.

As Ramon's consciousness faded away, drowning him in hissing white snow, he saw, beyond the hole in the sky, a single pale and isolate star.

They leveled off. Maneck sat the cycle's saddle unshakably, firm and cold as a statue, quills rippling in the bitter wind. Banking again, falling at a slant through the air. He couldn't have been insensible for more than a minute or two, Ramon realized; that was the alien's mountain just behind them, the exit-hole now irised shut again, and that was the mountain slope where he'd been captured just below. Even as they coasted down toward it, the sky was growing significantly darker around them. The sun had gone behind the horizon some moments before, leaving only the thinnest sliver of glazed red along the junction line of land and air. The rest of the sky was the color of plum and eggplant and ash, dying rapidly to ink-dark blackness overhead and to the west. Armed and bristling with trees, the mountain slope rushed up to meet them. Too fast! Surely they would crash …

They touched down lightly in the upland meadow where Ramon had made his camp, settling out of the sky as silently as the shadow of a feather. Maneck killed the cycle's engine. Blackness swallowed them, and they were surrounded by the sly and predatory noises of evening. In that darkness, Maneck seized Ramon, and, lifting him like a child's toy, dragged him from the cycle, carried him a few feet away, and dropped him to the ground.

Ramon groaned involuntarily, startled and ashamed by the loudness of his voice. His arms were still bound behind him, and to lay upon them was excruciatingly painful. He rolled over onto his stomach. The ground under him was so cold that it was comfortable, and even in his present sick and confused condition, Ramon realized that that was death. He thrashed and squirmed, and managed to roll himself up in the long cloak he'd been given; it was surprisingly warm. He would have fallen asleep then, in spite of his pain and discomfort, but light beat against his eyelids where there had been no light, and he opened his eyes.

The light seemed blinding at first, but it dimmed as his eyes adjusted. Maneck had brought something from the cycle, a small globe attached to a long metal rod, and jammed the sharp end of the rod into the soil; now the globe was alight, burning from within with a dim bluish light, sending off rhythmic waves of heat. As Ramon watched, Maneck walked around the globe—the sahael shortening visibly with each step—and came slowly toward him with seeming deliberation. Only then, watching Maneck prowl toward him, seeing the wet gleam in the corner of its orange eyes as it looked from side to side, seeing the way its nose crinkled and twitched, the way its head swiveled and swayed restlessly on the stubby neck, the shrugging of its shoulders at each step, hearing the iron rasp of its breath, smelling its thick musky odor—only then did some last part of Ramon's mind fully accept the fact that Maneck was an alien, accept it all the way down at the most basic of gut levels. It was not an odd animal, a man in costume, a robot, a dream, an illusion, a trick: it was an intelligent alien being, and he was its captive, alone and at its mercy in the wilderness.

That simple knowledge hit Ramon with such force that he felt the blood begin to drain out of his face, and even as he was worming and scrambling backward in a futile attempt to get away from the monster, he was losing his grip on the world, losing consciousness, slipping down into darkness.

The alien stood over him, seen again through the hazy white snow of faintness, seeming to loom up endlessly into the sky like some horrid and impossible beanstalk, with eyes like blazing orange suns. That was the last thing Ramon saw. Then the snow piled up over his face and buried him, and everything was gone.

I will kill you, Ramon thought. There was very little anger in it. Only a deep, animal certainty. Somehow, I will kill you.

Maneck hauled Ramon to his feet and set him loose, but his legs would not hold him, and he crashed back to the ground as soon as he was released. Again Maneck pulled him up, and again Ramon fell.

As Maneck reached for him the third time, Ramon screamed, "Kill me! Why don't you just kill me?" He wormed backward, away from Maneck's reaching hand. "You might as well just kill me now!"

Maneck stopped. Its head tilted to one side to regard Ramon curiously, in an oddly birdlike manner. The cool orange eyes peered at him closely, unblinking.

"I need food," Ramon went on in a more reasonable tone. "I need water. I need rest. I can't use my arms and legs if they're tied like this. I can't even stand, let alone walk!" He heard his voice rising again but couldn't stop it. "Listen, you monster, I need to piss! I'm a man, not a machine!" With a supreme effort, he heaved himself to his knees and knelt there in the dirt, swaying. "Is this aubre? Eh? Good! Kill me, then! I can't go on like this!"

Man and alien stared at each other for a long, silent moment. Ramon, exhausted by his outburst, breathed in rattling gasps. Maneck studied him carefully, snout quivering. At last, it said, "You possess retehue?"

"How the shit would I know?" Ramon croaked, his voice rasping in his dry throat. "What the fuck is it?" He drew himself up as much as he could, and glared back at the alien.

"You possess retehue," the alien repeated, but it was not a question this time. It took a quick step forward, and Ramon flinched, afraid that the death he'd demanded was on its way. But instead, Maneck cut him free.

At first, he could feel nothing in his arms and legs; they were as dead as old wood. Then sensation came back into them, burning like ice, and they began to spasm convulsively. Ramon set his face stoically and said nothing, but Maneck must have noticed and correctly interpreted the sudden pallor of his skin, for it reached down and began to massage Ramon's arms and legs. Ramon shrunk away from its touch—again he was reminded of snakeskin, dry, firm, warm—but the alien's powerful fingers were surprisingly deft and gentle, loosening knotted muscles, and Ramon found that he didn't mind the contact as much as he would have thought that he would; it was making the pain go away, after all, which was what really counted.

"Your limbs have insufficient joints," Maneck commented. "That position would not be uncomfortable for me." It bent its arms backward and forward at impossible angles to demonstrate. With his eyes closed, it was almost possible for Ramon to believe that he was listening to a human being—Maneck's Portuglish was much more fluent than that of the alien in the pit, and its voice had less of the rusty timbre of the machine. But then Ramon would open his eyes and see that terrible alien face, ugly and bestial, only inches from his own, and his stomach would turn over, and he would have to adjust all over again to the fact that he was chatting with a monster.

"Stand up now," Maneck said. It helped Ramon up and supported him while he limped and stomped in a slow semicircle to work out cramps and restore circulation, looking as if he was performing some arthritic tribal dance. At last, he was able to stand unsupported, although his legs wobbled and quivered with the strain.

"We have lost time this morning," Maneck said. "This is all time we might have employed in exercising our functions." You could almost imagine that it sighed. "I have not previously performed this type of function. I did not realize that you possessed retehue, and therefore failed to take all factors into account. Now we must suffer delays accordingly."

Suddenly, Ramon understood what retehue must be. He was more baffled than outraged. "How could you not realize that I was sentient? You were there all the while I talked to the white thing in the pit!"

"We were present, but I had not integrated yet, " Maneck said simply. It did not elaborate further, and Ramon had to be content with that. "Now that I am, I will observe you closely. You are to demonstrate the limitations to the human flow. Once we are informed, the man's path is better predicted."

That's not hard to guess, Ramon thought, but did not say. If there is some other poor bastard out here, knowing these monsters are after him, he's pushing like hell for Fiddler's Jump.

"Speaking of flow," Ramon said. "I still have to piss."

"Elimination of waste will suffice as a starting point. I will observe."

"I don't think so," Ramon said. "You can stay here."

To his surprise, the alien did as it was told. Ramon walked unsteadily to the edge of the meadow, the leash in his neck hardly tugging him as he walked. He pissed into the scrub brush and tried to make sense of the alien's behavior. The limitations of human flow, it had said. For a being so fascinated by purpose, Maneck was strangely interested in Ramon's need to urinate, which ought to have struck it as irrelevant. It wasn't an activity that seemed important to hunting down the fugitive. It had not known that binding his arms behind him would discomfort him. Ramon stood for a long moment after his bladder was empty, considering. Perhaps the aliens needed him in order to understand what the habits of a man were. He was more than a hound. Merely by being human, he was a guide for them.

Ramon pulled his clothes back into place, disturbed for a moment by how rough the fabric felt against his skin. Maneck loomed by the cycle, still as a tree. Ramon shrugged and returned.

"You are complete?" Maneck asked.

"Sure," Ramon said. "Complete enough for the moment."

"You have other needs?"

"I should eat. Do you have any food?"

Maneck paused for a long moment, as if struggling to understand the question. Then its snout twitched.

"No," it said. "The oekh I have would not nourish you. How do you obtain food? I will allow you to procure it for yourself."

Every minute that Ramon stalled was a gift to the fugitive, whoever he was, wherever he was. If he could stall long enough for the man to escape, that might bring help. If the prey could escape the net, someone would come. The news would spread. Eleana and Sanchez would guess what had happened to him. It was his best hope. Feeding off the land wasn't hard. The amino acids that had built up the biosphere of Sao Paolo were almost all identical to those on earth. A half-hour of gathering would have gotten him enough mianberry to make a small meal. Sug beetles would boil up in three minutes and tasted like lobster. This far north, you could pick them off the trees by the handful. But none of that would take long enough.

"We'll have to improvise some traps," Ramon said. "It could take a while."

"We will begin," Maneck said.

Ramon scouted the wreckage that had been his van and tent, gathering the lengths of wire, cloth, and rope he needed to set up snares. The animals this far north were naïve, unfamiliar with traps, never having been hunted by humans before, and so were easy to catch. He tied the ropes and bent the wire, surprised by how much the metal bit into the flesh of his hands. The syrup bath in which the aliens had soaked him must have melted away the calluses from his hands and feet, leaving his fingers ill-prepared for real work. Still, he placed the snares, Maneck watching him with what seemed sometimes like profound curiosity, sometimes like impatience, but was likely an emotion Ramon had never felt or heard named.

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. Ramon 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 when he rose and walked out to check his catch—two grasshoppers, and a gordita, the fuzzy round marsupials that the paulistas 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 Ramon 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 tatecredue?"

"No," Ramon said as he strung the bodies on the length of carrying twine. "It's not their tatecredue. 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. "Food is ae euth'eloi—a made thing. 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 tatecredue. Ae euth'eloi does not interfere with the flow."

Ramon 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, Ramon started a small cookfire. When the flames were crackling well, the alien turned to look at Ramon. "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.

Ramon 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 Ramon and sank to the ground, its legs bending backwards grotesquely. "It will be interesting to observe this function. Proceed."

"I need a knife," Ramon said.

Wordlessly, the alien plucked a cylinder from its belt and handed it to Ramon. When Ramon turned it over in bafflement, Maneck reached across and did something to the cylinder, and a six-inch silver wire sprang out stiffly. Ramon took the strange knife and began gutting the gordita. The wire slid easily through the flesh. Perhaps it was the hunger that focused Ramon so intently on his task, because it wasn't until he had set the gordita on a spit over the fire and begun on the first grasshopper that he realized what the alien had done. It had handed him a weapon.

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, Ramon 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 grasshopper. With its legs and scales cut away, its flesh was soft and pink as raw tuna. Maneck leaned closer, as Ramon 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 grasshopper, exposing the mottled black-and-yellow flesh of its throat, and then he struck—

Abruptly, he was laying on his back on the ground, staring up into the tall 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. His throat was raw, and he wondered if he had screamed. He had dropped the knife.

You fool, he thought.

Maneck moved into his field of vision and stood looking down at him. "That was unwise of you," it said, placidly. "It is not possible to take me by surprise. It cannot be done. Do you understand this?"

"You can … you can read my mind?"

"The sahael drinks from the flow of your body. I am tied to your neural pathways as an overseer. The intention to act precedes the action, and begins cascading flows. All flows relate and interact, and so you cannot act before I am aware of the action you are taking. You are a primitive being not to know this."

Maneck lifted him easily and set him on his feet. To Ramon'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."

Ramon 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 not even a threat to it.

"You are … distressed," Maneck said. "Why?"

"Because you are still alive!" Ramon spat.

The alien seemed to consider this.

"You attempted to function, and failed in your task. The distress you feel is an awareness of aubre, and shows promise for you, but you have not understood your tatecredue. These outbursts are part of your proper functioning. The uncontrolled violence, the tiny bladder and inefficient means of expelling nitrogenous waste, the aversion to eating the rind of another creature … all these things inform our behavior and lead us to the better fulfillment of our purpose. If you do not embody the weaknesses of the man as well as the strengths, we cannot prevent him from reaching others of his kind."

"My strengths are meaningless," Ramon said bitterly. "Another man might not have tried to kill you. Or he might have found some better way to do it. You have nothing to learn from me."

"He would have done as you have," Maneck said. "He could not do otherwise, anymore than a single flow can move against itself. Turbulence can only come of aubre or else from without."

Something shifted in the back of Ramon's mind. The roughness of the alien cloth against his skin, the calluses gone from his fingertips. He had not been breathing in that tank. His heart had not been beating. He dropped the knife, the wire scooping up a tiny spray of dirt where it landed. Slowly, he pulled back his sleeve. The scar he'd gotten in the machete fight with Chulo Lopez at the bar outside Little Dog, the trails of puckered white flesh that Eleana's fingertips opened and re-opened when they tore at each other during half-crazed sex, were gone. There were no cigaret stains on his fingers. None of the small nicks and discolorations and calluses that were the legacy of a lifetime working with your hands. Over the years, his arms had been burnt almost black by the sun, but now his skin was smooth and unblemished and pale brown as an eggshell. An awareness half-buried rose up in him, and he went cold.

"What have you done?" he said.

The alien stood still, observing him.

"What have you done!" Ramon screamed.

"I have performed many functions," Maneck said slowly, like a teacher speaking to a very dim child. "Which of these distresses you?"

"My body! My skin! What did you do to me?"

"Ah! Interesting. You are capable of khetanae. This may not be good. I doubt the man is able to integrate, and even if he did, it would not cause this disorientation. You may be diverging from him."

"What are you talking about, monster!"

"Your distress," Maneck said, simply. "You are becoming aware of who you are."

"I am Ramon Espejo!"

"No," Maneck said. "You are not that person."

"As you express that flow, you collapse into the forms from which you came. There was some loss of fidelity, so those forms that were of controlling function were emphasized—the brain and nerve column—while the skin complications were sacrificed. You will continue to develop across time."

"I am Ramon Espejo," Ramon said. "And you are a filthy whore with breath like a Russian's asshole."

"Both of these things are incorrect," Maneck said patiently.

"You're lying!"

"The language you use is not a proper thing. The function of communication is to transmit knowledge. To lie would fail to transmit knowledge. That is not possible."

Ramon's face went hot, then cold. "You're lying," he whispered.

"Your flesh is seared," Maneck said, and it was a long moment before Ramon understood. The gordita hadn't been turning on its spit. The meat was starting to burn. He sat up and shifted it, exposing the raw pink flesh that had been on the top to the heat of the flame. It was something concrete, physical, immediate. The scent of roasting meat woke a hunger in him that was more powerful even than horror or despair.

The body keeps on living, he thought bitterly, even when we do not wish it to.

"I know about cloning," Ramon said when he had composed himself. "What you say you've done isn't possible. A clone wouldn't have my memories. It would have my genes, yes, but it would be just a little baby. It wouldn't know anything about the life I've lived."

"You know nothing of what we can and cannot do," Maneck chided, "and yet you assert otherwise. This was not reproduction. You are a product of recapitulation." Maneck paused. "The thought fits poorly in your language, but if you were to gain enough atakka to understand it fully, you would diverge further from the model. It interferes with our tatecredue. Show me how the man would consume this seared flesh."

Because it was already what he had intended, Ramon did as he was bidden and ate, carving strips off the gordita with the wire knife. He felt Maneck's eyes upon him as he stuffed food greedily into his mouth, relishing the peppery taste of the meat, the grease he licked from his fingers. And as he chewed, he thought. If it was true—if he were not who he knew himself to be—then that other Ramon would not bring help. Even if he reached Fiddler's Jump, he had no way to know that his twin existed. And he might not care if he did. The other Ramon would likely think of him as a monster. An abomination.

He was an abomination. Cold sweat broke out on his forehead, his armpits, the back of his knees. He was coming to believe what Maneck had said: he was not the real Ramon Espejo, he was some monster born in a vat, an unnatural thing only three days old. Everything he remembered was false, had happened to some other man, not to him. He'd never been out of the mountain before, never broken heads in a bar fight, never made love to a woman. This meat he was eating now was the first meal he'd ever had in his life.

The thought was vertiginous, almost unthinkable, and deliberately, with an effort, he put it aside. To think deeply about it would lead to madness. Instead, he concentrated on carving a slender leg from the gordita and using his teeth to strip the greasy meat from the bone. If this is the first meal of my life, at least it's a good one. Whoever or whatever he was, he was alive, out in the world, reacting to it with animal intensity. The food tasted as good as his false memories said that it should, or perhaps better; the wind felt as cool and refreshing as it swept across the meadow; the immense vista of the Sierra Hueso, sun flashing off the snowcaps on the highest peaks, was as beautiful as it ever was. None of that had changed, regardless of his origin. He was Ramon Espejo, no matter what the monster said, no matter what his hands looked like. He had to be, because there was no one else to be. What difference did it make if there was another man out there that also thought that he was him? Or a hundred such? He was alive, right here and now, in this instant, whether he was three days old or thirty, and that was what mattered. He was alive—and he intended to stay that way.

And what Maneck had revealed changed everything. There was no advantage to stalling anymore. Maybe if he could actually find that other Ramon, together they could somehow turn the tables on the alien. But how to proceed wasn't immediately clear. Certainly the other would head for Fiddler's Jump. Nothing else was even close. And likely he would go by the Rio Embudo. The big river came out of the mountains a hundred and twenty-three kilometers from his ruined camp and eventually passed through Fiddler's Jump itself. It was where he would have gone had he been frightened, wounded, and alone. First, he would have gone south, through the foothills, to bypass the rapids and the falls, and then he would have turned west, to find the river. He would have built a raft and headed down the Rio Embudo, traveling much faster than he possibly could on foot through the thick, tangled forest. And he was sure that the other would do the same. The aliens had been smart to use him as their hunting dog after all—he did know what the other would do, where he would go. He could find him..

But he also 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 Ramon's only chance. If he could alert the other that he was being pursued and trust him to take the right action, together they might destroy the alien thing 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 Ramon—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.

The last grasshopper consumed, Ramon drowned the fire and covered it over with dirt while Maneck watched. It was approaching midday. Three days, Maneck said, the other had been running. Three and a half now. He guessed that he could cover thirty kilometers in a day, especially with all the demons of Hell on his heels. That 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 forest, far from help. Ramon shuddered at the thought, but then dispelled it, grinning. That was Ramon Espejo out there. A tough-ass bastard like that wasn't going to die easy!

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," Ramon 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 his tatecredue, 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 a norteamericano 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 the sahael. 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 alien had been the one learning all this time—how a man ate, how he pissed, how he slept. Ramon had 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 know still 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.