Hunters Run Page 0,12
unpeopled places. The tension that came with being around people loosened. In the city - Diegotown or Nuevo Janeiro or any place where too many people came together - Ramon had always felt the press of people against him. The voices just out of earshot, the laughter that might or might not have been directed at him, the impersonal stares of men and women, Elena's lush body and her uncertain mind; they were why Ramon drank when he was in the city and stayed sober in the field. In the field there was no reason to drink.
But here, where that peace should have been, the European was with him. Ramon would look out into the limitless bowl of the sky, and his mind would turn back to that night at the El Rey, the sudden awed silence of the crowd. The blood pouring from the European's mouth. His heels drumming against the ground. He checked his maps, and instead of letting his mind run freely across the fissures and plates of the planetary surface, he thought of where the police might go to search for him. He could not let go of what had happened, and the frustration of that was almost as enraging as the guilt itself.
But guilt was for weaklings and fools. Everything would be all right. He would spend his time in the field, communing with the stone and the sky, and when he returned to the city, the European would be last season's news. Something half remembered and retold in a thousand different versions, none of them true. It was one little death among all the hundreds of millions - natural and otherwise - that happened every year throughout the known universe. The dead man's absence would be like taking a finger out of water; it wouldn't leave a hole.
Mountains made a line across the world before him: ice and iron, iron and ice.
Those would be the Sawtooths, which meant that he'd already overflown Fiddler's Jump. When he checked the navigation transponders, there was no signal. He was gone, out of human contact, off the incomplete communication network of the colony. On his own. He made the adjustments he'd planned, altering his flight path to throw off any human hounds that the law might set after him, but even as he did so, the gesture seemed pointless. He wouldn't be followed. No one would care.
He set the autopilot, tilted his chair back until it was almost as flat as his cot, and, in spite of the reproachful almost-presence of the European, let the miles rolling by beneath him lull him to sleep.
When he woke, the even-grander peaks of the Sierra Hueso range were thrusting above the horizon, and the sun was getting low in the sky, casting shadows across the mountain faces. He switched off the autopilot and brought the van to rest in a rugged upland meadow along the southern slopes of the range. After the bubbletent had been set up, the last perimeter alarm had been placed, and a fire pit dug and dry wood scavenged to fill it, Ramon walked to the edge of a small nearby lake. This far north, it was cold even in summer, and the water was chill and clear; the biochip on his canteen reported nothing more alarming than trace arsenic. He gathered a doublehandful of sug beetles and took them back to his camp. Boiled, they tasted of something midway between crab and lobster, and the gray stone-textured shells took on an unpredictable rainbow of iridescent colors when the occupying flesh was sucked free. It was easy to live off this country, if you knew how. In addition to sug beetles and other scavengeable foodstuffs, there was water to hand and there would be easy game nearby if he chose to stay longer than the month or two his van's supplies would support. He might stay until the equinox, depending on the weather. Ramon even found himself wondering how difficult it would be to winter over here in the north. If he dropped south to Fiddler's Jump for fuel and slept in the van for the coldest months ...
After he'd eaten, he lit a cigarette, lay back, and watched the mountains darken with the sky. A flapjack moved against the high clouds, and Ramon rose up on one elbow to watch it. It rippled its huge, flat, leathery body, sculling with its wing tips, seeking a thermal. Its ridiculous squeaky cry came clearly to him across