Hunters Run Page 0,13
the gulfs of air. They were almost level; it would be evaluating him now, deciding that he was much too big to eat. The flapjack tilted and slid away and down, as though riding a long, invisible slope of air, off to hunt squeakers and grasshoppers in the valley below. Ramon watched the flapjack until it dwindled to the size of a coin, glowing bronze in the failing light.
"Good hunting!" he called after it, and then smiled. Good hunting for both of them, eh? As the last of the daylight touched the top of the ridgeline on the valley's eastern rise, Ramon caught sight of something. A discontinuity in the stone. It wasn't the color or the epochal striations, but something more subtle. Something in the way the face of the mountain sat. It wasn't alarming as much as interesting. Ramon put a mental flag there; something strange, worth investigating in the morning.
He lounged by the fire for a few moments while the night gathered completely around him and the alien stars came out in their chill, blazing armies. He named the strange constellations the people of S?o Paulo had drawn in the sky to replace the old constellations of Earth - the Mule, the Stone Man, the Cactus Flower, the Sick Gringo - and wondered (he'd been told, but had forgotten) which of them had Earth's own sun twinkling in it as a star? Then he went to bed and to sleep, dreaming that he was a boy again in the cold stone streets of his hilltop pueblo, sitting on the roof of his father's house in the dark, a scratchy wool blanket wrapped around him, trying to ignore the loud, angry voices of his parents in the room below, searching for S?o Paulo's star in the winter sky.
Chapter Four
In the morning, Ramon poured water over the remains of the fire, then pissed on it just to be sure it was out. He ate a small breakfast of cold tortillas and beans, and disconnected his pistol from the van's power cells and tucked it into his holster, where it was a warm, comforting weight on his hip; out here, you could never be sure when you were going to run into a chupacabra or a snatchergrabber. He exchanged the soft flatfur slippers he wore in the van for his sturdy old hiking boots, and set out to hike to the discontinuity he'd spotted the night before; as always, his boots somehow seemed more comfortable crunching over the uneven ground than they had been on the city streets. Dew soaked the grasses and the leaves of the shrubs. Small monkeylike lizards leaped from branch to branch before him, calling to each other with high, frightened voices. There were millions of uncataloged species on S?o Paulo. In the twenty minutes it took him to make his way to a promising site at the base of a stone cliff, Ramon might have climbed past a hundred plants and animals never before seen by human eyes.
Before long, he found the discontinuity, and surveyed it almost with regret; he'd been relishing the effort for its own sake, pausing frequently to enjoy the view or to rest in the watery sunlight. Now he'd have to get to work.
The lichen that clung to the rock of the mountainside was dark green and grew in wide spirals that reminded Ramon of cave paintings. Up close, the discontinuity was less apparent. He could trace the striations from one face to the next without sign of a break or level change. Whatever Ramon had caught in the failing light of the day before, it was invisible now.
He took the field pack from his shoulders, lit a cigarette, and considered the mountain face before him. The stones around him appeared to be largely metamorphic - their elongated grain speaking to Ramon of the unthinkable pressure and heat near S?o Paulo's mantle. The glaciers, when they passed, would have carved this ground, strewing parts of any given field far from their origin. Still, the underlying stone was certainly igneous or metamorphic. The sedimentary layers, if there were any, would be higher up, where the ground was newest. It was the sort of place where a man might find the strike he'd hoped for. Uranium ore, possibly. Tungsten or tantalum, if he was lucky. And even if he only found gold or silver or copper, there were places he could still sell the data. The information would be worth more than