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rose and fell. Again, the strange curling motion. Ramon suddenly recalled a journalist who had come to S?o Paulo from Kigiake whose only word of Spanish had been gracias. The alien was the same - a single gesture repeated for every occasion; employed ubiquitously.

The alien turned away, took a few inhumanly graceful strides, then shifted its torso back toward Ramon and gestured again. Follow me. The other two aliens were still as stone except for the restless twitching of their snouts.

"I get taken captive by aliens, and they're too stupid to talk," Ramon said, bravado and anger filling him. "Hey, you. Pendejo. Why the fuck would I follow you, eh? Give me a good fucking reason."

The alien stood motionless. Ramon spat, the sputum vanishing as soon as it struck the black tongue-like platform, which seemed to absorb it with a slurping noise. Ramon shook his head in disgust; in fact, there didn't seem to be anything else for him to do but follow. He came forward slowly, his footing unreliable on the disturbingly wet, velvety ground, which gave under him with every step, looking warily all around him, wondering if he should try to run. Run to where, though? And some of the objects suspended from the alien's belt were almost certainly weapons ...

Ahead was a door cut through the naked rock of the cavern wall, into which the alien disappeared, looking back once again to make its favorite gesture.

Trying to wear his nakedness like a suit of clothes, Ramon followed the alien into the darkness. The other two beasts fell in close behind.

Chapter Six

Afterward, Ramon could not clearly remember that trip. He was led through tunnels barely wide and tall enough to allow the alien to pass. The tunnels slanted steeply up and down, and doubled back on themselves, seemingly at random. The rock was slightly phosphorescent, providing just enough light to let him see his footing. He refused to look behind at the following shapes, although his nerves were crawling like worms.

The silence was heavy here in the belly of the hill, although occasionally a faraway hooting could be heard through many thicknesses of rock. It sounded to Ramon like the noise damned souls might make crying unheeded to a cold and distant God. Sometimes they passed through pockets of light and activity, rooms full of chattering noise and rich, rotten smells, rooms drenched in glaring red or blue or green illumination, rooms dark as ink but for the faint silver line of the path they followed. Once, they stood motionless for long moments in such a room, while Ramon's stomach dropped and he wondered if they could be in an elevator.

Each chamber they passed through seemed more surreal than the last. In one, things that looked like oversize spiders lay in a clump in the center of what looked like a sluggishly moving pool of glowing blue oil. Another high-ceilinged chamber teemed with aliens, swarming over terraced layers of strange 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 his three companions 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 what looked like spongy molasses down a stairstep fall of boulders, touching the flowing mass occasionally with a long, black rod, as if to urge it along.

It was too much to take in. Ramon's conscious mind was spinning too fast in desperate attempts to make sense of what he saw. The nightmare walk became an interminable series of incomprehensibilities. A great gray tentacle reached out from one wall, caressing the alien before him, and then dropped to the ground and slithered away like a snake. A scent like cardamom and fried onions and rubbing alcohol filled the air and vanished. The deep throbbing booms that he had heard earlier filled the air at intervals that seemed to have no pattern, though Ramon found himself slowly learning to anticipate them.

Away from the chambers, in the tunnels, it was close and dark and silent. The lead alien's back gleamed pale and faint in the phosphorescent glow of the rock, like a fish in dark water, and,