Hunters Run Page 0,33

north, the glaciers fed the streams and eventually the great river, the Rio Embudo, that passed through Fiddler's Jump. As he squatted, cupping the numbing cold water to his lips, he imagined setting a message in a bottle to bob its way down to civilization. Trapped by monsters! Send help! He might as well plan to make a flock of flapjacks fly him back to Diegotown. Dreaming was no better than dreaming.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and sat back.

"This is all then?" Maneck said. "Consume dead flesh and water. Emit piss. These are the channels that constrain the man?"

"Well, he'll have to take a dump sometimes. Like pissing, sort of. And he'll sleep."

"You will do these things," Maneck said.

Ramon stood, turning back toward the camp and the flying box. The alien followed him.

"You can't just command those things," Ramon said. "It's not like I'm some kind of pinche machine that you can press a button and I fall asleep. Things come in their own time."

"And the dumping?"

Ramon felt a surge of rage. The thing was an idiot; he was enslaved by a race of morons.

"It comes in its own time too," Ramon said.

"Then we will observe the time," Maneck said.

"Fine."

"While we observe, you will explain 'free.'"

Ramon paused, looking back over his shoulder. Light dappled the alien's swirling skin, an effect like camouflage.

"You will kill to be free," Maneck said. "What is 'free'?"

"Free is not with a fucking thing sticking into my neck," Ramon said. "Free is able to do what I want when I want without having to dance to anyone's fucking tune."

"Is this dance customary?"

"Christ!" Ramon yelled, wheeling on his captor. "Free is being your own goddamn man! Free is not answering to anybody for anything! Not your boss, not your woman, not the pinche governor and his pinche little army! A man who's free makes his own path where he wants to make it, and no one can stand in the way. No one! Are you too fucking stupid to understand that?"

Ramon was breathing hard as if he'd been running, his cheeks hot with blood. The hot orange eyes shifted over him. The sahael pulsed once, and a shudder of fear ran through Ramon - the presentiment of pain that never came.

"Free is to be without constraint?"

"Yes," Ramon said, mincing the words as if he were speaking to a child he disliked. "Free is to be without constraint."

"And this is possible?" it asked.

Thoughts and memories flickered through Ramon's mind. Elena. The times he'd had to scrape by without liquor in order to make the payment on his van. The police. The European.

"No," Ramon said. "It's not. But you aren't a real man if you don't try. Come on. You're holding me back. If you're going to keep this fucking thing in me, the least you can do is keep up when I walk."

At the camp, Ramon lapsed into silence, and the alien allowed him that. It seemed thoughtful and introspective itself, as far as one could judge that in a creature that looked the way it did. As the day shifted toward night, Ramon did indeed feel the call to relieve himself, and was humiliated as the alien looked on.

"How about dinner, eh?" Ramon said briskly afterward, trying to shake off his shame. "More food? It's too late to go on today anyway."

"You've just emptied your bowels," Maneck said. "Now you will fill them up again?"

"That's what it is to be alive," Ramon said. "Eating and shitting, they never stop until you're dead. Dead men don't shit, or eat, but living men have to, or they soon stop living." A thought struck him, and he glanced slyly at the alien. "The man will have to eat too. The man you're chasing. You may as well learn how he'll do it. I'll show you how to fish."

"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 and - after a tedious consultation with Maneck, who took a long time to understand what Ramon wanted - a length of pale, soft, malleable wire supplied by the alien. A stiffer 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.