Hunters Run Page 0,41

though there was some other name on the alcohol license.

Ramon had been drunk. He saw her again, black hair pulled back from an oval face. The lines at the corners of her mouth. The deep, saturated red of the wallpaper behind her. He'd seen her, and he'd remembered all the images he'd endured, all the fantasies Martin had spun of her body. When she'd looked up, caught his eye, it was like water flowing downhill. He hadn't had a choice. He'd just gone to her.

Martin, before him now, had the sheet metal hook in his hand. Ramon dropped the bloody rag at Maneck's feet, his hand going to his belly. Martin's hand had looked flayed and skinless, but the blood had been Ramon's. The pain had been hideous, the bleeding so bad Ramon had felt it in his crotch and thought he'd pissed himself. He opened the alien robe, half expecting the Martin of his memory to swing again, to cut him further, though when it had actually happened, the man had broken down weeping.

Ramon's fingers touched a smooth, almost unblemished belly. The thick, knobby scar was gone, only a hairline of white in its place. He realized now that he'd known it, his fingers had kept straying to the missing wound, his body knowing better than his mind that something was missing. The roughness of the alien cloth against his skin, the calluses gone from his fingertips and feet. 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 Elena's fingertips opened and reopened when they tore at each other during half-crazed sex were gone. There were no cigarette stains on his fingers. None of the small nicks and discolorations and calluses that were the legacy of a lifetime working with one's hands. Over the years, his arms had been burned almost black by the sun, but now his skin was smooth and unblemished and pale brown as an eggshell. An awareness half-buried rose in him, and he went cold.

He had not been breathing in that tank. His heart had not been beating.

"What did you do to me?" Ramon whispered, horror-struck. "What the fuck did you do to me? To my body?"

"Ah! Interesting," Maneck said. "You are capable of kahtenae. This may not serve us well. I doubt the man is capable of multiple integration, and even if he were, it would not produce this disorientation. You must take care not to diverge. It will not focus your tatecreude if you become too much unlike the man."

"What are you talking about, monster?"

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

"I am Ramon Espejo!"

"No," the alien said, "you are not."

Chapter Nine

Ramon - if he was Ramon - squatted, his elbows resting on his knees, hands wrapped around his bowed head. Maneck, looming beside him, explained in its deep, sorrowful voice. The man who had discovered the alien hive had been Ramon Espejo. There had been no one following him; no constable, no other van from the south. The discovery of the nest in itself had constituted contradiction, and in order to correct the illusion that the man existed, he had been attacked. He had escaped, but not uninjured. An appendage - a finger - had been torn from him in the attack. That flesh had acted as the seed for the creation of a made thing - ae euth'eloi - that had participated in the original being's flow, and woken with Ramon's memory and knowledge. Maneck had to explain twice before Ramon truly understood that it meant him.

"You participate in his flow," Maneck said. "All of the whole is present in the fragment, and the fragment may express the whole. There was some loss of fidelity, and the decision was made to favor functional knowledge and immediate recall over precise physical approximation. As you progress, you collapse into the form that shaped the fragment."

"I am Ramon Espejo," Ramon said. "And you are a lying 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.

"No," the alien said sadly. "You are a made thing."

Ramon surged to his feet, but Maneck didn't step back. The great