Hunters Run Page 0,42

orange eyes flickered.

"I am Ramon Espejo!" Ramon shouted. "I flew that van out here. I set the charges. Me! I am the one that did that! I'm not some fucking finger grown in a fucking vat!"

"You are becoming agitated," Maneck said. "Contain your anger, or I will use the pain."

"Use it!" Ramon shouted. "Go on, you coward! Are you afraid of me?" He gathered saliva in his mouth and spit full into Maneck's face.

The glob of spittle struck the alien beneath one eye and ran slowly down the side of its face. Maneck seemed more puzzled than offended, displaying none of the normal human revulsion. It wiped the spit away carefully and stared at the wetness of its fingers. "What is the meaning of this action?" it asked. "I sense that this substance is not venomous. Does it have a function?"

All the fight went out of Ramon, like air rushing from a pricked balloon. "Wipe your face, pendejo," he whispered, and then sank to a crouch, wrapping his arms around his knees. It was true. He was an abomination. Cold sweat broke out on his forehead, his armpits, the back of his knees. He was coming to believe what Maneck had said: he was not the real Ramon Espejo, he wasn't even really human, he was some monster born in a vat, an unnatural thing only three days old. Everything he remembered was false, had happened to some other man, not to him. He'd never been out of the mountain before, never broken heads in a bar fight, never fucked a woman. He'd never even met a real human being, in spite of his memories of all the people he thought he knew.

How he wished he had never come here, never set that fateful charge! And then he realized that he had not done any of those things. It had been the other who had done them. All of the past belonged to the other. He had nothing but the present, nothing but Maneck and surrounding forest. He was nothing. He was nobody. He was a stranger to the world.

The thought was vertiginous, almost unthinkable, and deliberately, with an enormous effort of will, he put it aside. To think deeply about it would lead to madness. Instead, he concentrated on the physical world around him, the cold wind in his face, the clouds scuttling through an ominous indigo sky. Whoever or whatever he was, he was alive, out in the world, reacting to it with animal intensity. The iceroot smelled as good as his false memories said it should, the wind felt as cool and refreshing as it swept across the meadow; the immense vista of the Sierra Hueso on the far horizon, sun flashing off the snowcaps on the highest peaks, was as beautiful as it ever was, and the beauty of it lifted his heart, as it always did. The body keeps on living, he thought bitterly, even when we do not wish it to.

He forced the thought from his mind. He couldn't afford despair, if he was going to survive. Nothing had changed, regardless of his origin, whether he'd been grown in a pot like a chili pepper or popped bloody and screaming out of his mother's womb. He was Ramon Espejo, no matter what the alien said, no matter what his hands looked like. He had to be, because there was no one else to be. What difference did it make if there was another man out there that also thought that he was him? Or a hundred such? He was alive, right here and now, in this instant, whether he was three days old or thirty years, and that was what mattered. He was alive - and he intended to stay that way.

He looked up at the alien, who was waiting with surprising patience. "How can what you say be true?" Ramon said through tight lips. "I'm not an ignorant peasant - I know what a clone is. It's just a baby that has to grow up, like every baby. It wouldn't have my memories. It doesn't work like that."

"You know nothing of what we can and cannot do," Maneck chided, "and yet you assert otherwise. You refer to the creation of a novel individual from a similar gross molecular template. That process would be development. You are the expression of recapitulation. The two are dissimilar." Maneck paused. "The thought fits poorly in your language, but if you were to gain enough atakka to understand