Hunters Run Page 0,45

energy. When something is funny, I laugh."

"Explain 'funny.'"

He thought for a minute, then recalled a joke he had heard the last time he was in Little Dog. Eloy Chavez had told it to him when they went drinking together. "Listen, then, monster," he said, "and I will tell you a funny story."

The telling did not go very well. Maneck kept interrupting with questions, asking for definitions and explanations, until Ramon finally said irritably, "Son of a whore, the story will not be funny if you do not shut up and let me tell it to you! You are ruining it with all your questions!"

"Why does this make the incident less funny?" Maneck asked.

"Never mind!" Ramon snapped. "Just listen."

The alien said nothing more, and this time Ramon told it straight through without interruption, but when he was finished, Maneck twitched its snout and stared at him from expressionless orange eyes.

"Now you are supposed to laugh," Ramon told it. "That was a very funny story."

"Why is this incident funny?" it said. "The man you spoke of was instructed to mate with a female of his species and kill a large carnivore. If this was his tatecreude, he did not fulfill it. Why did he mate with the carnivore instead? Was he aubre? The creature injured him, and might have killed him. Did he not understand that this might be the result of his actions? He behaved in a contradictory manner."

"That's why the story is funny! Don't you understand? He fucked the chupacabra!"

"Yes, I comprehend that," said Maneck. "Would the story not be more 'funny' if the man had performed his function properly?"

"No, no, no! It would not be funny at all then!" He glanced sidelong at the alien, sitting there like a great, solemn lump, its face grave, and couldn't help but start to laugh again.

And then the pain came - world-rending, humiliating, abasing. It lasted longer than he had remembered; hellish and total and complex as nausea. When at last it ended, Ramon found himself curled tight in a ball, his fingers scrabbling at the sahael, which pulsed with his own heartbeat. To his shame, he was weeping, betrayed as a dog kicked without cause. Maneck stood over him, silent and implacable, and, in that moment, to Ramon, a figure of perfect evil.

"Why?" Ramon shouted, ashamed to hear the break in his voice. "Why? I didn't do anything!"

"You threaten to contract cancer to avoid our purpose. You engage in a seizure that impairs your functioning. You take pleasure in contradictions. You take pleasure in the failure to integrate. This is aubre. Any sign of aubre will be punished thus."

"I laughed," Ramon whispered. "I only laughed!"

"Any laughter will be punished thus."

Ramon felt something like vertigo. He had forgotten. He had forgotten again that this thing on the far end of his tether was not a strangely shaped man. The mind behind the opaque orange eyes was not a human mind. It had been easy to forget. And it had been dangerous.

If he was to live - if he was to escape this and return to the company of human beings - he had to remember that this thing was not like him. He was a man, however he had been created. And Maneck was a monster. He had been a fool to treat it otherwise. "I will not laugh again," Ramon said. "Or get cancer."

Maneck said nothing more, but sat down next to him. Silence stretched between them, a gulf as strange and dark as the void between stars. Many times Ramon had felt estranged from the people he was forced to deal with - norteamericanos, Brazilians, or even the full-blooded mejicanos to whom he was related courtesy of rape; they thought differently, those strangers, felt things differently, could not wholly be trusted because they could not wholly be understood. Often women, even Elena, made him feel that way too. Perhaps that was why he had spent so much of his life by himself, why he was more at home alone in the wilderness than he had ever been with the others of his kind. But all of them had more in common with him than Maneck ever could. He was separated from a norteamericano by history, culture, and language - but even a gringo knew how to laugh, and got mad when you spat on him. No such common ground united Ramon and Maneck; between them lay light-years, and a million centuries of evolution. He could take nothing for granted about