Hunters Run Page 0,46

the thing at the other end of the sahael. The thought made him colder than the breeze from the mountains.

It was something Mikel Ibrahim, the manager of the El Rey, had said more than once: If lions could speak, we still wouldn't understand them. His only chance was to never let himself forget that he was tethered to a lion.

Maneck nudged him. "Time to resume our functioning."

"Give me a minute," Ramon said. "I don't think I can walk yet."

Maneck was silent for a time, then turned and began pacing between the abandoned lean-to and the trees. The sahael tugged and stretched as the alien moved. Ramon tried to ignore it. Somewhere in the blindness that was the sahael's punishment, Ramon had bit his tongue. His mouth tasted of blood. Not alien ichor: coppery human blood. When he spat, it was red. If he had harbored any doubt or fears that he might have been something inhuman after Maneck and his fellow demons had done whatever it was they had done to him, they were gone now. Maneck had shown how far removed it was from humanity, and so it had also shown how much Ramon was indeed a man.

"There's something," Ramon said. "The plan you have - watching me and then searching. If I'm really the same as the pendejo that's out there now, I can tell you some things that he'd do. Specific things. Not just something any man might think of."

Maneck strode back to Ramon's side as he stood and brushed ashes and litter from his alien robes.

"You have insight into the man's probable flow," Maneck said. "You will express this insight."

"The river," Ramon said. "He'll head toward the river. If he can make it there and build a raft, he can ride it down to Fiddler's Jump. There are fish to eat, and the water's safe to drink. He could travel day and night both and he wouldn't have to rest. It would be the best thing for him to do."

Maneck was silent, its snout moving as if tasting the idea. And why not, Ramon thought. Tasting ideas was no stranger than anything else about the creature that controlled him.

"The man was here," Maneck said at last. "If it is his function to approach the river, it becomes a better expression of our tatecreude. You have functioned well. To avoid aubre is better than funny."

"If you say so."

"We will proceed," Maneck said and led Ramon back to the flying box.

As they swooped over the forest, he began to think more carefully about the campsite they had left behind. Small things tugged at his attention. Why had the other Ramon left the camp and returned to it so many times? Why had he gone to the trouble of catching and skinning animals when there were perfectly good sug beetles to eat? Where was the spit he'd used to roast the little animals? Slowly it occurred to Ramon that his double out there in the bush was up to something. There was a plan forming besides his own, and he couldn't quite make out its shape.

And if he was Ramon Espejo remade from a bit of flesh by unthinkable alien technology, if he was truly identical to the man out there, the man he remembered being, shouldn't he already know what it was? Perhaps his simple acceptance of his identity wasn't as straightforward as he'd thought. He found himself wondering whether the sahael could do more than humiliate him with pain. Perhaps it could slide some sort of drug into his blood that made him calmer, more accepting, more likely to ignore the questions that arose from his curious situation. Now that he considered it, this was not how he would have expected himself to react.

The alien had instructed him not to diverge from his identity as Ramon Espejo, and he had followed that order. Was that really how a man would react? Was that how he would have reacted, if his route to this moment hadn't been through the vat?

There was no way to know. All he could do was dismiss these doubts from his mind and pin his hopes on that other Ramon Espejo, who was lurking somewhere out there in the forest. He was probably close. Three days, Maneck had said, the other had been running. It was almost five now. He guessed that he could cover thirty kilometers in a day, especially with all the demons of Hell on his heels. That would put his