these beautiful things had fallen into illusion because he had failed to bear the weight of truth.
With a sorrow as profound as any Ramon had ever felt - more than the loss of his mother and his Yaqui father, more than the heartbreak of first love - he began to eat the dead, and with every corpse that he took into himself, he became less real, more lost in aubre and sin, more fully damned.
But there was no end of them. With every tiny body he consumed, they killed a thousand more. The screaming blackness that had followed him in flight began here, opened here like a box whose lid lifted forever, continually revealing the horror that would never end. The eaters, the flowless ones, the enemy. They saw the great bouldershaped bodies, heard the strange, piping voices raised in praise of the slaughter, saw the hatchlings lifeless and crushed beneath the vast machines. Ships hung in the air like birds of prey.
I know that ship, Ramon thought. Ramon only, and not Maneck. I've been on that ship.
With a shriek that was both his and Maneck's, Ramon awoke.
Maneck crouched beside him, its long arms lifting him with something between tenderness and anger.
"What have you done?" the alien whispered, and, as it did, it seemed somehow less alien, lost and frightened and alone.
"Yes, gaesu," Ramon mumbled, hardly knowing what he was saying. "Prime contradiction! Very bad."
"You should not have been able to use the sahael this way," Maneck said fretfully. "You should not have been able to drink of my flow. You are diverging from the man. It threatens our function. You will not do this again, or I will punish you!"
"Hey," Ramon said, shaking his head, coming back to himself with a start. "You're the one who put this fucking thing in my neck! Don't blame me ."
Maneck blinked its strange orange eyes and seemed to settle back, subtly defeated. "You are correct," Maneck said after a long pause. "Your language allows for deception, but your participation in my flow was not willed. The failure is mine. I am sick and injured, or I would not have lost control of the sahael. Still, the fault is mine."
Its voice surprised and confused Ramon. It was still deep and sorrowful, but there was something else in it - a sense of regret and dread that couldn't have come entirely from Ramon's imagination. He wondered whether the sahael was still leaking some signal from the alien's mind into his own. Ramon felt as if he'd walked in on a weeping man. In his own discomfort, he shrugged.
"Don't let it bother you," he said. "It wasn't something you meant to have happen either."
"You must not diverge any further," Maneck said, almost pleadingly. "Your mind is twisted and alien. And that is as it should be. You will cease to diverge from the man. You will not integrate with me any further. We will wait here and hunt him. If he does not reach his hive, there will be no gaesu. You must not diverge any further."
"I won't, then. Don't worry. I'm still plenty twisted and alien."
Maneck didn't reply.
Around them, the sounds of night slowly began to come back as the animals and insects frightened by their raised voices began tentatively to return to their songs and courtships and hunts. It occurred to Ramon to wonder whether the other Ramon had heard, if he was close enough to know now that the coring charges hadn't finished off his pursuers. But for that to be true, he would have to be very close, yet Ramon and Maneck had slept through most of the night unmolested by anything other than jabali and ugly dreams. The other Ramon would not have missed a chance to attack them in their sleep - he would not have - and so he must not be that close. He was still out there in the forest somewhere, and the job of hunting him down was still ahead of them. But, as he now knew, theirs was not the only hunt.
"The Silver Enye," Ramon said tentatively. "The big, ugly, bouldershaped things."
"The eaters-of-the-young," Maneck said.
"They're what you're hiding from."
"It is better if this does not affect your function," Maneck said. "It must not inform your action."
"Don't fucking diverge, I got it. But I'm the guy who can tell you about being a man, and I say that if you tell me, it'll help."
"There has been too much participation already," Maneck began, but Ramon cut