desperation in its tone. Even despair. "It might be possible to find a new method of fulfilling their function. But I cannot find a plausible reason."
Ramon sighed.
"Don't try," he said. "You'll only make yourself crazy. There's no way to understand them. They're fucking aliens."
Chapter Fourteen
Ramon surprised himself by going back to sleep, and was even more surprised in the morning when he woke up and actually found himself leaning against Maneck, who had sat stoically, unmoving, throughout the rest of the night.
Before then, though, three times before the sun rose, Ramon was assaulted in his dreams by memories. One was a card game he'd played on the Enye ship during his flight out, away from Earth. Palenki had been having a good day - there were fewer and fewer of those - and had insisted that his crew come together and play poker. Ramon felt the strangely soft, limp cards in his hands again. He smelled the high, acidic reek of the Enye's huge bodies and the ever-present undertone of overheated ceramic, like a pan left empty in a heated stove. He'd beaten Palenki's full house with a straight flush. He remembered seeing the sick man's delight falter and fail when the cards came down, disappointment filling the old prospector's eyes like dry tears. Ramon regretted that he hadn't folded without showing.
That was the only memory that seemed related to his strange interaction with the alien's mind. The other two were mundane moments - first, bathing in a hotel in Mexico City before going off to a brothel, and second, a meal of river fish encrusted in black pepper he'd eaten shortly after his arrival on S?o Paulo. In each case, the memory was so vivid that it was as if he had momentarily stopped living in the present and begun to live again in the past, as if he was actually there rather than here, sitting on his butt on the grass in the middle of a chilly night next to an alien monstrosity. Each time he woke for a second to see Maneck sitting next to him, as still as a statue, and he got the impression that it knew what was happening to him, but it offered no advice on how best to accommodate this intrusive blooming of the past. Ramon didn't ask. It was his mind coming back to the way it should be, and that was all. Still, he wondered how many years it had been since the other Ramon had thought of that card game.
The daymartins were singing their low, throbbing song as the eastern sky lightened from star-filled blackness to a dimmer charcoal, and then at last to the cool light of morning. Something squawked and fled when Ramon rose to go for water. Whatever it was, it had snuck in and gnawed silently on the corpse of the jabali rojo in the night. Tenfin birds and whirlygigs flew through the trees, shouting at one another and fighting over places for their nests, food, mates to bear their children. The same petty struggles of all life, everywhere. Larger beasts, hoppers and fatheads, came to the stream's edge, glanced incuriously at him, and drank from the water. Fish leaped and fell back. He felt himself relax as he watched it all, able to forget for a moment what he was, what his forced mission was, and how bleak were his hopes.
Then back to the camp, to eat more sug beetles, make the usual review of his biological functions for the alien, and prepare himself for the hunt. Maneck's skin was still ashy, but the oil-swirls were beginning to reappear. Its stance remained low to the ground, its movements careful and pained. Ramon wished he knew enough to judge how serious the alien's injuries were - if it was just going to keel over at some point, there was no need to make elaborate plans to escape. On the other hand, suppose he found he couldn't free himself from the sahael after Maneck was dead? How horrible, to be shackled to the alien's rotting corpse until he starved to death himself! Or perhaps if Maneck died, he would die - they shared physical impulses through the sahael, after all. He'd never thought of that before, and it was unsettling. Still, given the opportunity, he'd take his chances ...
When it had grown light enough, Ramon and Maneck rose without consulting each other and set off again, moving downstream. The other Ramon's path tracked toward the