Hunters Run Page 0,61

could still grow whiskers. The pinche aliens hadn't turned him into a woman.

I'm still going to kill you fuckers for this, Ramon thought. But even though he had the intent and the focus, his rage seemed more distant; like something he had chosen to feel rather than something that actually possessed him. It felt like being in love with Elena. Familiar but hollow.

"What are you going to do with me?" Ramon asked. "When this is over. When you kill the man, what happens to me?"

"Your tatecreude will be complete," Maneck said.

"So what happens to someone when their tatecreude is complete?"

"Your language is flawed. To have completed tatecreude is to return to the flow."

"I don't know what that means," Ramon said.

"Once our function is fulfilled, we will return to the flow," it said.

Suddenly, with a flash of insight intense enough that he wondered if it partook of the two-way flow through the sahael, he knew what would happen to them both: they would die. They would be reabsorbed into the "flow," whatever that was. Once they had fulfilled their tatecreude, they would have no reason for existing anymore, like tools that were disposed of once the job they were needed for was done.

Perhaps Maneck was content to submit to that fate, perhaps the alien even welcomed it, but, as far as Ramon was concerned, that was another good reason to escape as soon as possible. "Whatever you say," he said wearily.

Ramon found that resting was more pleasant than he'd expected. He was more tired than he thought he'd be. But then, he had marched all the previous day after nearly being killed in an explosion. He'd slept poorly. And perhaps Maneck's distress was carried over in some alien fashion through the still-bruise-colored sahael.

The connection between Maneck's people and the Enye haunted him, but he found it difficult to wrap his mind around it in any meaningful way. A war that crossed stars, that lasted through centuries, possibly millennia. A vendetta against Maneck's kind, which had no discernible reason, which employed the human race as a tool.

They had always been hunting dogs for demons. Mikel Ibrahim, Martin Casaus, Ramon himself. Everyone, always. Dogs sent into the bush to flush out Maneck and beings like it. It was as deep a change of his view of the world as the curious fact of his twinning, but this time he didn't have the alien injunction not to diverge. He was free to think anything of this that he saw fit, and discovered that a smalltime independent prospector fleeing from the governor's constabulary wasn't the right man to make sense of it all. It only made his head ache.

Instead, he wondered what Elena was doing now. It had to be near noon, and ... how many days since he'd snuck out of her apartment before dawn? A week? More than that? He wasn't even certain of the day anymore. He wasn't religious. Sunday mostly meant that the bars were closed. So perhaps this was a weekday, and she'd risen with the sun, showered, pulled on her dress, and gone to work.

He noticed with detachment that he had never fucked around on Elena. He'd killed men, he'd lied, he'd stolen. He'd beaten Elena and been attacked by her, but he hadn't frequented the whores down by the port when they were together. Even when they'd had a fight, he hadn't taken up with other women.

Elena would have killed him and any woman he slept with, for one thing. And also, the prospect of finding a woman who would think Ramon worthy of her attention, much less of her body, filled him with either a sick dread that came from years of rejections or the quiet aloofness that sprang from the anticipation of refusal. But besides all that, and to his surprise, Ramon found that it was simply not something that a real man did. Fuck women who were for hire, yes. Tempt your friend's woman away from him, certainly. See more than one woman, yes - if you were the kind of lucky sonofabitch who could juggle girlfriends that way. But cheat on your woman once she'd become your woman? That, somehow, was crossing the line. Even when the woman was a crazed weasel in human skin like Elena. Even when you didn't love her, or even like her very much, it wasn't something a real man did.

Ramon coughed out a laugh. Maneck's turtle head rose and swung toward him, but apparently there wasn't enough mirth