try it sometime."
"The sleep is complete," Maneck said. "It is time to start fulfilling your function."
"Not so fast. I've got to piss."
"You made piss before."
"Well, I'm an ongoing fucking process," Ramon said, misquoting a priest he'd heard once preaching in the plaza at Diegotown. The sermon had been about the changing nature of the soul, the man who was delivering it red-faced and sweaty. Ramon and Pauel Dominguez had thrown sugared almonds at him. It wasn't something he'd thought of in years, and yet he could recall it now as clearly as if it had happened moments before. He wondered whether the alien goo in which he'd been incarcerated might have done something to his memory. He had heard that men waking from stasis sometimes suffered episodes of amnesia or powerful dislocation.
Now, standing before a mesh-barked pseudo-pine and pissing at its base, Ramon found more strange rushes of memory returning to him. Martin Casaus, his first friend when he'd come to Diegotown, had lived by the port, in a two-room apartment with butter-yellow bamboo flooring that peeled up at the corners. They'd gotten drunk there every night for a month, singing and sucking down beer. Martin had told him stories about being out in the forest working as a trapper, tricking a chupacabra into a spear pit with fresh meat, and Ramon had made up sexual exploits from his time in Mexico, each one more lurid and improbable than the last. Martin's landlady had come once and threatened to have them both arrested, and Ramon had exposed himself. He remembered the old woman's shocked expression, the way her hands had fluttered, unsure whether his penis was an insult to her or a threat. It was like seeing a recording of it: a flashback as powerful as the experience, and then gone again and only a memory.
Ramon scratched his belly idly, fingertips moving over the smooth curve of his skin. Poor old Martin. He wondered what had happened to the bastard. Nothing, he had to imagine, worse than what he himself was going through now.
"You don't piss either, do you?" Ramon said, shaking the last drops from his penis.
"The voiding of waste is necessary only because you ingest improper foods," Maneck replied. "Oekh provides nourishment without waste. It is so designed, in order to increase efficiency. Your food is full of poisons and inert substances that your body cannot absorb. This is why you must make piss and dump. This is primitive and unnatural."
Ramon chuckled. "Primitive, maybe," he said, "but you are the one who goes against nature! We are animals, both of us. Animals sleep, and eat other animals, and shit, and fuck. You do none of those things. So who is the unnatural one, eh?"
Maneck looked down on him. "A being possessed of retehue has the capacity to be more than an animal," it said. "If an ability exists, it must be used. Therefore you are unnatural, because you cling to the primitive although you possess the ability to transcend that state."
"Clinging to the primitive can be a lot of fun," Ramon started to say, but Maneck, who seemed to be growing impatient, cut him off. "We have begun with making piss," it said, "and we have returned to this place in the cycle. We are now prepared. You will enter the yunea. We will proceed."
"Yunea?"
Maneck paused.
"The flying box," it said.
"Oh. But I need to eat still. You can't have a man go without breakfast."
"You can continue for weeks without food. This is what you reported in the night."
"Doesn't mean I'd want to," Ramon said. "You want me working at my best, I've got to eat. Even machines need to be refueled to work."
"No more delays," Maneck said, fingering the sahael ominously. "We go now."
Ramon considered objecting, claiming that there was some further biological function that humanity required - he could spit for an hour or two, just to take more time. But Maneck seemed resolute, and he didn't want it to resort to the sahael in order to get him to obey.
"Okay, okay, I'm coming. Just wait a second."
Ramon had done what he could for the policeman. Any bastard who'd come out to arrest him should be fucking grateful for what he'd done so far! Ramon snatched up the leaf-wrapped strips of smoked fish he'd prepared the night before and followed the alien back to its bone-white box. A cold breakfast in transit would have to do.
His belly lurched as the strange ship took to the air. They