Hunters Run Page 0,38

into aubre. I have no reason to express regret."

"Yeah, fine. Be like that."

"But if you wish to speak, I will participate in this fashion. I do indeed have sensors. They are of the nature of the yunea as the drinking of your flow is of the nature of the sahael or the management and direction of this form," and the alien gestured at itself, "is mine. The man, however, is much like the other creatures, and discovering the channels which he has been bound into is subtle."

Ramon shrugged.

Their best bet of catching the policeman was to head west for the Rio Embudo, get well south of where he could have reached on foot, and then wait there by the riverside until the bastard came floating by on his raft, but if the alien didn't see it that way, Ramon felt no particular impulse to enlighten his captor. If the alien wanted to swing uselessly back and forth all day like a missionary's balls, Ramon was fine with that.

"What are you going to do with the poor fucker when you catch him?"

"Correct the illusion of his existence," Maneck said. "To be observed cannot happen. The illusion that it has happened is prime contradiction, gaesu, the negation of reality. If we were to be seen, we would not be what we are, we would never have been what we are. That which cannot be found cannot be found. This is contradiction. It must be resolved."

"That doesn't make sense. The man, he's already seen you."

"He is still within illusion. If he is prevented from reaching his kind, the information cannot diffuse. He will have been corrected. The illusion of his existence will have been denied. If he is real, however, we cannot be."

Ramon unwrapped the hierba leaf, sucked the meat from his strip of smoked fish, then dropped the empty bone on the slats at his feet.

"You know, monster, to make as little sense as you, I have to drink for half a night."

"I do not understand."

"That's the point, cabron ."

"Your consumption of liquid affects your communication? Was your time at the camp insufficient to express this?"

"That was river water," Ramon said impatiently. "Liquor. I mean, drink liquor. I've got the only devil in hell that's never heard of hard drink!"

"Explain to me 'hard drink.'"

Ramon scratched his belly. The smooth skin under his fingertips seemed momentarily odd. How could he explain drinking - really drinking - to a thing with a half-crazed devil's mind?

"There's a thing. It's a liquid," Ramon said. "It's called alcohol. You get it from things fermenting. Fermenting. Breaking down. Potatoes make vodka, and grapes make wine, and grain makes beer. And when you drink it, when a man drinks it ... it lifts him up out of himself. You understand? All the things he's supposed to be, they don't bother him so much anymore. All the petty fucking shit that ties him up, it lets loose a little. Piss. I don't know. This is like telling a virgin what it's like to fuck."

"It loosens bindings," Maneck said. "It makes you free."

Memory assaulted Ramon again; the world vanished.

He was fourteen, two long years stretching out before him until he would elect to join a job gang and get off Earth. August brought thunderstorms to the mountains of Mexico, great white clouds that went gray-black at the base. Having come down from his tiny clifftop pueblo, Ramon was living in an older boy's shack in a squatters' village on the north slope of a mesa near Mexico City.

The day of his memory, he'd been sitting on the misshapen mass of rotten wood and worn plastic that he and the older boy jokingly called their front porch, watching the clouds form and rise toward the sky. The storm would reach them by night, Ramon had guessed. He was trying to judge whether the shack could withstand another hard storm or if it would collapse under wind and water when the older boy appeared, sauntering down the thin street of mud and rocks that separated one line of hovels from the next. He had a girl with him, his arm around her waist. He had a bottle in the other.

Ramon didn't ask where he'd found either of them. He remembered the astringent fire of the gin, the fascination and repulsion of listening to the older boy and the girl fuck while he sat outside drinking and counting the seconds between lightning flashes and thunder. By the time the rain came, the older boy