and cooking had fallen to coals and ashes. In other circumstances, it would have been a perfect night. In the distance, something called - an animal or bird or insect that might never have been seen by human eyes. The sound was high and fluting, and a moment after it came, two more answered it. Another memory filled his awareness. Elena in her apartment. They had had one of their first fights over his habit of camping outside the van. She had been certain that a wild animal would find him and kill him in the darkness. She'd had a friend taken by redjackets, and she claimed to suffer nightmares. He'd been sleeping with her for a month and hadn't seen evidence of it, but when he said so, she only got angrier.
The argument had ended with her throwing a kitchen knife at him. He'd slapped her. Afterward they'd screwed.
Far above him, a meteor streaked across the sky, burning and vanishing in the space of a heartbeat. The Sick Gringo peered down on them from the stars, and, on the horizon, the Stone Man was beginning to rise.
He knew she was crazy. Elena was the kind of woman who wound up killing herself or her lover or her children, and he didn't love her any more than she loved him. It was all perfectly clear to him, and also totally unimportant. People, he decided, didn't come together from love or hatred. They came together because they were the kind of people who fit. She was a crazed bitch. He was a drunk and a killer. They deserved each other.
Except he wasn't a drunk when he was here. In the field, he was sober as a priest. He was a better man out here. His mind was growing muzzy and losing itself in sleep when the alien jerked to attention. Ramon sat up.
"What is it?" he whispered.
"Something is observing us," Maneck said.
A chill went up Ramon's spine. There were enough real monsters waiting out here in the bush that S?o Paulo featured relatively few myths about duppies and mothmen and mysterious unknown creatures. Ghosts were a different story, though. There were plenty of ghosts here - from the ghost of Ugly Pete, a prospector who wandered the night looking for a replacement for the head he'd lost in a mine accident, to Black Maria, who appeared to men at the moment of their deaths. One cult in Little Dog believed that S?o Paulo was where the dead of Earth went when they died. So the night here swarmed with ghosts, like moths around a light, and out here in the dark wilderness, that was not a good thing to think about - although, of course, he didn't believe in such things. Whatever was out there in the dark, it was more likely to be a real physical creature than a ghost.
With that thought, Elena's terror of redjackets and chupacabras abruptly returned to Ramon, and he rose, moving closer to the huge alien. He closed his eyes for the space of twenty breaths, adapting them to darkness, then scanned the meadow's edge. It was dark enough that he couldn't see anything directly. Only his peripheral vision would pick out movement from the gloom beneath the trees.
"There," he whispered. "Just to the right of the white-barked tree. In that bush."
Maneck did something complex with its arm. A flash of light extended from its hand, and the bush exploded in a ball of fire. Ramon jumped back.
"Come," Maneck said, and began moving forward. Ramon hung back half a pace, struggling between curiosity, fear of whatever was in the trees, and unease at his alien captor's weapon. He had thought the thing was unarmed after the yunea's crash. It was the sort of mistake that would get him killed if he wasn't more careful.
The corpse at the foot of the tree, twisted in sudden agony and scorched black on its spine, was a jabali rojo, something like a boar that had decided to be a fox instead halfway through its evolution; the ornate tusks at the sides of its open, lifeless mouth were better suited for impressing female jabali than attacking men or aliens.
"It's nothing," Ramon said. "It was no danger to us."
"It might have been the man," Maneck said. Was there regret in its tone? Relief ? Fear? Who could say?
When they returned to the modest camp, Ramon lay back down, but found it hard to sleep. His mind worked variation after variation on