his new circumstances. Maneck was still well-armed. The other Ramon didn't have a pistol or any more coring charges. He tried to imagine ways in which he might be able to give his other self an edge - some chance that would make his own freedom possible.
And what then?
He found himself staring at Maneck, his strange alien shape silhouetted against the cold stars like some pagan idol dedicated to unimaginable gods. Before long, he found himself beginning to drift. In his torpor, he realized that the alien had been the one learning all this time - how a man ate, how he pissed, how he slept. Ramon had learned nothing. For all his strategy and subterfuge, he knew hardly more about the alien than when he'd first woken in darkness.
He would learn. If he had been created as the thing said, then, in a way, Ramon was part alien himself - the product of an alien technology. He was a new man. He could learn new ways. He would come to understand the aliens, what they believed, how they thought. He would leave no tool unused.
Sleep stole into him, taking him gently down below consciousness, his determination to know still locked in his mind like a rat in a pit terrier's teeth. Ramon Espejo felt dreams lapping at his mind like water at the bank of a river, and at last let them come. They were strange, dreams such as Ramon Espejo had never dreamed before.
But, after all, he was not Ramon Espejo.
Chapter Thirteen
In his dream, he was within the river. He had no need to breathe, and moving through the water was as simple as thinking. Weightless, he inhabited the currents like a fish, like the water itself. His consciousness shifted throughout the river as if it were his body. He could feel the stones of the riverbed where the water smoothed them, and the shift, far ahead, where the banks turned the flow one way and then another. And farther, past that, to the sea.
The sea. Vast as a night sky, but full. The flow shifting throughout, alive and aware. Ramon floated down through the waters until he came near the dappled bottom and it swam away, the back of a leviathan larger than a city and still insignificant in the living abyss.
And then he was also the abyss.
Ramon dreamed of flow. Meaningless syllables took on significance and passed back into nonsense. Insights as profound as love and sleep moved through him, and left him filled with a terrible awe. The sky was an ocean, and the flow filled the space between stars. He followed the flow for hundreds or thousands of years, swimming between the stars, his belly heavy with generations yet unborn, searching for refuge, for someplace safe, away from pursuit, where he could hide and fulfill his destiny. And behind him, relentlessly pursuing, was something black and ominous, calling out to him in a voice at once terrible and seductive. Ramon tried not to listen to that terrible voice, tried not to let it pull him back. The beauty of the flow, the power of it, the deep and wordless promise; he fought to fill his mind with this and not think of the thing behind him, the thing that was reaching out toward him, dead tendrils still stinking with blood. Only the act of thinking itself gave the thing power; awareness of it, even in the act of repudiation, gave it reality.
Then, while he was still dreaming, something caught him. A powerful eddy threw him in a direction he could not name, back to the dim, hellish place from which he had struggled to escape.
Abruptly, there was a dead sun above him, hanging gray in an ashen sky. This was his home, the place of his hatching, his source, as rivers sprang from a glacier. His heart was tight with dread; he knew what was coming and also did not.
Around him were alien forms, as familiar as lovers. The great pale beast in the pit that had counseled him before this desperate hunt began. The small, bluish forms of kait eggs, now destined never to hatch. Yellow-fringed mahadya and half-grown ataruae still bent at the spine. (These were not words that Ramon knew, and yet he knew them.) All of the young beyond redemption, crushed, lifeless. He was Maneck, athanai of his cohort, and these dead that touched him, that polluted the flow, were his failing. His tatecreude was unfulfilled, and each of