Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  And then he was also the abyss.

  Ramon dreamed of flow. Meaningless syllables took on significance and passed back into nonsense. Insights 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. His mind was a river, and he fed into the sea and sky. The part of his dream that was human knew that if he had the courage, he would see the face of God in the waters.

  And then, still dreaming, something caught him. An eddy powerful as violence threw him in a direction he could not name, and there in the current floated the bodies of the dead—alien forms but familiar as lovers. The great pale beast in the pit who had counseled him before this desperate hunt began. The small, bluish forms ofkait eggs, now never to hatch. Yellow-fringedmahadya and half-grown ataruae still bent at the spine. (These were not words that Ramon knew, and yet he knew them.) All of them beyond redemption. He was Maneck, athanai of his cohort, and these dead that touched him, that polluted the flow, were his failing. His tatecreduewas unfulfilled, and each of these beautiful things had fallen into illusion because he had failed to bear the weight of truth.

  With a sorrow as profound as any Ramon had ever felt—more than the loss of his mother and his Yaqui father, more than the heartbreak of first love—he began to eat the dead, and with every corpse that he took into himself, he became less real, more lost in aubre and sin, more fully damned, until he reached out for the last floating, lost, illusory form and woke with a shriek.

  Maneck stood beside him, its long arms lifting him with something between tenderness and anger. In the east, a paleness had snuffed out stars—the dawn coming up.

  "What have you done?" the alien cried, and, as it did, seemed somehow less alien, lost and frightened and alone.

  "Gaesu," Ramon said. "Prime contradiction. This is what it means? That all of you kill yourselves?"

  "You should not have been able to use the sahaelthis way," Maneck said. "You should not have been able to drink of my flow. You are diverging from the man. It threatens our function. You will not do this again, or I will punish you!"

  "Why?" Ramon asked, and the alien knew as well as he did that he was not asking why he would be punished. Maneck blinked its strange orange eyes and seemed to settle back, subtly defeated.

  "To be observed cannot happen." Maneck said. "The illusion that it has happened is prime contradiction, the negation of reality. We escaped from our enemies and came here, we have hidden here for generations of recycling, waiting until the time was right to fulfill the tatecredue of our kind. 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."

  "You would all die rather then be discovered?"

  "It must be resolved," the alien repeated.

  "That doesn't make sense. The one, the man"—he couldn't bring himself to call him Ramon—"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."

  "Dios mio," Ramon said. "You are … sick. You are sick, sick creatures."

  "It is not illness. It is the dictate of proper flow. Your mind is twisted and alien," Maneck said. "And that is as it should be. You will cease to diverge from the man. We will wait here and hunt him. If he does not reach his hive, there will be nogaesu."

  The alien turned its back to him, its attention once again on the river. Ramon lay back, listening to the rush and murmur of the river, staring at the sky as dawn slowly turned the black to blue, the light cool and bright as the foreign sun rose. In the distance, there came the odd booming cry of adescamisado, returning to its lair in the trees after a long night of hunting. When he went to the edge of the forest to relieve himself, the distinctive cinnamon scent of the iceroots strong in his nostrils, the sahael stretched to accommodate him, but Maneck took no notice. When he gathered a double handful of berries for his breakfast, the alien showed no interest. Ramon might almost have been alone and bound by his flexible leash to a tree stump. As the hours passed, the memory of the dream faded, the sadness becoming not an emotion, but the memory of one. The conviction he had felt thatany price would be justified if it turned aside the horror of gaesu faded but did not vanish. It was the thought of the monsters, and he knew it.

  When he stretched out on the greymoss at the water's edge at midday, his skin warmed by the sun, Maneck made no movement, but the nap he had intended would not come. He wondered if thesahael was preventing it.

  Tenfin birds and whirlygigs flew through the trees, shouting out at one another and fighting over places for their nests, food for themselves, mates to bear their children. The same petty struggles of all life, everywhere. Larger beasts, hoppers and fatheads, came to the river's edge, glanced incuriously at them, and drank from the water. Fish leaped and fell back. The knot of tension in his belly loosened as he watched it all, able to forget for a moment what he was, what his forced mission was, and how bleak his hopes.

  He was still half-lost in his reverie when the other Ramon found them.

  · · · · ·

  Seven

  · · · · ·

  The shout had no words to it—only a long, drawn-out sound, unmistakably from a human throat. Ramon's heart was racing even before the sound was gone, and Maneck was already moving to the cycle. The sahael tugged viciously, pulling Ramon almost faster than he could rise and walk.

  "That noise was the man," Maneck said, its voice as calm and steady as if the fate of its people didn't hang in the balance. "You will come."

  Ramon didn't bother protesting. He could tell from the color of its flesh and the restless movement of its arms that the alien was agitated. He seemed, after his dream, to know much more about Maneck, but the knowledge did him no good. The other was out there in the trees, and nothing he could do or say would keep the alien from finding him. Ramon took his place on the sidecar, and, in an instant, with a dizzying lurch, they were airborne.

  The search was brief, and the story it told was all too clear. In a small clearing that almost overlooked the river, a tree limb had broken high up, the pale wood standing out from the darkness of the bark like a fresh wound. And there, near where the limb had fallen, a twisted, motionless form—the shirt and trousers Ramon remembered having worn in another life, the workboots angled awkwardly out. The shape of the body hardly made sense. The other Ramon had climbed the tree to survey the land, and the branch supporting him had snapped. He was shattered now, and certainly dead. Maneck landed the cycle ten yards from the fallen man.

  "You will remain here," it said, sternly.

  Ramon only nodded, his heart heavy as lead. This was the end of his hopes for freedom. The aliens would take him back to their strange, terrible caverns. Perhaps he would be allowed to remain as he was—a man with the memories and spirit of a man, trapped among aliens for the rest of his life. Perhaps they would destroy him as a tool that had outlasted its function. Which would be worse?

  Maneck lumbered across the high grass to where the corpse lay. Perhaps, Ramon thought, if he could find a way to start the cycle … it was a desperate idea, and pointless. Even if he could have figured out how to fly it, the thing in his neck would no more have allowed him to escape than gravity would let him flap his arms and fly. Maneck reached the body, leaning over it and prodding with its long, slender hands.

  Ramon heard a creak in the silence and realized what was happening even before the deadfall dropped from high in the canopy—a log of copperwood twice a man's thickness and at least a hundred kilos in weight, screaming down through leaves and twig-thin branches. Mane
ck looked up just as the log struck him and bore him to the ground. The pain hit Ramon instantly—it was not so intense as it had been, but it was disorienting and nauseating. He stumbled from the sidecar and tried to walk forward, but the earth seemed to shift and tip. He fell to his knees, aware distantly of a shrieking human voice and a thick, naked form, more like a chimpanzee than a man, that howled in victory as it ran forward. The sharp, dry report of a pistol sounded again and again.

  "Help me!" Ramon cried, scrabbling at the sahael."For the love of God, cut this pinche thing off of me!"

  Through the pain and the haze of tears, Ramon saw the naked man—the other Ramon—shift away from his attack on the fallen alien, then run toward him. He cringed away, expecting assault as much as assistance. But the other knelt, trapping the sahael under his knees, and began sawing at it vigorously with his bush knife. Ramon felt the damage as if the fleshy leash were a part of him, but he gritted his teeth until his jaw creaked and forced himself to breathe through the pain.

  And then, like turning off a light, it was gone. Ramon lay back, gulping air. His body trembled like he'd just run a fast mile. The severed end of the sahael shifted in the flesh of his neck, withdrawing and then falling the few inches to the ground with a sound like a cooing pigeon. It skittered away like a live thing until the other speared it with the point of his knife.

  "Do I know you?" the other said through labored breaths. "Who the fuck are you?

  Ramon looked at him directly for the first time. He was filthy and unkempt—the light stubble that often darkened his chin was already a moth-eaten beard. Distrust shone in his black eyes. His left hand was wrapped in bloody cloth, and Ramon realized, with a profound sense of vertigo, that in that mess of soiled bandages, a finger was missing. A finger from which he had been born.

  But the other Ramon also looked wrongsomehow. He had expected it to be like looking into a mirror, but it was not. The face he was accustomed to seeing reflected back was different than this. Perhaps, he thought, his features were not so symmetrical as he'd liked to believe. Also the voice was higher than his own, with more of a whine in it. The voice he heard and hated when he heard himself recorded. The other Ramon's bearded chin jutted aggressively.

  "I know you can talk," he said. "Who are you? What's your name?"

  There was no recognition in the other's eyes. Ramon floundered, searching for a plausible lie. Maneck was the only name he could think of besides his own. He shook his head, forcing his mind to work. If he told the other the truth, he would be killed. He knew this for a certainty, because it was what he would have done himself.

  "Manuel," he said. "Manuel Tenorio. I was working survey for the bank out of Fiddler's Jump. The thing over there. It caught me. It was taking me back to its hive."

  "Which bank?"

  "Sanchez-Perdida," Ramon said, pulling the first name that came to mind. He wasn't certain that S-P had a branch in Fiddler's Jump. But if he didn't know, neither would the other. The other narrowed his eyes, evaluating, and then slowly nodded.

  "I must have seen you at the bars there. You drink at El Pinto Negro?"

  "All the time."

  "I must have seen you there. Well. You're lucky I found you," he said. "I was prospecting up Tierra Hueso. They blew up my van."

  "The thing," Ramon said, gesturing toward Maneck. "Is it dead?"

  "It better be," the other said. "I'm out of bullets." They walked over together. The other kept his bush knife at the ready in his right hand, his empty pistol still clutched in the left. Maneck lay unmoving under the deadfall, the whole lower part of its body crushed to a bloody, pulpy paste. The swirling patterns of its skin had stilled, and the hot orange eyes had faded to sightless gray. Bullet wounds made little mouths in the still flesh. No blood flowed from them. The other spat on the corpse of Maneck, athanai of his cohort and the last hope of his people, before turning to strip the bloodied clothing from the pile of stones and branches that had imitated a broken body, baiting the trap. Ramon lingered a moment, staring down at Maneck.

  Better thee than me, monster, he thought. But still he didn't spit. In a odd way that surprised and disquieted him, he almost missed Maneck, now that it was over, now that he was free.

  After all, Maneck was the only one he'd ever met in his life, except for the thing in the pit. And now the other.

  "We have to get back to Fiddler's Jump," the other said as he pulled on his soiled, bloody shirt. "Do you have anything? A gun? A sat finder?"

  "No," Ramon said. "The thing took everything I had. It made me wear this. I haven't got anything."

  "Well," the other said, "let's see what it had."

  They ransacked the cycle of strange artifacts—thin tangles of something like wire. The spheres and rods. A pink translucent cube. The strange twined eggbeater weapon that had destroyed the van and the bubbletent. But nothing worked, nothing functioned, no matter how they poked and prodded at it. Ramon couldn't even make the sharp wire end come out of the cylindrical knife. Perhaps it had all died with Maneck.

  "What about this?" the other asked, holding out a length of light metal that curved at the edges like a drying leaf.

  "I don't know," he said, again.

  "Didn't you see the thing use any of this?"

  "The tube there. It called it oekh. It was what it ate."

  The other snatched up the tube and threw it hard against a tree.

  "I don't care about its food! I need weapons! Or a way to make this thing fly! Why are you making noise if you've got nothing to say?" the other demanded, thrusting his face aggressively much too close, almost nose to nose. Ramon could see the frustration in him, the anger, the desire to strike out and make himself feel better by hurting someone, and felt its twin in his own breast.

  "I was a prisoner, not a chingada exchange student," he said, stopping just short of calling the other cabron or pendejo or asshole or any of the other thousand epithets that would have edged them over into a fight. The other's face puckered. Was this what Chulo Lopez had seen that night in Little Dog? It looked less impressive than it felt. This close, he could smell the other man, a rank, musky, unwashed reek that he found amazingly unpleasant. His breath huffed into Ramon's face like a blast of foul air, stinking of dead meat. With an effort, Ramon kept his own face still, and refused to rise to the bait.

  "Fine," the other said, turning away. "At least help me build a raft. We got to get back to the world before those things find us again."

  They worked through the afternoon. The other had already gathered supplies, slowed though he was by his wounds. Together, they braced the wood, bound it with long flexible strips of bark and ice grass and lengths of the alien wire. As they worked, the other told how he had rigged the deadfall, alerted by the plume of smoke from Ramon's cook fire. How he had planted the bait, how he had killed Maneck. Ramon listened as he boasted, fascinated not by the story, but by the man who told it. The delight the other took in his own cleverness was annoying. If Ramon didn't nod or make appreciative noises at the right moment, he would glare at him.

  "Killed that fucking thing dead," the other said with an air of satisfaction. Ramon made a grunting noise, assent without comment. They finished lashing the last of the planks. The raft was rickety, but it would hold together. "So, how long you been in Fiddler's Jump?"

  "Eight years," Ramon said, making up the number on the spot.

  "Long time."

  "Almost since the beginning," Ramon agreed. "You want me to get some food?"

  "I can get my own food," the other said. "I'm not a fucking baby. I came five days on foot, catching meals. I don't need some pinche Fiddler's Jump banker doing my work for me!

  Ramon frowned, but nodded passively. The other would like nothing better than goading him into a fight, he knew—but he wasn't going to oblige.

  "Sorry," he said.

  After dinner—sug beetles boiled in riverwater—the other Ramon smoked a cigarette that he didn't offer to share and fell asleep by the glowing embers of
the fire, his hand still on his knife. In the morning, they would set out, floating their raft back to civilization. And the aliens would die, victims of gaesu.

  And what, he wondered, would happen to him?When they reached Fiddler's Jump, it wouldn't be possible to pretend that he was really a native of the town. Eight years? He should have said he'd just arrived. Or said he was from some backwater like Los Cuates. And when other people saw them together, it wouldn't be possible to hide their resemblance.

  Ramon looked out over the shining face of the water. He was a monstrosity—a made thing. Ae euth'eloi. He touched the place on his throat where the sahael had entered him—a disk of numb flesh the size of a New Peso. It had all seemed easy when he had been a prisoner. Now that he was free, he understood the depth of his troubles. He had no place in the world. He was Ramon Espejo, and he was not. He imagined Maneck's metal-and-gravel voice. To be Ramon and not to be Ramon is aubre. It will be punished.He chuckled.

  "What?" the other said, petulant and half-asleep.

  "It's nothing," Ramon said, wrapping the alien cloth closer about him and settling down for sleep himself. "Just remembering something a friend of mine used to say."

  · · · · ·

  Eight

  · · · · ·

  Ramon cast his wire into the flowing icy waters that surrounded them. The raft rode high on the river, bouyed-up by the corklike iceroot logs. Far above, a flapjack—perhaps the same one, perhaps another—folded itself and dove after some hidden prey. The other was more clearly feverish this morning, and weaker. The chill coming off the water was doing him no good. Ramon had left him at the back of the raft to sleep, and most of the morning had passed that way. By this point in its long journey to the sea, the river was deep and steady—not at all swift as big rivers go, but they had still covered much more ground in these last hours than either man could possibly have on foot, even in their best condition. Fiddler's Jump drew nearer. And then … And then he didn't know what. Something had to happen before that did.