Hunter's Run Part 2

"A month," Ramon said. "Maybe two."

"Miss the whole festival."

"That's the idea," Ramon agreed.

"You got enough food for that?"

"I got hunting gear," Ramon said. "I could live out there forever if I wanted." He was surprised at the wistful, even yearning, tone that he could hear in his own voice.

There was a moment's silence before Griego spoke again; words that made Ramon's nerves shrill with sudden fear.

"You hear about the European that got killed?"

Ramon looked up, startled, but Griego was sucking at his teeth, his expression placid.

"What about him?" Ramon asked warily.

"Governor's all p.i.s.sed off about it, from what I hear."

"Too bad for the governor, then."

"The police came by. Two constables looking real serious. Asked if anyone had been in, getting a van in shape to head out fast. You know, someone who was maybe trying not to be found."

Ramon nodded, staring at the van. His throat felt tight and the thick beer in his belly seemed to have turned to stone.

"What did you tell them?"

"Told them no," Griego said with a shrug.

"There wasn't anyone?"

"A couple," Griego said. "Orlando Wa.s.serman's kid. And that crazy gringa from Swan's Neck. But I figured, what the h.e.l.l, you know? The police don't pay me, these other people do. So where do my loyalties lie?"

"Man got killed," Ramon said.

"Yeah," Griego agreed, pleasantly. "A gringo." He spit sideways, then shrugged, as if the death of a gringo or any other kind of European was of no great consequence. "I'm just saying it because I'm not the only one they're asking. You taking off, they may take that the wrong way, give you a hard time about it. Just keep that in mind when you supply up."

Ramon nodded.

"They gonna catch him, you think?" Ramon asked.

"Oh yeah," Griego said. "They'll have to. Bust a gut to do it, if they got to. Show the Enye that we're a justice-loving people. Not that they they care. s.h.i.t, f.u.c.king Enye care. s.h.i.t, f.u.c.king Enye lick lick each other h.e.l.lo. Probably lick the governor and get p.i.s.sed off if he doesn't lick them back. Anyway, he'll make a big show out of the trial, do everything to prove how they got the right guy, then put him down like a f.u.c.king dog. You know, whoever it is they decide did it. No one else, there's always Johnny Joe Cardenas. They've been looking for something to hang on him for years." each other h.e.l.lo. Probably lick the governor and get p.i.s.sed off if he doesn't lick them back. Anyway, he'll make a big show out of the trial, do everything to prove how they got the right guy, then put him down like a f.u.c.king dog. You know, whoever it is they decide did it. No one else, there's always Johnny Joe Cardenas. They've been looking for something to hang on him for years."

"Maybe it'll be good that I get out of the city for a while, then,"

Ramon said. He tried a weak smile that felt as obvious as a confes-sion. "You know. Just to avoid misunderstandings."

"Yeah," Griego said. "Besides, this is the big one, right?"

"Lucky strike," Ramon agreed.

29 When he started up the van, he could feel the difference. The lift tubes seemed to chime as he lifted up into the sky, all of Diegotown, with its unplanned maze of narrow streets and red-roofed buildings, below him. Elena was down there somewhere. The police too. The body of the European. Mikel Ibrahim and the gravity knife Ramon had handed to him, just handed to him. The murder weapon! And slumped in a bar or a bas.e.m.e.nt opium den-or maybe breaking into someone's house-Johnny Joe Cardenas, just waiting to hang.

And Lianna, maybe, somewhere in the good section by the port, who didn't think of Ramon anymore and probably never would.

Ramon's thoughts were interrupted by the pulsing hum of a shuttle rising up into the thin and distant air. Another load of metal or plastic or fuel or chitin for the welcoming platform. Ramon spun the van north, set it for proximity avoidance, and headed out alone, leaving all the h.e.l.l and s.h.i.t and sorrow of Diegotown behind.

Chapter 3.

It was a warm day in the Second June. He flew his beat-up old van north across the Fingerlands, the Greengla.s.s country, the river marshes, the Oceano Tetrico, heading deep into unknown territory.

North of Fiddler's Jump, the northernmost outpost of the metas-tasizing human presence on the planet, were thousands of hectares that no one had ever explored, or even thought of exploring, land so far only glimpsed from orbit during the first colony surveys.

The human colony on the planet of So Paulo was only a little more than forty years old, and the majority of its towns were situated in the subtropic zone of the snaky eastern continent that stretched almost from pole to pole. The colonists were mostly from Brazil and Mexico, with a smattering from Jamaica, Barbados, Puerto Rico, and other Caribbean nations, and their natural inclination was to expand south, into the steamy lands near the equator-they were not effete 31 31 norteamericanos, after all; they were used to such climates, they knew how to live with the heat, they knew how to farm the jungles, their skins did not sear in the sun. So they looked to the south, and tended to ignore the cold northern territories, perhaps because of an un-vocalized common conviction-one antic.i.p.ated centuries before by the first Spanish settlers in the New World of the Americas-that life was not worth living any place where there was even a remote pos-sibility of snow. after all; they were used to such climates, they knew how to live with the heat, they knew how to farm the jungles, their skins did not sear in the sun. So they looked to the south, and tended to ignore the cold northern territories, perhaps because of an un-vocalized common conviction-one antic.i.p.ated centuries before by the first Spanish settlers in the New World of the Americas-that life was not worth living any place where there was even a remote pos-sibility of snow.

Ramon, however, was part Yaqui, and had grown up in the rugged plateau country of northern Mexico. He liked the hills and white water, and he didn't mind the cold. He also knew that the Sierra Hueso mountain chain in the northern hemisphere of So Paulo was a more likely place to find rich ore than the flatter country around the Hand or Nuevo Janeiro or Little Dog. The peaks around the Sierra Hueso had been piled up many millions of years before by a collision between continental plates squeezing an ocean out of existence between them; the former sea-bottom would have been pinched and pushed high into the air along the collision line, and it would be rich in copper and other metals.

Few if any of the mule-back prospectors like himself had as yet bothered with the northern lands; pickings were still rich enough down south that the travel time seemed unnecessary to most people.

The Sierra Hueso had been mapped from orbit, but no one Ramon knew had ever actually been there, and the territory was still so un-explored that the peaks of the range had not even been individually named. That meant that there were no human settlements within hundreds of miles, and no satellite to relay his network signals this far north; if he got into trouble he would be on his own. He would be one of the first to prospect there, but years would pa.s.s, the econom-ic pressure in the south would get higher, and more people would come north, following the charts Ramon had made and sold, interpreting the data he rented out to the corporations and governingbodies. They would follow him like the native scorpion ants-first one, and then a handful, and then countless thousands of small in-sectoid bodies in the consuming river. Ramon was that first ant, the one driven to risk, to explore. He was a leader not because he chose to be, but because it was his nature to seek distance.

It was better that way, to be the first ant. Although he was reluctant to admit it, he'd finally come to realize that it was better if he worked someplace away from other prospectors. Away from other people. The bigger prospecting cooperatives might have better contracts, better equipment, but they also had more rum and more women. And between those two, Ramon knew, more fighting. He couldn't trust his own volatile temper, never had been able to. It had held him back for years, the fighting, and the trouble it got him into.

Now it had gotten him into trouble that might cost him his life, if they caught him. No, it was was better this way-mule-back prospecting, just himself and his van. better this way-mule-back prospecting, just himself and his van.

Besides, he was finding that he liked to be out on his own like this, on a clear day with So Paulo's big, soft sun blinking dimly back at him from rivers and lakes and leaves. He found that he was whistling tunelessly as the endless forests beneath the van slowly changed from blackwort and devilwood to the local conifer-equivalents: iceroot, creeping willow, hierba hierba. At last, there was no one around to bother him. For the first time that day, his stomach had almost stopped aching.

Almost.

With every hour that pa.s.sed, every forest and lake that appeared, drew near, and slipped away, the thought of the European he'd killed grew in Ramon's mind, his presence sharpening pixel by pixel, becoming more real, until he could almost, almost, see him sitting in the copilot's seat, that stupid look of dumb surprise at his own mortality still stamped on his big, pale face-and the more real his ghostly presence became, the deeper Ramon's hatred for him grew.

33 He hadn't hated him back at the El Rey; the man had just been another b.a.s.t.a.r.d looking for trouble and finding Ramon. It had happened before more times than he could recall. It was part of how things worked. He came to town, he drank, he and some rabid a.s.shole found each other, and one of them walked away. Maybe it was Ramon, maybe it was the other guy. Rage, yes, rage had something to do with it, but not hatred. Hatred meant you knew a man, you cared about him. Rage lifted you up above everything-morality, fear, yourself. Hatred meant that someone had control over you.

This was the place that usually brought him peace, the outback, the remote territory, the unpeopled places. The tension that came with being around people loosened. In the city-Diegotown or Nuevo Janeiro or any place where too many people came together-Ramon had always felt the press of people against him. The voices just out of earshot, the laughter that might or might not have been directed at him, the impersonal stares of men and women, Elena's lush body and her uncertain mind; they were why Ramon drank when he was in the city and stayed sober in the field. In the field there was no reason to drink.

But here, where that peace should have been, the European was with him. Ramon would look out into the limitless bowl of the sky, and his mind would turn back to that night at the El Rey, the sudden awed silence of the crowd. The blood pouring from the European's mouth. His heels drumming against the ground. He checked his maps, and instead of letting his mind run freely across the fissures and plates of the planetary surface, he thought of where the police might go to search for him. He could not let go of what had happened, and the frustration of that was almost as enraging as the guilt itself.

But guilt was for weaklings and fools. Everything would be all right. He would spend his time in the field, communing with the stone and the sky, and when he returned to the city, the Europeanwould be last season's news. Something half remembered and retold in a thousand different versions, none of them true. It was one little death among all the hundreds of millions-natural and otherwise- that happened every year throughout the known universe. The dead man's absence would be like taking a finger out of water; it wouldn't leave a hole.

Mountains made a line across the world before him: ice and iron, iron and ice.

Those would be the Sawtooths, which meant that he'd already overflown Fiddler's Jump. When he checked the navigation tran-sponders, there was no signal. He was gone, out of human contact, off the incomplete communication network of the colony. On his own. He made the adjustments he'd planned, altering his flight path to throw off any human hounds that the law might set after him, but even as he did so, the gesture seemed pointless. He wouldn't be followed. No one would care.

He set the autopilot, tilted his chair back until it was almost as flat as his cot, and, in spite of the reproachful almost-presence of the European, let the miles rolling by beneath him lull him to sleep.

When he woke, the even-grander peaks of the Sierra Hueso range were thrusting above the horizon, and the sun was getting low in the sky, casting shadows across the mountain faces. He switched off the autopilot and brought the van to rest in a rugged upland meadow along the southern slopes of the range. After the bubbletent had been set up, the last perimeter alarm had been placed, and a fire pit dug and dry wood scavenged to fill it, Ramon walked to the edge of a small nearby lake. This far north, it was cold even in summer, and the water was chill and clear; the biochip on his canteen reported nothing more alarming than trace a.r.s.enic. He gathered a double-handful of sug beetles and took them back to his camp. Boiled, they tasted of something midway between crab and lobster, and the gray stone-textured sh.e.l.ls took on an unpredictable rainbow of irides-35 cent colors when the occupying flesh was sucked free. It was easy to live off this country, if you knew how. In addition to sug beetles and other scavengeable foodstuffs, there was water to hand and there would be easy game nearby if he chose to stay longer than the month or two his van's supplies would support. He might stay until the equinox, depending on the weather. Ramon even found himself wondering how difficult it would be to winter over here in the north.

If he dropped south to Fiddler's Jump for fuel and slept in the van for the coldest months . . .

After he'd eaten, he lit a cigarette, lay back, and watched the mountains darken with the sky. A flapjack moved against the high clouds, and Ramon rose up on one elbow to watch it. It rippled its huge, flat, leathery body, sculling with its wing tips, seeking a thermal. Its ridiculous squeaky cry came clearly to him across the gulfs of air. They were almost level; it would be evaluating him now, deciding that he was much too big to eat. The flapjack tilted and slid away and down, as though riding a long, invisible slope of air, off to hunt squeakers and gra.s.shoppers in the valley below. Ramon watched the flapjack until it dwindled to the size of a coin, glowing bronze in the failing light.

"Good hunting!" he called after it, and then smiled. Good hunting for both of them, eh? As the last of the daylight touched the top of the ridgeline on the valley's eastern rise, Ramon caught sight of something. A discontinuity in the stone. It wasn't the color or the epochal striations, but something more subtle. Something in the way the face of the mountain sat. It wasn't alarming as much as interesting. Ramon put a mental flag there; something strange, worth investigating in the morning.

He lounged by the fire for a few moments while the night gathered completely around him and the alien stars came out in their chill, blazing armies. He named the strange constellations the people of So Paulo had drawn in the sky to replace the old constellationsof Earth-the Mule, the Stone Man, the Cactus Flower, the Sick Gringo-and wondered (he'd been told, but had forgotten) which of them had Earth's own sun twinkling in it as a star? Then he went to bed and to sleep, dreaming that he was a boy again in the cold stone streets of his hilltop pueblo, sitting on the roof of his father's house in the dark, a scratchy wool blanket wrapped around him, trying to ignore the loud, angry voices of his parents in the room below, searching for So Paulo's star in the winter sky.

Chapter 4.

In the morning, Ramon poured water over the remains of the fire, then p.i.s.sed on it just to be sure it was out. He ate a small breakfast of cold tortillas and beans, and disconnected his pistol from the van's power cells and tucked it into his holster, where it was a warm, comforting weight on his hip; out here, you could never be sure when you were going to run into a chupacabra chupacabra or a s.n.a.t.c.hergrabber. He exchanged the soft flatfur slippers he wore in the van for his st.u.r.dy old hiking boots, and set out to hike to the discontinuity he'd spotted the night before; as always, his boots somehow seemed more comfortable crunching over the uneven ground than they had been on the city streets. Dew soaked the gra.s.ses and the leaves of the shrubs. or a s.n.a.t.c.hergrabber. He exchanged the soft flatfur slippers he wore in the van for his st.u.r.dy old hiking boots, and set out to hike to the discontinuity he'd spotted the night before; as always, his boots somehow seemed more comfortable crunching over the uneven ground than they had been on the city streets. Dew soaked the gra.s.ses and the leaves of the shrubs.

Small monkeylike lizards leaped from branch to branch before him, calling to each other with high, frightened voices. There were millions of uncataloged species on So Paulo. In the twenty minutes ittook him to make his way to a promising site at the base of a stone cliff, Ramon might have climbed past a hundred plants and animals never before seen by human eyes.

Before long, he found the discontinuity, and surveyed it almost with regret; he'd been relishing the effort for its own sake, pausing frequently to enjoy the view or to rest in the watery sunlight. Now he'd have to get to work.

The lichen that clung to the rock of the mountainside was dark green and grew in wide spirals that reminded Ramon of cave paint-ings. Up close, the discontinuity was less apparent. He could trace the striations from one face to the next without sign of a break or level change. Whatever Ramon had caught in the failing light of the day before, it was invisible now.

He took the field pack from his shoulders, lit a cigarette, and considered the mountain face before him. The stones around him appeared to be largely metamorphic-their elongated grain speaking to Ramon of the unthinkable pressure and heat near So Paulo's mantle. The glaciers, when they pa.s.sed, would have carved this ground, strewing parts of any given field far from their origin. Still, the underlying stone was certainly igneous or metamorphic. The sedimentary layers, if there were any, would be higher up, where the ground was newest. It was the sort of place where a man might find the strike he'd hoped for. Uranium ore, possibly. Tungsten or tantalum, if he was lucky. And even if he only found gold or silver or copper, there were places he could still sell the data. The information would be worth more than the metals themselves.

The sad irony of his profession had not escaped Ramon. He would never willingly move off So Paulo. Its emptiness was the thing that made it a haven for him. In a more developed colony, the global satellites and ground-level networked particulates would have made solitude impossible. So Paulo still had frontiers, limits beyond which little or nothing was known. He and the others like him were the hands and eyes of the colony's industry; his love of the unknown 39 39 corners and niches of the world was unimportant. His experience of them, the data and surveys and knowledge-those had value. And so he made his money by destroying the things that gave him solace.

It was an evil scheme, but typical, Ramon thought, of humanity's genetic destiny of contradiction. He stubbed out his cigarette, took a hand pick from the field pack, and began the long, slow process of scouting out a good place for a coring charge.

The sun shone down benevolently, and Ramon stripped off his shirt, tucking it into the back of his pistol belt. Between the hand pick and his small field shovel, he cleared away the thin covering of plants and soil, finding hard, solid rock not more than a foot and a half below the surface. If it had been much more, he'd have gone back for the tools in the van-powered for minor excavations, but expensive, p.r.o.ne to breaking down, and with the whining electrical sound of civilization to argue against their use. Looking along the mountainside, he thought there would likely be other places that would require the more extensive labor. All the better, then, that he begin here.

The coring charge was designed to carve a sample out of the living rock the length of an arm. Longer, if it was a particularly soft stone.

In the next week, Ramon would gather a dozen or so such cores from sites up and down the valley. After that, there would be three or four days while the equipment in the van sifted through the debris for trace elements and ores too slight to identify simply by looking. Once Ramon had that in hand, he could devise a strategy for garnering the most useful information in the cheapest possible way. Even as he set the first charge, he found himself fantasizing about those long, slow, lazy days while the tests ran. He could go hunting. Or explore the lakes. Or find a warm place in the sun and sleep while the breeze set the gra.s.ses to singing. His fingers danced across the explosives, tugging at wires and timing chips with the ease and autonomous grace of long practice. Many prospectors lost careers and hands-sometimes lives-by being too careless with their tools. Ramon was care-ful, but he was also practiced. Once the site was chosen and cleared, placing the charge took less than an hour.

He found himself, strangely, procrastinating about setting it off.

It was so quiet here, so still, so peaceful! From up here, the forested slopes fell away in swaths of black and dead-blue and orange, the trees rippling like a carpet of moss as the wind blew across them.

Except for the white egg of his bubbletent on the mountain shoulder below, it was a scene that might not have changed since the beginning of time. For a moment, he was almost tempted to forget about prospecting and just relax and unwind on this trip, as long as he was being forced to hide out in the hills anyway, but he shrugged the temptation away: once the fuss over the European had blown over, once he went back, he would still need money, the van wouldn't hold together forever, and he wasn't anxious to face Elena's scorn if he returned empty-handed again. Perhaps there will be no ore here anyway, he told himself, almost wishing it, and then wondered at the tenor of his thoughts. Surely it could not be a bad thing to be rich?

His stomach was beginning to ache again.

He looked up at the mountain face. It was beautiful; rugged and untouched. Once he was done with it, it would never be the same.

"All apologies," he said to the view he was about to mar. "But a man has to make his money somehow. Hills don't have to eat."

Ramon took one last cigarette from its silver case and smoked it like a man at an execution. He walked down to the boulders he'd chosen for shelter stringing the powder-primed fuse cord, hunkered down behind the rocks, and lit the fuse with the last ember.

There was the expected blast; but while the sound should have been a single report echoing against the mountains and then fading, it grew louder and longer instead. The hillside shifted greasily under him, like a giant shrugging in uneasy sleep, and he heard the express-train rumble of sliding rock. He could tell from the sound alone that something had gone very wrong.

41 A great cloud of dust enveloped him, white as fog and tasting like plaster and stone. A landslide. Somehow Ramon's little coring charge had set off a landslide. Coughing, he cursed himself, thinking back to what he'd seen. How could he have missed a rock face that unstable?

It was the kind of mistake that killed prospectors. If he had chosen shelter a little nearer than he had, he could have been crushed to death. Or worse, crippled and buried here where no man would ever find him-trapped until the redjackets came and stripped the flesh off his bones.

The angry, thundering roar quieted, faded. Ramon rose from behind the boulders, waving his hand before his face as if stirring the air would somehow put more oxygen in it or lessen the thick coat-ing of stone dust that was no doubt forming in his nose and lungs.

He walked slowly forward, his footing uncertain on the newly made scree. The stones smelled curiously hot.

A metal wall stood where the facade of stone had fallen away; half a mountain high and something between twenty and twenty-five meters wide.

It was, of course, impossible. It had to be some bizarre natural formation. He stepped forward, and his own reflection-pale as the ghost of a ghost-moved toward him. When he reached out, his blurred twin reached out as well, pausing when he paused. He stopped the motion before hand and ghostly hand could touch, noticing the stunned and bewildered expression on the face of his reflection in the metal, one no doubt matched by the expression on his own face. Then, gingerly, he touched the wall.

The metal was cool against his fingertips. The blast had not even scarred it. And though his mind rebelled at the thought, it was clearly unnatural. It was a made made thing. Made by somebody and thing. Made by somebody and hidden hidden by somebody, behind the rock of the mountain, though he couldn't imagine by whom. by somebody, behind the rock of the mountain, though he couldn't imagine by whom.

It took another moment for the full implication to register.

Something was buried here under the hill, something big, perhaps a building of some sort, a bunker. Perhaps the whole mountain was hollow.

This was was the big one, just the way he'd told Manuel it would be. the big one, just the way he'd told Manuel it would be.

But the find wasn't ore; it was this ma.s.sive artifact. It couldn't be a human artifact, the human colony here wasn't old enough to have left ruins behind. It had to be alien. Maybe it was millions of years old. Scientists and archaeologists would go insane over this find; perhaps even the Enye would be interested in it. If he couldn't parlay this discovery into an immense fortune, he wasn't anywhere near as smart as he thought he was. . . .

He flattened his palm against the metal, matching hands with his reflection. The cool metal vibrated under his hand, and, even as he waited, a deeper vibration went through the wall-boom, boom boom- low and rhythmic, like the beating of some great hidden heart, like the heart of the mountain itself, vast and stony and old.

A warning bell began to sound in the back of Ramon's mind, and he looked uneasily around him. Another man might not have reacted to this strange discovery with suspicion, but Ramon's people had been persecuted for hundreds of years, and he himself well remembered living on the grudging sufferance of the mejicanos, mejicanos, never knowing when they would find some pretext to wipe out his village. never knowing when they would find some pretext to wipe out his village.

Whatever this wall was, whatever reason it had for existing here in the twice-forsaken a.s.s-end of a half-known planet, it was no dead ruin-something was at work beneath this mountain. If this was hidden, it was because someone didn't want it to be found found. And might not be happy that it had had been. Someone unimaginably powerful, to judge from the scale of this artifact-and probably dangerous. been. Someone unimaginably powerful, to judge from the scale of this artifact-and probably dangerous.

Suddenly, the sunlight seemed cold on his shoulders. Again, he looked nervously around him, feeling much too exposed on the bare mountain slope. Another flapjack called, away across the air, but now its cries sounded to him like the shrill and batlike wailing of the d.a.m.ned.

43 It was time to get out out of here. Get back to the van-maybe take a short video recording of the wall, and then find someplace else to be. Anywhere else. Even back in Diegotown, where the threats were at least knowable. of here. Get back to the van-maybe take a short video recording of the wall, and then find someplace else to be. Anywhere else. Even back in Diegotown, where the threats were at least knowable.

He couldn't run run back to his camp-the terrain was too rough. back to his camp-the terrain was too rough.

But he scrambled down the mountainside as recklessly as he dared, sliding on his b.u.t.tocks down bluffs in a cloud of dust and scree when he could, jumping from rock to rock, bulling his way through bushes and tangles of scrub hierba, hierba, scattering gra.s.shoppers and paddlefoots before him. scattering gra.s.shoppers and paddlefoots before him.

He moved so quickly that he was more than a third of the way to his camp before the mountain opened behind him and the alien came out.

High above him, a hole opened in the mountain's side-a cave in the metal that a moment ago had not been there and now simply was. There was a high-pitched whine, like a centrifuge spinning up, and then, a breath later, something something flew out of the hole. flew out of the hole.

It was square-shaped and built awkwardly for flight, like something designed to move in vacuum. Bone-white and silent, it reminded Ramon of a ghost, or a great floating skull. Against the great empty blue of the sky-atmosphere thin enough at the top that stars shone through the blue-it could have been any size at any distance.

The strange boxy thing hung in the sky, rotating slowly. Looking, Ramon thought. Looking for him.