Hunter’s Run

George R.R. Martin, Gardner Dozois and Daniel Abraham

Hunter’s Run

to Connie Willis who learned everything she knows from Gardner and George and taught it all to Daniel

Overture

Ramon Espejo awoke floating in a sea of darkness. For a moment, he was relaxed and mindless, drifting peacefully, and then his identity returned to him lazily, like an unwanted afterthought.

After the deep, warm nothingness, there was no pleasure in recalling who he was. Without coming fully awake, he nonetheless felt the weight of his own being settling on his heart. Despair and anger and the constant gnawing worry sounded in his mind like a man in the next room clearing his throat. For some blissful time, he had been no one, and now he was himself again. His first truly conscious thought was to deny the disappointment he felt at being.

He was Ramon Espejo. He was working a prospecting contract out of Nuevo Janeiro. He was … he was … Ramon Espejo.

Where he had expected the details of his life to rush in – what he had done last night, what he was to do today, what grudges he was nursing, what resentments had pricked him recently – the next thought simply failed him. He knew he was Ramon Espejo – but he did not know where he was. Or how he had got there.

Disturbed, he tried to open his eyes, and found that they were open already. Wherever he was, it was a totally lightless place, darker than the jungle night, darker than the deep caves in the sandstone cliffs near Swan’s Neck.

Or perhaps he was blind.

That thought started a tiny spring of panic within him. There were stories of men who’d got drunk on cheap synthetic Muscat or Sweet Mary and woke up blind. Had he done that? Had he lost that much control of himself? A tiny rivulet of fear traced a cold channel down his spine. But his head didn’t hurt, and his belly didn’t burn. He closed his eyes, blinking them hard several times, irrationally hoping to jar his vision back into existence; the only result was an explosion of bright pastel blobs across his retinas, scurrying colors that were somehow more disturbing than the darkness.

His initial sense of drowsy lethargy slid away from him, and he tried to call out. He felt his mouth moving slowly, but he heard nothing. Was he deaf, too? He tried to roll over and sit up, but could not. He lay back against nothing, floating again, not fighting, but his mind racing. He was fully awake now, but he still couldn’t remember where he was, or how he had got there. Perhaps he was in danger: his immobility was both suggestive and ominous. Had he been in a mine cave-in? Perhaps a rockfall had pinned him down. He tried to concentrate on the feel of his body, sharpening his sensitivity to it, and finally decided that he could feel no weight or pressure, nothing actually pinioning him. You might not feel anything if your spinal cord has been cut, he thought with a flash of cold horror. But a moment’s further consideration convinced him that it could not be so: he could move his body a little, although when he tried to sit up, something stopped him, pulled his spine straight, pulled his arms and shoulders back down from where he’d raised them. It was like moving through syrup, only the syrup pushed back, holding him gently, firmly, implacably in place.

He could feel no moisture against his skin, no air, no breeze, no heat or cold. Nor did he seem to be resting on anything solid. Apparently, his first impression had been correct. He was floating, trapped in darkness, held in place. He imagined himself like an insect in amber, caught fast in the gooey syrup that surrounded him, in which he seemed to be totally submerged. But how was he breathing?

He wasn’t, he realized. He wasn’t breathing.

Panic shattered him like glass. All vestiges of thought blinked out, and he fought like an animal for his life. He clawed the enfolding nothingness, trying to pull his way up toward some imagined air. He tried to scream. Time stopped meaning anything, the struggle consuming him entirely, so that he couldn’t say how long it was before he fell back, exhausted. The syrup around him gently, firmly, pulled him back precisely as he had been – back into place. He felt as if he should have been panting, expected to hear his blood pounding in his ears, feel his heart hammering at his chest – but there was nothing. No breath, and no heartbeat. No burning for air.

He was dead.

He was dead and floating on a vast dry sea that stretched away to eternity in all directions. Even blind and deaf, he could sense the immensity of it, of that measureless midnight ocean.

He was dead and in Limbo, that Limbo that the Pope at San Esteban kept having to repudiate, waiting in darkness for the Day of Judgment.

He almost laughed at the thought – it was better than what the Catholic priest in the tiny adobe church in his little village in the mountains of northern Mexico had promised him; Father Ortega had often assured him that he’d go right to the flames and torments of Hell as soon as he died unshriven – but he could not push the thought away. He had died, and this emptiness – infinite darkness, infinite stillness, trapped alone with only his own mind – was what had always waited for him all his life, in spite of the blessings and benedictions of the Church, in spite of his sins and occasional semi-sincere repentance. None of it had made any difference. Numberless years stretched before him with nothing but his own sins and failures to dwell upon. He had died, and his punishment was to be always and forever himself under the implacable, unseen eye of God.

But how had it happened? How had he died? His memory seemed sluggish, unresponsive as a tractor’s engine on a cold winter morning – hard to start and hard to keep in motion without sputtering and stalling.

He began by picturing what was most familiar. Elena’s room in Diegotown with the small window over the bed, the thick pounded-earth walls. The faucets in the sink, already rusting and ancient though humanity had hardly been on the planet for more than twenty years. The tiny scarlet skitterlings that scurried across the ceiling, multiple rows of legs flailing like oars. The sharp smells of iceroot and ganja, spilled tequila and roasting peppers. The sounds of the transports flying overhead, grinding their way up through the air and into orbit.

Slowly, the recent events of his life took shape, still fuzzy as a badly aligned projection. He had been in Diegotown for the Blessing of the Fleet. There had been a parade. He had eaten roasted fish and saffron rice bought from a street vendor, and watched the fireworks. The smoke had smelled like a strip mine, and the spent fireworks had hissed like serpents as they plunged into the sea. A giant wreathed in flames, waving its arms in agony. Was that real? The smell of lemon and sugar. Old Manuel Griego had been talking about all his plans for when the Enye ships finally emerged from the jump to the colony planet São Paulo. He flushed with the sudden, powerful recollection of the scent of Elena’s body. But that was before …

There had been a fight. He’d fought with Elena, yes. The sound of her voice – high and accusing and mean as a pitbull. He’d hit her. He remembered that. She’d screamed and clawed at his eyes and tried to kick him in the balls. And they’d made up afterwards like they always did. Afterwards, she had run her fingers along the machete scars on his arm as he fell into a sated sleep. Or was that another night? So many of their nights together ended like that …

There had been another fight, earlier still, with someone else … But his thoughts shied away from that like a mule might shy away from a snake on a path.

He’d left her before first light, sneaking out of her room heavy with the smell of sweat and sex while she was still asleep so he wouldn’t have to talk to her, feeling the morning breeze cool against his skin. Flatfurs had scurried away from him as he walked down the muddy street, their alarm cries sounding like panicked oboes. He’d flown his van to the outfitter’s station because he was going … before they caught him …

His mind balked again. It was not the nauseating forgetfulness that seemed to have consumed his world, but something else. There was something his mind didn’t want to recall. Slowly, gritting his teeth, he forced his memory to bend to his will.

He’d spent the day realigning two lift tubes in the van. Someone had been there with him. Griego, bitching about parts. And then he had flown off into the wastelands, the outback, terreno cimarrón …

But his van had exploded! Hadn’t it? He suddenly remembered the van exploding, but he remembered seeing it from a distance. He hadn’t been caught in the blast, but nonetheless the memory was thick with despair. The van’s destruction was part of it, then, whatever it was. He tried to bring his focus to that moment – the brightness of the flame; the hot, sudden wind of the concussion …

Had his heart been beating, it would have stopped then in terror as memory returned.

He remembered now. And maybe dying and being in Hell would have been better …

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

Ramon Espejo lifted his chin, daring his opponent to strike. The crowd that filled the alleyway behind the ramshackle bar called the El Rey formed a ring, bodies pressing against each other in the tension between coming close enough to see and retreating to a safe distance. Their voices were a mixture of shouts urging the two men to fight and weak, insincere exhortations to make peace. The big man who was bobbing and weaving across the narrow circle from him was a pale European, his cheeks flushed red from liquor, his wide, soft hands balled into fists. He was taller than Ramon, with a greater reach. Ramon could see the man’s eyes shifting, as wary of the crowd as of Ramon.

‘Come on, pendejo,’ Ramon said, grinning. His arms were raised and spread, as if he were ready to embrace the fighter. ‘You wanted power. Come have a taste of it.’

The shifting LEDs of the bar’s signs turned the night blue and red and amber in turn. Far above them all, the night sky shone with countless stars too bright and close for the lights of Diegotown to drown.

The constellation of the Stone Man stared down at them as they circled, a single star smoldering balefully like a red eye, as if it was watching, as if it was urging them on.

‘I ought to do it, you ugly little greaser!’ the European spat. ‘I ought to go ahead and kick your skinny ass!’

Ramon only bared his teeth and motioned the man nearer. The European wanted this to be a talking fight again, but it was too late for that. The voices of the crowd merged into a single waterfall roar. The European made his move, graceless as a falling tree; the great left fist made its slow way through the air, moving as though through molasses. Ramon stepped inside the swing, letting the gravity knife slip from his sleeve into his hand. He flicked the blade open in the same motion that brought his fist against the larger man’s belly.

A look of almost comical surprise crossed the European’s face. His breath went out of him with a whoof.

Ramon stabbed twice more, fast and hard, twisting the knife just to be sure. He was close enough to smell the nose-tingling reek of the flowery cologne the man wore, to feel his liquorice-scented breath panting against his face. The crowd went silent as the European slipped to his knees and then sat, legs spread, in the filthy muck of the alley. The big, soft hands opened and closed aimlessly, slick with blood that turned pale when the LEDs were red, black when the light shifted blue.

The European’s mouth gaped open, and blood gushed out over his teeth. Slowly, very slowly, seeming to move in slow motion, he toppled sideways to the ground. Kicked his feet, heels drumming the ground. Was still.

Someone in the crowd uttered an awed obscenity.

Ramon’s shrill, self-satisfied pleasure faded. He looked at the faces of the crowd – wide eyes, mouths open in little, surprised ‘o’s. The alcohol in his blood seemed to thin, sobriety floating to the top of his mind. A sinking sense of betrayal possessed him – these people had been pushing him on, encouraging the fight. And now they were abandoning him for winning it!

‘What?’ Ramon shouted to the other patrons of the El Rey. ‘You heard what he was saying! You saw what he did!’

But the alley was emptying. Even the woman who’d been with the European, the one who had started it all, was gone. Mikel Ibrahim, the manager of the El Rey, lumbered toward him, his great bear-like face the image of patient, saintly suffering. He held out his wide hand. Ramon lifted his chin again, thrust out his chest, as if Mikel’s gesture was an insult. The manager only sighed, shook his head slowly back and forth, and made a pulling gesture with his fingers. Ramon curled his lip, half-turned away, then slapped the handle of the knife into the waiting palm.

‘Police are coming,’ the manager warned. ‘You should go home, Ramon.’

‘You saw what happened,’ Ramon said.

‘No, I wasn’t here when it happened,’ he said. ‘And neither were you, eh? Now go home. And keep your mouth shut.’

Ramon spat on the ground and stalked into the night. It wasn’t until he began to walk that he understood how drunk he was. At the canal by the plaza, he squatted down, leaned back against a tree, and waited until he was sure he could walk without listing. Around him, Diegotown spent its week’s wages on alcohol and kaafa kyit and sex. Music tumbled in from the rough gypsy houseboats on the canal; fast, festive accordion mixing with trumpets and steel drums and the shouts of the dancers.

Somewhere in the darkness, a tenfin was calling mournfully, a ‘bird’ that was really a flying lizard, and which sounded uncannily like a woman sobbing in misery and despair, something that had led the superstitious Mexican peasants who made up a large percentage of the colony’s population to say that La Llorona, the Crying Woman, had crossed the stars with them from Mexico and now wandered the night of this new planet, crying not only for all the children who’d been lost and left behind on Earth, but for all the ones who would die on this hard new world.

He, of course, didn’t believe in such crap. But as the ghostly crying accelerated to a heartbreaking crescendo, he couldn’t help but shiver.

Alone, Ramon could regret stabbing the European; surely it would have been enough just to punch him around, humiliate him, slap him like a bitch? But when Ramon was drunk and angry, he always went too far. Ramon knew that he shouldn’t have drunk so much, and that whenever he got around people, it always seemed to end like this. He’d begun his evening with the sick knot in his belly that being in the city seemed to bring, and then by the time he’d drunk enough to untie that knot, as usual someone had said or done something to enrage him. It didn’t always end with a knife, but it rarely ended well. Ramon didn’t like it, but he wasn’t ashamed of it either. He was a man – an independent prospector on a tough frontier colony world less than a generation removed from its founding. By God, he was a man! He drank hard, he fought hard, and anyone who had a problem with that would be wise to keep their pinche opinions to themselves!

A family of tapanos – small, raccoon-like amphibians with scales like a hedgehog’s spikes – lumbered up from the water, considered Ramon with dark, shining eyes, and made their way toward the plaza, where they would scavenge for the dropped food and trash of the day. Ramon watched them pass, slick dark paths of canal water trailing behind them, then sighed and hauled himself to his feet.

Elena’s apartment was in the maze of streets around the Palace of the Governors. It perched above a butcher’s shop, and the air that came in the back window was often fetid with old gore. He considered sleeping in his van, but he felt sticky and exhausted. He wanted a shower and a beer and a plate of something warm to keep his belly from growling. He climbed the stairs slowly, trying to be quiet, but the lights were burning in her windows. A shuttle was lifting from the spaceport far to the north, tracking lights glowing blue and red as the vessel rose toward the stars. Ramon tried to cover the click and hiss of the door with the throbbing rumble of the shuttle’s lift drive. But it was no use.

‘Where the fuck have you been?’ Elena yelled as he stepped inside. She wore a thin cotton dress with a stain on the sleeve. Her hair was tied back into a knot of black darker than the sky. Her teeth were bared in rage, her mouth almost square with it. Ramon closed the door behind him, and heard her gasp. In an instant, the anger had left her. He followed her gaze to where the European’s blood had soaked the side of his shirt, the leg of his pants. He shrugged.

‘We’ll have to burn these,’ he said.

‘Are you okay, mi hijo? What happened?’

He hated it when she called him that. He was no one’s little boy. But it was better than fighting, so he smiled, pulling at the tongue of his belt.

‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘It was the other cabron who took the worst of it.’

‘The police … will the police …?’

‘Probably not,’ Ramon said, dropping his trousers around his knees. He pulled his shirt up over his head. ‘Still, we should burn these.’

She asked no more questions, only took his clothes out to the incinerator that the apartments on the block all shared, while Ramon took a shower. The time readout in the mirror told him that dawn was still three or four hours away. He stood under the flow of warm water, considering his scars – the wide white band on his belly where Martin Casaus had slashed him with a sheet metal hook, the disfiguring lump below his elbow where some drunken bastard had almost sheared through his bones with a machete. Old scars. Some older than others. They didn’t bother him; in fact, he liked them. They made him look strong.

When he came out, Elena was standing at her back window, arms crossed below her breasts. When she turned to him, he was ready for the blast furnace of her rage. But instead, her mouth was a tiny rosebud, her eyes wide and round. When she spoke, she sounded like a child; worse, like a woman trying to be a child.

‘I was scared for you,’ she said.

‘You never have to be,’ he said. ‘I’m tough as leather.’

‘But you’re just one man,’ she said. ‘When Tomas Martinez got killed, there were eight men. They came right up to him when he came out of his girlfriend’s house, and …’

‘Tomas was a little whore,’ Ramon said and waved a hand dismissively, as if to say that any real man ought to be able to stand up against eight thugs sent to even a score. Elena’s lips relaxed into a smile, and she walked toward him, her hips shifting forward with each step, as if her pussy were coming to him, the rest of her trailing behind reluctantly. It could have gone the other way, he knew. They could as easily have passed the night as they had so many others, shouting at each other, throwing things, coming to blows. But even that might have ended in sex, and he was tired enough that he was genuinely grateful that they could simply fuck and then sleep, and forget about the wasted, empty day that had just gone by. Elena lifted off her dress. Ramon took her familiar flesh in his arms. The scent of old blood rose from the butcher’s shop below like an ugly perfume of Earth and humanity that had followed them across the void.

Afterward, Ramon lay spent in the bed. Another shuttle was lifting off. Usually there was hardly more than one a month. But the Enye were coming soon, earlier than expected, and the platform above Diegotown needed to be fitted out to receive the great ships with their alien cargos.

It was generations ago that mankind had raised itself up from the gravity wells of Earth and Mars and Europa and taken to the stars with dreams of conquest. Humanity had planned to spread its seed through the universe like a high councilor’s son at a port town brothel, but it had been disappointed. The universe was already taken. Other star-faring races had been there before them.

Dreams of empire faded into dreams of wealth. Dreams of wealth decayed into shamed wonder. More than the great and enigmatic technologies of the Silver Enye and Turu, it was the nature of space itself that defeated them, as it had defeated every other star-faring race. The vast dark was too great. Too big. Communication at the speed of light was so slow as to barely be communication at all. Governance was impossible. Law beyond what could be imposed locally was farcical. The outposts of the Commercial Alliance that humanity had been ‘persuaded’ to join by the Silver Enye (much as Admiral Perry’s gunships had ‘persuaded’ Japan to open itself up for trade in a much earlier generation) were wideflung, some outposts falling out of contact for generations, some lost and forgotten or else put on a bureaucrat’s schedule of concerns to be addressed another generation hence by another bureaucrat as yet unborn.

Establishing dominance – or even much continuity – across that gaping infinity of Night was something that seemed possible only from the provincially narrow viewpoint imposed by looking up from the bottom of a gravity well. Once you got out amongst the stars, you learned better.

No race had been able to overcome such vast distance, and so they had striven to overcome time. And it was in this that humanity at last found some small niche in the crowded, chaotic darkness of the universe. Enye and Turu saw the damage done by humanity to their own environment, the deep human propensity for change and control and their profoundly limited ability to see ahead to consequences, and they had found it more virtue than vice. The vast institutional minds, human and alien both, entered into a glacially slow generational agreement. Where empty planets were, intractable and inconvenient and dangerous, with wild flora and unknown fauna, there humans would be put. For the slow decades or centuries that it required to tame, to break, to pave over whatever marvels and threats evolution had put there, the Silver Enye and Cian and Turu and whatever other of the great races happened by would act as trade ships once had in the ancient days when mankind had displaced itself from the small islands and insignificant hills of Earth.

The São Paulo colony was barely in its second generation. There were women still alive who could recall the initial descent onto an untouched world. Diegotown, Nuevo Janeiro, San Esteban. Amadora. Little Dog. Fiddler’s Jump. All the cities of the south had bloomed since then, like mold on a Petri dish. Men had died from the subtle toxins of the native foods. Men had discovered the great cat-lizards, soon nicknamed chupacabras, after the mythical goat-suckers of Old Earth, that had stood proud and dumb at the peak of the planet’s food chain, and men had died for their discovery. The oyster-eyed Silver Enye had not. The insect-and-glass Turu had not. The enigmatic Cian with their penchant for weightlessness had not.

And now the great ships were coming ahead of schedule; each half-living ship heavy, they all assumed, with new equipment and people from other colonies hoping to make a place for themselves here on São Paulo. And also rich with the chance of escape for those to whom the colony had become a prison. More than one person had asked Ramon if he’d thought of going up, out, into the darkness, but they had misunderstood him. He had been in space; he had come here. The only attraction that leaving could hold was the chance to be someplace with even fewer people, which was unlikely. However ill he fit in São Paulo, he could imagine no situation less odious.

He didn’t recall falling asleep, but woke when the late morning sun streaming through Elena’s window shone in his face. He could hear her humming in the next room, going about the business of her morning. Shut up, you evil bitch, he thought, wincing at the flash of a lingering hangover. She had no talent for song – every note she made was flat and grating. Ramon lay silent, willing himself back to sleep, away from this city, this irritating noise, this woman, this moment in time. Then the humming was drowned by an angry sizzling sound, and, a moment later, the scent of garlic and chile sausage and frying onions wafted into the room. Ramon was suddenly aware of the emptiness in his belly. With a sigh, he raised himself to his elbow, swung his sleep-sodden legs around, and, stumbling awkwardly, made his way to the doorway.