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

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 was Ramon Espejo—but he did not know where he was. Or how he had gotten there.

Disturbed, he tried to open his eyes, and found that they were open already. Wherever he was, it was a totally dark place, darker than the jungle night, darker than the darkness in 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 along 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 completely 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 gotten 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 had 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, 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 it 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 all the blessings and benedictions of the Church, in spite of all his sins and occasional semi-sincere repentances. None of it had made any difference.

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 with what was most familiar, imagining his room in Deigotown—the small window over his cot, the thick pounded-earth walls. The faucets in his sink, already rusting and ancient though humanity had hardly been on the planet for sixteen 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. He had eaten roasted fish and saffron rice from a street vendor and watched the fireworks. The smoke had smelled like a strip mine from all the explosions, and the spent fireworks had hissed like serpents as they plunged into the sea. But that was before … yes, before.

There had been a fight. He'd fought with Eleana. 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. Afterward, she had run her fingers along the machete scars on his arm as he fell into a sated sleep.

He remembered now.

He'd left her before first light, sneaking out of a 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 scurrying away from him as he walked down the muddy street, making their alarm cries like panicked oboes. He'd flown his van to the outfitter's station because he was going …

His mind balked. 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 his will.

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

Had his heart been beating, it would have stopped then in remembered terror. He had gone to the mountains—and he had seen it.

"Yes," Ramon said as he clamped down the cowl on his left-rear lift tube. "This time, I'm coming back with enough good claims to make the pinche lawyers start working for me."

The outfitters shop was a mix of junkyard and clean room—great scraps of the vans and transports Old Sanchez had gathered up over the years to strip for parts or else retool into cheap buys for people even more desperate than themselves lay among storage units of picocircuitry that it would have taken Ramon half his life to pay for. Old Sanchez himself waddled through the work bays with a glass of iced tea in his hand. When Ramon had first known him, it had been whiskey. Never say that times don't change.

"You better hope not," Old Sanchez said. "Too much money kills men like you and me. God meant us to be poor, or he wouldn't have made us so mean."

Ramon tested the tubes. The yields were balanced and good enough, and the hum from them was like a promise of escape.

"God meant you to be mean, Sanchito. He just didn't want me taking any shit."

"Eleana know you're going out? Last time she came here looking for you two days after you left. You're gonna have to do something about that bitch. Kill her or get married."

The knot in Ramon's belly went a notch tighter. He wasn't sure if it was dread at leaving her behind or the need to be gone. Both, maybe.

"She knows I'm going this time. And when I get back, she'll be happy to help me spend what I get. You watch. This is going to be the big one."

The human colony on the planet of São Paulo was only a little more than ten 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 the Brazilian Commonwealth, Mexico, Jamaica, and Hispaniola, and their natural inclination was to expand south, into the steamy lands near the equator—they were not effete 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 unvocalized common conviction—one anticipated 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 possibility 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 chain in the northern hemisphere of São Paulo was a more likely place to find rich ore than the flatter country around the Hand or Nuevo Janeiro or Little Dog. The mountains of the Sierra Hueso had been piled up many millions of years before by a collision between continental plates, the colliding plates squeezing an ocean out of existence between them; the former seabottom would have been pinched and pushed high into the air along the collision line, and it would be rich in copper and other metals.

The Sierra Hueso had been mapped from orbit by the colony ramscoop, but no one Ramon knew had ever actually been there, and the territory was still so unexplored 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.

It was probably better that way. 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. No, it was better this way—muleback 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 São 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. At last, there was no one around to bother him. His stomach had stopped hurting, for the first time that day.

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

The sun was setting, pulling shadows across the mountain faces, when he brought the van to rest in a rugged upland meadow along the southern slopes of the Sierra Hueso range. It took him only moments to set up his bubbletent, light a small fire, and set his simple dinner—a filleted fatfin, rubbed with garlic and habenaro—to grilling. While the fish cooked, he lit a cigaret and watched the stone of the mountains darkening with the sky. Other nights, on other trips, he'd have broken out a bottle of tequila or rum or whisky to keep himself company, but he'd deliberately left such distractions behind this time; this time, he needed to be all business. Truth be told, with the immense view spread to the horizon around him, and the stars beginning to show in the cold, blue-black sky, he found, to his surprise, that he didn't miss the tequila all that much anyway. A flapjack moved against the sky, and Ramon roused 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 grasshoppers 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, amigo," he called after it, and then smiled. Good hunting for both of them, eh? Quickly, he ate his dinner—briefly missing the tequila after all—and then sat 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 São Paulo had drawn in the sky to replace the old constellations of Earth—the Mule, 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 São Paulo's star in the winter sky.

In the morning, he ate a small breakfast of cold tortillas and beans, consulted the survey maps, and started up the southern slopes, looking for the collision line. He didn't expect it would be hard to locate; ocean floor rocks were unmistakable—a mangled, kneaded layer of pillow lava, basalt, and gabbo. He found it before the sun had reached its zenith, and surveyed it almost with regret; he'd been enjoying the climb 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

With a sigh, Ramon unslung his backpack. It took him only minutes to rig the small charge for the coring sample. He had done it a thousand times before, it seemed. Still, he walked slowly, stringing out the det cord to a safe distance, finding a boulder that would shield him from the blast. 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 went 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 this trip, but he shrugged the temptation away—he needed money, the van wouldn't hold together forever, and Eleana's scorn when he came back empty-handed again was something he wasn't anxious to face. Perhaps there will be no copper here anyway, he told himself reassuringly, 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 hurt again.

He rubbed his hand over the boulder in front of him, tracing the aquatic fossils, ancestors of the fatfins and butterfish that were the mainstay of the Nuevo Janeiro fishing industry, that were another indicator of the collision line; the fossils were grotesquely distorted, as though seen in a funhouse mirror—squeezed out of shape by the slow heat and pressure of the continental collision. How long had it taken for that to happen, for fish to turn to stone and be lifted from the bottom of the sea thousands of feet into the thinning air? The crash of stone and stone had taken an inconceivably vast time, pushing the mountains toward the sky at a rate of only a few inches per century, slowly enough so that the big river to the west had been able to saw its way through the range as it rose, keeping pace inch for inch. Millions of years. And what had taken millions of years to become as it was, he was about to change in an instant, and afterward, it could never be undone. The untouched vastness was about to be touched, altered irrevocably, by the hand of man. By his hand. There was regret in that, and a kind of melancholy—but also an oily sort of pride that swelled his heart even as it made his belly twinge.

He lit a cigaret and the det cord with the same match.

"All apologies, mi amigo," he said to the mountainside. "I'm just a man, not a hill, and I've got to eat somehow." Then he crouched behind the sheltering stone.

There was the expected blast; then 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 wrong. The coring blast shouldn't have set off a rockslide, let alone one that sounded that big …

When silence returned, Ramon stood up and walked carefully through the swirling cloud of dust, testing each step before he trusted his weight to it, squinting at the blast site. He moved slowly up the trail of rubble and scree left by the slide. The whole rockface had slid away, revealing a wall. A metal wall.

Ramon stood unmoving as the arid mist of rock dust thinned. 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 thing. Made by somebody and hidden by somebody, behind the rock of the mountain, though he couldn't imagine by whom.

It took a moment more 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.

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, never knowing when they would find some pretext to wipe out the village.

If this was hidden, it was because someone didn't want it to be found. And might not be happy that it had been.

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, low and rhythmic, like the beating of some great hidden heart, like the heart of the mountain itself, vast and stony and old.

This was no ancient artifact or age-old ruin. Whatever it was, this installation was alive.

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 damned.

Move, move.

He couldn't run back to his camp—the terrain was too rough. But he scrambled down the mountainside as recklessly as he dared, sliding on his buttocks 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, scattering grasshoppers and paddlefoots before him.

He moved so quickly that he was over halfway to his camp before the mountain opened behind him and the alien came out.

A rushing sound made him turn in time to see an opening high on the ridgeline iris shut. Something was moving through the air—a grotesque goblin-shape larger than a man, on a device that looked for all the world like a flying motorcycle. The thing spiraled up, gaining altitude.

Ramon threw himself flat and rolled under bushes, only vaguely aware of the thorns and twigs biting his flesh. High above, the thing had steadied and begun to fly in slow, concentric circles. He tried to estimate its distance and size. If he'd had his hunting rifle, Ramon thought, the thing would have been easily in range. But it was too far for his handgun. At a guess, the thing might have stood two full meters. If he had brought his binoculars from the camp …

Sick dread squeezed his chest. His camp. The thing was clearly searching for something, and Ramon hadn't done anything to conceal the white dome of the bubbletent or the van beside it. There had been no reason to. The thing might not see him down in the underbrush, but it would see his camp. He had to get there—get back to the van and into the air—before the thing from the mountain discovered it.

He waited until the thing had its back to him, then burst out from the brush, pelting wildly down the slope without bothering with cover. Speed was more important now than invisibility. His mind was already racing ahead—would his van outpace the thing's cycle? Just let him get it in the air. He could fly it low, make it hard to spot or attack. He was a good pilot. He could dodge between treetops from here to Fiddler's Jump if he had to …

He reached the meadow that contained his camp just as the alien appeared overhead. He hesitated, torn between dashing for the van and diving back into the brush. The thing swooped forward. Perhaps it's friendly, Ramon thought in numb despair. Madre de Dios, it had better be friendly!

The van exploded. A geyser of fire and smoke shot up out of the meadow with a waterfall roar, and tenfin birds rose screaming all along the mountain flank. The shockwave buffeted Ramon, splattering him with dirt and pebbles and shredded vegetation. He staggered, fighting to maintain his balance. Pieces of fused metal thumped down around him, burning holes in the moss of the meadow floor. Through the plume of smoke, Ramon saw the thing turn, flying fifteen feet above the ground and brandishing something that looked like a pair of eggbeaters twined together; obviously a weapon. In his shock, Ramon found himself entranced by the fluid way the thing moved—sure as a cat, jointless as a tentacle. It pointed the eggbeaters. The bubbletent went up in a ball of expanding gas, pieces of torn plastic tumbling and swooping like frightened white birds in the hot turbulence of the explosion.

Ramon caught only a glimpse of that. He was already in frantic motion, running, swerving, tearing through the brush. He could hear his own gasping breath, and his heart slammed against his ribs like a fist. Faster!

He felt the alien behind him more than he saw it. Some sixth sense made him turn, and there it was, bearing down on him with weapon leveled, a devil flying out of a hell of smoke and flame. Its eyes were bright orange. Ramon fumbled for his sidearm, confounded by the snap on the holster.

Something hit him—

Air and light and sound hit him like a fist.

His body convulsed like a live fish on a frying pan, every muscle knotting. He arched up like an epileptic—head and heels bearing his weight, his spine bent like a bow. Something he couldn't see flipped him on his belly, and he felt a needle slide in at the base of his spine. He vomited with wrenching violence—thick amber syrup gouting from his mouth and nose. And then again, sick, racking spasms that expelled even more, as if his lungs had been filled with the stuff. Another long needle dug into his neck, and, with a terrible shudder, Ramon began to breathe.

The air he gulped cut like glass on the way in, and his quiescent heart came suddenly, violently to life. The world went red. Pain drove away all thought, all sense of self, and then slowly abated.

He was sprawled naked on the bottom of a metal tank not more than ten feet square. So much for his measureless midnight ocean! The walls were too high to see over, and the lights—blue-white and bitter—were too bright to see past and make out the ceiling beyond. He tried to sit up, but his muscles were putty. It was bitingly cold. He settled against the metal floor and shivered, feeling his teeth start to chatter. He tried lifting an arm, but the impulse was slow to reach his flesh, and the limb swayed drunkenly when it rose. Strong smells that he couldn't identify burned his nostrils.

He was alive now, certainly, if he'd ever been dead at all. This was no supernatural otherworld, no Limbo, no Land of Ghosts—this was real.

That in no way abated his terror. In fact, it increased it.

A thing like a long gray snake reared up above the rim of the tank. Ramon saw it hesitate, as if considering him, and then stretch down. Three long, thin tendrils split off where the head should have been. The gray snake brushed aside Ramon's clumsy parry and seized him by the shoulder. Ramon struggled weakly. But his strength was gone, and the snake's grip was as cold and pitiless as death. Another of the snakes stretched down and wrapped itself around his waist.

The snakes lifted him smoothly out of the tank. He tried to scream, but the sound came out more like a cough. He was high in the air now, above what seemed to be a vast, high-domed cavern full of noise and lights and motion and alien shapes. The cavern swarmed with activity that Ramon could not resolve into recognizable patterns, having no referents for it. His nose and mouth were filled with a biting, acrid odor, something like formaldehyde. The smell triggered a rush of raw hysterical horror, deep-buried xenophobic nightmares: they'll cut me open, dissection, they'll chop me up, put me in bottles, CUT me— He thrashed impotently, mad with terror, but was unable to break free.

The snake-tentacles set him down on a platform near one wall of the cavern. He collapsed as soon as they released him, his legs too weak to bear his weight. He waited on his hands and knees, staring into the terrible bright lights, panting like a trapped animal.

It was dimmer here, in the angle of the wall and the cavern floor. Inchoate shapes moved ponderously in the shadows; as they came forward, they were finished and fleshed by the light, but Ramon still could not discern them. His mind kept fighting to resolve them into the familiar aspects of humanity, and—terribly, terrifyingly—they would not resolve. They were too big, and shaped wrong, and their eyes were a bright glowing orange.

A needle slid out of the end of a hovering gray tentacle, thrust quickly into Ramon's arm, too quickly for him to move or protest. A prickly wave of heat went through him, and he suddenly felt much stronger. What kind of injection had it given him? Glucose? Vitamins? Perhaps there'd been a tranquilizer in it as well; his head was clear now, and he felt more alert, less frightened. He drew himself up to his knees, one hand instinctively covering his crotch.

The aliens had stopped a few feet away. There were three of them, one bigger than the others. Ramon could make them out more clearly now. His mind accepted them by treating them as frauds; he saw them now as men wearing grotesque monster costumes, and kept looking for some unconvincing detail that would betray the disguise.

Intellectually, he knew better, of course. They were not men in costume. They were not men at all.

They were humanoid bipeds, at least, not spiders or octopi or big-eyed blobs, although something about the articulation of the limbs was disturbingly odd. These three ranged in height from about six-and-a-half to seven feet tall, making even the shortest of them far taller than Ramon. Their torsos were columnar, seemingly of uniform breath at hip and waist and shoulder, and surely they must weigh more than three hundred pounds apiece, although somehow the dominant impression they created was one of grace and suppleness. Their skins were glossy, shining, but each had its own distinctive coloration: one was a mottled blue and gold, the second a pale amber, while the largest one had yellowish flesh covered with strange, swirling patterns in silver and black.

All wore broad belts hung with unknown objects of metal and glass, and nondescript halters of some ash-gray and lusterless material. Their arms were disproportionately long, the hands huge, the fingers—three fingers, two thumbs—incongruously slender and delicate. Their heads were set low in a hollow between the shoulders and thrust a little forward on thick, stumpy necks, giving them a belligerent and aggressive look, like snapping turtles. Crests of hair or feathers slanted back from the tops of their heads at rakish angles. Quills protruded from their shoulders, the napes of their necks, and the top of their spinal ridges, forming a bristly ruff. Their heads were roughly triangular, flattened on top but bulging out at the base of the skull, the faces tapering sharply to a point. And the faces were faces out of nightmare: large rubbery black snouts streaked with blue and orange, trembling and sniffing, mouths like raw wet wounds, too wide and lipless, and small staring eyes set too low on either side of the snout. Orange eyes, hot and featureless as molten marbles.

Staring at him.

They were staring at him as though he were a bug, and that fanned a spark of anger inside him. He got to his feet and glared back at them, still shaky but determined not to show it. Ramon Espejo knelt to nobody! Especially not to ugly, unnatural monsters like these!

The biggest alien gestured: come with me. There was something studied about the motion, as though it had been learned by rote, as though its natural equivalent might be without meaning for men. The alien turned and began to walk toward the cavern wall. Reluctantly, Ramon followed. He glanced suspiciously at the two smaller aliens as he passed between them, but they neither moved nor looked his way.

Ahead was a door cut through the naked rock of the cavern wall, which the alien disappeared into. Ramon came slowly forward, looking warily all around him, wondering if he should try to run. Run to where, though? And some of the objects suspended from the alien's belt were almost certainly weapons. Shaking his head, grinning with fear and tension, Ramon followed the alien through the door.

Afterward, Ramon could not clearly remember that trip. He was led through tunnels barely wide and tall enough to allow the alien to pass. The tunnels slanted steeply up and down, and doubled back on themselves, seemingly at random. The rock was slightly phosphorescent, providing just enough light to let him see his footing. He refused to look behind at the following darkness, although his nerves were crawling like worms.

The silence was heavy here in the belly of the hill, although occasionally a far-away hooting could be heard through many thicknesses of rock, sounding to Ramon like the noise damned souls might make crying unheeded to a cold and distant God. Sometimes they passed through pockets of light and activity, rooms full of chattering noise and rich rotten smells, rooms drenched in glaring red or blue or green illumination, rooms dark as ink but for the faint silver line of the path they followed. Once they stood motionless for long moments in such a room, while Ramon's stomach dropped and he wondered if they could be in an elevator.

Back in the tunnel again, it was close and dark and silent. The alien's back gleamed pale and faint in the phosphorescent glow of the rock, like a fish in dark water, and, for a moment, it seemed to Ramon as if the markings on its flesh were moving, writhing and changing like living things. He stumbled, and instinctively clutched the alien's arm to keep from falling. Its skin was warm and dry, like snake skin. In the enclosed space of the tunnel, he could smell the alien; it had a heavy, musky odor, like olive oil, like cloves, strange rather than unpleasant. It neither looked behind nor paused nor made a sound. It continued to walk imperturbably on, at the same steady pace, and Ramon had no choice but to follow after it or be left alone in the chilly darkness of this black alien maze.

At last, the tunnel ended in another big, garishly lit chamber. To the human eye, there was something subtly wrong about the proportions and dimensions of the chamber: it was more a rhombus than a rectangle, the floor was slightly tilted, the ceiling tilted at another angle and not of uniform height, everything subliminally disorienting, everything off, making Ramon feel sick and dizzy. The light was too bright and too blue, and the chamber was filled with a whispering susurrus that hovered right at the threshold of hearing.

This place had not been made by human beings, nor was it meant for them. As he came forward into the chamber, he saw that the walls streamed with tiny, crawling pictures, as though a film of oil was continuously flowing down over them from ceiling to floor and carrying with it a thin scum of ever-changing images: swirls of vivid color, geometric shapes, mazy impressionistic designs, vast surrealistic landscapes. Occasionally, something representational and recognizable would stream by, trees, mountains, stars, tiny alien faces that would seem to stare malignly at Ramon out of the feverdream chaos as they swept down to be swallowed by the floor.

The alien stopped, but gestured him on. Gingerly, Ramon crossed the chamber, feeling uneasy and disconcerted, unconsciously leaning to one side to correct the tilt of the floor and putting his feet down cautiously, as though he expected the chamber to pitch or yaw.

In the center of the chamber was a deep circular pit, lined by metal, and down in the pit was another alien.

It was even taller than Ramon's guide, and thinner, and its crest and quills were much longer. Its skin was bone-white and completely free of markings. White with age? Dyed white as an indication of rank? Or was it of a different race? Impossible to say, but as the alien's eyes turned upward toward Ramon, he was seized and shaken by the force behind its gaze, by the harsh authority it palpably exuded. He noticed, with another little shock, that the creature was physically connected to the pit—things that might have been wires or rods or cables emerged from its body and disappeared into the smooth metal walls, forming an intricate cat's cradle around it. Some of the cables were black and dull, some were luminescent, and some, glossy red and gray and brown, pulsed slowly and rhythmically, as if with an obscene life of their own. Ramon looked away.

"You will find him," said the thing in the pit.

Ramon turned back to stare at the alien, fighting to keep surprise from his face. It had spoken in Portuglish, the bastard lingua franca of the colony, and quite clearly, though its voice was disturbingly rusty and metallic, as though a machine had spoken. Ramon, who also spoke Spanish, English, Portuguese, and a smattering of Navaho and French, slyly and instinctively pretended not to understand, although even he was unsure what he hoped to gain by doing so. "¿Como?" he said.

The alien's cold opaque eyes fixed on him. "It is statistically unlikely that you speak only that language," it said.

The arrogance of its harsh, unused voice and the steady gaze of those orange, unblinking eyes made Ramon angry. In times of stress—when he had lost his first van in a drunken bet, when his wife had left him, when Eleana threatened to throw him out—Ramon's rage had never deserted him. Now it returned, flushing him with heat and certainty. "What are you, you creatures?" he said. "Where do you come from? From this planet? Somewhere else? What do you think you're doing, attacking me, keeping me here against my will? And what about my van, eh? Who's going to get me a new van?"

The alien stared at him wordlessly. It struck Ramon that this was likely the first conversation ever to take place between a human and an alien. And he was bitching about his van! He had to fight down the urge to laugh, trying to keep his anger hot and stoked.

"Those are sounds, not words," the alien said after a long pause. "Discordancies outside proper flow. You must not speak in meaningless sounds, or you will be corrected."

Ramon shivered and looked away; his rage had ebbed as quickly as it had flared, and now he felt tired, chilled by the alien's imperturbability. "What do you want?" he asked wearily.

"We do not 'want' anything," the alien said. "Again, you speak outside the way of reality. You have a function: therefore, you exist. You will exercise that function because it is your purpose to do so, your tatecredue. No 'wanting' is involved: all is inevitable flow."

"And if I do not function as you wish?"

The alien paused, as though briefly puzzled. "You live," it said finally. "Therefore, you exercise your function. Nonfunctioning, you could not exist. To exist and yet not exist—you would be a contradiction, aubre, a disruption in the flow. Aubre cannot be tolerated. To restore balanced flow, it would be necessary to deny the illusion that you exist."

That at least was clear enough, Ramon thought, feeling gooseflesh sweep across his skin.

Ramon chose his words carefully when he spoke again. "And what function am I to fulfill?"

The cold orange eyes fixed on him again. "Take care," the alien warned. "That we must interpret your tatecredue for you is a sign that you incline toward aubre. But we will grant you a dispensation, as you are not a proper creature. Listen: a man has escaped from us. Three days ago he fled from us on foot, and we have not been able to find him. By this act, he has shown himself to be aubre, and so proved that he does not exist. The illusion of his existence must therefore be negated. The man must not be allowed to reach a human settlement, to tell other humans about us. Should he do so, that would interfere with our own tatecredue. Such interference is gaesu, prime contradiction. Therefore you will find him, negate him, in order to restore balanced flow."

"How am I supposed to find him if you could not?"

"You are men. You are the same. You will find him."

"He could be anywhere by now!" Ramon protested.

"Where you would go and where he would go—they are the same. You will go where he has gone, and you will find him."

Ramon chewed his lip and thought. He had no intention of playing Judas Goat for these monsters, but he was naked, alone, and in their power. If he pretended to agree, they would have to take him out—out to the world he knew. After that, he could slip away. It wouldn't do to give in too easily, though. Even things as strange as these might recognize that as subterfuge.

"If I do this thing for you, what do I get out of it?" he asked.

The alien stared at him for several long moments. "You are an improper and contradictory creature. Aubre may manifest in you. We will insure against such manifestations, by separating a part of ourselves to act as overseer. Maneck will sacrifice himself to maintain the flow."

The alien who had led him from the first chamber moved silently to Ramon's side. It was eerie—nothing so big should be so quiet.

"Maneck, eh?" Ramon said to the thing. "Your name's Maneck?"

Before Ramon could react, Maneck reached out and took him by the shoulders, lifted him like a doll, and held him immobile in the air. Ramon fought instinctively—nights at the bar and in the street coming back to his arms and legs in a rage. He might as well have punched the ocean. Maneck didn't budge.

Up from the pit rose a pale white snake.

Ramon watched in horrified fascination. It was obviously a cable of some sort—two bare wires protruded from the visible end—but its movements were so supple and lifelike that he could not help but think of it as a pale and sinister cobra. It reared almost to eye-level, swayed slowly from side to side, aimed its blind pallid head at Ramon. The head quivered slightly, as though the snake was testing the air in search of its prey. Then it stretched out toward him.

Again Ramon tried desperately to break free, but Maneck wrenched him effortlessly back into position. As the cable-snake came closer, he saw that it was pulsating rhythmically, as if it were truly alive, and that the two naked wires in its head were vibrating like a serpent's flickering tongue. His flesh crawled, and he felt his testicles retract. He felt his nakedness vividly now—he was unprotected, helpless, all of the soft vulnerable parts of his body exposed to the hostile air. The cable touched the hollow of his throat.

Ramon felt a sensation like the touch of dead lips, a double pinprick of pain, a flash of intense cold. An odd quivering shock ran up and down his body, as though someone were tracing his nervous system with feather fingers. His vision dimmed for a heartbeat, then came back. Maneck lowered him to the ground.

The cable was now embedded in his neck. Fighting nausea, he reached up and took hold of it, feeling it pulse in his hands. It was warm to the touch, like human flesh. He pulled at it tentatively, then tugged harder. He felt the flesh of his throat move when he tugged. To rip it free would obviously be as difficult as tearing off his own nose. The cable pulsed again, and Ramon realized that it was pulsing in time to the beating of his heart. As he watched, it seemed to darken slowly, as if it were filling up with blood.

The cable had somehow also linked itself to the alien that had held him, blending into its right wrist. Maneck. He was on a leash. A hunting dog for demons.

"The sahael will not injure you, but it will help to resolve your contradictions," the thing in the pit said as if sensing his distress but failing to understand it. "Should you manifest aubre, you will be corrected. Like this."

Ramon found himself on the floor, though he did not remember falling. Only now that the pain had passed could he look back at it, as a swimmer turns to look back at a wave that has passed over his head, and realize that it had been the worst pain he had ever experienced. He didn't remember screaming, but his throat was raw, and it almost seemed as if the echo of his shriek was still reverberating from the chamber walls; perhaps it would echo there forever. He caught his breath, and then retched. He knew that he would do whatever was required to prevent that from happening again, anything at all, and for the first time since he woke in darkness, Ramon Espejo felt ashamed.

"School yourself," the pale alien said. "Correct aubre, and even such a flawed thing as yourself may achieve cohesion or even coordinate level."

It took Ramon some time to realize that this gibberish had been a dismissal: a stern but kindly admonition, hellfire threatened, the prospect of redemption dangled, and go forth mi hijo and sin no more. The sonofabitch was a missionary! Maneck lifted Ramon back to his feet and nudged him toward a tunnel. The fleshy leash—the sahael—shrank to match whatever distance was between them. Maneck made a sound that he couldn't interpret and apparently gave up gentle coaxing. The alien moved briskly forward, the sahael tugging now at Ramon's throat. He had no choice but to follow, like a dog trotting at its master's heel.