Hunter’s Run. Джордж Р. Р. МартинЧитать онлайн книгу.
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. For the first time that day, his stomach had almost stopped hurting.
Almost.
With every hour that passed, 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.
He hadn’t hated him back at the El Rey; the man had just been another bastard 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 asshole 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 European would 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 transponders, 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 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 arsenic. 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 shells took on an unpredictable rainbow of iridescent 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 scavengable 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 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!’ 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 São Paulo had drawn in the sky to replace the old constellations of 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 twink ling 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.
CHAPTER FOUR
In the morning, Ramon poured water over the remains of the fire, then pissed 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 or a snatchergrabber. He exchanged the soft flatfur slippers he wore in the van for his sturdy 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 grasses and the leaves of the shrubs. Small monkey-like lizards leapt from branch to branch before him, calling to each other with high, frightened voices. There were millions of uncataloged species on São Paulo. In the twenty minutes it took 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 enjoying 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 paintings. 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