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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 bubble-tent 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 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.
     
    * * * *

 
    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