Читать книгу Hunter’s Run - Джордж Р. Р. Мартин - Страница 7

In the darkness – immobile, unbreathing – Ramon found his memory growing clearer and clearer. The way Griego had shrugged. The rattling mechanical roar of the chupacabra float. The European’s blood; pale in the red light and black in the blue. The taste of the stone dust. The taste of Elena’s mouth. Details that had been vague grew clearer until, by concentrating, he could hear the voices, feel the cloth of the shirt he’d worn. All of it. The thing from the mountain had taken him and had done something to him. Imprisoned him in this vast, empty blackness through a process he could not imagine and for reasons he couldn’t guess. The silence and the emptiness changed the nature of time. There was no longer a sense of duration. He couldn’t say how long he had been there or whether he had slept. He could no more judge his own sanity than point north; without context, ideas like madness and direction were meaningless.

The movement, when it came, was so slight that Ramon could believe that he had imagined it. Something nudged him. A current moved against his skin; an invisible current in an invisible sea. He had the feeling of being turned in slow circles. Something solid bumped his shoulder, and then rose up against his back, or else he sank down upon it. The syrupy liquid streamed past him, flowing past his face and his body. He thought of it as draining away, though he might as easily be being lifted up through it. The flow grew faster and more turbulent. A deep vibration shook him: boom. Then again, beating through flesh and bone: boom, boom. A blurred, watery light appeared above him, very dim and immensely far away. Like a star in a distant constellation. It grew brighter. The liquid in which he floated drained, the surface coming nearer, like he was rising from the bottom of a lake, until at last he breached it, and the last of the liquid was gone.

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 onto 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.

I will live, Ramon told himself. It’s no worse than being sick from too much Muscat. I can live through this …

Another long needle dug into his neck. A cold fire sprang to life where the thing had pierced him; he felt the saliva-like secretion running down his sides, then heat, like boiling water pouring into him.

What have you done to me? Ramon tried to scream. What did you put in me?

Suddenly, violently, his heart came to life – and, with a terrible shudder, he began to breathe.

The air he gulped cut like glass, and his heart thundered in his chest. The world went red. Pain drove away all thought, all sense of self, and then slowly abated.

Another wave of the sickness shook him. He voided his bowels, weeping with pain and shame when he wasn’t coughing. It seemed to go on for hours, but the moments of peace between spasms gradually grew longer, and it seemed as if some of the strength was beginning to come back to his arms and legs. His heart ceased to race like a bird trying to free itself from a net. Tentatively, he sat up.

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 stand 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.

A thing like a snake reared up above the rim of the tank – thick as a strong man’s arm, it was a dead gray color, like old meat, and segmented like a worm’s body. Pulsations seemed to travel along its length. Ramon saw it hesitate, as if considering him, and then stretch down toward him. 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 snake stretched down and wrapped itself around his waist.

The snakes lifted him smoothly out of the tank. He tried to scream, but the sound he made sounded 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 two snakes set him down on a platform near one wall of the cavern, the surface solid but spongy, like a great dark tongue. 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, suddenly longing for the timeless darkness he’d left behind.

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. Another prickly wave of heat passed 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 shapes had stopped a few feet away. There were three of them, all bipedal, 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 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 aliens, and not of any race he knew. Ramon had sailed among the stars on one of the great galley ships of the Silver Enye, and once he had glimpsed three of the furred, six-legged H’zhei on the back streets of Acapulco, exotic creatures that looked like a cross between a cat and a caterpillar. The Turu he had seen only on video, and even there they made his skin crawl. These aliens were not Turu, not Enye, not Cian, not members of any of the Great Races. They were not part of the universe as he knew it. They did not belong. A hundred questions, accusations, and pleas fought in his mind. Who are you? What do you want? Please don’t kill me.

At least they were humanoid bipeds, not spiders or octopi or big-eyed blobs, although something about the articulation of the limbs was disturbingly odd. The smaller two were perhaps six and a half feet tall, the larger one seven feet, making even the shortest of them far taller than Ramon. Their torsos were columnar, seemingly of uniform breadth 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!

‘Which one,’ he croaked, coughed, and began again. ‘Which one of you pinche motherfuckers is paying for my van?’

The aliens didn’t react to his words. The large one reached out a strangely articulated arm – a motion that reminded Ramon of seaweed stirred by some gentle oceanic current. Ramon frowned as the alien curled what he had to think of as its fingers back toward itself once, twice, three times. The thing paused and then repeated the movement. 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 humans. A low thudding boom came from deep below them; a mountainous heart that beat twice and went silent. Ramon glanced around him. The alien repeated the curling gesture.

‘You want me to come close to you?’ Ramon demanded. The great thing’s snout twitched, and the quills on its head rose and fell. Again, the strange curling motion. Ramon suddenly recalled a journalist who had come to São Paulo from Kigiake whose only word of Spanish had been gracias. The alien was the same – a single gesture repeated for every occasion; employed ubiquitously.

The alien turned away, took a few inhumanly graceful strides, then shifted its torso back toward Ramon and gestured again. Follow me. The other two aliens were still as stone except for the restless twitching of their snouts.

‘I get taken captive by aliens, and they’re too stupid to talk,’ Ramon said, bravado and anger filling him. ‘Hey, you. Pendejo. Why the fuck would I follow you, eh? Give me a good fucking reason.’

The alien stood motionless. Ramon spat, the sputum vanishing as soon as it struck the black tongue-like platform, which seemed to absorb it with a slurping noise. Ramon shook his head in disgust, but in fact there didn’t seem to be anything else for him to do but follow. He came forward slowly, his footing unreliable on the disturbing wet, velvety ground, which gave under him with every step, 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 …

Ahead was a door cut through the naked rock of the cavern wall, into which the alien disappeared, looking back once again to make its favorite gesture.

Trying to wear his nakedness like a suit of clothes, Ramon followed the alien into the darkness. The other two beasts fell in close behind.