Way of the Pilgrim, page 34
He felt a sudden, almost spiteful envy of Johann, sitting safely back in the car, waiting. It would not occur to the other man to worry about him—wasn’t Shane the Pilgrim? Moreover, Johann, who did not seem unduly blessed with intelligence anyway, might well be incapable of concentrating on anything but his own immediate situation. Shane forced the thought of Johann out of his mind. He must concentrate on what was to be done.
The Castel Sant’Angelo, built originally as a mausoleum for the Emperor Hadrian, and fortified by later popes, had more of the appearance of a drum-shaped fortress than anything else. Forcing himself to ignore the apprehension he felt, Shane emerged in his cloak and staff on the top level of the drum portion itself, amongst a small crowd of the tourists, picked a spot halfway to the exterior wall with its embrasures, and went to work.
It was simply a matter of taking a rolled-up and now painted bedsheet from under his robe, together with the folded stand of metal he and Johann had constructed. He unfolded the stand, set his staff upright in it, unrolled the flag and hooked the eyelets cut into its inner edge over the bent nails Johann had hammered into the staff the day before. There was not much breeze, but enough to lazily furl and unfurl the liberated flag.
Turning from it with the first sense of satisfaction and relief from apprehension that he had felt since they had left the place where he and Johann had spent the night, Shane found something he had not counted on. He was completely encircled, hemmed in by the sightseers on the platform, all staring at him and examining him in a fascinated and utter silence. Any way out was blocked unless he wanted to physically shove his way through them. Plainly they felt that they were staring at the Pilgrim of legend—or at least someone walking in his footsteps—and they all looked as if in a second they would start crowding in on him with questions, and hands reached out to touch him.
He caught himself back from his first panic-induced reflex, which was to order them out of his way. To speak at all here and now would be far too ordinary, too human. Instead, thankful that the edges of his cowl were pulled close together to hide his face, he extended one arm in silence and pointed, beginning to walk forward.
They parted before him, along the line indicated by his pointing finger. Still in staring silence, they made a way clear; and he walked through them to the balcony that guarded the edge of this level, stepped up on it and activated both the levitating tool and the privacy one. Invisible, he then stepped off into space and, controlling his descent with the levitator, let himself safely down the outside of the structure. Down on the ground and still invisible, he made his way as quickly as he could back to the car where Johann was waiting for him.
The small man’s face went pale as the car door on the other side of the front seat appeared to open itself, then close again, and the seat cushions dimpled beside him. His color came back as Shane shut off the privacy tool and became visible beside him.
“You made it. Thank the Mother of God!” ejaculated Johann, putting the car into motion and joining the traffic of the street, his eyes steady on the traffic alone. A moment later, he added, “I prayed for you all the time you were gone.”
The remark took Shane suddenly and utterly by the throat.
“That… helped,” he managed to say.
It was all a farce, he thought despairingly, as the car, under Johann’s skilled control, began to nose its way out of the city northward, headed back toward Milan. How had he gotten into this, anyway? Who could have suspected that a rough sketch he had made on a wall in a moment of crazy drunkenness would operate like a lit match in a house filled with loose papers? Who could have suspected that any of this that had followed could happen?
He was a juiceless grain of wheat between two gigantic millstones that were determined to grind each other to bits— the humans and the Aalaag. Neither one had the slightest idea of what the other was, or how the other thought. For that matter they had no idea of what they were themselves, or how they thought.
And yet they should have had some understanding of each other. His mind returned to his earlier thought of the Aalaag as administrators rather than the warriors they thought themselves to be. They were administrators dreaming of a long-sought goal far in the future which would be a return to something far in the past.
There was no reason the two races could not understand each other better. They shared more than they thought. The human race had lived in a constant state of war from its animal stage on up. The Aalaag, in spite of what they believed about themselves, had once been more than just a race of soldiers— and still had some traits from that earlier time, from what he had occasionally seen.
Lyt Ahn had shown a capability for consideration, if not kindness, with him, Shane. Both Lyt Ahn and his consort Adtha Or Ain, had shown a love for their son who was possibly dead, possibly captured; and they had shown something very like affection for each other, in spite of the impression which the Aalaag generally gave, that the male-female pairings among them were for reasons of procreation and teamwork only.
What were humans? And what were Aalaag? Who had even thought of those two questions, let alone how these two unknowns should get along together or not get along together? The humans at least had had a future—once. The Aalaag certainly had a past and claimed to have a future. But what kind of future would it be?
Assume they could retake the worlds of their birth. Assume they could reverse any physical changes the usurper race had made in the appearance of those worlds. With everything back as it was, could the Aalaag take up life once more on those worlds as they had used to live it? If so, how?
It would be contrary to their dream to import beast-servants to run the machinery of their home worlds, to be the suppliers of food and materials for shelter, tools and all else. But after all these thousands of years how could the Aalaag change themselves back overnight into farmers and artisans, researchers and marketers, and all else required; and if they did, who among them would be ready to defend their worlds if another race attacked them?
But this was the goal they believed themselves to be working for, and had enslaved an unknown number of races to help them reach.
It was all crazy. By human standards the Aalaag made no sense. By Aalaag standards, the humans had no worth except as domesticated animals. And yet each race formed a sort of mirror in which the other, if it would, could see a distorted version of itself.
Because of those distortions the Aalaag were ready to kill any humans who did not behave as they wanted; and the people in the Resistance wanted to kill Aalaag for being what they appeared to be.
If only, thought Shane desperately, he could be completely all on one side or another. If he could be like other humans and see the Aalaag only as monster invaders; or if he could be like the Aalaag and see other humans as no more than beasts. If he could be like Maria and Peter and Johann and…
If only there was some real hope for the wild notion he had originally given the Resistance people for getting rid of the Aalaag. If it would work to make them want to abandon the human race and go elsewhere. If he could summon up one grain of belief in that, one particle of real hope, then maybe he, too, might be able to completely join the human camp and find the courage and will to fight the Aalaag. But he was cursed with the knowledge that that hope was groundless. The Aalaag were about as removable by human action as the sun would be from the sky.
Somewhere along the trip back he dozed and once more had, but without remembering when he woke what it was, the nightmare he had endured back in Milan. This time Johann shook him awake.
“You were dreaming and trying to talk about something,” said the little man.
“I was?” said Shane.
Grimly, he set his teeth on the determination to stay awake until he was safely back in Milan, alone with Maria. It was dangerous to appear so human, so vulnerable, in the eyes of someone like Johann, he told himself; and, in fact, he did manage to stay awake the rest of the trip, although he was unaccountably, desperately tired.
Back at the hotel suite, he found Peter still there, as he had been asked to be, but packed and ready to leave.
“Well, you can go now,” Shane told him. “You can also tell anyone you want that there’s been another appearance of the Pilgrim, this time in Rome at the Castel Sant’Angelo.”
“I guessed it would be Rome,” said Peter, “and I was sure you meant to make another appearance. Why didn’t you tell us what you were going to do? I could have gotten you help, if not from the professional organization I told you about, then from the local Resistance people.”
“The fewer who knew about it in advance, the better,” said Shane. “You and Maria would have been the first to know if I’d told anyone. Even Johann, here, didn’t know from moment to moment, until I needed to tell him so he’d be in position and ready to bring me back.”
He looked at the three of them now. Maria, wearing a plain black wool dress, was standing barely an arm’s length from him, having run to embrace him when he had come in. She looked remarkably composed and even happy. Peter stood back by the coffee table in front of the couch and Johann had taken a position off a little to his right and stood simply waiting. For some reason probably connected with the strain Shane had been under these last thirty hours or so, all three of them seemed to stand out as if in bright three-dimensional relief against a painted scene that was the room and its furniture; as if they were more real than it, as if, he thought, they were in some way particular, unique and precious individuals.
“Well?” said Peter. “Aren’t you going to tell me about it, so I can tell whoever else needs to be told?”
Shane came back from his moment of mental fixation with an interior start.
“Of course,” he said. And so he told them, all three of them, in a minimum number of words. But he did not mention anything about the raid on the arms locker.
“… Now, if you don’t mind,” he wound up, “I’m going to get some sleep. I didn’t sleep so well while I was gone—”
“Or before you left,” said Maria.
“I’ll go, then,” said Peter, picking up his small handbag. “Maybe Johann can take me to the airport?”
“Sure,” said Johann.
“Good-bye, then.” Peter took a step forward and offered his hand to Shane, who shook it, reflexively.
“Good luck,” Shane heard himself say, as if it was someone else saying it from a long way off.
“And to both of you,” said Peter.
He went out with Johann. Maria stepped past Shane to set the chain lock on the parlor door to the hall.
“And now, my darling,” she said, turning to him. “Bed.”
He slept heavily that night, so heavily that it seemed he had barely closed his eyes before he was opening them again upon the morning.
“Did I have any nightmares again last night?” he dared to ask Maria over breakfast in the parlor of the suite.
“No,” she said. “You slept beautifully. Do you go right to the Unit today?”
“Yes,” he said. “Would you get us both packed? I’ve got to report to Lyt Ahn, and as soon as I do that, he’ll pass the word for transportation for us. There’ll almost undoubtedly be an Aalaag courier ship ready for us by midafternoon at the airport.”
Once at the Unit, he went first to his office for form’s sake, and spent some fifteen minutes there killing time and assembling some completely unnecessary papers. Then, carrying these, he went to the office of the Officer of the Day.
“This beast is to make a report to the First Captain, untarnished sir,” he told the Aalaag on duty.
“Go to the Communications Room,” said the officer. “I’ll give the necessary orders.”
When Shane reached the Communications Room, the Interior Guard captain in charge there motioned him over into a cleared area in one corner of the room.
“Your request to report is already put through,” the captain told Shane. He smiled. “Now you wait for the First Captain to find time to listen to you.”
Shane stood in the center of the clear area. It was no different from several thousand other such waits he had made in the past two years, but this time there was both an uneasiness and a curiosity in him that made the time seem to go more slowly than training had accustomed him to experience it. He was puzzled over what Lyt Ahn had expected him to find in such a new Unit that could be of interest to someone like the First Captain. It was too soon for any results to show either in personnel or operations, much as the Aalaag might like to think that an order creating an organization such as this set things there to running instantaneously.
Eventually, the figure of Lyt Ahn, standing, appeared in the cleared space facing Shane.
“This is to be a secure report,” said Lyt Ahn.
The Aalaag who was Officer of the Day had come in some few minutes before and had been waiting as Shane had been waiting. Now it was that officer who answered rather than the captain in charge of the Communications Room.
“Understood, immaculate sir,” said the Aalaag. He reached out to the wall and touched something. The room around Shane vanished. At the same time, the shapes of Lyt Ahn’s office appeared around both Shane and the First Captain, so that only Shane’s knowledge that these surroundings were images protected him from the otherwise natural assumption that he had suddenly been transferred around the world to the House of Weapons.
“So, Shane-beast,” said Lyt Ahn, looking at him. “Your report on the Milan Government Unit. Give it to me.”
Shane began talking. The same memory that his job had developed in him, the memory that had allowed him to remember in order the list of cities he was to visit next which Lyt Ahn had reeled off in his message to the hotel suite worked for him now as he talked about the Unit, giving the names of all those, Aalaag and human, who worked there presently, and his assessment of them—a discreet assessment in the case of each of the Aalaag officers, for all the privacy in which he was now reporting. It would not be considered good form by any Aalaag, and least of all the First Captain, that even a very favored beast should criticize a true person.
He watched Lyt Ahn closely as he spoke, in search of some reaction that would give him a clue to the answer he sought, to the question of what Lyt Ahn might be expecting him to have learned from a Unit so newly formed. It might be that the whole matter of having him report was simply good procedure in Lyt Ahn’s eyes—but in that case, why have him come here to look the place over at all?
It was difficult but not always impossible for Shane to read a reaction in the First Captain. By most humans, the Aalaag were considered to be all but expressionless, and in practical consequence, incapable of reading expressions on a human face. This inability to read human expressions was something often taken advantage of by human children, and those human adults who, like the children, did not stop to think that the faces they made might also be seen by a human servant of the Aalaag, who would have no compunction about reporting on how their looks belied their respectful tone and words.
But, in fact, the Aalaag did express themselves; not only facially but by small body positions and movements, and long-term human servants had learned to read these signals. For one thing, an Aalaag normally looked directly at whoever he or she was addressing. Not to do so was an insult, implying that the being addressed, like an unknown human beast for example, was beneath notice. It was a mark of favor for an Aalaag to look directly at a human servant as the Aalaag spoke to him or her. But there were differences almost too small to be consciously seen in how the direct look was given. A certain type of direct stare could be the ultimate in threat, a signal of approval, or a signal of something as close to fury as an Aalaag ever permitted himself to come.
Or, it could be that it merely implied an extreme interest in what was being said or heard. How Shane had come to tell the differences in implication of different expressions of Lyt Ahn, he did not really know. Physically, he could have had difficulty describing any specific differences; but he had come to be able to know what the First Captain was feeling by the way he stared.
Primarily, the particular look that Shane was seeing now was a matter of focus. Privately, Shane had named it the “pinpoint stare.” An ordinary Aalaag stare was one in which the eyes of the alien seemed to take in at least the full spread of eyes in the person looked at. But in the pinpoint stare, it was as if that focus had been narrowed down to a point no larger than the head of a pin on the forehead between the eyes of the one stared at. It signaled extreme interest on the part of the Aalaag.
As Shane began talking now, he saw Lyt Ann’s eyes narrow to that pinpoint stare. But after his first few sentences, the alien eyes relaxed again, and Lyt Ahn was merely meeting him, eye to eye.
Puzzling over this, for his first few sentences had merely been a listing of those he had talked to at this Unit, Shane felt the tension and the quickening of his mind that came whenever he had to deal with a problem involving himself and one of the Aalaag; and, as if by intuition, the idea came to him that possibly it was not what he had said first, but what he had not said, that Lyt Ahn had been waiting to hear. If so, what could that be?
