Nightwings

by Robert Silverberg

  Our Merchant’s life seemed enviably undisrupted by the fall of our planet: he was as rich as ever, as comfortable, as free to move about. But even he felt occasionally irked by the presence of the invaders, as we found out by night not far from Marsay, when we were stopped at a checkpoint on the road.

  Spy-eye scanners saw us coming, gave a signal to the spinnerets, and a golden spiderweb spurted into being from one shoulder of the highway to the other. The landcar’s sensors detected it and instantly signaled us to a halt. The screens showed a dozen pale human figures clustered outside.

  “Bandits?” Olmayne asked.

  “Worse,” said the Merchant. “Traitors.” He scowled and turned to his communicator horn. “What is it?” he demanded.

  “Get out for inspection.”

  “By whose writ?”

  “The Procurator of Marsay,” came the reply.

  It was an ugly thing to behold: human beings acting as road-agents for the invaders. But it was inevitable that we should have begun to drift into their civil service, since work was scarce, especially for those who had been in the defensive guilds. The Merchant began the complicated process of unsealing his car. He was stormy-faced with rage, but he was stymied, unable to pass the checkpoint’s web. “I go armed,” he whispered to us. “Wait inside and fear nothing.”

  He got out and engaged in a lengthy discussion, of which we could hear nothing, with the highway guards. At length some impasse must have forced recourse to higher authority, for three invaders abruptly appeared, waved their hired collaborators away, and surrounded the Merchant. His demeanor changed; his face grew oily and sly, his hands moved rapidly in eloquent gestures, his eyes glistened. He led the three interrogators to the car, opened it, and showed them his two passengers, ourselves. The invaders appeared puzzled by the sight of Pilgrims amid such opulence, but they did not ask us to step out. After some further conversation the Merchant rejoined us and sealed the car; the web was dissolved; we sped onward toward Marsay.

  As we gained velocity he muttered curses and said, “Do you know how I’d handle that long-armed filth? All we need is a coordinated plan. A night of knives: every ten Earthmen make themselves responsible for taking out one invader. We’d get them all.”

  “Why has no one organized such a movement?” I asked.

  “It’s the job of the Defenders, and half of them are dead, and the other half’s in the pay of them. It’s not my place to set up a resistance movement. But that’s how it should be done. Guerrilla action: sneak up behind ’em, give ’em the knife. Quick. Good old First Cycle methods; they’ve never lost their value.”

  “More invaders would come,” Olmayne said morosely.

  “Treat ’em the same way!”

  “They would retaliate with fire. They would destroy our world,” she said.

  “These invaders pretend to be civilized, more civilized than ourselves,” the Merchant replied. “Such barbarity would give them a bad name on a million worlds. No, they wouldn’t come with fire. They’d just get tired of having to conquer us over and over, of losing so many men. And they’d go away, and we’d be free again.”

  “Without having won redemption for our ancient sins,” I said.

  “What’s that, old man? What’s that?”

  “Never mind.”

  “I suppose you wouldn’t join in, either of you, if we struck back at them?”

  I said, “In former life I was a Watcher, and I devoted myself to the protection of this planet against them. I am no more fond of our masters than you are, and no less eager to see them depart. But your plan is not only impractical: it is also morally valueless. Mere bloody resistance would thwart the scheme the Will has devised for us. We must earn our freedom in a nobler way. We were not given this ordeal simply so that we might have practice in slitting throats.”

  He looked at me with contempt and snorted. “I should have remembered. I’m talking to Pilgrims. All right. Forget it all. I wasn’t serious, anyway. Maybe you like the world the way it is, for all I know.”

  “I do not,” I said.

  He glanced at Olmayne. So did I, for I half-expected her to tell the Merchant that I had already done my bit of collaborating with our conquerors. But Olmayne fortunately was silent on that topic, as she would be for some months more, until that unhappy day by the approach to Land Bridge when, in her impatience, she taunted me with my sole fall from grace.

  We left our benefactor in Marsay, spent the night in a Pilgrim hostelry, and set out on foot along the coast the next morning. And so we traveled, Olmayne and I, through pleasant lands swarming with invaders; now we walked, now we rode some peasant’s rollerwagon, once even we were the guests of touring conquerors. We gave Roum a wide berth when we entered Talya, and turned south. And so we came to Land Bridge, and met delay, and had our frosty moment of bickering, and then were permitted to go on across that narrow tongue of sandy ground that links the lake-sundered continents. And so we crossed into Afreek, at last.

  4

  OUR first night on the other side, after our long and dusty crossing, we tumbled into a grimy inn near the lake’s edge. It was a square whitewashed stone building, practically windowless and arranged around a cool inner courtyard. Most of its clientele appeared to be Pilgrims, but there were some members of other guilds, chiefly Vendors and Transporters. At a room near the turning of the building there stayed a Rememberer, whom Olmayne avoided even though she did not know him; she simply did not wish to be reminded of her former guild.

  Among those who took lodging there was the Changeling Bernalt. Under the new laws of the invaders, Changelings might stay at any public inn, not merely those set aside for their special use; yet it seemed a little strange to see him here. We passed in the corridor. Bernalt gave me a tentative smile, as though about to speak again, but the smile died and the glow left his eyes. He appeared to realize I was not ready to accept his friendship. Or perhaps he merely recalled that Pilgrims, by the laws of their guild, were not supposed to have much to do with guildless ones. That law still stood.

  Olmayne and I had a greasy meal of soups and stews. Afterward I saw her to her room and began to wish her good night when she said, “Wait. We’ll do our communion together.”

  “I’ve been seen coming into your room,” I pointed out. “There will be whispering if I stay long.”

  “We’ll go to yours, then!”

  Olmayne peered into the hall. All clear: she seized my wrist, and we rushed toward my chamber, across the way. Closing and sealing the warped door, she said, “Your starstone, now!”

  I took the stone from its hiding place in my robe, and she produced hers, and our hands closed upon them.

  During this time of Pilgrimage I had found the starstone a great comfort. Many seasons now had passed since I had last entered a Watcher’s trance, but I was not yet reconciled entirely to the breaking of my old habit; the starstone provided a kind of substitute for the swooping ecstasy I had known in Watching.

  Starstones come from one of the outer worlds—I could not tell you which—and may be had only by application to the guild. The stone itself determines whether one may be a Pilgrim, for it will burn the hand of one whom it considers unworthy to don the robe. They say that without exception every person who has enrolled in the guild of Pilgrims has shown uneasiness as the stone was offered to him for the first time.

  “When they gave you yours,” Olmayne asked, “were you worried?”

  “Of course.”

  “So was I.”

  We waited for the stones to overwhelm us. I gripped mine tightly. Dark, shining, more smooth than glass, it glowed in my grasp like a pellet of ice, and I felt myself becoming attuned to the power of the Will.

  First came a heightened perception of my surroundings. Every crack in the walls of this ancient inn seemed now a valley. The soft wail of the wind outside rose to a keen pitch. In the dim glow of the room’s lamp I saw colors beyond the spectrum.

  The quality of the experience the stars
tone offered was altogether different from that given by my instruments of Watching. That, too, was a transcending of self. When in a state of Watchfulness I was capable of leaving my Earthbound identity and soaring at infinite speed over infinite range, perceiving all, and this is as close to godhood as a man is likely to come. The starstone provided none of the highly specific data that a Watcher’s trance yielded. In the full spell I could see nothing, nor could I identify my surroundings. I knew only that when I let myself be drawn into the stone’s effect, I was engulfed by something far larger than myself, that I was in direct contact with the matrix of the universe.

  Call it communion with the Will.

  From a great distance I heard Olmayne say, “Do you believe what some people say of these stones? That there is no communion, that it’s all an electrical deception?”

  “I have no theory about that,” I said. “I am less interested in causes than in effects.”

  Skeptics say that the starstones are nothing more than amplifying loops that bounce a man’s own brain-waves back into his mind; the awesome oceanic entity with which one comes in contact, these scoffers hold, is merely the thunderous recycling oscillation of a single shuttling electrical pulse beneath the roof of the Pilgrim’s own skull. Perhaps. Perhaps.

  Olmayne extended the hand that gripped her stone. She said, “When you were among the Rememberers, Tomis, did you study the history of early religion? All through time, man has sought union with the infinite. Many religions—not all!—have held forth the hope of such a divine merging.”

  “And there were drugs, too,” I murmured.

  “Certain drugs, yes, cherished for their ability to bring the taker momentarily to a sensation of oneness with the universe. These starstones, Tomis, are only the latest in a long sequence of devices for overcoming the greatest of human curses, that is, the confinement of each individual soul within a single body. Our terrible isolation from one another and from the Will itself is more than most races of the universe would be able to bear. It seems unique to humanity.”

  Her voice grew feathery and vague. She said much more, speaking to me out of the wisdom she had learned with the Rememberers, but her meaning eluded me; I was always quicker to enter communion than she, because of my training as a Watcher, and often her final words did not register.

  That night as on other nights I seized my stone and felt the chill and closed my eyes, and heard the distant tolling of a mighty gong, the lapping of waves on an unknown beach, the whisper of the wind in an alien forest. And felt a summons. And yielded. And entered the state of communion. And gave myself up to the Will.

  And slipped down through the layers of my life, through my youth and middle years, my wanderings, my old loves, my torments, my joys, my troubled later years, my treasons, my insufficiencies, my griefs, my imperfections.

  And freed myself of myself. And shed my selfness. And merged. And became one of thousands of Pilgrims, not merely Olmayne nearby, but others trekking the mountains of Hind and the sands of Arba, Pilgrims at their devotions in Ais and Palash and Stralya, Pilgrims moving toward Jorslem on the journey that some complete in months, some in years, and some never at all. And shared with all of them the instant of submergence into the Will. And saw in the darkness a deep purple glow on the horizon—which grew in intensity until it became an all-encompassing red brilliance. And went into it, though unworthy, unclean, flesh-trapped, accepting fully the communion offered and wishing no other state of being than this divorce from self.

  And was purified.

  And awakened alone.

  5

  I knew Afreek well. When still a young man I had settled in the continent’s dark heart for many years. Out of restlessness I had left, finally, going as far north as Agupt, where the antique relics of First Cycle days have survived better than anywhere else. In those days antiquity held no interest for me, however. I did my Watching and went about from place to place, since a Watcher does not need to have a fixed station; and chance brought me in contact with Avluela just as I was ready to roam again, and so I left Agupt for Roum and then Perris.

  Now I had come back with Olmayne. We kept close to the coast and avoided the sandy inland wastes. As Pilgrims we were immune from most of the hazards of travel: we would never go hungry or without shelter, even in a place where no lodge for our guild existed, and all owed us respect. Olmayne’s great beauty might have been a hazard to her, traveling as she was with no escort other than a shriveled old man, but behind the mask and robe of a Pilgrim she was safe. We unmasked only rarely, and never where we might be seen.

  I had no illusions about my importance to Olmayne. To her I was merely part of the equipment of a journey—someone to help her in her communions and rituals, to arrange for lodgings, to smooth her way for her. That role suited me. She was, I knew, a dangerous woman, given to strange whims and unpredictable fancies. I wanted no entanglements with her.

  She lacked a Pilgrim’s purity. Even though she had passed the test of the starstone, she had not triumphed—as a Pilgrim must—over her own flesh. She slipped off, sometimes, for half a night or longer, and I pictured her lying maskless in some alley gasping in a Servitor’s arms. That was her affair entirely; I never spoke of her absences upon her return.

  Within our lodgings, too, she was careless of her virtue. We never shared a room—no Pilgrim hostelry would permit it—but we usually had adjoining ones, and she summoned me to hers or came to mine whenever the mood took her. Often as not she was unclothed; she attained the height of the grotesque one night in Agupt when I found her wearing only her mask, all her gleaming white flesh belying the intent of the bronze grillwork that hid her face. Only once did it seem to occur to her that I might ever have been young enough to feel desire. She looked my scrawny, shrunken body over and said, “How will you look, I wonder, when you’ve been renewed in Jorslem? I’m trying to picture you young, Tomis. Will you give me pleasure then?”

  “I gave pleasure in my time,” I said obliquely.

  Olmayne disliked the heat and dryness of Agupt. We traveled mainly by night and clung to our hostelries by day. The roads were crowded at all hours. The press of Pilgrims towards Jorslem was extraordinarily heavy, it appeared. Olmayne and I speculated on how long it might take us to gain access to the waters of renewal at such a time.

  “You’ve never been renewed before?” she asked.

  “Never.”

  “Nor I. They say they don’t admit all who come.”

  “Renewal is a privilege, not a right,” I said. “Many are turned away.”

  “I understand also,” said Olmayne, “that not all who enter the waters are successfully renewed.”

  “I know little of this.”

  “Some grow older instead of younger. Some grow young too fast, and perish. There are risks.”

  “Would you not take those risks?”

  She laughed. “Only a fool would hesitate.”

  “You are in no need of renewal at this time,” I pointed out. “You were sent to Jorslem for the good of your soul, not that of your body, as I recall.”

  “I’ll tend to my soul as well, when I’m in Jorslem.”

  “But you talk as if the house of renewal is the only shrine you mean to visit.”

  “It’s the important one,” she said. She rose, flexing her supple body voluptuously. “True, I have atoning to do. But do you think I’ve come all the way to Jorslem just for the sake of my spirit?”

  “I have,” I pointed out.

  “You! You’re old and withered! You’d better look after your spirit—and your flesh as well. I wouldn’t mind shedding some age, though. I won’t have them take off much. Eight, ten years, that’s all. The years I wasted with that fool Elegro. I don’t need a full renewal. You’re right: I’m still in my prime.” Her face clouded. “If the city is full of Pilgrims, maybe they won’t let me into the house of renewal at all! They’ll say I’m too young—tell me to come back in forty or fifty years—Tomis, would they do that to me?”
/>
  “It is hard for me to say.”

  She trembled. “They’ll let you in. You’re a walking corpse already—they have to renew you! But me—Tomis, I won’t let them turn me away! If I have to pull Jorslem down stone by stone, I’ll get in somehow!”

  I wondered privately if her soul were in fit condition for one who poses as a candidate for renewal. Humility is recommended when one becomes a Pilgrim. But I had no wish to feel Olmayne’s fury, and I kept my silence. Perhaps they would admit her to renewal despite her flaws. I had concerns of my own. It was vanity that drove Olmayne; my goals were different. I had wandered long and done much, not all of it virtuous; I needed a cleansing of my conscience in the holy city more, perhaps, than I did a lessening of my years.

  Or was it only vanity for me to think so?

  6

  SEVERAL days eastward of that place, as Olmayne and I walked through a parched countryside, village children chattering in fear and excitement rushed upon us.

  “Please, come, come!” they cried. “Pilgrims, come!”

  Olmayne looked bewildered and irritated as they plucked at her robes. “What are they saying, Tomis? I can’t get through their damnable Aguptan accents!”

  “They want us to help,” I said. I listened to their shouts. “In their village,” I told Olmayne, “there is an outbreak of the crystallization disease. They wish us to seek the mercies of the Will upon the sufferers.”

  Olmayne drew back. I imagined the disdainful wince behind her mask. She flicked out her hands, trying to keep the children from touching her. To me she said, “We can’t go there!”

  “We must.”

  “We’re in a hurry! Jorslem’s crowded; I don’t want to waste time in some dreary village.”

  “They need us, Olmayne.”