Way of the Pilgrim

by Matt

  "Isn't anybody willing to do anything? Not anybody? Nobody at all?"

  They were all insane, those Resistance people. He shivered. He had been wise to play along and pretend to consider their suggestion that he involve himself in their charade of resistance that could only lead to torture and death at Aalaag hands. They had no chance. None. If he had seriously considered joining them, he would have been as insane as they were.

  His heart beat heavily. The cold touch of Maria's fingers that lingered in his fingers seemed to spread up his arms and all through him. No, he was lying to himself. It was no use. It made no difference that they were insane.

  There was no real choice for him. There never had been from the moment he first saw her in the viewing screen. Something within him left him no choice, even though he knew what helping them would mean. He would do it even knowing it would mean his death in the end. He would seek them out again and go back to them. Join them....

  4

  The dumbbell shape of the Aalaag courier ship in which Shane was being transported dropped suddenly like an extremely swift elevator. Shane's stomach floated within him, making physical the uneasiness that had ridden with him all the way from Milan.

  Then his body adjusted and he felt himself weightless, held in place solely by the restraining arms of his seat. The control board viewing screen was all but hidden by the massive, white-uniformed shoulders of the nine-foot Aalaag female who was his pilot. But the same view was displayed in the screen on the back of the seat ahead of him, so he had a telescopic November view of the Twin Cities—Minneapolis and St. Paul,

  In summer these cities, chief population centers of what had once been Minnesota, one of the former United States of America, would have been only partly visible like this, from above. Thick-treed avenues and streets would then have given the illusion of nothing more than two small, separate downtown business centers surrounded by heavy forest. But now, in the final months of the dying year, the full extent of buildings in both cities and their suburbs lay revealed among the piled up leaves stripped from their branches by the winds of early winter. It was as if winter, too, was a servant of the Aalaag and had cleared all that was soft and gentle from the scene.

  Even snow would have relieved some of the uncompromising harshness from what he looked at now, but no snow was yet on the ground to soften what the fallen leaves had uncovered. Shane looked down into the empty-seeming thoroughfares. Under Aalaag rule they would be as clean as, but colder than, those he had just left in Milan of northern Italy; particularly clean, here around the Headquarters of all the alien power on Earth, that building placed above the headwaters of navigation on the Mississippi River. That destination to which Shane now, without choice, returned.

  The body odor of his pilot forced itself once more on his attention. It was inescapable in the close confines of the small vessel—as no doubt his human smell was to her. Though as an Aalaag she would never have lowered herself to admit noticing such a fact. The scent of her in his nostrils was hardly agreeable, but not specifically disagreeable, either.

  It was the smell of a different animal, only. Something like the reek of a horse or cow barn, only with that slightly acid tinge which identified a meat-eater. For the Aalaag, though they required that Earthly foodstuffs be reconstituted for their different digestive systems, were, like humanity, omnivores who made a certain portion of their diet out of flesh—though of Earthly creatures other than human.

  That exception of human flesh from the Aalaag diet might be merely policy on the part of the aliens. Or it might not, thought Shane. Even after nearly three years of living here at the very heart and center of the Aalaag Command on Earth, in many cases like this he had no way of knowing what their real reasons were, or whether what he believed might be merely a false assumption on his part....

  He forced his mind to stop playing with the question of the aliens' diet. It was unimportant, as unimportant as the differences in appearance of the Twin Cities between June and November. Both thoughts were straw men thrown up by his subconscious as excuses to avoid thinking of the situation which would be facing him momentarily.

  In only a few minutes he would be once more in the House of his Master, reporting to him—to Lyt Ahn, First Captain and Commander of all the Aalaag on this captive and subject Earth. And this time, for the first time, he would face that all-powerful ruler, knowing himself to be doubly guilty of what to these Aalaag was a capital crime among themselves, let alone in one of their servants. It was not merely that he had violated an order, but he had violated it while he was on duty, as a courier and translator for the First Captain.

  It was ironic. He had clung to the thought, these last few years, of himself as someone well able to endure existence under the domination of the alien rulers. He had gone on believing this until just a few hours ago. But now he had to face the fact that there was one area in which he was just as vulnerable as any of the rest of his race.

  As a member of the Courier-Translator Corps belonging to the First Captain of Earth, he was well fed, well housed, well paid—unbelievably so by comparison with the overwhelming mass of his fellow humans. As a result, he had come to believe in his own ability to avoid trouble with their overlords. But in spite of all this, twice now, yowaragh had overtaken him, just as if he had been one of the ordinary, starveling mass of Earth's population. Even though no alien knew it, he had now twice defied them.

  Further, during the hours just past, he had revealed his existence and his identity to several members, at least, of the human Resistance group in Milan.

  Now, on the return trip to his Master's Headquarters, he faced the fact that he was no different from all the rest of the race of humans. Like them, he walked a razor's edge between the absolute laws and power of his rulers and a possibility that at any moment an uncontrollable inner explosion might drive him to do something that would bring his hatred of them to their attention.

  It was strange, he thought, that this should only now be striking home to him, more than three years after the Aalaag had landed and taken over Earth in one swift and effortless moment. Squarely, he faced the fact that he was terrified of what the consequences could be of another such bout of madness in him. He had seen Aalaag interrogation and disciplines at work. He knew, as the Resistance people like those in Milan did not, that there was literally no hope of a successful revolt against the military power of the aliens. Anyone attempting to act against the Aalaag was courting certain and painful death—as an object lesson to other humans who might also be tempted to revolt.

  And this would be as true for him as for any other human, in spite of the value of his work to the aliens and the kindness with which Lyt Ahn had always seemed to regard him.

  But at the same time the logical front of his mind was reading him this lesson, the back of it was playing with the notion of finding ways around his situation and avoiding any such future risks that might trigger off the yowaragh reaction in him. He remembered how simple it would be to contact the Resistance people again. All he had to do was buy himself the pilgrim's gown of two different colors with the gold that only an alien-employed human like himself would be carrying. The dream of revolt, even to him, was an unbelievably seductive one—in the years before the coming of the Aalaag, he could never have imagined how seductive. He checked the thought. He must never forget how hopeless and false it was. He must remember he lived with one goal and one goal only—his personal survival. That was all that the Aalaag had left him.

  So he must hold himself under tight control and continue to chart his way cool-headedly among the reefs of Aalaag behavior that surrounded him. Some things to protect himself, he could do.

  To begin with, as soon as he got the ear of Lyt Ahn, he must set up excuses against the two crimes he had just committed in Milan. The lie to Laa Ehon about his worth must be covered; and there was still deep danger in the fact that he had helped to rescue Maria. For a moment the thought of her brought back an inexpressible longing. If he had
only had the chance to at least get to know her.... He forced his mind back to immediate problems. The Aalaag, if they should ever actually come to suspect him, had devices which could, like mechanical bloodhounds, sniff out his having left the Milanese Headquarters building without permission.

  That was the most dangerous of the two crimes he had just committed in Aalaag terms—crimes, as they would be seen by Aalaag eyes. The lesser crime, that he had lied to Laa Ehon about the price Lyt Ahn had placed upon him was the more likely of the two to come to light.

  The ship he rode in was almost to its landing place now.

  A lying beast, in Aalaag eyes, was an untrustworthy beast, and should therefore be destroyed. Somehow, this statement of his to Laa Ehon must be handled—but at the moment he had no idea how to do it. Perhaps, if he put it deliberately out of his mind, a solution would come to him naturally....

  He made a conscious effort to do so, and out of habit his thoughts drifted off once more into his fantasy of the Pilgrim, who, like himself, lived under the cover of being a courier-translator for Lyt Ahn, and who was also superior to all Aalaag, as they were superior to humans.

  The Pilgrim, he dreamed, would wear the same anonymous garb in which Shane himself came and went among his fellow humans; who, otherwise, catching him alone and away from Aalaag or the Interior Guard who policed mem, would have torn him apart if they had known that he was one of those favored and employed by their masters.

  The Pilgrim would be uncatchable and uncontrollable by the Aalaag. He would set their laws and their might at defiance. He would rescue humans who had been trapped by those same alien rules and laws—as Shane had, by sheer luck more than anything else, managed to get Maria out of the clutches of the Milanese garrison.

  Above all, the Pilgrim would bring home to the aliens the fact that they were not the masters of Earth that they thought themselves to be....

  For the few minutes in which the courier ship dropped to its destination, he let himself indulge in that dream, seeing himself as the Pilgrim with a power that put him above even Lyt Ahn, to say nothing of all the other alien masters who made his insides go hollow every time they so much as looked at him.

  Then he roused himself and shook it off. It was all right as a means to keep him sane; but it was dangerous, indulged in when under alien observation, as he was about to be within seconds. Besides, he could afford to put it aside for the moment. Five minutes from now he would be in the small cubicle that was his living quarters and he could think what he liked, including how to protect himself against Lyt Ann's discovery of either of his recent crimes.

  The courier ship was now right over its destination. The landing spot to which it dropped was only a couple of hundred meters below, the rooftop of an enormous construction with only some twenty stories or so above ground but as many below, and covering several acres. Like all structures now taken over or built by the Aalaag, it gleamed; in this chill, thin November sunlight looking as if liquid mercury had been poured over it. That shining surface was a defensive screen or coating—Shane had never been able to discover which, since the Aalaag took it so for granted that they never spoke of it. Once in place, apparently, it needed neither renewal nor maintenance; although the First Captain often turned it off.

  Just as it seemed their ship must crash into the rooftop, a space of the silver surface vanished. Revealed were a flat, gray surface and a platoon of the oversized humans recruited as Interior Guards to the aliens. These stood, fully armed, under the command of an Aalaag officer who towered in full, white armor above the tallest of them. The officer was a male, Shane saw, the fact betrayed by the narrowness of his lower-body armor.

  As the ship touched down, its port opened and Shane's pilot stepped out. The Interior Guards at once fell back, leaving the Aalaag to come forward alone and meet the pilot. Shane, lost behind her powerful shape, had followed her out.

  "Am Mehon, twenty-eighth rank," the pilot introduced herself. "I return one of the First Captain's cattle, at his orders—"

  She half turned to indicate, with the massive thumb of her left hand, Shane, who was standing a respectful two paces behind her and to her left.

  "Aral Te Kinn," the Aalaag on guard introduced himself. "Thirty-second rank..."

  His armored head bent slightly, acknowledging the fact that the courier pilot outranked him by four degrees. But it would have bent no farther for the First Captain himself.

  Theoretically all Aalaag were equal; and the lowest of them, when on duty, could give orders to the highest, if the other was not. Here, on the roof landing space of the House of Weapons, as the First Captain's residence and Headquarters were always called, the officer on guard, being in control of the area, was therefore in authority. Only courtesy dictated the slight inclination of his head.

  "This beast is to report itself to the First Captain immediately," he went on now. His helmet turned slightly, bringing its viewing slit to focus on Shane. "You heard me, beast?"

  Shane felt a sudden, sickening emptiness in his stomach. Surely it was impossible that what he had done in Milan could have been found out and reported to the First Captain this quickly? He shook off the sudden weakness. Of course it was impossible. But even with the sudden fear gone, he felt robbed of the anticipated peace and quiet of his cubicle, the chance to think and plan he had been looking forward to. However, there could be no delay in obeying the order.

  "I heard, untarnished sir," answered Shane in Aalaag, bending his own head in a considerably deeper bow.

  He walked past the pilot and Aral Te Kinn toward the shedlike structure containing the drop-pad that would lower him to his meeting with Lyt Ahn. The tall humans who were the Interior Guards gazed down at him with faint contempt as their ranks parted to let him through. But Shane was by now so used to their attitude to such as himself that he hardly noticed.

  "... I had heard there were a rare few among these cattle who could speak the actual language as a real person does," he could hear the pilot saying to Aral Te Kinn behind him, "but I had not believed it until now. If it were not for the squeakiness of its high voice—"

  Shane shut the door to the shed on the rest of her words and on the scene behind him as he entered the structure. He stepped onto the round green disk of the drop-pad.

  "Sub-floor twenty," he told it, and the alien-built elevator obeyed, dropping him swiftly toward his destination, twenty floors beneath the surface of the surrounding city.

  Its fall stopped with equal suddenness, and his knees bent under a deceleration that would not have been noticed by an Aalaag. He stepped forward into a wide corridor with black-and-white tiles on its polished floor, and both walls and ceiling of a hard, uniformly gray material.

  A male Aalaag officer sat on the solid block that was his seat, at the duty desk opposite the elevator, engaged in conversation with someone in the communications screen set in the surface of the desk before him. Shane had halted at once after his first step out of the drop-pad and stood motionless. Eventually, the talk was ended and the Aalaag cut the connection, looking up at him.

  "I am Shane Evert, courier-translator for the First Captain, untarnished sir," said Shane, as the pale, heavy-boned and expressionless, humanlike face, under its mane of pure white hair, considered him. This particular alien had seen him at least a couple of hundred times previously, but like most Aalaag, was not good at distinguishing one human from another, even if the two were of opposite sexes.

  The Aalaag continued to stare, waiting.

  "I have returned from a courier run," Shane went on, "and the untarnished sir on duty at the roof parking area said I was ordered to report immediately to the First Captain."

  The desk officer looked down and spoke again into his communications screen—checking, of course, on what Shane had said. Ordinarily, the movements of a single human would be of little concern to any Aalaag, but entrance to the apartments of the First Captain, along the corridor to Shane's right, was a matter of unique security. Shane glanced briefly
along the corridor in the opposite direction, to his left, and toward his own distant quarters, with those of the other translators, and such other private servants of Lyt Ahn, or his mate-consort, the female Adtha Or Ain.

  Shane had been continuously on duty and in the presence of Aalaag for three days, culminating in that disastrous, if still secret, act of insanity he had given way to in Milan. His desire to return to his own quarters, to be alone, was like a living hunger in him, a desperate hunger to lock himself away in a place that for a moment would be closed off, away from all the daily terrors and orders; a place where he could at last put aside his constant fears and lick his wounds in peace.

  "You may report as instructed."

  The voice of the Aalaag on duty behind the desk cut across his thoughts.

  "I obey, untarnished sir," he answered.

  He turned to his right and went away down the long hall, hearing the clicking of his heels on the hard tiles underfoot echoing back from the unyielding walls. Along those walls at intervals of what would be not more than half a dozen strides for an Aalaag hung long arms—equivalents of human rifles —armed and ready for use. But for all their real deadliness, they were there for show only, a part of the militaristic Aalaag culture pattern that justified the name of House of Weapons for this abode of Lyt Ahn.