Way of the Pilgrim

by Matt

  It was only after he got past his first shock of seeing it and began to examine it in detail that he noticed two unusual things. One was that there was a faintish yellow tinge to the ends of the white hair on the head of the encased Aalaag; and the second—it was unbelievable, but the Aalaag shown was alive, if completely helpless.

  He could see the pupils of the gray eyes move minutely, as he watched. They were focused on something that seemed to be outside the scene imaged on the screen. Other expression there was none—nor probably could be any, since the face, like all the rest of the body, seemed imprisoned and held immobile by the enclosing material.

  "No," said Lyt Ahn behind him.

  Shane's ears, sharpened by two and a half years of servitude, heard that rare thing, a note of emotion in an Aalaag voice; and, faint as it was, he read it clearly as a note of pain. Those years of attuning himself to the moods of the First Captain had finally created a bond that was all but empathic between them; and his own emotions felt Lyt Ahn's in this moment without uncertainty.

  "I must look at it," said Adtha Or Ain, standing before the screen.

  Lyt Ahn took three steps forward, moving up behind her. His two great hands reached out part way toward her shoulders and then fell back to his sides.

  "It's only a conception," he said. "A mock-up. You've no reason for assuming it represents reality. Almost certainly no such thing has happened. Undoubtedly he and his team are dead, destroyed utterly."

  "But perhaps he is like this," said Adtha Or Ain, without turning her head from the screen. "Maybe they have him so, and will keep him so for thousands of lifetimes. I will have no more children. I had only this one, and perhaps this is how he is now."

  Lyt Ahn stood, saying nothing. She turned to face him.

  "You let him go," she said.

  "You know—as I know," he answered. "Some of us must keep watch on the Inner Race who stole our homes, in case they move again and the movement is in this direction. He was my son—my son as well as yours—and he wanted to be one of those to go and check."

  "You could have denied him. I asked you to order him to stay. You did not."

  "How could I?"

  "By speaking."

  Shane had never before seen emotion at this level between two of the normally expressionless Aalaag, and he felt like someone tossed about in a hurricane. He could not leave, but to stay and listen was all but unbearable. Against his will, the empathic response he had so painstakingly developed to the feelings of Lyt Ahn was at him now with a pain he felt at second hand, pain he could not understand or do anything about.

  "In a thousand lifetimes," she said, "a thousand lifetimes and more, they've made no sign of moving again. They only wanted our worlds, our homes, and once they had them they were content enough. We all know that. Why send our children back to what's theirs now—so that they can catch them and make toys for themselves of our flesh and blood—make a toy and a thing of my son?"

  "There was no choice," said Lyt Ahn. "Could I protect my son before others—when he'd asked to go?"

  "He was a child. He didn't know."

  "It was his duty. It was my duty—and your duty—to let him go. So the Aalaag survive. You know your duty. And I tell you again, you've no way of knowing he's not at peace, safely dead and destroyed. You make yourself a nightmare of the one most unlikely thing that could happen."

  "Prove it to me," Adtha Or Ain said. "Send an expedition to find out."

  "You know I can't. Not yet. We've only held this world three of its years. It's not properly tamed yet. The crew, the needs for the expedition you want aren't to spare."

  "You promised me."

  "I promised to send an expedition as soon as team and materials were to spare."

  "And it's been three years, and still you say there're none."

  "None, for only a possibility—none for what may be nothing more than a nightmare grown in your own mind. As soon as I can in duty and honor spare people for something of that level, the expedition will go. I promise you. It will bring back the truth of what happened to our son. But not yet."

  She turned from him.

  "Three years," she said.

  "These beasts are not like some on other worlds we've taken. I've done with this planet as much as I might, given the force I had to work with. No one could do more. You are unfair, Adtha Or Ain."

  Silently, she turned, crossed the room once more and passed back through the doorway by which she had entered. Its doors closed behind her.

  Lyt Ahn stood for a moment, then looked at the screen. It went blank and gray once more. He turned and went to sit down again at his desk, touching the smaller screen inset in it and apparently returning to the work he had been doing when Shane had come in.

  Shane continued to stand, unmoving. He stood, and the minutes went by. It was not unusual that a human should have to hold his place indefinitely, waiting for the attention of an Aalaag; Shane was trained to it. But this time his mind was a seething, bewildered mass. He longed for the First Captain to remember he was there and do something about him.

  A very long time later, it seemed, Lyt Ahn did lift his head from his screen and his eyes took notice of Shane's presence.

  "You may go," he said. His gaze was back on the desk screen before the words had left his lips.

  Shane turned and left.

  He went back down the long corridor, past the Aalaag officer still on duty at the desk and after some distance, to the door of his own cubicle. Opening that door at last, he saw, seated in the room's single armchair by the narrow bed, a human figure. It was one of the other translators, a brown-haired young woman named Sylvie Onjin.

  "I heard you were back," she told him.

  He made himself smile at her. How she had heard did not matter. There was an informational grapevine among all humans in the House of Weapons that operated entirely without reference to whether the giver and receiver of information were personally on good terms. It was to the benefit of all humans in the House that as much as possible be known about the activities of both Aalaag and humans there.

  Probably, word of his return had been passed through the ranks of the Interior Guards, either directly to the corps of translators, or by way of one of the other groups of human specialists personally owned and used by the First Captain.

  What did matter was that now, of all times, was not a moment in which he wanted to see her—or anyone. The need for privacy was so strong in him that he felt ready to break down emotionally and mentally if he did not have it. But he could not easily tell her to go.

  The humans owned by Lyt Ahn, being picked beasts and therefore of good quality, were encouraged to intermingle, and even to mate and have young if they wished. Although Aalaag mores stood in the way of the aliens' making any specific command or order that they do so. Only the Interior Guard welcomed the idea of being parents under these conditions. None of those in the translator ranks had any desire to perpetuate their kind as slaves of the aliens. But still, sheer physical and emotional hungers drew individuals together.

  Sylvie Onjin and Shane had been two so drawn. They had no real lust or love for each other, in the ordinary senses of those words. Only, they found each other slightly more compatible than either found others of the human opposite sex in the House of Weapons. In the world as it had been before the Aalaag came, Shane thought now, if they two had met they would almost undoubtedly have parted again immediately with no great desire to see more of each other. But in this place they clung instinctively together.

  But the thought of Sylvie's company now, when his mind was in turmoil and his emotions had just been stretched to a breaking point, was more than Shane could face. At best, it was only an act he and she played together, a pretense that erected a small, flimsy and temporary private existence for them both, away from the alien-dominated world that held their lives and daily actions in its indifferent hand. Also, now, after Shane's encounter with the other young woman, the one called Maria, there was something ab
out Sylvie that almost repelled him, the way a tamed animal might suffer in comparison with one still wild, but free.

  But the narrow face of Sylvie smiled confidently back up at him. Her smile was her best feature; and in the days before the Aalaag she might have emphasized her other good features with makeup to the point where she could have been considered attractive, if not seductive. The aliens, however, classed lipstick and all such other beauty aids with that uncleanliness they were so adamant about erasing from any world they owned. To an Aalaag, a woman with makeup on had merely dirtied her face. Ordinary humans, in private, might indulge in such actions, but not those human servants which the Aalaag saw daily.

  So Sylvie's face was starkly clean, pale-looking under her close-cropped, ordinary brown hair. It was a small-boned face. She was a woman of one hundred and thirty-four centimeters in height—barely over five feet, a corner of Shane's western mind automatically calculated—and narrow-bodied even for that height. Her figure was unremarkable, but not bad for a woman in her early twenties. Like Shane himself she had been a graduate student when the Aalaag landed.

  She sat now with her legs crossed, the skirt of the black taffeta cocktail dress she had put on lifted by the action to reveal her knees. In her lap was a heavy-looking, cylindrical object about ten inches long wrapped in white documentary paper, held in place by a narrow strip of such paper wrapped around its neck, formed into a bow and colored red, apparently by some homemade substance, since such a thing as red tape—let alone the red ribbon the paper strip was evidently intended to mimic—was not something which the Aalaag would find any reason for permitting to be manufactured.

  "Happy homecoming!" She held it out to him.

  He stepped forward automatically and took it, making himself smile back at her. He could feel through the paper that it was a full bottle of something. He hardly drank, as she knew—there was too much danger of making some mistake in front of their owners if some unexpected call to duty should come—but it was about the only gift available for any of them to give each other. He held it, feeling how obvious the falseness of his smile must be. The image of Maria was still between them—but then suddenly it cleared and it was as if he saw Sylvie unexpectedly wiped clean of all artifice, naked in her hopes and fears as in the pretensions with which she strove to battle those fears.

  His heart turned suddenly within him. It was a physical feeling like a palpable lurch in his chest. He saw her clearly for the first time and understood that he could never betray her, could never deny help to her in this or any like moment. For all that there was not even the shadow of real love between them, he felt his smile become genuine and tender as he looked down at her; and he felt—not the actual love for which she yearned, or even the pretense of it, for which she was willing to settle—but a literal affection that was based in the fact that they were simply two humans together in this alien house.

  Not understanding the reasons for it, but instinctively recognizing the emotion that had come into him, she rose suddenly and came into his arms; and he felt a strong gush of tenderness, such as he had never felt before in his long months in this place of weapons, that made him hold her tight to him.

  Later, lying on his back in the darkness, the slight body of Sylvie sleeping contentedly beside him, he was assaulted by an unexpected tidal wave of loneliness and emptiness that washed over him, and threatened to drown him.

  His father and mother had died when he had been so young that he barely remembered them. He had been raised after that by an aunt and uncle, who were well off and had given him everything that could physically and socially be expected; but they had made no real effort to hide the fact that they considered raising him a duty rather than a matter of affection. Left to themselves, they would have preferred not to have been bothered with children.

  He had escaped them with relief as soon as he was old enough to go to college; but he had never been able to escape the feeling that there was no real place for him among other people. Deeply, he envied Sylvie's ability to find satisfaction and relief in these brief encounters of theirs. Outside of a moment's forgetfulness of the world that held them prisoner, and a rare burst of emotion such as the one he had felt earlier when he had seen her as naked in her hopes and fears, his inner feeling of valuelessness had him by the throat once more.

  He wrestled with the despondency in him, fought it off, and after a while he, too, slept.

  He was roused from deep slumber by the burring of his bedside phone. He reached out toward it and the action triggered to life the light over the nightstand where the square screen of the phone sat. He touched the screen and the face of an Aalaag above the collar of a duty officer appeared in it.

  "You are ordered to attend the First Captain, beast," said the officer's deep, remote voice. "Report to him in the Council Conference Room."

  "I hear and obey, untarnished sir," Shane heard his own voice, still thick with sleep, answering.

  The screen went blank, leaving a flat, silvery gray surface. Shane rose and dressed, a sick feeling growing inside him. Whatever reason there could be for the unheard-of action of calling a beast into a Conference of the Council made up of the Area Commanders among the Aalaag, it could mean nothing good for the beast. Sylvie was already gone and the chronometer by his bed showed that the hour was barely past dawn.

  Twenty minutes later, shaven, clean and dressed, he touched the bronze surface of the door to the Council Conference Room.

  "Come," said the voice of Lyt Ahn.

  The door opened itself and he entered to find twelve Aalaag, five males and seven females, seated around the floating, shimmering surface that served them as a table. Lyt Ahn sat at the far end. On his right was Laa Ehon, the Commander whom Shane had only just left in Milan. A dryness tightened Shane's throat as he remembered his secret crimes against that officer and his command. He told himself no such august assemblage would be convened only to deal with the criminal acts of a simple beast; but his throat remained tight. He looked down the table surface toward the First Captain and waited for orders. He had halted, from custom, two paces inside the open door, and the twelve powerful alien faces were studying him as lions might study some small animal that had wandered into the midst of their pride.

  6

  "This is the one you spoke of?" asked the female Aalaag closest on Lyt Ann's left and second down the table from him.

  Her voice had the depth of age and it came to Shane that she—in fact, all the aliens here—would be Captains of no lower than the ninth rank, not to be easily satisfied with quickly dreamed-up explanations. He wondered what District the speaker commanded. She was no alien he recognized.

  "It is the one I call Shane-beast," said Lyt Ahn. "It is the one I sent only the day before yesterday to Laa Ehon with communications."

  He turned to look at the Commander of the Milanese area.

  "I'm still uncertain as to how you think its presence here can contribute to the discussion," he went on to Laa Ehon.

  So, it was Laa Ehon who was responsible for his presence here. The sick feeling in Shane expanded. His mind raced.

  "Order it to speak," Laa Ehon replied to Lyt Ahn.

  "Identify yourself and your work," Lyt Ahn said to Shane.

  "By your command, immaculate sir," said Shane clearly. "I am a translator and courier of your staff and have been so for nearly three of our planet's years."

  There was a moment's silence around the table.

  "Remarkable," said the female Aalaag on Lyt Ann's left who had spoken earlier.

  "Exactly," put in Laa Ehon. "Notice how perfectly it speaks the true language—all of you who are so used to the limited mouthings of your beasts, when they can be brought to attempt to communicate in real speech at all."

  "It's one of a special, limited corps of the creatures, all of whom have been selected for special ability in this regard," said Lyt Ahn. "I'm still waiting to hear how you think, Laa Ehon, that its presence here can contribute to our discussion."


  "'Special,'" echoed Laa Ehon. The single sound of the word in the Aalaag tongue was completely without emphasis.

  "As I said," replied Lyt Ahn.

  Laa Ehon turned his head to the First Captain, inclined it in a brief gesture of respect, and then turned back to look around the table at the others there.

  "Let's return to the matter at hand, then," Laa Ehon said. "I asked for this meeting because it's been over three local years since our Expedition to this world first sat down upon it. That length of time has now passed and certain signs of adjustments to our presence here, in the attitudes of the local dominant race, that should by now be showing themselves have not done so—"

  "The incidence of yowaragh among the beasts," interrupted the female who had spoken before, "isn't that much above the norm for such a period. Granted, no two situations on any two acquired worlds are ever the same—"

  "Granted exactly that," Laa Ehon interrupted in his turn, "it is not yowaragh with which I am primarily concerned, but a general failure on the part of the cattle to keep production levels as expected. Past Expeditions on other worlds have often found such a slump in production in their early years, but always it's turned out in the end to be caused by depression in the beasts at finding themselves governed—even though that governing has resulted for them in a safer, cleaner world, as it has here. On this world, however, it is something much more like silent defiance than depression with which we seem to be dealing. I repeat, it is this, not incidents of yowaragh, with which I am concerned."