by Matt
He had survived under the Aalaag until now because he had been able to take refuge in the fact that he stood alone and apart from even his fellow courier-translators. He had found safety and comfort of a sort in being alone with his emptiness. Now he was proposing to bridge the space around him to one particular other human being; and he was full of fear and self-doubts at the prospect.
He told himself that it would be easier once they were away from the driver of the car and privately at table in the restaurant. But the feeling inside him did not abate once they were seated in the restaurant. His generous bribe to the head-waiter had given them an excellent table semi-detached from the other tables in the restaurant's one large room, which was enclosed on two sides and had a window on a third. Immersed in himself he almost forgot the ritual of pre-dinner drinks and remembered it only just in time. Predictably, Maria took a glass of white wine. He ordered whisky and soda without bothering to wonder why he chose that, rather than some other drink.
"You surprised Peter by simply arriving, instead of just writing back to his letter," he said to her in Italian, when they were alone with the drinks.
"So I noticed," she answered in the same language—and she did smile. "But you weren't surprised, were you?"
"I expected you here, eventually, but not quite so fast," he said.
Her face became serious.
"The letter said you had a use for me. You do have a use for me, haven't you?"
"Oh yes," he said. "It's critical to have you with me." Her face grew even more serious.
"I hope you don't expect too much from me," she said. "I'm not a remarkable person."
"I don't think I expect too much," he said. "We'll have to find that out. Your coming without asking what for was a good sign, a great sign."
She looked him directly in the eyes.
"I know what you did for me," she answered. "I know what would have happened to me if you hadn't got me out of that alien Headquarters. You gave me my life. It's yours to use now, if you've a real need of it. I did a lot of thinking about what you did, and what you told all of us after we had you picked up and brought in. I believe everything you said then was the truth, including being the one who invented the Pilgrim symbol. I also believe that you can do things for us no one else can do."
He felt pinned by her gaze as a specimen butterfly might be pinned in a case.
"I'm not superhuman," he said awkwardly. "I just have the advantage of knowing something more than others about the Aalaag, and I've got some physical advantages by being a sort of special servant of theirs. That's all."
"That's everything," Maria leaned forward toward him. Her eyes still held him. "Peter told me after I got here what you told him and the English fighters—that your plan is to make the aliens drive themselves away from here, off this planet completely. I know you don't dare tell us how, yet, but I believe you can do it. I think if anyone can, you can."
He was cut adrift by her belief in him. It made the fact that he was planning to betray everyone she knew and everything she presently believed in, to achieve his planned end, a dozen times more painful a secret. But it remained just that: a secret that must be kept, even from her, until it was too late for her or anyone else to do anything about it. Once more he thought of the Resistance members and what would happen to them when his plan worked, and the thought was like a deep inward pain, almost too great to hide. It was only by reminding himself that they would face their fate anyway, no matter what he did—and that she would be one of them if his plan did not work, that he brought himself back under control. At least, he would have snatched this one brand from the burning.
"I can tell you more than I told Peter," he said to her. He lowered his voice and glanced around to make sure there was no one close enough to overhear. "Because you'll need to know more. In fact, you'll need to know more than anyone else except me. But it's all going to depend on your being able to do some things. How many languages do you speak?"
"Besides my own?" she said. "French—and my English is passable. So is my Romanian—we have Romanian relatives I used to visit occasionally when I was a little girl. My German is not good and other languages—languages of Europe—I know only a few words, like a tourist. And that's all."
He nodded.
"All right," he said. "The next question, then. How old are you?"
She frowned a little at him.
"Twenty-three," she answered. "Does my age matter a great deal?"
"I want to try to pass you off as about sixteen," he said. "Do you think you could dress and perhaps act that age? Fooling the Aalaag isn't any problem. But there'll be other humans who'll also have to believe you're sixteen. Particularly, there'll be other women."
She laughed.
"Sixteen wasn't so long ago that I've forgotten what it was like being that age," she said. "I think I can convince men, and probably women, even those my own age, as well. With the women I'll simply be a little innocent, stupid and dowdy ... and not too successful with the men."
"You won't have too much to do with other men," he said. "Just me."
She looked at him calculatingly.
"Then it might not be so easy after all, if any of the women you talk about are interested in you," she said. "You're attractive."
"I am?"
He was genuinely startled. What women, like Sylvie, had come his way he had assumed had done so because of his tendency to yield to their desires and do what they wanted. If anything, he had assumed they had only put up with his looks, which had seemed to him a dull average, at best.
"Let me think about it," she said. "There should be ways of making me seem harmless, even at that. Why am I going to be mostly with you?"
"I need someone alongside who can both go into the Aalaag areas and be accepted by Resistance people," he told her.
She paled.
"Go into alien areas? Like the Headquarters in Milan where you first saw me?"
"Yes," he said. "They're not that different or that terrible, if you have a right to be there. I'll tell you more about that in a minute. But the first problem is a language one."
"What language is that?"
"Aalaag," he said.
A little of the color that had left her face a second earlier had come back. Now it went again.
"But humans can't possibly talk like the aliens!"
"Yes, they can," he said. "Well, to be strictly truthful, no, they can't. Not actually like the Aalaag, but close enough so that even the Aalaag understand them and find their speaking and understanding of it acceptable. That's my job, after all... ."
He told her a little about Lyt Ann's original drafting and testing of humans to act as translators and couriers, as well as other servants who would work directly with the Aalaag.
"Outside of translators like myself," he said, "most human servants only have to understand a few Aalaag words—which isn't hard. There're a few commands that go along with any job done for them and these can be recognized and told apart fairly quickly by anyone who isn't literally ear-blind. Speaking's a different matter—and that's where you're technically right. Of course we can't speak just the way they do. We don't have the vocal apparatus for it. Our vocal apparatuses are almost identical to theirs, but not quite, and there's the difference in physical size."
"You don't make it sound easier," she said. She had not moved, that he had noticed, and yet she seemed to have huddled in on herself. "You make it sound harder."
"The point is—and those of us who were natural linguists and got picked for Lyt Ahn's translator group found it out almost immediately, I suppose because we were used to experimenting with sounds—that the trick is to approximate the sounds the Aalaag make when they speak. Luckily for us, there's a model for us to work to. The Aalaag children have high voices and trouble with some—not all, just some—of the same sounds we do. By playing to that difference, it's possible to convince an adult Aalaag ear that they're hearing their own tongue spoken passably well. Of course, it helps
that since they consider us beasts, they expect the least from us and they're happy to find any success in us at all."
"Would I be actually living in one of their Headquarters?" Maria asked.
"You would. In Lyt Ahn's—the Headquarters of the First Captain."
"And all those aliens there would expect me to understand them and speak to them?"
He laughed deliberately, to counteract her fears.
"It's nowhere near as bad as that," he said. "But we're putting the cart five kilometers in front of the horse. First, let's see what you can do. I said there were a number of Aalaag sounds that their very young children have trouble pronouncing and we can get away with mispronouncing ourselves. Unfortunately, their name—Aalaag—doesn't have any of these particular sounds in it; and it's also the one word by which they make a snap judgment of the intelligence of any human pronouncing it. Let's hear you try to say it... 'Aalaag.'"
She stared across the table at him for a long moment, opened her mouth, sat a moment without making a sound, then closed her mouth again.
"I can't say it the way you say it," she said. "I just can't."
"Try it anyway. 'Aalaag.'"
She looked at him for a long moment, drew a deep breath like a child about to blow out the candles on a birthday cake and spoke—but not rapidly as Peter had done. She spoke carefully and precisely as if she would imitate each twist his mouth had made as he had pronounced the word.
"Ahh ... yaa... h'ag," she said.
He stared at her.
"Good!" he said—then checked himself. "I don't mean you said it just the way it should be, just yet, but you're on the track of saying it right. Shorten up that first sound; and on the second sound—you're right, it is something like 'yaa' but actually it's closer to an T sound. Think of a double 'l.' Let your tongue vibrate—tremble—once against the roof of your mouth as you say it. Try it again."
"Ah ... yawl... ag," she said, and checked herself. "No, I was even worse."
"You're trying too hard. And you were right the first time when you ended up with 'h'ag.' It's not precisely that. That's the part of the name where the adult Aalaag goes back deeper into his throat than any human can do. The young ones use a sort of breathy cough to fill in. Try something like that yourself. Try a voiceless 'IT; say 'hah' under your breath."
She did.
"Now try putting it all together once more...."
They went on practicing. Maria improved for a while, then began to get worse.
"You're tiring," he said. "Let's leave it for now. What I want to do in the next two weeks I'm here is spend every moment I can working with you; not only to get that word down pat, but several phrases I want you to be able to reel off when you need to. Also, you're going to have to learn to understand some Aalaag. We'll practice with me saying certain set phrases to you, for you to answer."
"But how am I going to use all this?"
"Oh," he said. "I'm sorry. Now I'm the one who's gone and put the cart before the horse. I want to try and get Lyt Ahn to accept you as a young girl I've run across, who by natural talent only has picked up some of the Aalaag language, and have him agree to take you into the translator corps to be my personal assistant on this liaison business."
He saw by her face she did not understand, and spoke before she could open her mouth.
"Sorry again," he said. "I forget how little I've told Peter and the rest and how much you have to know. Did Peter tell you I told the local Resistance people that a new Aalaag project here is a government unit staffed by humans but directly under Aalaag control, being set up to improve production in these islands?"
She nodded.
"All right," he said, "what I didn't tell Peter is that I'm sent as a liaison for Lyt Ahn—who you'll need to start thinking of, even in your dreams, by his title of First Captain"—he repeated the title for her in Aalaag—"to Laa Ehon, whose idea the Project was and under whose control it is—"
"But Laa Ehon's Commander of our Milanese District."
"He is. But he's this, too. The whole thing is experimental, and involved in what I'd call Aalaag politics, if the word politics wasn't misleading where the Aalaag are concerned. At any rate, I'm to report to Lyt Ahn on what I see of the human element of that project. It's to Laa Ehon's advantage that the Project work. Probably—but not certainly—to Lyt Ahn's advantage if it fails; and to our human advantage if it works. We want it to work so other such governing units will be set up elsewhere in the world and so the Aalaag'll become dependent on them for the goods they need produced by the economy of our world. Then, hopefully, the day will come when by destroying the effectiveness of the governing units we can make Earth seem unreliable enough in its production so that the Aalaag will look for other worlds to colonize. So they'll go away and leave us alone. Do you follow me?"
"I understand what you tell me," she said. "But I don't see how it's going to work."
"Most of that I'll have to explain later. The point is I need to be liaison to all this whole governing system, and I'll need help—as I say, someone who's in both the Courier-Translator Corps and the Resistance at the same time. It also has to be one of the few people who already know what I look like, so as to cut down on the number of people who could identify me if they were caught and questioned by the Aalaag. Finally, it has to be someone who I think has the intelligence and the other capabilities to do what they'll have to do. That limited the field to those of you who saw my face in Milan; and of those only you or Peter were the sort I could hope to get accepted among the translators of the Corps. Peter, I've a need for in another capacity."
He stopped speaking and gazed at her.
"You can say no to all this, you know," he said. "I can only use you if you want to work with me, if you want to help."
"But I do," she said. "You scare me. I'm frightened to death by all this you talk about so casually, like living in an Aalaag Headquarters. But I want to do it."
"Good," he said. "I think you're being braver than I'd be in the same situation, where you don't actually know what you're getting into."
He looked around for a waiter. "Let's order our meal," he said. "I've got a lot to tell you. More, in fact, than we'll have time for tonight."
They ordered, the meal came, and he did tell her. Privately, he was astonished and dismayed to find that her ignorance of the Aalaag was even greater than he had suspected even the Resistance members of having. He talked steadily about the organization of Aalaag society, the place in it of people like Lyt Ahn and Laa Ehon, the Aalaag rules and mores and outlook on life. He tried to describe how the Aalaag were individuals and the kind of thing that made one different from another; and how important it was for any human owned by one of them to know the personality of his or her master and be able to predict even the small reactions of the Aalaag to ordinary, daily happenings.
He tried to give her some idea of how uncompromising the difference was between what was acceptable to an Aalaag— and therefore to any human they controlled—and what was unacceptable. Finally, he tried to make this information real for her by showing how all these elements had helped produce the kind of world they had presently and the specific laws the Aalaag had set up for humans to make it work.
By the time dinner was over, he was not quite hoarse but close to it. The back of his neck ached a little from the rigidity with which he had held himself in making the effort to bring her to a better understanding. When he finally fell silent, he became suddenly aware of exhaustion all through him like a deep stain.
He sat back in his chair and, in an action unusual for him, drained the glass holding the wine he had, for her, ordered with the meal.
She smiled a little wistfully at him.
"Yes," she said. "You wear an invisible cloak and carry a staff, even when you're dressed like this."
"Oh—," he said. "I'm sorry. I should have introduced myself again. My name is Shane Evert. You'll have to know that to talk about me to the other humans in the Courier-Translator Corps and
at Headquarters where I'm known."
"I remembered your name," she said. As if on an impulse, she reached out and gently touched his cheek with her fingertips. "But for me the only right name for you is Pilgrim."
11
"Beast,"said Laa Ehon, six days later, "you have now had ten days in which to observe the cattle at work on this project. Give me your report on them."
Enclosed with the Aalaag by a privacy sphere, Shane stood before the desk at which Laa Ehon sat in the latter's office. Shane was not quite standing at attention, but there was a large difference between this situation and the more relaxed conditions under which he normally reported to Lyt Ahn.
As usual, whenever he had to deal with an Aalaag, there had been that first rush of fear, escalating swiftly to a tension so tight that all emotion was lost in the intense concentration of giving answers that would be at once satisfactory and safe. He had thought in the past that what he felt at these times must be something like what a high-wire artist in a circus must go through just before, and once he had stepped upon, the thin, taut strand of metal on which his life depended.