by Matt
Shane stared at him. The question called for so complicated an answer that he did not know where to start. Finally, he managed to say something.
"The Aalaag have a word for it," he said. "Yowaragh."
"Eeyah...what?" said Peter.
"Don't try to pronounce it," said Shane. "It's one of the more impossible words for a human to say properly. Yowaragh. It means beasts who suddenly go insane to the point where they try a perfectly hopeless physical attack on an Aalaag."
Peter looked at him narrowly. "You did this?"
"No, no." Shane shook his head. "Not me. Remember the Dane I told you about after you, shall we say, escorted me to your hiding place in Milan? The one who attacked the Aalaag who accidentally killed the man's wife?"
"I remember," Peter said. "But it's still not clear to me what that has to do with your joining us now."
Shane had told, at that first meeting in Milan, about the execution in the square he had been made to watch, about getting drunk in the tavern and being attacked outside by the Nonservs, but he had not told about the butterfly.
Now, he tried to explain to Peter why the Aalaag had felt they had to execute the man publicly, on the hooks, how they would not tolerate anything but obedience. And he tried to explain about the tension he always felt, living close to them all the time and knowing as he did how uncompromising they were in their rules and laws, even when their own children were involved. He told Peter about the father Aalaag solemnly bringing his son to task for being responsible for the deaths of two valuable beasts. How the son had defended himself saying it was an accident, he was only trying to save the woman from being trampled by the riding beast, and how the father scorned all excuses. He tried again to explain the term yowaragh, the craziness that overcame him at times and made him want to strike out, no matter what the consequences.
"There was a—" Shane broke off. He found these words hard to come by.
"It was spring," he said. "There was a butterfly on a branch of a tree there, just coming out of the chrysalis. You know how the Aalaag've cleared all insects and wild creatures of any kind out of the cities? These two didn't see the butterfly; and so this won't make any sense to you, but it seemed to me that if the butterfly could just last long enough to get its wings working and escape, then we'd have gained a life— even if it was only the life of a butterfly—for the two they'd just taken from us. I know this doesn't make sense...."
Peter was looking at him oddly.
"Nevermind," said Peter. "Go on."
"So I concentrated on the butterfly. Kept my eyes on it. And it got away. The man died. Then all of us who'd been required to stand and watch were free to go; and I found the tavern not far away. The barman sold me some illegal homemade liquor. I got a little drunk and I was still all shaken up by what I'd had to watch. I left and right away I was jumped by the three Nonservs who wanted to rob me. I beat them off with my staff—killed two of them, actually; and ended up thinking what a great warrior I was, until I saw how they were nothing but skin and bones—they'd been starving to death."
He stopped.
"Go on," said Peter.
"On my way back, I had to pass through the square again. There was no one in it but the dead man and his wife. I had to do something—it was yowaragh, as the Aalaag say. All I could think of doing was making some kind of protest where people could see it—putting some kind of mark there to say, even if only to myself, that they may have killed the man and woman but the butterfly lived. Something lived...that's all there is to it."
He said no more and Peter was silent for a long minute or two.
"So," he said, "you still didn't do anything about the Aalaag until you were in Milan, the time we picked you up."
"I could see Maria there through one of the vision screens they have in their offices. Just waiting...it was Aalborg all over again. I thought if I could only make sure she lived, save one life. It was the way it had been with thebutterfly...."
He ran down.
"Well," said Peter after a bit. He had been staring off across the room at nothing in particular; now he brought his gaze back to Shane. "That answers me."
Shane took a deep breath and drank some of the god-awful wine.
"I'm glad," he said.
"So am I," said Peter.
"And now," said Shane, gathering strength, "now that I've told you all about me, how about telling me about you? I don't know a thing about you. Who you are, or what you do. Your turn to tell me."
"I'm a solicitor," said Peter, staring moodily at his wineglass. He lifted it to his lips, but at the first taste set it quickly down again.
"A lawyer?"
Peter opened his mouth to answer and closed it again as the heavy-bodied, middle-aged waitress, with a wisp of hair dangling down on a forehead shiny with sweat, came to their table and took their orders.
"One kind of lawyer," he said when she was gone. "You know we've got barristers, who actually appear in court, and solicitors—"
"I do know. I'm sorry," said Shane. "It's not an important point. Go on about yourself."
"Well, that's all there is about me, really." Peter frowned at the tablecloth, on which he was drawing lines with the tines of his fork. "I've got a little independent income; but I try to get into the office fairly regularly to look busy to the aliens and the police, if nothing else."
"Why are you in the Resistance?" asked Shane bluntly.
"Well, there isn't much choice, is there?" said Peter. "I can't say I and those close to me have been directly and personally misused by the aliens. Though it was a result of their occupation that my father and mother are dead now. They were old, you see. I was an only child and a late child. They had all sorts of little things wrong with their health; and the way they had to live after the aliens came was fairly hard on my father. He died about a year after the aliens took over and my mother only about six months after that. But I can't say I'm out for revenge, anything like that."
"Oh?" Shane looked at him. Peter's eyes were still on the marks he was making in the tablecloth. "What is it that made you an Aalaag-fighter then?"
Peter raised his gaze and looked straight at Shane.
"I suppose you could call it some kind of duty," he answered. "As I said, this is my ground. In fact, this is my world. If a thief comes and sets up camp in your house, you do something about it, don't you? You don't just sit there and let him use the silver and empty the refrigerator. You do whatever has to be done to get rid of him."
"Including facing what the Aalaag will do to you when they catch you?"
"More of the if and less of the when, if you don't mind," said Peter. "Of course. Whatever's necessary. There'd hardly be much point in living, otherwise."
Shane looked down at the lines in the tablecloth, at a loss for something to say. Peter, seeing his eyes upon the fork tines, laid the fork down.
"I expect everybody has their own reason," he said with unexpected gentleness.
Shane shook his head. "I guess there's nothing we can do about ourselves, anyway," he said. "Well, shall I tell you what I've got in mind to show the visiting firemen?"
"Firemen?"
"The visitors here from the Continent to see me," said Shane.
"All right, then. What is it?"
"I want you to get all of them into positions—separate positions—close to the Houses of Parliament, so that they've got as close a view as is safe, of Big Ben, at just a little after noontime, tomorrow. There's an Aalaag on his riding beast always on duty around the Houses of Parliament—"
"I know," interrupted Peter.
"I know you know," said Shane. "I'm trying to tell you something. Please listen. He rides from position to position around the building, sits his riding beast a short while at each position, then moves on. He usually stops just before the clock tower at noon, or a little after. Tell your people that when they see him ride into position there and stop, to start watching the face of Big Ben. They may have to wait some minutes before they see
anything, but they're to keep their eyes on the clockface until they do, or they'll miss what I want them to see."
"And what is it they're going to see?" demanded Peter.
"Let me finish telling you what I'll need, first," said Shane. "Now, I want you, personally—"
He broke off as the waitress once again approached their table, this time with filled plates. He waited until she had gone again, then picked up where he had left off.
"... I'll need you standing out about twenty yards beyond the Aalaag on his riding beast; and you'll have a car either parked, or driving around close enough by so that you can get me into it and away in the shortest possible time. There's nothing about that that'll be difficult to arrange, is there?"
"No," said Peter. "Go on. What's all this for?"
"A show for the visitors, as I said. One to make sure they don't doubt my bona fides as the Pilgrim," Shane went on. "Most of them are probably going to be coming in with strong doubts—"
"You can count on that," said Peter.
"I am. This should put their doubts to rest. I haven't got time to go around convincing them all individually. Let me go on—I want you standing by ready to guide me to that car, or to where it can pick me up. Our visitors who're observing will have to see to getting themselves out of the area and meeting·us somewhere else later. They can be given instructions on what to do and where to go. I'll be wearing my pilgrim outfit, of course, with the hood pulled together in front, just as I will when I talk to them that evening. I suppose you've warned them about the fact I've got to preserve my anonymity; and they've agreed to go along with that?"
Peter nodded.
"Right," he said. "Now—and no more nonsense about it —what is it you're planning to do?" Shane took a deep breath.
"Mark a Pilgrim symbol on the face of the clock," he answered, "while the Aalaag on duty's right there—and walk away under his nose while all our friends watch."
13
Peter stared.
"You're out of your head! With the alien there on his riding beast at the same time?"
"With luck, he won't see me until I'm back on the ground," said Shane. "Even if he does, I'm just another beast who was working up in the clock tower and left a sort of smudge or mark on it. But the chances are he won't even look up. Why should he?"
"Why shouldn't he—when he sees you up there on the clockface?"
"I tell you, he shouldn't see me. If he did, why should he be interested? His job is to ride around the Houses of Parliament, and, of course, to react to any crimes against Aalaag law that happen right under his nose."
"Putting the Pilgrim mark anywhere is a crime."
"He'll only see it's a Pilgrim symbol if (a) he notices it at all and if (b) he takes a very close look at it. It'll take a good pair of human eyes—and the Aalaag vision isn't any better than ours—to make out what the mark is from the ground unless you really look closely at it. He might decide to do that, but meanwhile I'll be walking away. I've got a few Aalaag-type tricks up my sleeve he won't be expecting from a human. Now—that's all I'm going to say about it, even to you. Did you change those gold pieces I gave you into ordinary money?"
Peter reached into his inside coat pocket and took out an envelope, which he handed to Shane.
"Thanks," said Shane. "The gold's useful sometimes, but most of the time now, I'd rather not attract attention to myself; and after tomorrow, I particularly won't want to attract attention when I'm wearing the pilgrim robe. Oh, I'll get myself to the Houses of Parliament to begin with, by the way."
"I assumed you had something like that in mind; otherwise you'd have asked me for transportation there at the start," said Peter drily.
They talked of nothing more that had to do with tomorrow during the rest of their meal together. Shane did not offer any more information and Peter did not ask questions, for which Shane was grateful. He was coming to like Peter, almost against his will. More and more, he was convinced of the wisdom of his first reaction on seeing those Resistance people whom Peter had got together to meet him on his first arrival in London. It would be much safer to be disliked than liked by those he met who had dedicated themselves to fighting against the Aalaag. To say nothing of the fact that it would help his conscience to sleep nights.
By a natural progression from that thought he found himself thinking again of Maria; and he was still thinking of her as he took a taxi home from the restaurant where he had eaten with Peter. With their need for spending as much time as possible together to practice on her speaking and understanding of Aalaag, it had been effectively necessary that they move into the same quarters. He was too aware of the advantages of anonymity which a hotel offered to take the flat which Peter suggested. Instead he had moved to a larger hotel and changed his single room for a two-bedroom suite.
The hotel he had chosen was a British edition of one of the chain hotels from the U.S., and he was careful to speak to anyone on the premises there, when he had to speak at all, with a North American accent. Maria, speaking English with an Italian accent, was unremarkable enough so that they could be taken for a visiting couple from the States.
As the taxi moved him through the darkened streets, he found himself wound up by the same feelings that he wrestled with each time he returned to the hotel and Maria.
He could not wait to get back to her—and that feeling was a dangerous indulgence. He had faced the fact, shortly after they had moved into the new hotel, that she meant more to him than anyone else ever had; and that was the one thing she must never be allowed to suspect. It would be hard enough on her, when the time came that he delivered up the rest of the Resistance people to the Aalaag, without her knowing that she alone was in a position of safety because he had come to value her so highly.
She would hate him, of course, when she found out what he was doing. If, in addition to hating him, she should ever tell herself that it had all happened because of the way he felt about her, and because he had wanted to keep her, her alone, alive—if that ever happened, her hate would be mixed with guilt. Nevermind that she had no responsibility for what had happened. She would see only those that were dead and blame herself for being the cause of those deaths.
And the end result would be that she would give up her own life to ease her conscience. She would go to the Aalaag and denounce herself as a Resistance member. She would also tell them all about him—but if it came to that point, what happened to him would hardly matter. He could not make the prospect of it matter to him even now, thinking about it. All he could think of was Maria and the absurd joy he felt in the fact that soon he would be with her again... and with all this, he had never even touched her.
He smiled a little in the darkness of the cab's rear seat. That puzzled her, he knew. What she felt for him was an entirely overblown sense of gratitude, plus something that could hardly be described otherwise than as hero worship. She had not hidden it, nor had she hidden the fact that she would not have been averse to being physically close to him. But he dared not. He could never have made his lie continue to work, the lie that he was concerned only with her usefulness to him, once physical intimacy had been established.
He stiffened his resolve, therefore, paid off the cab at the hotel from the envelope Peter had handed him in the restaurant, and climbed the five flights of stairs to let himself into the sitting room of their hotel suite.
She was seated on the sofa there, with some pages of a part of a routine Aalaag order he had surreptitiously copied for her to study, spread out on the low coffee table before her. She jumped up on seeing him and came forward.
"I did not order you to move," he said in Aalaag.
They had fallen into a practice of speaking that language, in which he played the part of an Aalaag and she tried to respond as a human would be expected to respond.
She checked her forward motion.
"Forgive this beast," she said in Aalaag, not too awkwardly—but then it was a routine phrase that she had been drilling on steadily. "Th
is beast was only—"
She broke off.
"You never taught me the word for 'happy,'" she said in English. "I was going to say 'happy to see you.'"
"There is no such word," he told her, also in English. "The closest you could come to 'happy' is 'very interested.' You might say 'this beast is very interested to see you,'—except that such a thing is never said. It would be presumptuous on the part of a beast, even if such a reaction on the part of a beast would make any sense to an Aalaag. But it wouldn't."
"It wouldn't?" She stared at him.
"No. Why should a beast have any reaction other than a willingness to obey when it sees its master? Anything else suggests some kind of unwholesome relationship between master and beast—unwholesome to the Aalaag mind, that is."
"But you told me that Lyt Ahn had sometimes been considerate and even kind to you—and you're a beast to him."