Way of the Pilgrim

by Matt

  He shrugged; he had run out of words. She sat without saying anything, and he also did not say anything, for what seemed to be a very long time.

  "I believe you," she said. "But I still have trouble understanding it—just a few words being that bad."

  He gazed at her, helpless.

  "Just take my word for it," he said. "Believe me, it's something as bad as... as bad as... there's no way to describe it. No human equivalent. To ask someone else's beast! And to ask him that!"

  There was another long moment in which neither of them said anything.

  "You see," Maria said finally. "It's not as if Laa Ehon had been guilty of murdering another Aalaag, or anything like that. But you make it sound as if it is—or worse."

  "It is. Far worse," he said. "At the very least, Laa Ehon's just signed his own death warrant. Don't you see? If he's sane, then the insult to a superior officer requires Lyt Ahn to kill him, or have him killed. If he's insane, then any Aalaag would agree he needs to be put to death as unfit."

  "But how do you know they do these things?" she burst out. "Have you ever seen one Aalaag killing another? Do you really know they pass sentences of death on each other when they think one of them is unfit? How can you be so sure?" He stood silent.

  "You're right," he said at last. "I haven't seen—or even heard—one of them talk about killing another of their own kind; and I've never known of a sentence of death to be passed on one of them—even in the official documents that I've seen on Lyt Ann's desk."

  He stared at her.

  "But I tell you it's true!" he said. "Everything I've told you about Laa Ehon's true! I know the Aalaag well enough to know it!"

  Maria shivered.

  "I do believe you," she looked up at him. "I don't know why I should, but I believe you. It's horrible. You can think like them, feel like them. .. it's almost as if you've become part Aalaag yourself, from being around them so much."

  It was like being hit in the face. He hardly heard her as she went on and her voice softened.

  "But you could never be that," she was saying.

  "No, no, of course not!" he answered. The words tumbled out of him, too hastily it seemed to his own ears. "How could any human be like that—come to be like them—of all..."

  He ran out of words suddenly* and in desperation he reached for her without thinking, as someone drowning might reach for a lifeboat just barely within arm's reach. She came to him and clung to him.

  "I shouldn't have said it," she whispered into his ear, holding him. "I should never have said it. Don't think of it, Shane! Please, dear one, forget I said any such thing."

  "I'm not like an Aalaag!" he said hoarsely into her thick, black hair. "How can any human be like an Aalaag? Nobody can. Nobody! It's crazy to say something like that!"

  "Yes, yes," she soothed him, stroking him. "It's not true. I don't know why I said such a thing. Of course you aren't. I know. I know you aren't. Shane, you aren't...."

  ... And by some miracle they were no longer standing, but had moved—he was hardly conscious of how—to a bedroom of their suite and a double bed there; and he lost himself in her, finding at last relief, at last a place to hide from all the never-ending terrors and nightmares of the past two years.

  It was a long while later, when they lay side by side on the bed and he was at peace, unthinking. The day had waned, and the late afternoon was deepening in shadow toward twilight. The window of their hotel bedroom was open and a warm breeze from time to time stirred the semitransparent curtain that had shielded them from the hard, direct, hot rays of the morning sun earlier, as they had prepared to go and report to Laa Ehon. Then the curtain had hung straight and still. Now it waved inward over them, reassuring as a blessing, as the gesture of another living human being, to tell him that the world to which he had been born still waited for his return and claimed him.

  "You are my Shane," she had said, sometime in the period just passed. "No one else's." And the words had comforted him as nothing had ever done in his life before that he could remember.

  "We have to get ready soon to go meet Georges," she said now.

  "Yes," he answered idly. At the moment Georges Marrotta and the Milanese Resistance people seemed very far away. He did not move, and neither did she.

  "How soon will they find out about us?" she asked. "I mean—how soon will they know we've been together?"

  The question shocked him suddenly back into all he had escaped from in the past few hours.

  "Find out?" he said harshly. "Why should they? I don't even know if they can and they wouldn't be interested anyway—in the coupling of a couple of cattle. I lied to you when—"

  He broke off, aghast at the full truth he had been on the verge of revealing to her, all his plans and their inevitable outcome. If he told her—now more than ever—she would recoil from him forever. And if he had not been able to face the loss of her before, how could he stand it now? Now, she was more vital to him even than his heartbeat.

  "You lied?" She propped herself up on one elbow to frown down into his face. "About what?" The darkness of her hair fell about their two faces, making a small confessional space between them. She must have seen the look he wore, because she added swiftly. "It's all right. You can tell me now. It doesn't matter what you tell me. Everything'!! be all right."

  But it wouldn't; and he knew it would not. Fear scrabbled in him like a drowning animal.

  "I.... didn't know how I'd act. I've been alone so long and I love you—"

  The last words amazed him as he said them and realized he meant them.

  "—I thought..." He turned his head, hiding his face against her breast so it would not betray him to those eyes of hers. "I thought you might be disappointed, somehow; and I couldn't face it "

  He left the rest of the sentence unsaid, partly because there were no more words in him he could safely say and partly out of the cunning of an animal-like instinct that told him his silence would lie for him more effectively than his tongue.

  It was deep dusk when they finally entered the building that housed the office of the trucking firm which Georges Marrotta owned and ran. They were both wearing their pilgrim robes with the hoods pulled up and closed in front of their faces.

  A young male clerk showed them into an inner office where Marrotta sat behind a desk. There were a couple of straight chairs before the desk and facing it; and it was to these he waved them.

  "Well?" he said, as they seated themselves.

  He was unchanged, thick-bodied and black-haired, with his pipe even at the same angle in his mouth. He looked at both of them, then fastened his gaze on the larger hooded figure who was Shane.

  "I'll need some help, of course," said Shane. "That's why I'm here."

  He heard the edge in his own voice. It had come instinctively in response to the tone of the other.

  "Just that?" said Marrotta, ironically.

  His dark eyes were steady as knife-points held at Shane's throat. Suddenly, Shane realized that a part of his reaction to this other man was an antipathy founded on fear. Somehow, in the way he was, or in the way he sat or acted, Marrotta could generate the power to make others afraid—and Shane was sensing this in this moment.

  Shane was dumbfounded. For a second, even, he felt a touch of deep alarm. The Pilgrim could not afford to be afraid —particularly of someone he would eventually need to command. But that emotion was not something that would just go away because you did not want it—

  Shane caught his thoughts up short, with an effort of will. What was wrong with him? He had been living in fear daily for two years, fear of those whom there was real cause to fear. What was there to be frightened of in an ordinary human, compared to them? Besides, what reasons were there for him to fear Marrotta?

  But he had only to ask himself the question and understanding came, bringing a sense of shock with it. Georges Marrotta, he suddenly realized, hated him—instinctively, re-flexively, not for any logical reasons. The cause could have had its root
s in what had happened in London, or in Shane's being here now, or even in his having enlisted Maria—who had been one of Georges's Resistance group. But the cause did not matter. The only thing that mattered was the hate itself, and its palpable existence, here and now.

  Shane had never had the experience of being hated before —not as an individual, for himself, alone. He'd like to kill me, thought Shane, fascinated, staring at Georges. If he had an excuse he'd kill me, right now, here, where I stand.

  And that, he understood suddenly, was why he was afraid. There was no way around or through the hate he faced. There was no way to placate it. Marrotta wanted him off the face of the Earth and nothing less than that would satisfy him. There was nothing to be done but face the fact.

  Shane had not known that the human engine was capable of such pure, undiluted antagonism. Nothing in his life so far had prepared him for it. But now, confronted with it, he found his own animal instincts responding as millions of generations of ancestors had triggered them to respond. His fear escalated into something that was no longer fear. He looked back at Georges from the hidden shadows of his cowl and knew that his own eyes were as unmoving on the other man as Georges's were on him. He found himself responding to the threat against his life with a threat as great against the other. He found himself hating back.

  And I could kill him, Shane thought.

  ... A small voice in the back of his head answered—but isn't that what you've been planning all along, for all of them?

  Time and distance seemed to move between him and Marrotta, and his hate went away, to be replaced only by a great emptiness. It was true. All his planning condemned the man across the desk from him to die eventually, and possibly under torture. This had been so, even before he had known of the other's existence.

  "Well?" Georges demanded harshly. "Are you going to stand there all night? Tell me what you want from us."

  "Not," said Shane through stiff lips, "until I know I've got your cooperation."

  Georges's upper lip twisted.

  "I'll tell you that when I hear what you want," he said.

  "No," said Shane. "You'll tell me first."

  He was no longer affected by the way Georges felt about him. He was too far off in emptiness. He heard his own voice, speaking almost detachedly.

  "You've got a choice to make, Marrotta," he said, "and you'll have to make it now. You can follow my direction, or I'll go on without you; and if I have to go on without you, in the end most, if not all, of the people that follow you now will end up leaving you to follow me. You were in London. You saw what I did. You can't, and no one you know, can, do what you saw me do there. We need to cooperate, because we're fighting on the same side; but whether we do or not—and it'll have to be done on my terms, not yours—is up to you. Now, which is it going to be? Will you promise to give me what I need, as far as you can, without first sitting in judgment on what that is, or are you going to try to set up some kind of conditions?"

  "Follow you blindly, you mean?"

  "Yes."

  Georges made a quick gesture with one hand.

  "That'll be the day!" the gesture said, in effect.

  Shane stood up. Almost immediately, Maria rose from her chair beside him.

  "Come along, Maria," said Shane. His voice still sounded strangely detached and quiet in his own ears. "There's nothing we can do here."

  They were almost to the door before Marrotta's voice sounded again behind them.

  "Tell me what it is you want," he said. "I'll tell you if I can get it for you."

  Shane turned and went back to seat himself again. Maria followed. Once more he looked across the desk at Marrotta.

  "I've got to make a quick trip to Rome and back—just when I don't know," Shane said, "and I've got to travel in a way where I won't be seen coming or going, so that no one'll know I've left Milan. Laa Ehon may have had an image of me circulated among his Interior Guard—I doubt it, but it's something I can't risk. I need identification papers; and I need a car and a driver to drive me to Rome, wait for me there as long as necessary—which shouldn't be more than twelve hours at the most—and then drive me back immediately."

  Marrotta did not answer immediately.

  "I suppose," he said at last, "something like that could be done."

  "It won't be as easy as perhaps I make it sound," said Shane. "There's more to it. I don't know when I'll be going. It'll probably be several days from now. But it could be yet this evening. Also, I won't know when I'm going to want to leave until a few minutes, or hours, before I'll need to go. As soon as I do, I'll want to leave as quickly as I can and get back just as quickly, so I'm gone a minimum of time. You'll have to find a car for me right away and start right now having at least two possible drivers ready on twelve-hour shifts—better have four in case one of the original two falls sick—and keep them standing by so I can leave any time, day or night, when the chance to go comes up for me. It goes without saying that anyone who drives me will need to know his way around Rome—because I don't—and be able to give a good excuse to local police there, or Interior Guard, for being there with the car."

  Marrotta hesitated a trifle longer this time, then nodded.

  "It can be done," he said. "What's the outside number of days it could be before you need the car and driver?"

  "Probably not more than a week. I'll go as soon as the Governor Unit that Laa Ehon's been ordered to set up here's been running at least a few days."

  "My God!" said Marrotta. "That could take them months."

  "As I told Peter's people in London," said Shane, "you who don't deal with them everyday don't understand the Aalaag. They've got technology we can't even imagine; and that, plus the way they do things, means that an order—any order —is executed immediately. If an office is to be set up, in theory it's set up and responsible for what it will do from the moment the order to set it up is issued. The order in this case probably went out the day before Lyt Ahn sent me here. By the time I landed, there were undoubtedly both Aalaag and humans handling at least some documents of the kind that fall under the authority of the office. Tomorrow, or the next day at the latest, Laa Ehon will tell me where the Unit is and let me go to see it. I'll have to spend anywhere from one day to a week with it to get ready for my trip. So, figure up to a week, but not much more."

  "The drivers will want to know what kind of danger they're going into," said Marrotta.

  "None, on the trip down," said Shane, standing up, with Maria imitating his actions again, "as long as they can account for their presence. On the way back, there might be a watch being kept by police and Interior Guard along the way for anyone dressed like a pilgrim."

  "You could try not dressing like a pilgrim on the way back," said Marrotta.

  "You know better than that," said Shane.

  "What if something comes up to make you take off your Pilgrim disguise?" Marrotta said. He smiled thinly. "And your driver gets a look at your face after all?"

  "The driver should try very hard not to see my face," said Shane. "If I thought he had..."

  Shane did not finish.

  He heard the words he just said as if someone else had just spoken them, in that same calm, detached voice. Something within him stood amazed that he could say such a thing. Something else knew that he was saying only what must be said.

  "I'll tell the drivers that."

  "Yes," said Shane. "They ought to be warned. Maria'll bring you word when I find the chance to leave, so the car and driver can be waiting and ready."

  He turned and went out with her.

  They took a cab back to within a few blocks of their hotel and got out. In the cab they did not speak; but when they were walking along alone together, Shane broke the silence.

  "Does he love you?" Shane asked.

  "I think he might have once," Maria said. "But not for a long time. No, it's just that I was one of his people, once; and now I'm yours. It's the way he is."

  "Should I trust him?" asked Shane bl
untly.

  "Yes," she said, "at least as far as not doing anything behind your back."

  They returned to the room; and, since there was now no need to sleep apart, they shared the same bed and he found his sanctuary again in the loving of her.

  The next day, as he had been almost sure the Aalaag Commander would, Laa Ehon sent him to the Milanese Government Unit. It was only a few streets away from the Headquarters building and was remarkably similar to the building housing the Unit in London. As in London, there was nothing displayed to mark the structure as being in alien hands. There was also a courtyard before the building enclosed by walls and used as a parking place for human and Aalaag vehicles.