by Matt
In any case, Shane had not concerned his thoughts with it much in advance. His plan was merely to get in, display the Pilgrim mark and get out. All the real attention of his thoughts and his planning had been concentrated on the raid on the arms locker—which had been both dangerous and vital.
But now as he sat in his robes, being driven by Johann to the Castel, a perverse uneasiness began to gnaw at him. A fear about what might happen when he tried to make the Pilgrim appearance.
It was ridiculous. This appearance should be a piece of cake. There would be no Aalaag. Nor would there be any reason for human police, and no reason at all for the Castel to be under any kind of surveillance for someone playing the role of Pilgrim. For that matter, not a few of the daily visitors would be wearing robes and carrying staves. Now that he watched for it out of the car window as they traveled, he saw that Maria and Peter had been right. He was startled to see how many more people were on the streets in pilgrim garb than he had been used to seeing. Their number must have been increasing daily without his noticing it.
So, why did the reeling of fear persist?
The only conceivable cause for danger could be if the officer who had caught him in the arms locker the night before had set in motion a search which went beyond the walls of the Headquarters building, and was now causing the whole metropolitan area of Rome to be combed for the beast that had been seen in a forbidden area of the building.
And that was ridiculous.
Or was it?
The very idea of such a search was, said the logical front of Shane's mind, unthinkable. Even if the Aalaag at the Roman Headquarters had later checked the number of wall-cutting tools in stock and found it one short, the fact that they could not find it, or the particular beast Chagon Een had spoken to, was hardly important enough to justify a city wide search. For one thing, the equipment automatically monitoring the main doorway to the Headquarters—which, as far as any junior Aalaag officer was likely to know would be the only way a beast could carry away such a tool—would show that nothing had gone out that way. Therefore, the tool must still be around the Headquarters, somewhere. As for the strange beast itself, perhaps it had been only in the building temporarily to do some sort of construction job... it would be too time-consuming a labor to search all through the orders of the past few days on the off-chance of finding some kind of clue to its identity. Whichever it may have been, that beast had certainly not carried the tool from the building. Therefore, the tool would be found, eventually, and unusual concern was unnecessary.
Shane glanced out the windshield. They were not far now from the Castel. He attempted to think of something else, but the small knot of uneasiness in him persisted and his thoughts came back automatically onto the track on which they had been stuck.
... Nor would it be either practical or profitable for a junior officer to devote a great deal of time in trying to solve the mystery of a beast intruder. For one thing, clearly the beast had been able to get into the arms locker only because the officer himself had carelessly left the entrance open. Even, however, if his Aalaag sense of honor caused Chagon Een to accuse himself of carelessness and make a search, there was a practical limit to the time he could spend in pursuing it.
The Aalaag thought of themselves first and foremost as warriors. But in fact, thought Shane now, what they really were, were administrators. It took the full-time effort of all of them just to run the machinery of underbeasts on each of the various worlds they used to supply themselves. Proof of this was the limitedness of their pastimes; only the gaming and the viewing of the past of their race.
Nonetheless, the closer they got to the Castel, the more Shane's concern increased. It was a million-to-one chance, but what if Chagon Een or someone superior to him had connected the beast in their arms locker with the London report of a physical Pilgrim beast? What if the Aalaag had tracing equipment even beyond what Shane imagined them to have? What if, on walking into the Castel, he should find himself confronted and trapped by an Aalaag and perhaps a platoon of Interior Guard... ?
Urgently, Shane felt the need to talk the possibility over with someone, if only to get it out into the open where his sensible upper mind could measure the great odds against it. But there was no one to talk to except Johann, who had just now stopped the car and was beginning to back it into a parking place at curbside, the equivalent of a couple of blocks from the Castel.
And there was no point in trying to talk to Johann about it. The other had resisted all efforts by Shane to be drawn into conversation. Shane's first assumption regarding this had been that the smaller man was echoing Georges Marrotta's dislike for Shane. But the long trip and the working together to prepare a stand for his staff to hold the cloth with the Pilgrim mark had convinced Shane that Johann's silence was due to some other cause.
Basically he seemed, if anything, shy. Or perhaps "shy" was the wrong word. Perhaps, farfetched as it sounded, he seemed to consider Shane as a person in some strange special category that put all but necessary conversation out of the question.
At any rate, they were now at their destination. With the stand they had built that would convert his staff into a flagpole under his cloak and with the staff itself in his hand, Shane got out of the car.
"Wait for me here," he told Johann.
Johann nodded.
Shane turned and joined the late morning foot traffic that was headed toward the Castel.
Among these sightseers, more than a few of whom, as Shane had expected, were also dressed in pilgrim cloaks, Shane attracted no notice. Nonetheless, as he went, the worry and fear inside him began to increase and he began to sweat under his robe, for all that alien-designed garment tried to balance the temperatures of his body surface.
He felt a sudden, almost spiteful envy of Johann, sitting safely back in the car, waiting. It would not occur to the other man to worry about him—wasn't Shane the Pilgrim? Moreover, Johann, who did not seem unduly blessed with intelligence anyway, might well be incapable of concentrating on anything but his own immediate situation. Shane forced the thought of Johann out of his mind. He must concentrate on what was to be done.
The Castel Sant'Angelo, built originally as a mausoleum for the Emperor Hadrian, and fortified by later popes, had more of the appearance of a drum-shaped fortress than anything else. Forcing himself to ignore the apprehension he felt, Shane emerged in his cloak and staff on the top level of the drum portion itself, amongst a small crowd of the tourists, picked a spot halfway to the exterior wall with its embrasures, and went to work.
It was simply a matter of taking a rolled-up and now painted bedsheet from under his robe, together with the folded stand of metal he and Johann had constructed. He unfolded the stand, set his staff upright in it, unrolled the flag and hooked the eyelets cut into its inner edge over the bent nails Johann had hammered into the staff the day before. There was not much breeze, but enough to lazily furl and unfurl the liberated flag.
Turning from it with the first sense of satisfaction and relief from apprehension that he had felt since they had left the place where he and Johann had spent the night, Shane found something he had not counted on. He was completely encircled, hemmed in by the sightseers on the platform, all staring at him and examining him in a fascinated and utter silence. Any way out was blocked unless he wanted to physically shove his way through them. Plainly they felt that they were staring at the Pilgrim of legend—or at least someone walking in his footsteps—and they all looked as if in a second they would start crowding in on him with questions, and hands reached out to touch him.
He caught himself back from his first panic-induced reflex, which was to order them out of his way. To speak at all here and now would be far too ordinary, too human. Instead, thankful that the edges of his cowl were pulled close together to hide his face, he extended one arm in silence and pointed, beginning to walk forward.
They parted before him, along the line indicated by his pointing finger. Still in staring silence, they made a
way clear; and he walked through them to the balcony that guarded the edge of this level, stepped up on it and activated both the levitating tool and the privacy one. Invisible, he then stepped off into space and, controlling his descent with the levitator, let himself safely down the outside of the structure. Down on the ground and still invisible, he made his way as quickly as he could back to the car where Johann was waiting for him.
The small man's face went pale as the car door on the other side of the front seat appeared to open itself, then close again, and the seat cushions dimpled beside him. His color came back as Shane shut off the privacy tool and became visible beside him.
"You made it. Thank the Mother of God!" ejaculated Johann, putting the car into motion and joining the traffic of the street, his eyes steady on the traffic alone. A moment later, he added, "I prayed for you all the time you were gone."
The remark took Shane suddenly and utterly by the throat.
"That... helped," he managed to say.
It was all a farce, he thought despairingly, as the car, under Johann's skilled control, began to nose its way out of the city northward, headed back toward Milan. How had he gotten into this, anyway? Who could have suspected that a rough sketch he had made on a wall in a moment of crazy drunkenness would operate like a lit match in a house filled with loose papers? Who could have suspected that any of this that had followed could happen?
He was a juiceless grain of wheat between two gigantic millstones that were determined to grind each other to bits— the humans and the Aalaag. Neither one had the slightest idea of what the other was, or how the other thought. For that matter they had no idea of what they were themselves, or how they thought.
And yet they should have had some understanding of each other. His mind returned to his earlier thought of the Aalaag as administrators rather than the warriors they thought themselves to be. They were administrators dreaming of a long-sought goal far in the future which would be a return to something far in the past.
There was no reason the two races could not understand each other better. They shared more than they thought. The human race had lived in a constant state of war from its animal stage on up. The Aalaag, in spite of what they believed about themselves, had once been more than just a race of soldiers— and still had some traits from that earlier time, from what he had occasionally seen.
Lyt Ahn had shown a capability for consideration, if not kindness, with him, Shane. Both Lyt Ahn and his consort Adtha Or Ain, had shown a love for their son who was possibly dead, possibly captured; and they had shown something very like affection for each other, in spite of the impression which the Aalaag generally gave, that the male-female pairings among them were for reasons of procreation and teamwork only.
What were humans? And what were Aalaag? Who had even thought of those two questions, let alone how these two unknowns should get along together or not get along together? The humans at least had had a future—once. The Aalaag certainly had a past and claimed to have a future. But what kind of future would it be?
Assume they could retake the worlds of their birth. Assume they could reverse any physical changes the usurper race had made in the appearance of those worlds. With everything back as it was, could the Aalaag take up life once more on those worlds as they had used to live it? If so, how?
It would be contrary to their dream to import beast-servants to run the machinery of their home worlds, to be the suppliers of food and materials for shelter, tools and all else. But after all these thousands of years how could the Aalaag change themselves back overnight into farmers and artisans, researchers and marketers, and all else required; and if they did, who among them would be ready to defend their worlds if another race attacked them?
But this was the goal they believed themselves to be working for, and had enslaved an unknown number of races to help them reach.
It was all crazy. By human standards the Aalaag made no sense. By Aalaag standards, the humans had no worth except as domesticated animals. And yet each race formed a sort of mirror in which the other, if it would, could see a distorted version of itself.
Because of those distortions the Aalaag were ready to kill any humans who did not behave as they wanted; and the people in the Resistance wanted to kill Aalaag for being what they appeared to be.
If only, thought Shane desperately, he could be completely all on one side or another. If he could be like other humans and see the Aalaag only as monster invaders; or if he could be like the Aalaag and see other humans as no more than beasts. If he could be like Maria and Peter and Johann and...
If only there was some real hope for the wild notion he had originally given the Resistance people for getting rid of the Aalaag. If it would work to make them want to abandon the human race and go elsewhere. If he could summon up one grain of belief in that, one particle of real hope, then maybe he, too, might be able to completely join the human camp and find the courage and will to fight the Aalaag. But he was cursed with the knowledge that that hope was groundless. The Aalaag were about as removable by human action as the sun would be from the sky.
Somewhere along the trip back he dozed and once more had, but without remembering when he woke what it was, the nightmare he had endured back in Milan. This time Johann shook him awake.
"You were dreaming and trying to talk about something," said the little man.
"I was?" said Shane.
Grimly, he set his teeth on the determination to stay awake until he was safely back in Milan, alone with Maria. It was dangerous to appear so human, so vulnerable, in the eyes of someone like Johann, he told himself; and, in fact, he did manage to stay awake the rest of the trip, although he was unaccountably, desperately tired.
Back at the hotel suite, he found Peter still there, as he had been asked to be, but packed and ready to leave.
"Well, you can go now," Shane told him. "You can also tell anyone you want that there's been another appearance of the Pilgrim, this time in Rome at the Castel Sant'Angelo."
"I guessed it would be Rome," said Peter, "and I was sure you meant to make another appearance. Why didn't you tell us what you were going to do? I could have gotten you help, if not from the professional organization I told you about, then from the local Resistance people."
"The fewer who knew about it in advance, the better," said Shane. "You and Maria would have been the first to know if I'd told anyone. Even Johann, here, didn't know from moment to moment, until I needed to tell him so he'd be in position and ready to bring me back."
He looked at the three of them now. Maria, wearing a plain black wool dress, was standing barely an arm's length from him, having run to embrace him when he had come in. She looked remarkably composed and even happy. Peter stood back by the coffee table in front of the couch and Johann had taken a position off a little to his right and stood simply waiting. For some reason probably connected with the strain Shane had been under these last thirty hours or so, all three of them seemed to stand out as if in bright three-dimensional relief against a painted scene that was the room and its furniture; as if they were more real than it, as if, he thought, they were in some way particular, unique and precious individuals.
"Well?" said Peter. "Aren't you going to tell me about it, so I can tell whoever else needs to be told?"
Shane came back from his moment of mental fixation with an interior start.
"Of course," he said. And so he told them, all three of them, in a minimum number of words. But he did not mention anything about the raid on the arms locker.
"... Now, if you don't mind," he wound up, "I'm going to get some sleep. I didn't sleep so well while I was gone—"
"Or before you left," said Maria.
"I'll go, then," said Peter, picking up his small handbag. "Maybe Johann can take me to the airport?"
"Sure," said Johann.
"Good-bye, then." Peter took a step forward and offered his hand to Shane, who shook it, reflexively.
"Good luck," Shane heard himself say, as if it
was someone else saying it from a long way off.
"And to both of you," said Peter.
He went out with Johann. Maria stepped past Shane to set the chain lock on the parlor door to the hall.
"And now, my darling," she said, turning to him. "Bed."
He slept heavily that night, so heavily that it seemed he had barely closed his eyes before he was opening them again upon the morning.
"Did I have any nightmares again last night?" he dared to ask Maria over breakfast in the parlor of the suite.
"No," she said. "You slept beautifully. Do you go right to the Unit today?"
"Yes," he said. "Would you get us both packed? I've got to report to Lyt Ahn, and as soon as I do that, he'll pass the word for transportation for us. There'll almost undoubtedly be an Aalaag courier ship ready for us by midafternoon at the airport."
Once at the Unit, he went first to his office for form's sake, and spent some fifteen minutes there killing time and assembling some completely unnecessary papers. Then, carrying these, he went to the office of the Officer of the Day.
"This beast is to make a report to the First Captain, untarnished sir," he told the Aalaag on duty.