by Matt
A warm hand came out of the darkness of the bed and rested comfortingly on his thigh.
"How are you now?" Maria's voice asked softly.
"All right," he said; and his voice was dull and remote, even to his own ears. "Yes, I'm fine."
She said nothing; but he could feel the disbelief in her. He could not lie successfully to her anymore, in any case.
"What did you hear when I was dreaming?" he asked.
"It was the way it always is," her voice answered. "You didn't make much sense with what you said."
"Said?" he echoed. "Be honest, Maria. I wasn't just talking in my sleep, was I? I was shouting."
"Yes," she said on an exhalation of breath. She could not lie successfully to him anymore, either.
"I've always been yelling when I have these dreams, haven't I?" he said. "What was it this time?"
"That it was too big. Too big. You kept shouting that, over and over."
"And it is," he said.
He blinked. He was suddenly conscious that his face was wet. He put a hand up to it and found that tears were leaking from his eyes and running silently down his cheeks. He wiped them^iway with his hand—it was useless, for others came to replace them. He gave up and dropped his hand.
"Maria," he said, "did I tell you about the butterfly?"
"You've never told me anything much," her voice answered. "Nothing about yourself."
"That's right. It was Peter I told," he said. "But I didn't tell him all of it. I'll tell you now."
So he told her. About the butterfly and the Aalaag father and son and the man in Aalborg, Denmark that they had hung on the hooks. He told her all of that, including his drinking the illegal liquor, his fight with the Nonservs and his marking of the Pilgrim image on the wall under the hooks holding the dead man.
She said nothing. He told her about being in the Milanese Headquarters and seeing her, that first time in the vision screen. He told her about going out and acting as decoy to confuse the Aalaag and about the conversation Laa Ehon had had with Otah On about her.
"... It was just seeing you there, that first time in the vision screen," he said. "I couldn't bear to let them have you. That was all, then. Later, I got to thinking of it happening to you again, when I wasn't around to help you; and I decided I had to get you out of it, into someplace safe. I decided the only way to save you was to get you into or under the protection of Lyt Ahn, with me, and the only way to do that was to get you into the Corps and buy safety for you by turning in to the Aalaag the Resistance people I could find and claiming you had helped me find them. I was going to say that your being one of them had only been part of the business of finding them. It was just a way to solve things. Then I found out I love you; and I saw what it meant to turn in people I knew, now that I knew them. Only now it's run wild, this Pilgrim business and there's no way to stop what I started. And it's all a lie, Maria, it always was a lie. What I said might work against the Aalaag won't work; and I knew so from the first."
He ran down.
"Say it again." Her voice came at him out of darkness. "Say it again?" He stared into the obscurity. "You never said you loved me, until now. I want to hear you say it again."
"I love you," he said.
"And I love you," she answered.
"But don't you understand what I told you?" He wanted light to see her face and at the same time he was glad that there was no light so she could not see his. "I'm a traitor, Maria. I'm a spy. And I'm a coward. I'd never have the courage the rest of you had, who went into the Resistance, knowing how you were risking your lives. I'm everything that people like Georges suspected. I did it all for myself, just to have you with me and safe. To have that I was willing to turn your friends in to the Aalaag and to what the Interior Guard would do to them."
"No," said Maria. "You wouldn't have done it."
"But I would!"
"You're not doing it now," said Maria. "Don't you understand, by telling me, you're making it impossible to do it?" That had never occurred to him. Not that it mattered now.
"But don't you understand?" he said. "It makes no difference, anyway, because this Pilgrim business has got out of hand. It's a juggernaut now. I can't stop it. And they're all betting on what I told them; that if the whole world demonstrates against the Aalaag, the Aalaag will give up and go away, leaving our world alone. But it's not true; and I knew it wasn't true from the beginning. Only nobody can stop it now —not even me."
"Are you sure?" said Maria.
"Of course I'm sure. The Aalaag's way of thinking wouldn't ever let them give in to any kind of pressure from beasts, as they think of us. They'd die first—and there's no need for them to die. Just for us. Just for the whole world to be incinerated with the human race on it."
"Then there's another answer. You'll have to think of it."
"What do you suppose I've been doing for weeks?"
"Think some more."
"But there's nothing else to think of! You don't understand. There's no answer—just no answer!"
"Dear one..." she said, and her hand came out of the darkness to rest softly and warmly on his knee. He jumped as if she had pricked him with a knife.
"How can you touch me," he said, "knowing what I was going to do? Knowing what I was capable of?"
"Hush," she said. "I said you'd never have done it, and you haven't. And you can think of a way to actually do what you promised, if you'll try."
He shrugged his shoulders in the darkness, wild with defeat.
"If I could only make you understand—," he began.
"No," she interrupted. "Let me help you understand. I know you better than anyone ever knew you. You were a little boy, left all alone with no one who wanted you; and you grew up trying to make a plus out of a minus by saying to yourself that it just proved how different you were, which was good because you didn't really want other people to be close to you. But all the time you did; and so you kept denying and denying, while inside you were hoping and hoping that somewhere there were people you could be close to, people you could belong to and be like. But you never found them; and then the Aalaag came along."
She paused. Somehow, there were no words in him to tell her she was wrong.
"Do you understand?" she went on. "You couldn't find anyone to be like, among humans, so unconsciously you tried to be an Aalaag. You found things to like in them. And you felt equal to them, in spite of what you knew about them, because you could always think fast and come up with an answer that pleased or satisfied them. You practiced saying the right thing and learning how to handle them; and in the end you got to know them better than any other human knows them; better maybe than they know themselves, in some ways."
She paused again. He sat there, with her words echoing in his mind.
"Maybe..." he said at last. "But knowing them doesn't change the fact they can burn this world to a cinder at a whim. We're not talking about little things, we're talking about one big thing—one big destruction everyone in the world is running pell-mell into, because of a lie I told them."
"No, we aren't," she said. "We're talking about the Aalaag and the way they think. You're human, so you know how humans think. You love humanity, even though you'd never admit it to yourself; so you were able to sell them your story of how to get rid of the Aalaag. You like the Aalaag—you do! I know you hate them, but at the same time there's some of them you like, like Lyt Ahn. Oh, call it admire them, if you can't stand the word 'like.' But because you like them, you understand them; and because you understand them, you can find what's needed to drive them away from us. You can, Shane!"
"I can't," he said hoarsely. He felt as if he had been caught and was held forever immobile, like Adtha Or Ain's vision of her son and Lyt Ahn's in the hands of their enemies. He knew now why that image in the vision screen had shaken him so strongly. He was like that, himself. Enclosed in the amber of his solitariness; forever held away from the outside world, forever helpless.
"Yes, you can." Her voice wa
s like a gentle but persistent rain tapping on the colored transparency holding him prisoner. "You tried to deny the human part of you and love the Aalaag and it didn't work. Now all you have to do is admit that you've finally realized your love for the human part of you and break clear of the Aalaag part. You're the one who finds answers. Always, you've found answers. Find the answer now. You can."
"But there isn't any."
"There must be, or you wouldn't have let the world go this far with the Pilgrim symbol. You just don't want to face the fact there's a solution because—just like you didn't really want to betray any humans to the Aalaag, you don't want to do to the Aalaag what you know can be done to them."
"What makes you think such crazy things?" he said dully. "There's no way of changing the way things are going now. I tell you. No way."
"There has to be," she said. "And you can find it—it's hidden in something you know about the Aalaag. It has to be. And all you have to do is find it."
He did not answer her.
"Why don't you try to sleep now," she said. "Maybe the answer'll come in a good dream instead of a nightmare. It's almost morning, but you don't have to go anywhere today unless you want to. Lie down and try to sleep. I'm right here with you."
He shook his head.
"No," he said.
He got to his feet.
"I can't sleep now," he said. "I've got to get up. I've got to walk awhile."
"All right, then," she said, still gently. "Then walk. I'll wait for you here."
23
Shane dressed, not in his pilgrim robe but in his regular office clothes, tucking into his pocket the Identification Pass that had seen them through the police roadblock in Cairo and would see him also past any local authority on the streets outside. He went down in the elevator and emerged into the wide and gleaming lobby.
It was deserted except for one sleepy-eyed clerk who looked up dully at Shane as he passed on his way toward the rotating glass panels of the front door. Evidently, however, the clerk decided that if the westerner was going out, he could probably be assumed to know enough about the streets at this hour to take responsibility for himself. In any case, it was not a specifically assigned duty of desk personnel to volunteer warnings to guests.
Shane barely noticed the clerk. At the moment he would hardly have noticed a tornado passing by him at half a block's distance. He was drunk on the realization that he had told Maria the worst there was to tell about himself and, unbelievably, she had not immediately withdrawn from him in shock and loathing.
Outside, the air was chill on Shane's hands and face and no one was in sight. It was not yet dawn, but a gray light from a gray sky faintly lit the bare sidewalks and the silent fronts of buildings. The Aalaag, who occasionally did strange things and who never explained themselves, had literally levelled a section of downtown Beijing and on a strict grid pattern of streets had built a cluster of hotels, shops, pharmacies and other service enterprises as a quarter for foreign visitors. They had done the same thing in all the large cities from Calcutta to the west coast of North America, including such unlikely places as Sydney, Australia and Honolulu, Hawaii—where the buildings wiped out of existence would have been all but indistinguishable from the buildings that replaced them.
The streets were deserted—this was what the clerk might have warned the departing guest about if he had chosen to do so. But in Shane's case, the warning was unnecessary. The Aalaag, in their stern crusade against all crime, had arbitrarily decreed that there be no unauthorized traffic in the streets of such a quarter as this between the hours of midnight and six a.m. And, sure enough, within a couple of blocks, Shane was confronted by a uniformed woman who stepped out of the recess of a dress shop entrance, her left fist upheld and her left arm bent at the elbow in the Aalaag-decreed international gesture that demanded identification papers.
Shane produced his Pass. She nodded briefly and stepped back out of his way. In the next five minutes he was stopped and checked two more times.
But he was as little aware of these interruptions in his walk as he had been of the attention of the desk clerk on his way out of the hotel. He had no doubt that those who stopped him would recognize and give way to his Pass, and his mind was too full for him to pay more than a minimum of attention to those who stopped him.
It was unbelievable that Maria should understand him so well, should know so much more about him than anyone else had ever known—more than he had known about himself— after so little time together. How could she have learned so much? The only people she had met who knew Shane at all had been other members of the Corps, during the time she had been with him at the House of Weapons—and most of that time she had been alone in their rooms.
Or had she? There had been some visitors, of course. That he remembered. But she had done little of the talking on those occasions, letting him carry the conversational ball as he had warned her to let him do, for fear she would make some mistake. The rest of the time, while he was gone, she had been alone there.
Or had she been alone? There had been a good deal of curiosity about her in the Corps, which had been the reason for the unusual number of visitors he remembered having.
Marika, who had lost her room to give them their suite, had dropped by several times on the excuses of tiny items lost, perhaps forgotten and left behind at the time of her move. She and Maria, now that Shane stopped to think about it, had ended up chatting together more than Maria had with any other guests.
There had been nothing to prevent Marika from coming back when he was on duty and Maria was alone. Or for others to have come by when he was not there. Maria had never mentioned any such visitors; but then, if she had been interested in finding out about him from them, she probably would not want to risk his reaction to her seeing anyone without him.
She could, in fact, have learned a lot from such people. As a group, the members of the Corps were intelligent and perceptive. They undoubtedly had noticed many things about him which offered Maria a chance to form her own conclusions.
But even given that kind of input, she still must have an ability to deduce what lay under the human surface with an acuity he had never known in anyone but himself; and in his case it had been a sheer, raw instinct for self-preservation that had taught him to do what he did. Her ability must spring from other sources.
But whatever those sources were, she had been right in everything she had just said to him—except perhaps in her unwarranted faith that he could find a solution to the world situation that his own actions had helped bring about. He began to sober down from the exaltation he had been feeling, remembering that part of their talk. She had sent him out to find precisely what he had spent all these months trying to find with no success. The fact remained that the human race and the Aalaag were on a collision course, each fueled by its ignorance of the true capabilities of the other; and there was nothing to be done about it.
But Maria wanted him to try once more. And somehow, the hope in her had been so certain that he found it infecting even him to some extent. Perhaps there was something, some little thing, anyway, that could be done. Walking the empty dawn streets of Beijing, he put his mind to the problem once more.
It may have been the infection of hope from Maria that did it, but out of nowhere he remembered one of his own rules that he had temporarily forgotten. The rule was that when in a situation that seemed to have no solution, so that he found himself going around and around in a circular search of ways already tried and found useless, then it was time to use dynamite.
In short, the rule was to throw out everything and start from scratch. Discard all failed answers, even those that had seemed to come close, and attack the problem all over again from the starting point of pure ignorance.
And the first step in doing that was to throw the problem itself out the window. Forget it.
Just forget about a world about to go up in flames? He grinned wryly.
But the conscious mind could only really concentrate
on one thing at a time. He made himself think about the argument behind what he wanted to do.
Solutions were creative. Creativity was a function of the unconscious part of the mind, which was dominated by the conscious part, in situations like this. Let these two parts of his mind represent a man on horseback, lost in the desert, out of water and desperate. The horse is capable of smelling water at a distance and does so now; left alone, it would take them both to it. The rider, however, feeling that he must always guide the horse, directs it first in this direction, then that, all of them wrong, until he ends up riding in a circle. Meanwhile, they come nearer and nearer to dying of thirst, and the water they need is just over the horizon.
The answer for the rider is to have the courage to let go of the reins, let the horse wander, and it will bring them both to water and life.
The rider was his conscious mind. The horse, his unconscious—which did not stop to reason why it should head toward the smell in its nostrils but only knew it must, to live. The necessary part for the rider was to trust the horse.
It was, indeed, the hard part. He had made himself do it before in situations like this, however, and he could do it now. For a little while as he walked he struggled with himself; but at last his conscious mind relaxed and let his thoughts run in whatever wild direction drew them. Past experience had taught him that always, somehow, the route they took in the end turned out to have been on the way to the solution he searched for.