by Matt
"We better not take chances with a commercial airline. We'll send you across as part of the crew on a cargo flight, on a plane of our own," said Mr. Wong.
"What puzzles me," Mr. Shepherd said, "is why the aliens don't seem to have noticed what's going on. Pilgrims multiplying under their noses and they don't seem to pay any attention."
"They've noticed," said Shane emptily. "They've been taking over worlds like ours ever since they lost their own, thousands of years ago."
"But then why haven't they done anything?" demanded Peter.
"How do we know they haven't done anything? Maybe they're watching and listening to us talking here, right now. Whatever their usual procedure is in such cases, they'll have done. Maybe it is nothing. They can't imagine us doing anything to hurt them—and of course, they're right. We had our chance with our weapons and our armies when they first landed. You remember how many days that lasted. But, even if they didn't think of themselves as invulnerable, they wouldn't be moved to do anything from what they've seen so far because the Pilgrim is inconceivable to them."
"Inconceivable?" echoed Mr. Wong.
Shane nodded.
"The Pilgrim's an instinct, a reflex in us, that the Aalaag don't have. Humans are moved to go on pilgrimages to touch something invisible and untouchable that's shared with others of the race. In their case, the Aalaag don't have to go to find such a thing; they're already where it is. That's also why they don't have any religion or understand the idea of religion except as superstition or magic in the minds of underraces. What they worship is the race they already are. Even to be First Captain is relatively unimportant to Lyt Ahn. But to be an Aalaag is all-important. While, to us, to be our own individual selves is the most important thing in existence. Imagine what makes you, you—different from anyone else in the world. Don't you think that if that vanished, you'd effectively have ceased to exist? While an Aalaag'd find the yearning to be an individual ugly and repugnant, if it wasn't for the fact that they can't imagine such a thing in the first place."
Mr. Wong looked at him curiously.
"But how does all that tie in with this entity you talk of as the real Pilgrim?" he asked.
"The Pilgrim is the ability in each of us to be what makes us our unique, individual selves. The Aalaag would take that from us—without even realizing what they're robbing us of. So the idea of the Pilgrim has come up, up, up from thousands of fathoms deep in our unconscious history and prehistory, to be the symbol of the right of each of us to be what we are— not some other's idea of what we should be."
"But just that—," broke in Shepherd. "If that's all he is, this Pilgrim of yours, what makes you think he can make the Aalaag back away from us; when the best of our armies together couldn't?"
"Because the Aalaag can't face him. As long as he doesn't exist for them, they can deal with us. But once I can make Lyt Ahn see him they'll have to turn their backs on us to shut out the fact that something like him could exist—" Shane broke off.
"I shouldn't call him 'him,'" he said. "The Pilgrim is neither male nor female. What the Pilgrim is, is spirit—a great, invisible living existence that can't be touched—by humans or by Aalaag."
He looked at the expressions on the three men's faces; and he tried to look at Maria but somehow he could not manage to turn his head.
"But he's real," Shane went on. "As real as that fireplace. I can feel him here in the room with me now. Maybe you can't, but I can." In fact the hairs were standing up on the back of Shane's neck and a chill ran down along his spine.
"I feel," he said, "that he's so close here, and so real, that if I pointed at that curtain there and told it to move, as if a wind had stirred it, it'd move."
He pointed as he spoke—but the curtain did not move. Still, he felt the presence of what he had named the Pilgrim. He looked again at the faces of the other men and laughed.
"You think I'm crazy, don't you?" he said. "At least a little crazy. But if I'm crazy, why did you come to me? Why are you working with me? Because I didn't come to you or ask you for anything. I'll tell you why you came. You came because there was some of the Pilgrim in you, as there is in every human. He brought you to me, and he moves you, as he moves me and all of us."
He stopped speaking. It was a moment when the others could have spoken, but none of them said anything. It was so still, he could hear his own breathing in his chest.
"Do you know how I see him?" Shane asked them. "I see him as a great towering shadow, thousands of feet high, standing over the House of Weapons in Minneapolis. A great shadow in the shape of someone in a robe, with cowl closed to hide both head and face and the hand that holds his staff. He's only a shadow. You can put your hand through where you see him, but he's real—maybe, in some senses, more real than we are, who only live a hundred years at most and then get replaced by someone else as vessels to hold him."
He looked at the other men and laughed again, this time a little sadly.
"But most, I think, don't feel him the active way I do," he said. "So you do think I'm crazy, don't you?"
"Not I," said Peter, his voice oddly thick. "I don't think you're crazy, Shane, at all. Tell us more about him—about the Pilgrim."
"There isn't any more," Shane said. "He's just a part of every one of us, a part that means nothing until it starts to gather together out of a very large number of people."
He paused, but as they sat still, saying nothing, he went on.
"Because he's what he is, he can't endure the kind of slavery the Aalaag want to hold us in," Shane said. "That's all. One on one—or even several on one—we can enslave each other because there's part of him in the slavers as well as in the enslaved, and only the little piece in the slave fights against it. But when even a whole tribe is enslaved by another tribe, the parts of him in those enslaved gather together and grow into a being with some powers. Here, the Pilgrim is made up of all the people in the world; and he's through serving the Aalaag."
He paused again. They still listened in silence.
'That's what I have to get Lyt Ahn to see," Shane said. "If I can just make him see that..."
His voice died away. Even now, no one else spoke.
"Well, tell us at least this much," said Wong. "What do you plan to do, once you have your pilgrim army at the gates of the alien Headquarters building and yourself face-to-face with Lyt Ahn? I think it's time we knew."
"I plan to tell him about the Pilgrim," said Shane.
"But you just said he couldn't conceive of the Pilgrim."
"No, but he can believe in the Pilgrim, without conceiving of him. if he sees that humans are ready to die for what the Pilgrim stands for—you see, that's something the Aalaag do understand. They're born, live and die, to do something for their race. The worst torture an Aalaag could conceive of..." The vision of an amber block with a figure held motionless inside it came back to his mind. "... would be to be forced to live forever while being held back from doing anything at all for their race. To die for their race, to die for any purpose considered good by the one who dies, makes sense to an Aalaag."
"I see," said Mr. Wong. "And so you'll prove this to Lyt Ahn—how?"
"I'll suggest that he try to remove the humans from the square in front of his Headquarters," said Shane emptily. "He'll send the Interior Guard out to do it."
He stopped speaking. The others waited.
"And then... ?" said Shepherd.
"What will happen will happen," said Shane. "If what I think of as the Pilgrim lives, Lyt Ahn will be convinced by what he sees. Then his choice will be to take his Expedition from Earth, or destroy Earth and then take his Expedition from it."
"And you think he won't destroy Earth before leaving?" Wong asked.
"I think there're reasons why a sane Aalaag wouldn't," answered Shane. "But that's all I know. There's nothing more I can tell you."
He took a deep breath.
"Now," he said, "you told me the point of action was five days away. That means there're a
t least four days before I leave here. If this house is a safe place for me to hide in that time, I'll just stay. Otherwise, you'd better find some safer place for me to wait."
"You'll be perfectly safe here," said Mr. Wong. "Also, as I said before, does it matter much now if you're recognized?"
"Only if Laa Ehon or Lyt Ahn has posted me as a deserter for not showing up in Minneapolis within twenty-four hours after I signed out of the Headquarters in Milan," said Shane. "But Lyt Ahn, I think, wouldn't do that until a lot more than twenty-four hours had gone by; Laa Ehon might, just to put the machinery to work to locate me. But—you're right. As long as I stay away from Aalaag, it doesn't matter where I go or what I do."
He turned to Maria. She was looking at him strangely.
"What about it, Maria?" he said, smiling. "How'd you like to enjoy the next four days? What would you like to do?"
"I'd like to go to some museums, some churches—to old places that have things that were part of people over the centuries before this," she said, immediately and seriously. "I want to look at things that show us what we were once. When I was in England by myself before, I was too young to want to spend my time in museums—and churches were only for Sundays and confession. But now I want to see and touch what the race was, before the Aalaag were ever dreamed of."
"All right," said Shane. He swung on Mr. Shepherd and Mr. Wong. "I suppose you can help us, with a car and English pounds, directions, if we need them?"
"Of course," said Mr. Wong gravely.
29
They started out the next morning with the dark green sedan that had been lent them and a pile of guidebooks and street maps. But the first place Maria insisted on going to was a flower shop, where she considered a number of small potted plants but ended up buying a cineraria, which they took back to the sitting room and she put on a small table before one of the windows.
"Now," she said, standing back to look at it, "this place is ours."
It was merely one of the vanguard of a flood of such plants, prematurely forced by greenhouses into bloom for the Christmas season that would come later; but as Shane looked at it, it did seem that its small, red-white blooms on the eight-inch plant stood out bravely in the stuffy, heavy-furnitured room and brought it all to life.
They went out again, to Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London and the British Museum, as well as to a number of other such places both in the London area and outside it. In between they ate in restaurants, went for walks and generally behaved more like two people on a honeymoon than anything else.
It was clear to him that this was what Maria had had in mind, a time-out, during which they could pretend that everything was ordinary and what was just ahead of them did not exist. The places they chose to visit and walk in were places that were largely deserted these days; and it was easy to pretend.
It was in the early afternoon of the third day, in one of the museums, that they ran across the suit of plate armor—turning a corner and encountering it so suddenly that they both stopped short, as if they had come face-to-face with all they had been trying to forget.
Indeed, at first sight it could have been an Aalaag because of its very size. But even this shrank as they recovered from the first shock and came closer. The fact that it was on a pedestal that added to its already considerable height, and shone under the tall window some feet behind and above it, had contributed to the illusion of an Aalaag in full battle gear.
It was no such thing. It was a complete suit of sixteenth-century plate armor—from somewhere in Germany, the plaque on the stand informed them—erected in a standing position with tilting helm, right-hand steel glove holding upright a short stabbing spear, butt to the ground. The spear was about the length of the Aalaag weapon, the long arm, and the strong in-pouring of early winter sunlight reflected from the metal plates with a gleam not unlike the protective, silvery shine of alien armor.
Even now that they had recognized it for what it was, the sunlight flooding over the figure lent it a radiance of its own and made a sparkling in the seams between the armor parts as if precious gems had been fastened there. For a moment, even for Shane, it took an effort to realize the figure was not alien and alive. But when he tapped its breastplate with his knuckle, now, only a drumlike sound returned. It was hollow; and the one who had worn it had been dead for centuries.
The hair on the back of Shane's neck rose and he felt the shiver within him like that he had felt when he had sensed the presence of the Pilgrim. But in this case it was caused by the thought of the person who must once have owned this metal casing. Whoever he was, he would have had dreams of what he might do, wearing it. He would have thought of things to be accomplished in it, things that could leave his mark upon history and time. Once this armor had clothed such a living being.
But now, according to the plaque, not even his name was known. And the breastplate, when Shane had tapped it, had given back only the sound of emptiness. Centuries had passed and the wearer was dust. It seemed to Shane that he could even smell that dust, now coating the inside of the armor. Nothing else remained of dreams and ambitions—of what once had been a man. He, whoever he had been, was long dead and all that remained was the smell of the dust of time.
Only, for a moment the unfeeling armor that was left had once more owned the power to terrify—though in no way the original owner could ever have imagined. It was merely that the size had been so convincing; and the sunlight, so effective upon it—and the suddenness with which they had encountered it. They stood still, looking at it with the wordlessness that had suddenly come upon them.
Even now that they knew it for what it was, only an artifact, and a human artifact at that, it could create a powerful feeling in them. Once, its owner had been as they were now.
—And even this remnant of him, like they themselves, might be nothing but ash in two days if the Aalaag should choose to destroy the world and everything on it. It was a sudden reminder of all they had been pretending did not exist; and in mutual, silent agreement, they turned and walked away from the great tower of empty armor, leaving it to the silence and equal emptiness of the gallery in which it stood.
It woke them out of the dream in which they had been successfully living for the last few, short days. They were conscious once more that there was only what was left of this day and one night and then they would be going to Minneapolis. Shane, because he must; Maria because she had insisted on accompanying him as far as she could, which would be almost to the threshold of the House of Weapons.
They finished their tour of the museum, took the car that had been provided for them and drove for several hours, out of the city far enough so that flat open fields stretched to the horizon; and above that horizon the winter sun, going down, was the same red ball Shane had seen as his plane had landed. Then Shane turned the car and they drove back to a restaurant in the city for dinner.
But there was little appetite and almost as little speech in either of them. Shane felt simply empty, as if his soul had already left his body; and he was unable to sense how Maria must be feeling, where normally he would have been quick to touch her mood with his own.
They went back to their house. The air in it was slightly stale-smelling, and as they passed the sitting room on their way to the stairs up to their bedroom, Shane noticed that nearly all of the petals of the cineraria had fallen, and the sprig of plant, itself, looked shrunken and dying. Maria had fussed over it daily, giving it water and moving it to take advantage of the best window to give it sunlight, but there had not been enough light after all for it to survive, and the blooms were gone.
They went up to their bedroom on this last night and to bed. They would have to be up at two in the morning to get to the cargo plane that was taking them overseas, and neither could sleep. Shane lay on his back, completely empty now, even of words, watching the ceiling and letting the slow minutes march by in his mind. Sometime during this long watch, he felt Maria take his hand.
"You know," she whispere
d in his ear, "I believe in the Pilgrim, too. I wanted you to look at me so that you could see I did, when you were talking to Peter and the others, so that you could see I did. But you didn't look and I tried to will you to, but I couldn't."
Shane turned on his side toward her, put his arm around her and squeezed her.
"I thought you might," he said.
"I wanted you to know," she said, "that I believed. Like Peter. In the Pilgrim."
"Did you believe before you met me?"
"I think I did," she said. "But after I met you, I was sure. Then, in the sitting room there, once you told us all what he looked like, I could see him—just as you said, looming over the Aalaag Headquarters building."
"You didn't need to believe," Shane said. "He's not like Peter Pan who needed people to believe in fairies. The Pilgrim's with us whether we want him or not. As long as there's one person alive, he's there."