by Matt
Their attention was all on the screen; he had every expectation of slipping past behind their backs, unnoticed, but he had barely gotten half a dozen steps past them when a bass voice hailed him.
"Beast! You there! Come here."
He turned and went back to the group.
"Did one of the untarnished sirs call me?" he asked.
"I called you." An unusually tall young officer looked curiously down at him from a position right before the screen. "You are Shane-beast, are you not? Of the Courier-Translator Corps?"
Shane felt a faint touch of surprise and chagrin. It was just his luck to run into one of the rare officers who paid attention to the individual appearances of humans.
"This beast is indeed Shane-beast," answered Shane. "In what manner can I be of service to the untarnished sir?"
"You can settle a question among us, Shane-beast," said the officer. He lifted a thumb to indicate the screen. "Tell us, do those cattle out there consider the rods in their hands to be weapons? Or not?"
"Untarnished sir and sirs," said Shane, "that is a question to which it is difficult to give a precise answer even under ordinary conditions, and this moment is not ordinary. The body coverings and the rods you mention are the traditional accoutrements of some individual beasts in our past history who traveled on journeys to places considered by us places of great magic; and virtue was thought to be gained by these travelers in going to these places. The body coverings were their only protection against weather; the rod was to assist them in traversing difficult country, but could also be used as a weapon against any other beast or lesser species that should impede their progress or threaten them. In this case, the rods are carried mainly as possible weapons."
"You hear the beast, Neath Mhon?" demanded the tall young officer, swinging about to face the Aalaag next to him. "I said they were weapons and possibly to be used as such."
"Those who carry them must be unwell, then," retorted the other. "Our own Guard-beasts can kill them all before any such simple weapons could be brought to play against them. Consider, they must reach the Guards before they can use the rods, and there is no hope of even one of them doing so."
"Shane-beast," said the tall young officer. "Are they unwell?"
"Not as we beasts consider unwellness, untarnished sir," answered Shane.
"Then do they consider there to be some magic—" there was no Aalaag word for religion and their word for magic was always pronounced, as now, with disdain, as something pertaining only to primitive species—"in these rods that would make them effective even against the weapons of the Guard-beasts?"
This was a most unusually discerning and inquisitive Aalaag, thought Shane.
"Untarnished sir," he said, "that is a question to which I have no clear answer. I can only say what I believe; and I believe them to consider that the rods are not magic in any way."
"Then they have to be unwell," said the other Aalaag. "It must be that they have a belief in magic or are unwell, one answer or another."
Shane said nothing.
"Well, beast?" demanded the Aalaag who had just spoken. "Answer me!"
"Forgive this beast, but it does not know how to answer the untarnished sir," said Shane. "I have answered to the limit of my ability to do so."
"Oh, leave the beast alone, Neath Mhon!" said the tall young officer. "It's given us what it can. Let it go about its duties—you are indeed on duty, are you not, Shane-beast?"
"Indeed, untarnished sir," said Shane. "I am on my way to report to the First Captain."
"Go then."
"Go."
"Go."
"Go." Several voices spoke hastily and simultaneously.
"I thank the untarnished sirs," said Shane.
He turned and continued on along the corridor, encountering a few other solitary Aalaag, apparently moving between offices, but still no humans. Eventually he reached the familiar doors to Lyt Ahn's offices, and touched the panel of one door.
"Come," replied an Aalaag voice that was not Lyt Ahn's; and the door opened before him. He stepped into the office and found the room empty of aliens except for the aide seated at the desk, smaller than that of Lyt Ahn, which sat just inside the doors.
"Your purpose?" demanded this Aalaag.
"Untarnished sir, I am Shane-beast of the Courier-Translator Corps, presently on loan to the immaculate sir Laa Ehon. I am returning from Milan as I was commanded by the First Captain, to speak to him."
The aide considered him.
"It is a busy time," he said. "You will wait in that corner there. You may sit or lie on the floor, if you desire."
"This beast thanks the untarnished sir."
The aide returned to his work. Shane went to the empty corner of the room behind the aide's desk and from familiarity that had bred the action into a habit, seated himself cross-legged on the floor with his back against the joining of the two walls.
He began his wait. From those Aalaag who came in to speak to the aide on business of one kind or another, he gradually pieced together a picture of what was happening within the House of Weapons and its counterparts all over the world.
Apparently, all the Headquarters belonging to the Aalaag had closed up and put out Interior Guards to deal with any problems from the pilgrim-dressed crowds around each stronghold. Aalaag in every area had also been put under orders to return to their Headquarters building, and all but a handful had already done so. The Commanders of the various areas—including, Shane guessed, Laa Ehon—were presently gathered at the House of Weapons for a military council, over which Lyt Ahn was presiding at the moment.
The hours slid by. Checking his watch, Shane saw that it was almost three o'clock in the afternoon. Twice already, he had had to ask the aide for permission to go to the nearest human latrine. His western-educated legs had cramped several times in the cross-legged seated position and he had been forced to uncramp them by stretching out, dog-fashion, on the floor on his side.
Years in the Aalaag service had dissolved any self-consciousness he had originally felt about curling up like a dog on the floor of some room where he was waiting to speak to one of the aliens. But after some hours it occurred to him that this one time he did not want Lyt Ahn to return and find him lying down. He therefore seated himself once more, making himself as comfortable as he could in the cross-legged position and set himself to wait until his interview with the First Captain would be possible.
After a while he ceased to pay more than passing attention to the visitors coming into the office and to what he could overhear the aide saying, in his occasional response to messages from his desk-communications equipment. As on previous occasions when he had been forced to endure such endless waits, his mind withdrew from his body. He was no longer conscious of the hard floor under him, of the once again commencing cramp in his legs, or even of passage of time itself.
But, unlike previous occasions when his mind had simply withdrawn, putting him in what was something like a wideawake doze with eyes fully open but no continuous thought process, this time his mind wandered.
Old memories came back to him, moments of large importance and small. He remembered being told he could not climb into his aunt's lap. This, which must have happened when he was still very small, he had remembered doing with his mother when she had been alive and well. After his mother's death his aunt had endured his climbing during the first few days, but the time had come when she had pushed him off.
"You're a big boy, now," she had told him. "You don't need people to hold you."
But, his soul had cried in that instant, he was not a big boy yet, still far off from being old enough for kindergarten, and he deeply felt the need of someone to run to, someone to hold him.
Other memories returned, of various scenes from his school and high school days when he was left to stand apart, shut out by his older classmates from whatever they were doing at the time. Sharply and strongly, he remembered the moment in which he had scratched the first outline of the Pil
grim on the brick wall holding the body of the man dead on the hooks in Aalborg.
He remembered seeing Maria for the first time in the wall screen of Laa Ehon's office. He remembered walking past the Aalaag sentinel on his riding beast, outside the Houses of Parliament, after he had marked the Pilgrim symbol on the face of Big Ben. He remembered the nights and days with Maria since—having her with him had changed him profoundly. He had never realized how profound that change until now.
Once, he would have laughed at the idea that he could consider dying to protect or defend anyone else. It was the limits of utter foolishness to think, seriously, that he might put his own life at stake between anyone else and death, or anyone else and serious harm.
Now, he knew better. His appreciation of what that death meant had grown no less. It loomed no less terribly in his thinking; but he knew now that he would go to it in Maria's place—that, in effect, he had made a decision to do just that, though he had not thought of it in those terms, on that first time he had seen her, and gone out into the city of Milan to create an excuse for her not being a beast that the Aalaag would wish to destroy.
Now, the idea of her death had become unthinkable to him. The suffering and death of others he had come to know, like Peter, and like Johann in the Milanese Resistance, had become things he would prevent at any cost to himself. At last, it had developed that the suffering of the race he belonged to was a thing he would not allow at any cost anymore.
It was strange. He felt no braver, though for Maria's sake, of course, he had pretended that there was a chance that not only could he bring the Aalaag to leave Earth, but that after doing so he could leave the House of Weapons, untouched.
But this last, he knew, and had always known, was the one most certainly false of all hopes. The question would not be why Lyt Ahn should destroy him, even if the First Captain could be brought, with his fellow Aalaag, to depart. The question would be what possible reason there could be for Lyt Ahn not to destroy a beast who was not only the leader of cattle who had chosen to revolt, but one who had individually betrayed Lyt Ahn's trust by being disloyal and an enemy even while taking advantage of that trust.
The strange thing was that his certainty of his own end made no difference. It was a lion in the doorway, but it was only the lion he had expected to come through that door, sooner or later. Meanwhile he had found someone to love, someone who loved him. And he had done something. Right or wrong he had not just let his life trickle away into nothingness. All humans in the end wanted their moment of living to have some use; and he had. He had done. The desire to do so was a feeling upon which even humans and Aalaag could have agreed, if the Aalaag had come to Earth otherwise than as overbearing conquerors.
He had done something and what might follow was of secondary importance. His mind did not so much refuse, as fail to picture, what would follow once he had spoken to Lyt Ahn. It was as if a room existed in his imagination, but it was a room which had been filled with concrete. There was no way of entering it, even if he had wanted to.
He thought of the short time he and Maria had had each other. The days and nights came back to him like immensely precious possessions to be counted over once again. He remembered their last few days in London. He remembered stopping in the doorway to the little balcony at the back of their apartment in Milan and watching her with Peter, their two heads close together, both the hands of both of them clasped together in something like a promise or a prayer.
It came to him then, without pain, what he should probably have guessed long since; which was that she and Peter had, at least once upon a time, loved each other. Possibly they still did; and the clasping of their hands he had seen was evidence of it. Shane could not doubt that all these last few months it had been he, himself, she had truly loved. They had been too close for any pretense to hold up.
But perhaps for her there had once been Peter instead— possibly that had even been the reason Peter had been in Milan at the time Shane had been caught and questioned by Georges Marrotta's group.
But there was nothing impossible about her being still in love with Peter, in spite of her feeling for Shane.
Shane felt a sudden sense of great relief, recognizing this at last. In the end, Maria and Peter would have each other—and if Shane was successful, they would be together in a world that was for humans alone. If the Aalaag should leave the world and leave it unharmed, Maria and Peter could live normally, marry and have children, as people had in the past and might again. If the Aalaag should destroy the world on leaving, of course... But if neither thing happened, and the Aalaag defeated the Pilgrim and surmounted all the reaction of a human race that was now against mem, even then Peter and Maria under other names could hide among the millions of beasts populating this world and in some degree have a life together still. And Shane would in some measure have bought that future for them.
It was a relief to think they would be safely away from this place by now. The Organization people would not stay around a Headquarters that might suddenly open up its alien weapons and scorch the Earth to the horizon in all directions; and Peter would have seen that Maria and he were part of whatever evacuation the Organization had planned for its own people.
A long, long time had gone by since he had first been told to wait in a corner of the office. Hours upon hours had passed since he had even looked at his watch. Just how long, he could not say. But a different Aalaag was on duty as Lyt Ahn's aide now; and more than a few hours had passed since that changeover. He had no particular desire to look at his watch again. The time was immaterial. It would be early morning by now, at least. Possibly, it was even daybreak outside.
He thought with compassion of those who had taken their turn at standing in the cold before the House of Weapons. For himself, the discomfort of his position had been forgotten a long time ago. Even the visits to the latrine had all but ceased. Lyt Ahn's office and everything in it had become irrelevant to him. His consciousness lived in his thoughts and those thoughts were of happy moments with Maria.
Strangely, he found himself free of all self-comforting illusions; and because he was free, happier, not sadder. Out of the same realization that Maria must have carried with her a love for Peter all this time, there came to him the further understanding that she had not at all been deceived about the fact that, whatever larger things might result, once he had come back here to the House of Weapons, he would almost surely not be leaving it again. So she had given him the courage and the reason to go, by pretending to believe his pretense that, while there was danger, his chances of escaping were good. Meanwhile, she had also given him everything else she had, to make what little real lifetime was permitted to him worth living.
She had made him happy. It was a remarkable thing. He found himself wondering if all those in the past who had been aware they were about to die, those still with the health of life in them but knowing they were condemned, had ended by feeling as he did, a resignation and sense of accomplishment. Above all, a feeling of peace...
The door opened and Lyt Ahn strode into the office.
"I will rest now," he told the aide at the desk. "The Council meeting is over and the Commanders are also going to rest in quarters already assigned to them. Call me if necessary, of course. There is nothing unusual, nothing important, that I should deal with before resting?"
"No, immaculate sir," said the aide. "Nothing—unless you had some urgency in your desire to see the courier-translator that has just arrived from Milan to report to you?"
"Courier—" Lyt Ahn broke off, his gaze traveling past the aide into the corner where Shane sat, once more thoroughly awake, thoroughly aware and in the present, but motionless and silent. "I did not see it there behind you. Shane-beast?"
"Immaculate sir—" Shane tried to get to his feet, but his legs had long since gone to sleep. The two Aalaag watched in noncommittal silence as he pulled himself upright with a palm of each hand on each of the adjoining walls. "Immaculate sir, this beast is reporting as o
rdered."
"Come," said Lyt Ahn.
He turned on his heel and walked farther into the office to seat himself at his desk. Shane tottered after him, unsteadily, toward the far side of that desk; and Lyt Ahn, as if suddenly recollecting something, turned to look at his aide.