by Matt
Here, as it had been in Rome, there was no alien riding sentinel about such a politically unimportant structure. The Citadel in Cairo, Egypt, had been built by Saladin in the year 1176 of the Christian Calendar; but that date was the equivalent of the day before yesterday in terms of Aalaag history. There was, however, a human police guard at the entrance— or at least a man in blue uniform with a machine pistol slung by its carrying strap over one shoulder. Moving to his right until the curve of one of the round towers that flanked the entrance hid him from the man's view, Shane turned to face the wall.
His intentions this time were as simple as his approach had been. Out of the corner of his eyes he saw the robe-clad imitation Pilgrims beginning to gather into a crowd at the bus stop and reached in under his robe for the cutting tool that was the equivalent of the one he had seen used by the Maintenance woman in the House of Weapons, the one he had stolen from the arms locker in the Aalaag Headquarters in Rome.
He had experimented with the tool since, and found that the depth of its cut could be varied—which was well, since apparently the tool was capable of cutting clear through a wall like the one before him. He had preset it before leaving the hotel, to a depth of one inch. Activating it now, he cut into the wall before him, forming the outline of the Pilgrim with staff in hand. Then he turned and—hiding the tool under his robe again—walked leisurely toward the crowd of robe-clad individuals at the bus stop.
He had covered perhaps a third of the distance before a voice cried out behind him. He had calculated on such a delay in reaction from the people nearby. The tool itself was silent in its operation, and the cut was only visible against the identical color of the wall in which it was incised by the shadow of its depths. Theoretically, most of those now looking at it would have no reason to connect it with him, rather than anyone else at the scene who was clad as a pilgrim.
But he had underestimated the reaction the figure would generate, together with the fact that he was the only one who had not turned to look but had continued walking away from the wall. He realized his mistake when he saw the eyes of those in front of him all swing to focus upon him—and the guard came running around the curve of the building with his machine pistol unslung and ready. He stared at the figure cut in the wall and his eyes turned like the eyes of all the rest to Shane.
Then to Shane's complete dismay all those around him, including the guard and more than half of his imitation Pilgrims at the bus stop began to go down on their knees, bowing to him.
Shane felt a sudden sickness in his gut. Unexpectedly, painfully, he remembered Johann.
"Get up!" he cried furiously at them in Egyptian Arabic. "Never kneel to me! Do you hear me? Get up, get up!"
Gradually, at individual rates of speed, they began to get back to their feet. Shane forced himself to continue to pace sedately forward as the rising people around him began to hide him from sight of the guard.
Reaching the bus stop, he stepped in among the standing, pilgrim-robed crowd there.
"Now, go!" he ordered them. "Imshie! In different directions—at a walk!"
They obeyed him immediately, going off in all directions except back toward the Citadel. He himself continued on around the curve of the circular central area, looking for Peter and some kind of transportation. He was almost ready to keep walking until he was out of sight of those behind him, and then make a run for it, when he saw a somewhat battered gray, four-door Chevy Nova coming slowly down the street toward him with, not Peter, but Maria behind the wheel.
It drew level. Peter swung the back door open and Shane jumped thankfully into the hot, shadowed, interior. Reaching across him, Peter slammed the car door closed again as Maria accelerated away from the Citadel.
"What're you doing here?" he shouted at the back of Maria's head. He was violently angry with her. After all he had done to protect her and save her life, for her to involve herself in something like this...
"Someone gave you away," Peter said beside him. The English accent made the matter-of-factness of the other man's tone of voice seem somehow actorly and unreal. "Your driver heard of it and backed out. I couldn't be sure but what they had my description, so I had to stay out of sight. We'd just heard at the last moment and there was no time to find another driver, one we could be sure of trusting. Someone else had to drive so I could stay out of sight in the back—and there was really only Maria available."
He felt abruptly humbled.
"Maria...," he said. "I'm sorry."
"For what?" she called back cheerfully over her shoulder.
"You'd better get out of that robe now, just to be on the safe side if we're stopped by the police," said Peter.
"The police? What about the connections those other people you've been talking to me about so much?" demanded Shane savagely. "Can't they be of some use in a situation like this?"
"They already have," said Peter. "It was one of their people in the police who slowed down the machinery when word came through about your visiting the Citadel. Otherwise there'd have been a small army of police there waiting for you. As it was, the order went out just a little too late— thanks to these friends you won't talk to."
"Unless it was one of them let out the word that I'd be there in the first place," said Shane.
"They'd have to guess it," said Peter. "Only Maria and I knew. Your words were that even the imitation Pilgrims weren't to know what they were there for—"
He stopped speaking so abruptly it was as if the sentence had been chopped off.
"Maybe it was me," he said suddenly and bitterly. "It wouldn't take much imagination to deduce what a crowd of Pilgrims like your imitation gang might be needed for. The local Resistance here is like any in Europe, only more so. People of all religions and politics, working together. One of them could have been a police spy or have his own reason for wanting you caught."
"If it was that," said Shane, "then the fault's mine, not yours, for asking for a crowd of people in robes in the first place. In any case, the question is why someone in the Resistance would want to give me away."
"As Peter said," spoke up Maria from the front seat of the car without turning her head, "one of the local Resistance could have been a police spy—even one of the people got to dress up could have been a police spy."
Her voice altered suddenly.
"Police roadblock ahead," she said.
"It's all right. I'm out of the robe." Shane put the robe down under his feet and Peter's. "When we're stopped, let me talk to them."
Maria pulled the car into line behind those already stopped by the roadblock.
"No, no!" said Shane. "Drive up to the head of the line. Force your way into first place—"
He was clambering over Peter as he spoke, in order to get to the other side of the car. Arrived there, he rolled the window down just as a policeman ran up to them, pointing his gun.
Shane leaned out the window, waving an opened wallet in the air, and shouting in Arabic.
"What's the matter? Can't you see I'm on Aalaag business? Don't you know an official identity card when you see it? I don't have time to waste here! Let us through!"
The police officer had reached them now. He gaped at the glowing, three-dimensional rectangle that showed Shane's image and some lines of Aalaag script. As the man watched, these dissolved and reformed into Arabic script.
"THIS BEAST IS ONE OF THE CATTLE OF THE FIRST CAPTAIN, LYT AHN, OF FIRST RANK. YOU WILL ASSIST AND NOT IMPEDE IT, IN ALL CASES."
The policeman blinked, stared and turned, calling for someone whom Shane guessed to be the superior of those in charge of holding this roadblock. A nattily dressed officer with a small mustache came over and stared at the unprepossessing vehicle and then at the card. His thoughts were all but printed on his face. He teetered uncertainly between profuse subservience and authoritarian suspicion.
Then his face darkened with a scowl. Clearly, he had decided on the latter.
"How did you come by this?" he snapped at Shane.
<
br /> "I've no time to waste with you!" Shane snapped back, and broke suddenly into Aalaag. "Obey! You hear me? Obey!"
The officer had probably never seen one of the type of cards Shane carried in his life, although he would have heard of them. Plainly, also, he did not speak Aalaag nor understand it—except for one set of sounds that were familiar to anyone whose work might at one time or another bring them into contact with the aliens—and that was the Aalaag order to "obey."
His face changed. He saluted and stood back. Maria drove on through the opening in the roadblock, out and away.
22
He woke in terror.
In that first moment both the reality of darkness around him and the remnants of the dream were mixed up so that he did not know which was which. It was the same dream he had had for months and always been unable to remember after waking; but somehow he knew in these first few seconds that this time he had it, this time he would remember. And he did.
So he came back to himself, once more in bed, holding fiercely to Maria and being held by her in turn. He could not see her in the dark, except in his mind's eye; but in that eye he saw her face and knew it was one of those he had seen beyond the point of his lance in the dream. He remembered other familiar faces seen there, also. He was clammy with sweat and he could feel the thudding of his heart through the wall of his chest.
Then, as full realization that he was once again in the waking world spread through him, he relaxed with a great sigh of relief, loosening his drowning grip on Maria and sagging back to lie on his spine, staring straight up into the darkness that hid the ceiling of their bedroom.
"I did it again," he said thickly. "Didn't I?"
"It's all right. It's all right.. .," Maria's voice murmured in his ear as she continued to hold him; and he realized she had been speaking to him, soothing him, all the time he was coming out of his nightmare.
"I remember, this time," he said to her and the ceiling. "It was the same dream it's always been, but this time I remember it all."
There was silence in the darkness. Then Maria whispered. "Do you want to tell me?"
"I was in armor," he said. "It was a dark, cold night. There was a wind whipping the flames. We were all in armor and on horseback, with lance, sword and mace. And we were burning a village and killing the people, who had only pointed, fire-hardened, or stone-tipped sticks for spears and no armor. They couldn't stand against us. We killed... and we set fire to their brushwood huts. We killed the men, the women and the children, all by the light of the burning huts as we rode through; and not one of us was hurt, not one was scratched...."
His voice ran down. With one hand he searched up her closest naked arm to her shoulder and patted it clumsily when he found it. "Let me go. I've got to get up and take a shower."
She let him go. Once on his feet he realized that the room was not wholly dark. Nighttime lighting of the city outside made ghostly rectangles of the thick curtains drawn over the windows all along one wall of the room; and by the illumination that leaked through, his darkness-expanded gaze could make out the shape of the room and the door to the bathroom. What city was it? At the moment, he could not remember. He went toward the bathroom door, stepped inside, closed the door behind him and groped on the wall for the light switch. Light came on, blinding him.
Under the steady flow of hot water from the shower, he began properly to wake. The heat of the cascading liquid flowing over him sank into him and became the heat of life replacing the cold half-death of sleep. His mind began to work. Beijing, China, that was where he was now—the word chimed oddly in his memory against the fact that he had first learned to call the city "Peiping." His area was western and near eastern languages. Among the oriental ones he stumbled like a stranger, although his innate ability had led him to a low-level working knowledge of Mandarin and a pidgin level in a few of the other Chinese and other oriental tongues. He had been able to speak well enough to the Resistance people in Shanghai, when he had met with them.
Thought of that brought back a flood of memories of such meetings, not only with the faces in Shanghai but other oriental and dark-to-light faces he had spoken to since that first meeting with Peter's group in London. It seemed unbelievable that more than eleven months had gone by since his first sight of Maria in the vision screen of Aalaag Headquarters in Milan. Most of that time, the last ten months or more, he had been involved in the inspections of Government Units; and meanwhile winter had passed into summer and then back toward winter again in the northern hemisphere. Here in Beijing, at the moment, it was no season at all, merely pleasant daytime temperatures and slightly cooler nights.
Since London he had met with other faces under many widely different conditions, from palatial rooms to structures of cardboard and cloth. They had become real and individual, those faces, as Johann had suddenly become real. Each one had developed into an individual human universe in itself, linked by relationships to brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, children—each one with a universe of possibilities and life experiences, good and bad, happy and unhappy. Each had revealed himself or herself as something more than just one of a number of cattle which could be sent to the slaughterhouse without empathy, without realization of what life would mean to them.
And meanwhile, his own role had changed—as the world had changed, even in these months while he had been moving about it. The word of the Pilgrim had swept around the globe like wildfire.
Robes and staves were to be seen everywhere now. He no longer made an appearance in each city as the Pilgrim. Someone from the Resistance made it for him—helped if necessary by the group that had contacted Peter, the Organization, made up of the former national army Intelligences, secret service units and others.
He had come to think of these latter groups as the Professionals; and of the Resistance fighters as the Amateurs. Little by little, the two groups had drawn together, in spite of his own continued stiff refusal to have any meeting between himself and the Professionals. Still, the Professionals were capable of being tremendously useful—and they had been so. Gradually, they had worked their way into the activities of the Amateurs and into partnership with his own activities as the Pilgrim. Undoubtedly, he had admitted to himself, a long time since, they had inserted at least some of their own people into his meetings with the Amateurs; and seen as much of him as the Resistance people had been permitted to see.
But it was the Amateurs he clung to in spirit. There had been a gradual wakening in him to them as individuals, unique and precious, as companions-in-arms; in effect, that development he had first thought had begun only with his experience of Johann, on the trip to Rome, but which he had now come to realize must have roots going back further than that, to Maria and even to Peter. Now they had all taken on substance, like friends; and their numbers were multiplying by the hundreds of thousands, perhaps by the millions, daily. They were putting on the uniform of the Pilgrim and announcing themselves in opposition to the Aalaag publicly.
It was as if he had pulled a twig from some snowy slope and unthinkingly started an avalanche. The Aalaag were indifferent to much their cattle did in personal matters—but not that indifferent. Not even they could ignore a change as noticeable as this. In a few weeks more he would be face-to-face with Lyt Ahn again, and Lyt Ahn would want to know what was afoot amongst the beasts.
The image of them all, dead, like those he had killed and seen killed in his dream, came on him; and he shivered, even in the hot water of the shower, under the thought of the weight and coldness of the would-be corpses who were now still living beings. He could stand it no longer—and, at the same time, there was nothing he could do to stop what he had started. The impossible was happening. He had begun it, and he was now as much a prisoner of its inexorable momentum as any of the rest of them. Four billion humans marching against the strongholds of a race that could destroy them all in a single breath, marching against those strongholds with only wooden sticks in their hands, were ridiculous, bitterly funny. And he
had been the cause of it all.
Desperation clawed at him. He had searched and searched his mind, over and over again, for some chance, some real way, or even some trick that would allow a human uprising to show just enough muscle so that the Aalaag would be willing to make even the slightest of concessions to avoid or end it.. . his mind went around again over the hopeless hope and the undeniable. Their road led nowhere but to destruction.
He could not stand it any longer, carrying this impossible load of lies. Something had broken in him, during this last dreaming of the dream; and there was now a collapse he could almost feel like a physical break inside him. He could not fight the problem any longer. Like a condemned prisoner headed toward the place of execution, he turned off the shower, dried himself, turned off the bathroom light and went out into the bedroom, groping his way back to the edge of the bed and seating himself on it. He stared into the darkness where Maria lay.
