Way of the Pilgrim

by Matt

  Now, images apparently unrelated to each other flitted through his head as he continued at random through the streets. To begin with, the images were mostly concerned with his earlier years after his mother and father had died, leaving him alone with his aunt and uncle. When his mother had been alive, he and his aunt had been fairly close; but, alone, he felt he had little in common with either aunt or uncle—particularly his uncle, whom he saw only briefly and at long intervals when the man was home from work, or from trips that had either been required by his current job or made necessary by his search for the next one.

  His hours in the schoolroom had been neither pleasant nor unpleasant—he remembered them only as a sort of void. He could get good grades by doing nothing more than listening to what went on in class. Rarely, for a test, he would delve into a textbook; but years of reading had given him a reading speed that let him cover the necessary pages within a very short time and the knowledge had a way of sticking, at least until the test was over.

  His real life had been spent with the books in the local library. He had become fascinated by the foreign language shelves and taught himself to read French, German, Spanish and Italian, first by a process that he was to recognize only later—an unconscious recognition of Latin and Germanic roots in words of those languages which were cognate with English words of roughly the same meaning—then with a foreign language dictionary in hand. Early, he came to appreciate how much more there was to be felt and understood about the characters in Dumas's novel, The Three Musketeers, for example, when he read that novel in its native French rather than in English translation.

  This had led him to elect numerous language courses even in high school; and his capabilities there attracted the attention of his teachers. Eventually, they had led to a scholarship and a university major in linguistics. All this came back to him in bits and flashes of remembered scenes from those past years —and for the first time he began to realize how right Maria had been, how strongly he had built a life for himself apart from family, from any friends he might have made, even from his teachers and fellow students in the areas he studied.

  But how had he got from there to here—to this moment in a Chinese metropolis, facing a holocaust he himself had created for the human race?

  Clearly, his unconscious mind was suggesting that his solitariness was a key to the answer he needed to deal with the Aalaag. But why that, in this moment, in this place?

  The question brought him back to recognition of his surroundings.

  He was aware that for some time he had been noticing that the dawn had strengthened. A still gray, but clear, light now showed his surroundings. In that light, he saw that on the sidewalk at the four corners of every intersection he passed were one or two cats, simply standing or sitting and staring at cats on one or more of the other three corners.

  They stared at him also, as he passed, but only briefly. He was almost as beneath their notice as if they had been Aalaag. They did nothing and made no noise. Nor were they together in any sense. Even when there was more than one on a corner, they were spread out from each other and acted as if the others occupying the corner with them were not there.

  Perhaps it was some sort of territorial statement they were making to each other. But if so, he saw no territory being challenged or defended. Only the silent waiting and watching.

  It also could be, he thought, that it was not so much that they were like Aalaag as that he himself was like an Aalaag, and they were like humans—engaged in some ritual incomprehensible to an Aalaag; which he, the Aalaag, ignored because there was no reason for him to understand or interfere with it.

  How could Maria have come up with the idea that he admired the Aalaag and wanted to be like them? He had always believed he hated the Aalaag with a secret hatred that he was sure not even his fellow translators could approach. He hated them more than others did because he feared them more; and he feared them more because he had studied them more closely and understood them better. Oh, there were things for which he gave the Aalaag credit—a more than human passion for order, cleanliness, honesty and moral uprightness. But it could not be true that he unconsciously wanted to be like them; that he was, in any sense, imitating them.

  As far as he could see, it was what he had encountered in high school all over again. He could never be a part of what the Aalaag were because they would never accept him. He simply was not an Aalaag and never could be. He had survived with them by using his wits, as Maria had said. Also, by being invisible as much as possible; and by giving them no need to demonstrate that they were superior to him in their own ways. Those were tricks he was good at....

  It hit him, suddenly, like a body blow, where he had learned such tricks. It had been in those same high school years when he had been double-promoted twice and so thrown into close contact with young human males and females two years older than he was. They had been like the Aalaag, as far as he had been concerned. In no way would they accept him. Two years at that age made for a tremendous social difference. No one of them, male or female, wanted friends of their own age to see them in friendship with a kid two years younger. Such a friendship would label them as different, at a time when everybody most wanted to be alike. Also, outside of the classroom he could no more compete with them physically, socially, or emotionally than he could compete with the Aalaag in their special alien areas.

  And he had hated his classmates for it then, as he believed he hated the Aalaag now.

  No—trudging the dawn-lit, empty streets with the silent cats on each corner, watching, he faced the fact that his hate was not all of it. Maria was right. He had yearned to be accepted by the Aalaag, to be one of them, since he could find no acceptance in his own race. But as there had been no acceptance possible by his classmates, there was no possibility of acceptance by the Aalaag; and in each case he had pretended not to care, to be outside it all—while inwardly he both hated and yearned to belong.

  He felt a sudden kinship with the cats.

  They're like me, he thought of the cats, they live alone and they'll die alone.

  He stopped dead.

  It had burst upon him with devastating suddenness that he had just done what he had accused the Resistance people in London, and others since like them, of doing. He had lectured them for anthropomorphizing—for interpreting the different actions of a different race as if that different race had been humans like themselves; and thereby come to erroneous conclusions and beliefs.

  So, he with the cats, just now.

  As a human in a cat's body he might live alone and face dying alone. But what gave him the right to assume that aloneness was the same thing for a cat? Maybe aloneness meant something else to a cat. Maybe it was an incomprehensible term, with no place in a cat's universe—something a cat was blind to, and did not react to, because, for them, it was not there. A shock went through him. He stopped suddenly and simply stood still, facing what he had just realized. The Aalaag must indeed have an Achilles' heel, which he could find if he tried hard enough; and indeed there had to be one. They had one because there was no way they could not have one. It was implied in the understanding he had just stumbled across with the cats.

  He felt a tremendous excitement.

  24

  Elevated by that excitement he headed back toward Maria, the one person with whom he could talk over the ideas that were now swarming through his head. Walking rapidly toward his hotel through empty streets that now were beginning to show themselves in full daylight, he was astonished to see how many people were already on the street and how the sun was now noticeably above the horizon. It was going to be a clear day. He had evidently walked and thought much longer than he had imagined.

  He found Maria awake when he got back to the hotel suite, up and in a robe. He grabbed her up into his arms.

  "You were right!" he said. "There's a way to get rid of the Aalaag. I haven't found it yet, but now I know there has to be! Come into the sitting room with me so I can talk it over with you,
and maybe sort out my own thoughts about it."

  "Can we order up some breakfast at the same time?" She covered an enormous yawn with her hand.

  "Ten breakfasts!" he said exuberantly.

  While they waited for the food to come, he told her about the cats.

  "... You see," he was going on, once the food was before them and they were eating—at least Maria was eating. Shane had so much talking to do that he found food getting in his way. "What I suddenly understood from watching those cats was how little an individual of one species can fully appreciate what moves another species, let alone another race. What works for one kind of being can be something that doesn't even exist for another. In fact, it may effectively be invisible and inaudible. There comes a point, as I came to it with the cats, of ignoring what can't be understood. Even if I could get myself to the point of intellectually understanding that what was moving those cats was a matter of territorial rights, I still couldn't know, the way a cat would know, what it meant in the mind and muscles and guts, to take up such a position on a corner, at that time—and hold it."

  She stopped eating to stare curiously at him.

  "I thought you said now you were sure there's a solution?" she said. "You sound as if, even if there was, you'd never be able to recognize it."

  "Maybe not—directly," he told her. "But indirectly—what I said about knowing what things were like for another species or race was true. But while maybe duplications of awareness aren't possible, there can be parallels. Human mothers love and protect their children. Mother cats love and protect their kittens. I remember thinking once—I don't know if I said anything about it to you—that the Aalaag race and the human race were like images in different distorting mirrors of each other."

  Maria frowned.

  "Distorting mirrors?"

  "I mean," he said, "that a member of one race sees one of the other race distorted from what he or she actually is—as if the one seen was a reflection of the one looking, in the sort of funny mirrors you see in amusement parks. There're things, in the one seen, that the one looking can't see or understand, so to make sense out of the picture, they adjust it to fit what they know about themselves. You see, the trouble is we and the Aalaag are so damned alike to start off with."

  Maria nodded.

  "They're humanoid."

  "They're remarkably humanoid," said Shane. "Or we're remarkably Aalaagoid—depending on your point of view. It's almost unbelievable that the first completely separate race to find us should be so like us—well, maybe it isn't so surprising after all. Similarities make for the same requirements, the same sort of prehistory and social history—and the same sort of needs. Just like we'll go looking for worlds like Earth when we get out in interstellar space, so the Aalaag've gone looking for worlds like the ones they knew to begin with; and similar worlds make for other similarities. But that's the point. Similarities—not identities. We look at the Aalaag and see a race we haven't any cause to love, so we call them aliens. They look at us and see a sort of distorted Aalaagoid which makes them uncomfortable—and so they call us beasts. But on the unconscious level we go on thinking of them as sort of distorted humans and they can't help thinking of us as a shrunken and weakened variant of Aalaag. So that when the chips are down, members of both races take it for granted those of the other see what they do, feel what they do, and ought to act the way they do."

  She shook her head slowly.

  "I can't believe that," she said, "that they'd go so far they'd even expect us to feel like them."

  "I think they do. I think it goes so far that, down deep, they feel that we'd even prefer their home worlds to ours, if we could see them as they were before they were driven out of them. Consciously, they know we've never seen anything like that and there's no reason we should be deeply moved by their crusade to get those worlds back; but unconsciously, they simply can't imagine anything Aalaag-like who wouldn't be happy to die to recover those worlds. Because that's the way they feel."

  Maria shook her head again, this time wordlessly.

  "I know, I know," said Shane. "It's crazy; but I'm making a point. I tell you they don't see us as we are—and we don't see them as they are. We can't. I can't—but from my position of thinking of myself as outside both races, I just might be able to see something in human beings from which I can guess at a parallel in the Aalaag that isn't visible otherwise, but which can give us a lever to drive them away."

  "If anyone can, you can," said Maria soberly. "But how are you even going to go looking?"

  "I'm going to get as far away from my own prejudices as possible," said Shane eagerly. "That's where you come in. I want you to help me. You weren't at the House of Weapons more than a little time, but you met Aalaag and you've got a different slant on them than I have. I want you to start telling me what you think of them, what you believe about them. Start now. Tell me everything that comes into your mind about them; and I'll tell you where I think you're wrong. We'll discuss the difference; and the two of us together may get to looking at the Aalaag enough from the outside to begin to see where their vulnerabilities lie."

  Maria stopped eating.

  "I don't know where to begin," she said.

  "What do you think of Lyt Ahn? Tell me."

  "He scares me."

  "What do you think of Laa Ehon?"

  "He scares me, too."

  "In the same way? Or is there a difference between them?"

  "In the same way," said Maria. Then checked herself. "No, there's a difference. Lyt Ahn is more... terrifying, but Laa Ehon makes me shudder, in some way. I can't describe it."

  "As if he was more unpredictable?"

  "Yes, and... oh, I don't know," said Maria. "Dear, I don't know if I'm going to be any real use to you in this."

  "Give it a chance. Wait and see. I think you will. What do you think an Aalaag feels; say, one who's just riding his beastin full armor through a town, when some human goes off his head and attacks him "

  They kept it up for a couple of hours, at the end of which Maria was showing signs of exhaustion and flashes of temper that come with exhaustion. More and more she was answering questions with an "I don't know. I just don't know!"

  "All right," said Shane at last. "Let's take a break."

  They took a break by going out for a walk to burn off some of the excess nervous tension built up over the previous two hours. They strolled through the visitors' area, ended up sitting in a sidewalk cafe—for the day had now become comfortably warm—playing with drinks and watching the people go by. In the process they came back to calmness and love. They ended by returning to the hotel suite, where the maid had already been in, and going to bed again.

  Refreshed, they started out the afternoon by once more getting down to work. This time Shane let Maria tell him in her own words about her experiences with the Aalaag and their government, from the time they had landed, a process which was easier on her.

  With all this, however, by the hour it became time for Shane to head off alone, he had turned up nothing that made him feel he was on the track to uncovering an Aalaag vulnerability.

  He was going to have to be content with putting the matter out of his conscious mind once more, and hope his unconscious would work on what Maria had told him and come up with something. This was the evening that the local Beijing Resistance group had chosen to meet him, under the guise of a local business group having a restaurant meal with a North American exporter.

  He had fallen into a pattern in meetings like this, in which he would first ask for any questions they might have; and then talk to them, using the questions asked as a cue to what he thought they needed to hear. In this particular case, after this enlightenment of the last twenty-four hours, he decided simply to speak first. But he found that apparently his chance to talk was scheduled for the final event of the get-together.

  Each Resistance group was different and no two meetings went the same way. In this particular case the dinner apparently had to involve a numb
er of courses of food and liquor, which he was careful only to taste, and what seemed a totally unnecessary number of speeches by others at the table. He tried to follow what was being said at first, but his limited knowledge of the language made the effort wearying. Finally, he simply sat back and waited silently, his cowl fastened close in front of his face.

  When his turn came at last, preceded by a flattering introduction in English, he followed the example given by rising to his feet, saying a few complimentary words, then launching into a speech of his own in Mandarin.

  It was a case in which his limited knowledge of that tongue could show itself to its best advantage. However privately those listening might deplore the clumsy way he spoke it, they showed visible signs of being pleased with the fact that he could speak it at all. He had, he found, a receptive audience.

  Drawn by this, he found himself saying things he had not said to previous groups. He found himself telling them about the cats.