by Matt
"Wait," he said, stopping and forcing her to stop. He looked at her. Her close-cut brown hair retained its order, but her face was pale and tight-drawn over the bones beneath its skin, to the point of ugliness. She had been capable of raising a feeling of tenderness in him, once, and the ghost of that feeling still lingered in him; but somehow he could no longer give it life and substance. He took her free hand in his free one.
"Sylvie," he said, "a meeting's not going to do any good, or delegates either. Come with me and we'll go outside together. I'll see no one hurts you. They'll listen to me. I'm the Pilgrim, the one who got this revolution started all over the world."
She stared at him. She let go of his arm and suddenly jerked her hand out of his.
"Oh, you've gone crazy, like so many of them!" she cried. "Go out with you? You must think I'm crazy, too! You, the Pilgrim? Do you think I'd believe a thing like that? Someone like you could never be the Pilgrim; anyone'd have sense enough to understand that. The people outside'd tear us to bits the moment you tried to tell them such a thing!"
She backed a step from him.
"You'll just have to save yourself, Shane," she said. "I can't help you if you've gone crazy. I haven't got time to help you if you're crazy...."
She had begun backing farther with her last words. As she stopped talking, she turned and ran; and he lost sight of her in among the other bodies, human and Aalaag, passing through the corridor.
Sadly he put himself back into motion and went on his way. It came to him finally that he knew where he was going, after all. He was going to the front entrance of the House of Weapons. Before he reached it, however, he found his way blocked by a tall, thin man in the blue overalls of the Maintenance Corps but with the collar tabs of the beast-officer who was that Corps' Commander.
"You're Shane, aren't you?" said the man. "I've seen you around and I know your reputation. You could have been in command of the Couriers by this time if you'd wanted. Look.
Your own Corps will listen to you if you speak to them. You've got to help me."
"Not now," said Shane. He started to push past but the other caught him by the loose fabric of the overalls over Shane's chest.
"No, it has to be now. Don't you understand? They're going; but they're leaving behind everything of their technology they built into places like this. People who don't understand seem to think that with a little jiggering and poking we can learn how to work these things. But we can't. Ordinary people don't understand what the gap between our technology and the Aalaag's really means. It'll take years of study for us to understand what they've left behind; and even then the chances we'll learn how to use it—anyway, you've got to help by speaking to your own Corps people. Tell them—make them understand they mustn't try to monkey with the technological stuff, even those that worked with some of it under Aalaag direction. And those people outside have to be made to understand that technicians like those in my Corps have got to be protected and supported for the years of work it'll take—"
"I'm sorry," Shane broke away from him. "I can't help you now. I've got to go. Good-bye."
He kept walking. The other followed alongside him for some little distance, still talking to him, but Shane refused to answer or look at him. Finally the Maintenance Corps Commander gave up and Shane was alone when he came at last to the main entrance of the House and found it wide open.
He stepped out from it into the chill sunlight of a November morning and caught sight as he passed through it of a grayness to the outside edge of the entrance. He turned and looked up at the building and saw only the sheer rise of blank concrete wall surrounding the darkness of the entrance. No silver coating flowed over that surface.
He turned away again and looked out over the square. At its far end, some vehicles were parked, some passenger cars, two heavy, army-type trucks and three ambulances. There were people around them, standing and talking; but whatever work they had come there to do had evidently mostly been done, for there was no air of urgency about those in movement. Here and there could be seen the tall figures of Aalaag in full armor with only their faces uncovered. Shane recognized them all as junior officers experiencing that rare thing for an Aalaag—free time. They wandered about the dead bodies in the square like tourists at an amusement park, discovering and calling each other's attention to things. They and the humans around the vehicles paid no attention to each other's presence.
He blinked his eyes in the daylight, although it did not seem that strong after the day-bright lighting inside. Still, he was shocked to realize that a full, cold night had passed while he sat or stood, and waited for and with Lyt Ahn.
He looked last at the part of the square at his feet, right up against the House of Weapons, and knew finally why he had come. What was here had called him. The dead. Those he had killed.
They lay in windrows like breeze-heaped leaves all mixed together, bodies in pilgrim cloaks and bodies in the black uniforms of the Interior Guard. Those who were merely wounded, if there had been any such after staves and poisoned bullets had done their work, had evidently already been removed.
He began to walk among them, looking at their faces. He was surprised at the serenity of the features of most of them; until he realized that neither poison nor staff-blows would have brought death so swiftly that the body would not have had a chance to relax, and the expression of the features when death came would have shared in that relaxation. The charge of the crowd upon the Guardsmen had scattered the black-uniformed men, and so the dead lay in separate clumps where one or more Guardsmen had been brought down.
It was remarkable how similar pilgrim and play-soldier looked in death. Shane had not expected so many to look so young. That the Guardsmen should look so was not surprising. Those lined up before the building had been from the lowest ranks of that Corps and had indeed been young. Overgrown boys in most instances. But he had not expected so many of those in gray cloaks, men and women alike, also to show such youth.
Not that there were not older faces to be seen among them. He reached one heap and thought he saw something familiar in a cloaked body that lay on its back near the top of the heap, but with its face and upper body covered by the pilgrim corpse that had fallen on top of it.
He bent to take hold of the corpse on top and with some effort rolled it aside. The face on the body underneath was uncovered. It was the body of Peter.
He stood over it, looking down.
He should have expected it, he told himself, from the last words of the Englishman, when the other had squeezed Shane's shoulder and spoken in his ear, just before Shane ran for the protection of the lines of the Guardsmen.
"See you on the other side," Peter had said.
The words had sounded overdone to Shane at the time, almost melodramatic, and not like what Peter would normally say. He had supposed then that their unnaturalness was owing to the fact that Peter was playing up the pretense of everyone that Shane would be able to give Lyt Ahn the human ultimatum and still walk back out of the House of Weapons alive— something none of them in their hearts could have actually believed.
But Shane understood now that it had not been pretense at all that had caused Peter to speak so. The other man must have planned from the beginning to be in the first wave of those in the square, whenever the time came to clash with the Guards. Peter must have been telling only the truth when he said that he believed that Shane could see the gigantic shadow-figure of the actual Pilgrim. It would have been that sort of belief in him which had led Peter to form his Resistance group in London. He had been one of those who, from the first, had truly believed that humans would do anything rather than continue to endure the Aalaag in the long run.
Now, Shane was alive after all.
And Peter was dead.
He deserved better than to have his body lie sprawled like this, awkwardly in a pile of other, nameless corpses. Undoubtedly, there would be people along in due time to take all the bodies from the square for proper interment or disposal. B
ut until then, Shane thought, he could at least pull Peter off the pile and straighten out his limbs decently.
He began to do so. Like the body he had to remove first from above him, Peter's lifeless form was heavy and difficult to move. As it finally came free from the pile, it exposed the bottom layer of the heap, in particular the body just beneath. Shane was concentrating on nothing but Peter; but suddenly he knew without looking.
Slowly, on neck muscles that fought against the movement, he turned his head to look at who lay under Peter; and it was Maria.
There was an end to feeling in him.
33
Mechanically, he finished pulling Peter clear of the other bodies and laying him out on the cold concrete with his legs straight and together and his arms at his sides. Then Shane went back to the heap and began to move bodies so that he could get Maria out.
It was a hard task. Some of the bodies, particularly those of two of the Guardsmen which he had to shift, were heavier than he was. But he kept at it and finally he had removed all who in any way lay upon Maria. Uncovered, she lay still, with the same relaxed face as the others, as if she slept. Only a breath of the wind stirred a wisp of her dark hair, blowing it across her closed eyes and forehead. Unthinkingly he set the hair gently back in place.
It was then he noticed that her left leg had been broken. Either Peter or the last body he had removed, had fallen on it in such a way as to deal it a blow below the knee; and the distortion of the overstressed bone was visible. As gently as if she was still alive, he drew her free to lie beside Peter and set about straightening her out as naturally as possible.
With the two of them at last clear on the concrete, he sat down beside Maria and took her hand in his. It felt waxy and there was a stiffness to it. His own hands could not warm it; and the longer he sat there, the more he became unable to endure the fact that she should lie here, like this. He could not shift Peter any distance, but surely he could carry her, say, as far as one of the ambulances that were still parked at the edge of the square, and lay her out decently on one of the stretchers inside it.
He squatted on the concrete at her side, got one arm under her shoulders and head, the other under her hips; and, holding her, he struggled to his feet. He began to carry her toward the nearest ambulance, perhaps fifty steps away across the square, standing empty and waiting with its back door open.
For perhaps a dozen steps he had no doubt he could make it; and then swiftly—too swiftly—the weight of her body began to tell on his arms and shoulders. He would not have thought it would be so hard to carry the body of a relatively small person such as she had been. His knees, his back, his whole body began to give; and a fury took him that he could not do this last thing for her—carry her. to a place where she could be laid down properly.
His knees gave finally. He sank down on them and managed with shaking arms to lower Maria gently to the concrete, rather than simply dropping her. He sat, squatting on his knees, with his head bowed over her. I'll make it, he told himself. I'll get her there if it takes a hundred tries like this.
"—Shane-beast, is that you?"
He looked up to see one of the young Aalaag officers looking down at him. It was the tall one who had helped to get him free from the questioner in the corridor when he had been on his way to the office of Lyt Ahn.
"Yes, untarnished sir," he answered automatically.
"They were warriors, were they not?" said the tall Aalaag enthusiastically, looking around the square at the dead. "Beasts, and clumsy at it, but warriors—what are you doing with that particular dead one, Shane-beast?"
"It is my mate," said Shane dully. "I was taking it to lie properly in one of the medical vehicles at the edge of the square."
"And you were too small to carry it all that distance yourself," said the Aalaag. "How does it come that someone like you had a mate who was on the side of those cattle who attacked our beast-troops?"
"It is a long story, untarnished sir," said Shane dully.
"Nevermind. I understand. It was unwell, this mate of yours, like the rest, was it not? But it also, like the rest, was a warrior. Here, I will take it for you."
The officer leaned down and scooped up Maria with one hand and arm. His armored fingertips among Maria's dark hair held her head gently. The rest of her body weight was supported on his crooked forearm. He carried her as if she was no weight at all.
"Come," he said.
Shane forced himself to his feet. Together, the Aalaag carrying Maria, they paced across the square to the ambulance with the door open.
"You wish her where? Ah, I see the surface you mean." The Aalaag slid Maria's body on one of the stretchers fastened to the side of the ambulance. Shane pushed in after him to lift her arms up and cross them on her breast.
"That is good," said the Aalaag. "Stay with your mate, Shane-beast. If the cattle had been all like you we would not have to be leaving."
He turned and went back across the square to join several others of the Aalaag there and evidently to tell the story of Shane and Maria, for he gestured with his thumb toward the ambulance as he spoke.
Meanwhile, Shane sat numbly beside the motionless form of Maria. He had taken a blanket from one of the other stretchers and covered her, all but her face, so that it was almost as if she was merely unconscious, not dead. His mind was still a void; and all he felt inside him was the emptiness that had been with him for some time now. The only thought he seemed able to manage was that he had killed those who lay about him in the square; therefore perhaps it was fitting that he should have killed Peter and Maria as well.
Some minutes passed. Suddenly there was a voice shouting at him and he was literally jerked away from the cot.
"... stay clear, can't you?"
There were two figures in white coats. They had pulled him from the side of Maria and thrust him clear out of the ambulance. They were now bustling about Maria as if in some unholy ritual, hooking her up with electric cords to some box with a screen, across which a line of light jumped and ran, pulling away the blanket he had covered her with and wrapping her with some sort of endless, heavy bandage. One of them was pushing something into her mouth as if he would ram it clear down her throat.
"Stop it!" he shouted at them, and started to clamber back into the ambulance to stop them, when he was caught from behind and found each of his arms held, straightened out in the grip of a blue-uniformed policeman so that any attempt to move forward brought an excruciating pain to his elbows. "Let me go!"
"Keep him out of here!" said one of the white-coated figures, without turning its head. "There's a chance—aside from that broken leg I think she's only hypothermic ..."
"Come on with us, friend," said one of the policemen, and the pain in his arm increased until it forced Shane to turn away from the open end of the ambulance.
"Wait! No!" Shane cried. "You mean she's alive? There's a chance?"
"Come on with us," said the policeman as the two of them marched him in the direction. "We've got to get you out of here."
"But I've got to stay and see if she's alive!" Shane was almost crying. "It's Maria. She's... she's my wife!"
The footsteps of the policemen slowed for just a second and they looked across Shane at each other.
"It doesn't matter," muttered the one who had not yet spoken. "It's for your own safety. We've got to get you out of here before some crowd comes along. Do you know what they'd do to you, dressed like that?"
Shane had completely forgotten that he still wore his indoor uniform coveralls from the House of Weapons.
"It doesn't matter," he said, as they came to a patrol car. "It doesn't matter what happens to me. I've got to know if she's alive, I tell you!"
He played his last card.
"Don't you understand?" he said. "I'm the Pilgrim—The Pilgrim!"
"Sure. Sure you are..." One of the policemen shoved him into the back of the patrol car and got in with him, while the other climbed behind the wheel. A moment later they wer
e underway, moving away from the square, away from Maria, headed for downtown Minneapolis.
They held him in the jail for nearly ten hours. At the end of that time, there were footsteps in the corridor and Mr. Shepherd—still dressed in a gray pilgrim's cloak—showed up, along with one of his jailers, who let him out with a touch of apologetic awe.
"Maria!" was the first word he said to Shepherd. "I've got to know if she's alive—"
"She is," said Shepherd. "We'll take you to the hospital now. I'm sorry about this. There were supposed to be some of our own men on duty at the square at all times, just in case you were able to come back out after all; but something seems to have gone wrong. We'll find out about that later...."
Shane paid no attention to the rest of what Shepherd was trying to tell him. Everything, in fact, was a blur until he got to the hospital and the room where Maria lay under white sheets, with a massive-seeming cast on her left leg. She smiled palely up at him. He had only a few seconds with her before the nurse and Shepherd—for different reasons, but united in execution of them—literally pulled him out of the room again.
