“Get the car,” said Maria, in Italian, when Peter still hesitated. “Get him there on time.”
Peter jerked suddenly into movement, as if Maria’s words had wakened him from a dream so powerful it had held him prisoner. He turned to Carlo.
“Get the car,” he said. “You drive. Maria, you’ll go with me and Shane. Georges–”
He spoke just in time to cut short the beginnings of a protest from the man with the pipe.
“–I want you to close this place up. Bury it! We may end up wanting better security on this than we ever have had on anything until now. Then get out of sight yourself. We’ll find you. You follow me?”
“All right,” said Georges. “Don’t take too long to come calling.”
“A day or two. That’s all. Carlo–” He looked around.
“Carlo’s gone for the car,” said Maria. “Let’s move, Peter. We’ll barely make it to the airport as it is.”
Shane followed them back through the hall by which he had entered. Crammed in the back seat of the taxi between Maria and Peter, with Carlo driving up front, he had a sudden feeling of ridiculousness, as if they were all engaged in some wild, slapstick movie.
“Tell me,” said Peter in English, in a voice that was friendlier than any he had used until now, “just how it happened you made that first mark in—where did you say it was?”
“Denmark,” said Shane, answering in English also. “The city of Aalborg. I was delivering messages there, and on my way back from that, I saw two of the aliens, a father and a son, mounted on their riding animals, crossing the square there that has the statue of the Cymri bull–”
It came back to him as he told them. The son, using the haft of his power lance to knock aside a woman who otherwise would have been trampled by his riding animal. The husband of the woman, suddenly mad with yowaragh, attacking the son bare-handed and being easily knocked unconscious. The woman trying to rescue the man and being killed for it—and all of them who were human and in the square at the time being forced to watch under Aalaag law while the man, still unconscious, was thrown onto the sharp points of the triple-punishment hooks on the wall of a building on the edge of the square.
Shane had stood, for the half hour it took the man to die, almost within arm’s length of the two Aalaag sitting on their riding animals. He had been trapped into listening as the senior of the two, who could have no suspicion he was within earshot of one of the rare humans who actually understood Aalaag, gently reproved his son for bad judgment in trying to save the woman from being trampled. Because of this, they had been forced to kill not one, but two healthy beasts and also to engage in a ritual of justice—which always had a disturbing effect on the others, no matter how necessary.
Remembering, Shane felt the inner center of his body grow icy with the recalled horror and the near-approach of his own madness. He told how he had gone on to the bar, drunk the bootleg rotgut the bartender had claimed was aquavit, how he had been set upon by the three vagabonds and killed or badly damaged two of them with his staff before the third had run off. He had not intended to tell it all, movement by movement; but somehow, once started, he could not help himself. He told how, once more crossing the now-empty square, on impulse he had scratched the mark of the pilgrim beneath the body on the hooks before returning to the airport.
“I believe you,” said Peter.
Shane said nothing. Crowded together as they were, he was conscious of the softness of Maria’s thigh pressed against his; and the warmth of her seemed also to press in upon the iciness within him, melting it as if he were someone lost and frozen in a snowstorm who was now getting back life and heat from the living temperature of another human being.
He felt a sudden, desperate longing for her as a woman. Beasts were encouraged by the Aalaag to breed—particularly valuable cattle like those special human translator-couriers of Lyt Ahn’s; but living continually under the observations of the aliens, as Shane and the others did, cultured a paranoia. They all knew too well the innumerable ways that could bring them to destruction at the hands of their masters; and when their duties were completed, their instinct was to draw apart, to creep separately into their solitary beds and lock their individual doors against each other for fear that close contact with another could put their survival too completely in another’s power.
In any case, Shane did not want to breed. He wanted love—if only for a moment; and love was the one thing the highly paid human servants of the First Captain of Earth could not afford. Suddenly the warmth of Maria drew him like a dream of peace…
He jerked himself out of his thoughts. Peter was looking at him curiously. What had the man just been saying—that he believed Shane?
“Get someone to check Aalborg and ask people there what happened. The mark I made might still be there if the Aalaag haven’t erased it.”
“I don’t need to,” said Peter. “What you say explains how the mark could spread around the world the way it already has. It would have to take someone who can move around as you can to get it known everywhere as the symbol of resistance. I always thought there must have been someone at the root of the legend.”
Shane let the first part of Peter’s comment pass without answer. The other man obviously did not understand what Shane had learned in his travels—the speed with which rumor of any kind could travel in a subject population. Shane had been present at the origin of rumors in Paris which he had heard again in this city of Milan less than a week later. Also, Peter seemed to be giving him credit for continuing to spread the mark around, himself; and that, too, was probably a matter on which it was better not to correct the other.
“But I think you ought to face something,” Peter said, leaning hard against him for a second as Carlo whipped the taxi around a corner. “It’s time to move on from just being a legend, time to set up an organization with practical goals of resistance against the aliens, looking forward to the day when we can kill them all, or drive them off the Earth entirely.”
Shane looked sideways at him. It was incredible that this man could be saying such things in all seriousness. But, of course, Peter had not seen what Shane had, up close, of the power of the Aalaag. Mice might as well dream of killing or driving off lions. He was about to say this bluntly when the instinct for survival cautioned him to go cautiously, still. Avoiding a direct answer, he fastened on something else.
“That’s the second time you’ve mentioned a legend,” he said. “What legend?”
“You don’t know?” There was a note of triumph in Peter’s voice. He did not offer to explain.
“There’s talk that all the marks are made by one person,” said Maria, also in English now. She had only a trace of Italian accent—Venetian. “By someone called simply the Pilgrim, who has the ability to come and go without the Aalaag being able to stop or catch whoever it is.”
“And you, all of you, have been helping this Pilgrim, is that it?” said Shane, raising his voice.
“The point is,” Peter interrupted, “that it’s time the Pilgrim was associated with a solid organization. Don’t you think?”
Shane felt a return of the weariness that had deadened him when he had first been abducted by these people. “If you can find your Pilgrim, ask him,” he said. “I’m not him, and I’ve got no opinions.”
Peter watched him for a moment. “Whether you’re the Pilgrim or not is beside the point,” he said. “The point still is, you could help us and we need you. The world needs you. Just from what you’ve told us, it’s plain you could be invaluable just acting as liaison between resistance groups.”
Shane laughed grimly. “Not on the best day in the year,” he said.
“You aren’t even stopping to think about it,” Peter said. “What makes you so positive you don’t want to do it?”
“I’ve been trying to tell you ever since you kidnapped me,” said Shane. “You’re the one who doesn’t listen. You don’t know the Aalaag. I do. Because you don’t know them, you can fool yoursel
f that you’ve got a chance with this resistance of yours. I know better. They’ve been taking over worlds like this and turning the native populations into their servants for thousands of years. Did you think this was the first planet they’d ever tried it on? There’s nothing you can come up with by way of attacking them that they haven’t seen before and know how to deal with. But even if you could come up with something new, you still couldn’t win.”
“Why not?” Peter’s head leaned close.
“Because they’re just what they say they are—born conquerors who could never be dominated or defeated themselves. You can’t torture an Aalaag and get information out of him. You can’t point a weapon at one of them and force him to back off or surrender. All you can do is kill them—if you’re lucky. But they’ve got so much power, so much military power, that even that’d work only if you killed them all in the same moment. If even one escaped and had warning, you’d have lost.”
“Why?”
“Because with any warning at all, any one of them could make himself or herself invulnerable and then take all the time he needed to wipe out whole cities and sections of Earth, one by one, until the other humans who were left served you and anyone else who had been fighting the Aalaag up on a platter, to stop the killing.”
“What good would it do just one Aalaag to do all that,” Peter said, “if he was the last one on Earth?”
“You don’t think all the Aalaag in the universe are here, do you?” said Shane. “Earth, with only one Aalaag left alive on it, would only represent that much new homesteading territory for the surplus Aalaag population elsewhere. In a year or less, you’d have as many Aalaag here as before; and the only result would be the humans who’d died, the slagged areas of Earth, and the fact that the Aalaag would then set up an even stricter control system to make sure no one like you rose against them again.”
There was silence in the car. Carlo whipped them around another corner and Shane could see a sign beside the highway announcing that the airport was now only one kilometer distant. The warmth of Maria’s body penetrated through him, and he could smell the harsh, clean odor of the all-purpose soap with which she must just this morning have washed her hair.
“Then you won’t lift a finger to help us?” said Peter.
“No,” said Shane.
Carlo turned the car onto an off-ramp leading up to the airport road.
“Isn’t anybody willing to do anything?” burst out Maria suddenly. “Not anybody? Nobody at all?”
An icy, electric shock jarred all through Shane. It was as if a sword had been plunged clear through him, a sword he had been expecting, but a sword to take his life nonetheless. It cut to his instinctive roots, to the ancient racial and sexual reflexes from which yowaragh sprang. The words were nothing, the cry was everything.
He sat for a numb moment.
“All right,” he said. “Let me think about it then.”
He heard his own voice far off, remote.
“You’re never going to get anywhere the way you’ve been acting so far,” he said. “You’re doing all the wrong things because you don’t understand the Aalaag. I do. Maybe I could tell you what to do—but you’d have to let me tell you, not just try to pick my brains, or it won’t work. Would you do it that way? Otherwise it’s no use.”
“Yes!” Maria said.
There was a slight pause.
“All right,” said Peter. Shane turned to stare at him.
“If you don’t, it won’t work.”
“We’ll do anything to hit at the Aalaag,” said Peter; and this time his answer came immediately.
“All right,” said Shane emptily. “I’ll still have to think about it. How do I get in touch with you?”
“We can find you if we know what city you’re coming into,” said Peter. “Can you arrange to put an ad in the local paper before you come–”
“I don’t have that much warning,” said Shane. “Why don’t I go into a shop in the center of a city when I first get there and buy a pilgrim robe—a gray one like the one I’m wearing—and pay for it in a silver or gold Aalaag coin. You can have the shopkeepers warn you if anyone does that. If the description fits me, you watch the local Aalaag HQ and pick me up coming or going.”
“All right,” said Peter.
“One other thing,” Shane said. They were almost to the terminal building of the airport. He looked directly into Peter’s eyes. “I’ve seen the Aalaag questioning humans and I know what I’m talking about. If they suspect me, they’ll question me. If they question me, they’ll find out everything I know. You have to understand that. If everything else fails, they have drugs that just start you talking and you talk until you die. They don’t like to use them because they’re not efficient. Someone has to wade through hours of nonsense to get the answers they want. But they use them when they have to. You understand? Anyone they question is going to tell them everything. Not just me—anyone. That’s one of the things you’re going to have to work with.”
“All right,” said Peter.
“What it means as far as I’m concerned is that I don’t want anyone who doesn’t already know about me to know I exist.”
He held Peter’s eye, glanced meaningfully at Carlo and back to Peter.
“And those who aren’t to have something to do with me in the future—if I decide to have anything to do with you in the future—should believe that I get out of this car now and none of you ever see me again.”
“I understand,” said Peter. He nodded. “Don’t worry.”
Shane laughed harshly.
“I always worry,” he said. “I’d be insane not to. I’m worrying about myself right now. I need my head examined for even thinking about this.”
The taxi pulled up to the long concrete walk fronting the airline terminal and stopped. Peter, on the curb side of the car, opened the door beside him and got out to let Shane out. Shane started to follow him, hesitated, and turned back for a second to Maria.
“I will think about it,” he said. “I’ll do whatever I can, the best I can.”
In the relative shadow of the corner of the taxi’s back seat, her face was unreadable. She reached out a hand to him. He took and held it for a second. Her fingers were as icy as Milan itself had been this morning.
“I’ll think about it,” he said again, squeezed her fingers and scrambled out. On the walk, he stood for a second facing the other man.
“If you don’t hear from me in six months, forget me,” he said.
Peter’s lips opened. He appeared about to say something; then the lips closed again.
He nodded.
Shane turned and went swiftly into the terminal. Just inside the entrance doors, he spotted a terminal policeman and swung on him, taking the key from his purse and exposing it for a second in the palm of his hand to the other’s gaze.
“This is the key of Lyt Ahn, First Captain of Earth,” he said in rapid Italian. “I’m one of his special couriers, and I need transport to the Masters’ section of the field, fast. Fast! Emergency! But do it without attracting attention!”
The officer snapped upright, jerked the phone from his belt and spoke into it. There was no more than a thirty-second wait before an electric car came sliding through the crowd on its air cushion. Shane jumped into one of the passenger seats behind the driver, glancing at his watch.
“The hangars for smaller military craft!” he said. He hesitated, then made up his mind. “Use your siren.”
The driver cranked up his siren, the crowd parted before him as he swung the car around and drove at it. They slid swiftly across the polished floor, out through a vehicle passway by the entrance to the field itself.
Once on the field, the car lifted higher on its cushion and went swiftly. They swung around two sides of the field and approached the heavily guarded silver hangars housing the military atmosphere ships of the Aalaag. They slowed at the guard gate of the entrance to this area. Shane showed his key and explained his errand to the human
Special Guard on duty there.
“We’ve been warned to expect you,” said the Guard. “Hangar Three. The courier ship is piloted by the Master Enech Ajin, who is of the thirty-fifth rank.”
Shane nodded and the driver of the car, having heard, moved them off without any further need for orders.
In the hangar, the slim, dumbbell shape of the courier sat dwarfed by the large fighter ships of the Aalaag on either side of her. Yet, as Shane knew, even these seemingly larger ships were themselves small as Aalaag warships went. The true fighting vessels of the Aalaag never touched planetary surface but hung in continual orbit and readiness—as much for reasons of principle as for the fact that there was no air or spaceport on Earth where they could have set down without causing massive damage.
He jumped down from the car as it paused by the open port of the courier vessel and ran up the steps of the port, stepping into the cramped interior. It need not have been so cramped, but even this ship, designed for carrying dispatches, was heavy with armament.
The massive back of an Aalaag showed itself above one of the triple seats at the control panel in the front of the ship. Shane walked up to just behind the seat and stood waiting. This was not only his duty, but all that was necessary, even if the pilot had not heard him come in. This close to the other, he smelled the typical Aalaag body odor plainly; and the pilot was as surely scenting him. After a moment the pilot spoke.
“Take one of the seats farther back, beast.” It was the voice of an adult Aalaag female. “I have two other stops to make before I bring you to the area of the First Captain.”
Shane went back and sat down. After only a couple of minutes, the courier ship lifted and hovered lightly perhaps ten feet off the floor of the hangar. It slid out into the late daylight of the field, turned and went softly to a blast pad. At the pad it stopped, and Shane let the air out of his lungs and laid his arms in the hollows of the armrests on either side of his chair.
For a second there was neither sound nor movement. Then something like a clap of thunder, a great weight crushing him into the seat so that he could not move for a long moment—then sudden freedom and lightness, so that he felt almost as if he could float out of the chair. Actually, the feeling was exaggerated. He was still within gravity. It was the contrast with the pressure of takeoff that created the illusion of lightness.
There Will Be War Volume IV Page 5
