Way of the Pilgrim - Softcover

Dickson, Gordon R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312866623 ISBN 13: 9780312866624

Publisher: Tor Books, 1999

Synopsis

Shane, a gifted linguist, has spent his life learning the language of the old and powerful alien race that has conquered Earth. He has learned it so well that the interstellar masters, old hands at enslaving planets, regard him as a valuable servant.

But Shane has a secret. One day, in a rebellious moment, he invented The Pilgrim: a mysterious figure who incites rebellion and vanishes unseen, leaving a distinctive icon behind him.

Now the human underground is preparing to rebel. Shane knows how hopeless their rebellion will be. He knows, as well, that he will be unable to keep himself from taking part.

About this title

About the Author

Gordon R. Dickson was the Hugo- and Nebula-winning author of many classics of fantasy and science fiction, most famously the Childe Cycle (also known as the Dorsai series). He died in 2001.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER ONE
 
 
IN THE SQUARE AROUND THE BRONZE STATUE OF THE Cimbrian bull, the crowd was silent. The spring sky over Aalborg, Denmark, was high and blue; and on the weather-grayed red brick wall of the building before them a man was dying upon the triple blades, according to an alien law. The two invokers, judges and executioners of that law, sat their riding beasts, watching, less than two long paces from where Shane Evert stood in the crowd of humans on foot.
"My son," the older and bulkier of the two was saying to the younger in the heavy Aalaag tongue, plainly unaware that there was a human nearby who could understand him, "as I've told you repeatedly, no creature tames overnight. You've been warned that when they travel in a family the male will defend his mate, the female and male defend their young."
"But, my father," said the younger, "there was no reason. I only struck the female aside with my power-lance to keep her from being ridden down. It was a consideration I intended, not a discipline or an attack...."
Their words rumbled in Shane's ears and printed themselves in his mind. Like giants in human form, medieval and out of place, the two massive Aalaag loomed beside him, the clear sunlight shining on the green and silver metal of their armor and on the red, camel-like creatures that served them as riding animals. Their concern was with their conversation and the crowd of humans they supervised in this legal deathwatch. Only slightly did they pay attention to the man they had hung on the blades.
Mercifully, for himself as well as for the humans forced to witness his death, it happened that the Dane undergoing execution had been paralyzed by the power-lance, called by the Aalaag a "long arm," before he had been thrown upon the three sharp lengths of metal protruding from the wall twelve feet above the ground. The blades had pierced him while he was still unconscious, and he had passed immediately into shock. So that he was not now aware of his own dying, or of his wife, the woman for whom he had incurred the death penalty, who lay dead at the foot of the wall below him. Now he himself was almost dead. But while he was still alive all those in the square were required by Aalaag law to observe.
"...Nonetheless," the alien father was replying, "the male misunderstood. And when cattle make errors, the master is responsible. You are responsible for the death of this one and his female--which had to be, to show that we are never in error, never to be attacked by the native beasts we have conquered. But the responsibility is yours."
Under the bright sun the metal on the alien pair glittered as ancient and primitive as the bronze statue of the bull or the blades projecting from the homely brick wall. But the watching humans would have learned long since not to be misled by appearances.
Tradition, and something like superstition among the religion-less Aalaag, preserved the weapons and armor of a time already more than fifty thousand Earth years lost and gone in their history, on whatever world had given birth to these nine-foot-tall conquerors of humanity. But their archaic dress and weaponry were only for show.
The real power of the two watching did not lie in their swords and long arms, but in the little black-and-gold rods at their belts, in the jewels of the rings on their massive fore-fingers, and in the tiny, continuously moving orifice in the pommel of each saddle, looking eternally and restlessly left and right at the crowd.
"Then it is true. The fault is mine," said the Aalaag son submissively. "I have wasted good cattle."
"It is true good cattle have been wasted," answered his father, "innocent cattle that originally had no intent to challenge our law. And for that I will pay a fine, because I am your father and it is to my blame that you made an error. But you will pay me back five times over, because your error goes deeper than mere waste of good cattle, alone."
"Deeper, my father?"
Shane kept his head utterly still within the concealing shadow of the hood of his pilgrim's cloak. The two could have no suspicion that one of the cattle of Lyt Ahn, Aalaag Governor of all Earth, stood less than the length of a long arm from them, able to understand every word they spoke. But it would be wise not to attract their attention. An Aalaag father did not ordinarily reprimand his son in public, or in the hearing of any cattle. The heavy voices rumbled on and the blood sang in Shane's ears.
"Much deeper, my son..."
The sight of the figure on the blades before him sickened Shane. He had tried to screen it from himself with one of his own private imaginings--the image he had dreamed up of a human outlaw whom no Aalaag could catch or conquer. A human who went about the world anonymously, like Shane, in pilgrim's robes; but, unlike Shane, exacting vengeance from the aliens for each wrong they did to a man, woman, or child. However, in the face of the bloody reality on the wall before Shane, fantasy failed. Now, though, out of the corner of his right eye, he caught sight of something that momentarily blocked that reality from his mind and sent a thrill of unreasonable triumph running through him.
Barely four meters or so beyond and above him and the riders on the two massive beasts, the sagging branch of an oak tree pushed its tip almost into the line of vision between Shane's eyes and the bladed man. On the end of the branch, among the new green leaves of the year, was a small, cocoon-like shape, already broken. From it had just recently struggled the still crumpled shape of a butterfly that did not yet know what its wings were for.
How it had managed to survive through the winter here was beyond guessing. Theoretically, the Aalaag had exterminated all insects in towns and cities. But here it was, a butterfly of Earth being born even as a man of Earth was dying--a small life for a large. An utterly disproportionate feeling of triumph sang in Shane. Here was a life that had escaped the death sentence of the aliens and would live in spite of the Aalaag--that is, if the two now watching on their great red mounts did not notice it as it waved its wings, stiffening them for flight.
They must not notice. Unobtrusively, lost in the crowd with his rough gray pilgrim's cloak and staff, undistinguished among the other drab humans, Shane drifted right, toward the aliens, until the branch tip with its emerging butterfly hung squarely between him and the man on the wall.
It was superstition, magic...call it what you like, it was the only help he could give the butterfly. The chances for the small life now beginning on the branch tip should, under any cosmic justice, be insured by the larger life now ending for the man on the wall. The one should balance out the other. Shane fixed the nearer shape of the butterfly in his gaze so that it hid the farther figure of the man on the blades. He bargained with fate. I will not blink, he told himself, and the butterfly will stay invisible to the Aalaag. They will see only the man....
Beside him, neither of the massive, metal-clad figures had noticed his moving. They were still talking.
"...in battle," the father was saying, "each of us is equal to more than a thousand thousand of such as these. We would be nothing if not that. But though one be superior to so many, it does not follow that the many are without force against the one. Expect nothing, therefore, and do not be disappointed. Though they are now ours, inside themselves these new cattle still remain what they were when we conquered them. Beasts, as yet untamed to proper love of us. Do you understand me now?"
"No, my father."
There was a burning in Shane's throat, and his eyes blurred so that he could hardly see the butterfly clinging tightly to its branch and yielding at last to the instinctive urge to unfold its crumpled, damp wings and spread them to their full expanse. The wings spread, orange, brown and black--like an omen, it was that species of sub-Arctic butterfly called a "Pilgrim"--just as Shane himself was called a "pilgrim" because of the hooded robe he wore. The day three years ago at the University of Kansas rose in his mind. He remembered standing in the student union, among the mass of other students and faculty, listening to the broadcast announcing that the Earth had been conquered, even before any of them had fully grasped that beings from a far world had landed amongst them. He had not felt anything then except excitement, mixed perhaps with a not unpleasant apprehension.
"Someone's going to have to interpret for us to those aliens," he had told his friends cheerfully. "Language specialists like me--we'll be busy."
But it had been for the aliens rather than to the aliens that interpreting had needed to be done--and he was not, Shane told himself, the stuff of which underground resistance fighters were made.
Only...in the last two years...
Almost directly over him, the voice of the elder Aalaag rumbled on. "To conquer is nothing. Anyone with power can conquer. We rule--which is a greater art. We rule because eventually we change the very nature of our cattle."
"Change?" echoed the younger.
"Alter," said the older. "Over their generations we teach them to love us. We tame them into good kine. Beasts still, but broken to obedience. To this end we leave them their own laws, their religions, their customs. Only one thing we do not tolerate--the concept of defiance against our will. And in time they tame to this."
"But--always, my father?"
"Always, I say!" Restlessly, the father's huge riding animal shifted its weight on its hooves, crowding Shane a few inches sideways. He moved. But he kept his eyes on the butterfly. "When we first arrive, some fight us--and die. Only we know that it is the heart of the beast that must be broken. So we teach them first the superiority of our weapons, then of our bodies and minds; finally, that of our law. At last, with nothing of their own left to cling to, their beast-hearts crack, and they follow us unthinkingly, blindly loving and trusting us like newborn pups behind their dam...

About this edition

• Publisher: Tor Books
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0312866623
• ISBN 13: 9780312866624
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 448