As we gained velocity he muttered curses and said, “Do you know how I’d handle that long-armed filth? All we need is a coordinated plan. A night of knives: every ten Earthmen make themselves responsible for taking out one invader. We’d get them all.”
“Why has no one organized such a movement?” I asked.
“It’s the job of the Defenders, and half of them are dead, and the other half’s in the pay of them. It’s not my place to set up a resistance movement. But that’s how it should be done. Guerrilla action: sneak up behind ’em, give ’em the knife. Quick. Good old First Cycle methods; they’ve never lost their value.”
“More invaders would come,” Olmayne said morosely.
“Treat ’em the same way!”
“They would retaliate with fire. They would destroy our world,” she said.
“These invaders pretend to be civilized, more civilized than ourselves,” the Merchant replied. “Such barbarity would give them a bad name on a million worlds. No, they wouldn’t come with fire. They’d just get tired of having to conquer us over and over, of losing so many men. And they’d go away, and we’d be free again.”
“Without having won redemption for our ancient sins,” I said.
“What’s that, old man? What’s that?”
“Never mind.”
“I suppose you wouldn’t join in, either of you, if we struck back at them?”
I said, “In former life I was a Watcher, and I devoted myself to the protection of this planet against them. I am no more fond of our masters than you are, and no less eager to see them depart. But your plan is not only impracticaclass="underline" it is also morally valueless. Mere bloody resistance would thwart the scheme the Will has devised for us. We must earn our freedom in a nobler way. We were not given this ordeal simply so that we might have practice in slitting throats.”
He looked at me with contempt and snorted. “I should have remembered. I’m talking to Pilgrims. All right. Forget it all. I wasn’t serious, anyway. Maybe you like the world the way it is, for all I know.”
“I do not,” I said.
He glanced at Olmayne. So did I, for I half-expected her to tell the Merchant that I had already done my bit of collaborating with our conquerors. But Olmayne fortunately was silent on that topic, as she would be for some months more, until that unhappy day by the approach to Land Bridge when, in her impatience, she taunted me with my sole fall from grace.
We left our benefactor in Marsay, spent the night in a Pilgrim hostelry, and set out on foot along the coast the next morning. And so we traveled, Olmayne and I, through pleasant lands swarming with invaders; now we walked, now we rode some peasant’s rollerwagon, once even we were the guests of touring conquerors. We gave Roum a wide berth when we entered Talya, and turned south. And so we came to Land Bridge, and met delay, and had our frosty moment of bickering, and then were permitted to go on across that narrow tongue of sandy ground that links the lake-sundered continents. And so we crossed into Afreek, at last.
4
Our first night on the other side, after our long and dusty crossing, we tumbled into a grimy inn near the lake’s edge. It was a square whitewashed stone building, practically windowless and arranged around a cool inner courtyard. Most of its clientele appeared to be Pilgrims, but there were some members of other guilds, chiefly Vendors and Transporters. At a room near the turning of the building there stayed a Rememberer, whom Olmayne avoided even though she did not know him; she simply did not wish to be reminded of her former guild.
Among those who took lodging there was the Changeling Bernalt. Under the new laws of the invaders, Changelings might stay at any public inn, not merely those set aside for their special use; yet it seemed a little strange to see him here. We passed in the corridor. Bernalt gave me a tentative smile, as though about to speak again, but the smile died and the glow left his eyes. He appeared to realize I was not ready to accept his friendship. Or perhaps he merely recalled that Pilgrims, by the laws of their guild, were not supposed to have much to do with guildless ones. That law still stood.
Olmayne and I had a greasy meal of soups and stews. Afterward I saw her to her room and began to wish her good night when she said, “Wait. We’ll do our communion together.”
“I’ve been seen coming into your room,” I pointed out. “There will be whispering if I stay long.”
“We’ll go to yours, then!”
Olmayne peered into the hall. All clear: she seized my wrist, and we rushed toward my chamber, across the way. Closing and sealing the warped door, she said, “Your starstone, now!”
I took the stone from its hiding place in my robe, and she produced hers, and our hands closed upon them.
During this time of Pilgrimage I had found the starstone a great comfort. Many seasons now had passed since I had last entered a Watcher’s trance, but I was not yet reconciled entirely to the breaking of my old habit; the starstone provided a kind of substitute for the swooping ecstasy I had known in Watching.
Starstones come from one of the outer worlds—I could not tell you which—and may be had only by application to the guild. The stone itself determines whether one may be a Pilgrim, for it will burn the hand of one whom it considers unworthy to don the robe. They say that without exception every person who has enrolled in the guild of Pilgrims has shown uneasiness as the stone was offered to him for the first time.
“When they gave you yours,” Olmayne asked, “were you worried?”
“Of course.”
“So was I.”
We waited for the stones to overwhelm us. I gripped mine tightly. Dark, shining, more smooth than glass, it glowed in my grasp like a pellet of ice, and I felt myself becoming attuned to the power of the Will.
First came a heightened perception of my surroundings. Every crack in the walls of this ancient inn seemed now a valley. The soft wail of the wind outside rose to a keen pitch. In the dim glow of the room’s lamp I saw colors beyond the spectrum.
The quality of the experience the starstone offered was altogether different from that given by my instruments of Watching. That, too, was a transcending of self. When in a state of Watchfulness I was capable of leaving my Earthbound identity and soaring at infinite speed over infinite range, perceiving all, and this is as close to godhood as a man is likely to come. The starstone provided none of the highly specific data that a Watcher’s trance yielded. In the full spell I could see nothing, nor could I identify my surroundings. I knew only that when I let myself be drawn into the stone’s effect, I was engulfed by something far larger than myself, that I was in direct contact with the matrix of the universe.
Call it communion with the Will.
From a great distance I heard Olmayne say, “Do you believe what some people say of these stones? That there is no communion, that it’s all an electrical deception?”
“I have no theory about that,” I said. “I am less interested in causes than in effects.”
Skeptics say that the starstones are nothing more than amplifying loops which bounce a man’s own brain-waves back into his mind; the awesome oceanic entity with which one comes in contact, these scoffers hold, is merely the thunderous recycling oscillation of a single shuttling electrical pulse beneath the roof of the Pilgrim’s own skull. Perhaps. Perhaps.
Olmayne extended the hand that gripped her stone. She said, “When you were among the Rememberers, Tomis, did you study the history of early religion? All through time, man has sought union with the infinite. Many religions—not all!—have held forth the hope of such a divine merging.”