Nightfall (novel)

28

The first thing of which Theremon became aware, after a long period of being aware of nothing at all, was that something huge and yellow was hanging over him in the sky.

It was an immense blazing golden ball. There was no way he could look at it for more than a fraction of a second, on account of its brilliance. Searing heat was coming from it in pulsing waves.

He huddled in a crouching position, head downward, and crossed his wrists in front of his eyes to protect himself from that great outpouring of heat and light overhead. What, he wondered, kept it up there? Why didn’t it simply fall?

If it falls, he thought, it will fall on me.

Where can I hide? How can I protect myself?

For a long moment he hunkered down where he was, hardly daring to think. Then, cautiously, he opened his eyes just a slit. The gigantic blazing thing was still there in the sky. It hadn’t moved an inch. It wasn’t going to fall on him.

He began to shiver despite the heat.

The dry, choking smell of smoke came to him. Something was burning, not very far away.

It was the sky, he thought. The sky was burning.

The golden thing is setting fire to the world.

No. No. There was another reason for the smoke. He would remember it in a moment, if only he could clear the haze out of his mind. The golden thing hadn’t caused the fires. It hadn’t even been here when the fires started. It was those other things, those cold glittering white things that filled the sky from end to end—they had done it, they had sent the Flames—

What were they called? The Stars. Yes, he thought.

The Stars.

And he began to remember, just a little, and he shivered again, a deep convulsive quiver. He remembered how it had been when the Stars came out, and his brain had turned to a marble and his lungs refused to pump air and his soul had screamed in the deepest of horror.

But the Stars were gone now. That bright golden thing was in the sky instead.

The bright golden thing?

Onos. That was its name. Onos, the sun. The main sun. One of—one of the six suns. Yes. Theremon smiled. Things were beginning to come back to him now. Onos belonged in the sky. The Stars did not. The sun, the kindly sun, good warm Onos. And Onos had returned. Therefore all was well with the world, even if some of the world seemed to be on fire.

Six suns? Then where were the other five?

He even remembered their names. Dovim, Trey, Patru, Tano, Sitha. And Onos made six. He saw Onos, all right—it was right above him, it seemed to fill half the sky. What about the rest? He stood up, a little shakily, still half afraid of the hot golden thing overhead, wondering now if perhaps he stood up too far he would touch it and be burned by it. No, no, that didn’t make any sense. Onos was good, Onos was kind. He smiled.

Looked around. Any more suns up there?

There was one. Very far off, very small. Not frightening, this one—the way the Stars had been, the way this fiery hot globe overhead was. Just a cheerful white dot in the sky, nothing more. Small enough to put in his pocket, almost, if he could only reach it.

Trey, he thought. That one is Trey. So its sister Patru ought to be somewhere nearby—

Yes. Yes, that’s it. Down there, in the corner of the sky, just to the left of Trey. Unless that one’s Trey, and the other one is Patru.

Well, he told himself, the names don’t matter. Which one is which, unimportant. Together they are Trey and Patru. And the big one is Onos. And the other three suns must be somewhere else right now, because I don’t see them. And my name is—

Theremon.

Yes. That’s right. I’m Theremon.

But there’s a number, too. He stood frowning, thinking about it, his family code, that’s what it was, a number he had known all his life, but what was it? What—was—it?

762.

Yes.

I am Theremon 762.

And then another, more complex thought followed smoothly along: I am Theremon 762 of the Saro City Chronicle.

Somehow that statement made him feel a little better, though it was full of mysteries for him.

Saro City? The Chronicle?

He almost knew what those words meant. Almost. He chanted them to himself. Saro saro saro. City city city. Chronicle chronicle chronicle. Saro City Chronicle.

Perhaps if I walk a little, he decided. He took a hesitant step, another, another. His legs were a little wobbly. Looking around, he realized that he was on a hillside out in the country somewhere. He saw a road, bushes, trees, a lake off to the left. Some of the bushes and trees seemed to have been ripped and broken, with branches dangling at odd angles or lying on the ground below them, as though giants had come trampling through this countryside recently.

Behind him was a huge round-topped building with smoke rising from a hole in its roof. The outside of the building was blackened as if fires had been set all around it, though its stone walls appeared to have withstood the flames well enough. He saw a few people lying scattered on the steps of the building, sprawled like discarded dolls. There were others lying in the bushes, and still others along the path leading down the hill. Some of them were faintly moving. Most were not.

He looked the other way. On the horizon he saw the towers of a great city. A heavy pall of smoke hung over them, and when he squinted he imagined that he could see tongues of flame coming from the windows of the tallest buildings, although something rational within his mind told him that it was impossible to make out any such detail at so great a distance. That city had to be miles away.

Saro City, he thought suddenly.

Where the Chronicle is published.

Where I work. Where I live.

And I’m Theremon. Yes. Theremon 762. Of the Saro City Chronicle.

He shook his head slowly from side to side, as some wounded animal might have done, trying to clear it of the haze and torpor that infested it. It was maddening, not being able to think properly, not being able to move around freely in the storehouse of his own memories. The brilliant light of the Stars lay like a wall across his mind, cutting him off from his own memories.

But things were beginning to get through. Colored fragments of the past, sharp-edged, shimmering with manic energy, were dancing around and around in his brain. He struggled to make them hold still long enough for him to comprehend them.

The image of a room came to him, then. His room, heaped with papers, magazines, a couple of computer terminals, a box of unanswered mail. Another room: a bed. The small kitchen that he almost never used. This, he thought, is the apartment of Theremon 762, the well-known columnist for the Saro City Chronicle. Theremon himself is not at home at this time, ladies and gentlemen. At the present moment Theremon is standing outside the ruins of the Saro University Observatory, trying to understand—

The ruins—

Saro University Observatory—

“Siferra?” he called. “Siferra, where are you?”

No answer. He wondered who Siferra was. Someone he must have known before the ruins were ruined, probably. The name had come bubbling up out of the depths of his troubled mind.

He took another few uncertain steps. There was a man lying under a bush a short distance downhill. Theremon went to him. His eyes were closed. He held a burned-out torch in his hand. His robe was torn.

Sleeping? Or was he dead? Theremon prodded him carefully with his foot. Yes, dead. That was strange, all these dead people lying around. You didn’t ordinarily see dead people everywhere like this, did you? And an overturned car over there—it looked dead, too, with its undercarriage turned pathetically toward the sky, and curls of smoke rising sluggishly from its interior.

“Siferra?” he called again.

Something terrible had happened. That seemed very clear to him, though hardly anything else did. Once again he crouched, and pressed his hands against the sides of his head. The random fragments of memory that had been jigging around in there were moving more slowly now, no longer engaged in a frantic dance: they had begun to float about in a stately fashion, like icebergs drifting in the Great Southern Ocean. If he could only get some of those drifting fragments to come together—force them into a pattern that made a little sense—

He reviewed what he had already managed to reconstruct. His name. The name of the city. The names of the six suns. The newspaper. His apartment.

Last evening—

The Stars—

Siferra—Beenay—Sheerin—Athor—names—

Abruptly things began to form connections in his mind.

The memory-fragments of his immediate past had finally started to reassemble themselves. But at first nothing yet made real sense, because each little cluster of memories was something independent unto itself, and he was unable to put them into any kind of coherent order. The harder he tried, the more confused everything became again. Once he understood that, he gave up the idea of trying to force anything.

Just relax, Theremon told himself. Let it happen naturally.

He had, he realized, suffered some great wound of the mind. Although he felt no bruises, no lumps on the back of his head, he knew that he must have been injured in some way. All his memories had been cut into a thousand pieces as though by a vengeful sword, and the pieces had been stirred and scattered like the pieces of some baffling puzzle. But he seemed to be healing, moment by moment. Moment by moment, the strength of his mind, the strength of the entity that was Theremon 762 of the Saro City Chronicle, was reasserting itself, putting him back together.

Stay calm. Wait. Let it happen naturally.

He drew in his breath, held it, slowly released it. Breathed in again. Hold, release. Breathe, hold, release. Breathe, hold, release.

In his mind’s eye he saw the interior of the Observatory. Remembering, now. It was evening. Only the little red sun was in the sky—Dovim, that was its name. That tall woman: she was Siferra. And the fat man was Sheerin, and the young slender earnest one, he was Beenay, and the fierce old man with the patriarchal mane of white hair was the great famous astronomer, the head of the Observatory—Ithor? Uthor? Athor, yes. Athor.

And the eclipse was coming. The Darkness. The Stars.

Oh, yes. Yes. It was all flowing together now. The memories returning. The mob outside the Observatory, led by fanatics in black robes: the Apostles of Flame, that’s what they were called. And one of the fanatics had been inside the Observatory. Folimun, his name was. Folimun 66.

He remembered.

The moment of totality. The sudden and complete descent of night. The world entering the Cave of Darkness.

The Stars—

The madness—the screaming—the mob—

Theremon winced at the recollection. The hordes of crazed, frightened people from Saro City breaking down the heavy doors, bursting into the Observatory, trampling each other in their rush to destroy the blasphemous scientific instruments and the blasphemous scientists who denied the reality of the gods—

Now that the memories came flooding back, he almost wished he had not recaptured them. The shock he had felt at the first moment of seeing the brilliant light of the Stars—the pain that had erupted within his skull—the strange horrific bursts of cold energy racing across his field of vision. And then the coming of the mob—that moment of frenzy—the struggle to escape—Siferra beside him, and Beenay nearby, and then the mob surging around them like a river in full spate, separating them, pulling them in opposite directions—

Into his mind came a single last glimpse of old Athor, his eyes bright and glazed with the wildness of utter madness, standing majestically on a chair, furiously ordering the intruders out of his building as though he were not merely the director of the Observatory but its king. And Beenay standing next to him, tugging at Athor’s arm, urging the old man to flee. Then the scene dissolved. He was no longer in the great room. Theremon saw himself swept down a corridor, scrambling for a staircase, looking around for Siferra, for anyone he knew—

The Apostle, the fanatic, Folimun 66, suddenly appearing before him, blocking his way in the midst of the chaos. Laughing, holding out a hand to him in a mocking gesture of false friendship. Then Folimun too had disappeared from sight, and Theremon continued frantically onward, down the spiral stairs, tumbling and stumbling, clambering over people from the city who were wedged so tightly together on the ground floor that they were unable to move. Out the door, somehow. Into the chill of night. Standing bareheaded, shivering, in the Darkness that was Darkness no longer, for everything was illuminated now by the terrible, hideous, unthinkable cold blaze of those thousands of merciless Stars that filled the sky.

There was no hiding from them. Even when you closed your eyes you saw their frightful light. Mere Darkness was nothing, compared with the implacable pressure of that heaven-spanning vault of unthinkable brilliance, a light so bright that it boomed in the sky like thunder.

Theremon remembered that he had felt as though the sky, Stars and all, was about to fall on him. He had knelt and covered his head with his hands, futile though he knew that to be. He remembered, too, the terror all about him, people rushing this way and that, the shrieking, the crying. The fires of the blazing city leaping high on the horizon. And above all else those hammering waves of fear descending from the sky, from the remorseless unforgiving Stars that had invaded the world.

That was all. Everything after that was blank, utterly blank, until the moment of his awakening, when he looked up to see Onos in the sky once more, and began to put back together the shards and slivers of his mind.

I am Theremon 762, he told himself again. I used to live in Saro City and write a column for the newspaper.

There was no Saro City any longer. There was no newspaper.

The world had come to an end. But he still lived, and his sanity, he hoped, was returning.

What now? Where to go?

“Siferra?” he called.

No one answered. Slowly he began to shuffle down the hill once more, past the broken trees, past the burned and overturned cars, past the scattered bodies. If this is what it looks like out here in the country, he thought, what must it be like in the city itself?

My God, he thought again.

All you gods! What have you done to us?

29

Sometimes cowardice has its advantages, Sheerin told himself, as he unbolted the door of the storeroom in the Observatory basement where he had spent the time of Darkness. He still felt shaky, but he had no doubt that he was still sane. As sane as he had ever been, at any rate.

It seemed quiet out there. And although the storeroom had no windows, enough light had managed to make its way through a grating high up along one of its walls so that he was fairly confident that morning had come, that the suns were in the sky again. Perhaps the madness had passed by this time. Perhaps it was safe for him to come out.

He poked his nose out into the hallway. Cautiously he looked around.

The smell of smoke was the first thing he perceived. But it was a stale, musty, nasty, damp, acrid kind of smoke-smell, the smell of a fire that has been extinguished. The Observatory was not only a building made of stone, but it had a highly efficient sprinkler system, which must have gone into operation as soon as the mob began setting fires.

The mob! Sheerin shuddered at the recollection.

The rotund psychologist knew that he would never forget the moment when that mob had come bursting into the Observatory. It would haunt him as long as he lived—those twisted, distorted faces, those berserk eyes, those howling cries of rage. These were people who had lost their fragile grip on sanity even before the totality of the eclipse. The deepening Darkness had been enough to push them over the edge—that, and the skillful rabble-rousing of the Apostles of Flame, triumphant now in their moment of fulfilled prophecy. So the mob had come, by the thousands, to root out the despised scientists in their lair; and there they were, now, rushing in, waving torches, clubs, brooms, anything at all with which they could hit, smash, ruin.

Paradoxically enough, it was the coming of the mob that had jolted Sheerin into being able to get a grip on himself. He had had a bad moment, back there when he and Theremon first went downstairs to barricade the doors. He had felt all right, even strangely buoyant, on the way down; but then the first reality of the Darkness had hit him, like a whiff of poison gas, and he had folded up completely. Sitting huddled up there on the stairs, cold with panic, remembering his trip through the Tunnel of Mystery and realizing that this time the trip would last not only a few minutes but for hour upon intolerable hour.

Well, Theremon had pulled him out of that one, and Sheerin had recovered some of his self-control as they returned to the upper level of the Observatory. But then came totality—and the Stars. Though Sheerin had turned his head away when that ungodly blast of light first came bursting through the opening in the Observatory roof, he had not been able completely to avoid the shattering sight of it. And for an instant he could feel his mind’s grip giving way—could feel the delicate thread of sanity beginning to sunder—

But then had come the mob, and Sheerin knew that the issue wasn’t simply one of preserving his sanity, any more. It was one of saving his life. If he wanted to survive this night he had no choice but to hold himself together and find a place of safety. Gone was his naive plan to observe the Darkness phenomena like the aloof, dispassionate scientist he pretended to be. Let someone else observe the Darkness phenomena. He was going to hide.

And so, somehow, he had made his way to the basement level, to that cheery little storeroom with its cheery little god-light casting a feeble but very comforting glow. And bolted the door, and waited it out.

He had even slept, a little.

And now it was morning. Or perhaps afternoon, for all he knew. One thing was certain: the terrible night was over, and everything was calm, at least in the vicinity of the Observatory. Sheerin tiptoed into the hall, paused, listened, started warily up the stairs.

Silence everywhere. Puddles of dirty water, from the sprinklers. The foul reek of old smoke.

He halted on the stairway and thoughtfully removed a firehatchet from a bracket on the wall. He doubted very much that he could ever bring himself to use a hatchet on another living thing; but it might be a useful thing to be carrying, if conditions outside were as anarchic as he expected to find them.

Up to the ground floor, now. Sheerin pulled the basement door open—the same door that he had slammed behind him in his frenzied downward flight the evening before—and looked out.

The sight that greeted him was horrifying.

The great hall of the Observatory was full of people, all scrambled together on the floor, sprawled every which way, as though some colossal drunken orgy had been going on all night. But these people weren’t drunk. Many of them lay twisted in ghastly impossible angles that only a corpse could have adopted. Others lay flat, stacked like discarded carpets in heaps two or three people high. They too seemed dead, or lost in the last unconsciousness of life. Still others were plainly alive, but sat whimpering and mewling like shattered things.

Everything that once had been on display in the great hall, the scientific instruments, the portraits of the great early astronomers, the elaborate astronomical charts, had been pulled down and burned or simply pulled apart and trampled. Sheerin could see the charred and battered remains jutting up here and there amidst the crush of bodies.

The main door was open. The warm and heartening glow of sunlight was visible beyond.

Carefully Sheerin picked his way through the chaos toward the exit.

“Dr. Sheerin?” a voice said suddenly, unexpectedly.

He whirled, brandishing his hatchet so fiercely that he came close to laughing at his own feigned belligerence.

“Who’s there?”

“Me. Yimot.”

“Who?”

“Yimot. You remember me, don’t you?”

“Yimot, yes.” The gangling, gawky young graduate astronomy student from some backwoods province. Sheerin saw the boy now, half hidden in an alcove. His face was blackened with ashes and soot and his clothing was torn, and he looked stunned and shaken, but he seemed otherwise to be all right. As he came forward, in fact, he moved in a far less comical way than usual, none of his jerky mannerisms, no wild swings of his arms or twitches of his head. Terror does strange things to people, Sheerin told himself.—“Have you been hiding here all through the night?”

“I tried to get out of the building when the Stars came, but I got jammed up in here. Have you seen Faro, Dr. Sheerin?”

“Your friend? No. I haven’t seen anyone.”

“We were together for a while. But then, with all the shoving and pushing, things got so wild—” Yimot managed an odd smile. “I thought they would burn the building down. But then the sprinklers came on.” He pointed at the townspeople who lay all around.—“Are they all dead, do you think?”

“Some of them are just insane. They saw the Stars.”

“I did too, just for a moment,” Yimot said. “Just for a moment.”

“What were they like?” Sheerin asked.

“You didn’t see them, Doctor? Or is it that you just don’t remember?”

“I was in the basement. Nice and snug.”

Yimot craned his long neck upward as though the Stars were still blazing in the ceiling of the hallway. “They were—awesome,” he whispered. “I know that doesn’t tell you anything, but that’s the only word I can use. I saw them only for two seconds, maybe three, and I could feel my mind spinning, I could feel the top of my head starting to lift off, so I looked away. Because I’m not very brave, Dr. Sheerin.”

“No. Neither am I.”

“But I’m glad I had those two or three seconds. The Stars are very frightening, but they’re also very beautiful. At least to an astronomer they are. They were nothing at all like those silly little pinpricks of light that Faro and I created in that stupid experiment of ours. We must be right in the middle of an immense cluster of them, you know. We have our six suns in a tight group close by us—some of them closer than others, I mean—and then farther back, five or ten light-years back, or more, there’s this whole giant sphere of Stars, which are suns, thousands of suns, a tremendous globe of suns completely enclosing us, but invisible to us normally because of the light of our own suns shining all the time. Just as Beenay said. Beenay’s a wonderful astronomer, you know. He’ll be greater than Dr. Athor some day.—You didn’t see the Stars at all?”

“Just the merest quick glimpse,” said Sheerin, a little sadly. “Then I went and hid.—Look, boy, we’ve got to get ourselves out of this place.”

“I’d like to try to find Faro first.”

“If he’s all right, he’s outside. If he isn’t, there’s nothing you can do for him.”

“But if he’s underneath one of those heaps—”

“No,” Sheerin said. “You can’t go poking around those people. They’re all still stunned, but if you provoke them there’s no telling what they’ll do. The safest thing is to get out of here. I’m going to try to make it to the Sanctuary. If you’re smart, you’ll come with me.”

“But Faro—”

“Very well,” Sheerin said, with a sigh. “Let’s look for Faro. Or Beenay, or Athor, or Theremon, any of the others.”

But it was hopeless. For perhaps ten minutes they picked through the heaps of dead and unconscious and semi-conscious people in the hallway; but none of them were university people. Their faces were appalling, horribly distorted by fear and madness. Some stirred when they were disturbed, and began to froth and mutter in a horrifying way. One snatched at Sheerin’s hatchet, and Sheerin had to use the butt end to push him away. It was impossible to ascend the stairs to the upper levels of the building; the staircase was blocked by bodies, and there was broken plaster everywhere. Pools of muddy water had collected on the floor. The harsh, piercing smell of smoke was intolerable.

“You’re right,” Yimot said finally. “We’d better go.”

Sheerin led the way, stepping out into the sunlight. After the hours that had just passed, golden Onos was the most welcome sight in the universe, though the psychologist found his eyes unaccustomed to so much bright light after the long hours of Darkness. It hit him with almost tangible force. For a few moments after he emerged he stood blinking, waiting for his eyes to readapt. After a time he was able to see, and gasped at what he saw.

“How awful,” Yimot murmured.

More bodies. Madmen wandering in circles, singing to themselves. Burned-out vehicles by the side of the road. The shrubbery and trees hacked up as though by blind monstrous forces. And, off in the distance, a ghastly pall of brown smoke rising above the spires of Saro City.

Chaos, chaos, chaos.

“So this is what the end of the world looks like,” Sheerin said quietly. “And here we are, you and I. Survivors.” He laughed bitterly. “What a pair we are. I’m carrying a hundred pounds too many around my middle and you’ve got a hundred pounds too few. But we’re still here. I wonder if Theremon made it out of there alive. If anyone did, he would have. But I wouldn’t have bet very much on you or me.—The Sanctuary’s midway between Saro City and the Observatory. We ought to be able to walk it in half an hour or so, if we don’t get into any trouble. Here, take this.”

He scooped up a thick gray billy-club that was lying beside one of the fallen rioters and tossed it to Yimot, who caught it clumsily and stared at it as though he had no idea what it might be.

“What will I do with it?” he asked finally.

Sheerin said, “Pretend that you’ll use it to bash in the skull of anybody that bothers us. Just as I’m pretending that I’d use this hatchet if I needed to defend myself. And if necessary I will. It’s a new world out here, Yimot. Come on. And keep your wits about you as we go.”

30

The Darkness was still upon the world, the Stars still were flooding Kalgash with their diabolical rivers of light, when Siferra 89 came stumbling out of the gutted Observatory building. But the faint pink glow of dawn was showing on the eastern horizon, the first hopeful sign that the suns might be returning to the heavens.

She stood on the Observatory lawn, legs far apart, head thrown back, pulling breath deep down into her lungs.

Her mind was numb. She had no idea how many hours had passed since the sky had turned dark and the Stars had erupted into view like the blast of a million trumpets. All the night long she had wandered the corridors of the Observatory in a daze, unable to find her way out, struggling with the madmen who swarmed about her on all sides. That she had gone mad too was not something she stopped to think about. The only thing on her mind was survival: beating back the hands that clutched at her; parrying the swinging clubs with blows of the club that she herself had snatched up from a fallen man; avoiding the screaming, surging stampedes of maniacs who rumbled arm in arm in groups of six or eight through the hallways, trampling everyone in their way.

It seemed to her that there were a million townsfolk loose in the Observatory. Wherever she turned she saw distended faces, bulging eyes, gaping mouths, lolling tongues, fingers crooked into monstrous claws.

They were smashing everything. She had no idea where Beenay was, or Theremon. She vaguely remembered seeing Athor in the midst of ten or twenty bellowing hoodlums, his thick mane of white hair rising above them—and then seeing him go down, swept under and out of sight.

Beyond that Siferra remembered nothing very clearly. For the whole duration of the eclipse she had run back and forth, up one hallway and down the other like a rat caught in a maze. She had never really been familiar with the layout of the Observatory, but getting out of the building should not have been that difficult for her—if she had been sane. Now, though, with the Stars blazing relentlessly at her out of every window, it was as if an icepick had been driven through her brain. She could not think. She could not think. She could not think. All she could do was run this way and that, shoving leering gibbering fools aside, shouldering her way through clotted gangs of ragged strangers, searching desperately and ineffectually and futilely for one of the main exits. And so it went, for hour after hour, as though she were caught in a dream that would not end.

Now, at last, she was outside. She didn’t know how she had gotten there. Suddenly there had been a door in front of her, at the end of a corridor that she was sure she had traversed a thousand times before. She pushed and it yielded and a cool blast of fresh air struck her, and she staggered through.

The city was burning. She saw the flames far away, a bright furious red stain against the dark background of sky.

She heard screams, sobs, wild laughter from all sides.

Below her, a little way down the hillside, some men were mindlessly pulling down a tree—tugging at its branches, straining fiercely, ripping its roots loose from the ground by sheer force. She couldn’t guess why. Probably neither could they.

In the Observatory parking lot, other men were tipping cars over. Siferra wondered whether one of those cars might be hers. She couldn’t remember. She couldn’t remember very much at all. Remembering her name was something of an effort.

“Siferra,” she said aloud. “Siferra 89. Siferra 89.”

She liked the sound of that. It was a good name. It had been her mother’s name—or her grandmother’s, perhaps. She wasn’t really sure.

“Siferra 89,” she said again. “I am Siferra 89.”

She tried to remember her address. No. A jumble of meaningless numbers.

“Look at the Stars!” a woman screamed, rushing past her. “Look at the Stars and die!”

“No,” Siferra replied calmly. “Why should I want to die?”

But she looked at the Stars all the same. She was almost getting used to the sight of them now. They were like very bright lights—very bright—so close together in the sky that they seemed to merge, to form a single mass of brilliance, like a kind of shining cloak that had been draped across the heavens. When she looked for more than a second or two at a time she thought she could make out individual points of light, brighter than those around them, pulsing with a bizarre vigor. But the best that she could manage was to look for five or six seconds; then the force of all that pulsating light would overwhelm her, making her scalp tingle and her face turn burning hot, and she would have to lower her head and rub her fingers against the fiery, throbbing, angry place of pain between her eyes.

She walked through the parking lot, ignoring the frenzy going on all about her, and emerged on the far side, where a paved road led along a level ridge on the flank of Observatory Mount. From some still-functioning region of her mind came the information that this was the road from the Observatory to the main part of the university campus. Up ahead, Siferra could see some of the taller buildings of the university now.

Flames were dancing on the roofs of some of them. The bell tower was burning, and the theater, and the Hall of Student Records.

You ought to save the tablets, said a voice within her mind that she recognized as her own.

Tablets? What tablets?

The Thombo tablets.

Oh. Yes, of course. She was an archaeologist, wasn’t she? Yes. Yes. And what archaeologists did was dig for ancient things. She had been digging in a place far away. Sagimot? Beklikan? Something like that. And had found tablets, prehistoric texts. Ancient things, archaeological things. Very important things. In a place called Thombo.

How am I doing? she asked herself.

And the answer came: You’re doing fine.

She smiled. She was feeling better moment by moment. It was the pink light of dawn on the horizon that was healing her, she thought. The morning was coming: the sun, Onos, entering the sky. As Onos rose, the Stars became less bright, less terrifying. They were fading fast. Already those in the east were dimmed by Onos’s gathering strength. Even at the opposite end of the sky, where Darkness still reigned and the Stars thronged like minnows in a pool, some of the intensity was starting to go from their formidable gleam. She could look at the sky for several moments at a stretch now without feeling her head begin to throb painfully. And she was feeling less confused. She remembered clearly now where she lived, and where she worked, and what she had been doing the evening before.

At the Observatory—with her friends, the astronomers, who had predicted the eclipse—

The eclipse—

That was what she had been doing, she realized. Waiting for the eclipse. For the Darkness. For the Stars.

Yes. For the Flames, Siferra thought. And there they were. Everything had happened right on schedule. The world was burning, as it had burned so many times before—set ablaze not by the hand of the gods, nor by the power of the Stars, but by ordinary men and women, Star-crazed, cast into a desperate panic that urged them to restore the normal light of day by any means they could find.

Despite the chaos all around her, though, she remained calm. Her injured mind, numbed, all but stupefied, was unable to respond fully to the cataclysm that Darkness had brought. She walked on and on, down the road, into the main quadrangle of the campus, past scenes of horrifying devastation and destruction, and felt no shock, no regret for what had been lost, no fear of the difficult times that must lie ahead. Not enough of her mind was restored yet for such feelings. She was a pure observer, tranquil, detached. The blazing building over there, she knew, was the new university library that she had helped to plan. But the sight of it stirred no emotion in her. She could just as well have been walking through some two-thousand-year-old site whose doom was a cut-and-dried matter of historical record. It would never have occurred to her to weep for a two-thousand-year-old ruin. It did not occur to her to weep now, as the university went up in flames all around her.

She was in the middle of the campus now, retracing familiar paths. Some of the buildings were on fire, some were not. Like a sleepwalker she turned left past the Administration building, right at the Gymnasium, left again at Mathematics, and zigzagged past Geology and Anthropology to her own headquarters, the Hall of Archaeology. The front door stood open. She went in.

The building seemed almost untouched. Some of the display cases in the lobby were smashed, but not by looters, since all the artifacts appeared still to be there. The elevator door had been wrenched off its hinges. The bulletin board next to the stairs was on the floor. Otherwise everything apparently was intact. She heard no sounds. The place was empty.

Her office was on the second floor. On the way up the stairs she came upon the body of an old man lying face upward at the first-floor landing. “I think I know you,” Siferra said. “What’s your name?” He didn’t answer. “Are you dead? Tell me: yes or no.” His eyes were open, but there was no light in them. Siferra pressed her finger against his cheek. “Mudrin, that’s your name. Or was. Well, you were very old anyway.” She shrugged and continued upward.

The door to her office was unlocked. There was a man inside.

He looked familiar too; but this one was alive, crouching against the file cabinets in a peculiar huddled way. He was a burly, deep-chested man with powerful forearms and broad, heavy cheekbones. His face was bright with sweat and his eyes had a feverish gleam.

“Siferra? You here?”

“I came to get the tablets,” she told him. “The tablets are very important. They have to be protected.”

He rose from his crouch and took a couple of uncertain steps toward her. “The tablets? The tablets are gone, Siferra! The Apostles stole them, remember?”

“Gone?”

“Gone, yes. Like your mind. You’re out of your mind, aren’t you? Your face is blank. There’s nobody home behind your eyes. I can see that. You don’t even know who I am.”

“You are Balik,” she said, the name coming unbidden to her lips.

“So you do remember.”

“Balik. Yes. And Mudrin is on the stairs. Mudrin is dead, do you know that?”

Balik shrugged. “I suppose. We’ll all be dead in a little while. The whole world’s gone crazy out there. But why am I bothering to tell you that? You’re crazy too.” His lips trembled. His hands shook. An odd little giggle burst from him, and he clenched his jaws as though to suppress it. “I’ve been here all through the Darkness. I was working late, and when the lights started to fail—my God,” he said, “the Stars, the Stars. I had just one quick look at them. And then I got under the desk and stayed there through the whole thing.” He went to the window. “But Onos is coming up now. The worst must be over.—Is everything on fire out there, Siferra?”

“I came for the tablets,” she said again.

“They’re gone.” He spelled the word out for her. “Do you understand me? Gone. Not here. Stolen.”

“Then I will take the charts that we made,” she said. “I must protect knowledge.”

“Absolutely crazy, aren’t you? Where were you, the Observatory? Got a good view of the Stars, did you?” He giggled again and started to cut diagonally across the room, moving closer to her. Siferra’s face twisted with disgust. She could smell the odor of his sweat now, sharp and harsh and disagreeable. He smelled as if he hadn’t bathed in a week. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in a month. “Come here,” he said, as she backed away from him. “I won’t hurt you.”

“I want the charts, Balik.”

“Sure. I’ll give you the charts. And the photographs and everything. But first I’m going to give you something else. Come here, Siferra.”

He reached for her and pulled her toward him. She felt his hands on her breasts and the roughness of his cheek against her face. The smell of him was unbearable. Fury rose in her. How dare he touch her like this? Brusquely she pushed him away.

“Hey, don’t do that, Siferra! Come on. Be nice. For all we know, there’s just the two of us in the world. You and me, we’ll live in the forest and hunt little animals and gather nuts and berries. Hunters and gatherers, yes, and later on we’ll invent agriculture.” He laughed. His eyes looked yellow in the strange light. His skin seemed yellow too. Again he reached for her, hungrily, one cupped hand seizing one of her breasts, the other sliding down her back toward the base of her spine. He put his face down against the side of her throat and nuzzled her noisily like some kind of animal. His hips were heaving and thrusting against her in a revolting way. At the same time he began to force her backward toward the corner of the room.

Suddenly Siferra remembered the club that she had picked up somewhere during the night in the Observatory building. She was still holding it, loosely dangling in her hand. Swiftly she brought it upward and rammed the top of it against the point of Balik’s chin, hard. His head snapped up and back, his teeth clattered together.

He let go of her and lurched a few steps backward. His eyes were wide with surprise and pain. His lip was split where he had bitten into it, and blood was pouring down on one side.

“Hey, you bitch! What did you want to hit me for?”

“You touched me.”

“Damn right I touched you! And about time, too.” He rubbed his jaw. “Listen, Siferra, put that stick down and stop looking at me that way. I’m your friend. Your ally. The world has turned into a jungle now, and there’s just the two of us. We need each other. It isn’t safe trying to go it alone now. You can’t afford to risk it.”

Again he came toward her, hands upraised, seeking her.

She hit him again.

This time she brought the club around and smashed it against the side of his cheek, connecting with bone. There was an audible sharp sound of impact, and Balik jerked to one side under the force of it. With his head turned halfway away from her, he looked at her in utter astonishment and staggered back. But he was still standing. She hit him a third time, above his ear, swinging the club with all her strength in a long arc. As he fell, Siferra clubbed him once more, in the same place, and felt everything give beneath the blow. His eyes closed and he made a strange soft sound, like an inflated balloon releasing its air, and sank down in the corner against the wall, with his head going one way and his shoulders the other.

“Don’t ever touch me like that again,” Siferra said, prodding him with the tip of the club. Balik didn’t reply. He didn’t move, either.

Balik ceased to concern her.

Now for the tablets, she thought, feeling wonderfully calm.

No. The tablets were gone, Balik had said. Stolen. And she remembered now: they really were. They had disappeared just before the eclipse. All right, the charts then. All those fine drawings they had made of the Hill of Thombo. The stone walls, the ashes at the foundation lines. Those ancient fires, just like the fire that was ravaging Saro City at this very moment.

Where were they?

Oh. Here. In the chart cabinet, where they belonged.

She reached in, grabbed a sheaf of the parchment-like papers, rolled them, tucked them under her arm. Now she remembered the fallen man, and glanced at him. But Balik still hadn’t moved. He didn’t look as though he was going to, either.

Out the office door, down the stairs. Mudrin remained where he had been before, sprawled out motionless and stiff on the landing. Siferra ran around him and continued to the ground floor.

Outside, the morning was well along. Onos was climbing steadily and the Stars were pale now against its brightness. The air seemed fresher and cleaner, though the odor of smoke was thick on the breeze. Down by the Mathematics building she saw a band of men smashing windows. They caught sight of her a moment later and shouted to her, raucous, incoherent words. A couple of them began to run toward her.

Her breast ached where Balik had squeezed it. She didn’t want any more hands touching her now. Turning, Siferra darted behind the Archaeology building, pushed her way through the bushes on the far side of the pathway in back, ran diagonally across a lawn, and found herself in front of a blocky gray building that she recognized as Botany. There was a small botanical garden behind it, and an experimental arboretum on the hillside beyond that, at the edge of the forest that encircled the campus.

Looking back, Siferra thought she saw the men still pursuing her, though she couldn’t be sure. She sprinted past the Botany building and easily leaped the low fence around the botanical garden.

A man riding a mowing machine waved at her. He wore the olive-drab uniform of the university gardeners; and he was methodically mowing the bushes, cutting a wide swath of destruction back and forth across the center of the garden. He was chuckling to himself as he worked.

Siferra went around him. From there it was a short run into the arboretum. Were they still following her? She didn’t want to take the time to glance behind her. Just run, run, run, that was the best idea. Her long, powerful legs carried her easily between the rows of neatly planted trees. She moved in steady strides. It felt good, running like this. Running. Running.

Then she came to a rougher zone of the arboretum, all brambles and thorns, everything tightly interwoven. Unhesitatingly Siferra plunged into it, knowing no one would go after her there. The branches clawed at her face, ripped at her clothing. As she pushed her way through one dense patch she lost her grip on the roll of charts, and emerged on the far side without them.

Let them go, she thought. They don’t mean anything any more anyway.

But now she had to rest. Panting, gasping with exhaustion, she vaulted across a little stream at the border of the arboretum and dropped down on a patch of cool green moss. No one had followed her. She was alone.

She looked up, through the tops of the trees. The golden light of Onos flooded the sky. The Stars could no longer be seen. The night was over at last, and the nightmare too.

No, she thought. The nightmare is just beginning.

Waves of shock and nausea rolled through her. The strange numbness that had afflicted her mind all through the night was beginning to lift. After hours of mental dissociation, she was starting to comprehend the patterns of things again, to put one event and another and another together and understand their meaning. She thought of the campus in ruins, and the flames rising above the distant city. The wandering madmen everywhere, the chaos, the devastation.

Balik. The ugly grin on his face as he tried to paw her. And the look of amazement on it when she had hit him.

I’ve killed a man today, Siferra thought in astonishment and dismay. Me. How could I ever have done a thing like that?

She began to tremble. The horrifying memory seared her mind: the sound the club had made when she hit him, the way Balik had staggered backward, the other blows, the blood, the twisted angle of his head. The man with whom she had worked for a year and a half, patiently digging out the ruins at Beklimot, falling like a slaughtered beast under her deadly bludgeoning. And her utter calmness as she stood over him afterward—her satisfaction at having prevented him from annoying her any more. That was perhaps the ghastliest part of it all.

Then Siferra told herself that what she had killed hadn’t been Balik, but only a madman inside Balik’s body, wild-eyed and drooling as he clawed and fondled her. Nor had she really been Siferra when she wielded that club, but a ghost-Siferra, a dream-Siferra, sleepwalking through the horrors of the dawn.

Now, though, sanity was returning. Now the full impact of the night’s events was coming home to her. Not just Balik’s death—she would not let herself feel guilt for that—but the death of an entire civilization.

She heard voices in the distance, back in the direction of the campus. Thick, bestial voices, the voices of those whose minds had been destroyed by the Stars and would never again be whole. She searched for her club. Had she lost that too, in her frenzied flight through the arboretum? No. No, here it was. Siferra grasped it and rose to her feet.

The forest seemed to beckon to her. She turned and fled into its cool dark groves.

And went on running as long as her strength held out.

What else was there to do but go on running? Running. Running.

31

It was late afternoon, the third day since the eclipse. Beenay came limping down the quiet country road that led to the Sanctuary, moving slowly and carefully, looking about him in all directions. There were three suns shining in the sky, and the Stars had long since returned to their age-old obscurity. But the world had irrevocably changed in those three days. And so had Beenay.

This was the young astronomer’s first full day of restored reasoning power. What he had been doing for the two previous days he had no clear idea. The whole period was simply a blur, punctuated by the rising and setting of Onos, with other suns wandering across the sky now and then. If someone had told him that this was the fourth day since the catastrophe, or the fifth or sixth, Beenay would not have been able to disagree.

His back was sore, his left leg was a mass of bruises, and there were blood-encrusted scratches along the side of his face. He hurt everywhere, though the pain of the early hours had given way by now to dull aches of half a dozen different kinds radiating from various parts of his body.

What had been happening? Where had he been?

He remembered the battle in the Observatory. He wished he could forget it. That howling, screaming horde of crazed townspeople breaking down the door—a handful of robed Apostles were with them, but mainly they were just ordinary people, probably good, simple, boring people who had spent their whole lives doing the good, simple, boring things that kept civilization operating. Now, suddenly, civilization had stopped operating and all those pleasant ordinary people had been transformed in the twinkling of an eye into raging beasts.

The moment when they came pouring in—how terrible that had been. Smashing the cameras that had just recorded the priceless data of the eclipse, ripping the tube of the great solar-scope out of the Observatory roof, raising computer terminals high over their heads and dashing them to the floor—

And Athor rising like a demigod above them, ordering them to leave—! One might just as well have ordered the tides of the ocean to turn back.

Beenay remembered imploring Athor to come away with him, to flee while there still might be a chance. “Let go of me, young man!” Athor had roared, hardly seeming even to recognize him. “Get your hands off me, sir!” And then Beenay had realized what he should have seen before: that Athor had gone insane, and that the small part of Athor’s mind that was still capable of functioning rationally was eager for death. What was left of Athor had lost all will to survive—to go forth into the dreadful new world of the post-eclipse barbarism. That was the most tragic single thing of all, Beenay thought: the destruction of Athor’s will to live, the great astronomer’s hopeless surrender in the face of this holocaust of civilization.

And then—the escape from the Observatory. That was the last thing that Beenay remembered with any degree of confidence: looking back at the main Observatory room as Athor disappeared beneath a swarm of rioters, then turning, darting through a side door, scrambling down the fire escape, out the back way into the parking lot—

Where the Stars were waiting for him in all their terrible majesty.

With what he realized later had been sublime innocence, or else self-confidence verging on arrogance, Beenay had totally underestimated their power. In the Observatory at the moment of their emergence he had been too preoccupied with his work to be vulnerable to their force: he had merely noted them as a remarkable occurrence, to be examined in detail when he had a free moment, and then had gone on with what he was doing. But out here, under the merciless vault of the open sky, the Stars had struck him in their fullest might.

He was stunned by the sight of them. The implacable cold light of those thousands of suns descended upon him and knocked him groveling to his knees. He crawled along the ground, choking with fear, sucking in sharp gasps of breath. His hands were shaking feverishly, his heart was palpitating, streams of sweat were running down his burning face. When some shred of the scientist he once had been motivated him to turn his face toward that colossal brilliance overhead, so that he could examine and analyze and record, he was compelled to hide his eyes after only a second or two.

He could remember that much: the struggle to look at the Stars, his failure, his defeat.

After that, everything was murky. A day or two, he guessed, of wandering in the forest. Voices in the distance, cackling laughter, harsh discordant singing. Fires crackling on the horizon; the bitter smell of smoke everywhere. Kneeling to plunge his face in a brook, cool swift water sweeping along his cheek. A pack of small animals surrounding him—not wild ones, Beenay decided afterward, but household pets that had escaped—and baying at him as though they meant to rip him apart.

Pulling berries off a vine. Climbing a tree to strip it of tender golden fruit, and falling off, landing with a disastrous thud. The long hours of pain before he could pick himself up and move onward.

A sudden furious fight in the deepest, darkest part of the woods—fists flailing, elbows jabbing into ribs, wild kicks, then stone-throwing, bestial screeching, a man’s face pushed close up against his own, eyes red as flame, fierce wrestling, the two of them rolling over and over—reaching for a massive rock, bringing it down in a single decisive motion—

Hours. Days. A feverish daze.

Then, on the morning of the third day, remembering finally who he was, what had happened. Thinking of Raissta, his contract-mate. Remembering that he had promised to go to her at the Sanctuary when his work at the Observatory was done.

The Sanctuary—now where was that?

Beenay’s mind had healed enough for him to recall that the place of refuge that the university people had established for themselves was midway between the campus and Saro City, in an open, rural area of rolling plains and grassy meadows. The Physics Department’s old particle accelerator was there, a vast underground chamber, abandoned a few years back when they had built the new research center at Saro Heights. It hadn’t been difficult to equip the echoing concrete rooms for short-term occupation by several hundred people, and, since the accelerator site had always been sealed off from easy access for security reasons, it was no problem to make the site safe against any sort of invasion by townsfolk who might be driven insane during the eclipse.

But in order to find the Sanctuary, Beenay first had to find out where he was. And he had been wandering randomly in a dismal stupor for at least two days, perhaps more. He could be anywhere.

In the early morning hours he found his way out of the forest, almost by accident, stepping forth unexpectedly into what had once been a neatly laid out residential district. It was deserted now, and in frightening disarray, with cars piled up every which way in the streets where their owners had left them when they no longer were capable of driving, and the occasional body lying in the street under a black cluster of flies. There was no sign that anyone was alive here.

He spent a long morning trudging along a suburban highway lined by blackened, abandoned homes, without recognizing a single familiar landmark. At midday, as Trey and Patru rose into the sky, he entered a house through its open door and helped himself to whatever food he could find that had not spoiled. No water came out of the kitchen tap; but he found a cache of bottled water in the basement and drank as much of that as he could hold. He bathed himself in the rest.

Afterward he proceeded up a winding road to a hilltop cul-de-sac of spacious, imposing dwellings, every one of them burned to a shell. Nothing at all was left of the uppermost house except a hillside patio decorated with pink and blue tiles, no doubt very handsome once, but marred now by thick black lumps of clotted debris scattered along its gleaming surface. With difficulty he made his way out onto it and looked out into the valley beyond.

The air was very still. No planes were aloft, there was no sound of ground traffic, a weird silence resounded from every direction.

Suddenly Beenay knew where he was, and everything fell into place.

The university was visible off to his left, a handsome cluster of brick buildings, many of them now streaked with black smoke-stains and some seeming to be altogether destroyed. Beyond, on its high promontory, was the Observatory. Beenay glanced at it quickly and looked away, glad that at this distance he was unable to make out its condition very clearly.

Far away to his right was Saro City, gleaming in the bright sunlight. To his eyes it seemed almost untouched. But he knew that if he had a pair of field glasses he would surely see shattered windows, fallen buildings, still-glowing embers, rising wisps of smoke, all the scars of the conflagration that had broken out at Nightfall.

Straight below him, between the city and the campus, was the forest in which he had been wandering during the time of his delirium. The Sanctuary would be just on the far side of that; he might well have passed within a few hundred yards of its entrance a day or so ago, all unknowing.

The thought of crossing that forest again did not appeal to him. Surely it was still full of madmen, cutthroats, irate escaped pets, all manner of troublesome things. But from his vantage point on the hilltop he could see the road that cut across the forest, and the pattern of streets that led to the road. Stick to paved routes, he told himself, and you’ll be all right.

And so he was. Onos was still in the sky when he completed the traversal of the forest highway and turned onto the small rural road that he knew led to the Sanctuary. Afternoon shadows had barely begun to lengthen when he came to the outer gate. Once past that, Beenay knew, he had to go down a long unpaved road that would take him to the second gate, and thence around a couple of outbuildings to the sunken entrance to the Sanctuary itself.

The outer gate, a high metal-mesh screen, was standing open when he reached it. That was an unexpected and ominous sight. Had the mob come roaring in here too?

But there was no sign of mob destruction. Everything was as it should be, except that the gate was open. He went on in, puzzled, and made his way down the unpaved road.

The inner gate, at least, was closed.

“I am Beenay 25,” he said to it, and gave his university identification-code number. Moments passed, and lengthened into minutes, and nothing happened. The green scanner eye overhead seemed to be working—he saw its lens sliding from side to side—but perhaps the computers that operated it had lost their power, or had been smashed altogether. He waited. He waited some more. “I am Beenay 25,” he said again, finally, and gave his number a second time. “I am authorized to enter here.” Then he remembered that mere name and number were not enough: there was a password to say, also.

But what was it? Panic churned his soul. He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember. How absurd, finally to have found his way here and then be stranded at the outer gate by his own stupidity!

The password—the password—

Something to do with the catastrophe, that was it. “Eclipse?” No, not that. He wracked his aching brain. “Kalgash Two?” Didn’t seem right. “Dovim?” “Onos?” “Stars?”

That was closer.

Then it came to him.

“Nightfall,” he said triumphantly.

Still nothing happened, at least not for a long while.

But then, what seemed like a thousand years later, the gate opened to admit him.

He zigzagged past the outbuildings and confronted the oval metal door of the Sanctuary itself, set at a forty-five-degree angle into the ground. Another green eye studied him here. Did he have to identify himself all over? Evidently he did. “I am Beenay 25,” he said, preparing for another long wait.

But the gate began immediately to roll back. He stared down into the Sanctuary’s concrete-floored vestibule.

Raissta 717 was waiting for him there, scarcely ten yards away.

“Beenay!” she cried, and came rushing toward him. “Oh, Beenay, Beenay—”

Since they had first become contract-mates, two years earlier, they had never been apart longer than eighteen hours. Now they had been separated for days. He pulled her slim form up against him and held her tight, and it was a long while before he would release her.

Then he realized they were still standing in the open gateway of the Sanctuary.

“Shouldn’t we go in and lock the gate behind us?” he asked. “What if I’ve been followed? I don’t think I was, but—”

“It doesn’t matter. There’s no one else here.”

“What?”

“They all went yesterday,” she said. “As soon as Onos came up. They wanted me to come too, but I said I was going to wait for you, and I did.”

He gaped at her, uncomprehendingly.

He saw now how weary and haggard she looked, how drawn and thin. Her once-lustrous hair was hanging in unkempt strings and her face was pale, unadorned. Her eyes were reddened and puffy. She seemed to have aged five or ten years.

“Raissta, how long has it been since the eclipse?”

“This is the third day.”

“Three days. That was more or less what I figured.” His voice echoed strangely. He glanced past her, into the deserted Sanctuary. The bare underground chamber stretched on and on, lit by a track of overhead bulbs. He saw no one as far as his eye could reach. He hadn’t expected this, not at all. The plan had been for everyone to stay hidden down here until it was safe to emerge. In wonder he said, “Where have they gone?”

“Amgando,” Raissta said.

“Amgando National Park? But that’s hundreds of miles from here! Were they crazy, coming out of hiding on only the second day and going marching off to some place halfway across the country? Do you have any idea what’s going on out there, Raissta?”

Amgando Park was a nature preserve, far to the south, a place where wild animals roamed, where the native plants of the province were jealously protected. Beenay had been there once, when a boy, with his father. It was almost pure wilderness, with a few hiking trails cut into it.

She said, “They thought it would be safer to go there.”

“Safer?”

“Word came that everyone who was still sane, everybody who wanted to take part in the rebuilding of society, should rendezvous at Amgando. Apparently people are converging on it from all over, thousands of them. From other universities, mostly. And some government people.”

“Fine. A whole horde of professors and politicians trampling around in the park. With everything else ruined, why not ruin the last bit of unspoiled territory we have, too?”

“That isn’t important, Beenay. The important thing is that Amgando Park is in the hands of sane people, it’s an enclave of civilization in the general madness. And they knew about us, they were asking us to come join them. We took a vote, and it was two to one to go.”

“Two to one,” said Beenay darkly. “Even though you people didn’t see the Stars, you managed to go nuts anyway! Imagine leaving the Sanctuary to take a three-hundred-mile stroll—or is it five hundred?—through the utter chaos that’s going on. Why not wait a month, or six months, or whatever? You had enough food and water to hold out here for a year.”

“We said the same thing,” Raissta replied. “But what they told us, the Amgando people, was that the time to come was now. If we waited another few weeks, the roving bands of crazed men out there would coalesce into organized armies under local warlords, and we’d have to deal with them when we came out. And if we waited any longer than a few weeks, the Apostles of Flame would probably have established a repressive new government, with its own police force and army, and we’d be intercepted the moment we stepped outside the Sanctuary. It’s now or never, the Amgando people said. Better to have to contend with scattered half-insane free-lance bandits than with organized armies. So we decided to go.”

“Everyone but you.”

“I wanted to wait for you.”

He took her hand. “How did you know I’d come?”

“You said you would. As soon as you were finished photographing the eclipse. You always keep your promises, Beenay.”

“Yes,” Beenay said, in a remote tone of voice. He had not yet recovered from the shock of finding the Sanctuary empty. It had been his hope to rest here, to heal his bruised body, to complete the job of restoring his Stars-shattered mind. What were they supposed to do now, set up housekeeping here by themselves, just the two of them in this echoing concrete vault? Or try to get to Amgando all alone? The decision to vacate the Sanctuary made a sort of crazy sense, Beenay supposed—assuming it made any sense at all for everyone to collect at Amgando, it was probably better to make the journey now, while the countryside was in such a high degree of disorder, than to wait until new political entities, whether Apostles or private regional buccaneers, clamped down on all travel between districts. But he had wanted to find his friends here—to sink down into a community of familiar people until he had recovered from the shock of the past few days. Dully he said, “Do you have any real idea of what’s going on out there, Raissta?”

“We got reports by communicator, until the communicator channels broke down. Apparently the city was almost completely destroyed by fire, and the university was badly damaged also—that’s all true, isn’t it?”

Beenay nodded. “So far as I know, it is. I escaped from the Observatory just as a mob came smashing in. Athor was killed, I’m pretty sure. All the equipment was wrecked—all our observations of the eclipse were ruined—”

“Oh, Beenay, I’m so sorry.”

“I managed to get out the back way. The moment I was outside, the Stars hit me like a ton of bricks. Two tons. You can’t imagine what it was like, Raissta. I’m glad you can’t imagine it. I was out of my mind for a couple of days, roaming around in the woods. There’s no law left. It’s everybody for himself. I may have killed someone in a fight. People’s household animals are running wild—the Stars must have made them crazy too—and they’re terrifying.”

“Beenay, Beenay—”

“All the houses are burned. This morning I came through that fancy neighborhood on the hill just south of the forest—Onos Point, is that what it’s called?—and it was unbelievable, the destruction. Not a living soul to be seen. Wrecked cars, bodies in the streets, the houses in ruins—my God, Raissta, what a night of madness! And the madness is still going on!”

“You sound all right,” she said. “Shaken, but not—”

“Crazy? But I was. From the moment I first came out under the Stars until I woke up today. Then things finally began to knit back together in my head. But I think it’s much worse for most other people. The ones who hadn’t the slightest degree of emotional preparation, the ones who simply looked up and— bam!—the suns were gone, the Stars were shining. As your Uncle Sheerin said, there’ll be a whole range of responses, from short-term disorientation to total and permanent insanity.”

Quietly Raissta said, “Sheerin was with you at the Observatory during the eclipse, wasn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“And afterward?”

“I don’t know. I was busy overseeing the photographing of the eclipse. I don’t have any idea what became of him. He didn’t seem to be in sight when the mob broke in.”

With a faint smile Raissta said, “Perhaps he slipped away in the confusion. Uncle is like that—very quick on his feet, sometimes, when there’s trouble. I’d hate to have had anything bad happen to him.”

“Raissta, something bad has happened to the whole world. Athor may have had the right idea: better just to let it sweep over you and carry you away. That way you don’t have to contend with worldwide insanity and chaos.”

“You mustn’t say that, Beenay.”

“No. No, I mustn’t.” He came up behind her and lightly stroked her shoulders. Bent forward, softly nuzzled behind her ear.—“Raissta, what are we going to do?”

“I think I can guess,” she said.

Despite everything, he laughed. “I mean afterward.”

“Let’s worry about that afterward,” she told him.

32

Theremon had never been much of an outdoorsman. He thought of himself as a city boy through and through. Grass, trees, fresh air, the open sky—he didn’t actually mind them, but they held no particular appeal for him. For years his life had shuttled along a fixed urban-based triangular orbit, rigidly following a familiar path bounded at one corner by his little apartment, at another by the Chronicle office, by the Six Suns Club at the third.

Now, suddenly, he was a forest-dweller.

The strange thing was that he almost liked it.

What the citizens of Saro City called “the forest” was actually a fair-sized woodsy tract that began just southeast of the city itself and stretched for a dozen miles or so along the south bank of the Seppitan River. There once had been a great deal more of it, a vast wilderness sweeping on a great diagonal across the midsection of the province almost to the sea, but most of it had gone to agriculture, much of the remainder had been cut up into suburban residential districts, and the university had taken a goodly nip some fifty years back for what was then its new campus. Unwilling to have itself engulfed by urban development, the university had then agitated to have what was left set aside as a park preserve. And since the rule in Saro City for many years had been that whatever the university wanted the university usually got, the last strip of the old wilderness was left alone.

That was where Theremon found himself living now.

The first two days had been very bad. His mind was still half fogged by the effects of seeing the Stars, and he was unable to form any clear plan. The main thing was just to stay alive.

The city was on fire—smoke was everywhere, the air was scorching hot, from certain vantage points you could even see the leaping flames dancing along the rooftops—so obviously it wasn’t a good idea to try to go back there. In the aftermath of the eclipse, once the chaos within his mind had begun to clear a little, he had simply continued downhill from the campus until he found himself entering the forest.

Many others plainly had done the same thing. Some of them looked like university people, others were probably remnants of the mob that had come out to storm the Observatory on the night of the eclipse, and the rest, Theremon guessed, were suburbanites driven from their homes when the fires began to break out.

Everyone he saw appeared to be at least as unsettled mentally as he was. Most seemed very much worse off—some of them completely unhinged, totally unable to cope.

They had not formed any sort of coherent bands. Mainly they were solitaries, moving on mysterious private tracks through the woods, or else groups of two or three; the biggest aggregation Theremon saw was eight people, who from their appearance and dress seemed all to be members of one family.

It was horrifying to encounter the truly crazy ones: the vacant eyes, the drooling lips, the slack jaws, the smeared clothing. They plodded through the forest glades like the walking dead, talking to themselves, singing, occasionally dropping to their hands and knees to dig up clumps of sod and munch on them. They were everywhere. The place was like one vast insane asylum, Theremon thought. Probably the whole world was.

Those of this sort, the ones who had been most affected by the coming of the Stars, were generally harmless, at least to others. They were too badly deranged to have any interest in being violent, and their bodily coordination was so seriously disrupted that effective violence was impossible for them, anyway.

But there were others who were not quite so mad—who at a glance might seem almost normal—who posed very serious dangers indeed.

These, Theremon quickly realized, fell into two categories. The first consisted of people who bore no one any ill will but who were hysterically obsessed with the possibility that the Darkness and the Stars might return. These were the fire-lighters.

Very likely they were people who had led orderly, settled lives before the catastrophe—family folk, hard workers, pleasant cheerful neighbors. So long as Onos was in the sky they were perfectly calm; but the moment the primary sun began to sink in the west and evening approached, fear of Darkness overcame them, and they looked around desperately for something to burn. Anything. Anything at all. Two or three of the other suns might still be overhead when Onos set, but the light of the minor suns did not seem sufficient to soothe the raging dread of Darkness that these people felt.

These were the ones who had burned their own city down around themselves. Who, in their desperation, had ignited books, papers, furniture, the roofs of houses. Now, driven into the forest by the holocaust in the city, they were trying to burn that down too. But that was a harder job. The forest was densely wooded, lush, its thick cover of trees well supplied by the myriad streams that flowed into the broad river running along its border. Pulling down green boughs and trying to set them afire did not provide very satisfactory blazes. As for the carpet of dead wood and fallen leaves that lay on the forest floor, it had been pretty well soaked by the recent rains. Such of it that was capable of being burned was quickly found and used for bonfires, without touching off any sort of general conflagration; and by the second day the supply of such debris was very sparse.

So the fire-lighter people, hampered as they were by forest conditions and by their own shock-muddled minds, were having little success so far. But they had managed to start a couple of good-sized fires in the forest all the same, which fortunately had burned themselves out in a few hours because they had consumed all the fuel in their vicinity. A few days of hot, dry weather, though, and these people might well be able to set the whole place ablaze, as they had already done in Saro City.

The second group of not-quite-stable people roaming the forest seemed to Theremon to be a more immediate menace. These were the ones who had let all social restraints fall away from them. They were the banditti, the hooligans, the cutthroats, the psychopaths, the homicidal maniacs: the ones who moved like unsheathed blades along the quiet forest pathways, striking whenever they pleased, taking whatever they wanted, killing anyone unlucky enough to arouse their irritation.

Since everyone had a certain glazed look in his eyes, some merely from fatigue, others from despondency, and others from madness, you could never be sure, whenever you met someone in the forest, how dangerous he was. There was no way of telling at a quick glance whether the person approaching you was merely one of the distraught or bewildered crazies, and therefore basically harmless, or one of the kind who were full of lethal fury and attacked anyone they encountered, with neither rhyme nor reason behind their deeds.

So you quickly learned to be on your guard against anyone who came prancing and swaggering through the woods. Any stranger at all could be a menace. You might be talking quite amiably with someone, comparing notes on your experiences since the evening of Nightfall, when abruptly he would take offense at some casual remark of yours, or decide that he admired some article of your clothing, or perhaps merely take a blind unreasoning dislike of your face—and, with an animallike howl, he would come rushing at you in mindless ferocity.

Some of this sort, no doubt, had been criminals to begin with. The sight of society collapsing all around them had freed them of all restraint. But others, Theremon suspected, had been placid enough folk until their minds were shattered by the Stars. Then, suddenly, they found all the inhibitions of civilized life fall away from them. They forgot the rules that made civilized life possible. They were like small children again, asocial, concerned only with their own needs—but they had the strength of adults and the will power of the deeply disturbed.

The thing to do, if you hoped to survive, was to avoid those whom you knew to be lethally crazy, or suspected of it. The thing to pray for was that they would all kill each other off within the first few days, leaving the world safe for the less predatory.

Theremon had three encounters with madmen of this terrifying breed in the first two days. The first one, a tall, rangy man with a weird diabolical grin who was cavorting by the side of a brook that Theremon wanted to cross, demanded that the newspaperman pay him a toll to go past. “Your shoes, let’s say. Or how about that wristwatch?”

“How about getting out of my way?” Theremon suggested, and the man went berserk.

Snatching up a cudgel that Theremon hadn’t noticed until that moment, he roared some sort of war-cry and charged. There was no time to take evasive action: the best Theremon could do was duck as the other man swung the cudgel with horrific force at his head.

He heard the club go whirring by, missing him by inches. It hit the tree beside him instead, cracking into it with tremendous force—a force so great that the impact of it traveled up the attacker’s arm, and he gasped in pain as the cudgel fell from his nerveless fingers.

Theremon was on top of him in an instant, seizing the man’s injured arm, bringing it sharply upward with merciless force, making him grunt in agony and double up and fall moaning to his knees. Theremon prodded and pushed him down until his face was in the stream, and held him there. And held him there. And held him there.

How simple it would be, Theremon thought in wonder, just to go on holding his head under water until he drowned.

A part of his mind was actually arguing in favor of it. He would have killed you without even thinking about it. Get rid of him. Otherwise what will you do once you let go of him? Fight him all over again? What if he follows you through the forest to get even with you? Drown him now, Theremon. Drown him.

It was a powerful temptation. But only one segment of Theremon’s mind was willing to adapt so readily to the world’s new jungle morality. The rest of him recoiled at the idea; and finally he released the man’s arm and stepped back. He picked up the fallen cudgel and waited.

All the fight was gone from the other man now, though. Choking and gasping, he rose from the stream with water flowing from his mouth and nostrils, and sat trembling by the bank, shivering, coughing, struggling for breath. He stared sullenly and fearfully at Theremon, but he made no attempt to get up, let alone to renew the fighting.

Theremon stepped around him, crossed the stream in a bound, and trotted off quickly, deeper into the forest.

The implications of what he had almost done did not fully strike him for another ten minutes. Then he halted suddenly, in a burst of sweat and nausea, and was swept by a fierce attack of vomiting that racked him so savagely that it was a long while before he could rise.

Later that afternoon he realized that his roamings had brought him right to the border of the forest. When he looked out between the trees he saw a highway—utterly deserted—and, on the far side of the road, the ruins of a tall brick building standing in a broad plaza.

He recognized the building. It was the Pantheon, the Cathedral of All the Gods.

There wasn’t much left of it. He walked across the road and stared in disbelief. It looked as if a fire had started in the heart of the building—what had they been doing, using the pews for kindling?—and had swept right up the narrow tower over the altar, igniting the wooden beams. The whole tower had toppled, bringing down the walls. Bricks were strewn everywhere about the plaza. He saw bodies jutting out of the wreckage.

Theremon had never been a particularly religious man. He didn’t know anyone who was. Like everyone else, he said things like “My God!” or “Gods!” or “Great gods!” for emphasis, but the idea that there might actually be a god, or gods, or whatever the current prevailing belief-system asserted, had always been irrelevant to the way he lived his life. Religion seemed like something medieval to him, quaint and archaic. Now and then he would find himself in a church to attend the wedding of a friend—who was as much of a disbeliever as he was, of course—or else he went to cover some official rite as a news item—but he hadn’t been inside any kind of holy building for religious purposes since his own confirmation, when he was ten years old.

All the same, the sight of the ruined cathedral stirred him profoundly. He had been present at its dedication, a dozen years back, when he was a young reporter. He knew how many millions of credits the building had cost; he had marveled at the splendid works of art it contained; he had been moved by the marvelous music of Ghissimal’s Hymn to the Gods as it resounded through the great hall. Even he, who had no belief in the sacred, could not help feeling that if there was any place on Kalgash where the gods truly were present, it must be here.

And the gods had let the building be destroyed like this! The gods had sent the Stars, knowing that the madness to follow would wreck even their own Pantheon!

What did that mean? What did that say about the unknowability and unfathomability of the gods—assuming they even existed?

No one would ever rebuild this cathedral, Theremon knew. Nothing would ever be as it was.

“Help me,” a voice called.

That feeble sound cut into Theremon’s meditations. He looked around.

“Over here. Here.”

To his left. Yes. Theremon saw the glint of golden vestments in the sunlight. A man half buried in the rubble, far along down the side of the building—one of the priests, apparently, judging by his rich garb. He was pinned below the waist by a heavy beam and was gesturing with what must be the last of his strength.

Theremon started to go toward him. But before he could take more than a dozen steps a second figure appeared at the far end of the fallen building and came running forward: a lean, agile little man who went scrambling over the bricks with animal swiftness, heading for the trapped priest.

Good, Theremon thought. Together we ought to be able to pull that beam off him.

But when he was still some twenty feet away he halted, horror-stricken. The agile little man had already reached the priest. Bending over him, he had slit the priest’s throat with one quick stroke of a small knife, as casually as one might open an envelope; and now he was busily engaged in slicing the cords that fastened the priest’s rich vestments.

He looked up, glaring, at Theremon. His eyes were fiery and appalling.

“Mine,” he growled, like a jungle beast. “Mine!” And he flourished the knife.

Theremon shivered. For a long moment he stood frozen in his tracks, fascinated in a ghastly way by the efficient manner with which the looter was stripping the dead priest’s body. Then, sadly, he turned and hurried away, back across the road, into the forest. There was no point in doing anything else.

That evening, when Tano and Sitha and Dovim held the sky with their melancholy light, Theremon allowed himself a few hours of fragmentary sleep in a deep thicket; but he awoke again and again, imagining that some madman with a knife was creeping up on him to steal his shoes. Sleep left him long before Onos-rise. It seemed almost surprising to find himself still alive when morning finally came.

Half a day later he had his third encounter with one of the new breed of killers. This time he was crossing a grassy meadow close by one of the arms of the river when he caught sight of two men sitting in a shady patch just across the way, playing some sort of game with dice. They looked calm and peaceful enough. But as Theremon came nearer, he realized that an argument had broken out; and then, unthinkably swiftly, one of the men snatched up a bread-knife sitting on a blanket beside him and plunged it with lethal force into the other man’s chest.

The one who had wielded the knife smiled across at Theremon. “He cheated me. You know how it is. It makes you damned angry. I can’t stand it when a guy tries to cheat me.” It seemed all very clear-cut to him. He grinned and rattled the dice. “Hey, you want to play?”

Theremon stared into the eyes of madness.

“Sorry,” he said, as casually as he could. “I’m looking for my girlfriend.”

He kept on walking.

“Hey, you can find her later! Come on and play!”

“I think I see her,” Theremon called, moving faster, and got out of there without looking back.

After that he was less cavalier about wandering through the forest. He found a sheltered nook in what seemed like a relatively unoccupied glade and built a tidy little nest for himself under a jutting overhang. There was a berry-bush nearby that was heavily laden with edible red fruits, and when he shook the tree just opposite his shelter it showered him with round yellow nuts that contained a tasty dark kernel. He studied the small stream just beyond, wondering if it contained anything edible that he might catch; but there seemed to be nothing in it except tiny minnows, and he realized that even if he could catch them he would have to eat them raw, for he had nothing to use as fuel for a fire and no way of lighting one, besides.

Living on berries and nuts wasn’t Theremon’s idea of high style, but he could tolerate it for a few days. Already his waistline was shrinking commendably: the only admirable side effect of the whole calamity. Best to stay hidden away back here until things calmed down.

He was pretty sure that things would calm down. General sanity was bound to return, sooner or later. Or so he hoped, at least. He knew that he himself had come a long way back from the early moments of chaos that the sight of the Stars had induced in his brain.

Every day that went by, he felt more stable, more capable of coping. It seemed to him that he was almost his old self again, still a little shaky, perhaps, a little jumpy, but that was only to be expected. At least he felt fundamentally sane. He realized that very likely he had had less of a jolt during Nightfall than most people: that he was more resilient, more tough-minded, better able to withstand the fearful impact of that shattering experience. But maybe everybody else would start recovering, too, even those who had been much more deeply affected than he had been, and it would be safe to emerge and see what, if anything, was being done about trying to put the world back together.

The thing to do now, he told himself, was to lay low, to keep from getting yourself murdered by one of those psychopaths running around out there. Let them all do each other in, as fast as they could; and then he would come warily creeping out to find out what was going on. It wasn’t a particularly courageous plan. But it seemed like a wise one.

He wondered what had happened to the others who had been in the Observatory with him at the moment of Darkness. To Beenay, to Sheerin, to Athor. To Siferra.

Especially to Siferra.

From time to time Theremon thought of venturing out to look for her. It was an appealing idea. During his long hours of solitude he spun glowing fantasies for himself of what it would be like to hook up with her somewhere in this forest. The two of them, journeying together through this transformed and frightening world, forming an alliance of mutual protection—

He had been attracted to her from the first, of course. For all the good that had done him, he might just as well not have bothered, he knew: handsome as she was, she seemed to be the sort of woman who was absolutely self-contained, in no need whatever of any man’s company, or any woman’s, for that matter. He had maneuvered her into going out with him now and then, but she had efficiently and serenely kept him at a safe distance all the time.

Theremon was experienced enough in worldly things to understand that no amount of smooth talk was persuasive enough to break through barriers that were so determinedly maintained. He had long ago decided that no worthwhile woman could ever be seduced; you could present the possibility to them, but you had to leave it ultimately to them to do the seducing for you, and if they weren’t so minded, there was very little you could do to change their outlook. And with Siferra, things had been sliding in the wrong direction for him all year long. She had turned on him ferociously—and with some justification, he thought ruefully—once he began his misguided campaign of mockery against Athor and the Observatory group.

Somehow right at the end he had felt that she was weakening, that she was becoming interested in him despite herself. Why else had she invited him to the Observatory, against Athor’s heated orders, on the evening of the eclipse? For a short time that evening there actually had seemed to be real contact blossoming between them.

But then had come the Darkness, the Stars, the mob, the chaos. After that everything had plunged into confusion. But if he could find her somehow, now—

We’d work well together, he thought. We’d be a tremendous team—hard-nosed, competent, survival-oriented. Whatever kind of civilization is going to evolve, we’d find a good place for ourselves in it.

And if there had been a little psychological barrier between them before, he was certain it would seem unimportant to her now. It was a brand-new world, and new attitudes were necessary if you were going to survive.

But how could he find Siferra? No communications circuits were open, so far as he knew. She was just one of millions of people at large in the area. The forest alone probably had a population of many thousands now; and he had no real reason for assuming that she was in the forest. She could be fifty miles from here by this time. She could be dead. Looking for her was a hopeless task: it was worse than trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack. This haystack was several counties wide, and the needle might well be getting farther away every hour. Only by the wildest sort of coincidence could he ever locate Siferra, or, for that matter, anyone else he knew.

The more Theremon thought about his chances of finding her, though, the less impossible the task seemed. And after a while it began to seem quite possible indeed.

Perhaps his steadily rising optimism was a by-product of his new secluded life. He had nothing to do but spend hours each day sitting by the brook, watching the minnows go by—and thinking. And as he endlessly reevaluated things, finding Siferra went from seeming impossible to merely unlikely, and from unlikely to difficult, and from difficult to challenging, and from challenging to feasible, and from feasible to readily achievable.

All he had to do, he told himself, was get back out into the forest and recruit a little help from those who were reasonably functional. Tell them who he was trying to find, and what she looked like. Spread the word around. Employ some of his journalistic skills. And make use of his status as a local celebrity. “I’m Theremon 762,” he would say. “You know, from the Chronicle. Help me and I’ll make it worth your while. You want your name in the paper? You want me to make you famous? I can do it. Never mind that the paper isn’t being published just now. Sooner or later it’ll be back, and I’ll be right there with it, and you’ll see yourself smack in the middle of the front page. You can count on that. Just help me find this woman that I’m looking for, and—”

“Theremon?”

A familiar voice, high-pitched, cheerful. He stopped short, squinted into the brightness of the midday sunlight cutting through the trees, peered this way and that to locate the speaker.

He had been walking for two hours, looking for people who would be glad to get out there and spread the word on behalf of the famous Theremon 762 of the Saro City Chronicle. But so far he had found only six people altogether. Two of them had taken to their heels the moment they saw him. A third sat where he was, singing softly to his bare toes. Another, crouching in the fork of a tree, methodically rubbed two kitchen knives together with maniacal zeal. The remaining two had simply stared at him when he told them what he wanted; one did not seem to understand at all, and the other burst into gales of wild laughter. Not much hope of help from any of them.

And now it appeared that someone had found him.

“Theremon? Over here. Over here, Theremon. Here I am. Don’t you see me, man? Over here!”

33

Theremon glanced to his left, into a clump of bushes with huge prickly parasol-shaped leaves. At first he saw nothing unusual. Then the leaves swayed and parted, and a plump, roundish man stepped out into view.

“Sheerin?” he said, amazed.

“Well, at least you’re not so far gone that you’ve forgotten my name.”

The psychologist had lost some weight, and he was incongruously dressed in overalls and a torn pullover. A hatchet with a chipped blade was dangling casually from his left hand. That was perhaps the most incongruous thing of all, Sheerin carrying a hatchet. It wouldn’t have been very much stranger to see him walking around with a second head or an extra pair of arms.

Sheerin said, “How are you, Theremon? Great gods, you’re all rags and tatters, and it hasn’t even been a week! But I suppose I’m not much better.” He looked down at himself. “Have you ever seen me this skinny? A diet of leaves and berries really slims you down, doesn’t it?”

“You’ve got a way to go before I’d call you skinny,” Theremon said. “But you do look trim. How did you find me?”

“By not looking for you. It’s the only way, when everything’s become completely random. I’ve been to the Sanctuary, but no one was there. Now I’m on my way south to Amgando Park. I was just ambling along the path that cuts across the middle of the forest, and there you were.” The psychologist came bounding forward, holding out his hand. “By all the gods, Theremon, it’s a joy to see a friendly face again!—You are friendly, aren’t you? You’re not homicidal?”

“I don’t think I am.”

“There are more crazies per square yard in here than I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’ve seen plenty of crazies, let me tell you.” Sheerin shook his head and sighed. “Gods! I never dreamed it would be this bad. Even with all my professional experience. I thought it would be bad, yes, very bad, but not this bad.”

“You predicted universal madness,” Theremon reminded him. “I was there. I heard you say it. You predicted the complete breakdown of civilization.”

“It’s one thing to predict it. It’s something else again to be right in the middle of it. It’s a very humbling thing, Theremon, for an academic like me to find his abstract theories turning into concrete reality. I was so glib, so blithely unconcerned. ‘Tomorrow there won’t be a city standing unharmed in all Kal-gash,’ I said, and it was all just so many words to me, really, just a philosophical exercise, completely abstract. ‘The end of the world you used to live in.’ Yes. Yes.” Sheerin shivered. “And it all happened, just like I said. But I suppose I didn’t really believe my own dire predictions, until everything came crashing down around me.”

“The Stars,” Theremon said. “You never really took the Stars into account. They were the thing that did the real damage. Maybe we could have withstood the Darkness, most of us, just felt a little shaken up, a little bit upset. But the Stars—the Stars—”

“How bad was it for you?”

“Pretty bad, at first. I’m better now. And you?”

“I hid away in the Observatory basement during the worst of it. I was hardly affected at all. When I came out the next day, the whole Observatory was wrecked. You can’t imagine the carnage all over the place.”

Theremon said, “Damn Folimun! The Apostles—”

“They poured fuel on the fire, yes. But the fire would have happened anyway.”

“What about the Observatory people? Athor, Beenay, and the rest? Siferra—”

“I didn’t see any of them. But I didn’t find their bodies, either, while I was looking around the place. Maybe they escaped. The only person I came across was Yimot—do you remember him? One of the graduate students, the very tall awkward one? He had hidden himself too.” Sheerin’s face darkened. “We traveled together for a couple of days afterward—until he was killed.”

“Killed?”

“By a little girl, ten, twelve years old. With a knife. A very sweet child. Came right up to him, laughed, stabbed him without warning. And ran away, still laughing.”

“Gods!”

“The gods aren’t listening any more, Theremon. If they ever were.”

“I suppose not.—Where have you been living, Sheerin?”

His look was vague. “Here. There. I went back to my apartment first, but the whole building complex had been burned out. Just a shell, nothing salvageable at all. I slept there that evening, right in the middle of the ruins. Yimot was with me. The next day we set out for the Sanctuary, but there wasn’t any way of getting there from where we were. The road was blocked—there were fires everywhere. And where it wasn’t still burning, there were mountains of rubble that you couldn’t get past. It looked like a war zone. So we doubled back south into the forest, figuring we’d circle around by way of Arboretum Road and try to reach the Sanctuary that way. That was when Yimot was—killed. The forest must be where all the most disturbed ones went.”

“It’s where everyone went,” Theremon said. “The forest is harder to set fire to than the city is.—Did I hear you tell me that when you finally did get to the Sanctuary you found it deserted?”

“That’s right. I reached it yesterday afternoon, and it was wide open. The outer gate and the inner gate too, and the Sanctuary door itself unlocked. Everyone gone. A note from Beenay was tacked up in front.”

“Beenay! Then he made it to the Sanctuary safely!”

“Apparently he did,” said Sheerin. “A day or two before I did, I suppose. What his note said was that everybody had decided to evacuate the Sanctuary and head for Amgando Park, where some people from the southern districts are trying to set up a temporary government. By the time he got to the Sanctuary there was no one there but my niece Raissta, who must have been waiting for him. Now they’ve gone to Amgando also. And I’m heading there myself. My friend Liliath was in the Sanctuary, you know. I assume she’s on her way to Amgando with the others.”

“It sounds nutty,” Theremon said. “They were as safe in the Sanctuary as they could have been anywhere. Why the deuce would they want to come out into all of this insane chaos and try to march hundreds of miles down to Amgando?”

“I don’t know. But they must have had a good reason. In any case, we have no choice, do we, you and I? Everybody who’s still sane is gathering there. We can stay here and wait for somebody to slice us up the way that nightmarish little girl did to Yimot—or we can take our chances trying to get to Amgando. Here we’re doomed, sooner or later, inevitably. If we can make it to Amgando we’ll be all right.”

“Have you heard anything about Siferra?” Theremon asked.

“Nothing. Why?”

“I’d like to find her.”

“She may have gone to Amgando too. If she met up with Beenay somewhere along the way, he would have told her where everybody is going, and—”

“Do you have any reason to think that might have happened?”

“It’s only a guess.”

Theremon said, “My guess is that she’s still somewhere around here. I want to try to track her down.”

“But the odds against that—”

“You found me, didn’t you?”

“Purely by accident. The chances that you’d be able to locate her the same way—”

“Are pretty good,” Theremon said. “Or so I prefer to believe. I’m going to attempt it, anyway. I can always hope to get to Amgando later on. With Siferra.”

Sheerin gave him an odd look, but said nothing.

Theremon said, “You think I’m crazy? Well, maybe I am.”

“I didn’t say that. But I think you’re risking your neck for nothing. This place is turning into a prehistoric jungle. It’s become absolute savagery here, and not getting any better as the days go along, from what I’ve seen. Come south with me, Theremon. We can be out of here in two or three hours, and the road to Amgando is just—”

“I mean to look for Siferra first,” said Theremon obstinately.

“Forget her.”

“I don’t intend to do that. I’m going to stay here and search for her.”

Sheerin shrugged. “Stay, then. I’m clearing out. I saw Yimot cut down by a little girl, remember, right before my eyes, no more than two hundred yards from here. This place is too dangerous for me.”

“And you think going on a hike of three or four hundred miles all by yourself isn’t dangerous?”

The psychologist hefted his hatchet. “I’ve got this, if I need it.”

Theremon fought back laughter. Sheerin was so absurdly mild-mannered that the thought of him defending himself with a hatchet was impossible to take seriously.

He said, after a moment, “Lots of luck.”

“You really intend to stay?”

“Until I find Siferra.”

Sheerin stared sadly at him.

“Keep the luck you just offered me, then. I think you’ll need it more than I will.”

He turned and trudged away without another word.

34

For three days—or perhaps it was four; the time went by like a blur—Siferra moved southward through the forest. She had no plan except to stay alive.

There was no point even in trying to get back to her apartment. The city still seemed to be burning. A low curtain of smoke hung in the air wherever she looked, and occasionally she saw a sinuous tongue of red flame licking into the sky on the horizon. It appeared to her as if new fires were being started every day. Which meant that the craziness had not yet begun to abate.

She could feel her own mind returning gradually to normal, clearing day by day, blessedly emerging into clarity as though she were awakening from some terrible fever. She was uncomfortably aware that she wasn’t fully herself yet—managing any sequence of thoughts was a laborious thing for her, and she lost herself quickly in muddle. But she was on her way back, of that she was sure.

Apparently many of the others around her in the forest weren’t recovering at all. Though Siferra was trying to keep to herself as much as she could, she encountered people from time to time, and most of them looked pretty badly deranged: sobbing, moaning, laughing wildly, glaring weirdly, rolling over and over on the ground. Just as Sheerin had suggested, some had suffered such mental trauma during the time of the crisis that they might never be sane again. Huge segments of the population must have lapsed into barbarism or worse, Siferra realized. They must be setting fires for the sheer fun of it now. Or killing for the same reason.

So she moved carefully. With no particular destination in mind, she drifted more or less southward across the forest, camping wherever she found fresh water. The club that she had picked up on the evening of the eclipse was never very far from her hand. She ate whatever she could find that looked edible—seeds, nuts, fruits, even leaves and bark. It wasn’t much of a diet. She knew that she was strong enough physically to endure a week or so on such improvised rations, but after that she’d begin to suffer. Already she could feel what little extra weight she had been carrying dropping away, and her physical resilience beginning little by little to diminish. And the supply of berries and fruits was diminishing too, very rapidly, as the forest’s thousands of hungry new inhabitants picked it over.

Then, on what she believed was the fourth day, Siferra remembered about the Sanctuary.

Her cheeks flamed as she realized that there had been no need for her to have been living this cave-woman life all week.

Of course! How could she have been so stupid? Just a few miles from here at this very moment, hundreds of university people were tucked away safe and sound in the old particle-accelerator lab, drinking bottled water and dining pleasantly on the canned foods that they had spent the last few months stashing away. How ridiculous to be skulking around in this forest full of madmen, scratching in the dirt for her meager meals and looking hungrily at the little forest creatures that cavorted beyond her reach on the branches of the trees!

She would go to the Sanctuary. Somehow there would be a way to get them to take her in. It was a measure of the extent to which the Stars had disrupted her mind, she told herself, that it had taken her as long as this to remember that the Sanctuary was there.

Too bad, she thought, that the idea hadn’t occurred to her earlier. She realized now that she had spent the last few days traveling in precisely the wrong direction.

Directly ahead of her now lay the steep chain of hills that marked the southern boundary of the forest. Looking up, she could see the blackened remains of the posh Onos Heights real estate development along the summit of the hill that rose like a dark wall before her. The Sanctuary, if she remembered correctly, was the opposite way entirely, midway between the campus and Saro City on the highway running along the north side of the forest.

It took her another day and a half to make her way back through the forest to the north side. In the course of the journey she had to use her club twice to fight off attackers. She had three non-violent but edgy staring-matches with young men sizing her up to decide whether she could be jumped. And once she blundered into a sheltered copse where five gaunt wild-eyed men with knives were stalking one another in a circle, like dancers moving in some strange archaic ritual. She got away from there as fast as she could.

Finally she saw the wide highway that was University Road ahead of her, just beyond the forest boundary. Somewhere along the north side of that road was the unobtrusive little country lane that led to the Sanctuary.

Yes: there it was. Hidden, insignificant, bordered on both sides by untidy clumps of weeds and thick grass that had gone to seed.

It was late afternoon. Onos was almost gone from the sky, and the hard baleful light of Tano and Sitha cast sharp shadows across the land that gave the day a wintry look, though the air was mild. The little red eye that was Dovim moved through the northern heavens, still very distant, still very high.

Siferra wondered what had become of the unseeable Kalgash Two. Evidently it had done its terrible work and moved on. By this time it might be a million miles out in space, curving away from the world on its long orbit, riding on and on through the airless dark, not to return for another two thousand and forty-nine years. Which would be at least two million years too soon, thought Siferra bitterly.

A sign appeared before her:

And then a second sign, in vivid scarlet:

Good. She must be going the right way, then.

Siferra had never been to the Sanctuary, even in the days when it had still been a physics laboratory, but she knew what to expect: a series of gates, and then some sort of scanner post that would monitor anyone who had managed to get this far. Within minutes she had come to the first gate. It was a double-hinged screen of tightly woven metal mesh, rising to perhaps twice her height, with a formidable-looking barbed-wire fence stretching off at either end and disappearing into the brambled underbrush that grew uncontrolledly here.

The gate was ajar.

She studied it, puzzled. Some illusion? Some trick of her muddled mind? No. No, the gate was open, all right. And it was the correct gate. She saw the University Security symbol on it. But why was it open? There was no indication that it had been forced.

Troubled now, she went through.

The road inward was nothing more than a dirt track, deeply rutted and cratered. She followed along its edge, and in a little while she saw an inner barrier, no mere barbed-wire fence here but a solid concrete wall, blank, impregnable-looking.

It was broken only by a gateway of dark metal, with a scanner mounted above it.

And this gate was open too.

Stranger and stranger! What about all the vaunted protection that was supposed to have sealed the Sanctuary away from the general madness that had overtaken the world?

She stepped inside. Everything was very quiet here. Ahead of her lay some scruffy-looking wooden sheds and barns. Perhaps the Sanctuary entrance itself—the mouth of an underground tunnel, Siferra knew—lay behind them. She walked around the outbuildings.

Yes, there was the Sanctuary entrance, an oval door in the ground, with a dark passageway behind it.

And there were people, too, a dozen or so of them, standing in front of it, watching her with chilly, unpleasant curiosity. They all had strips of bright green cloth tied about their throats, as a kind of neckerchief. She didn’t recognize any of them. So far as she could tell, they weren’t university people.

A small bonfire was burning just to the left of the door. Beside it was a pile of chopped logs, elaborately stacked, every piece of wood very neatly arranged according to size with astonishing precision and care. It looked more like some sort of meticulous architect’s model than like a woodpile.

A sickening sense of fear and disorientation swept over her. What was this place? Was it really the Sanctuary? Who were these people?

“Stay right where you are,” said the man at the front of the group. He spoke quietly, but there was whip-snapping authority in his tone. “Put your hands in the air.”

He held a small sleek needle-gun in his hand. It was pointing straight at her midsection.

Siferra obeyed without a word.

He appeared to be about fifty years old, a strong, commanding figure, almost certainly the leader here. His clothing looked costly and his manner was poised and confident. The green neckerchief he wore had the sheen of fine silk.

“Who are you?” he asked calmly, keeping the weapon trained on her.

“Siferra 89, Professor of Archaeology, Saro University.”

“That’s nice. Are you planning to do any archaeology around here, Professor?”

The others laughed as though he had said something very, very funny.

Siferra said, “I’m trying to find the university Sanctuary. Can you tell me where it is?”

“I think this might have been it,” the man replied. “The university people all cleared out of here a few days back. This is Fire Patrol headquarters now.—Tell me, are you carrying any combustibles, Professor?”

“Combustibles?”

“Matches, lighter, a pocket generator, anything that could be used to start a fire.”

She shook her head. “Not any of those things.”

“Fire-starting’s prohibited under Article One of the Emergency Code. If you’re in violation of Article One the punishment is severe.”

Siferra stared at him blankly. What was he talking about?

A thin, sallow-faced man standing beside the leader said, “I don’t trust her, Altinol. It was those professors that started all this. Two to one she’s got something hidden away in her clothes, out of sight somewhere.”

“I have no fire-making equipment anywhere on me,” Siferra said, irritated.

Altinol nodded. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. We won’t take the chance, Professor. Strip.”

She stared at him, startled. “What did you say?”

“Strip. Remove your clothes. Demonstrate that you have no concealed illegal devices anywhere on your person.”

Siferra hefted her club, rubbing her hand uneasily along its shaft. Blinking in astonishment, she said, “Hold on, here. You can’t be serious.”

“Article Two of the Emergency Code, Fire Patrol may take any precaution deemed necessary to prevent unauthorized fire-starting. Article Three, this may include immediate and summary execution of those who resist Fire Patrol authority. Strip, Professor, and do it quickly.”

He gestured with the needle-gun. It was a very serious-looking gesture.

But still she stared at him, still she made no move to remove her garments. “Who are you? What’s this Fire Patrol stuff all about?”

“Citizen vigilantes, Professor. We’re attempting to restore law and order in Saro after the Breakdown. The city’s been pretty much destroyed, you know. Or maybe you don’t. The fires are continuing to spread, and there’s no functioning fire department to do anything about it any more. And maybe you haven’t noticed, but the whole province is full of crazy people who think we haven’t quite had enough fires yet as it is, so they’re starting even more. That can’t go on. We intend to stop the starters by any means available. You are under suspicion of possessing combustibles. The accusation has been placed and you have sixty seconds to clear yourself of the charge. If I were you, I’d start getting my clothes off, Professor.”

Siferra could see him silently counting off the seconds.

Strip, in front of a dozen strangers? A red haze of fury surged through her at the thought of the indignity. Most of these people were men. They weren’t even bothering to hide their impatience. This wasn’t any sort of security precaution, despite Altinol’s solemn citing of an Emergency Code. They just wanted to see what her body looked like, and they had the power to make her submit. It was intolerable.

But then, after a moment, she found her indignation beginning to slip away.

What did it matter? Siferra asked herself wearily. The world had ended. Modesty was a luxury that only civilized people indulged in, and civilization was an obsolete concept.

In any case this was a blunt order, at gunpoint. She had wandered into a remote, isolated place far down a country road. No one was going to come to her rescue here. The clock was ticking. And Altinol didn’t seem to be bluffing.

It wasn’t worth dying just for the sake of concealing her body from them.

She tossed her club to the ground.

Then, in cold anger but without permitting herself to make any outward show of rage, she began methodically to peel away her garments and drop them down beside it.

“My underwear too?” she asked sardonically.

“Everything.”

“Does it look as if I’ve got a lighter hidden in here?”

“You’ve got twenty seconds left, Professor.”

Siferra glowered at him and finished undressing without another word.

It was surprisingly easy, now that she had done it, to stand naked in front of these strangers. She didn’t care. That was the essential thing that came with the end of the world, she realized. She didn’t care. She pulled herself up to her full imposing height and stood there, almost defiantly revealed, waiting to see what they’d do next. Altinol’s eyes traveled over her body in an easy, self-assured way. Somehow she found herself not even caring about that. A kind of burned-out indifference had come over her.

“Very nice, Professor,” he said finally.

“Thank you.” Her tone was icy. “May I cover myself now?”

He waved grandly. “Of course. Sorry for the inconvenience. But we had to be absolutely sure.” He slipped the needle-gun into a band at his waist and stood with his arms folded, casually watching her as she dressed. Then he said, “You must think you’ve fallen in among savages, isn’t that so, Professor?”

“Does what I think really interest you?”

“You’ll notice that we didn’t leer or drool or wet our clothes while you were—ah—demonstrating that you had no concealed fire-making apparatus. Nor did anyone attempt to molest you in any way.”

“That was extremely kind.”

Altinol said, “I point these things out, even though I realize it’s not likely to make much difference to you while you’re still this angry at us, because I want you to know that what you’ve stumbled across here may in fact be the last remaining bastion of civilization in this godforsaken world. I don’t know where our beloved governmental leaders have disappeared to, and I certainly don’t consider our cherished brethren of the Apostles of Flame to be in any way civilized, and your university friends who used to be hidden out here have picked up and gone away. Just about everybody else seems to be clear out of his mind. Except, that is, for you and us, Professor.”

“How flattering of you to include me.”

“I never flatter anybody. You give an appearance of having withstood the Darkness and the Stars and the Breakdown better than most. What I want to know is whether you’re interested in staying here and becoming part of our group. We need people like you, Professor.”

“What does that mean? Scrub floors for you? Cook soup?”

Altinol seemed impervious to her sarcasms. “I mean helping in the struggle to keep civilization alive, Professor. Not to sound too high-pitched about it, but we see ourselves as having a holy mission. Day after day we are making our way through that madhouse out there, disarming the crazies, taking the fire-making apparatus away from them, reserving to ourselves exclusively the right to light fires. We can’t put out the fires that are already burning, at least not yet, but we can do our best to keep new ones from being lit. That’s our mission, Professor. We are taking control of the concept of fire. It’s the first step toward making the world fit to live in again. You seem sane enough to join us and therefore I invite you in. What do you say, Professor? Do you want to be part of the Fire Patrol? Or would you rather try your luck back there in the forest?”

35

The morning was misty and cool. Thick swirls of fog blew through the ruined streets, fog so heavy that Sheerin was unable to tell which suns were in the sky. Onos, certainly—somewhere. But its golden light was diffused and almost completely concealed by the fog. And that patch of slightly brighter sky off to the southwest very likely indicated the presence of one of the pairs of twin suns, but whether they were Sitha and Tano or Patru and Trey he had no way of discerning.

He was very tired It was already abundantly clear to him that his notion of making his way alone and on foot across the hundreds of miles between Saro City and Amgando National Park was an absurd fantasy.

Damn Theremon! Together, at least, they might have stood a chance. But the newspaperman had been unshakable in his confidence that he would somehow find Siferra in the forest. Talk about fantasy! Talk about absurdity!

Sheerin stared ahead, peering through the fog. He needed a place to rest for a while. He needed to find something fit to eat, and perhaps a change of clothing, or at least a way of bathing himself. He had never been this filthy in his life. Or as hungry. Or as weary. Or as despondent.

Through the whole long episode of the coming of the Darkness, from the first moment that he had heard from Beenay and Athor that such a thing was likely, Sheerin had bounced around from one end of the psychological spectrum to the other, from pessimism to optimism and back again, from hope to despair to hope. His intelligence and experience told him one thing, his naturally resilient personality told him another.

Perhaps Beenay and Athor were wrong and the astronomical cataclysm wouldn’t happen at all.

No, the cataclysm will definitely happen.

Darkness, despite his own disturbing experiences with it at the Tunnel of Mystery two years before, would turn out not to be such a troublesome thing after all, if indeed it did come.

Wrong. Darkness will cause universal madness.

The madness would be only temporary, a brief period of disorientation.

The madness will be permanent, in most people.

The world would be disrupted for a few hours and then go back to normal.

The world will be destroyed in the chaos following the eclipse.

Back and forth, back and forth, up and down, up and down. Twin Sheerins, locked in endless debate.

But now he had hit the bottom of the cycle and he seemed to be staying there, unmoving and miserable. His resilience and optimism had evaporated in the glare of what he had seen during his wanderings these past few days. It would be decades, possibly even a century or more, before things returned to normal. The mental trauma had scored too deep a scar, the destruction that had already occurred to the fabric of society was too widespread. The world he had loved had been vanquished by Darkness and smashed beyond repair. That was his professional opinion and he could see no reason to doubt it.

This was the third day, now, since Sheerin had parted from Theremon in the forest and gone marching off, in his usual jaunty fashion, toward Amgando. That jauntiness was hard to recapture now. He had managed to get out of the forest in one piece—there had been a couple of bad moments, times when he had had to wave his hatchet around and look menacing and lethal, a total bluff on his part, but it had worked—and for the last day or so he had been moving in a plodding way through the once-pleasant southern suburbs.

Everything was burned out around here. Entire neighborhoods had been destroyed and abandoned. Many of the buildings were still smoldering.

The main highway running to the southern provinces, Sheerin had believed, began just a few miles below the park—a couple of minutes’ drive, if you were driving. But he wasn’t driving. He had had to make the horrendous climb up out of the forest to the imposing hill that was Onos Heights practically on hands and knees, clawing his way through the underbrush. It took him half a day just to ascend those few hundred yards.

Once he was on top, Sheerin saw that the hill was more like a plateau—but it stretched on endlessly before him, and though he walked and walked and walked he did not come to the highway.

Was he going the right way?

Yes. Yes, from time to time he saw a road sign at a street corner that told him he was indeed heading toward the Great Southern Highway. How far was it, though? The signs didn’t say. Every ten or twelve blocks there was another sign, that was all. He kept going. He had no choice.

But reaching the highway was only the first step in getting to Amgando. He would still be in Saro City, essentially, at that point. Then what? Keep on walking? What else? He could hardly hitch a ride with someone. No vehicles seemed to be running anywhere. The public fuel stations must have gone dry days ago, those that had not been burned. How long was it likely to take him, at this pace, to get down to Amgando on foot? Weeks? Months? No—it would take him forever. He’d be dead of starvation long before he came anywhere near the place.

Even so, he had to go on. Without a sense of purpose, he was finished right now, and he knew it.

Something like a week had passed since the eclipse, maybe more. He was beginning to lose track of time. He neither ate regularly nor slept regularly any more, and Sheerin had always been a man of the most punctual habits. Suns came and went in the sky, now, the light brightened or dimmed, the air grew warmer or grew cooler, and time passed: but without the progression of breakfast, lunch, dinner, sleep, Sheerin had no idea of how it was passing. He knew only that he was rapidly running out of strength.

He hadn’t eaten properly since the coming of the Nightfall. From that dark moment onward, it had been scraps and shards for him, nothing more—a bit of fruit from some tree when he could find it, any unripe seeds that didn’t look as though they’d be poisonous, blades of grass, anything. It wasn’t making him sick, somehow, but it wasn’t sustaining him very well, either. The nutritional content must have been close to zero. His clothes, worn and tattered, hung from him like a shroud. He didn’t dare look underneath them. He imagined that his skin must lie now in loose folds over his jutting bones. His throat was dry all the time, his tongue seemed swollen, there was a frightful pounding behind his eyes. And that dull, numb, hollow sensation in his gut, all the time.

Well, he told himself in his more cheerful moments, there must have been some reason why he had devoted himself so assiduously for so many years to building up such an opulent layer of fat, and now he was learning what that reason was.

But his cheerful moments were fewer and farther between every day. Hunger was preying on his spirits. And he realized that he couldn’t hold out much longer like this. His body was big; it was accustomed to regular feedings, and robust ones; he could live only so long on his accumulated backlog of Sheerin, and then he would be too weak to pull himself onward. Before long it would seem simpler just to curl up behind some bush and rest … and rest … and rest.…

He had to find food. Soon.

The neighborhood he was moving through now, though deserted like all the rest, seemed a little less devastated than the areas behind him. There had been fires here too, but not everywhere, and the flames appeared to have jumped randomly past this house and that without harming them. Patiently Sheerin went from one to the next, trying the door of each house that didn’t seem to have been seriously damaged.

Locked. Every one of them.

How fastidious of these people! he thought. How tidy! The world has fallen in around their ears, and they are abandoning their homes in blind terror, running off to the forest, the campus, the city, the gods only knew where—and they take the trouble to lock their houses before they go! As if they mean simply to have a brief holiday during the time of chaos, and then go home to their books and their bric-a-brac, their closets full of nice clothing, their gardens, their patios. Or hadn’t they realized that everything was over, that the chaos was going to go on and on and on?

Perhaps, Sheerin thought dismally, they aren’t gone at all. They’re in there hiding behind those locked doors of theirs, huddling in the basement the way I did, waiting for things to get normal again. Or else staring at me from the upstairs windows, hoping I’ll go away.

He tried another door. Another. Another. All locked. No response.

“Hey! Anybody home? Let me in!”

Silence.

He stared bleakly at the thick wooden door in front of him. He envisioned the treasures behind it, the food not yet spoiled and waiting to be eaten, the bathtub, the soft bed. And here he was outside, with no way of getting in. He felt a little like the small boy in the fable who has been given the magic key to the garden of the gods, where fountains of honey flow and gum-drops grow on every bush, but who is too small to reach up and put it in the keyhole. He felt like crying.

He realized, then, that he was carrying a hatchet. And he began to laugh. Hunger must have been making him simple-minded! The little boy in the fable perseveres, offering his mittens and his boots and his velvet cap to various animals who are passing by so that they will help him: each one gets on another one’s back, and he climbs on the top of the heap and puts the key in the keyhole. And here was not-so-little Sheerin, staring at a locked door, and he was holding a hatchet!

Break the door down? Just break it down?

It went against everything that he thought was right and proper.

Sheerin looked at the hatchet as though it had turned to a serpent in his hand. Breaking in—why, that was burglary! How could he, Sheerin 501, Professor of Psychology at Saro University, simply smash down the door of some law-abiding citizen’s house and casually help himself to whatever he found there?

Easily, he told himself, laughing even harder at his own foolishness. This is how you do it.

He swung the hatchet.

But it wasn’t all that easy. His starvation-weakened muscles rebelled at the effort. He could lift the hatchet, all right, and he could swing it, but the blow seemed pathetically weak, and a line of fire shot through his arms and back as the blade made contact with the stout wooden door. Had he split the door? No. Cracked it a little? Maybe. Maybe a little chip. He swung again. Again. Harder. There you go, Sheerin. You’re getting the hang of it now. Swing! Swing!

He scarcely felt the pain, after the first few swings. He closed his eyes, pulled breath deep into his lungs, and swung. And swung again. The door was cracking now. There was a perceptible crevice. Another swing—another—maybe five or six more good blows and it would break in half—

Food. Bath. Bed.

Swing. And swing. And—

And the door opened in his face. He was so astonished that he nearly fell through. He staggered and lurched, braced himself with the haft of the ax against the door-frame, and looked up.

Half a dozen fierce wild-eyed faces looked back at him.

“You knocked, sir?” a man said, and everyone howled in manic glee.

Then they reached out for him, caught him by his arms, pulled him inside.

“You won’t be needing this,” someone said, and effortlessly twisted the hatchet from Sheerin’s grasp. “You can only hurt yourself with a thing like that, don’t you know?”

More laughter—a crazed howling. They pushed him into the center of the room and formed a ring around him.

There were seven, eight, maybe nine of them. Men and women both, and one half-grown boy. Sheerin could see at a glance that they weren’t the rightful residents of this house, which must have been neat and well maintained before they moved into it. Now there were stains on the wall, half the furniture was overturned, there was a sodden puddle of something—wine?—on the carpet.

He knew what these people were. These were squatters, rough and ragged-looking, unshaven, unwashed. They had come drifting in, had taken possession of the place after its owners fled. One of the men was wearing only a shirt. One of the women, hardly more than a girl, was clad just in a pair of shorts. They all had an acrid, repellent odor. Their eyes had that intense, rigid, off-center look that he had seen a thousand times in recent days. You didn’t need any clinical experience to know that those were the eyes of the insane.

Cutting through the stink of the squatters’ bodies, though, was another odor, a much more pleasing one, one that almost drove Sheerin out of his mind too: the aroma of cooking food. They were preparing a meal in the next room. Soup? Stew? Something was boiling in there. He swayed, dizzied by his own hunger and the sudden hope of soothing it at last.

Mildly he said, “I didn’t know the house was occupied. But I hope you’ll let me stay with you this evening, and then I’ll be moving along.”

“You from the Patrol?” a big, heavily bearded man asked suspiciously. He seemed to be the leader.

Sheerin said uncertainly, “The Patrol? No, I don’t know anything about them. My name is Sheerin 501, and I’m a member of the faculty of—”

“Patrol! Patrol! Patrol!” they were chanting suddenly, moving in a circle around him.

“—Saro University,” he finished.

It was as though he had uttered a magic spell. They halted in their tracks as his quiet voice cut through their shrill screaming, and they fell silent, staring at him in a terrifying way.

“You say you’re from the university?” the leader asked in a strange tone.

“That’s right. Department of Psychology. I’m a teacher and I do a little hospital work on the side.—Look, I don’t intend to make any trouble for you at all. I just need a place to rest for a few hours, and a little food, if you can spare it. Just a little. I haven’t eaten since—”

“University!” a woman cried. The way she said it, it sounded like something filthy, something blasphemous. Sheerin had heard that tone before, from Folimun 66 the night of the eclipse, referring to scientists. It was a frightening thing to hear.

“University! University! University!”

They began to circle around him again, chanting again, pointing at him, making bizarre signs with their hooked fingers. He could no longer understand their words. It was a raucous nightmare chant, nonsense syllables.

Were these people some subchapter of the Apostles of Flame, convening here to practice an arcane rite? No, he doubted that. They had a different look, too ragged, too shabby, too demented. The Apostles, such few of them as he had seen, had always appeared crisp, self-contained, almost frighteningly controlled. Besides, the Apostles hadn’t been in evidence since the eclipse. Sheerin supposed that they had all withdrawn to some sanctuary of their own to enjoy the vindication of their beliefs in private.

These people, he thought, were simply unaffiliated wandering crazies.

And it seemed to Sheerin that he saw murder in their eyes.

“Listen,” he said, “if I’ve disturbed some ceremony of yours in any way, I apologize, and I’m perfectly willing to leave right now. I only tried to come in here because I thought the house was empty and I was so hungry. I didn’t mean to—”

“University! University!”

He had never seen a look of such intense hatred as these people were giving him. But there was fear there too. They kept back from him, tense, trembling, as if in dread of some terrible power that he might unexpectedly unleash.

Sheerin held his hands out to them imploringly. If only they’d stop prancing and chanting for a moment! The smell of the food cooking in the next room was making him wild. He caught one of the women by the arm, hoping to halt her long enough to appeal to her for a crust, a bowl of broth, anything. But she jumped away, hissing as though Sheerin had burned her with his touch, and rubbed frantically at the place on her arm where his fingers had briefly rested.

“Please,” he said. “I don’t intend any harm. I’m as harmless as anyone there is, believe me.”

“Harmless!” the leader cried, spitting the word out. “You? You, university? You’re worse than the Patrol. The Patrol just makes a little trouble for people. But you, you destroyed the world.”

“I what?”

“Be careful, Tasibar,” a woman said. “Get him out of here before he makes a magic on us.”

“A magic?” Sheerin said. “Me?”

They were pointing at him again, stabbing the air vehemently, terrifyingly. Some had begun to chant under their breaths, a low, fierce chant that had the rhythms of a motor steadily gaining speed and soon to spin out of control.

The girl who wore only a pair of shorts said, “It was the university that called down the Darkness on us.”

“And the Stars,” said the man who wore just a shirt. “They brought the Stars.”

“And this one might bring them back,” said the woman who had spoken before. “Get him out of here! Get him out of here!”

Sheerin stared incredulously. He told himself that he should have been able to predict this. It was an all too likely development: pathological suspicion of all scientists, all educated people, an unreasoning phobia that must be raging now like a virus among the survivors of the night of terror.

“Do you think I can bring back the Stars with a snap of my fingers? Is that what’s frightening you?”

“You are university,” the man called Tasibar said. “You knew the secrets. University brought the Darkness, yes. University brought the Stars. University brought doom.”

It was too much.

Bad enough to be dragged in here and forced to inhale the maddening flavor of that food without being allowed to have any of it. But to be blamed for the catastrophe—to be looked upon as some sort of malevolent witch by these people—

Something snapped in Sheerin.

Derisively he cried, “Is that what you believe? You idiots! You deranged superstitious fools! Blaming the university? We brought the Darkness? By all the gods, what stupidity! We were the very ones who tried to warn you!”

He gestured angrily, clenching his fists, clashing them furiously together.

“He’s going to bring them again, Tasibar! He’ll make it go dark on us! Stop him! Stop him!”

Suddenly they were clustering all about him, closing in, reaching for him.

Sheerin, standing in their midst, held out his hands helplessly, apologetically, toward them and did not try to move. He regretted having insulted them just now, not because it had endangered his life—they probably hadn’t even paid attention to the names he was calling them—but because he knew that the way they were was not their fault. If anything it was his fault, for not having tried harder to help them protect themselves against what he knew was coming. Those articles of Theremon’s—if only he had spoken with the newspaperman, if only he had urged him in time to change his mocking tack—

Yes, he regretted that now.

He regretted all sorts of things, things both done and undone. But it was much too late.

Someone punched him. He gasped in surprise and pain.

“Liliath—” he managed to cry.

Then they swarmed all over him.

36

There were four suns in the sky: Onos, Dovim, Patru, Trey. Four-sun days were supposed to be lucky ones, Theremon remembered. And certainly this one was.

Meat! Actual meat at last!

What a glorious sight!

It was food that he had obtained strictly by accident. But that was all right. The novel charms of outdoor life had been wearing thinner and thinner for him, the hungrier he got. By now he’d gladly take his meat any way it came, thank you very much.

The forest was full of all sorts of wild animals, most of them small, very few of them dangerous, and all of them impossible to catch—at least with your bare hands. And Theremon knew nothing about making traps, nor did he have anything out of which he might have fashioned one.

Those children’s tales about people lost in the woods who immediately set about adapting to life in the open, and turn instantly into capable hunters and builders of dwelling-places, were just that—fables. Theremon regarded himself as a reasonably competent man, as city-dwellers went; but he knew that he had no more chance of hunting down any of the forest animals than he did of making the municipal power generators start to work again. And as for building a dwelling-place, the best he had been able to do was throw together a simple lean-to of branches and twigs, which at least had kept most of the rain away from him on the one stormy day.

But now the weather was warm and lovely again, and he had actual meat for dinner. The only problem now was cooking it. He was damned if he was going to eat it raw.

Ironic that in a city that had just undergone near-total destruction by fire he should be pondering how he was going to go about cooking some meat. But most of the worst fires had burned themselves out by now, and the rain had taken care of the rest. And though for a while in the first few days after the catastrophe it had seemed as though new fires were still being lit, that didn’t seem to be happening any more.

I’ll figure something out, Theremon thought. Rub two sticks together and get a spark? Strike metal against stone and set a scrap of cloth ablaze?

Some boys on the far side of a lake near the place where he was camped had obligingly killed the animal for him. Of course, they hadn’t known they were doing him any favor—most likely they had been planning to eat it themselves, unless they were so unhinged that they were simply chasing the creature for the sake of sport. Somehow he doubted that. They had been pretty purposeful about it, with a singlemindedness that only hunger can inspire.

The beast was a graben—one of those ugly long-nosed bluish-furred things with slithery hairless tails that sometimes could be seen poking around suburban garbage cans after Onos had set. Well, beauty wasn’t a requirement just now. The boys had somehow flushed it out of its daytime hiding place and had driven the poor stupid thing into a little dead-end box of a canyon.

As Theremon watched from the other side of the lake, disgusted and envious at the same time, they chased it tirelessly up and down, pelting it with rocks. For a dumb scavenger it was remarkably agile, scooting swiftly this way and that in its desperation to elude its attackers. But finally a lucky shot caromed off its head and killed it instantly.

He had assumed that they would devour it on the spot. But at that moment a shaggy, shambling figure came into view above them, standing for a moment at the rim of the little canyon, then beginning to climb down toward the lake.

“Run! It’s Garpik the Slasher!” one of the boys yelled.

“Garpik! Garpik!”

In an instant the boys scattered, leaving the dead graben behind.

Theremon, still watching, had slipped back into the shadows on his side of the lake. He also knew this Garpik, though not by name: one of the most dreaded of the forest-dwellers, a squat, almost ape-like man who wore nothing but a belt through which an assortment of knives was thrust. He was a killer without motive, a cheerful psychopath, a pure predator.

Garpik stood by the mouth of the canyon for a while, humming to himself, fondling one of his knives. He didn’t seem to notice the dead animal, or didn’t care. Perhaps he was waiting for the boys to come back. But plainly they weren’t planning to do that, and after a time Garpik, with a shrug, went slouching off into the forest, most likely in search of something amusing to do with his weapons.

Theremon waited an endless moment, making certain Garpik didn’t intend to double back and pounce on him.

Then—when he could no longer bear the sight of the dead graben lying there on the ground, where some other human or animal predator might suddenly come along to seize it before he did—he rushed forward, circled the lake, snatched the animal up, carried it back to his hiding place.

It weighed as much as a small child. It might be good for two or three meals—or more, if he could restrain his hunger and if the meat didn’t spoil too quickly.

His head was spinning with hunger. He had had nothing but fruits and nuts to eat for more days than he could remember. His skin had drawn tight over his muscles and bones; what little spare fat he had been carrying he had long since absorbed, and now he was consuming his own strength in the struggle to stay alive. But this evening, at last, he would enjoy a little feast.

Roast graben! What a treat! he thought bitterly.—And then he thought: Be grateful for small meroies, Theremon.

Let’s see—to build a fire, now—

Fuel, first. Behind his shelter was a flat wall of rock with a deep lateral crack in it, in which a line of weeds was growing. Plenty of them were long dead and withered, and had dried out since the last rainstorm. Quickly Theremon moved along the rock wall, plucking yellowed stems and leaves, assembling a little heap of straw-like material that would catch fire easily.

Now some dry twigs. They were harder to find, but he rummaged around the forest floor, looking for dead shrubs or at least shrubs with dead branches. The afternoon was well along by the time he had put together enough of that sort of tinder to matter: Dovim was gone from the sky, and Trey and Patru, which had been low on the horizon when the boys were hunting the graben, now had moved into the center of things, like a pair of glittering eyes watching the sorry events on Kalgash from far overhead.

Carefully Theremon arranged his kindling-wood above the dried plants, building a framework as he imagined a real outdoorsman would, the bigger branches along the outside, then the thinner ones crisscrossed over the middle. Not without some difficulty, he skewered the graben on a spit he had made of a sharp, reasonably straight stick, and positioned it a short distance above the woodpile.

So far, so good. Just one little thing missing, now.

Fire!

He had kept his mind away from that problem while assembling his fuel, hoping that it would solve itself somehow without his having to dwell on it. But now it had to be faced. He needed a spark. The old boys’-book trick of rubbing two sticks together was, Theremon was certain, nothing but a myth. He had read that certain primitive tribes had once started their fires by twirling a stick against a board with a little hole in it, but he suspected that the process wasn’t all that simple, that it probably took an hour of patient twirling to get anything going. And in any case very likely you had to be initiated into the art by the old man of the tribe when you were a boy, or some such thing, or it wouldn’t work.

Two rocks, though—was it possible to strike a spark by banging one against the other?

He doubted that too. But he might as well try it, he thought. He had no other ideas. There was a wide flat stone lying nearby, and after a little searching he found a smaller triangular one that could fit conveniently in the palm of his hand. He knelt beside his little fireplace and began methodically to hit the flat one with the pointed one.

Nothing in particular happened.

A hopeless feeling began to grow in him. Here I am, he thought, a grown man who can read and write, who can drive a car, who can even operate a computer, more or less. I can turn out a newspaper column in two hours that everybody in Saro City will want to read, and I can do it day in, day out, for twenty years. But I can’t start a fire in the wilderness.

On the other hand, he thought, I will not eat this graben raw unless I absolutely have to. Will not. Will not. Not. Not. Not!

In fury he struck the stones together, again, again, again.

Spark, damn you! Light! Burn! Cook this ridiculous pathetic animal for me!

Again. Again. Again.

“What are you doing there, mister?” an unfriendly voice asked suddenly from a point just behind his right shoulder.

Theremon looked up, startled, dismayed. The first rule of survival in this forest was that you must never let yourself get so involved in anything that you failed to notice strangers sneaking up on you.

There were five of them. Men, about his own age. They looked as ragged as anyone else living in the forest. They didn’t seem especially crazy, as people went these days: no glassy eyes, no drooling mouths, only an expression that was grim and weary and determined. They didn’t appear to be carrying any weapons other than clubs, but their attitude was distinctly hostile.

Five against one. All right, he thought, take the damned graben and choke on it. He wasn’t foolish enough to try to put up a fight.

“I said, ‘What are you doing there, mister?’ ” the first man repeated, more coldly than before.

Theremon glared. “What does it look like? I’m trying to start a fire.”

“That’s what we thought.”

The stranger stepped forward. Carefully, deliberately, he aimed a kick into Theremon’s little woodpile. The painstakingly assembled kindling-wood went scattering, and the skewered graben toppled to the ground.

“Hey, wait a second—!”

“No fires here, mister. That’s the law.” Brusquely, firmly, bluntly. “Possession of fire-making equipment is prohibited. This wood is to use for a fire. That’s obvious. And you admit guilt besides.”

“Guilt?” Theremon said, incredulously.

“You said you were making a fire. These stones, they seem to be fire-making equipment, right? The law’s clear on that. Prohibited.”

At a signal from the leaders, two of the others came forward. One grabbed Theremon about the neck and chest from behind, and the other took the two stones he had been using from his hands and hurled them into the lake. They splashed and disappeared. Theremon, watching them go, felt the way he imagined Beenay must have felt at seeing his telescopes smashed by the mob.

“Let—go—of—me—” Theremon muttered, struggling.

“Let go of him,” said the leader. He dug his foot into Theremon’s fire-site again, grinding the bits of straw and stems into the dirt.—“Fires aren’t allowed any more,” he said to Theremon. “We’ve had all the fires we’re ever going to have. We can’t permit no more fires on account of the risk, the suffering, the damage, don’t you know that? You try to build another fire, we’re going to come back and smash your head in, you hear me?”

“It was fire that ruined the world,” one of the others said.

“Fire that drove us from our homes.”

“Fire is the enemy. Fire is forbidden. Fire is evil.”

Theremon stared. Fire evil? Fire forbidden?

So they were crazy after all!

“The penalty for trying to start a fire, first offense,” the first man said, “is a fine. We fine you this animal here. To teach you not to endanger innocent people. Take it, Listigon. It’s a good lesson to him. The next time this fellow catches something, he’ll remember that he oughtn’t try to conjure up the enemy just because he feels like having some cooked meat.”

“No!” Theremon cried in a half-strangled voice, as Listigon bent to pick up the graben. “That’s mine, you morons! Mine! Mine!”

And he charged wildly at them, all caution swept away by exasperation and frustration.

Someone hit him, hard, in the midsection. He gasped and gagged and doubled over, clutching his belly with his arms, and someone else hit him from behind, a blow in the small of the back that nearly sent him tumbling forward on his face. But this time he jabbed backward sharply with his elbow, felt a satisfying contact, heard a grunt of pain.

He had been in fights before, but not for a long, long time. And never one against five. But there was no running away from this one now. What he had to do, he told himself, was stay on his feet and keep on backpedaling until he was up against the rock wall, where at least they couldn’t come at him from the rear. And then just try to hold them off, kicking and punching and if necessary biting and roaring, until they decided to let him be.

A voice somewhere deep within him said, They’re completely nuts. They’re perfectly likely to keep this up until they beat you to death.

Nothing he could do about that now, though. Except try to hold them off.

He kept his head down and punched as hard as he could, while steadily pushing onward toward the wall. They crowded around him, battering him from all sides. But he stayed on his feet. Their numerical advantage wasn’t as overwhelming as he had expected. In these close quarters, the five of them were unable all to get at him at once, and Theremon was able to play the confusion to his own benefit, striking out in any direction and moving as quickly as he could while they lumbered around trying to avoid hitting each other.

Even so, he knew he couldn’t take much more. His lip was cut and one eye was starting to swell, and he was getting short of breath. One more good punch could send him down. He held one arm in front of his face and struck with the other, while continuing to back toward the shelter of the rock wall. He kicked someone. There was a howl and a curse. Someone else kicked back. Theremon took it on his thigh and swung around, hissing in pain.

He swayed. He struggled desperately for air. It was hard to see, hard to tell what was going on. They were all around him now, fists flailing at him from all sides. He wasn’t going to reach the wall. He wasn’t going to stay on his feet much longer. He was going to fall, and they were going to trample him, and he was going to die—

Going—to—die—

Then he became aware of confusion within the confusion: the shouts of different voices, new people mingling in the melee, a host of figures everywhere. Fine, he thought. Another bunch of crazies joining the fun. But maybe I can slip away somehow while all this is going on—

“In the name of the Fire Patrol, stop!” a woman’s voice called, clear, loud, commanding. “That’s an order! Stop, all of you! Get away from him! Now!”

Theremon blinked and rubbed his forehead. He looked around, bleary-eyed.

There were four newcomers in the clearing. They seemed fresh and crisp, and were wearing clean clothes. Flowing green neckerchiefs were tied about their throats. They were carrying needle-guns.

The woman—she appeared to be in charge—made a quick imperative gesture with the weapon she held, and the five men who had attacked Theremon moved away from him and went obediently to stand in front of her. She glowered sternly at them.

Theremon stared in disbelief.

“What’s all this about?” she asked the leader of the five in a steely tone.

“He was starting a fire—trying to—he was going to roast an animal, but we came along—”

“All right. I see no fire here. The laws have been maintained. Clear off.”

The man nodded. He reached down to take the graben.

“Hey! That belongs to me,” Theremon said hoarsely.

“No,” the other said. “You have to lose it. We fined you for breaking the fire laws.”

“I’ll decide the punishment,” the woman said. “Leave the animal and clear off! Clear off!”

“But—”

“Clear off, or I’ll have you up on charges before Altinol. Get! Get!”

The five men went slinking away. Theremon continued to stare.

The woman wearing the green neckerchief came toward him.

“I guess I was just in time, wasn’t I, Theremon?”

“Siferra,” he said in amazement. “Siferra!”

37

He was hurting in a hundred places. He wasn’t at all sure how intact his bones were. One of his eyes was practically swollen shut. But he suspected he was going to survive. He sat leaning against the rock wall, waiting for the haze of pain to diminish a little.

Siferra said, “We’ve got a little Jonglor brandy back at our headquarters. I can authorize you to have some, I guess. For medicinal purposes, of course.”

“Brandy? Headquarters? What headquarters? What is this all about, Siferra? Are you really here at all?”

“You think I’m a hallucination?” She laughed and dug her fingertips lightly into his forearm. “Is that a hallucination, would you say?”

He winced. “Careful. I’m pretty tender there. And everywhere else, right now.—You just dropped right down out of the sky, is that it?”

“I was on Patrol duty, passing through the forest, and we heard the sounds of a scuffle. So we came to investigate. I had no idea you were mixed up in it until I saw you. We’re trying to restore order around here somehow.”

“We?”

“The Fire Patrol. It’s as close as there is to a new local government. The headquarters is at the university Sanctuary, and a man named Altinol who used to be some sort of company executive is in charge. I’m one of his officers. It’s a vigilante group, really, which has managed to put across the notion that the use of fire must be controlled, and that only members of the Fire Patrol have the privilege of—”

Theremon raised his hand. “Hold on, Siferra. Slow down, will you? The university people in the Sanctuary have formed a vigilante group, you say? They’re going around putting out fires? How can that be? Sheerin told me that they had all cleared out, that they had gone south to some sort of rendezvous at Amgando National Park.”

“Sheerin? Is he here?”

“He was. He’s on his way to Amgando now. I—decided to stick around here a little while longer.” It seemed impossible to tell her that he had stuck around on the unlikely chance that he would manage to find her.

Siferra nodded. “What Sheerin told you was true. All the university people left the Sanctuary the day after the eclipse. I suppose they’re off in Amgando by now—I haven’t heard anything about them. They left the Sanctuary wide open, and Altinol and his bunch wandered in and took possession of it. The Fire Patrol has fifteen, twenty members, all of them in pretty good shape, mentally. They’ve been able to establish their authority over about half the area of the forest, and some of the surrounding territory of the city where people are still living.”

“And you?” Theremon asked. “How did you get involved with them?”

“I went into the forest first, once the Stars were gone. But it looked pretty dangerous here, so when I remembered about the Sanctuary, I headed there. Altinol and his people were already there. They invited me to join the Patrol.” Siferra smiled in what might have been a rueful way. “They didn’t really offer me much of a choice,” she said. “They aren’t particularly gentle sorts.”

“These aren’t gentle times.”

“No. So I decided, better off with them than drifting around on my own. They gave me this green neckerchief—everybody around here respects it. And this needle-gun. People respect that too.”

“So you’re a vigilante,” Theremon said, musing. “Somehow I never figured you for that kind of thing.”

“I never did either.”

“But you believe that this Altinol and his Fire Patrol are righteous folk who are helping to restore law and order, is that it?”

She smiled again, and again it was not an expression of mirth.

“Righteous folk? They think they are, yes.”

“You don’t?”

A shrug. “They’re out for themselves first, and no kidding about that. There’s a power vacuum here and they mean to fill it. But I suppose they’re not the worst possible people to try to impose a governmental structure right now. They’re easier to take than some of the outfits I can think of, at least.”

“You mean the Apostles? Are they trying to form a government too?”

“Very likely they are. But I haven’t heard anything about them since it all happened. Altinol thinks that they’re still hidden away underground somewhere, or that Mondior has led them off to some place far out in the country where they’ll set up their own kingdom. But we’ve got a couple of new fanatic groups that are real lulus, Theremon. You just had a run-in with one of them, and it’s only by wild luck that they didn’t finish you off. They believe that the only salvation for humanity now is to give up the use of fire completely, since fire has been the ruin of the world. So they’re going around destroying fire-making equipment wherever they can find it, and killing anyone who seems to enjoy starting fires.”

“I was simply trying to cook some dinner for myself,” said Theremon somberly.

Siferra said, “It’s all the same to them whether you’re cooking a meal or amusing yourself with a little bit of arson. Fire is fire, and they abhor it. Lucky thing for you that we came along in time. They accept the authority of the Fire Patrol. We’re the elite, you understand, the only ones whose use of fire will be tolerated.”

“It helps to have needle-guns,” Theremon said. “That gets you a lot of toleration too.” He rubbed a sore place on his arm and looked off bleakly into the distance.—“There are other fanatics besides these, you say?”

“There are the ones who think the university astronomers had discovered the secret of making the Stars appear. They blame Athor, Beenay & Co. for everything that’s happened. It’s the old hatred of the intellectual that crops up whenever medieval emotions start surfacing.”

“Gods! Are there many like that?”

“Enough. Darkness only knows what they’ll do if they actually catch any university people who haven’t already reached Amgando safely. String them up to the nearest lamppost, I suppose.”

Morosely Theremon said, “And I’d be responsible.”

“You?”

“Everything that’s happened is my fault, Siferra. Not Athor’s, not Folimun’s, not the gods’, but mine. Mine. Me, Theremon 762. That time you called me irresponsible, you were being too easy with me. I wasn’t just irresponsible, I was criminally negligent.”

“Theremon, stop it. What’s the good of—”

He swept right on. “I should have been writing columns day in and day out, warning of what was coming, crying out for a crash program to build shelters, to set aside provisions and emergency generating equipment, to provide counseling for the disturbed, to do a million different things—and instead what did I do? Sneered. Poked fun at the astronomers in their lofty tower! Made it politically impossible for anybody in the government to take Athor seriously.”

“Theremon—”

“You should have let those crazies beat me to death, Siferra.”

Her eyes met his. She looked angry. “Don’t talk like a fool. All the government planning in the world wouldn’t have changed anything. I wish you hadn’t written those articles too, Theremon. You know how I felt about them. But what does any of that matter now? You were sincere in what you felt. You were wrong, but you were sincere. And in any case there’s no sense speculating about what might have been. What we have to deal with now is what is.” More gently she said, “Enough of this. Are you able to walk? We need to get you back to the Sanctuary. A chance to wash up, some fresh clothes, a little food in you—”

“Food?”

“The university people left plenty of provisions behind.”

Theremon chuckled and pointed to the graben. “You mean I don’t have to eat that?”

“Not unless you really want to. I suggest you give it to someone who needs it more than you do, while we’re on our way out of the forest.”

“Good idea.”

He pulled himself to his feet, slowly and painfully. Gods, the way everything was hurting! An experimental step or two: not bad, not bad. Nothing seemed to be broken after all. Just a little bit misused. The thought of a warm bath and actual substantial food was healing his bruised and aching body already.

He took a last look around at his little flung-together lean-to, his stream, his scruffy little bushes and weeds. His home, these strange few days. He wouldn’t miss it much, but he doubted that he’d forget his life here very soon, either.

Then he picked up the graben and slung it over his shoulder.

“Lead the way,” he said to Siferra.

They had not gone more than a hundred yards when Theremon caught sight of a group of boys skulking behind the trees. They were the same ones, he realized, who had flushed the graben from its burrow and hunted it to its death. Evidently they had come back to search for it. Now, sullenly, they were staring from a distance, obviously annoyed that Theremon was walking off with their prize. But they were too intimidated by the green neckerchiefs of office that identified the Fire Patrol group—or, more likely, simply by their needle-guns—to stake a claim to it.

“Hey!” Theremon called. “This is yours, isn’t it? I’ve been taking care of it for you!”

He flung the carcass of the graben toward them. It fell to the ground well short of the place where they were, and they hung back, looking mystified and uneasy. They were obviously eager to have the animal but afraid to come forward.

“There’s life in the post-Nightfall era for you,” he said sadly to Siferra. “They’re starving, but they don’t dare make a move. They think it’s a trap. They figure that if they step out from those trees to get the animal we’ll shoot them down, just for fun.”

Siferra said, “Who can blame them? Everyone’s afraid of everyone, now. Leave it there. They’ll go after it when we’re out of sight.”

He followed her onward, limping as he went.

Siferra and the other Patrol people moved confidently through the forest, as though invulnerable to the dangers that were lurking everywhere. And indeed there were no incidents as the group headed—as rapidly as Theremon’s injuries permitted—toward the road that ran through the woods. It was interesting to see, he thought, how quickly society was beginning to reconstitute itself. In just a few days an irregular outfit like this Fire Patrol had begun to take on a kind of governmental authority. Unless it was just the needle-guns and the general air of self-assurance that kept the crazies away, of course.

They came to the edge of the forest, finally. The air was growing cooler and the light was uncomfortably dim, now that Patru and Trey were the only suns in the sky. In the past Theremon had never been bothered by the relatively low light levels that were typical of the hours when the only illumination came from one of the double-sun pairs. Ever since the eclipse, though, such a two-sun evening had seemed disturbing and threatening to him, a possible harbinger—although he knew it could not be so—of the imminent return of Darkness. The psychic wounds of Nightfall would be a long time healing, even for the world’s sturdiest minds.

“The Sanctuary is just a little way down this road,” Siferra said. “How’re you doing?”

“I’m all right,” said Theremon sourly. “They didn’t cripple me, you know.”

But it was a considerable struggle to force his sore, throbbing legs to carry him along. He was intensely gladdened and relieved when at last he found himself at the cave-like entrance to the underground domain that was the Sanctuary.

The place was like a maze. Caverns and corridors led off in all directions. Vaguely in the distance he saw the intricate loops and coils of scientific-looking gear, mysterious and unfathomable, running along the walls and ceiling. This place, he remembered now, had been the site of the university’s atom smasher until the big new experimental lab at Saro Heights opened. Apparently the physicists had left a good deal of obsolete equipment behind.

A tall man appeared, radiating authority.

Siferra said, “This is Altinol 111. Altinol, I want you to meet Theremon 762.”

“Of the Chronicle?” Altinol said. He didn’t sound awed or in any way impressed: he seemed merely to be registering the fact out loud.

“Formerly,” said Theremon.

They eyed each other without warmth. Altinol, Theremon thought, looked to be a very tough cookie indeed: a man in early middle age, obviously trim and in prime condition. He was well dressed in sturdy clothing and carried himself with the air of someone who was accustomed to being obeyed. Theremon, studying him, riffled quickly through the well-stocked files of his memory and after a moment was pleased to strike a chord of recognition.

He said, “Morthaine Industries? That Altinol?”

A momentary flicker of—amusement? Or was it annoyance?—appeared in Altinol’s eyes. “That one, yes.”

“They always said you wanted to be Prime Executive. Well, it looks like you are, now. Of what’s left of Saro City, at least, if not the whole Federal Republic.”

“One thing at a time,” Altinol said. His voice was measured. “First we try to stumble back out of anarchy. Then we think about putting the country together again and worry about who’s going to be Prime Executive. We have the problem of the Apostles, for example, who have seized control of the entire north side of the city and the territory beyond, and placed it under religious authority. They won’t be easy to displace.” Altinol smiled coolly. “First things first, my friend.”

“And for Theremon,” Siferra said, “the first thing is a bath, and then a meal. He’s been living in the forest since Nightfall.—Come with me,” she said to him.

Partitions had been set up all along the old particle-accelerator track, carving it up into a long series of little rooms. Siferra showed him to one in which copper pipes mounted overhead carried water to a porcelain tank. “It won’t be really warm,” she warned him. “We only run the boilers a couple of hours a day, because the fuel supply is so low. But it’s bound to be better than bathing in a chilly forest stream.—You knew something about Altinol?”

“Chairman of Morthaine Industries, the big shipping combine. He was in the news a year or two back, something about wangling a contract by possibly irregular means to develop a huge real-estate tract on government land in Nibro Province.”

“What does a shipping combine have to do with real-estate development?” Siferra asked.

“That’s exactly the point. Nothing at all. He was accused of using improper government influence—something about offering lifetime passes on his cruise line to senators, I think—” Theremon shrugged. “Makes no difference now, really. There’s no more Morthaine Industries, no more real-estate developing to be done, no Federal senators to bribe. He probably didn’t like my recognizing him.”

“He probably didn’t care. Running the Fire Patrol is all that matters to him now.”

“For the time being,” said Theremon. “Today the Saro City Fire Patrol, tomorrow the world. You heard him talking about displacing the Apostles who’ve grabbed the far side of the city. Well, someone’s got to do it. And he’s the kind who enjoys running things.”

Siferra went out. Theremon lowered himself into the porcelain tank.

Not exactly sybaritic. But pretty wonderful, after all he had been through lately. He leaned back and closed his eyes and relaxed. And luxuriated.

Siferra took him to the Sanctuary dining hall, a simple tin-roofed chamber, when he was finished with his bath, and left him there by himself, telling him she had to make her day’s report to Altinol. A meal was waiting for him there—one of the packaged dinners that had been stockpiled here in the months that the Sanctuary was being set up. Lukewarm vegetables, tepid meat of some unknown kind, a pale green non-alcoholic drink of nondescript flavor.

It all tasted wondrously delicious to Theremon.

He forced himself to eat slowly, carefully, knowing that his body was unaccustomed to real food after his time in the forest; every mouthful had to be thoroughly chewed or he’d get sick, he knew, though his instinct was to bolt it as fast as he could and ask for a second helping.

After he had eaten Theremon sat back, staring dully at the ugly tin wall. He wasn’t hungry any more. And his frame of mind was beginning to change for the worse. Despite the bath, despite the meal, despite the comfort of knowing he was safe in this well-defended Sanctuary, he found himself slipping into a mood of the deepest desolation.

He felt very weary. And dispirited, and full of gloom.

It had been a pretty good world, he thought. Not perfect, far from it, but good enough. Most people had been reasonably happy, most were prosperous, there was progress being made on all fronts—toward deeper scientific understanding, toward greater economic expansion, toward stronger global cooperation. The concept of war had come to seem quaintly medieval and the age-old religious bigotries were mostly obsolete, or so it had seemed to him.

And now it was all gone, in one short span of hours, in a single burst of horrifying Darkness.

A new world would be born from the ashes of the old, of course. It was always that way: Siferra’s excavations at Thombo testified to that.

But what sort of world would it be? Theremon wondered. The answer to that was already at hand. It would be a world in which people killed other people for a scrap of meat, or because they had violated a superstition about fire, or simply because killing seemed like a diverting thing to do. A world in which the Altinols came forward to take advantage of the chaos and gain power for themselves. A world in which the Folimuns and Mondiors, no doubt, were scheming to emerge as the dictators of thought—probably working hand in hand with the Altinols, Theremon thought morbidly. A world in which—

No. He shook his head. What was the point of all this dark, brooding lamentation?

Siferra had the right notion, he told himself. There was no sense in speculating about what might have been. What we have to deal with is what is. At least he was alive, and his mind was pretty much whole again, and he had come through his ordeal in the forest more or less intact, aside from a few bruises and cuts that would heal in a couple of days. Despair was a useless emotion now: it was a luxury that he couldn’t allow himself, any more than Siferra would allow herself the luxury of still being angry at him over the newspaper pieces he had written.

What was done was done. Now it was time to pick up and move onward, regroup, rebuild, make a fresh start. To look back was folly. To look forward in dismay or despondency was mere cowardice.

“Finished?” Siferra said, returning to the dining hall. “I know, not magnificent food. But it beats eating graben.”

“I couldn’t say. I never actually got to eat any graben.”

“You probably didn’t miss much. Come: I’ll show you to your room.”

It was a low-ceilinged cubicle of no great elegance: a bed with a godlight on the floor beside it, a washstand, a single dangling light fixture. Scattered in one corner were some books and newspapers that must have been left behind by those who had occupied this room on the evening of the eclipse. Theremon saw a copy of the Chronicle opened to the page of his column, and winced: it was one of his last pieces, a particularly intemperate onslaught on Athor and his group. He reddened and pushed it out of sight with his foot.

Siferra said, “What are you going to do now, Theremon?”

“Do?”

“I mean, once you’ve had a chance to rest up a little.”

“I haven’t given it much thought. Why?”

“Altinol wants to know if you’re planning to join the Fire Patrol,” she said.

“Is that an invitation?”

“He’s willing to take you aboard. You’re the kind of person that he needs, someone strong, someone capable of dealing with people.”

“Yes,” Theremon said. “I’d be good here, wouldn’t I?”

“But he’s uneasy about one thing. There’s room for only one boss in the Patrol, and that’s Altinol. If you joined up, he’d want you to understand right from the beginning that what Altinol says goes, without any argument. He’s not sure how good you are at taking orders.”

“I’m not so sure how good I am at that either,” Theremon said. “But I can see Altinol’s point of view.”

“Will you join, then? I know there are problems with the whole Patrol setup. But at least it’s a force for order, and we need something like that now. And Altinol may be highhanded, but he’s not evil. I’m convinced of that. He simply thinks the times call for strong measures and decisive leadership. Which he’s capable of supplying.”

“I don’t doubt that he is.”

“Think it over this evening,” Siferra said. “If you want to join, talk to him tomorrow. Be frank with him. He’ll be frank with you, you can be certain of that. So long as you can assure him that you’re not going to be any direct threat to his authority, I’m certain that you and he—”

“No,” Theremon said suddenly.

“No what?”

He was silent for a time. At length he said, “I don’t need to spend the evening thinking about it. I already know what my answer will be.”

Siferra looked at him, waiting.

Theremon said, “I don’t want to butt heads with Altinol. I know the kind of man he is, and I’m very sure that I can’t get along with people like that for any length of time. And I also know that in the short run it may be necessary to have operations like the Fire Patrol, but in the long run they’re a bad thing, and once they’re established and institutionalized it’s very hard to get rid of them. The Altinols of this world don’t give up power voluntarily. Little dictators never do. And I don’t want the knowledge that I helped put him on top hanging around my neck for the rest of my life. Reinventing the feudal system doesn’t strike me as a useful solution for the problems we have now. So it’s no go, Siferra. I’m not going to wear Altinol’s green neckerchief. There isn’t any future for me here.”

Quietly Siferra said, “What are you going to do, then?”

“Sheerin told me that there’s a real provisional government being formed at Amgando Park. University people, maybe some people from the old government, representatives from all over the country coming together down there. As soon as I’m strong enough to travel, I’m going to head for Amgando.”

She regarded him steadily. She made no reply.

Theremon took a deep breath. And said, after a moment, “Come with me to Amgando Park, Siferra.” He reached a hand toward her. Softly he said, “Stay with me this evening, in this miserable little tiny room of mine. And in the morning let’s clear out of here and go down south together. You don’t belong here any more than I do. And we stand five times as much chance of getting to Amgando together than we would if either of us tried to make the journey alone.”

Siferra remained silent. He did not withdraw his hand.

“Well? What do you say?”

Theremon watched the play of conflicting emotions moving across her features. But he did not dare try to interpret them.

Clearly Siferra was struggling with herself. But then, abruptly, the struggle came to an end.

“Yes,” she said at last. “Yes. Let’s do it, Theremon.”

And moved toward him. And took his hand. And switched off the dangling overhead light, though the soft glow of the godlight beside the bed remained.

38

“Do you know the name of this neighborhood?” Siferra asked. She stared, numbed, dismayed, at the charred and ghastly landscape of ruined houses and abandoned vehicles that they had entered. It was a little before midday, the third day of their flight from the Sanctuary. The unsparing light of Onos mercilessly illuminated every blackened wall, every shattered window.

Theremon shook his head. “It was called something silly, you can be sure of that. Golden Acres, or Saro Estates, or something like that. But what it was called isn’t important now. This isn’t a neighborhood any more. What we have here used to be real estate, Siferra, but these days what it is is archaeology. One of the Lost Suburbs of Saro.”

They had reached a point well south of the forest, almost to the outskirts of the suburban belt that constituted the southern fringes of Saro City. Beyond lay agricultural zones, small towns, and—somewhere far in the distance, unthinkably far—their goal of Amgando National Park.

The crossing of the forest had taken them two days. They had slept the first evening at Theremon’s old lean-to, and the second one in a thicket halfway up the rugged slope leading to Onos Heights. In all this while they had had no indication that the Fire Patrol was on their trail. Altinol had apparently made no attempt to pursue them, even though they had taken weapons with them and two bulging backpacks of provisions. And surely, Siferra thought, they were beyond his reach by now.

She said, “The Great Southern Highway ought to be somewhere around here, shouldn’t it?”

“Another two or three miles. If we’re lucky there won’t be any fires burning to block us from going forward.”

“We’ll be lucky. Count on it.”

He laughed. “Always the optimist, eh?”

“It doesn’t cost any more than pessimism,” she said. “One way or another, we’ll get through.”

“Right. One way or another.”

They were moving steadily along. Theremon seemed to be making a quick recovery from the beating he had received in the forest, and from his days of virtual starvation. There was an amazing resilience about him. Strong as she was, Siferra had to work hard to keep up with his pace.

She was working hard, too, to keep her own spirits up. From the moment of setting out, she had consistently struck a hopeful note, always confident, always certain that they’d make it safely through to Amgando and that they would find people like themselves already hard at work there at the job of planning the reconstruction of the world.

But inwardly Siferra wasn’t so sure. And the farther she and Theremon went into these once pleasant suburban regions, the more difficult it was to fight back horror, shock, despair, a sense of total defeat.

It was a nightmare world.

There was no escaping the enormity of it. Everywhere you turned you saw destruction.

Look! she thought. Look! The desolation—the scars—the fallen buildings, the walls already overrun by the first weeds, occupied already by the early platoons of lizards. Everywhere the marks of that terrible night when the gods had once more sent their curse against the world. The awful acrid smell of black smoke rising from the remains of fires that the recent rains had extinguished—the other smoke, white and piercing, curling upward out of basements still ablaze—the stains on everything—the bodies in the streets, twisted in their final agonies—the look of madness in the eyes of those few lingering living people who now and then peered out from the remains of their homes—

All glory vanished. All greatness gone. Everything in ruins, everything—as if the ocean had risen, she thought, and swept all our achievements into oblivion.

Siferra was no stranger to ruins. She had spent her whole professional life digging in them. But the ruins she had excavated were ancient ones, time-mellowed and mysterious and romantic. What she saw here now was all to immediate, all too painful to behold, and there was nothing at all romantic about it. She had been able readily enough to come to terms with the downfall of the lost civilizations of the past: it carried little emotional charge for her. But now it was her own epoch that had been swept into the discard-bin of history, and that was hard to bear.

Why had it happened? she asked herself. Why? Why? Why?

Were we so evil? Had we strayed so far from the path of the gods that we needed to be punished this way?

No.

No!

There are no gods; there was no punishment.

Of that much, Siferra was still certain. She had no doubt that this was simply the working of blind fate, brought about by the impersonal movements of inanimate and uncaring worlds and suns, drawing together every two thousand years in dispassionate coincidence.

That was all. An accident.

An accident that Kalgash had been forced to endure over and over again during its history.

From time to time the Stars would appear in all their frightful majesty; and in a desperate terror-kindled agony, man would unknowingly turn his hand against his own works. Driven mad by the Darkness; driven mad by the ferocious light of the Stars. It was an unending cycle. The ashes of Thombo had told the whole tale. And now it was Thombo all over again. Just as Theremon had said: This place is archaeology now. Exactly.

The world they had known was gone. But we are still here, she thought.

What shall we do? What shall we do?

The only comfort she could find amidst the bleakness was the memory of that first evening with Theremon, in the Sanctuary: so sudden, so unexpected, so wonderful. She kept going back to it in her mind, over and over. His oddly shy smile as he asked her to stay with him—no sly seductive trick, that! And the look in his eyes. And the feel of his hands against her skin—his embrace, his breath mingling with hers—

How long it had been since she had been with a man! She had almost forgotten what it was like—almost. And always, those other times, there had been the uneasy sense of making a mistake, of taking a false path, of committing herself to a journey she should not be taking. It had not been that way with Theremon: simply a dropping of barriers and pretenses and fears, a joyful yielding, an admission, finally, that in this torn and tortured world she must no longer go it alone, that it was necessary to form an alliance, and that Theremon, straightforward and blunt and even a little coarse, strong and determined and dependable, was the ally she needed and wanted.

And so she had given herself at last, unhesitatingly and without regret. What an irony, she thought, that it had taken the end of the world to bring her to the point of falling in love! But at least she had that. Everything else might be lost; but at least she had that.

“Look there,” she said, pointing. “A highway sign.”

It was a shield of green metal, hanging at a crazy angle from a lamppost, its surface blackened by smoke-stains. In three or four places it was punctured by what probably were bullet-holes. But the bright yellow lettering was still reasonably legible: GREAT SOUTHERN HIGHWAY, and an arrow instructing them to go straight ahead.

“It can’t be more than another mile or two from here,” Theremon said. “We ought to reach it by—”

There was a sudden high whining sound, and then a twanging crash, reverberating with stunning impact. Siferra covered her ears. A moment later she felt Theremon hooking his arm through hers, pulling her to the ground.

“Get down!” he whispered harshly. “Somebody’s firing!”

“Who? Where?”

His needle-gun was in his hand. She drew hers also. Glancing up, she saw that the projectile had struck the highway sign: there was a new hole in it between the first two words, obliterating several of the letters.

Theremon, crouching, was moving in a quick shuffle toward the edge of the nearest building. Siferra followed him, feeling hideously exposed. This was worse than standing naked in front of Altinol and the Fire Patrol: a thousand times worse. The next shot might come at any moment, from any direction, and she had no way to protect herself. Even when she pulled herself around the corner of the building and huddled up against Theremon in the alleyway, breathing hard, her heart pounding, she felt no assurance that she was safe.

He nodded toward a row of burned-out houses on the other side of the street. Two or three of them were intact, down near the opposite corner; and now she saw grimy shadowy faces peering out of an upstairs window of the farthest one.

“People in there. Squatters, I bet. Crazies.”

“I see them.”

“Not afraid of our Patrol neckerchiefs. Maybe the Patrol doesn’t mean anything to them, this far out of town. Or maybe they were shooting at us because we’re wearing them.”

“You think so?”

“Anything’s possible.” Theremon edged forward a little way. “What I wonder is, were they trying to hit us and is their aim really lousy, or were they just trying to scare us? If they tried to shoot at us and the best they could do was hit the highway sign, then we could try making a run for it. But if it was just a warning—”

“That’s what I suspect it was. A shot that went astray isn’t likely to have gone astray right into the highway sign. That’s too neat.”

“Probably so,” Theremon said. He scowled. “I think I’m going to let them know we’re armed. Just to discourage them from trying to send a few scouts sneaking around one of these houses and coming up on us from the rear.”

He looked down at his needler, adjusting the aperture to wide beam and maximum distance. Then he raised it and squeezed off a single shot. A bolt of red light sizzled through the air and struck the ground just in front of the building where the faces had appeared. An angry charred spot appeared on the lawn, and wisps of smoke came curling up.

Siferra asked, “Do you think they saw that?”

“Unless they’re so far gone that they aren’t capable of paying attention. But my guess is that they saw, all right. And didn’t like it much.”

The faces were back at the window.

“Stay down,” Theremon warned. “They’ve got some kind of heavy hunting rifle. I can see its snout.”

There was another whining sound, another tremendous crash.

The highway sign, shattered, fell to the ground.

“They may be crazies,” Siferra said, “but their aim is pretty damned good.”

“Too good. They were just playing with us when they fired that first shot. Laughing at us. They’re telling us that if we show our noses they’ll blow us away. They’ve got us pinned down, and they’re enjoying it.”

“Can we get out of here down the far end of this alley?”

“It’s all rubble back there. And more squatters waiting for us on the other side, for all we know.”

“Then what are we going to do?”

“Set that house on fire,” Theremon said. “Burn them out. And kill them, if they’re too crazy to surrender.”

Her eyes widened. “Kill them?”

“If they give us no other option, yes, yes, I will. Do you want to get to Amgando, or would you rather spend the rest of your life hiding out here in this alleyway?”

“But you can’t just kill people, even though you—even though they—”

Her voice trailed off. She didn’t know what she was trying to say.

“Even though they’re trying to kill you, Siferra? Even though they think it’s fun to send a couple of shots whistling past your ears?”

She made no reply. She had thought she was beginning to understand the way things worked in the monstrous new world that had come into being on the evening of the eclipse; but she realized that she understood nothing, nothing at all.

Theremon had crept out toward the street a short way once again. He was aiming his needler.

The incandescent bolt of light struck the white facade of the house down the street. Instantly the wood began to turn black. Little flamelets sprang up. He drew a line of fire across the front of the building, paused a moment, fired again, tracing a second line across the first.

“Give me your gun,” he said. “Mine’s overheating.”

She passed him the weapon. He adjusted it and fired a third time. An entire section of the house’s front wall was ablaze now. Theremon was cutting through it, aiming his beam toward the interior of the building.

Not very long ago, Siferra thought, that white wooden house had belonged to someone. People had lived there, a family, proud of their house, their neighborhood—tending their lawn, watering their plants, playing with their pets, giving dinner parties for their friends, sitting on the patio sipping drinks and watching the suns move through the evening sky. Now none of that meant anything. Now Theremon was lying on his belly in an alleyway strewn with ashes and rubble across the way, efficiently and systematically setting that house on fire. Because that was the only way that he and she could get safely out of this street and continue on their way to Amgando Park.

A nightmare world, yes.

A column of smoke was rising within the house now. The whole left-hand side of its front wall was on fire.

And people were leaping from the second-story windows.

Three, four, five of them, choking, gasping. Two women, three men. They dropped down on the lawn and lay there a moment, as though dazed. Their clothes were ragged and dirty, their hair was unkempt. Crazies. They had been something else, before Nightfall, but now they were simply part of that vast horde of wild-eyed, uncouth-looking drifters whose minds had been unhinged, perhaps forever, by the sudden astounding blast of stunning light that the Stars had hurled against their unprepared senses.

“Stand up!” Theremon called to them. “Hands in the air! Now! Come on, get ’em up!” He stepped out into full view, holding both of the needle-guns. Siferra came out beside him. The house was shrouded in heavy smoke now, and within that dark cloak great frightful gusts of flame were sweeping upward on all sides of the building, blazing like scarlet banners.

Were there people still trapped inside? Who could tell? Did it matter?

“Line up, there!” Theremon ordered. “That’s it! Face to the left!” They straggled to attention. One man was a little slow, and Theremon sent a needler beam blazing past his cheek to encourage his cooperation. “Start running, now. Down the street! Faster! Faster!”

One side of the house caved in with a terrible roaring sound, exposing rooms, closets, furniture, like a doll’s house that had been cut away. Everything was on fire. The squatters were almost at the corner now. Theremon continued to shout at them, urging them on, aiming an occasional needle-bolt at their heels.

Then he turned to Siferra. “All right. Let’s get out of here!”

They holstered their needlers and went running off in the opposite direction, toward the Great Southern Highway.

“What if they had come out firing?” Siferra asked afterward, when they could see the highway entrance itself just a short distance away and were moving through the open fields that led to it. “Would you really have killed them, Theremon?”

He looked at her in a steady, severe way. “If that was the only way we could have gotten ourselves out of that alleyway? I thought I gave you my answer to that before. Of course I would. What choice would I have had? What else could I have done?”

“Nothing, I suppose,” Siferra said, her voice barely audible.

The image of the burning house still seared her mind. And the sight of those ragged, shabby people, running down the street.

But they had fired first, she told herself. They had started the trouble. There was no telling how far they would have carried it, if Theremon hadn’t hit on the idea of burning the house down.

The house—somebody’s house—

Nobody’s house, she corrected.

“There it is,” Theremon said. “The Great Southern Highway. It’s a nice smooth five-hour drive to Amgando. We could be there by dinnertime.”

“If we only had something to drive,” said Siferra.

“If,” he said.

39

Even after all he had seen in the course of having come this far, Theremon wasn’t prepared for the way the Great Southern Highway looked. A traffic engineer’s worst nightmare would not have been as bad.

Everywhere in their crossing of the southern suburbs, Theremon and Siferra had passed abandoned vehicles in the streets. No doubt many drivers, overcome by panic at the moment of the emergence of the Stars, had stopped their cars and fled from them on foot, hoping to find someplace to hide from the terrifying overpowering brilliance that blazed suddenly from the skies.

But the abandoned cars that littered the streets of these quiet residential sectors of the city through which he and Siferra had come so far had been scattered in a sparse random manner, here and there at relatively wide intervals. In these neighborhoods vehicular traffic must have been fairly light at the time of the eclipse, coming as it had after the end of the regular working day.

The Great Southern Highway, though—crowded with late intercity commuters—must have become an utter madhouse in the instant when calamity struck the world.

“Look at it,” Theremon whispered, awestruck. “Will you look at it, Siferra!”

She shook her head in wonder. “Incredible. Incredible.”

There were cars everywhere—clotted masses of them, piled up everywhere in a chaotic scramble, stacked two or three high in places. The wide roadway was almost completely blocked by them, an all but impassable wall of wrecked vehicles. They were facing in every direction. Some were upside down. Many were burned-out skeletons. Bright puddles of spilled fuel gleamed like little crystalline lakes. Streaks of pulverized glass gave the roadbed a sinister sheen.

Dead cars. And dead drivers.

It was the most grisly sight they had seen thus far. A vast army of the dead stretched before them. There were bodies slumped at the controls of their cars, bodies wedged between vehicles that had collided, bodies pinned beneath the wheels of cars. And a host of bodies simply strewn like pitiful discarded dolls along the sides of the road, their limbs frozen in the grotesque attitudes of death.

Siferra said, “Probably some drivers stopped right away, when the Stars came out. But others speeded up, trying to get off the highway and head for home, and went piling into the cars that had stopped. And still other people were so dazed they forgot how to drive altogether—look, they went right off the edge of the road over there, and this one here must have turned around and tried to drive back through the oncoming traffic—”

Theremon shuddered. “A horrendous colossal pileup. Cars crashing in from all sides at once. Spinning around, turning over, flung right across the road to the opposite lanes. People getting out, running for cover, getting hit by other cars just arriving. Everything gone crazy in fifty different ways.”

He laughed bitterly.

Siferra said in surprise, “What can you possibly find to laugh about, Theremon?”

“Only my own foolishness. Do you know, Siferra, a wild idea crossed my mind half an hour ago, as we were getting close to the highway, that we could just sit down in somebody’s abandoned car and find it fueled up and ready to go, and drive ourselves off to Amgando? Just like that, convenient as could be. I didn’t stop to think that the road would be totally blocked—that even if we were lucky enough to find a car we could use, we wouldn’t be able to drive so much as fifty feet in it—”

“It’ll be hard enough just to walk along the road, in the shape it’s in.”

“Yes. But we’ll have to.”

Grimly, they set out on their long journey south.

By the warm Onos-light of early afternoon they picked their way through the carnage of the highway, scrambling over the twisted and battered wreckage of the cars, trying hard to ignore the charred and mutilated bodies, the dried pools of blood, the reek of death, the total horror of it all.

Theremon felt himself growing desensitized to it almost at once. Perhaps that was an even greater horror. But after a short while he simply stopped noticing the gore, the staring eyes of the corpses, the vastness of the disaster that had taken place here. The task of clambering over mountainous heaps of shattered cars and squeezing himself past dangerous jutting masses of jagged metal was so exacting that it required all his concentration, and he quickly ceased to pay attention to the victims of the debacle. He already knew there was no point in searching for survivors. Anyone who had been trapped here this many days would surely have died of exposure by now.

Siferra too seemed to have quickly adapted to the nightmare scene that was the Great Southern Highway. Scarcely saying a word, she picked her way through the obstacles alongside him, now pausing to point to an opening in the tangle of debris, now dropping to her hands and knees to crawl under some overhang of crumpled metal.

They were virtually the only living people using the road. Now and then they caught sight of someone moving southward on foot far ahead of them, or even coming up out of the south heading toward the Saro City end of the road, but there were never any encounters. The other wayfarers would hastily duck down out of sight and lose themselves in the wreckage, or, if they were up ahead, would begin frantically to scramble forward at a pace that spoke of terrible fear, disappearing quickly in the distance.

What are they afraid of? Theremon wondered. That we’ll attack them. Is everyone’s hand lifted against everyone else, now?

Once, an hour or so from their starting point, they saw a bedraggled-looking man going from car to car, reaching in to fumble in the pockets of the dead, despoiling the bodies of their possessions. There was a great sack of loot on his back, so heavy that he was staggering under the weight of it.

Theremon cursed angrily and pulled out his needle-gun.

“Look at the filthy ghoul! Look at him!”

“No, Theremon!”

Siferra deflected his arm just as Theremon fired a bolt at the looter. The shot struck a nearby car, and for a moment set up a glittering sunburst of reflected energy.

“Why did you do that?” Theremon asked. “I was only trying to scare him.”

“I thought—that you—”

Bleakly Theremon shook his head. “No,” he said. “Not yet, anyway. There—look at him run!”

The looter had swung around at the sound of the shot, staring in berserk manic astonishment at Theremon and Siferra. His eyes were blank; a trail of spittle dribbled from his lips. He gaped at them for a long moment. Then, dropping his sack of booty, he went scrabbling away in a wild, desperate flight over the tops of the cars and soon was lost from view.

They went onward.

It was slow, dreadful going. The road-signs that rose high above them on shining stanchions mocked their pitiful progress by telling them what a very small distance from the beginning of the highway they had succeeded in traversing so far. By Onos-set they had gone only a mile and a half.

“At this rate,” Theremon said somberly, “it’ll take us close to a year to reach Amgando.”

“We’ll move faster as we get the knack of it,” said Siferra, without much conviction.

If only they could have followed along some street parallel to the highway, instead of having to walk on the roadbed itself, it would all have been much simpler for them. But that was impossible. Much of the Great Southern Highway was an elevated road, rising on lofty pillars above wooded tracts, areas of marsh, and the occasional industrial zone. There were places where the highway became a bridge across long open patches of mining scars, or over lakes and streams. For most of the distance they would have no choice but to stick to what had once been the central traffic lanes of the highway itself, difficult as it was to get around the unending array of wreckage.

They kept to the edge of the roadbed as much as they could, since the density of wrecked cars was lower there. Looking over into the districts below, they saw signs of continuing chaos everywhere.

Burned houses. Fires still raging after all this time, stretching to the horizon. Occasional little bands of forlorn refugees, looking stunned and dazed, straggling bewilderedly through the debris-choked streets bound on some hopeless, desperate migration. Sometimes a larger group, a thousand people or more, camped together in some open place, everyone huddled in a desolate, paralyzed-looking way, scarcely moving, their wills and energies shattered.

Siferra pointed to a burned-out church at the crest of a hill just across from the highway. A small group of ragged-looking people were scrambling over its tumbled walls, prying at the remaining blocks of gray stone with crowbars, pulling them loose and hurling them into the courtyard.

“It looks as though they’re demolishing it,” she said. “Why would they do that?”

Theremon said, “Because they hate the gods. They blame them for everything that happened.—Do you know the Pantheon, the big Cathedral of All the Gods just at the edge of the forest, with the famous Thamilandi murals? I saw it a couple of days after Nightfall. It had been burned down—just rubble, everything destroyed, and one half-conscious priest sticking out of a pile of bricks. Now I realize that it was no accident that it burned. That fire was deliberately set. And the priest—I saw a crazy kill him right before my eyes, and I thought it was to steal his vestments. Maybe not. Maybe it was out of mere hatred.”

“But the priests didn’t cause—”

“Have you forgotten the Apostles so soon? Mondior, telling us for months that what was going to happen was the vengeance of the gods? The priests are the voice of the gods, isn’t that so, Siferra? And if they led us into evil, so that we needed to be punished this way, why, the priests themselves must be responsible for the coming of the Stars. Or so people would think.”

“The Apostles!” Siferra said darkly. “I wish I could forget them. What do you think they’re doing now?”

“Came through the eclipse safe and sound in their tower, I suppose.”

“Yes. They must have made it through the night in good shape, prepared for it as they were. What was it Altinol said? That they were already operating a government on the north side of Saro City?”

Theremon stared gloomily at the devastated church across the way. Tonelessly he said, “I just can imagine what sort of government that will be. Virtue by decree. Mondior issuing new commandments of morality every Onos Day. All forms of pleasure prohibited by law. Weekly public executions of the sinful.” He spat into the wind. “By Darkness! To think I had Folimun right within my reach that evening and let him go, when I could so easily have throttled him—”

“Theremon!”

“I know. What good would it have done? One Apostle, more or less? Let him live. Let them set up their government, and tell everyone who’s unlucky enough to live north of Saro City what to do and what to think. Why should we care? We’re heading south, aren’t we? What the Apostles do won’t affect us. They’ll be just one of fifty rival squabbling governments, when things have a chance to settle down. One of five thousand, maybe. Every district will have its own dictator, its own emperor.” Theremon’s voice darkened suddenly. “Oh, Siferra, Siferra—”

She took his hand. Quietly she said, “You’re accusing yourself again, aren’t you?”

“How did you know that?”

“When you get yourself so worked up.—Theremon, I tell you you’re not guilty of anything! This would have happened no matter what you wrote in the paper, can’t you see? One man alone couldn’t have made any difference. This is something the world was destined to go through, something that couldn’t have been prevented, something—”

“Destined?” he said sharply. “What a weird word for you to use! The vengeance of the gods, is that what you mean?”

“I didn’t say anything about gods. I mean only that Kalgash Two was destined to come, not by the gods but simply by the laws of astronomy, and the eclipse was destined to happen, and Nightfall, and the Stars—”

“Yes,” Theremon said indifferently. “I suppose.”

They walked onward, through a stretch of road where very few cars had come to rest. Onos was down now, and the evening suns were out, Sitha and Tano and Dovim. A chilly wind blew from the west. Theremon felt the dull ache of hunger rising in him. They had not taken time to eat all day. Now they halted, camping between two crumpled cars, and unpacked some of the packages of dried food they had brought with them from the Sanctuary.

But, hungry as he was, he found that he had little appetite, and he had to force the meal down mouthful by mouthful. The rigid faces of corpses were staring at him from the nearby cars. While he was on the move he had been able to ignore them; but now, sitting here on what had once been Saro Province’s finest highway, he could not screen the sight of them from his mind. There were moments when he felt that he had murdered them all himself.

They built a bed from seat-cushions that had been thrown from colliding cars, and slept close together, a fitful scattered sleep, which could not have been much worse had they tried to sleep on the hard concrete roadbed itself.

During the evening came shouts, hoarse laughter, the distant sound of singing. Theremon awoke once and peered over the edge of the elevated highway, and saw distant campfires in a field down there, perhaps twenty minutes’ march off to the east. Did anyone ever sleep under a roof any more? Or had the impact of the Stars been so universal, he wondered, that the whole population of the world had turned itself out of house and home, to camp in the open as he and Siferra were doing, beneath the familiar light of the eternal suns?

Toward dawn he finally dozed. But hardly had he fallen asleep when Onos came up, pink and then golden in the east, pulling him out of fragmentary, terrifying dreams.

Siferra was already awake. Her face was pale, her eyes were reddened and puffy.

He managed a smile. “You look beautiful,” he told her.

“Oh, this is nothing,” she said. “You ought to see me when I’ve gone without washing for two weeks.”

“But I meant—”

“I know what you meant,” she said. “I think.”

That day they covered four miles, and it was difficult going for them, every step of the way.

“We need water,” Siferra said, as the afternoon wind began to rise. “We’ll have to take the next exit ramp we see, and try to find a spring.”

“Yes,” he said. “I guess we’ll have to.”

Theremon felt uneasy about descending. Since the beginning of the journey they had had the highway virtually to themselves; and by now he had come to feel almost at home, in a strange sort of way, amid the tangle of crushed and ruined vehicles. Down there, in the open fields where the bands of refugees were moving—Odd, he thought, how I call them refugees, as though I’m simply off on some sort of holiday myself—there was no telling what sort of trouble they would get into.

But Siferra was right. They had to go down and find water. The supply that they had brought with them was all but exhausted. And perhaps they needed some time away from the hellish unending strip of demolished cars and stiff, staring corpses before they resumed their march toward Amgando.

He pointed to a road-sign a short way in front of them. “Half a mile to the next exit.”

“We should be able to get there in an hour.”

“Less,” he said. “The road looks pretty clear up ahead. We’ll get ourselves down from the highway and do what we need to do, as fast as we can, and then we’d better get back up here to sleep. It’s safer to bed down out of sight between a couple of these cars than to take our chances in the open fields.”

Siferra saw the logic of that. In this relatively uncluttered stretch of the road they moved quickly toward the upcoming exit ramp, traveling faster than they had in covering any previous section of the highway. In hardly any time at all they came to the next road-sign, the one that gave quarter-mile warning of the exit.

But then their rapid progress was sharply checked. They found the roadbed blocked at that point by so immense a pileup of crashed cars that Theremon feared for a moment that they would not be able to get through at all.

There must have been some truly monstrous series of crashes here, something dreadful even by the standards of what he and Siferra had already passed through. Two huge transport trucks seemed to be in the middle of it, interlocked face to face like two warring beasts of the jungle; and it appeared that dozens of passenger cars had come barreling into them, flipping up on end, falling back on those who followed them, building a gigantic barrier that reached from one side of the road to the other and outward over the railings at the road’s margins. Crumpled doors and fenders, sharp as blades, stuck out everywhere, and acres of broken glass set up a sinister tinkling as the wind played over it.

“Here,” Theremon called. “I think I see a way—up through this opening, and then over the left-hand truck—no, no, that won’t work, we’ll have to go under—”

Siferra came up alongside him. He showed her the problem—a cluster of up-ended cars waiting for them on the far side, like a field of upturned knives—and she nodded. They went underneath instead, a slow, dirty, painful crawl through shards of glass and clotted pools of fuel. Midway through they paused to rest before continuing through to the far side of the pileup.

Theremon was the first to emerge.

“Gods!” he muttered, staring in bewilderment at the scene that lay before him. “What now?”

The road was open for perhaps fifty feet on the far side of the great mass of wreckage. Beyond the clear space a second roadblock lay across the highway from one side to the other. This one, though, had been deliberately constructed—a heap of car doors and wheels neatly piled on the roadbed to a height of eight or nine feet.

In front of the barricade Theremon saw some two dozen people, who had set up a campsite right on the highway. He had been so intent on getting through the tangle of wreckage that he had paid no attention to anything else, and so he had not heard the sounds from the other side.

Siferra came crawling out beside him. He heard her gasp of surprise and shock.

“Keep your hand on your needler,” Theremon said quietly to her. “But don’t pull it out and don’t even think of trying to use it. There are too many of them.”

A few of the strangers were sauntering up the road toward them now, six or seven brawny-looking men. Theremon, motionless, watched them come. He knew that there was no turning back from this encounter—no hope of escape through that maze of knife-sharp wreckage through which they had just wriggled. He and Siferra were trapped in this clearing between the two roadblocks. All they could do was wait to see what happened next, and hope that these people were reasonably sane.

A tall, slouch-shouldered, cold-eyed man came unhurriedly up to Theremon until they were standing virtually nose to nose, and said, “All right, fellow. This is a Search station.” He put a peculiar emphasis on the word Search.

“Search station?” Theremon repeated coolly. “And what is it that you’re searching for?”

“Don’t get wise with me or you’ll find yourself going over the edge head first. You know damned well what we’re searching for. Don’t make trouble for yourself.”

He gestured to the others. They moved in close, patting Theremon’s clothes and Siferra’s. Angrily Theremon pushed the questing hands away.

“Let us pass,” he said tightly.

“Nobody goes through here without Search.”

“By whose authority?”

“By my authority. You going to let us, or we going to have to make you?”

“Theremon—” Siferra whispered uneasily.

He shook her off. Rage was rising in him.

Reason told him that it was folly to try to resist, that they were badly outnumbered, that the tall man wasn’t fooling around when he said there’d be trouble for them if they refused to submit to the search.

These people didn’t exactly seem to be bandits. There was something official-sounding about the tall man’s words, as though this were some kind of boundary, a customs station, perhaps. What were they searching for? Food? Weapons? Would these men try to take the needle-guns from them? Better to give them everything they were carrying, Theremon told himself, than to be killed in a vain and foolishly heroic attempt at maintaining their freedom of passage.

But still—to be manhandled like this—to be forced to submit, on a free public highway—

And they couldn’t afford to give up the needle-guns, or their food supply. It was still hundreds of miles to Amgando.

“I warn you,” the tall man began.

“And I warn you, keep your hands away from me. I’m a citizen of the Federal Republic of Saro and this is still a road freely open to all citizens, no matter what else has happened. You have no authority over me.”

“He sounds like a professor,” one of the other men said, laughing. “Making speeches about his rights, and all.”

The tall man shrugged. “We’ve already got our professor here. We don’t need any more. And this is about enough talk. Grab them and put them through Search. Top to bottom.”

“Let—go—of—me—”

A hand clutched at Theremon’s arm. He brought his fist up quickly and jammed it forward into someone’s ribs. This all seemed very familiar to him: another scuffle, another beating in store for him. But he was determined to fight. An instant later someone hit him in the face and another man caught him by the elbow, and he heard Siferra cry out in fury and fear. He tried to pull free, hit someone again, was hit again himself, ducked, swung, took a sharp stinging blow in the face—

“Hey, wait a second!” a new voice called. “Hold on! Butella, get away from that man! Fridnor! Talpin! Let go of him!”

A familiar voice.

But whose?

The Searchers stepped back. Theremon, swaying a little, struggled to keep his balance as he looked at the newcomer.

A slender, wiry, intelligent-looking man, grinning at him, keen bright eyes peering out of a dirt-stained face—

Someone he knew, yes.

“Beenay!”

“Theremon! Siferra!”

40

In a moment everything was changed. Beenay led Theremon and Siferra to a surprisingly cozy-looking little nest just on the far side of the roadblock: cushions, curtains, a row of canisters that appeared to contain foodstuffs. A slim young woman was lying there, her left leg swathed in bandages. She looked weak and feverish, but she flashed a brief faint smile as the others entered.

Beenay said, “You remember Raissta 717, don’t you, Theremon? Raissta, this is Siferra 89, of the Department of Archaeology. I told you about her—her discovery of previous episodes of city-burning in the remote past.—Raissta is my contractmate,” he said to Siferra.

Theremon had met Raissta a few times over the past couple of years, in the course of his friendship with Beenay. But that had been in another era, in a world that was dead and vanished now. He could barely recognize her. He remembered her as a slender, pleasant-looking, nicely dressed woman who seemed always well groomed, always agreeably turned out. But now—now! This gaunt, frail, haggard girl—this hollow-eyed stringy-haired ghost of the Raissta he had known—!

Had it really been only a few weeks since Nightfall? It seemed like years ago, suddenly. It seemed like eons—several geological epochs ago—

Beenay said, “I have a little brandy here, Theremon.”

Theremon’s eyes widened. “Are you serious? Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had a drink?—How ironic, Beenay. You, the teetotaler who I had to coax into taking his first sip of a Tano Special—you’ve got the last bottle of brandy in the world hidden away here with you!”

“Siferra?” Beenay asked.

“Please. Just a little.”

“Just a little is all we have.” He poured three thimble-sized drinks for them.

Theremon said, as the brandy began to warm him, “Beenay, what’s going on out there? This Search business?”

“You don’t know about Search?”

“Not a thing.”

“Where have you two been since Nightfall?”

“In the forest, mostly. Then Siferra found me after some hoodlums beat me up, and took me to the university Sanctuary while I recovered from what they did to me. And for the past couple of days we’ve been trekking down the highway here, hoping to get to Amgando.”

“So you know about Amgando, do you?”

“By way of you, at one remove,” Theremon said. “I ran into Sheerin in the forest. He was at the Sanctuary right after you must have left it, and he saw your note about Amgando. He told me, I told Siferra. And we set out together to go there.”

“With Sheerin?” Beenay asked. “Where is he, then?”

“He isn’t with us. He and I split up days ago—he went off to Amgando by himself, and I stayed in Saro to look for Siferra. I don’t know what happened to him.—Do you think I could have another little nip of this brandy, Beenay? If you could spare it. And you were starting to tell me about Search.”

Beenay poured a second small drink for Theremon. He looked toward Siferra, who shook her head.

Then he said uneasily, “If Sheerin was traveling alone, he’s probably in trouble, probably very serious trouble. He certainly hasn’t come this way since I’ve been here, and the Great Southern Highway is the only route out of Saro that anybody could take if he hoped to get to Amgando. We’ll have to send out a scouting party to look for him.—As for Search, it’s one of the new things that people do. This is an official Search station. There’s one at the beginning of every province that the Great Southern Highway runs through.”

“We’re only a few miles from Saro City,” Theremon said. “This is still Saro Province, Beenay.”

“Not any more. All the old provincial governments have disappeared. What’s left of Saro City’s been divided up—I hear that the Apostles of Flame have one big chunk of it, over on the far side of town, and the area around the forest and the university is under the control of somebody named Altinol, who’s operating a quasi-military group that calls itself the Fire Patrol. Perhaps you’ve run into them.”

Siferra said, “I was an officer in the Fire Patrol for a few days. This green neckerchief I’m wearing is their official badge of office.”

Beenay said, “Then you know what’s happened. Fragmentation of the old system—a million petty governmental units springing up like mushrooms everywhere. What you’re in now is Restoration Province. It runs from here down the highway about seven miles. When you get to the next Search station, you’re in Six Suns Province. Beyond that is Godland, and then Daylight, and after that—well, I forget. They change every few days, anyway, as people wander on to other places.”

“And Search?” Theremon prompted.

“The new paranoia. Everyone’s afraid of fire-starters. You know what they are? Crazies who thought that what happened at Nightfall was a load of fun. They go around burning things down. I understand that a third of Saro City burned down the night of the eclipse, just from people’s panicky wild attempts to drive away the Stars, but that another third of it has been destroyed since then, even though the Stars are long gone again. A sick business, that is. So the people who are more or less intact of mind—you’re among some now, in case you were wondering—are searching everyone for fire-lighting equipment. It’s forbidden to possess matches, or mechanical lighters, or needle-guns, or anything else capable of—”

“The same thing’s going on on the outskirts of the city,” Siferra said. “That’s what the Fire Patrol is all about. Altinol and his people have set themselves up as the only people in Saro who are allowed to use fire.”

“And I was attacked in the forest while I was trying to cook a meal for myself,” said Theremon. “I suppose they were Searchers too. I’d have been beaten to death if Siferra and her Patrol hadn’t come along to rescue me in the nick of time, pretty much the same way you did just now.”

“Well,” Beenay said, “I don’t know who you ran into in the forest. But Search is the formal ritual down here to deal with the same problem. It goes on everywhere, everybody searching everybody else, never any let-up. Suspicion is universal: nobody’s exempt. It’s like a fever—a fever of fear. Only little elites, like Altinol’s Fire Patrol, can carry combustibles. At every border you have to surrender your fire-making apparatus to the authorities, such as they may happen to be at the moment. You might as well leave those needle-guns here with me, Theremon. You’ll never get to Amgando with them.”

“We’ll never get there without them,” Theremon said.

Beenay shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. But you won’t be able to avoid surrendering them as you continue south. The next time you hit Search, you know, I won’t be there to call off the Search force.”

Theremon considered that.

“How is it that you were able to make them listen to you, anyway?” he asked. “Or are you the head Searcher here?”

With a laugh Beenay said, “The head Searcher? Hardly. But they respect me. I’m their official professor, you see. There are places where university people are loathed, do you know that? Killed on sight by mobs of crazies, because the crazies think we caused the eclipse and are getting ready to cause another one. But not here. Here I’m considered useful for my intelligence—I can compose diplomatic messages to adjoining provinces, I’ve got ideas about how to take broken things and make them work again, I can even explain why the Darkness isn’t going to come back and why nobody will have to look at the Stars again for two thousand years. They find that very comforting to hear. So I’ve settled in among them. They feed us and take care of Raissta, and I think for them. It’s a nice symbiotic relationship.”

“Sheerin told me you were going to Amgando,” said Theremon.

“I was,” Beenay said. “Amgando’s the place where people like you and me ought to be. But Raissta and I ran into some trouble on the way down. Did you hear me tell you that crazies are hunting down university people and trying to kill them? We nearly got caught by a bunch of them ourselves, as we were heading south through the suburbs toward the highway. All those neighborhoods on the south side of the forest are occupied by wild squatters now.”

“We ran into some,” Theremon said.

“Then you know. We were surrounded by a bunch of them. They could tell just by the way we talked that we had to be educated people, and then someone recognized me—recognized me, Theremon, from a picture in the newspaper, from one of your columns, one of the times when you were interviewing me about the eclipse! And he said I was from the Observatory, I was the man who had made the Stars appear.” Beenay stared off into nowhere for a moment. “We were about two minutes away from being strung up from a lamppost, is my guess. But then came a providential distraction. Another gang showed up—territorial rivals, I suppose—throwing bottles, yelling, waving kitchen knives around. Raissta and I were able to get away. They’re like children, the crazies—they can’t keep their minds on any one thing very long. But as we were crawling through a narrow path between two burned-out buildings Raissta cut her leg on some broken glass. And by the time we got this far south on the highway it was so badly infected that she couldn’t walk.”

“I see.” No wonder she looks so terrible, Theremon thought.

“Luckily for us, Restoration Province’s border guards were in need of a professor. They took us in. We’ve been here a week, or maybe ten days, now. I figure Raissta may be able to travel again in another week if all goes well, or more likely two. And then I’ll have the boss of this province write out a passport for us that might get us safely through the next few provinces down the road, at least, and we’ll set out on our way for Amgando. You’re welcome to stay here with us until then, and then we can all go south together, if you like. Certainly it’ll be safer that way.—You want me, Butella?”

The tall man who had tried to search Theremon in the clearing had poked his head over the curtains of Beenay’s little den. “Messenger just came in, Professor. Brought some news from the city, by way of Imperial Province. We can’t make much sense out of it.”

“Let me see,” Beenay said, reaching up and taking a folded slip of paper from the man. To Theremon he said, “Messengers go back and forth between the various new provinces all the time. Imperial’s north and east of the highway, stretching up toward the city itself.—Most of these Searchers here aren’t too good at reading. Their exposure to the Stars seems to have damaged their verbal centers, or something.”

Beenay fell silent as he began to scan the message. He scowled, frowned, pursed his lips, muttered something about post-Nightfall handwriting and spelling. Then after a moment his expression grew dark.

“Good God!” he cried. “Of all the rotten, miserable, terrible—”

His hand was shaking. He looked up at Theremon, wild-eyed.

“Beenay! What is it?”

Somberly Beenay said, “The Apostles of Flame are coming this way. They’ve assembled an army, and they’re going to march down to Amgando, clearing away all the new little provincial governments that have sprung up along the highway. And when they get to Amgando they’re going to smash whatever reconstituted governing body it is that has taken form down there and proclaim themselves the only legally empowered ruling force in all of the Republic.”

Theremon felt Siferra’s fingers digging into his arm. He turned to look at her and saw the horror on her face. He himself must not look very different, he knew.

“Coming—this—way—” he said slowly. “An army of Apostles.”

“Theremon, Siferra—you’ve got to get out of here,” said Beenay. “Immediately. If you’re still here when the Apostles arrive, everything’s lost.”

“Go to Amgando, you mean?” Theremon asked.

“Absolutely. Without wasting another minute. The whole university community that was in the Sanctuary is down there, and people from other universities, educated people from all over the Republic. You and Siferra have to warn them to scatter, fast. If they’re still in Amgando when the Apostles get there, Mondior will be able to gobble up the whole nucleus of any future legitimate government this country’s likely to have, all in one swoop. He might even order mass executions of university people.—Look, I’ll write out passports for you that’ll get you through the next few Search stations down the line, anyway. But when you’ve gotten beyond our authority, you’ll simply have to submit to Search and let them take whatever they want from you, and then keep on heading south. You can’t afford to let yourself be distracted by secondary issues like resisting Search. The Amgando group has to be warned, Theremon!”

“And what about you? Are you just going to stay here?”

Beenay looked puzzled. “What else can I do?”

“But—when the Apostles come—”

“When the Apostles come, they’ll do what they want with me. Are you suggesting that I leave Raissta behind and run off to Amgando with you?”

“Well—no—”

“Then I have no choice. Right? Right? Here I stay, with Raissta.”

Theremon’s head began to ache. He pressed his hands against his eyes.

Siferra said, “There’s no other way, Theremon.”

“I know. I know. But all the same, to think of Mondior and his crew taking a man as valuable as Beenay prisoner—executing him, even—”

Beenay smiled and rested his hand for a moment on Theremon’s forearm. “Who knows? Maybe Mondior would like to keep a couple of professors around as pets. Anyway, what happens to me is unimportant now. My place is with Raissta. Your place is on the road—scampering down to Amgando as fast as you know how. Come on: I’ll get you a meal, and I’ll give you some official-looking documents. And then on your way with you.” He paused. “Here. You’ll need this, too.” He poured the rest of the brandy, no more than an ounce or so, into Theremon’s empty glass.—“Down the hatch,” he said.

41

At the boundary between Restoration Province and Six Suns they had no trouble at all getting through Search. A border official who looked as though he might have been an accountant or a lawyer in the world that no longer existed simply glanced at the passport Beenay had written out, nodded when he saw the florid “Beenay 25” inscription at the bottom, and waved them on through.

Two days later, when they were crossing from Six Suns Province into Godland, it wasn’t that simple. Here the border patrol looked like a gang of cutthroats, who would just as soon toss Theremon and Siferra over the side of the elevated highway as look at their papers at all. There was a long uneasy moment as Theremon stood there, dangling the passport like some sort of magic wand. Then the magic worked, more or less.

“This thing a safe-through?” the head cutthroat asked.

“A passport, yes. Exemption from Search.”

“Who from?”

“Beenay 25, Chief Search Administrator, Restoration Province. That’s two provinces up the road.”

“I know where Restoration Province is. Read it to me.”

“ ‘To Whom It May Concern: This is to attest that the bearers of this document, Theremon 762 and Siferra 89, are properly accredited emissaries of the Fire Patrol of Saro City, and that they are entitled to—’ ”

“The Fire Patrol? What’s that?”

“Altinol’s bunch,” one of the other cutthroats murmured.

“Ah.” The head man nodded toward the needle-guns that Theremon and Siferra wore in full view at their hips. “So Altinol wants you to go marching off through other people’s countries carrying weapons that could set a whole district on fire?”

Siferra said, “We’re on an urgent mission to the people at Amgando National Park. It’s vital that we get there safely.” She touched her green neckerchief. “You know what this means? What we do is to keep fires from starting, not to start them. And if we don’t get to Amgando on time, the Apostles of Flame will come marching down this highway and destroy everything you people are trying to create.”

It didn’t make a lot of sense, Theremon thought. Their getting to Amgando, far to the south, wasn’t going to save the little republics at the northern end of the highway from the Apostles. But Siferra had put just the right note of conviction and passion into her speech to make it all sound very significant, in a jumbled sort of way.

The response was silence, for a moment, while the border patrolman tried to figure out what she was talking about. Then an irritated frown and a perplexed glare. And then, suddenly, almost impetuously: “All right. Go on through. Get the hell out of here, and don’t let me see you anywhere inside Six Suns Province again, or we’ll make you regret it.—Apostles! Amgando!”

“Thank you very much,” said Theremon, with a graciousness bordering so closely on sarcasm that Siferra took him by the arm and steered him quickly through the checkpoint before he could get them into real trouble.

They were able to move quickly in this stretch of the highway, covering a dozen or more miles a day, sometimes even more. The citizens of the provinces that called themselves Six Suns and Godland and Daylight were hard at work, clearing the debris that had littered the Great Southern Highway since Nightfall. Barricades of rubble were set up at regular intervals—nobody was going to be driving the Great Southern Highway again for a long, long time, Theremon thought—but between checkpoints it was possible now to walk at a steady clip, without having to crawl and creep around mounds of hideous wreckage.

And the dead were being taken from the highway and buried, too. Bit by bit, things were beginning to seem almost civilized again. But not normal. Not even remotely normal.

There were few fires now to be seen still burning in the hinterlands flanking the highway, but burned-out towns were visible all along the route. Refugee camps had been set up every mile or two, and as they walked briskly along the elevated road Theremon and Siferra could look down and see the sad, bewildered people of the camps moving slowly and purposelessly about in them as if they had all aged fifty years in that one single terrible night.

The new provinces, Theremon realized, were simply strings of such camps linked together by the straight line of the Great Southern Highway. In each district local strongmen had emerged who had been able to put together a little realm, a petty kingdom that covered six or eight or ten miles of the highway and spread out for perhaps a mile on either side of the roadbed. What lay beyond the eastern and western borders of the new provinces was anybody’s guess. No radio or television communications seemed to be in existence.

“Wasn’t there any kind of emergency planning at all?” Theremon asked, speaking more to the air than to Siferra.

But it was Siferra who answered him. “What Athor was predicting was altogether too fantastic for the government to take seriously. And it would have been playing into Mondior’s hands to admit that anything like the collapse of civilization could happen in just one short period of Darkness, especially a period of Darkness that could be predicted so specifically.”

“But the eclipse—”

“Yes, maybe some people in high office were capable of looking at the diagrams and really did believe that there was going to be an eclipse. And a period of Darkness as a result. But how could they anticipate the Stars? The Stars were simply the fantasy of the Apostles of Flame, remember? Even if the government knew that something like the Stars was going to happen, no one could predict the impact the Stars would have.”

“Sheerin could,” Theremon said.

“Not even Sheerin. He didn’t have an inkling. It was Darkness that was Sheerin’s specialty—not sudden unthinkable light filling the whole sky.”

“Still,” Theremon said. “To look around at all this devastation, all this chaos—you want to think that it was unnecessary, that it could have been avoided, somehow.”

“It wasn’t avoided, though.”

“It better be, the next time.”

Siferra laughed. “Next time is two thousand and forty-nine years away. Let’s hope we can leave our descendants some kind of warning that seems more plausible to them than the Book of Revelations seemed to most of us.”

Turning, she stared back over her shoulder, peering apprehensively at the long span of highway they had covered in the past few days of hard marching.

Theremon said, “Afraid you’ll see the Apostles thundering down the road behind us?”

“Aren’t you? We’re still hundreds of miles from Amgando, even at the pace we’ve been going lately. What if they catch up with us, Theremon?”

“They won’t. A whole army can’t possibly move as quickly as two healthy and determined people. Their transport isn’t any better than ours—one pair of feet per soldier, period. And there are all sorts of logistic considerations that are bound to slow them down.”

“I suppose.”

“Besides, that message said that the Apostles are planning to stop at each new province along the way to establish their authority. It’s going to take them plenty of time to obliterate all those stubborn little petty kingdoms. If we don’t run into any unexpected complications ourselves, we’ll be at Amgando weeks ahead of them.”

“What do you think will happen to Beenay and Raissta?” Siferra asked, after a time.

“Beenay’s a pretty clever boy. I suspect he’ll work out some way of making himself useful to Mondior.”

“And if he can’t?”

“Siferra, do we really need to burn up our energies worrying ourselves over horrible possibilities that we can’t do a damned thing about?”

“Sorry,” she said sharply. “I didn’t realize you’d be so touchy.”

“Siferra—”

“Forget it,” she said. “Maybe I’m the touchy one.”

“It’ll all work out,” said Theremon. “Beenay and Raissta aren’t going to be harmed. We’ll get down to Amgando in plenty of time to give the warning. The Apostles of Flame won’t conquer the world.”

“And all the dead people will rise up and walk again, too. Oh, Theremon, Theremon—” Her voice broke.

“I know.”

“What will we do?”

“We’ll walk fast, is what we’ll do. And we won’t look back. Looking back doesn’t do any good at all.”

“No. None at all,” said Siferra. And smiled, and took his hand. And they walked quickly onward in silence.

It was amazing, Theremon thought, how swiftly they were going, now that they had hit their stride. The first few days, when they were coming down out of Saro City and picking their way through the wreckage-strewn upper end of the highway, progress had been slow and their bodies had protested bitterly against the strains that they were imposing on them. But now they were moving like two machines, perfectly attuned to their task. Siferra’s legs were nearly as long as his own, and they walked along side by side, muscles working efficiently, hearts pumping steadily, lungs expanding and contracting in flawless rhythm. Stride stride stride. Stride stride stride. Stride stride stride—

Hundreds of miles yet to go, sure. But it wouldn’t take long, not at this pace. Another month, perhaps. Perhaps even less.

The road was almost completely clear, down here in the rural regions beyond the farthest edge of the city. There hadn’t been nearly as much traffic here in the first place as there had been to the north, and it looked as though many of the drivers had been able to get off the highway safely even while the Stars were shining, since they were in less danger of being struck by the cars of other drivers who had lost control.

There were fewer checkpoints, too. The new provinces in these sparsely populated areas covered much greater areas than those up north, and their people seemed less concerned with such things as Search. Theremon and Siferra underwent serious interrogation only twice in the next five days. At the other border points they were simply waved on through without even having to show the papers Beenay had provided for them.

Even the weather was on their side. It was fair and mild almost every day: a few little rain-showers now and then but nothing that caused serious inconvenience. They would walk for four hours, pause for a light meal, walk another four, eat again, walk, stop for six hours or so of sleep—taking turns, one sitting up and watching for a few hours, then the other—and then get up and march onward. Like machines. The suns came and went in the sky in their age-old rhythm, now Patru and Trey and Dovim up above, now Onos and Sitha and Tano, now Onos and Dovim, now Trey and Patru, now four suns at once—the unending succession, the great pageant of the skies. Theremon had no idea how many days had passed since they had left the Sanctuary. The whole idea of dates, calendars, days, weeks, months—it all seemed quaint and archaic and cumbersome to him, something out of a former world.

Siferra, after her spell of brooding and apprehensiveness, became cheerful again.

This was going to be a breeze. They would make it down to Amgando with no trouble at all.

They were passing through a district known as Spring Glen now—or perhaps it was called Garden Grove; they had heard several different names from the people they encountered along the road. It was farm country, open and rolling, and there was little sign here of the hellish devastation that had blighted the urbanized regions: an occasional fire-damaged barn, or a herd of farm animals that seemed to be roaming unattended, and that was about the worst of it. The air was sweet and fresh, the light of the suns was bright and strong. But for the eerie absence of vehicular traffic on the highway, it was possible here to think that nothing extraordinary had happened at all.

“Are we halfway to Amgando yet?” Siferra asked.

“Not quite. I haven’t seen a road-sign for a while, but my guess is that—”

He stopped abruptly.

“What is it, Theremon?”

“Look. Look there, to the right. Along that secondary road coming in from the west.”

They peered over the edge of the highway. Down below, a few hundred yards away, a long row of trucks was drawn up at the side of the secondary road, where it fed into an approach to the main one. There was a large, bustling camp there: tents, a big campfire burning, some men chopping logs.

Two or three hundred people, perhaps. All of them in black hooded robes.

Theremon and Siferra exchanged astounded glances.

“Apostles!” she whispered.

“Yes. Get down. Hands and knees. Hide yourself against the railing here.”

“But how did they manage to get this far south so fast? The highway’s upper end is completely blocked!”

Theremon shook his head. “They didn’t take the highway at all. Look there—they’ve got trucks that work. Here’s another one, coming right now. Gods, that looks strange, doesn’t it, an actual moving vehicle! And hearing the sound of an engine again after all this time.” He felt himself beginning to shiver. “They were able to keep a fleet of trucks undamaged, and a supply of fuel. And obviously they’ve come down from Saro around through the west, on little country roads. Now they’re joining up with the main highway, which I suppose is open from here to Amgando. They could be there by this evening.”

“This evening! Theremon, what are we going to do?”

“I’m not sure. There’s only one wild chance, I guess.—What if we went down there and tried to seize one of those trucks? And drove it to Amgando ourselves. Even if we got there only two hours ahead of the Apostles, there’d be time for most of the Amgando people to escape. Right?”

Siferra said, “Perhaps. It sounds crazy, though. How could we steal a truck? The moment they see us, they’ll know we aren’t Apostles, and they’ll grab us.”

“I know. I know. Let me think.” After a moment he said, “If we could catch a couple of them at a distance from the others, and take their robes away from them—shoot them with our needlers, if we have to—and then, when we’re robed, just walk up to one of the trucks as though we have every right to be doing that, and jump on board and drive off toward the highway—”

“They’d follow after us in two minutes.”

“Maybe. Or maybe if we were calm and cool about it they’d think it was something perfectly ordinary, part of their plan—and by the time they realized it wasn’t, we’d be fifty miles down the road.” He looked at her eagerly. “What do you say, Siferra? What other hope do we have? Continue toward Amgando on foot, when for us it’ll be a journey of weeks and weeks, and they can drive past us in a couple of hours?”

She was staring at him as though he had lost his mind.

“Overpower a couple of Apostles—hijack one of their trucks—go zooming off toward Amgando—oh, Theremon, it’ll never work. You know that.”

“All right,” he said abruptly. “You stay here. I’ll try to do it alone. It’s the only hope there is, Siferra.”

He rose to a half-crouch, and began to scuttle along the side of the highway toward the exit ramp a few hundred yards ahead.

“No—wait, Theremon—”

He looked back at her and grinned. “Coming?”

“Yes. Oh, this is crazy!”

“Yes,” he said. “I know. But what else can we do?”

She was right, of course. The scheme was crazy. Yet he saw no alternative. Evidently the report Beenay had received had been garbled: the Apostles had never intended to move down the Great Southern Highway province by province, but instead had set out directly for Amgando in a huge armed convoy, taking minor roads which, though not very direct, were at least still open to vehicular transport.

Amgando was doomed. The world would fall by default to Mondior’s people.

Unless—unless—

He had never imagined himself as a hero. Heroes were people he wrote about in his column—people who functioned at the top of their form under extreme circumstances, performing strange and miraculous deeds that the ordinary individual would never dream of even attempting, let alone of carrying off. And now here he was in this strangely transformed world, blithely talking of overpowering hooded cultists with his needle-gun, commandeering a military truck, speeding off to Amgando Park to sound the warning of the oncoming attack—Crazy. Utterly crazy.

But perhaps it might just work, simply because it was so crazy. Nobody would be expecting two people to appear out of thin air down here in this peaceful bucolic setting and simply run off with a truck.

They edged their way down the highway ramp, Theremon a short distance in the lead. A thickly overgrown field lay between them and the camp of the Apostles. “Maybe,” he whispered, “if we get down and wriggle through the tall grass here, and a couple of the Apostles come wandering out this way for some reason, we can rise up and jump them before they know what’s happening.”

He got down. He wriggled.

Siferra went right after him, keeping pace.

Ten yards. Twenty. Just keep going, head down and wriggle, over to that little knoll, and then wait—wait—

A voice said suddenly, just behind him, “What do we have here? A couple of peculiar serpents, is it?”

Theremon turned, looked, gasped.

Gods! Apostles, seven or eight of them! Where had they come from? A private picnic in the field? Which he and Siferra had crawled right past, all unknowing?

“Run for it!” he barked to her. “You go this way—I’ll go that—”

He began to sprint to his left, toward the towers that supported the highway. Maybe he could outrun them—disappear into the wooded country on the other side of the road—

No. No. He was strong and fast, but they were stronger, faster. He saw them coming up alongside him.

“Siferra!” he yelled. “Keep going! Keep—going!”

Perhaps she had actually made it to safety. He couldn’t see her now. The Apostles were all around him. He reached for his needle-gun, but one of them caught his arm immediately, and another got him by the throat. The gun was yanked from his hand. Legs poked between his, entangling him, tripping him. He fell heavily, rolled over, looked up. Five hooded faces, unsmiling, rigid, looked back. One of the Apostles had his own needle-gun aimed at his chest.

“Get up,” the Apostle said. “Slowly. With your hands in the air.”

Awkwardly Theremon stumbled to his feet.

“Who are you? What are you doing here?” the Apostle demanded.

“I live around here. My wife and I were just taking a shortcut through these fields, back to our house—”

“The nearest farm is five miles away. A very long shortcut.” The Apostle gestured with a nod of his head toward the camp. “Come with us. Folimun will want to talk to you.”

Folimun!

So he had survived the night of the eclipse after all. And was in charge of the expedition against Amgando!

Theremon glanced around. No sign of Siferra at all. He hoped she was back on the highway by now, heading for Amgando as fast as she could go. A slim hope, but the only one left.

The Apostles marched him toward the camp. It was a weird sensation to be among so many hooded figures. Scarcely any of them paid attention to him, though, as his captors nudged him along, into the largest of the tents.

Folimun was seated at a bench near the back of the tent, looking through a sheaf of papers. He turned his chilly blue eyes on Theremon and his thin, sharp face softened for an instant as a smile of surprise crossed it.

“Theremon? You here? What are you doing—covering us for the Chronicle?”

“I’m traveling south, Folimun. Taking a little holiday, since things are a little unsettled back in the city. Would you mind asking these thugs of yours to let go of me?”

“Release him,” Folimun said.—“Where are you heading, exactly, eh?”

“That’s of no importance to you.”

“Let me be the judge of that. Going to Amgando, are you, Theremon?”

Theremon offered the cultist a cold level stare. “I don’t see any reason why I should tell you anything.”

“After all that I told you, when you interviewed me?”

“Very funny.”

“I want to know where you’re heading, Theremon.”

Stall, Theremon thought. Stall him as long as you can.

“I decline to answer that question, or any other you might happen to have for me. I’ll discuss my intentions only with Mondior himself,” he said in a steady, determined tone.

Folimun made no reply for a moment. Then he smiled again, a quick on-off. And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, he broke into actual laughter. Theremon wondered if he had ever seen Folimun laugh before. “Mondior?” Folimun said, his eyes glinting with amusement. “There is no Mondior, my friend. There never was.”

42

It was hard for Siferra to believe that she had actually managed to escape. But that was indeed what appeared to have happened.

Most of the Apostles who had surprised them in the field had gone after Theremon. Looking back once, she had seen them surrounding him like hunters’ hounds surrounding their prey. They had knocked him down; he would certainly be captured.

Only two of the Apostles had split off to pursue her. Siferra had jabbed one in the face, hard, with the flat of her hand at the end of her stiff outstretched arm, and at the speed she was traveling the impact had sent him reeling to the ground. The remaining one was fat and ungainly and slow; in moments Siferra left him far behind.

She doubled back the way she and Theremon had come, toward the elevated highway. But it seemed unwise to go up onto it. The highway was too easily blocked, and there was no safe way down from it except at the exit ramps. She would only be putting herself at risk of running into a trap if she went up there. And even if no roadblocks lay ahead, it would be a simple thing for the Apostles to come after her in their trucks and pick her up, a mile or two down the way.

No, the thing to do was to run into the woods on the far side of the road. The Apostles’ trucks wouldn’t be able to follow her there. She could lose herself easily enough in those low shrubby trees, and hide there until she had figured out her next move.

And what could that be? she wondered.

She had to admit that Theremon’s idea, wild as it was, still was their only hope: steal a truck somehow, drive down to Amgando and sound the alarm before the Apostles could get their army on the move again.

But Siferra knew there wasn’t the remotest chance that she could simply tiptoe up to an empty truck, jump in, and drive it away. The Apostles weren’t that stupid. She’d have to order one of them at gunpoint to switch the truck on for her and surrender its controls to her. And that involved carrying out the whole bizarre maneuver of trying to overpower a stray Apostle, getting his robe, slipping into the camp, locating someone who could open up one of the trucks for her—

Her heart sank. It was all too implausible. She might just as well consider trying to rescue Theremon while she was at it—go marching in with her needle-gun blazing, take hostages, demand his immediate release—oh, it was absolute foolishness, a silly melodramatic dream, a gaudy maneuver out of some cheap children’s adventure book—

But what will I do? What will I do?

She huddled down in a copse of tightly woven little trees with long feathery leaves and waited for time to pass. The Apostles gave no sign of breaking camp: she could still see the smoke of their bonfire against the twilight sky, and their trucks were still parked where they had been along the road.

Evening was coming on. Onos was gone from the sky. Dovim hovered on the horizon. The only suns overhead were her two least favorite ones, bleak and cheerless Tano and Sitha, casting their cold light from their distant location at the edge of the universe. Or what people had thought was the edge of the universe, rather, in those far-off innocent days before the Stars appeared and revealed to them just how immense the universe really was.

The hours ticked interminably by. No solution to the situation made sense to her. Amgando seemed lost, unless someone else had managed to get a warning to them—certainly there was no way she was going to get down there ahead of the Apostles. Rescuing Theremon was an absurd idea. Her chances of stealing a truck and getting to Amgando by herself was only slightly less preposterous.

What then? Simply sit back and watch while the Apostles took command of everything?

There seemed to be no alternative.

At one point during the evening she thought that the only path open to her was to walk into the Apostles’ camp, surrender, and ask to be imprisoned with Theremon. At least they would be together then. It astonished her how much she missed him. They had not been out of each other’s company in weeks, she who had never lived with a man in her life. And all during the long journey from Saro City, though they had bickered now and then, even quarreled a little, she had never tired of being with him. Not once. It had seemed the most natural thing in the world for them to be together. And now she was alone again.

Go on, she told herself. Give yourself up. Everything’s lost anyway, isn’t it?

It grew darker. Clouds veiled Sitha and Tano’s frosty light, and the sky turned so dusky that she half expected the Stars to reappear.

Go ahead, she thought bitterly. Come out and shine. Drive everyone crazy all over again. What harm can it do? The world can only be smashed once, and that’s been done already.

But the Stars, of course, did not appear. Veiled as they were, Tano and Sitha nevertheless afforded enough light to mask the glow of those distant points of mysterious brilliance. And as the hours went by, Siferra found herself swinging completely around from her mood of total defeatism to a new sense of almost reckless hope.

When all is lost, she told herself, there’s nothing left to lose. Under cover of this evening gloom she would slip into the Apostles’ camp and—somehow, somehow—take one of their trucks. And rescue Theremon, too, if she could manage it. And then off to Amgando! By the time Onos was in the sky tomorrow morning, she’d be down there, among her university friends, in plenty of time to let them know that they had to scatter before the enemy army arrived.

All right, she thought. Let’s go.

Slowly—slowly—more cautiously than before, just in case they have sentries hidden in the grass—

Out of the woods. A moment of uncertainty, there: she felt tremendously vulnerable, now that she had left the safety of that tangle of shrubbery behind. But the dimness still protected her. Across the cleared place, now, that led from the woods to the elevated highway. Under the great metal legs of the roadbed and into the unkempt field where she and Theremon had been surprised that afternoon.

Get down and wriggle, now, the way they had before. Once again across the field—looking this way and that, scanning for sentries who might be on duty at the perimeter of the Apostles’ camp—

Her needle-gun was in her hand, set for minimum aperture, the sharpest, most highly focused, deadliest beam the gun could produce. If anyone came upon her now, so much the worse for him. There was too much at stake to worry about the niceties of civilized morality. While still half out of her mind she had killed Balik in the Archaeology lab, not meaning to, but he was dead all the same; and, a little to her surprise, she found herself quite ready to kill again, this time intentionally, if circumstances required it of her. The important thing was to get a vehicle and get out of here and carry the news of the Apostles’ army’s approach to Amgando. Everything else, including considerations of morality, was secondary. Everything. This was war.

Onward. Head down, eyes raised, body hunched. She was only a few dozen yards from the camp now.

It was very silent over there. Probably most of them were asleep. In the murky grayness Siferra thought she could see a couple of figures on the far side of the main bonfire, though the smoke rising from the fire made it difficult to be sure. The thing to do, she thought, was to slip into the deep shadows behind one of the trucks and toss a rock against a tree some distance away. The sentries would probably investigate; and if they fanned out separately, she could slip up behind one of them, jab the needler into his back, warn him to keep quiet, make him strip off his robe—

No, she thought. Don’t warn him of anything. Just shoot him, quickly, and take his robe, before he can call out an alarm. These are Apostles, after all Fanatics.

Her own newfound cold-bloodedness amazed her.

Onward. Onward. She was almost at the nearest truck now. Into the darkness on the side opposite the campfire. Where’s a rock? Here. Here, this is a good one. Shift the needler to the left hand for a moment. Now, toss the rock at that big tree over there—

She raised her arm to make the throw. And in that moment she felt a hand seize her left wrist from behind and a powerful arm clamp across her throat.

Caught!

Shock and outrage and a jolt of maddening frustration went coursing through her. Furiously Siferra lashed out with her foot, kicking backward with all her strength, and connecting. She heard a grunt of pain. Not enough to break the man’s strong grip, though. Twisting halfway around, she kicked again, and attempted at the same time to pass the needle-gun from her left hand to her right.

But her assailant pulled her left arm upward in a short, sharp, agonizing gesture that numbed her and sent the needler spilling out of her hand. The other arm, the one that was pressing against her throat, tightened to choking intensity. She coughed and gasped.

Darkness! Of all the stupidity, to let someone sneak up on her while she was sneaking up on them!

Tears of rage burned her cheeks. In fury she kicked backward again, and then again.

“Easy,” a deep voice whispered. “You could hurt me that way, Siferra.”

“Theremon?” she said, astounded.

“Who do you think it is? Mondior?”

The pressure at her throat eased. The hand that clutched her wrist released its grasp. She took a couple of tottering steps forward, fighting for breath. Then, numb with confusion, she swung around to stare at him.

“How did you get free?” she asked.

He grinned. “A holy miracle, it was. An absolute holy miracle.—I watched you the whole time, coming from the woods. You were very good, really. But you were concentrating so hard on getting here unnoticed that you didn’t notice me circling around behind you.”

“Thank all the gods it was you, Theremon. Even if you did give me the shock of my life when you grabbed me.—But why are we standing here? Quick, let’s grab one of those trucks and clear out of here before they see us.”

“No,” he said. “That isn’t the plan any more.”

She gave him a blank look. “I don’t understand.”

“You will.” To her amazement he clapped his hands and called loudly, “Over here, fellows! Here she is!”

“Theremon! Are you out of your—”

The beam of a flashlight struck her in the face with an impact nearly as devastating as the one the Stars had had. She stood blinded, shaking her head in bewilderment and consternation. There were figures moving all around her, but it was another moment before her eyes adapted sufficiently to the sudden brightness for her to make them out.

Apostles. Half a dozen of them.

She glared accusingly at Theremon. He seemed calm, and very pleased with himself. Her dazed mind could barely begin to accept the awareness that he had betrayed her.

When she tried to speak, nothing but blurted monosyllables would emerge. “But—why?—what?—”

Theremon smiled. “Come on, Siferra. There’s someone I want you to meet.”

43

Folimun said, “There’s not really any need to glower at me like that, Dr. Siferra. You may have trouble believing it, but you are among friends here.”

“Friends? You must think I’m a very gullible woman.”

“Not at all. Quite the contrary.”

“You invade my laboratory and steal priceless research materials. You order your horde of berserk superstitious followers to invade the Observatory and wreck the equipment with which the university astronomers are trying to perform unique, essential research. Now you hypnotize Theremon into doing your bidding, and send him out to capture me and turn me over to you as a prisoner. And then you tell me that I’m among friends?”

Theremon said quietly, “I haven’t been hypnotized, Siferra. And you aren’t a prisoner.”

“Of course not. And this is all just a very bad dream, too: Nightfall, the fires, the collapse of civilization, the whole thing. An hour from now I’ll wake up in my apartment in Saro City and everything will be just the way it was when I went to sleep.”

Theremon, facing her across the middle of Folimun’s tent, thought that she had never looked more beautiful than she did right then. Her eyes were luminous with anger. Her skin seemed to glisten. There was an aura of intensely focused energy about her that he found irresistible.

But this was hardly the moment to tell her anything like that.

Folimun said, “For stealing your tablets, Dr. Siferra, I can only offer my apologies. It was a shameless act of theft, which I assure you I never would have authorized except that you made it necessary.”

“I made it—”

“You did. You insisted on keeping them in your possession—on placing those irreplaceable relics of the previous cycle in jeopardy at a time when chaos was about to break loose and, for all you knew, the university buildings were going to be destroyed down to the last brick. We saw it as essential that they be placed in safekeeping, that is to say, in our own hands, and since you would not authorize that we found it necessary to take them from you.”

“I found those tablets. You’d never have known they existed if I hadn’t dug them up.”

“Which is beside the point,” Folimun said smoothly. “Once the tablets were discovered, they became vital to our needs—to humanity’s needs. We felt that the future of Kalgash was more important than your personal proprietary interest in your artifacts. As you will see, we have translated the tablets fully now, making use of the ancient textual material already available to us, and they have added greatly to our understanding of the extraordinary challenges that civilized life on Kalgash must periodically confront. Dr. Mudrin’s translations were, unfortunately, extremely superficial. But the tablets provide an accurate and convincing version, uncorrupted by centuries of textual alteration and error, of the chronicles that have come down to us under the name of the Book of Revelations. The Book of Revelations, I must confess, is full of mysticism and metaphor, adopted for propagandistic purposes. The Thombo tablets are straightforward historical accounts of two separate advents of the Stars thousands of years ago, and of the attempts made by the priesthoods of the time to warn the populace of what was about to happen. We can demonstrate now that throughout history and prehistory on Kalgash, small groups of dedicated people have struggled again and again to prepare the world for the disruption that repeatedly falls upon it. The methods they used, obviously, were insufficient to the problem. Now at last, aided as we are by a knowledge of past mistakes, we will be able to spare Kalgash from another devastating upheaval when the present Year of Godliness comes to its end two thousand years from now.”

Siferra turned to Theremon. “How smug he sounds! Justifying his own burglary of my tablets by telling me that they’ll enable him to set up an even more efficient theocratic dictatorship than they had hoped! Theremon, Theremon, why did you sell me out like this? Why did you sell us out? We could have been halfway to Amgando by this time, if only—”

Folimun said, “You’ll be in Amgando tomorrow afternoon, Dr. Siferra, I assure you. All of us will be in Amgando by tomorrow afternoon.”

“What will you do?” she asked hotly. “March me in chains at the rear of your conquering army? Tie me up and make me walk in the dust behind Mondior’s chariot?”

The Apostle sighed. “Theremon, explain things to her, if you please.”

“No,” she said. Her eyes were blazing. “You poor brainwashed ninny, I don’t want to hear the gibberish this maniac has poured into your mind! I don’t want to hear anything from any of you! Let me alone. Lock me up, if you like. Or turn me loose, if you can bring yourself to do it. I can’t possibly harm you, can I? One woman against a whole army? I can’t even cross a field without having someone come up and surprise me from behind!”

Theremon, dismayed, reached toward her.

“No! Keep away from me! You disgust me!—But it isn’t your fault, is it? They’ve done something to your mind.—You’ll do it to me too, won’t you, Folimun? You’ll make me into an obliging little puppet. Well, let me ask just this one favor. Don’t force me to wear an Apostle’s robe. I can’t stand the idea of walking around inside one of those ridiculous things. Take my soul away, if you have to, but let me dress as I please, all right? All right, Folimun?”

The Apostle laughed faintly. “Perhaps it would be best if I left the two of you alone. I see that nothing’s going to be accomplished so long as I’m part of the conversation.”

Siferra cried, “No, damn you, I don’t want to be left alone with—”

But Folimun had already risen and walked quickly from the tent.

Theremon turned toward Siferra, who backed away from him as though he were carrying some plague.

Softly he said, “I wasn’t hypnotized, Siferra. They haven’t done anything to my mind.”

“Of course you’d say that.”

“It’s true. I’ll prove it to you.”

She stared at him bleakly, coldly, making no response. Very quietly he said, after a moment, “Siferra, I love you.”

“How long did it take the Apostles to program that line into you?” she asked.

He winced. “Don’t. Don’t. I mean it, Siferra. I won’t try to tell you that I’ve never said those words to anyone before. But this is the first time I’ve meant them.”

“Oldest line in the book,” said Siferra derisively.

“I suppose I deserve that. Theremon the ladies’ man. There-mon the seducer-about-town. Well, all right. Forget I said it.—No. No. I’m serious, Siferra. Traveling with you these past weeks—being with you morning and afternoon and evening—there hasn’t been a moment when I haven’t looked at you and thought to myself, This is the woman I was waiting for all these years. This is the woman I never dared to imagine I would find.”

“Very touching, Theremon. And the best way you could find to show your love was to grab me from behind, practically breaking my arm in the process, and turn me over to Mondior. Right?”

“Mondior doesn’t exist, Siferra. There’s no such person.”

For an instant he saw a flicker of surprise and curiosity cut through her hostility.

“What?”

“He’s a convenient mythical construct, put together by electronic synthesis to make speeches on television. No one’s ever had an audience with him, have they? He’s never been seen in public. Folimun invented him to be a public spokesman. Since Mondior never appears in person, he can be on television in five different countries at once, all over the world—nobody could ever be sure where he really was, and so he could be displayed simultaneously. Folimun’s the real boss of the Apostles of Flame. He simply masquerades as a public-relations officer. In fact he calls all the shots, and has for the past ten years. Before that there was someone named Bazret, who’s dead now. Bazret was the one who invented Mondior, but Folimun’s brought him to his present eminence.”

“Folimun told you all this?”

“He told me some. I guessed the rest, and he confirmed it. He’ll show me the Mondior apparatus when we’re back in Saro City. The Apostles plan to restore television transmissions in another few weeks.”

“All right,” Siferra said harshly. “The discovery that Mondior’s a fake so overwhelmed you with its slimy cleverness that you decided on the spot that you absolutely had to join up with Folimun’s outfit. And your first assignment was to turn me in. So you skulked around looking for me, and took me by surprise, and thereby made certain that the people down in Amgando would fall into Folimun’s clutches. Nicely done, Theremon.”

“Folimun’s heading for Amgando, yes,” Theremon said. “But he doesn’t intend to harm those who have gathered there. He wants to offer them posts in the new government.”

“Gods almighty, Theremon, do you believe—”

“Yes. Yes, Siferra!” Theremon held his hands out, fingers spread wide in an agitated gesture. “I may be a mere coarse journalist, but at least grant me that I’m no fool. Twenty years in the newspaper business has made me an excellent judge of character, at the very least. Folimun impressed me in a strange way from the first time I met him. He seemed very much the opposite of crazy, very complex, very sly, very sharp. And I’ve been talking with him for the past eight hours. Nobody’s been sleeping here this evening. He’s laid his whole plan bare. He’s shown me his entire scheme. Would you grant, for the sake of argument, that it’s possible for me to get an accurate psychological reading on someone during the course of an eight-hour conversation?”

“Well—” she said grudgingly.

“Either he’s completely sincere, Siferra, or he’s the best actor in the world.”

“He could be both. That still doesn’t make him someone we’d want to trust.”

“Maybe not. But I do. Now.”

“Go on.”

“Folimun is a totally ruthless, almost monstrously rational man who believes that the only thing that’s of any real importance is the survival of civilization. Because he’s had access, through his age-old religious cult, to historical records of previous cycles, he’s known for many years what we’ve all just learned in the hardest possible way: that Kalgash is doomed to be shown a view of the Stars once every two thousand years and that the sight of them is so overwhelming that it’ll shatter ordinary minds and give even the strongest ones a bad time for days or weeks.—He’s willing to let you see all their ancient documents, by the way, when we’re back in Saro City.”

“Saro City has been destroyed.”

“Not the part of it controlled by the Apostles. They made damned well sure nobody would be setting any fires within a mile of their tower on all sides.”

“Very efficient of them,” Siferra said.

“They’re efficient people. All right: Folimun knows that in a time of total madness the best hope of pulling things together is a religious totalitarianism. You and I may think the gods are just old fables, Siferra, but there are millions and millions of people out there, believe it or not, who have a different view of things. They’ve always been uneasy about doing things that they consider sinful, for fear the gods will punish them. And now they have an absolute dread of the gods. They think the Stars might come back tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, and finish off the job.—Well, here are the Apostles, who claim a direct pipeline to the gods and have all sorts of scriptural passages to prove it. They’re in a better position to set up a world government than Altinol, or the little provincial overlords, or the fugitive remnants of the former governments, or anyone else. They’re the best hope we have.”

“You’re serious,” Siferra said in wonder. “Folimun hasn’t hypnotized you, Theremon. You’ve managed to do it to yourself!”

“Look,” he said. “Folimun’s been working all his life toward this moment, knowing that his is the generation of Apostles on whom the responsibility for ensuring survival will fall. He’s got all sorts of plans. He’s well on his way to establishing control over enormous territories north and west of Saro City, and next he’s going to take charge of the new provinces along the line of the Great Southern Highway.”

“And establish a theocratic dictatorship that will begin its rule by executing all the atheistic, cynical, materialistic university people like Beenay and Sheerin and me.”

“Sheerin’s already dead. Folimun told me his people found his body in a ruined house. He was apparently killed some weeks back by a band of anti-intellectual crazies.”

Siferra looked away, unable for a moment to meet Theremon’s eyes. Then she stared at him more angrily than before and said, “There you are. First Folimun sends his goons crashing into the Observatory—Athor was killed too, wasn’t he?—and then he eliminates poor harmless Sheerin. And then all the rest of us will be—”

“He was trying to protect the Observatory people, Siferra.”

“He didn’t go about it very well, did he?”

“Things got out of hand. What he wanted to do was rescue all the scientists before the rioting started—but because he was operating under the guise of a wild-eyed fanatic, he had no way of persuading them to hear what he was offering, which was to give them safe-conduct to the Apostles’ Sanctuary.”

“After the Observatory was wrecked.”

“That wasn’t his first choice either. The world was crazy that night. Things didn’t always follow his scheme.”

“You’re very good at making excuses for him, Theremon.”

“Maybe so. Hear me out, anyway. He wants to work with the surviving university people, and the other sane and intelligent ones who have gathered at Amgando, to rebuild humanity’s pool of knowledge. He—or the supposed Mondior, rather—will be in charge of the government. The Apostles will keep the unstable and superstition-ridden populace pacified by religious domination, at least for a generation or two. Meanwhile the university people will help the Apostles assemble and codify the knowledge they’ve managed to save, and together they’ll guide the world back to a rational state—as has happened so many times before. But this time, perhaps, they’ll be able to begin the preparations for the next eclipse a hundred years or so in advance, and head off the worst of the upheaval, the mass insanity, the torchings, the universal devastation.”

“And you believe all this?” Siferra asked. There was the bite of acid in her voice. “That it makes sense to stand back and applaud while the Apostles of Flame spread their poisonous irrational totalitarian creed throughout the world? Or what’s even worse—that we should join forces with them?”

“I hate the idea,” Theremon said suddenly.

Siferra’s eyes widened. “Then why—?”

“Let’s go outside,” he said. “It’s almost dawn. Give me your hand?”

“Well—”

“It wasn’t just a line, when I told you I love you.”

She shrugged. “One thing has nothing to do with another. The personal and the political, Theremon—you’re using one to muddle the other.”

“Come,” he said.

44

They stepped from the tent. The early light of Onos was a pink glow on the eastern horizon. High overhead, Tano and Sitha had emerged from the clouds, and the twin suns, now at their zenith, had a radiance that was strange and wonderful to behold.

There was one more. Far off in the north the small hard red sphere that was the little sun Dovim was shining like a tiny ruby set in the forehead of the sky.

“Four suns,” Theremon said. “A sign of luck.”

All about them in the Apostles’ camp there was the bustle of activity. The trucks were being loaded, the tents were coming down. Theremon caught sight of Folimun far across the other side, directing a team of workers. The Apostle leader waved to Theremon, who nodded in return.

“You hate the idea that the Apostles will rule the world,” Siferra said, “and yet you’re still willing to give your allegiance to Folimun? Why? What sense does that make?”

Quietly Theremon said, “Because there’s no other hope.”

“Is that what you think?”

He nodded. “It began to sink in, after Folimun had been talking with me for a couple of hours. Every rational instinct in me tells me not to trust Folimun and his crew of fanatics. Whatever else he may be, there’s no doubt that Folimun’s a power-hungry manipulator, very ruthless, very dangerous. But what other chance is there? Altinol? All the petty little bosses along the highway? It could take a million years to weld all the new provinces into a global economy. Folimun’s got the authority to make the whole world kneel to him—or to Mondior, rather.—Listen, Siferra, most of mankind is lost in madness. There are millions of crazies loose out there now. Only strong-minded ones like you and me and Beenay have been able to recover, or very stupid ones; but for the others, the mass of humanity, it’ll be months or years or never before they can think straight again. A charismatic prophet like Mondior, much as I loathe the idea, may be the only answer.”

“No other option, then?”

“Not for us, Siferra.”

“Why not?”

“Look, Siferra: I believe that what matters is healing. Everything else is secondary to that. The world has suffered a terrible wound, and—”

“Has inflicted a terrible wound on itself.”

“That’s not how I see it. The fires were a response to a vast change of circumstances. They never would have happened if the eclipse hadn’t yanked our curtain away and shown us the Stars.—But the wounds go on and on. One leads to another, now. Altinol is a wound. These new little independent provinces are wounds. The crazies killing each other in the forest—or hunting down fugitive university professors—are wounds.”

“And Folimun? He’s the biggest wound of all!”

“Yes and no. Of course he’s peddling fanaticism and mysticism. But there’s discipline there. People believe in what he’s selling, even the crazies, even the ones with sick minds. He’s a wound so big he can swallow all the others. He can heal the world, Siferra. And then—from within—we can try to heal what he has done. But only from within. If we join him, we stand a chance. If we set ourselves up in opposition, we’ll be swept aside like fleas.”

“What are you saying, then?”

“We have our choice between rallying behind him and becoming part of the ruling elite that will bring the world back from insanity, or becoming wanderers and outlaws. Which do you want, Siferra?”

“I want a third choice.”

“There isn’t any. The Amgando bunch doesn’t have the force of will to form a workable government. People like Altinol don’t have the scruples. Folimun already controls half of what used to be the Federal Republic of Saro. He’s certain to prevail over the rest. It’ll be centuries before the reign of reason returns, Siferra, regardless of what you and I do.”

“So you say it’s better to join him, and try to control the direction in which the new society goes, than to oppose him simply because we don’t like the kind of fanaticism he represents?”

“Exactly. Exactly.”

“But to cooperate in handing the world over to religious fanaticism—”

“The world has made its way up from religious fanaticism before, hasn’t it? The important thing now is to find some way out of the chaos. Folimun and his crew offer the only visible hope of that. Think of their faith as a machine that’ll drive civilization, at a time when all the other machinery is broken. That’s the only thing that counts now. First fix the world; then hope our descendants will get tired of the mystical fellows in the robes and hoods. Do you see what I’m saying, Siferra? Do you?”

She nodded in a strange, vague way, as though she were responding in her sleep. Theremon watched as she walked slowly away from him, toward the clearing where they had been surprised by the sentries of the Apostles the evening before. It seemed like years ago.

She stood a long while by herself there, in the light of the four suns.

How beautiful she looks, Theremon thought.

How I love her!

How strange this all has turned out to be.

He waited. All about him the breakup of the Apostles’ camp was reaching a pitch of activity, robed and hooded figures running back and forth past him.

Folimun came over. “Well?”

“We’re thinking it over,” Theremon said.

“We? I had the impression you were with us, no matter what.”

Theremon eyed him steadily. “I’m with you if Siferra is. Otherwise no.”

“Whatever you say. We’d hate to lose a man with your skills at communication, though. Not to mention Dr. Siferra’s expertise with the artifacts of the past.”

Theremon smiled. “Let’s see how skillful I’ve been at communicating just now, eh?”

Folimun nodded and walked away, back to the trucks that were being loaded. Theremon looked toward Siferra. She was facing the east, toward Onos, while the light of Sitha and Tano descended on her in a dazzling stream from above, and out of the north came the slender red spear of Dovim’s beam.

Four suns. The best of omens.

Siferra was coming back, now, trotting across the field. Her eyes were shining, and she seemed to be laughing. She came running up to him.

“Well?” Theremon asked. “What do you say?”

She took his hand in hers. “All right, Theremon. So be it. Almighty Folimun is our leader, and I will follow him whithersoever he telleth me to go. With one condition.”

“Go on. What is it?”

“The same one I mentioned when we were in his tent. I won’t wear the robe. I absolutely will not. If he insists on the robe, the deal is off!”

Theremon nodded happily. It was going to be all right. After Nightfall came daybreak, and rebirth. Out of the devastation a new Kalgash would rise, and he and Siferra would have a voice, a powerful voice, in creating it. “I think that can be arranged,” he replied. “Let’s go talk to Folimun and see what he says.”