Nightfall (32 page)

“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.”

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?”