Nightfall (31 page)

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?

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?”