Nightfall (33 page)

“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.

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.