Nightfall (2 page)

“What about Gistin 190?” Cubello asked.

“She’s another possibility, but she’s not as strong as Harrim. Let him get the basic story from Harrim, and then he can talk to Gistin, and—oh, maybe Chimmilit. After lunch, that is.”

“Thank you,” said Sheerin.

“If you’ll come this way, Dr. Sheerin—”

Kelaritan gestured toward a glassed-in passageway that led from the rear of his office to the hospital itself. It was an airy, open catwalk with a 360-degree view of the sky and the low gray-green hills that encircled the city of Jonglor. The light of the day’s four suns came streaming in from all sides.

Pausing for a moment, the hospital director looked to his right, then to his left, taking in the complete panorama. The little man’s dour pinched features seemed to glow with sudden youth and vitality as the warm rays of Onos and the tighter, sharply contrasting beams from Dovim, Patru, and Trey converged in a brilliant display.

“What an absolutely splendid day, eh, gentlemen!” Kelaritan cried, with an enthusiasm that Sheerin found startling, coming from someone as restrained and austere as he seemed to be. “How glorious it is to see four of the suns in the sky at the same time! How good it makes me feel when their light strikes my
face! Ah, where would we be without our marvelous suns, I wonder?”

“Indeed,” said Sheerin.

He was feeling a little better himself, as a matter of fact.

Half a world away, one of Sheerin 501’s Saro University colleagues was staring at the sky also. But the only emotion she felt was horror.

She was Siferra 89, of the Department of Archaeology, who had been conducting excavations for the past year and a half at the ancient site of Beklimot on the remote Sagikan Peninsula. Now she stood rigid with apprehension, watching a catastrophe come rushing toward her.

The sky offered no comfort. In this part of the world the only real light visible just then was that of Tano and Sitha, and their cold, harsh gleam had always seemed joyless, even depressing, to her. Against the deep somber blue of the two-sun-day sky it was a baleful, oppressive illumination, casting jagged, ominous shadows. Dovim was in view also—barely, just rising now—right on the horizon, a short distance above the tips of the distant Horkkan Mountains. The dim glow of the little red sun, though, was hardly any more cheering.

But Siferra knew that the warm yellow light of Onos would come drifting up out of the east before long to cheer things up. What was troubling her was something far more serious than the temporary absence of the main sun.

A killer sandstorm was heading straight toward Beklimot. In another few minutes it would sweep over the site, and then anything might happen. Anything. The tents could be destroyed; the carefully sorted trays of artifacts might be overturned and their contents scattered; their cameras, their drafting equipment, their laboriously compiled stratigraphic drawings—everything that they had worked on for so long might be lost in a moment.

Worse. They could all be killed.

Worse yet. The ancient ruins of Beklimot itself—the cradle
of civilization, the oldest known city on Kalgash—were in jeopardy.

The trial trenches that Siferra had sliced in the surrounding alluvial plain stood wide open. The onrushing wind, if it was strong enough, would lift even more sand than it was already carrying, and hurl it with terrible force against the fragile remains of Beklimot—scouring, eroding, reburying, perhaps even ripping whole foundations loose and hurling them across the parched plain.

Beklimot was a historical treasure that belonged to the entire world. That Siferra had exposed it to possible harm by excavating in it had been a calculated risk. You could never do any sort of archaeological work without destroying something: it was the nature of the job. But to have laid the whole heart of the plain bare like this, and then to have the lousy luck of being hit by the worst sandstorm in a century—

No. No, it was too much. Her name would be blackened for aeons to come if the Beklimot site was shattered by this storm as a result of what she had done here.

Maybe there was a curse on this place, as certain superstitious people were known to say. Siferra 89 had never had much tolerance for crackpots of any sort. But this dig, which she had hoped would be the crowning achievement of her career, had been nothing but headaches ever since she started. And now it threatened to finish her professionally for the rest of her life—if it didn’t kill her altogether.

Eilis 18, one of her assistants, came running up. He was a slight, wiry man who looked insignificant beside the tall, athletic figure of Siferra.

“We’ve got everything nailed down that we were able to!” he called to her, half breathless. “It’s all up to the gods now!”

She replied, scowling, “Gods? What gods? Do you see any gods around here, Eilis?”

“I simply meant—”

“I know what you meant. Forget it.”

From the other side came Thuvvik 443, the foreman of the workers. He was wild-eyed with fear. “Lady,” he said. “Lady, where can we hide? There is no place to hide!”

“I told you, Thuvvik. Down below the cliff.”

“We will be buried! We will be smothered!”

“The cliff will shelter you, don’t worry,” Siferra told him, with a conviction she was far from feeling. “Get over there! And make sure everybody else stays there!”

“And you, lady? Why are you not there?”

She gave him a sudden startled glance. Did he think she had some private hiding place where she’d be safer than the rest?

“I’ll be there, Thuvvik. Go on! Stop bothering me!”

Across the way, near the six-sided brick building that the early explorers had called the Temple of the Suns, Siferra caught sight of the stocky figure of Balik 338. Squinting, shading his eyes against the chilly light of Tano and Sitha, he stood looking toward the north, the direction from which the sandstorm was coming. The expression on his face was one of anguish.

Balik was their chief stratigrapher, but he was also the expedition’s meteorological expert, more or less. It was part of his job to keep the weather records for them and to watch out for the possibility of unusual events.

There wasn’t much in the way of weather on the Sagikan Peninsula, normally: the whole place was unthinkably arid, with measurable rainfall no more often than every ten or twenty years. The only unusual climatic event that ever occurred there was a shift in the prevailing pattern of air currents that set cyclonic forces in motion and brought about a sandstorm, and even that didn’t happen more than a few times a century.

Was Balik’s despondent expression a hint of the guilt he must feel for having failed to foresee the coming of the storm? Or did he look so horrified because he was able now to calculate the full extent of the fury that was about to descend?

Everything might have been different, Siferra told herself, if they’d had a little more time to prepare for the onslaught. In hindsight, she could see that all the telltale signs had been there for those with the wit to notice them—the burst of fierce dry heat, excruciating even by the standards of the Sagikan Peninsula, and the sudden dead calm that replaced the usual steady breeze from the north, and then the strange moist wind that began to blow from the south. The khalla-birds, those weird scrawny scavengers that haunted the area like ghouls, had all taken wing when that wind started blowing, vanishing into the
dune-choked western desert as though demons were on their tails.

That should have been the clue, Siferra thought. When the khalla-birds took off and went screaming into the dune country.

But they had all been too busy working at the dig to pay attention to what was going on. Sheer denial, most likely. Pretend that you don’t notice the signs of an approaching sandstorm and maybe the sandstorm will go somewhere else.

And then that little gray cloud appearing out of nowhere in the far north, that dull stain on the fierce shield of the desert sky, which ordinarily was always as clear as glass—

Cloud? Do you see a cloud? I don’t see any clouds.

Denial again.

Now the cloud was an immense black monster filling half the sky. The wind still blew from the south, but it was no longer moist—a searing furnace-blast was what it was, now—and there was another wind, an even stronger one, bearing down from the opposite direction. One wind fed the other. And when they met—

“Siferra!” Balik yelled. “Here it comes! Take cover!”

“I will! I will!”

She didn’t want to. What she wanted to do was run from one zone of the dig to another, looking after everything at once, holding the flaps of the tents down, wrapping her arms around the bundles of precious photographic plates, throwing herself against the face of the newly excavated Octagon House to protect the stunning mosaics that they had discovered the month before. But Balik was right. Siferra had done all she could, this frantic morning, to batten down the site. Now the thing to do was to huddle in, down there below the cliff that loomed at the upper edge of the site, and hope that it would be a bulwark for them against the fullest force of the storm.

She ran for it. Her sturdy, powerful legs carried her easily over the parched, crackling sand. Siferra was not quite forty years old, a tall, strong woman in the prime of her physical strength, and until this moment she had never felt anything but optimism about any aspect of her existence. But suddenly everything was imperiled now: her academic career, her robust good health, maybe even her life itself.

The others were crowded together at the base of the cliff, behind a hastily improvised screen of bare wooden poles with tarpaulins lashed to them. “Move over,” Siferra said, pushing her way in among them.

“Lady,” Thuvvik moaned. “Lady, make the storm turn back!” As though she were some sort of goddess with magical powers. Siferra laughed harshly. The foreman made some kind of gesture at her—a holy sign, she imagined.

The other workers, all of them men of the little village just east of the ruins, made the same sign and began to mutter at her. Prayers? To
her?
It was a spooky moment. These men, like their fathers and grandfathers, had been digging at Beklimot all their lives in the employ of one archaeologist or another, patiently uncovering the ancient buildings and sifting through the sand for tiny artifacts. Presumably they had been through bad sandstorms before. Were they always this terrified? Or was this some kind of super storm?

“Here it is,” Balik said. “This is it.” And he covered his face with his hands.

The full power of the sandstorm broke over them.

Siferra remained standing at first, staring through an opening in the tarpaulins at the monumental cyclopean city wall across the way, as though simply by keeping her gaze fixed on the site she would be able to spare it from harm. But after a moment that became impossible. Gusts of incredible heat came sweeping down, so ferocious that she thought her hair and even her eyebrows would burst into flame. She turned away, raising one arm to shield her face.

Then came the sand, and all vision was blotted out.

It was like a rainstorm, a downpour of all too solid rain. There was a tremendous thundering sound, not thunder at all but only the drumming of a myriad tiny sand particles against the ground. Within that great sound were other ones, a slithery whispering sound, a jagged scraping sound, a delicate drumming sound. And a terrible howling. Siferra imagined tons of sand cascading down, burying the walls, burying the temples, burying the vast sprawling foundations of the residential zone, burying the camp.

And burying all of them.

She turned away, face to the wall of the cliff, and waited for
the end to come. A little to her surprise and chagrin, she found herself sobbing hysterically, sudden deep wails rising from the core of her body. She didn’t want to die. Of course not: who did? But she had never realized until this moment that there might be something worse than dying.

Beklimot, the most famous archaeological site in the world, the oldest known city of mankind, the foundation of civilization, was going to be destroyed—purely as a result of her negligence. Generations of Kalgash’s great archaeologists had worked here in the century and a half since Beklimot’s discovery: first Galdo 221, the greatest of them all, and then Marpin, Stinnupad, Shelbik, Numoin, the whole glorious roster—and now Siferra, who had foolishly left the whole place uncovered while a sandstorm was approaching.

So long as Beklimot had been buried beneath the sands, the ruins had slumbered peacefully for thousands of years, preserved as they had been on the day when its last inhabitants finally yielded to the harshness of the changing climate and abandoned the place. Each archaeologist who had worked there since Galdo’s day had taken care to expose just a small section of the site, and to put up screens and sand-fences to guard against the unlikely but serious danger of a sandstorm. Until now.

She had put up the usual screens and fences too, of course. But not in front of the new digs, not in the sanctuary area where she had focused her investigations. Some of Beklimot’s oldest and finest buildings were there. And she, impatient to begin excavating, carried away by her perpetual buoyant urge to go on and on, had failed to take the most elementary precautions. It hadn’t seemed that way to her at the time, naturally. But now, with the demonic roaring of the sandstorm in her ears, and the sky black with destruction—

Just as well, Siferra thought, that I won’t survive this. And therefore won’t have to read what they’re going to say about me in every book on archaeology that gets published in the next fifty years. “
The great site of Beklimot, which yielded unparalleled data about the early development of civilization on Kalgash until its unfortunate destruction as a result of the slipshod excavation practices employed by the young, ambitious Siferra 89 of Saro University
—”

“I think it’s ending,” Balik whispered.

“What is?” she said.

“The storm. Listen! It’s getting quiet out there.”

“We must be buried in so much sand that we can’t hear anything, that’s all.”