Nightfall (34 page)

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?”