Someone else in the crowd started shouting, “Death to the unbelievers! Death to the blasphemers in the Observatory!”
That cry was taken up by others until it became this ugly chant. I wanted to tell them, hey, I’d never even been in the Observatory, but they wouldn’t even have heard me.
Finally, a tall man in a black robe pushed his way to the front of the crowd. When he raised his hands, they all shut up. “Silence, my friends,” he goes. “Let us give these profaners of the truth one last chance to redeem their souls.”
“Who’s that?” I go.
“His name is Sor 5,” Segol goes. “He is the leader of the Cultists.”
“Oh, huh,” I go. I turned to this Sor 5 and I go, “I don’t know anything about your Cult. What’s your problem, anyway?”
The guy in the robe just gave me this sad little smile. “It’s not my problem, young lady. It’s yours. You have only a few minutes left before Lagash is swallowed up by the Cave of Darkness. Unless you embrace the revealed truth of our faith, your soul will be stripped from you when the Stars appear. You will become a savage, unreasoning brute. “
I looked at the flipped-out people who made up his congregation, and I figured most of them didn’t have far to go. Like maybe they’d already seen the stars, like at some kind of preview party or something. “So what are you guys selling?” I go.
Sor goes, “Behold! The Cave of Darkness is already engulfing Beta.”
I looked up. There wasn’t much of the red sun left. “Really,” I go. “Tell me about it.”
“Soon all will be in Darkness, and the Stars will blaze down in all their fury. “
“Really.”
Sor looked confused for a few seconds. “You do not deny any of this?”
I go, “See, you’re telling me the same thing that Segol told me, and I can’t figure out what your hang-up is.”
That made him mad. I thought he was going to split his black robe. “We believe the Stars are the source of the Heavenly Flame, which will scourge and cleanse Lagash. The infidels of the Observatory insist that the Stars are nothing but burning balls of gas, physical objects like our own six suns. They refuse to grant that the Stars have any holy power at all. “
“Death to the unbelievers!” screamed the mob. “Death to the blasphemers in the Observatory!” Sor tried again to quiet them, but this time they wouldn’t listen. They surged forward, and I was like sure they were fully ready to tear us limb from limb. I brandished Old Betsy, but I backed away uphill, praying that Segol and I could somehow make it to the Observatory alive.
The astronomer shot me a terrified glance. “You hold them off,” he goes, “and I’ll run for help.”
“Right,” I go, sort of contemptuously, “you just do that.” He was like a real poohbutt, you know?
Just then, the last red ember of Beta flickered in the sky and went out as the eclipse reached totality. There was a long moment of this really creepy quiet. You couldn’t hear a sound, not a person gasping or an animal rustling, not even the wind. It was like being in a movie theater when the film breaks, just before the audience starts getting rowdy. And then the stars came out, normally No Big Deal.
Except on Lagash, it was a big deal, and not just ‘cause it’d been two thousand years since the last time. Bitsy, these people really knew how to have stars! I looked up, and there were a zillion times as many stars as we have on Earth. It reminded me of when we were getting ready for that dance at Brush-Bennett, and you spilled that whole box of glitter on my black strapless. Remember? Well, on Lagash, the night sky looked just like that. All the places between the stars were crammed with stars.
“Oh…my…God!” I was totally impressed, but I wasn’t, you know, going insane or anything.
“Stars!” goes Segol in this kind of strangled voice.
“Surprise,” I go. I mean, he was a real melvin.
Now the mob started screaming and screeching and carrying on. They’d known the Stars were coming, but like they didn’t have any idea what stars really were, or how many of them there’d be, and all that. So even Sor looked haired, but I give him credit, he pulled himself together pretty fast. “Our salvation will be the destruction of the Observatory,” he goes. I mean, he couldn’t bring himself to look up at the stars anymore, and he had to kind of croak his speech out, but he made himself heard. “If we destroy the Observatory and everyone in it, the Stars will spare us. And we must begin with them.”
He was pointing at me and Segol. “That is so lame,” I go. “Don’t be stupid. There’s nothing to be-”
Sadly, I didn’t have the time to finish my explanation. The crowd was full-on crazy and ready to roust. When they charged, I felt a sudden calmness flood through me. I didn’t know what Segol was doing and I didn’t care. Old Betsy whistled through the air as I hacked and hewed at the waves of shrieking lunatics. Bodies piled up in front of me and on both sides. I took a couple of biffs and bruises, but I was too skillful and like too excellent for them to fight through my guard.
Of course, they had me outnumbered, and after a while I realized I was way tired. I wasn’t going to be able to handle all of them, so while I fought I tried to think up some, you know, strategy. And then I saw their leader over on the side of the road, kneeling down in the dark, with his face turned up to the sky where the eclipse was still chugging along and the stars were still blazing away. I started working my way toward him, wading through his nutty buddies with my broadsword cutting a swath before me.
Finally I was right beside him. I reached down and grabbed him by the neck of his robe and jerked him to his feet. “I am Sor!” he goes, like frothing a little in the corners of his mouth. He wasn’t all there anymore, okay?
“You’re sore,” I go. I let him go and he fell in a heap at my feet. “Tell your fruitcake army to stand still and shut up, or I’ll split your skull open and let the starlight in.”
Sor stared at me fearfully for a few seconds. Then he got to his feet and raised his arms. “Stand still and shut up!” he goes.
All the rest of the mob stopped what they were doing, which was mostly climbing over the stacks of bodies, trying to get to me.
“Good,” I go. “You have no reason to be afraid.”
Segol started babbling. I’d wondered what had happened to him. “Beenay guessed a dozen, maybe two dozen Stars. But this! The universe, the stars, the bigness!”
“Lagash is nothing, a speck of dust!” cried a voice from the mob.
“We’re nothing but insects, less than insects!”
“I want light! Let’s burn the Observatory!”
“We’re so small, and the Darkness is so huge! Our suns and our planet are insignificant!”
Well, these people had a serious problem. All of a sudden, they realized that there was a lot more to the universe than their precious Lagash. Then I had an idea that might keep these frenzied folks from thrashing all of their civilization and maybe save my own neck, too.
I go, “There’s no reason to be afraid. The stars are not what you think. I know. I come from a world that has studied them for many centuries.”
“She’s mad! The Stars have driven her insane!”
“Listen to her!” Segol goes. “She told me the same story long before the Stars appeared. She speaks the truth. “
“Yes,” I go, “there are other stars in the universe. That’s just something you ‘re going to have to learn to live with. But not as many as that.” I pointed up, and noticed that the eclipse had moved on past totality, and a teeny tiny thread of red light was starting to grow on one side of Beta.
“Then what are all those thousands of points of light?” goes Sor.
“Tonight is a night for revelations and strange truth,” I go. I’m always pretty good in a crisis like that. I can talk my way out of anything. Hey, you know that. You were my roommate, right? “Lagash, your six suns, and the other twelve stars in the universe are surrounded by a huge ball of ice. “
“Ice?” goes Segol. He sounded like he was having just a little bit of trouble buying it.
“Sure, ice, “ I go, acting kind of ticked off that he doubted me. “What did you think, that the universe just sort of went on and on forever? That’s so real, I’m totally sure.”
“A wall of ice,” Sor goes. “The Book of Revelations speaks of a Cave of Darkness. I don’t see why there can’t be a wall of ice as well.”
Now everyone had stopped trying to grab me by the throat. They were all like hanging on my every word, okay? “But what are the Stars?” someone goes.
“The Stars are an illusion,” I go. “What you see up there are only the reflections of the dozen real stars, shining on the craggy ice wall of the universe. “