She shrugged. “I still hate the thought that some thief in an Apostle’s robe was sniffing around in my office—jimmying my safe—taking things that I had uncovered with my own hands. It’s like a violation of my body, almost. Can you understand that, Dr. Athor? To have been robbed of those tablets—it’s almost like a rape.”
“I know how upset you are,” Athor said, in a tone that indicated he didn’t really understand at all. “Look—look there. How bright Dovim is this evening! And in just a little while how dark everything will be.”
She managed a vague smile and turned away from him.
All about her, people were buzzing to and fro, checking this, discussing that, running to the window, pointing, murmuring. Now and then someone would come rushing in with some new data from the telescope dome. She felt like a complete outsider among these astronomers. And altogether bleak, altogether hopeless. Some of Athor’s fatalism must have rubbed off on me, she thought. He seemed so depressed, so lost. It wasn’t at all like him to be that way.
She wanted to remind him that it wasn’t the world that would end this evening, it was just the present cycle of civilization. They would rebuild. Those who had gone into hiding would come forth and start everything over, as had happened a dozen times before—or twenty, or a hundred—since the beginning of civilization on Kalgash.
But for her to tell Athor that would probably do no more good than for him to have told her not to worry about the loss of the tablets. He had hoped all the world would prepare itself against the catastrophe. And instead only a small fraction had paid any heed to the warning. Just those few who had gone to the university Sanctuary, and whatever other sanctuaries might have been set up elsewhere—
Beenay came over to her. “What’s this I hear from Athor? The tablets are gone?”
“Gone, yes. Stolen. I knew I never should have allowed myself to have any sort of contact with the Apostles.”
Beenay said, “You think they stole them?”
“I’m sure of it,” she said bitterly. “They sent word to me, after the existence of the Thombo tablets first became a matter of public knowledge, that they had information that would be of use to me. Didn’t I tell you? I guess not. What they wanted was a deal similar to the one Athor worked out with that high priest, or whatever he is: Folimun 66. ‘We have maintained a knowledge of the old language,’ Folimun said, ‘the language spoken in the previous Year of Godliness.’ And so they had, apparently—texts of some sort, dictionaries, alphabets of the old script, perhaps a lot more.”
“Which Athor was able to obtain from them?”
“Some of it. Enough, at any rate, to determine that the Apostles did have genuine astronomical records of the previous eclipse—enough, Athor said, to prove that the world had been through such a cataclysm at least once before.”
Athor, she went on to tell Beenay, had given her copies of the few astronomical text fragments he had received from Folimun, and she had shown them to Mudrin. Who indeed had found them valuable in his own translation of the tablets. But Siferra had balked at sharing her tablets with the Apostles, at least not on their terms. The Apostles claimed to be in possession of a key to the early clay-tablet script, and perhaps they were. Folimun had insisted, though, that she give him the actual tablets to be copied and translated, rather than his giving her the decoding material that he had. He wouldn’t settle for copies of the tablet texts. It had to be the original artifacts, or else no deal.
“But you drew the line at that,” Beenay said.
“Absolutely. The tablets mustn’t leave the university. ‘Give us the textual key,’ I said to Folimun, ‘and we’ll provide you with copies of the tablet texts. Then we can each attempt a translation.’ ”
But Folimun had refused. Copies of the texts were of no use to him, since they could all too easily be dismissed as forgeries. As for giving her his own documents, no, absolutely not. What he had, he said, was sacred material, which could only be made available to Apostles. Give him the tablets and he would provide translations of them for her. But no outsider was going to get a look at the texts already in his possession.
“I was actually tempted to join the Apostles for a moment,” Siferra said, “just for the sake of getting access to the key.”
“You? An Apostle?”
“Only to get their textual material. But the idea repelled me. I turned Folimun down.” And Mudrin had had to toil on at his translations without the help of whatever material the Apostles might have. It became apparent that the tablets did indeed seem to talk about some fiery doom that the gods had sent upon the world—but Mudrin’s translations were sketchy, hesitant, sparse.
Well, now the Apostles had the tablets anyway, more likely than not. That was hard to take. In the chaos ahead, they’d be waving those tablets around—her tablets—as still more evidence of their own wisdom and holiness.
“I’m sorry that your tablets are gone, Siferra,” Beenay said.
“But maybe there’s still a chance the Apostles didn’t steal them. That they’ll turn up somewhere.”
“I’m not counting on that,” said Siferra. And she smiled ruefully and turned away to stare at the darkening sky.
The best she could do by way of comfort was take Athor’s line: that the world was ending in a little while anyway, and nothing mattered very much. But that was cold comfort indeed. She fought inwardly against any such counsel of despair. The important thing was to keep on thinking of the day after tomorrow—of survival, of rebuilding, of the struggle and its fulfillment. It was no good to fall into despondency like Athor, to accept the downfall of humanity, to shrug and give up all hope.
A high tenor voice cut suddenly across her gloomy meditations.
“Hello, everybody! Hello, hello, hello!”
“Sheerin!” Beenay cried. “What are you doing here?”
The plump cheeks of the newcomer expanded in a pleased smile. “What’s this morgue-like atmosphere in here? No one’s losing their nerve, I hope.”
Athor started in consternation and said peevishly, “Yes, what are you doing here, Sheerin? I thought you were going to stay behind in the Sanctuary.”
Sheerin laughed and dropped his tubby figure into a chair. “Sanctuary be damned! The place bored me. I wanted to be here, where things are getting hot. Don’t you suppose I have my share of curiosity? I rode in the Tunnel of Mystery, after all. I can survive another dose of Darkness. And I want to see these Stars that the Apostles have been spouting about.” He rubbed his hands and added in a soberer tone, “It’s freezing outside. The wind’s enough to hang icicles on your nose. Dovim doesn’t seem to give any heat at all, at the distance it is this evening.”
The white-haired director ground his teeth in sudden exasperation. “Why do you go out of your way to do a crazy thing like this, Sheerin? What kind of good can you be around here?”
“What kind of good am I around there?” Sheerin spread his palms in comical resignation. “A psychologist isn’t worth a damn in the Sanctuary. Not now. Not a thing I could do for them. They’re all snug and safe, laced in underground, nothing to worry about.”
“And if a mob should break in during the Darkness?”
Sheerin laughed. “I very much doubt that anyone who didn’t know where the entrance was would be able to find the Sanctuary in broad daylight, let alone once the suns have gone out. But if they do, well, they’d need men of action to defend them. Me? I’m a hundred pounds too heavy for that. So why should I huddle in down there with them? I’d rather be here.”
Siferra felt her own spirits rise as she heard Sheerin’s words. She too had chosen to spend the evening of Darkness at the Observatory, rather than in the Sanctuary. Perhaps it was mere wild bravado, perhaps it was idiotic overconfidence, but she was sure that she could last out the hours of the eclipse—and even the coming of the Stars, if there was anything to that part of the myth—and retain her sanity. And so she had decided not to pass up the experience.