“How strange it all looks,” he murmured. “The sky has a texture I’ve never seen before. It’s thick—it’s like some sort of blanket, almost.”
“A blanket that will smother us all.”
“Frightened?” he asked.
“Of course. Aren’t you?”
“Yes and no,” Theremon said. “I mean, I’m not trying to sound particularly heroic, believe me. But I’m not nearly as edgy as I was an hour or two ago. Numb, more than anything.”
“I think I know what you mean.”
“Athor says there’s already been some rioting in the city.”
“It’s only the beginning,” Siferra replied. “Theremon, I can’t get those ashes out of my mind. The ashes of the Hill of Thombo. Those big blocks of stone, the foundations of the cyclopean city—and ashes everywhere at their base.”
“With older ashes below, down and down and down.”
“Yes,” she said.
He realized that she had moved a little closer to him. He realized also that the animosity she had felt toward him over the past few months seemed to be completely gone, and—could it be?—she appeared to be responding to some ghost of the attraction that he had once had for her. He knew the symptoms. He was much too experienced a man not to know them.
Fine, Theremon thought. The world is coming to an end, and now, suddenly, Siferra is finally willing to put aside her Ice Queen costume.
A weird, gawky figure, immensely tall, came slithering by them in a clumsy jerky way. He offered them a giggly greeting.
“No sign of the Stars yet,” he said. It was Yimot, the other young graduate student. “Maybe we won’t get to see them at all. It’ll all turn out to be a fizzle, like the experiment Faro and I rigged up in that dark building.”
“Plenty of Dovim’s still visible,” Theremon pointed out. “We’re nowhere near total Darkness.”
“You sound almost eager for it,” said Siferra.
He turned to her. “I’d like to get the waiting over with.”
“Hey!” someone yelled. “My computer’s down!”
“The lights—!” came another voice.
“What’s happening?” Siferra asked.
“Power failure,” Theremon said. “Just as Sheerin predicted. The generating station must be in trouble. The first wave of madmen, running amok in the city.”
Indeed the dim lights in the sconces appeared to be on the verge of going out. First they grew very much brighter, as if a quick final surge of power had gone rushing through them; then they dimmed; then they brightened again, but not as much as a moment before; and then they dropped to just a fraction of their normal light output. Theremon felt Siferra’s hand gripping his forearm tightly.
“They’re out,” someone said.
“And so are the computers—cut in the backup power, somebody! Hey! Backup power!”
“Fast! The solarscope isn’t tracking! The camera shutter won’t work!”
Theremon said, “Why didn’t they prepare for something like this?”
But apparently they had. There came a thrumming from somewhere in the depths of the building; and then the screens of the computers scattered around the room winked back to life. The lamps in their sconces did not, though. Evidently they were on another circuit, and the emergency generator in the basement would not restore them to functioning.
The Observatory was practically in full Darkness.
Siferra’s hand still rested on Theremon’s wrist. He debated slipping a comforting arm around her shoulders.
Then Athor’s voice could be heard. “All right, give me a hand here! We’ll be okay in a minute!”
“What’s he got?” Theremon asked.
“Athor’s brought out the lights,” came the voice of Yimot.
Theremon turned to stare. It wasn’t easy to see anything, in such a low light level, but in another moment his eyes grew somewhat accustomed to it. There were half a dozen foot-long inch-thick rods cradled in Athor’s arms. He glared over them at the staff members.
“Faro! Yimot! Come here and help me.”
The young men trotted to the Observatory director’s side and took the rods from him. One by one, Yimot held them up, while Faro, in utter silence, scraped a large clumsy match into spluttering life with the air of one performing the most sacred rite of a religious ritual. As he touched the flame to the upper end of each of the rods, the little blaze hesitated a moment, playing futilely about the tip, until a sudden crackling flare cast Athor’s lined face into yellow highlights. A spontaneous cheer ran through the great room.
The rod was tipped by six inches of wavering flame!
“Fire?” Theremon wondered. “In here? Why not use godlights, or something?”
“We discussed it,” said Siferra. “But godlights are too faint. They’re all right for a small bedroom, just a little cozy presence to get you through the sleeping-period, but for a place this size—”
“And downstairs? Are they lighting torches there too?”
“I think so.”
Theremon shook his head. “No wonder the city’s going to burn this evening. If even you people are resorting to something as primitive as fire to hold back the Darkness—”
The light was dim, dimmer even than the most tenuous sunlight. The flames reeled crazily, giving birth to drunken, swaying shadows. The torches smoked devilishly and smelled like a bad day in the kitchen. But they emitted yellow light.
There was something joyous about yellow light, Theremon thought. Especially after nearly four hours of somber, dwindling Dovim.
Siferra warmed her hands at the nearest, regardless of the soot that gathered upon them in a fine, gray powder, and muttered ecstatically to herself. “Beautiful! Beautiful! I never realized before what a wonderful color yellow is.”
But Theremon continued to regard the torches suspiciously. He wrinkled his nose at the rancid odor and said, “What are those things made out of?”
“Wood,” she replied.
“Oh, no, they’re not. They aren’t burning. The top inch is charred and the flame just keeps shooting up out of nothing.”
“That’s the beauty of it. This is a really efficient artificiallight mechanism. We made a few hundred of them, but most went to the Sanctuary, of course. You see”—she turned and dusted off her blackened hands—“you take the pithy core of coarse water reeds, dry them thoroughly, and soak them in animal grease. Then you set fire to it and the grease burns, little by little. These torches will burn for almost half an hour without stopping. Ingenious, isn’t it?”
“Wonderful,” Theremon said dourly. “Very modern. Very impressive.”
But he couldn’t remain in this room any longer. The same restlessness that had led him to come up here now afflicted him again. The reek of the torches was bad enough; but also there was the cold blast of air coming in through the open panel in the dome, a harsh wintry flow, the icy finger of night. He shivered. He wished that he and Sheerin and Beenay hadn’t finished off that whole bottle of miserable wine so quickly.
“I’m going to go back below,” he said to Siferra. “There’s nothing to see here if you aren’t an astronomer.”
“All right. I’ll go with you.”
In the flickering yellow light he saw a smile appear on her face, unmistakable this time, unambiguous.
27
They made their way down the clattering spiral staircase to the lower room. Not much had changed down there. The people on the lower level had lit torches there too. Beenay was busy at three computers at once, processing data from the telescopes upstairs. Other astronomers were doing other things, all of them incomprehensible to Theremon. Sheerin was wandering around by himself, a lost soul. Folimun had carried his chair directly beneath a torch and continued reading, lips moving in the monotonous recital of invocations to the Stars.