The door to her office was unlocked. There was a man inside.
He looked familiar too; but this one was alive, crouching against the file cabinets in a peculiar huddled way. He was a burly, deep-chested man with powerful forearms and broad, heavy cheekbones. His face was bright with sweat and his eyes had a feverish gleam.
“Siferra? You here?”
“I came to get the tablets,” she told him. “The tablets are very important. They have to be protected.”
He rose from his crouch and took a couple of uncertain steps toward her. “The tablets? The tablets are gone, Siferra! The Apostles stole them, remember?”
“Gone?”
“Gone, yes. Like your mind. You’re out of your mind, aren’t you? Your face is blank. There’s nobody home behind your eyes. I can see that. You don’t even know who I am.”
“You are Balik,” she said, the name coming unbidden to her lips.
“So you do remember.”
“Balik. Yes. And Mudrin is on the stairs. Mudrin is dead, do you know that?”
Balik shrugged. “I suppose. We’ll all be dead in a little while. The whole world’s gone crazy out there. But why am I bothering to tell you that? You’re crazy too.” His lips trembled. His hands shook. An odd little giggle burst from him, and he clenched his jaws as though to suppress it. “I’ve been here all through the Darkness. I was working late, and when the lights started to fail—my God,” he said, “the Stars, the Stars. I had just one quick look at them. And then I got under the desk and stayed there through the whole thing.” He went to the window. “But Onos is coming up now. The worst must be over.—Is everything on fire out there, Siferra?”
“I came for the tablets,” she said again.
“They’re gone.” He spelled the word out for her. “Do you understand me? Gone. Not here. Stolen.”
“Then I will take the charts that we made,” she said. “I must protect knowledge.”
“Absolutely crazy, aren’t you? Where were you, the Observatory? Got a good view of the Stars, did you?” He giggled again and started to cut diagonally across the room, moving closer to her. Siferra’s face twisted with disgust. She could smell the odor of his sweat now, sharp and harsh and disagreeable. He smelled as if he hadn’t bathed in a week. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in a month. “Come here,” he said, as she backed away from him. “I won’t hurt you.”
“I want the charts, Balik.”
“Sure. I’ll give you the charts. And the photographs and everything. But first I’m going to give you something else. Come here, Siferra.”
He reached for her and pulled her toward him. She felt his hands on her breasts and the roughness of his cheek against her face. The smell of him was unbearable. Fury rose in her. How dare he touch her like this? Brusquely she pushed him away.
“Hey, don’t do that, Siferra! Come on. Be nice. For all we know, there’s just the two of us in the world. You and me, we’ll live in the forest and hunt little animals and gather nuts and berries. Hunters and gatherers, yes, and later on we’ll invent agriculture.” He laughed. His eyes looked yellow in the strange light. His skin seemed yellow too. Again he reached for her, hungrily, one cupped hand seizing one of her breasts, the other sliding down her back toward the base of her spine. He put his face down against the side of her throat and nuzzled her noisily like some kind of animal. His hips were heaving and thrusting against her in a revolting way. At the same time he began to force her backward toward the corner of the room.
Suddenly Siferra remembered the club that she had picked up somewhere during the night in the Observatory building. She was still holding it, loosely dangling in her hand. Swiftly she brought it upward and rammed the top of it against the point of Balik’s chin, hard. His head snapped up and back, his teeth clattered together.
He let go of her and lurched a few steps backward. His eyes were wide with surprise and pain. His lip was split where he had bitten into it, and blood was pouring down on one side.
“Hey, you bitch! What did you want to hit me for?”
“You touched me.”
“Damn right I touched you! And about time, too.” He rubbed his jaw. “Listen, Siferra, put that stick down and stop looking at me that way. I’m your friend. Your ally. The world has turned into a jungle now, and there’s just the two of us. We need each other. It isn’t safe trying to go it alone now. You can’t afford to risk it.”
Again he came toward her, hands upraised, seeking her.
She hit him again.
This time she brought the club around and smashed it against the side of his cheek, connecting with bone. There was an audible sharp sound of impact, and Balik jerked to one side under the force of it. With his head turned halfway away from her, he looked at her in utter astonishment and staggered back. But he was still standing. She hit him a third time, above his ear, swinging the club with all her strength in a long arc. As he fell, Siferra clubbed him once more, in the same place, and felt everything give beneath the blow. His eyes closed and he made a strange soft sound, like an inflated balloon releasing its air, and sank down in the corner against the wall, with his head going one way and his shoulders the other.
“Don’t ever touch me like that again,” Siferra said, prodding him with the tip of the club. Balik didn’t reply. He didn’t move, either.
Balik ceased to concern her.
Now for the tablets, she thought, feeling wonderfully calm.
No. The tablets were gone, Balik had said. Stolen. And she remembered now: they really were. They had disappeared just before the eclipse. All right, the charts then. All those fine drawings they had made of the Hill of Thombo. The stone walls, the ashes at the foundation lines. Those ancient fires, just like the fire that was ravaging Saro City at this very moment.
Where were they?
Oh. Here. In the chart cabinet, where they belonged.
She reached in, grabbed a sheaf of the parchment-like papers, rolled them, tucked them under her arm. Now she remembered the fallen man, and glanced at him. But Balik still hadn’t moved. He didn’t look as though he was going to, either.
Out the office door, down the stairs. Mudrin remained where he had been before, sprawled out motionless and stiff on the landing. Siferra ran around him and continued to the ground floor.
Outside, the morning was well along. Onos was climbing steadily and the Stars were pale now against its brightness. The air seemed fresher and cleaner, though the odor of smoke was thick on the breeze. Down by the Mathematics building she saw a band of men smashing windows. They caught sight of her a moment later and shouted to her, raucous, incoherent words. A couple of them began to run toward her.
Her breast ached where Balik had squeezed it. She didn’t want any more hands touching her now. Turning, Siferra darted behind the Archaeology building, pushed her way through the bushes on the far side of the pathway in back, ran diagonally across a lawn, and found herself in front of a blocky gray building that she recognized as Botany. There was a small botanical garden behind it, and an experimental arboretum on the hillside beyond that, at the edge of the forest that encircled the campus.
Looking back, Siferra thought she saw the men still pursuing her, though she couldn’t be sure. She sprinted past the Botany building and easily leaped the low fence around the botanical garden.
A man riding a mowing machine waved at her. He wore the olive-drab uniform of the university gardeners; and he was methodically mowing the bushes, cutting a wide swath of destruction back and forth across the center of the garden. He was chuckling to himself as he worked.