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?”
“Yes.”
“And afterward?”
“I don’t know. I was busy overseeing the photographing of the eclipse. I don’t have any idea what became of him. He didn’t seem to be in sight when the mob broke in.”
With a faint smile Raissta said, “Perhaps he slipped away in the confusion. Uncle is like that—very quick on his feet, sometimes, when there’s trouble. I’d hate to have had anything bad happen to him.”