“Theremon?”
A familiar voice, high-pitched, cheerful. He stopped short, squinted into the brightness of the midday sunlight cutting through the trees, peered this way and that to locate the speaker.
He had been walking for two hours, looking for people who would be glad to get out there and spread the word on behalf of the famous Theremon 762 of the Saro City Chronicle. But so far he had found only six people altogether. Two of them had taken to their heels the moment they saw him. A third sat where he was, singing softly to his bare toes. Another, crouching in the fork of a tree, methodically rubbed two kitchen knives together with maniacal zeal. The remaining two had simply stared at him when he told them what he wanted; one did not seem to understand at all, and the other burst into gales of wild laughter. Not much hope of help from any of them.
And now it appeared that someone had found him.
“Theremon? Over here. Over here, Theremon. Here I am. Don’t you see me, man? Over here!”
33
Theremon glanced to his left, into a clump of bushes with huge prickly parasol-shaped leaves. At first he saw nothing unusual. Then the leaves swayed and parted, and a plump, roundish man stepped out into view.
“Sheerin?” he said, amazed.
“Well, at least you’re not so far gone that you’ve forgotten my name.”
The psychologist had lost some weight, and he was incongruously dressed in overalls and a torn pullover. A hatchet with a chipped blade was dangling casually from his left hand. That was perhaps the most incongruous thing of all, Sheerin carrying a hatchet. It wouldn’t have been very much stranger to see him walking around with a second head or an extra pair of arms.
Sheerin said, “How are you, Theremon? Great gods, you’re all rags and tatters, and it hasn’t even been a week! But I suppose I’m not much better.” He looked down at himself. “Have you ever seen me this skinny? A diet of leaves and berries really slims you down, doesn’t it?”
“You’ve got a way to go before I’d call you skinny,” Theremon said. “But you do look trim. How did you find me?”
“By not looking for you. It’s the only way, when everything’s become completely random. I’ve been to the Sanctuary, but no one was there. Now I’m on my way south to Amgando Park. I was just ambling along the path that cuts across the middle of the forest, and there you were.” The psychologist came bounding forward, holding out his hand. “By all the gods, Theremon, it’s a joy to see a friendly face again!—You are friendly, aren’t you? You’re not homicidal?”
“I don’t think I am.”
“There are more crazies per square yard in here than I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’ve seen plenty of crazies, let me tell you.” Sheerin shook his head and sighed. “Gods! I never dreamed it would be this bad. Even with all my professional experience. I thought it would be bad, yes, very bad, but not this bad.”
“You predicted universal madness,” Theremon reminded him. “I was there. I heard you say it. You predicted the complete breakdown of civilization.”
“It’s one thing to predict it. It’s something else again to be right in the middle of it. It’s a very humbling thing, Theremon, for an academic like me to find his abstract theories turning into concrete reality. I was so glib, so blithely unconcerned. ‘Tomorrow there won’t be a city standing unharmed in all Kal-gash,’ I said, and it was all just so many words to me, really, just a philosophical exercise, completely abstract. ‘The end of the world you used to live in.’ Yes. Yes.” Sheerin shivered. “And it all happened, just like I said. But I suppose I didn’t really believe my own dire predictions, until everything came crashing down around me.”
“The Stars,” Theremon said. “You never really took the Stars into account. They were the thing that did the real damage. Maybe we could have withstood the Darkness, most of us, just felt a little shaken up, a little bit upset. But the Stars—the Stars—”
“How bad was it for you?”
“Pretty bad, at first. I’m better now. And you?”
“I hid away in the Observatory basement during the worst of it. I was hardly affected at all. When I came out the next day, the whole Observatory was wrecked. You can’t imagine the carnage all over the place.”
Theremon said, “Damn Folimun! The Apostles—”
“They poured fuel on the fire, yes. But the fire would have happened anyway.”
“What about the Observatory people? Athor, Beenay, and the rest? Siferra—”
“I didn’t see any of them. But I didn’t find their bodies, either, while I was looking around the place. Maybe they escaped. The only person I came across was Yimot—do you remember him? One of the graduate students, the very tall awkward one? He had hidden himself too.” Sheerin’s face darkened. “We traveled together for a couple of days afterward—until he was killed.”
“Killed?”
“By a little girl, ten, twelve years old. With a knife. A very sweet child. Came right up to him, laughed, stabbed him without warning. And ran away, still laughing.”
“Gods!”
“The gods aren’t listening any more, Theremon. If they ever were.”
“I suppose not.—Where have you been living, Sheerin?”
His look was vague. “Here. There. I went back to my apartment first, but the whole building complex had been burned out. Just a shell, nothing salvageable at all. I slept there that evening, right in the middle of the ruins. Yimot was with me. The next day we set out for the Sanctuary, but there wasn’t any way of getting there from where we were. The road was blocked—there were fires everywhere. And where it wasn’t still burning, there were mountains of rubble that you couldn’t get past. It looked like a war zone. So we doubled back south into the forest, figuring we’d circle around by way of Arboretum Road and try to reach the Sanctuary that way. That was when Yimot was—killed. The forest must be where all the most disturbed ones went.”
“It’s where everyone went,” Theremon said. “The forest is harder to set fire to than the city is.—Did I hear you tell me that when you finally did get to the Sanctuary you found it deserted?”
“That’s right. I reached it yesterday afternoon, and it was wide open. The outer gate and the inner gate too, and the Sanctuary door itself unlocked. Everyone gone. A note from Beenay was tacked up in front.”
“Beenay! Then he made it to the Sanctuary safely!”
“Apparently he did,” said Sheerin. “A day or two before I did, I suppose. What his note said was that everybody had decided to evacuate the Sanctuary and head for Amgando Park, where some people from the southern districts are trying to set up a temporary government. By the time he got to the Sanctuary there was no one there but my niece Raissta, who must have been waiting for him. Now they’ve gone to Amgando also. And I’m heading there myself. My friend Liliath was in the Sanctuary, you know. I assume she’s on her way to Amgando with the others.”
“It sounds nutty,” Theremon said. “They were as safe in the Sanctuary as they could have been anywhere. Why the deuce would they want to come out into all of this insane chaos and try to march hundreds of miles down to Amgando?”
“I don’t know. But they must have had a good reason. In any case, we have no choice, do we, you and I? Everybody who’s still sane is gathering there. We can stay here and wait for somebody to slice us up the way that nightmarish little girl did to Yimot—or we can take our chances trying to get to Amgando. Here we’re doomed, sooner or later, inevitably. If we can make it to Amgando we’ll be all right.”