“Have you heard anything about Siferra?” Theremon asked.
“Nothing. Why?”
“I’d like to find her.”
“She may have gone to Amgando too. If she met up with Beenay somewhere along the way, he would have told her where everybody is going, and—”
“Do you have any reason to think that might have happened?”
“It’s only a guess.”
Theremon said, “My guess is that she’s still somewhere around here. I want to try to track her down.”
“But the odds against that—”
“You found me, didn’t you?”
“Purely by accident. The chances that you’d be able to locate her the same way—”
“Are pretty good,” Theremon said. “Or so I prefer to believe. I’m going to attempt it, anyway. I can always hope to get to Amgando later on. With Siferra.”
Sheerin gave him an odd look, but said nothing.
Theremon said, “You think I’m crazy? Well, maybe I am.”
“I didn’t say that. But I think you’re risking your neck for nothing. This place is turning into a prehistoric jungle. It’s become absolute savagery here, and not getting any better as the days go along, from what I’ve seen. Come south with me, Theremon. We can be out of here in two or three hours, and the road to Amgando is just—”
“I mean to look for Siferra first,” said Theremon obstinately.
“Forget her.”
“I don’t intend to do that. I’m going to stay here and search for her.”
Sheerin shrugged. “Stay, then. I’m clearing out. I saw Yimot cut down by a little girl, remember, right before my eyes, no more than two hundred yards from here. This place is too dangerous for me.”
“And you think going on a hike of three or four hundred miles all by yourself isn’t dangerous?”
The psychologist hefted his hatchet. “I’ve got this, if I need it.”
Theremon fought back laughter. Sheerin was so absurdly mild-mannered that the thought of him defending himself with a hatchet was impossible to take seriously.
He said, after a moment, “Lots of luck.”
“You really intend to stay?”
“Until I find Siferra.”
Sheerin stared sadly at him.
“Keep the luck you just offered me, then. I think you’ll need it more than I will.”
He turned and trudged away without another word.
34
For three days—or perhaps it was four; the time went by like a blur—Siferra moved southward through the forest. She had no plan except to stay alive.
There was no point even in trying to get back to her apartment. The city still seemed to be burning. A low curtain of smoke hung in the air wherever she looked, and occasionally she saw a sinuous tongue of red flame licking into the sky on the horizon. It appeared to her as if new fires were being started every day. Which meant that the craziness had not yet begun to abate.
She could feel her own mind returning gradually to normal, clearing day by day, blessedly emerging into clarity as though she were awakening from some terrible fever. She was uncomfortably aware that she wasn’t fully herself yet—managing any sequence of thoughts was a laborious thing for her, and she lost herself quickly in muddle. But she was on her way back, of that she was sure.
Apparently many of the others around her in the forest weren’t recovering at all. Though Siferra was trying to keep to herself as much as she could, she encountered people from time to time, and most of them looked pretty badly deranged: sobbing, moaning, laughing wildly, glaring weirdly, rolling over and over on the ground. Just as Sheerin had suggested, some had suffered such mental trauma during the time of the crisis that they might never be sane again. Huge segments of the population must have lapsed into barbarism or worse, Siferra realized. They must be setting fires for the sheer fun of it now. Or killing for the same reason.
So she moved carefully. With no particular destination in mind, she drifted more or less southward across the forest, camping wherever she found fresh water. The club that she had picked up on the evening of the eclipse was never very far from her hand. She ate whatever she could find that looked edible—seeds, nuts, fruits, even leaves and bark. It wasn’t much of a diet. She knew that she was strong enough physically to endure a week or so on such improvised rations, but after that she’d begin to suffer. Already she could feel what little extra weight she had been carrying dropping away, and her physical resilience beginning little by little to diminish. And the supply of berries and fruits was diminishing too, very rapidly, as the forest’s thousands of hungry new inhabitants picked it over.
Then, on what she believed was the fourth day, Siferra remembered about the Sanctuary.
Her cheeks flamed as she realized that there had been no need for her to have been living this cave-woman life all week.
Of course! How could she have been so stupid? Just a few miles from here at this very moment, hundreds of university people were tucked away safe and sound in the old particle-accelerator lab, drinking bottled water and dining pleasantly on the canned foods that they had spent the last few months stashing away. How ridiculous to be skulking around in this forest full of madmen, scratching in the dirt for her meager meals and looking hungrily at the little forest creatures that cavorted beyond her reach on the branches of the trees!
She would go to the Sanctuary. Somehow there would be a way to get them to take her in. It was a measure of the extent to which the Stars had disrupted her mind, she told herself, that it had taken her as long as this to remember that the Sanctuary was there.
Too bad, she thought, that the idea hadn’t occurred to her earlier. She realized now that she had spent the last few days traveling in precisely the wrong direction.
Directly ahead of her now lay the steep chain of hills that marked the southern boundary of the forest. Looking up, she could see the blackened remains of the posh Onos Heights real estate development along the summit of the hill that rose like a dark wall before her. The Sanctuary, if she remembered correctly, was the opposite way entirely, midway between the campus and Saro City on the highway running along the north side of the forest.
It took her another day and a half to make her way back through the forest to the north side. In the course of the journey she had to use her club twice to fight off attackers. She had three non-violent but edgy staring-matches with young men sizing her up to decide whether she could be jumped. And once she blundered into a sheltered copse where five gaunt wild-eyed men with knives were stalking one another in a circle, like dancers moving in some strange archaic ritual. She got away from there as fast as she could.
Finally she saw the wide highway that was University Road ahead of her, just beyond the forest boundary. Somewhere along the north side of that road was the unobtrusive little country lane that led to the Sanctuary.
Yes: there it was. Hidden, insignificant, bordered on both sides by untidy clumps of weeds and thick grass that had gone to seed.
It was late afternoon. Onos was almost gone from the sky, and the hard baleful light of Tano and Sitha cast sharp shadows across the land that gave the day a wintry look, though the air was mild. The little red eye that was Dovim moved through the northern heavens, still very distant, still very high.
Siferra wondered what had become of the unseeable Kalgash Two. Evidently it had done its terrible work and moved on. By this time it might be a million miles out in space, curving away from the world on its long orbit, riding on and on through the airless dark, not to return for another two thousand and forty-nine years. Which would be at least two million years too soon, thought Siferra bitterly.