“Everything.”
“Does it look as if I’ve got a lighter hidden in here?”
“You’ve got twenty seconds left, Professor.”
Siferra glowered at him and finished undressing without another word.
It was surprisingly easy, now that she had done it, to stand naked in front of these strangers. She didn’t care. That was the essential thing that came with the end of the world, she realized. She didn’t care. She pulled herself up to her full imposing height and stood there, almost defiantly revealed, waiting to see what they’d do next. Altinol’s eyes traveled over her body in an easy, self-assured way. Somehow she found herself not even caring about that. A kind of burned-out indifference had come over her.
“Very nice, Professor,” he said finally.
“Thank you.” Her tone was icy. “May I cover myself now?”
He waved grandly. “Of course. Sorry for the inconvenience. But we had to be absolutely sure.” He slipped the needle-gun into a band at his waist and stood with his arms folded, casually watching her as she dressed. Then he said, “You must think you’ve fallen in among savages, isn’t that so, Professor?”
“Does what I think really interest you?”
“You’ll notice that we didn’t leer or drool or wet our clothes while you were—ah—demonstrating that you had no concealed fire-making apparatus. Nor did anyone attempt to molest you in any way.”
“That was extremely kind.”
Altinol said, “I point these things out, even though I realize it’s not likely to make much difference to you while you’re still this angry at us, because I want you to know that what you’ve stumbled across here may in fact be the last remaining bastion of civilization in this godforsaken world. I don’t know where our beloved governmental leaders have disappeared to, and I certainly don’t consider our cherished brethren of the Apostles of Flame to be in any way civilized, and your university friends who used to be hidden out here have picked up and gone away. Just about everybody else seems to be clear out of his mind. Except, that is, for you and us, Professor.”
“How flattering of you to include me.”
“I never flatter anybody. You give an appearance of having withstood the Darkness and the Stars and the Breakdown better than most. What I want to know is whether you’re interested in staying here and becoming part of our group. We need people like you, Professor.”
“What does that mean? Scrub floors for you? Cook soup?”
Altinol seemed impervious to her sarcasms. “I mean helping in the struggle to keep civilization alive, Professor. Not to sound too high-pitched about it, but we see ourselves as having a holy mission. Day after day we are making our way through that madhouse out there, disarming the crazies, taking the fire-making apparatus away from them, reserving to ourselves exclusively the right to light fires. We can’t put out the fires that are already burning, at least not yet, but we can do our best to keep new ones from being lit. That’s our mission, Professor. We are taking control of the concept of fire. It’s the first step toward making the world fit to live in again. You seem sane enough to join us and therefore I invite you in. What do you say, Professor? Do you want to be part of the Fire Patrol? Or would you rather try your luck back there in the forest?”
35
The morning was misty and cool. Thick swirls of fog blew through the ruined streets, fog so heavy that Sheerin was unable to tell which suns were in the sky. Onos, certainly—somewhere. But its golden light was diffused and almost completely concealed by the fog. And that patch of slightly brighter sky off to the southwest very likely indicated the presence of one of the pairs of twin suns, but whether they were Sitha and Tano or Patru and Trey he had no way of discerning.
He was very tired It was already abundantly clear to him that his notion of making his way alone and on foot across the hundreds of miles between Saro City and Amgando National Park was an absurd fantasy.
Damn Theremon! Together, at least, they might have stood a chance. But the newspaperman had been unshakable in his confidence that he would somehow find Siferra in the forest. Talk about fantasy! Talk about absurdity!
Sheerin stared ahead, peering through the fog. He needed a place to rest for a while. He needed to find something fit to eat, and perhaps a change of clothing, or at least a way of bathing himself. He had never been this filthy in his life. Or as hungry. Or as weary. Or as despondent.
Through the whole long episode of the coming of the Darkness, from the first moment that he had heard from Beenay and Athor that such a thing was likely, Sheerin had bounced around from one end of the psychological spectrum to the other, from pessimism to optimism and back again, from hope to despair to hope. His intelligence and experience told him one thing, his naturally resilient personality told him another.
Perhaps Beenay and Athor were wrong and the astronomical cataclysm wouldn’t happen at all.
No, the cataclysm will definitely happen.
Darkness, despite his own disturbing experiences with it at the Tunnel of Mystery two years before, would turn out not to be such a troublesome thing after all, if indeed it did come.
Wrong. Darkness will cause universal madness.
The madness would be only temporary, a brief period of disorientation.
The madness will be permanent, in most people.
The world would be disrupted for a few hours and then go back to normal.
The world will be destroyed in the chaos following the eclipse.
Back and forth, back and forth, up and down, up and down. Twin Sheerins, locked in endless debate.
But now he had hit the bottom of the cycle and he seemed to be staying there, unmoving and miserable. His resilience and optimism had evaporated in the glare of what he had seen during his wanderings these past few days. It would be decades, possibly even a century or more, before things returned to normal. The mental trauma had scored too deep a scar, the destruction that had already occurred to the fabric of society was too widespread. The world he had loved had been vanquished by Darkness and smashed beyond repair. That was his professional opinion and he could see no reason to doubt it.
This was the third day, now, since Sheerin had parted from Theremon in the forest and gone marching off, in his usual jaunty fashion, toward Amgando. That jauntiness was hard to recapture now. He had managed to get out of the forest in one piece—there had been a couple of bad moments, times when he had had to wave his hatchet around and look menacing and lethal, a total bluff on his part, but it had worked—and for the last day or so he had been moving in a plodding way through the once-pleasant southern suburbs.
Everything was burned out around here. Entire neighborhoods had been destroyed and abandoned. Many of the buildings were still smoldering.
The main highway running to the southern provinces, Sheerin had believed, began just a few miles below the park—a couple of minutes’ drive, if you were driving. But he wasn’t driving. He had had to make the horrendous climb up out of the forest to the imposing hill that was Onos Heights practically on hands and knees, clawing his way through the underbrush. It took him half a day just to ascend those few hundred yards.
Once he was on top, Sheerin saw that the hill was more like a plateau—but it stretched on endlessly before him, and though he walked and walked and walked he did not come to the highway.
Was he going the right way?
Yes. Yes, from time to time he saw a road sign at a street corner that told him he was indeed heading toward the Great Southern Highway. How far was it, though? The signs didn’t say. Every ten or twelve blocks there was another sign, that was all. He kept going. He had no choice.