37
He was hurting in a hundred places. He wasn’t at all sure how intact his bones were. One of his eyes was practically swollen shut. But he suspected he was going to survive. He sat leaning against the rock wall, waiting for the haze of pain to diminish a little.
Siferra said, “We’ve got a little Jonglor brandy back at our headquarters. I can authorize you to have some, I guess. For medicinal purposes, of course.”
“Brandy? Headquarters? What headquarters? What is this all about, Siferra? Are you really here at all?”
“You think I’m a hallucination?” She laughed and dug her fingertips lightly into his forearm. “Is that a hallucination, would you say?”
He winced. “Careful. I’m pretty tender there. And everywhere else, right now.—You just dropped right down out of the sky, is that it?”
“I was on Patrol duty, passing through the forest, and we heard the sounds of a scuffle. So we came to investigate. I had no idea you were mixed up in it until I saw you. We’re trying to restore order around here somehow.”
“We?”
“The Fire Patrol. It’s as close as there is to a new local government. The headquarters is at the university Sanctuary, and a man named Altinol who used to be some sort of company executive is in charge. I’m one of his officers. It’s a vigilante group, really, which has managed to put across the notion that the use of fire must be controlled, and that only members of the Fire Patrol have the privilege of—”
Theremon raised his hand. “Hold on, Siferra. Slow down, will you? The university people in the Sanctuary have formed a vigilante group, you say? They’re going around putting out fires? How can that be? Sheerin told me that they had all cleared out, that they had gone south to some sort of rendezvous at Amgando National Park.”
“Sheerin? Is he here?”
“He was. He’s on his way to Amgando now. I—decided to stick around here a little while longer.” It seemed impossible to tell her that he had stuck around on the unlikely chance that he would manage to find her.
Siferra nodded. “What Sheerin told you was true. All the university people left the Sanctuary the day after the eclipse. I suppose they’re off in Amgando by now—I haven’t heard anything about them. They left the Sanctuary wide open, and Altinol and his bunch wandered in and took possession of it. The Fire Patrol has fifteen, twenty members, all of them in pretty good shape, mentally. They’ve been able to establish their authority over about half the area of the forest, and some of the surrounding territory of the city where people are still living.”
“And you?” Theremon asked. “How did you get involved with them?”
“I went into the forest first, once the Stars were gone. But it looked pretty dangerous here, so when I remembered about the Sanctuary, I headed there. Altinol and his people were already there. They invited me to join the Patrol.” Siferra smiled in what might have been a rueful way. “They didn’t really offer me much of a choice,” she said. “They aren’t particularly gentle sorts.”
“These aren’t gentle times.”
“No. So I decided, better off with them than drifting around on my own. They gave me this green neckerchief—everybody around here respects it. And this needle-gun. People respect that too.”
“So you’re a vigilante,” Theremon said, musing. “Somehow I never figured you for that kind of thing.”
“I never did either.”
“But you believe that this Altinol and his Fire Patrol are righteous folk who are helping to restore law and order, is that it?”
She smiled again, and again it was not an expression of mirth.
“Righteous folk? They think they are, yes.”
“You don’t?”
A shrug. “They’re out for themselves first, and no kidding about that. There’s a power vacuum here and they mean to fill it. But I suppose they’re not the worst possible people to try to impose a governmental structure right now. They’re easier to take than some of the outfits I can think of, at least.”
“You mean the Apostles? Are they trying to form a government too?”
“Very likely they are. But I haven’t heard anything about them since it all happened. Altinol thinks that they’re still hidden away underground somewhere, or that Mondior has led them off to some place far out in the country where they’ll set up their own kingdom. But we’ve got a couple of new fanatic groups that are real lulus, Theremon. You just had a run-in with one of them, and it’s only by wild luck that they didn’t finish you off. They believe that the only salvation for humanity now is to give up the use of fire completely, since fire has been the ruin of the world. So they’re going around destroying fire-making equipment wherever they can find it, and killing anyone who seems to enjoy starting fires.”
“I was simply trying to cook some dinner for myself,” said Theremon somberly.
Siferra said, “It’s all the same to them whether you’re cooking a meal or amusing yourself with a little bit of arson. Fire is fire, and they abhor it. Lucky thing for you that we came along in time. They accept the authority of the Fire Patrol. We’re the elite, you understand, the only ones whose use of fire will be tolerated.”
“It helps to have needle-guns,” Theremon said. “That gets you a lot of toleration too.” He rubbed a sore place on his arm and looked off bleakly into the distance.—“There are other fanatics besides these, you say?”
“There are the ones who think the university astronomers had discovered the secret of making the Stars appear. They blame Athor, Beenay & Co. for everything that’s happened. It’s the old hatred of the intellectual that crops up whenever medieval emotions start surfacing.”
“Gods! Are there many like that?”
“Enough. Darkness only knows what they’ll do if they actually catch any university people who haven’t already reached Amgando safely. String them up to the nearest lamppost, I suppose.”
Morosely Theremon said, “And I’d be responsible.”
“You?”
“Everything that’s happened is my fault, Siferra. Not Athor’s, not Folimun’s, not the gods’, but mine. Mine. Me, Theremon 762. That time you called me irresponsible, you were being too easy with me. I wasn’t just irresponsible, I was criminally negligent.”
“Theremon, stop it. What’s the good of—”
He swept right on. “I should have been writing columns day in and day out, warning of what was coming, crying out for a crash program to build shelters, to set aside provisions and emergency generating equipment, to provide counseling for the disturbed, to do a million different things—and instead what did I do? Sneered. Poked fun at the astronomers in their lofty tower! Made it politically impossible for anybody in the government to take Athor seriously.”
“Theremon—”
“You should have let those crazies beat me to death, Siferra.”
Her eyes met his. She looked angry. “Don’t talk like a fool. All the government planning in the world wouldn’t have changed anything. I wish you hadn’t written those articles too, Theremon. You know how I felt about them. But what does any of that matter now? You were sincere in what you felt. You were wrong, but you were sincere. And in any case there’s no sense speculating about what might have been. What we have to deal with now is what is.” More gently she said, “Enough of this. Are you able to walk? We need to get you back to the Sanctuary. A chance to wash up, some fresh clothes, a little food in you—”
“Food?”
“The university people left plenty of provisions behind.”
Theremon chuckled and pointed to the graben. “You mean I don’t have to eat that?”