by Isaac Asimov
Siferra pointed to a burned-out church at the crest of a hill just across from the highway. A small group of ragged-looking people were scrambling over its tumbled walls, prying at the remaining blocks of gray stone with crowbars, pulling them loose and hurling them into the courtyard.
“It looks as though they’re demolishing it,” she said. “Why would they do that?”
Theremon said, “Because they hate the gods. They blame them for everything that happened. —Do you know the Pantheon, the big Cathedral of All the Gods just at the edge of the forest, with the famous Thamilandi murals? I saw it a couple of days after Nightfall. It had been burned down—just rubble, everything destroyed, and one half-conscious priest sticking out of a pile of bricks. Now I realize that it was no accident that it burned. That fire was deliberately set. And the priest—I saw a crazy kill him right before my eyes, and I thought it was to steal his vestments. Maybe not. Maybe it was out of mere hatred.”
“But the priests didn’t cause—”
“Have you forgotten the Apostles so soon? Mondior, telling us for months that what was going to happen was the vengeance of the gods? The priests are the voice of the gods, isn’t that so, Siferra? And if they led us into evil, so that we needed to be punished this way, why, the priests themselves must be responsible for the coming of the Stars. Or so people would think.”
“The Apostles!” Siferra said darkly. “I wish I could forget them. What do you think they’re doing now?”
“Came through the eclipse safe and sound in their tower, I suppose.”
“Yes. They must have made it through the night in good shape, prepared for it as they were. What was it Altinol said? That they were already operating a government on the north side of Saro City?”
Theremon stared gloomily at the devastated church across the way. Tonelessly he said, “I just can imagine what sort of government that will be. Virtue by decree. Mondior issuing new commandments of morality every Onos Day. All forms of pleasure prohibited by law. Weekly public executions of the sinful.” He spat into the wind. “By Darkness! To think I had Folimun right within my reach that evening and let him go, when I could so easily have throttled him—”
“Theremon!”
“I know. What good would it have done? One Apostle, more or less? Let him live. Let them set up their government, and tell everyone who’s unlucky enough to live north of Saro City what to do and what to think. Why should we care? We’re heading south, aren’t we? What the Apostles do won’t affect us. They’ll be just one of fifty rival squabbling governments, when things have a chance to settle down. One of five thousand, maybe. Every district will have its own dictator, its own emperor.” Theremon’s voice darkened suddenly. “Oh, Siferra, Siferra—”
She took his hand. Quietly she said, “You’re accusing yourself again, aren’t you?”
“How did you know that?”
“When you get yourself so worked up. —Theremon, I tell you you’re not guilty of anything! This would have happened no matter what you wrote in the paper, can’t you see? One man alone couldn’t have made any difference. This is something the world was destined to go through, something that couldn’t have been prevented, something—”
“Destined?” he said sharply. “What a weird word for you to use! The vengeance of the gods, is that what you mean?”
“I didn’t say anything about gods. I mean only that Kalgash Two was destined to come, not by the gods but simply by the laws of astronomy, and the eclipse was destined to happen, and Nightfall, and the Stars—”
“Yes,” Theremon said indifferently. “I suppose.”
They walked onward, through a stretch of road where very few cars had come to rest. Onos was down now, and the evening suns were out, Sitha and Tano and Dovim. A chilly wind blew from the west. Theremon felt the dull ache of hunger rising in him. They had not taken time to eat all day. Now they halted, camping between two crumpled cars, and unpacked some of the packages of dried food they had brought with them from the Sanctuary.
But, hungry as he was, he found that he had little appetite, and he had to force the meal down mouthful by mouthful. The rigid faces of corpses were staring at him from the nearby cars. While he was on the move he had been able to ignore them; but now, sitting here on what had once been Saro Province’s finest highway, he could not screen the sight of them from his mind. There were moments when he felt that he had murdered them all himself.
They built a bed from seat-cushions that had been thrown from colliding cars, and slept close together, a fitful scattered sleep, which could not have been much worse had they tried to sleep on the hard concrete roadbed itself.
During the evening came shouts, hoarse laughter, the distant sound of singing. Theremon awoke once and peered over the edge of the elevated highway, and saw distant campfires in a field down there, perhaps twenty minutes’ march off to the east. Did anyone ever sleep under a roof any more? Or had the impact of the Stars been so universal, he wondered, that the whole population of the world had turned itself out of house and home, to camp in the open as he and Siferra were doing, beneath the familiar light of the eternal suns?
Toward dawn he finally dozed. But hardly had he fallen asleep when Onos came up, pink and then golden in the east, pulling him out of fragmentary, terrifying dreams.
Siferra was already awake. Her face was pale, her eyes were reddened and puffy.
He managed a smile. “You look beautiful,” he told her.
“Oh, this is nothing,” she said. “You ought to see me when I’ve gone without washing for two weeks.”
“But I meant—”
“I know what you meant,” she said. “I think.”
That day they covered four miles, and it was difficult going for them, every step of the way.
“We need water,” Siferra said, as the afternoon wind began to rise. “We’ll have to take the next exit ramp we see, and try to find a spring.”
“Yes,” he said. “I guess we’ll have to.”
Theremon felt uneasy about descending. Since the beginning of the journey they had had the highway virtually to themselves; and by now he had come to feel almost at home, in a strange sort of way, amid the tangle of crushed and ruined vehicles. Down there, in the open fields where the bands of refugees were moving—Odd, he thought, how I call them refugees, as though I’m simply off on some sort of holiday myself—there was no telling what sort of trouble they would get into.
But Siferra was right. They had to go down and find water. The supply that they had brought with them was all but exhausted. And perhaps they needed some time away from the hellish unending strip of demolished cars and stiff, staring corpses before they resumed their march toward Amgando.
He pointed to a road-sign a short way in front of them. “Half a mile to the next exit.”
“We should be able to get there in an hour.”
“Less,” he said. “The road looks pretty clear up ahead. We’ll get ourselves down from the highway and do what we need to do, as fast as we can, and then we’d better get back up here to sleep. It’s safer to bed down out of sight between a couple of these cars than to take our chances in the open fields.”
Siferra saw the logic of that. In this relatively uncluttered stretch of the road they moved quickly toward the upcoming exit ramp, traveling faster than they had in covering any previous section of the highway. In hardly any time at all they came to the next road-sign, the one that gave quarter-mile warning of the exit.
But then their rapid progress was sharply checked. They found the roadbed blocked at that point by so immense a pileup of crashed cars that Theremon feared for a moment that they would not be able to get through at all.
There must have been some truly monstrous series of crashes here, something dreadful even by the standards of what he and Siferra had already passed through. Two huge transport trucks seemed to be in the middle of it, interlocked face to face like two warring beasts of the jungle; and it appeared that dozens of passenger cars had
come barreling into them, flipping up on end, falling back on those who followed them, building a gigantic barrier that reached from one side of the road to the other and outward over the railings at the road’s margins. Crumpled doors and fenders, sharp as blades, stuck out everywhere, and acres of broken glass set up a sinister tinkling as the wind played over it.
“Here,” Theremon called. “I think I see a way—up through this opening, and then over the left-hand truck—no, no, that won’t work, we’ll have to go under—”
Siferra came up alongside him. He showed her the problem—a cluster of up-ended cars waiting for them on the far side, like a field of upturned knives—and she nodded. They went underneath instead, a slow, dirty, painful crawl through shards of glass and clotted pools of fuel. Midway through they paused to rest before continuing through to the far side of the pileup.
Theremon was the first to emerge.
“Gods!” he muttered, staring in bewilderment at the scene that lay before him. “What now?”
The road was open for perhaps fifty feet on the far side of the great mass of wreckage. Beyond the clear space a second roadblock lay across the highway from one side to the other. This one, though, had been deliberately constructed—a heap of car doors and wheels neatly piled on the roadbed to a height of eight or nine feet.
In front of the barricade Theremon saw some two dozen people, who had set up a campsite right on the highway. He had been so intent on getting through the tangle of wreckage that he had paid no attention to anything else, and so he had not heard the sounds from the other side.
Siferra came crawling out beside him. He heard her gasp of surprise and shock.
“Keep your hand on your needler,” Theremon said quietly to her. “But don’t pull it out and don’t even think of trying to use it. There are too many of them.”
A few of the strangers were sauntering up the road toward them now, six or seven brawny-looking men. Theremon, motionless, watched them come. He knew that there was no turning back from this encounter—no hope of escape through that maze of knife-sharp wreckage through which they had just wriggled. He and Siferra were trapped in this clearing between the two roadblocks. All they could do was wait to see what happened next, and hope that these people were reasonably sane.
A tall, slouch-shouldered, cold-eyed man came unhurriedly up to Theremon until they were standing virtually nose to nose, and said, “All right, fellow. This is a Search station.” He put a peculiar emphasis on the word Search.
“Search station?” Theremon repeated coolly. “And what is it that you’re searching for?”
“Don’t get wise with me or you’ll find yourself going over the edge head first. You know damned well what we’re searching for. Don’t make trouble for yourself.”
He gestured to the others. They moved in close, patting Theremon’s clothes and Siferra’s. Angrily Theremon pushed the questing hands away.
“Let us pass,” he said tightly.
“Nobody goes through here without Search.”
“By whose authority?”
“By my authority. You going to let us, or we going to have to make you?”
“Theremon—” Siferra whispered uneasily.
He shook her off. Rage was rising in him.
Reason told him that it was folly to try to resist, that they were badly outnumbered, that the tall man wasn’t fooling around when he said there’d be trouble for them if they refused to submit to the search.
These people didn’t exactly seem to be bandits. There was something official-sounding about the tall man’s words, as though this were some kind of boundary, a customs station, perhaps. What were they searching for? Food? Weapons? Would these men try to take the needle-guns from them? Better to give them everything they were carrying, Theremon told himself, than to be killed in a vain and foolishly heroic attempt at maintaining their freedom of passage.
But still—to be manhandled like this—to be forced to submit, on a free public highway—
And they couldn’t afford to give up the needle-guns, or their food supply. It was still hundreds of miles to Amgando.
“I warn you,” the tall man began.
“And I warn you, keep your hands away from me. I’m a citizen of the Federal Republic of Saro and this is still a road freely open to all citizens, no matter what else has happened. You have no authority over me.”
“He sounds like a professor,” one of the other men said, laughing. “Making speeches about his rights, and all.”
The tall man shrugged. “We’ve already got our professor here. We don’t need any more. And this is about enough talk. Grab them and put them through Search. Top to bottom.”
“Let—go—of—me—”
A hand clutched at Theremon’s arm. He brought his fist up quickly and jammed it forward into someone’s ribs. This all seemed very familiar to him: another scuffle, another beating in store for him. But he was determined to fight. An instant later someone hit him in the face and another man caught him by the elbow, and he heard Siferra cry out in fury and fear. He tried to pull free, hit someone again, was hit again himself, ducked, swung, took a sharp stinging blow in the face—
“Hey, wait a second!” a new voice called. “Hold on! Butella, get away from that man! Fridnor! Talpin! Let go of him!”
A familiar voice.
But whose?
The Searchers stepped back. Theremon, swaying a little, struggled to keep his balance as he looked at the newcomer.
A slender, wiry, intelligent-looking man, grinning at him, keen bright eyes peering out of a dirt-stained face—
Someone he knew, yes.
“Beenay!”
“Theremon! Siferra!”
[40]
In a moment everything was changed. Beenay led Theremon and Siferra to a surprisingly cozy-looking little nest just on the far side of the roadblock: cushions, curtains, a row of canisters that appeared to contain foodstuffs. A slim young woman was lying there, her left leg swathed in bandages. She looked weak and feverish, but she flashed a brief faint smile as the others entered.
Beenay said, “You remember Raissta 717, don’t you, Theremon? Raissta, this is Siferra 89, of the Department of Archaeology. I told you about her—her discovery of previous episodes of city-burning in the remote past. —Raissta is my contractmate,” he said to Siferra.
Theremon had met Raissta a few times over the past couple of years, in the course of his friendship with Beenay. But that had been in another era, in a world that was dead and vanished now. He could barely recognize her. He remembered her as a slender, pleasant-looking, nicely dressed woman who seemed always well groomed, always agreeably turned out. But now—now! This gaunt, frail, haggard girl—this hollow-eyed stringy-haired ghost of the Raissta he had known—!
Had it really been only a few weeks since Nightfall? It seemed like years ago, suddenly. It seemed like eons—several geological epochs ago—
Beenay said, “I have a little brandy here, Theremon.”
Theremon’s eyes widened. “Are you serious? Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had a drink? —How ironic, Beenay. You, the teetotaler who I had to coax into taking his first sip of a Tano Special—you’ve got the last bottle of brandy in the world hidden away here with you!”
“Siferra?” Beenay asked.
“Please. Just a little.”
“Just a little is all we have.” He poured three thimble-sized drinks for them.
Theremon said, as the brandy began to warm him, “Beenay, what’s going on out there? This Search business?”
“You don’t know about Search?”
“Not a thing.”
“Where have you two been since Nightfall?”
“In the forest, mostly. Then Siferra found me after some hoodlums beat me up, and took me to the university Sanctuary while I recovered from what they did to me. And for the past couple of days we’ve been trekking down the highway here, hoping to get to Amgando.”
“So you know about Amga
ndo, do you?”
“By way of you, at one remove,” Theremon said. “I ran into Sheerin in the forest. He was at the Sanctuary right after you must have left it, and he saw your note about Amgando. He told me, I told Siferra. And we set out together to go there.”
“With Sheerin?” Beenay asked. “Where is he, then?”
“He isn’t with us. He and I split up days ago—he went off to Amgando by himself, and I stayed in Saro to look for Siferra. I don’t know what happened to him. —Do you think I could have another little nip of this brandy, Beenay? If you could spare it. And you were starting to tell me about Search.”
Beenay poured a second small drink for Theremon. He looked toward Siferra, who shook her head.
Then he said uneasily, “If Sheerin was traveling alone, he’s probably in trouble, probably very serious trouble. He certainly hasn’t come this way since I’ve been here, and the Great Southern Highway is the only route out of Saro that anybody could take if he hoped to get to Amgando. We’ll have to send out a scouting party to look for him. —As for Search, it’s one of the new things that people do. This is an official Search station. There’s one at the beginning of every province that the Great Southern Highway runs through.”
“We’re only a few miles from Saro City,” Theremon said. “This is still Saro Province, Beenay.”
“Not any more. All the old provincial governments have disappeared. What’s left of Saro City’s been divided up—I hear that the Apostles of Flame have one big chunk of it, over on the far side of town, and the area around the forest and the university is under the control of somebody named Altinol, who’s operating a quasi-military group that calls itself the Fire Patrol. Perhaps you’ve run into them.”
Siferra said, “I was an officer in the Fire Patrol for a few days. This green neckerchief I’m wearing is their official badge of office.”
