Siferra too seemed to have quickly adapted to the nightmare scene that was the Great Southern Highway. Scarcely saying a word, she picked her way through the obstacles alongside him, now pausing to point to an opening in the tangle of debris, now dropping to her hands and knees to crawl under some overhang of crumpled metal.
They were virtually the only living people using the road. Now and then they caught sight of someone moving southward on foot far ahead of them, or even coming up out of the south heading toward the Saro City end of the road, but there were never any encounters. The other wayfarers would hastily duck down out of sight and lose themselves in the wreckage, or, if they were up ahead, would begin frantically to scramble forward at a pace that spoke of terrible fear, disappearing quickly in the distance.
What are they afraid of? Theremon wondered. That we’ll attack them. Is everyone’s hand lifted against everyone else, now?
Once, an hour or so from their starting point, they saw a bedraggled-looking man going from car to car, reaching in to
fumble in the pockets of the dead, despoiling the bodies of their possessions. There was a great sack of loot on his back, so heavy that he was staggering under the weight of it.
Theremon cursed angrily and pulled out his needle-gun.
“
Look
at the filthy ghoul!
Look
at him!”
“No, Theremon!”
Siferra deflected his arm just as Theremon fired a bolt at the looter. The shot struck a nearby car, and for a moment set up a glittering sunburst of reflected energy.
“Why did you do that?” Theremon asked. “I was only trying to scare him.”
“I thought—that you—”
Bleakly Theremon shook his head. “No,” he said. “Not yet, anyway. There—look at him run!”
The looter had swung around at the sound of the shot, staring in berserk manic astonishment at Theremon and Siferra. His eyes were blank; a trail of spittle dribbled from his lips. He gaped at them for a long moment. Then, dropping his sack of booty, he went scrabbling away in a wild, desperate flight over the tops of the cars and soon was lost from view.
They went onward.
It was slow, dreadful going. The road-signs that rose high above them on shining stanchions mocked their pitiful progress by telling them what a very small distance from the beginning of the highway they had succeeded in traversing so far. By Onos-set they had gone only a mile and a half.
“At this rate,” Theremon said somberly, “it’ll take us close to a year to reach Amgando.”
“We’ll move faster as we get the knack of it,” said Siferra, without much conviction.
If only they could have followed along some street parallel to the highway, instead of having to walk on the roadbed itself, it would all have been much simpler for them. But that was impossible. Much of the Great Southern Highway was an elevated road, rising on lofty pillars above wooded tracts, areas of marsh, and the occasional industrial zone. There were places where the highway became a bridge across long open patches of mining scars, or over lakes and streams. For most of the distance they would have no choice but to stick to what had
once been the central traffic lanes of the highway itself, difficult as it was to get around the unending array of wreckage.
They kept to the edge of the roadbed as much as they could, since the density of wrecked cars was lower there. Looking over into the districts below, they saw signs of continuing chaos everywhere.
Burned houses. Fires still raging after all this time, stretching to the horizon. Occasional little bands of forlorn refugees, looking stunned and dazed, straggling bewilderedly through the debris-choked streets bound on some hopeless, desperate migration. Sometimes a larger group, a thousand people or more, camped together in some open place, everyone huddled in a desolate, paralyzed-looking way, scarcely moving, their wills and energies shattered.
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.