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!”
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 Amgando, 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.”
Beenay said, “Then you know what’s happened. Fragmentation of the old system—a million petty governmental units springing up like mushrooms everywhere. What you’re in now is Restoration Province. It runs from here down the highway about seven miles. When you get to the next Search station, you’re in Six Suns Province. Beyond that is Godland, and then Daylight, and after that—well, I forget. They change every few days, anyway, as people wander on to other places.”
“And Search?” Theremon prompted.
“The new paranoia. Everyone’s afraid of fire-starters. You know what they are? Crazies who thought that what happened at Nightfall was a load of fun. They go around burning things down. I understand that a third of Saro City burned down the night of the eclipse, just from people’s panicky wild attempts to drive away the Stars, but that another third of it has been destroyed
since
then, even though the Stars are long gone again. A sick business, that is. So the people who are more or less intact of mind—you’re among some now, in case you were wondering—are searching everyone for fire-lighting equipment. It’s forbidden to possess matches, or mechanical lighters, or needle-guns, or anything else capable of—”
“The same thing’s going on on the outskirts of the city,” Siferra said. “That’s what the Fire Patrol is all about. Altinol and his people have set themselves up as the only people in Saro who are allowed to use fire.”
“And I was attacked in the forest while I was trying to cook a meal for myself,” said Theremon. “I suppose they were Searchers too. I’d have been beaten to death if Siferra and her Patrol hadn’t come along to rescue me in the nick of time, pretty much the same way you did just now.”
“Well,” Beenay said, “I don’t know who you ran into in the forest. But Search is the formal ritual down here to deal with the same problem. It goes on everywhere, everybody searching everybody else, never any let-up. Suspicion is universal: nobody’s exempt. It’s like a fever—a fever of fear. Only little elites, like Altinol’s Fire Patrol, can carry combustibles. At every border you have to surrender your fire-making apparatus to the authorities, such as they may happen to be at the moment.
You might as well leave those needle-guns here with me, Theremon. You’ll never get to Amgando with them.”
“We’ll never get there without them,” Theremon said.
Beenay shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. But you won’t be able to avoid surrendering them as you continue south. The next time you hit Search, you know, I won’t be there to call off the Search force.”
Theremon considered that.
“How is it that you were able to make them listen to you, anyway?” he asked. “Or are you the head Searcher here?”
With a laugh Beenay said, “The head Searcher? Hardly. But they respect me. I’m their official professor, you see. There are places where university people are loathed, do you know that? Killed on sight by mobs of crazies, because the crazies think we caused the eclipse and are getting ready to cause another one. But not here. Here I’m considered useful for my intelligence—I can compose diplomatic messages to adjoining provinces, I’ve got ideas about how to take broken things and make them work again, I can even explain why the Darkness isn’t going to come back and why nobody will have to look at the Stars again for two thousand years. They find that very comforting to hear. So I’ve settled in among them. They feed us and take care of Raissta, and I think for them. It’s a nice symbiotic relationship.”
“Sheerin told me you were going to Amgando,” said Theremon.
“I was,” Beenay said. “Amgando’s the place where people like you and me ought to be. But Raissta and I ran into some trouble on the way down. Did you hear me tell you that crazies are hunting down university people and trying to kill them? We nearly got caught by a bunch of them ourselves, as we were heading south through the suburbs toward the highway. All those neighborhoods on the south side of the forest are occupied by wild squatters now.”
“We ran into some,” Theremon said.
“Then you know. We were surrounded by a bunch of them. They could tell just by the way we talked that we had to be educated people, and then someone recognized me—recognized me, Theremon, from a picture in the newspaper, from one of
your
columns, one of the times when you were interviewing
me about the eclipse! And he said I was from the Observatory, I was the man who had made the Stars appear.” Beenay stared off into nowhere for a moment. “We were about two minutes away from being strung up from a lamppost, is my guess. But then came a providential distraction. Another gang showed up—territorial rivals, I suppose—throwing bottles, yelling, waving kitchen knives around. Raissta and I were able to get away. They’re like children, the crazies—they can’t keep their minds on any one thing very long. But as we were crawling through a narrow path between two burned-out buildings Raissta cut her leg on some broken glass. And by the time we got this far south on the highway it was so badly infected that she couldn’t walk.”
“I see.” No wonder she looks so terrible, Theremon thought.
“Luckily for us, Restoration Province’s border guards were in need of a professor. They took us in. We’ve been here a week, or maybe ten days, now. I figure Raissta may be able to travel again in another week if all goes well, or more likely two. And then I’ll have the boss of this province write out a passport for us that might get us safely through the next few provinces down the road, at least, and we’ll set out on our way for Amgando. You’re welcome to stay here with us until then, and then we can all go south together, if you like. Certainly it’ll be safer that way. —You want me, Butella?”
The tall man who had tried to search Theremon in the clearing had poked his head over the curtains of Beenay’s little den. “Messenger just came in, Professor. Brought some news from the city, by way of Imperial Province. We can’t make much sense out of it.”
“Let me see,” Beenay said, reaching up and taking a folded slip of paper from the man. To Theremon he said, “Messengers go back and forth between the various new provinces all the time. Imperial’s north and east of the highway, stretching up toward the city itself. —Most of these Searchers here aren’t too good at reading. Their exposure to the Stars seems to have damaged their verbal centers, or something.”
Beenay fell silent as he began to scan the message. He scowled, frowned, pursed his lips, muttered something about post-Nightfall handwriting and spelling. Then after a moment his expression grew dark.
“Good God!” he cried. “Of all the rotten, miserable, terrible—”
His hand was shaking. He looked up at Theremon, wild-eyed.
“Beenay! What is it?”
Somberly Beenay said, “The Apostles of Flame are coming this way. They’ve assembled an army, and they’re going to march down to Amgando, clearing away all the new little provincial governments that have sprung up along the highway. And when they get to Amgando they’re going to smash whatever reconstituted governing body it is that has taken form down there and proclaim themselves the only legally empowered ruling force in all of the Republic.”