Isaac Asimov - Nightfall (novel)

At the boundary between Restoration Province and Six Suns they had no trouble at all getting through Search. A border official who looked as though he might have been an accountant or a lawyer in the world that no longer existed simply glanced at the passport Beenay had written out, nodded when he saw the florid “Beenay 25” inscription at the bottom, and waved them on through.

Two days later, when they were crossing from Six Suns Province into Godland, it wasn’t that simple. Here the border patrol looked like a gang of cutthroats, who would just as soon toss Theremon and Siferra over the side of the elevated highway as look at their papers at all. There was a long uneasy moment as Theremon stood there, dangling the passport like some sort of magic wand. Then the magic worked, more or less.

“This thing a safe-through?” the head cutthroat asked.

“A passport, yes. Exemption from Search.”

“Who from?”

“Beenay 25, Chief Search Administrator, Restoration Province. That’s two provinces up the road.”

“I know where Restoration Province is. Read it to me.”

“ ‘ To Whom It May Concern: This is to attest that the bearers of this document, Theremon 762 and Siferra 89, are properly accredited emissaries of the Fire Patrol of Saro City, and that they are entitled to —’ ”

“The Fire Patrol? What’s that?”

“Altinol’s bunch,” one of the other cutthroats murmured.

“Ah.” The head man nodded toward the needle-guns that Theremon and Siferra wore in full view at their hips. “So Altinol wants you to go marching off through other people’s countries carrying weapons that could set a whole district on fire?”

Siferra said, “We’re on an urgent mission to the people at Amgando National Park. It’s vital that we get there safely.” She touched her green neckerchief. “You know what this means? What we do is to keep fires from starting, not to start them. And if we don’t get to Amgando on time, the Apostles of Flame will come marching down this highway and destroy everything you people are trying to create.”

It didn’t make a lot of sense, Theremon thought. Their getting to Amgando, far to the south, wasn’t going to save the little republics at the northern end of the highway from the Apostles. But Siferra had put just the right note of conviction and passion into her speech to make it all sound very significant, in a jumbled sort of way.

The response was silence, for a moment, while the border patrolman tried to figure out what she was talking about. Then an irritated frown and a perplexed glare. And then, suddenly, almost impetuously: “All right. Go on through. Get the hell out of here, and don’t let me see you anywhere inside Six Suns Province again, or we’ll make you regret it.—Apostles! Amgando!”

“Thank you very much,” said Theremon, with a graciousness bordering so closely on sarcasm that Siferra took him by the arm and steered him quickly through the checkpoint before he could get them into real trouble.

They were able to move quickly in this stretch of the highway, covering a dozen or more miles a day, sometimes even more. The citizens of the provinces that called themselves Six Suns and Godland and Daylight were hard at work, clearing the debris that had littered the Great Southern Highway since Nightfall. Barricades of rubble were set up at regular intervals—nobody was going to be driving the Great Southern Highway again for a long, long time, Theremon thought—but between checkpoints it was possible now to walk at a steady clip, without having to crawl and creep around mounds of hideous wreckage.

And the dead were being taken from the highway and buried, too. Bit by bit, things were beginning to seem almost civilized again. But not normal. Not even remotely normal.

There were few fires now to be seen still burning in the hinterlands flanking the highway, but burned-out towns were visible all along the route. Refugee camps had been set up every mile or two, and as they walked briskly along the elevated road Theremon and Siferra could look down and see the sad, bewildered people of the camps moving slowly and purposelessly about in them as if they had all aged fifty years in that one single terrible night.

The new provinces, Theremon realized, were simply strings of such camps linked together by the straight line of the Great Southern Highway. In each district local strongmen had emerged who had been able to put together a little realm, a petty kingdom that covered six or eight or ten miles of the highway and spread out for perhaps a mile on either side of the roadbed. What lay beyond the eastern and western borders of the new provinces was anybody’s guess. No radio or television communications seemed to be in existence.

“Wasn’t there any kind of emergency planning at all?” Theremon asked, speaking more to the air than to Siferra.

But it was Siferra who answered him. “What Athor was predicting was altogether too fantastic for the government to take seriously. And it would have been playing into Mondior’s hands to admit that anything like the collapse of civilization could happen in just one short period of Darkness, especially a period of Darkness that could be predicted so specifically.”

“But the eclipse—”

“Yes, maybe some people in high office were capable of looking at the diagrams and really did believe that there was going to be an eclipse. And a period of Darkness as a result. But how could they anticipate the Stars? The Stars were simply the fantasy of the Apostles of Flame, remember? Even if the government knew that something like the Stars was going to happen, no one could predict the impact the Stars would have.”

“Sheerin could,” Theremon said.

“Not even Sheerin. He didn’t have an inkling. It was Darkness that was Sheerin’s specialty—not sudden unthinkable light filling the whole sky.”

“Still,” Theremon said. “To look around at all this devastation, all this chaos—you want to think that it was unnecessary, that it could have been avoided, somehow.”

“It wasn’t avoided, though.”

“It better be, the next time.”

Siferra laughed. “Next time is two thousand and forty-nine years away. Let’s hope we can leave our descendants some kind of warning that seems more plausible to them than the Book of Revelations seemed to most of us.”

Turning, she stared back over her shoulder, peering apprehensively at the long span of highway they had covered in the past few days of hard marching.

Theremon said, “Afraid you’ll see the Apostles thundering down the road behind us?”

“Aren’t you? We’re still hundreds of miles from Amgando, even at the pace we’ve been going lately. What if they catch up with us, Theremon?”

“They won’t. A whole army can’t possibly move as quickly as two healthy and determined people. Their transport isn’t any better than ours—one pair of feet per soldier, period. And there are all sorts of logistic considerations that are bound to slow them down.”

“I suppose.”

“Besides, that message said that the Apostles are planning to stop at each new province along the way to establish their authority. It’s going to take them plenty of time to obliterate all those stubborn little petty kingdoms. If we don’t run into any unexpected complications ourselves, we’ll be at Amgando weeks ahead of them.”

“What do you think will happen to Beenay and Raissta?” Siferra asked, after a time.

“Beenay’s a pretty clever boy. I suspect he’ll work out some way of making himself useful to Mondior.”

“And if he can’t?”

“Siferra, do we really need to burn up our energies worrying ourselves over horrible possibilities that we can’t do a damned thing about?”