head. "It was called something silly, you can be sure of that. Golden Acres, or Saro Estates, or something like that. But what it was called isn't important now. This isn't a neighborhood any more. What we have here used to be real estate, Siferra, but these days what it is is archaeology. One of the Lost Suburbs of Saro."
They had reached a point well south of the forest, almost to the outskirts of the suburban belt that constituted the southern fringes of Saro City. Beyond lay agricultural ones, small towns, and-somewhere far in the distance, unthinkably far- their goal of Amgando National Park.
The crossing of the forest had taken them two days. They had slept the first evening at Theremon's old lean-to, and the second one in a thicket halfway up the rugged slope leading to Onos Heights. In all this while they had had no indication that the Fire Patrol was on their trail. Altinol had apparently made no attempt to pursue them, even though they had taken weapons with them and two bulging backpacks of provisions. And surely, Siferra thought, they were beyond his reach by now.
She said, "The Great Southern Highway ought to be somewhere around here, shouldn't it?"
"Another two or three miles. If we're lucky there won't be any fires burning to block us from going forward."
"We'll be lucky. Count on it."
He laughed. "Always the optimist, eh?"
"It doesn't cost any more than pessimism," she said. "One way or another, we'll get through."
"Right. One way or another."
They were moving steadily along. Theremon seemed to be making a quick recovery from the beating he had received in the forest, and from his days of virtual starvation. There was an amazing resilience about him. Strong as she was, Siferra had to work hard to keep up with his pace.
She was working hard, too, to keep her own spirits up. From the moment of setting out, she had consistently struck a hopeful note, always confident, always certain that they'd make it safely through to Amgando and that they would find people like themselves already hard at work there at the job of planning the reconstruction of the world.
But inwardly Siferra wasn't so sure. And the farther she and Theremon went into these once pleasant suburban regions, the more difficult it was to fight back horror, shock, despair, a sense of total defeat.
It was a nightmare world.
There was no escaping the enormity of it. Everywhere you turned you saw destruction.
Look! she thought. Look! The desolation-the scars-the fallen buildings, the walls already overrun by the first weeds, occupied already by the early platoons of lizards. Everywhere the marks of that terrible night when the gods had once more sent their curse against the world. The awful acrid smell of black smoke rising from the remains of fires that the recent rains had extinguished-the other smoke, white and piercing, curling upward out of basements still ablaze-the stains on everything-the bodies in the streets, twisted in their final agonies-the look of madness in the eyes of those few lingering living people who now and then peered out from the remains of their homes- All glory vanished. All greatness gone. Everything in ruins, everything-as if the ocean had risen, she thought, and swept all our achievements into oblivion.
Siferra was no stranger to ruins. She had spent her whole professional life digging in them. But the ruins she had excavated were ancient ones, time-mellowed and mysterious and romantic. What she saw here now was all to immediate, all too painful to behold, and there was nothing at all romantic about it. She had been able readily enough to come to terms with the downfall of the lost civilizations of the past: it carried little emotional charge for her. But now it was her own epoch that had been swept into the discard-bin of history, and that was hard to bear.
Why had it happened? she asked herself. Why? Why? Why? Were we so evil? Had we strayed so far from the path of the gods that we needed to be punished this way?
No.
No!
There are no gods; there was no punishment.
Of that much, Siferra was still certain. She had no doubt that this was simply the working of blind fate, brought about by the impersonal movements of inanimate and uncaring worlds and suns, drawing together every two thousand years in dispassionate coincidence.
That was all. An accident.
An accident that Kalgash had been forced to endure over and over again during its history.
From time to time the Stars would