Orion in the Dying Time (2 page)

At the summit I saw that Anya had been right. An endless rolling plain of grass stretched out to the horizon, green and lush and seemingly empty of animal life. A broad treeless savannah that extended all the way across the northern sweep of Africa to the very shore of the Atlantic. To the south, according to the gray-bearded slave, was the forest land he called Paradise.

Pointing with my left hand, I commanded, "Southward."

I set as brisk a pace as I could, and the slaves half trotted behind me, gasping and groaning. They did not complain, perhaps because they did not have the breath to. But each time I glanced back over my shoulder to see if they were keeping up, they were glancing back over their shoulders in fear of the inevitable.

I had hardly worked up a sweat despite the warm sun slanting down on us from near the western horizon. I associated the sun with the Golden One, the Creator who called himself Ormazd in one era and Apollo in another, the half-mad megalomaniac who had created me to hunt down his enemies across the span of the eons.

"You must let them rest," Anya said, jogging easily beside me through the knee-high wild grass. "They are exhausted."

I reluctantly agreed. Up ahead I saw a small hill. Once we reached its base I stopped. All of the slaves immediately sprawled on the ground, wheezing painfully, rivers of sweat cutting grimy streaks through the dirt that crusted their bodies.

I climbed to the hilltop, less than thirty feet high, and scanned the view. Not a tree in sight. Nothing but trackless savannah in every direction. In a way it was thrilling to be in a time and place where no human feet had yet beaten out paths and trails. The sky was turning a blazing vermilion now along the western horizon. Higher up, the blue vault was deepening into a soft violet. There was already a star shining up there, even though we were far from twilight.

A single star, brighter than any I remembered seeing in any era. It did not twinkle at all, but shone with a constant ruddy, almost brownish light, bright and big enough to make me think that I could see a true disk instead of a mere pinpoint of light. The planet Mars? No, it was brighter than Mars had ever been, even in the clear skies of Troy, thousands of years in this era's future. And its color was darker than the bright ruby red of Mars, a brooding brownish red, almost like drying blood. Nor could it be Antares: that great red giant in the Scorpion's heart twinkled like all other true stars.

A shriek of fear startled me out of my astronomical musings.

"Look!"

"He comes!"

"They are searching for us!"

I followed the outstretched emaciated arms of my newfound companions and saw a pair of winged creatures crisscrossing the darkening sky to the northeast of us. Pterosaurs, sure enough. Enormous leathery wings flapping lazily every few heartbeats, then a slow easy glide as their long pointed beaks aimed down toward the ground. They were searching for us, no doubt of it.

"Stay absolutely still," I commanded. "Lie down on the ground and don't move!"

Winged reptiles flying that high depended on their vision above all other senses. My crew of scrawny slaves were as brown as dirt. If they did not attract attention by moving, perhaps the pterosaurs would not recognize them. They hugged the ground, half-hidden even from my view by the long grass.

But I saw the long rays of the setting sun glittering off Anya's metallic suit. For an instant I wanted to tell her to move into the shadow of the hill. But there was no time, and the motion would have caught the beady eyes of the searching pterosaurs. So I stretched myself out flat on the crest of the little hill and hoped desperately that the winged reptiles were not brainy enough to realize that a metallic glinting was something they should investigate further.

It seemed like hours as the giant fliers soared slowly across the sky, crisscrossing time and again in an obvious hunting pattern. They may have looked ugly and ungainly on the ground, with their long beaks and balancing bony crests extending rearward from their heads, but in the air they were nothing less than magnificent. They flew with hardly any effort at all, soaring along gracefully on the warm air currents rising from the grassy plain.

They passed us by at last and disappeared to the west. Once they were out of sight I got to my feet and started southward again. The slaves followed eagerly, without a grumble. Fear inspired them with new strength.

As the sun touched the green horizon I spotted a clump of trees in the distance. We hurried toward them and saw that a small stream had cut a shallow gorge through the grassland. Its muddy banks were overshadowed by the leafy trees.

"We can camp here for the night," I said. "Under the trees, with plenty of water."

"And what do we eat?" whined the elder.

I looked down at him, more in exasperation than anger. A true slave, waiting for someone to provide him with food rather than trying to get it for himself.

"What is your name?" I asked.

"Noch," he said, his eyes suddenly fearful.

Clasping his thin shoulder in my hand, I said, "Well, Noch, my name is Orion. I am a hunter. Tonight I will find you something to eat. Tomorrow you begin to learn for yourselves how to hunt."

Cutting a small branch from one of the trees, I whittled as sharp a point as I could on one end while the young Chron watched me avidly.

"Do you want to learn how to hunt?" I asked him.

Even in the shadows of dusk I could see his eyes gleam. "Yes!"

"Then come with me."

It could hardly be called hunting. The small game that lived by the stream had never encountered humans before. The animals were so tame that I could walk right up to them and spear one of them as it drank at the water's edge. Its companions scampered away briefly, but soon returned. It took only a few minutes to bag a brace of raccoons and three rabbits.

Chron watched eagerly. Then I let him have the makeshift spear, and after a few clumsy misses, he nailed a ground squirrel, squealing and screeching its last breath.

"That was the enjoyable part," I told him. "Now we must skin our kills and prepare them for cooking."

I did all that work, since we had only the one knife and I had no intention of letting any of the others touch it. As I skinned and gutted our tiny catch, to the avid eyes of the whole little tribe, I worried about a fire. If there were reptiles out there that could sense heat the way a rattlesnake or a cobra does, even a small cooking fire would be like a blazing beacon to them.

But there seemed to be no such reptiles in the area. The pterosaurs had passed us by hours earlier, and I had seen no other reptilians in this open savannah, not even the tiniest of lizards. Nothing but small mammals—and we few humans.

I decided to risk a fire, just large enough for cooking our catch, to be extinguished as soon as the cooking was done.

Anya surprised me by showing she could light a fire with nothing more than a pair of sticks and some sweat.

The others gaped in astonishment as wisps of smoke and then a flicker of flame rose from Anya's rubbing sticks.

Gray-bearded old Noch, kneeling next to her, said in an awed voice, "I remember my father making fire in the same way—before he was killed by the masters and I was taken away from Paradise."

"The masters have the eternal fire," said a woman's voice from out of the flickering shadows.

But none of the others seemed concerned with that now, not with the delicious aroma of roasting meat making them salivate and their stomachs rumble.

After we had eaten and most of the tribe had drifted off into sleep I asked Anya, "Where did you learn to make fire?"

"From you," she answered. Looking into my eyes, she added, "Don't you remember?"

I could feel my brows knitting with concentration. "Cold—I remember the snow and ice, and a small team of men and women. We were wearing uniforms. . . ."

Anya's eyes seemed to glow in the night shadows. "You do remember! You can break through the programming and remember earlier existences."

"I don't remember much," I said.

"But the Golden One wiped your memory clean after each existence. Or tried to. Orion, you are growing stronger. Your powers are growing."

I was more concerned with our present problems. "How do the Creators expect us to deal with Set with nothing but our bare hands?"

"They don't, Orion. Now that we have established ourselves in this era we can return to the Creators and bring back whatever we need: tools, weapons, machines, warriors . . . anything."

"Warriors? Like me? Human beings manufactured by the Golden One or the other Creators and sent back in time to do their dirty work?"

With a tolerant sigh, Anya replied, "You can hardly expect them to come themselves and do the fighting. They are not warriors."

"But you are here. Fighting. That monster would have killed me if you hadn't been there."

"I am an atavism," she said, almost with pleasure in her voice. "A warrior. A woman foolish enough to fall in love with one of our own creatures."

The fire had long been smothered in mud, and the only light sifting through the trees came from the cold white alabaster of the moon. It was enough for me to see how beautiful Anya was, enough to make me burn with love for her.

"Can we go to the Creators' realm and then return here, to this exact place and time?"

"Yes, of course."

"Even if we spend hours and hours?"

"Orion, in the realm of the Creators there is a splendid temple atop a crag of marble that is my favorite retreat. We could go there and spend hours, or days, or months, if you wish."

"I do wish it!"

She kissed me gently, merely a brushing of lips. "Then we will go there."

Anya put her hand in mine. Reflexively, I closed my eyes. But I felt nothing, and when I opened my eyes, we were still in the miserable little camp by the muddy bank of a Neolithic stream.

"What happened?"

Anya's whole body was stiff with tension. "It didn't work. Something—someone—is blocking access to the continuum."

"Blocking access?" I heard my own voice as if a stranger's: high-pitched with sudden fear.

"We're trapped here, Orion!" said Anya, frightened herself. "Trapped!"

CHAPTER 3

Now I knew something of how the tribe of ex-slaves felt.

It was easy to feel brave and confident when I knew that all the paths of the continuum were open to me. Knew that I could travel through time as easily as stepping through a doorway. Certainly I could feel pity, even contempt, for these cowardly humans who bowed down to the terrifying reptilian masters. I could leave this time and place at will, as long as Anya was with me to lead the way.

But now we were trapped, the way was cut off, and I felt the deep lurking dread of forces and powers far beyond my own control looming over me as balefully as final, implacable death.

We had no choice except to press on southward, hoping to reach the forests of Paradise before Set's scouting pterosaurs located us. Each morning we rose and trekked toward the distant southern horizon. Each night we made camp in the best available protective foliage we could find. The men were learning to hunt the small game that abounded in this endless grassy veldt, the women gathered fruits and berries.

Each time we saw pterosaurs quartering the skies above us we went to ground and froze like mice faced with a hunting hawk. Then we resumed our march to the south. Toward Paradise. And the horizon remained just as flat, just as far away, as it had been the first day we had started.

Sometimes in the distance we saw herds of grazing animals, big beasts the size of bison or elk. Once we stumbled close enough to them to see a pride of saber-toothed cats stalking the herd's fringes; the females sleek and deadly as they prowled through the long grass, bellies almost on the ground, the males massive with their scimitar like incisors and shaggy manes. They ignored us, and we steered as far away from them as we could.

Anya troubled me. I had never seen her look frightened before, but frightened she was now. I knew she was trying each night to make contact with the other Creators, those godlike men and women from the distant future who had created the human race. They had created me to be their hunter, and I had served them with growing reluctance over the millennia. Gradually I was remembering other missions, other lives. Other deaths.

Once I had been with another tribe of Neolithic hunter/gatherers, far from this monotonous savannah, in the hilly country near Ararat. In another time I had led a desperate band of abandoned soldiers through the snows of the Ice Age in the aftermath of our slaughter of the Neanderthals.

Anya had always been there with me, often disguised as an ordinary human being of that time and place, always ready to protect me even in the face of the displeasure of the other Creators.

Now we trekked toward a Paradise that may be nothing more than a half-remembered legend, fleeing devilish monsters who had apparently taken total control of this aspect of the continuum. And Anya was as helpless as any of us.

Some nights we made love, coupling as the others did, on the ground in the dark, silently, furtively, not wanting the others to see or hear us, as though what we were doing was shameful. Our passions were brief, spiritless, far from satisfying.

It was several nights before I realized that the mother whom I had saved from the lizard's punishment had taken to sleeping beside me. She and her baby remained several body lengths away the first night, but each evening she moved closer. Anya noticed, too, and spoke gently with her.

"Her name is Reeva," Anya told me as we marched the following morning. "Her husband was beaten to death by the guard lizards for trying to steal extra food for her so she could nurse the baby."

"But why—"

"You protected her. You saved her and her baby. She is very shy, but she is trying to work up the courage to tell you that she will be your number-two woman, if you will have her."

I felt more confusion than surprise. "But I don't want another woman!"

"Shhh," Anya cautioned, even though we were not speaking in the language of these people. "You must not reject her openly. She wants a protector for her child and she is willing to offer her body in return for your protection."

I cast a furtive glance at Reeva. She could not have been more than fourteen or fifteen years old. As thin as a piece of string, caked with days' worth of grime, her long hair matted and filthy. She carried the sleeping baby on one bony hip and walked along in uncomplaining silence with the rest of the tribe.

Anya, who bathed whenever we found enough water and privacy, seemed to be taking the situation lightly. She seemed almost amused.

"Can't you make Reeva understand," I virtually pleaded with her, "that I will do the best I can to protect all of us? I don't need her . . . enticements."

Anya grinned at me and said nothing.

Each night that baleful star looked down at us, like a glowing blot of dried blood, bright enough to cast shadows, brighter even than the full moon. Sunrise did not blot it out; it lingered in the morning sky until it dropped below the horizon. It could not be any planet that I knew of; it could not be an artificial satellite. It simply hung in its place among the other stars, unblinking, menacing, blood-chilling.

One night I asked Anya if she knew what it was.

She gazed at it for long moments, and its dark light made her lovely face seem grim and ashen. Then tears welled up in her eyes and she shook her head.

"I don't know," she answered in a whisper that carried untold misery. "I don't know anything anymore!"

She tried to stifle her tears, but she could not. Sobbing, she pressed her face against my shoulder so that the others would not hear her crying. I held her tightly, feeling strange, uncomfortable. I had never seen a goddess cry before.

By my count, it was on the eleventh day when young Chron came dashing back toward me with an ear-to-ear grin on his face.

"Up on the hill! I can see trees! Lots of trees!"

The teenager had taken to scouting slightly ahead of the rest of us. For all our wearying march and the terror that drove us onward, the tribe was actually in better physical condition now than when I had first stumbled across them. They were eating regularly, and a protein-rich diet at that. Skinny little Chron looked better and certainly had more energy than he had shown only ten days earlier. The hollow places between his ribs were beginning to fill in.

I went up to the top of the hillock with him and, sure enough, the distant horizon was no longer a flat expanse of grass. It was an undulating skyline of trees, waving to us, beckoning.

"Paradise!" Noch had come up to stand beside me. His voice trembled with joy and anticipation.

We headed eagerly for the trees, and even though it took the rest of the day, we finally entered their cool shade and threw ourselves exhausted on the mossy ground.

All around us towered broad-spreading oaks and lofty pines, spruce and balsam firs, the lovely slim white boles of young birch punctuating this world of leafy green. Ferns and mosses covered the ground. I saw mushrooms clustered between the roots of a massive old oak tree, and flowers waving daintily in the soft breeze.

An enormous feeling of relief washed over us all, a sense of safety, of being in a place where the terrible fear that had hovered over us was at last dissipated and driven away. Birds were singing in the boughs high above us, as if welcoming us to Paradise.

I sat up and took a deep breath of clean, sweet air redolent of pine and wild roses and cinnamon. Even Anya looked happy. We could hear the splashing of a brook nearby, beyond the bushes and young saplings that stood between the sturdy boles of the grown trees.

A doe stepped daintily out of those bushes and regarded us for a moment with large, liquid brown eyes. Then it turned and dashed off.

"What did I tell you, Orion?" Noch beamed happily. "This is Paradise!"

The men used the rudimentary hunting skills I had taught them to trap and kill a wild pig that evening as it came down to the brook to drink. They showed more enthusiasm than skill, and the pig screeched and squealed and nearly got away before they finally hacked it to death with their makeshift spears. But we feasted long into the night and then went to sleep.

Anya curled into my arms and fell asleep almost immediately. As our fire died slowly into embers I gazed down on her face, smudged and stained with grease from our pork dinner. Her hair was tangled and stubborn ringlets fell over her forehead. Despite her best efforts she was no longer the smoothly groomed goddess from a far superior culture. I remembered vaguely another existence, with that other hunting tribe, where she had become one of them, a fierce priestess who reveled in the blood and excitement of the hunt.

It would not be so bad to stay in this time, I thought. Being cut off from the other Creators had its compensations. We were free of their schemes and machinations. Free of the responsibilities they had loaded upon me. Anya and I could live here in this Paradise quite happily like two normal human beings; no longer goddess and creature, but simply a man and a woman living out normal lives in a simple, primitive time.

To live a normal life, free of the Creators. I smiled to myself in the darkness, and for the first time since we had arrived in this time and place, I let myself fall completely and unguardedly into a deep delicious sleep.

But with sleep came a dream. No, not a dream: a message. A warning.

I saw the statue of Set from that little stone temple back along the bank of the Nile. As I watched, the statue shimmered and came to life. The blank granite eyes turned carnelian, blinked slowly, then focused upon me. The scaly head turned and lowered slightly. A wave of utterly dry heat seemed to bake the strength from my body; it was as if the door to a giant furnace had suddenly swung open. The acrid smell of sulfur burned my lungs. Set's mouth opened in a hissing intake of breath, revealing several rows of sharply pointed teeth.

He was an overpowering presence. He loomed over me, standing on two legs that ended in clawed feet. His long tail flicked back and forth slowly as he regarded me the way a powerful predator might regard a particularly helpless and stupid victim.

"You are Orion."

He did not speak the words; I heard them in my mind. The voice seethed with malevolence, with an evil so deep and complete that my knees went weak.

"I am Set, master of this world. You have been sent to destroy me. Abandon all hope, foolish man. That is manifestly impossible."

I could not speak, could not even move. It had been the same when I had first been created by the Golden One. His presence had also paralyzed me. He had built such a reaction into my brain. Yet even so, I had learned to overcome it, somewhat. Now this monstrous apparition of evil held me in thrall even more completely than the Golden One ever had. I knew, with utter certainty, that Set could still my breath with a glance, could make my heart stop with a blink of his burning red eyes.

"Your Creators fear me, and justly so. I will destroy them and all their works utterly, beginning with you."

I struggled to move, to say something back to him, but I could not control any part of my body.

"You think you have struck a blow against me by killing one of my creatures and stealing a miserable band of slaves from my garden."

The terror that Set struck in me went beyond reason, beyond sanity. I realized that I was gazing upon the human race's primal fear, the image that would one day be called Satan.

"You think that you are safe from my punishment now that you have reached your so-called Paradise," Set went on, his words burning themselves into my mind.

He was incapable of laughter, but I felt acid-hot amusement in his tone as he said, "I will send you a punishment that will make those pitiful wretches beg for death and the eternal fire. Even in your Paradise I will send you a punishment that will seek you out in the darkest night and make you scream for mercy. Not this night. Perhaps not for many nights to come. But soon enough."

I was already screaming with the effort of trying to break free of his mental grasp. But my screams were silent, I did not have the power to voice them. I could not even sweat, despite bending every gram of my strength to battle against his hold over me.

"Do not bother to fight against me, human. Enjoy what little shreds of life you have remaining to you. I will destroy you all, including the woman you love, the self-styled goddess. She will die the most painful death of all."

And suddenly I was screaming, roaring my lungs out. Sitting up on the mossy ground beneath the trees of Paradise as the sun rose on a new day, bellowing with terror and horror and the self-hate that comes from weakness.