Orion

CHAPTER 42

I never lost consciousness. I felt nothing, as if my body had gone numb, encased in a cocoon of transparent gossamer that held me immobile and perfectly protected from everything outside. Neither heat nor cold, pain nor pleasure, joy nor fear penetrated the cladding that covered me.

But I could see. The night storm and the Ice Age landscape wavered and slowly dissolved, like a castle of sand being washed away by the incoming tide. Beside me stood Ahriman, still encased in the bluish-white shimmer of energy from the lightning bolt, frozen immobile just as I was. His red eyes glared at me, and in them I could see not only hate and anger, but fear as well.

Slowly, by degrees, it grew darker and darker until vision was useless. I could see nothing. I was alone in a well of darkness, suspended in time and space, not knowing where I was or where I was heading.

Strangely, I felt no fear — not even apprehension. Even though I could no longer see him, I knew that Ahriman was beside me. I knew that Adena and her tiny band of remaining soldiers would survive the cold of the Ice Age and raise their children to tell them of the demigod who taught them how to make fire. I realized now that Dal’s hunting clan and all the other humans of every age were the descendants of those few soldiers lost and abandoned after the last battle of The War.

And I knew that Ormazd was near. And with him would be the goddess whom I loved when she deigned to take human form.

The darkness began to pale. Faint flickers of light, almost like stars in the night sky, began to show themselves. Then, like a slow, reluctant dawn, the blackness around me softened, became a pearly gray, a softer pinkish hue.

Light and warmth slowly washed over me, thawing the cocoon that held me. I could flex my fingers, move my arms. Gradually I felt all constraints melt away from me. I could move and feel once again.

But Ahriman remained trapped in an invisible web of energy — glowering at me, but unable to move. I should have felt glad at that; instead, I felt something close to pity.

“There’s nothing I can do,” I said aloud, knowing that he could not hear me. I shrugged elaborately to show him that I was helpless. His baleful stare never left me.

I turned away from him to examine the place where we stood. It was a featureless expanse of clouds. Not a hill, not a tree, not a blade of grass in sight. Nothing but a cloudscape extending in every direction as far as the eye could see. Not even a horizon, in the usual sense of the word; merely soft, puffy white clouds drifting slowly, one after the other, endlessly.

My feet seemed to be standing on something solid; yet, when I looked down, I saw nothing more substantial than wisps of cloud tops. Overhead the sky was clear, and far up at zenith the blue was dark enough to show a few twinkling stars.

I remembered flying in jet airliners through cloudscapes such as this, where no trace of the ground could be seen and there was nothing below except the tufted tops of a thick, soft carpeting of dazzling white clouds.

I grinned to myself. “So this is heaven, is it?” Raising my hands to cup my mouth, I shouted as loudly as I could, “I don’t believe it, Ormazd! You’ll have to do better than this!”

I looked back at Ahriman. He stood like a statue of implacable enmity, the only substantial landmark in this fairyland of cloud and sky.

Something drew my eyes up toward the zenith, where those few stars looked down at us. One of them seemed to burn brighter than the rest. It glowed and shimmered and seemed to grow as I watched it. Like a bubble of light it expanded and blazed brighter until it was too brilliant to look at. I threw my arm over my eyes as the glare from that golden sphere flooded everywhere.

The glare subsided, and I looked up again to see the human form of Ormazd, splendidly adorned in a uniform of gold, his thick golden mane framing his handsome, smiling face.

“Well done, Orion,” he said to me, beaming. “You have succeeded at last.”

I felt an overpowering satisfaction at his words, the kind of emotion a puppy must feel when its master pats it on the head. Yet, deep within me, there was a nagging resentment.

“My duty was to kill Ahriman,” I heard myself say.

Ormazd waved a self-confident hand. “No matter. He is as good as dead. He can’t harm us now.”

“Then… my task has been accomplished?”

“Yes. Quite fulfilled.”

“What happens to me now? What happens to him?”

Ormazd’s satisfied smile faded. “He remains here, in this stasis, safely out of the stream of the continuum. He can do us no harm now. The continuum is safe, at last.”

“And me?” I asked.

He looked slightly puzzled. “Your task is finished, Orion. What would you have me do with you?”

My throat froze. I could not speak.

“What is it that you want?” Ormazd asked me. “What reward can I give you for your faithful service?”

He was playing with me, I could see. And I could not find the courage to tell him that I wanted Aretha, Agla, Ava, Adena — the gray-eyed goddess whom I loved and who loved me. Suddenly I wondered if she hadn’t been a part of Ormazd’s plan, a stimulus to move me through the pain of death in my hunt for Ahriman, an unattainable prize to lure me through space-time in the pursuit of Ormazd’s goal.

“Well, Orion?” Ormazd asked again, grinning at me. “What is it that you desire?”

“Is she… does she really exist?”

“Who?” Ormazd’s grin became feline. “Does who really exist?”

“The woman — the one who called herself Adena when she led a squad of your troops in The War.”

“Adena exists, certainly,” he replied. “She is as real as you are. And as human.”

“Ava… Agla…”

“They all exist, Orion. In their own time. They are all human beings, living their lifespans in their own particular times.”

“Then she’s not…”

The air beside Ormazd began to shimmer, as if a powerful beam of heat had suddenly been turned on. It wavered and sparkled. Ormazd edged back a step as the air seemed to congeal, to take on a silvery radiance and then solidify into the form of a tall, slender, beautiful woman, clad in glittering metallic silver.

“Stop toying with him, Ormazd,” she said sternly. Then she looked at me, and our eyes met. “I exist, Orion. I am real.”

The breath froze in my lungs. I could not utter a word.

But Ormazd could. “Is she the one you meant? Have you fallen in love with a goddess, Orion?” He laughed.

“You find it ridiculous that your creature should love me?” she asked, cutting through his laughter. “Then how amusing it must be to think that I love him.”

Ormazd shook his head. “That is impossible.”

“Is it?”

I found my voice at last. “Your name… what is your true name?”

Her tone softened as she told me, “I am all those women you have met, Orion, in each of the times you have found yourself. Here, I call myself Anya.”

“Anya.”

“Yes,” she said. “And despite the scoffing of your creator, I do love you, Orion.”

“And I love you, Anya.”

“Impossible!” snorted Ormazd. “Can a human being love a worm? You are a goddess, Anya, not one of these creatures of flesh.”

“I became one of them. I have learned to be human,” she said.

“But you are not human,” he insisted. “Any more than I am.” Ormazd’s form shimmered, blurred slightly. “Show him your true self.”

Anya shook her head slightly.

“You refuse? Then look upon me, Orion, and see your creator as he truly exists!”

Ormazd’s body flowed and blurred and began to burn with an inner golden light so powerful that I could not look directly at it. It cast no heat at all; if anything, the air around me seemed to grow colder. But the brilliance was painful. I had to lower my eyes, bow my head, put my arms up to shield my vision from that overpowering glare.

“I am Ormazd, the God of Light, the creator of humankind,” his voice bellowed.

Through nearly closed eyes I saw a great shining globe of light, radiant as the sun, hovering in the place where the golden-maned man had stood moments before.

“On your knees, creature! Worship your creator!”

I could feel the power of his brilliance pushing against me like a palpable force, like the pitiless blasting radiation from the fusion chamber, so many centuries away.

But Anya gripped my arm and held me steady. She looked straight into Ormazd’s glowing form.

“He has served you well, Ormazd,” she said. “This is no way to treat him.”

The glowing globe dimmed, shrank, and became a human form once again.

“I wanted him to realize,” Ormazd said, in a tone as calm and conversational as you might hear in a quiet church rectory, “with whom he is dealing.”

Anya smiled grimly. “And you should realize, O God of Light, with whom you are dealing. I have seen Orion’s courage. You cannot overawe him.”

“I built that courage into him,” he snapped.

“Then stop trying to overpower it!”

“Wait!” I said. “Wait. There’s so much to this that I don’t understand.”

“How could you?” Ormazd sneered.

I glanced back at Ahriman, who watched us with pain-filled eyes.

“You created me to hunt down Ahriman and kill him,” I said to Ormazd.

“Yes. But removing him from the continuum’s time stream is just as good. He will remain here, safely held in stasis, forever.”

“In each of the eras I was sent, I found a woman — the same woman — it was you, Anya, each time.”

“That is true,” she said.

“But Ormazd told me that each of those women was as human as I, and lived a human lifespan in that particular time…”

“He doesn’t understand the difference between time flow and stasis,” Ormazd said.

“Then we should explain it to him.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to,” Anya said.

Ormazd made a disgusted face. “Why bother with explanations to a creature that has outlived his usefulness?”

CHAPTER 43

Outlived my usefulness. I realized that if Ormazd had created me, had placed me in all those different eras to hunt down Ahriman, had brought me through death many times over — he could also end my existence, totally and forever.

I stared at him. “Is that the reward you will give me? Final death?”

“Orion, try to understand,” he said, almost placatingly. “What you desire is truly impossible. Anya is not a human being, no more than I am. We take on human form to make ourselves familiar to you.”

“But Adena… Agla…”

“They are human,” Anya said. “Adena was created in a time that is far in the future of any era you have known…”

“Fifty thousand years in the future from the twentieth century,” I said, recalling what Ormazd had told me when I had first met him.

“Exactly,” Anya said. “She was created at the same time you yourself were.”

“Then…”

“And the others, Aretha, Ava, Agla — they were born of human mothers, just as all humans have been, since Adena’s band of soldiers struggled to survive in the Age of Ice.”

“But they were you.”

“Yes. I inhabited their bodies for their entire lifetimes. I became human.”

“For me?”

“Not at first. In the beginning it was merely… curiosity, a novelty, a chance to see what Ormazd’s handiwork was like. But then I began to feel what they feel — the pain, the fear — and then I found you, and I began to understand what love is.”

I turned to Ormazd. “You would prevent us from being together?”

His taunting grin had long disappeared. He seemed deeply concerned now, somber. “I can give you a full, rich lifetime, Orion. Many lifetimes, if you wish. But I cannot make you into one of us. That is impossible.”

“Because you refuse to make it possible,” I replied, bitterly.

He shook his head. “No. It is impossible because not even I can accomplish it. I cannot transform a bacterium into a bird. I cannot turn a man into a god.”

Turning back to Anya, I pleaded, “Is he telling me the truth? There’s nothing that can be done?”

“Try to understand, Orion,” she said gently.

“How can I understand?” I felt rage boiling within me. I glanced at the imprisoned form of Ahriman and knew a little of the hatred burning in his eyes. “You haven’t allowed me to understand. You created me to do a job for you, and now that it’s finished, you’re finished with me.”

“No,” Anya said. “That’s not…”

But Ormazd overrode her. “Accept what cannot be changed, Orion. You have done well. The human race will worship you, through all of time, in one form or another. They will forget about me, but they will always remember Prometheus.”

“Why?” I asked. “Why did you create me? Why create humankind? Why fight The War against Ahriman’s people? Why did you cause all this agony and bloodshed?”

Ormazd fell silent. His golden radiance gathered around him almost like a protective cloak as he lowered his head and refused to answer me.

But Anya’s gray eyes flashed with silver flame. She stared at Ormazd until he lifted his eyes to meet hers.

“He deserves to be answered, God of Light,” she said, in a voice I could barely hear.

Ormazd did not reply. He merely shook his head slowly in refusal.

“Then I will tell him,” Anya insisted.

“What good will it do?” Ormazd said. “He already hates me. Do you want him to hate you, too?”

“I want him to understand,” she said.

“You are a fool.”

“Perhaps I am. But he deserves to know the entire truth.”

The golden glow of Ormazd’s aura began to pulsate and redden at its fringes. The light grew brighter, brighter, until it was impossible to look directly at him. His human body faded into the brilliance and the radiant golden sphere, a miniature fiery sun, then rose above our heads and dwindled in the featureless distance until it was no more than a star-like point of light against the far sky.

I turned back toward Anya.

“Are you prepared to see the truth, Orion?” she asked. Her eyes held all the sadness of time in them.

“Will it mean that I must lose you?” I asked.

“You must lose me in any case, Orion. Ormazd spoke truthfully: you cannot become one of us.”

I was tempted to ask her to end it all right there and then, to put me out of existence, out of pain. But, instead, I heard my voice replying, “If I must exist without you, then at least let me know why I was created.”

“You were created to hunt Ahriman,” she answered.

“Yes, but why? I don’t believe the story Ormazd told me. Ahriman couldn’t possibly destroy the universe. It’s all nonsense.”

“No, my love,” Anya said gently. “It is all quite true.”

“Then show me! Let me understand.”

Her beautiful face was utterly serious as she nodded to me. “You will have to enter the time stream again. I must send you to a place in space-time that is before the Age of Ice, before human beings existed on Earth.”

“Very well, send me. I’m willing.”

She drew a slow, hesitant breath. “I will not be there with you. Not in any form. You will be alone — except for…”

“Except for whom?”

“You will see,” Anya said. “Suffice it for now to know that there will be no other human beings on Earth, no creatures like yourself.”

I realized. “Ormazd won’t have created them yet.”

“That’s right.”

“But there will be others there,” I guessed. And then a flash of recognition lit my mind. “Ahriman’s people! They will be on Earth!”

Anya did not reply, but I could see in her eyes that it was true. I turned my gaze from her to Ahriman, imprisoned in his web of energy, and saw his eyes burning with a fury that could destroy worlds, if ever it got free.

CHAPTER 44

Anya instructed me to close my eyes, and not open them again until I felt the wind against my skin. For a moment I stood there, unmoving, my gaze fixed on her lovely, somber face.

This would be the last time I’d see her, I knew. There would be no return from this journey.

I wanted to take her in my arms, to kiss her and tell her for one last time that I loved her more than life itself. But she was a goddess, not a human woman. I could love her as Agla the witch, or Ava the huntress. I could love Aretha, whom I barely knew, or Adena, as she led her troops in battle. But this silver-clad goddess was beyond me, and I knew it. Ormazd had been right: a bacterium cannot become a bird; a goddess cannot fall in love with a monkey.

I closed my eyes.

“Keep them closed until you feel the wind against you,” her sweet voice told me.

I nodded to show her I understood. Then I felt the softest touch against my cheek. Her fingertips, perhaps. Or perhaps the faintest brush of her lips. I burned for her, but found myself paralyzed. I could not unclench my fists, could not move a step. My eyes would not open even if I willed them to.

“Good-bye, my love,” she whispered. But I was unable to answer.

For the briefest instant I remained locked in frozen darkness, deprived of all sensory inputs. I could see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing.

My hearing returned first. A soft, sighing sound came to me, the whisper of something I had not heard for so long that I thought I had forgotten it: a gentle breeze rustling the leafy limbs of trees.

I felt that breeze on my face, warm, kind, loving. Opening my eyes, I saw that I stood in the midst of a forest of gigantic trees — sequoias, from the looks of them. Their immense boles were wider than a house, and they stretched up toward the blue, cloud-flecked sky like the pillars of a giant’s cathedral.

Except for the sighing of the breeze, the forest seemed silent to me. But as I stood there lost in wonder beneath the shade of those gigantic leafy boughs, I began to recognize the sounds of life in the background: bird calls echoing through the forest, the gurgling of a fast-rushing stream off in the distance, the scampering of a small furry creature through the sparse underbrush between the enormous tree trunks.

What a world this was! How Dal and Ava and their clan would have loved it here. Even Subotai and the High Khan, crusty old warriors though they were, would have happily settled themselves here. Everything a man could desire was here — except other people.

I wandered through the forest for hours, picking berries from a bush, drinking from that noisy brook, reveling in the peace and joy of a world untainted by war and killing.

Slowly I began to wonder if Anya had not sent me here to get rid of me as gently as she could. It was a good world, an easy place to live in except for the absence of companions. Was this her way of exiling me, removing me from her presence? A pleasant Coventry? A warm and lovely Siberia? I would live out my solitary existence here in comfort, and when I finally died, I would no longer trouble her. Like putting a pet to sleep when you no longer need or want it.

I shook my head. No, she would not lie to me. She sent me here so that I might understand the whole scheme of things. She placed me here for a reason, not merely to get me out of her way, I told myself. I insisted to myself. I had to believe that. There was nothing else for me to cling to.

The sun was setting behind hills that I could barely make out, far off in the distance, through the stout columns of the trees. The shadows lengthened into dusk, but the air was still warm and fragrant with flowers. I wore a sleeveless shirt and knee-length pants made of hides. My feet were shod with thonged sandals of leather. Yet, even as twilight deepened into night, I did not feel cold. The ground was mossy and soft; I stretched out on it and fell asleep almost at once.

In my dreams I saw this early Earth as a god might see it, as Anya and Ormazd undoubtedly saw it, a beautiful blue sphere set against the cold darkness of unfathomable space, decked with bands and swirls of clouds that gleamed purest white. I recognized the rough outlines of Europe and Africa, the Americas and Asia, set against the glittering deep blue of the oceans. The Atlantic seemed narrower than it should be, and Australia was not yet an island, but this was Earth, clearly enough.

The Arctic was clear of ice, its waters as blue and inviting as those girdling the Equator. Antarctica was dazzling white, though. Nowhere did I see cities, or roads, or the gray domes and sooty plumes of human habitation.

It was an Earth empty of human life, devoid of intelligence — almost.

I awoke feeling physically refreshed, yet puzzled to the point of worry. There had to be people here; if not the human creations of Ormazd, then Ahriman’s people. That was why Anya had sent me here: to find them and see them for what they truly were.

I got to my feet, washed in the cold stream and ate a breakfast of berries and eggs. I could not bring myself to kill any of the animals that chattered and called through the echoing forest. I had no tools, no weapons, and no inclination to start making them.

Instead, I began walking along the stream’s bank, up the gently rising ground, surrounded by the skyscraper trees that threw dappled patterns of sunlight and shadow across the mossy ground. The stream gurgled and splashed across rocks. On the far side I saw a doe and her two fawns watching me, ears twitching and eyes so big and liquid brown.

“Good morning,” I called to them. They did not run away. They merely watched me until, satisfied that I was no threat, they returned to browsing on the shrubbery that grew by the stream’s edge.

As I walked further upstream, more deer came into view, stepping carefully on their slim legs, gazing at me with their innocent eyes. There must be predators somewhere nearby, I thought. Yet I had not heard a cat’s roar nor the growling and baying of canines during the night.

Although the ground was rising as I walked upstream, the going was quite easy. Undergrowth was sparse, and the ground was covered with green, springy mosses and needles from the trees. More and more groups of deer and smaller animals clustered by the water’s edge, where the shrubbery grew more thickly. It almost seemed to me like a park, a deliberately designed game preserve. Built by whom? I wondered. For whom?

By mid-morning I found the answer to those questions.

Birds were chattering and rustling up in the limbs of the giant trees. I looked up and saw them gathering, flocking, birds of every kind and color: brilliant red cardinals, bluebirds, brown sparrows, red-shouldered blackbirds, glossy crows, robins, wrens, birds of yellow and green and white. Hundreds of them, thousands, sitting and jabbering on the branches, swooping back and forth. Not a predator among them. No hawks or falcons, no ravens or eagles.

As I stood among the trees, my head tilted back in amazement, they all became still and quiet. As if expecting something. And then, one by one, they began gliding down from their lofty perches, wings outspread and hardly flapping at all, gliding down toward the ground, and swooping right past me.

I followed their flight with my eyes and saw, off in the distance, where they were heading.

Several men stood in a small clearing among the massive trees, reaching into pouches they wore slung over their shoulders and tossing handfuls of their contents onto the ground.

Human beings! I was staggered. Anya had said there were no humans here, and yet there were three — no, four of them, feeding a forest full of birds!

I approached them slowly, staying in the shadows of the trees, partly to get out of the way of the stream of birds swooping down toward the feeding area, partly because for some instinctive reason I did not want to startle them by revealing myself too soon.

As I came nearer, I saw who they were, and my heart sank. Ahriman’s people. The ones that Adena’s troopers called the brutes. They did not seem terribly brutal, sprinkling birdseed on the ground around them, letting birds perch on their broad shoulders, laughing as they fed the multihued flocks.

I studied them from the cover of a giant tree trunk. They were Ahriman’s people, not my own kind. Broad faces with high cheekbones and thin, almost lipless mouths. Wide, thick, well-muscled torsos. Heavy arms and legs.

Suddenly my insides seemed to go hollow. I realized who they were, what they were. Neanderthals.

I sank to my knees and leaned my head against the smooth bark of the mammoth tree. Neanderthals. The other race of intelligent primates who had lived on Earth during the Ice Ages.

Squeezing my eyes shut to concentrate, I tried to recall what little I knew of twentieth-century anthropology. The Neanderthals were regarded as quite human, and just as intelligent as my own kind of human being. The scientists had named them Homo sapiens neanderthalensis as opposed to our own Homo sapiens sapiens.

The Neanderthals had evolved out of the four-million-year-long line of primate apes, replacing the earlier hominids such as Homo erectus. And then, quite abruptly, the Sapients appeared — my own line of human beings, the ones whom Ormazd claimed to have created — and the Neanderthals became extinct. No anthropologist could explain why they disappeared; it happened very abruptly, as evolutionary time goes. Before the Age of Ice, Neanderthals were the highest and most widespread primates on Earth. When the glaciers melted, they were gone, and the high-domed, slim-bodied Sapients were the only intelligent species on the planet.

I knew what had happened. As I knelt there in that primeval forest, the knowledge made me sick.

It can’t be, I told myself. There must be more to it than you think. Anya would not have sent you here merely to show you the horror of genocide. Not even Ormazd could be that callous.

I did not want to believe what I knew to be true. I gathered my strength and pulled myself to my feet. There must be something else, something still hidden from me, something that I had yet to learn.

I have always been able to control my body, down to the most peripheral nerve cell. I have never lacked courage — most probably because I never had the imagination to see, ahead of time, what pain and danger I was facing. Action has always been easier for me than reflection.

Yet the most difficult action I ever had to take was to step out from behind the concealment of that tree and show myself to the four young Neanderthal men who were in the clearing, feeding the flocks of birds.

I took a deep breath, calmed my racing heart, and began walking toward them. They were youngsters, probably no more than teen-agers, their hair dark and full, their faces smooth and unlined. They were laughing and whistling to one another as they tossed birdseed around the mossy ground. One of them was holding out both his hands and half a dozen birds perched on them, pecking at the seeds in his palms.

The birds noticed me before the lads did. With a great swirling, fluttering, flashing of colors they flew off in all directions as I approached. Not a peep out of them; no sound except the beating of frightened wings.

The four young Neanderthals, suddenly alone except for a few drifting feathers, turned to gape at me.

I held up both my hands, palms outward, as I approached.

“I am Orion,” I said. “I come in peace.”

They glanced at one another, more puzzled than frightened. They made no move to stop me from coming nearer, nor did they seem in any way inclined to run from me. They whistled back and forth among themselves, low, musical sounds not unlike the calls of birds — or the whistling language of dolphins.

I stopped and let my hands fall to my sides. “Do you live nearby?” I asked. “Will you take me to your village?” I knew that they could not understand my words, any more than I could interpret their whistles. But I had to establish at least the beginnings of communication.

The four of them looked me up and down, then walked around me as if I were a clothing display. In utter silence. Yet I had the feeling that they were conversing with one another, without the need for sounds.

They were more than a full head shorter than I, all four of them, although already their barrel chests and powerful arms were much bigger than my own. I felt puny beside them. The tallest one, who almost came up to my chin, grinned at me. There was no hint of fear or distrust in his deep brown eyes. Merely curiosity.

He stared at me in silence for several moments, and I could almost hear the questions in his mind: Who are you? Where do you come from? What are you doing here?”

Like an English tourist, I spoke slowly and loudly in my effort to make him understand. “My name is Orion. Orion.” I touched my chest with a forefinger and repeated, “Orion.”

“Ho-rye-un,” the youngster said, in the same painful whisper that I had heard so often from Ahriman.

“Where is your village?” I asked. “Where do you live?”

No response.

I tried a different tack. “Do you know Ahriman? Where is Ahriman?”

The lad’s eyes flicked to his comrades and I could feel some form of mental communication vibrating from one to another. Ahriman echoed in my mind. Ahriman.

After a moment or so, the teen-ager stared into my eyes and frowned in concentration. I concentrated, too, trying to receive whatever mental message he was trying to send. I got nothing but the vaguest impression of the forest around us, trees and not much else.

With a very human shrug, the lad whistled a few notes to his companions, then gestured for me to come along with him. The five of us started along a well-worn trail that began in that clearing and headed deeper into the woods.

CHAPTER 45

The Neanderthals’ “village,” it turned out, was in the trees. Not among them, but actually inside the giant boles of those tall, massive sequoias. They had carved out elaborate living quarters for themselves, high above the ground, with long ladders made of vines hanging inside the trunks and leading up to their rooms. The broad, sturdy branches that radiated outward some forty or fifty feet above the ground served as patios and verandas for these dwellings.

At first I thought that their technology was pitifully limited. I could see nothing more sophisticated than stone axes and chisels, and smaller tools made of flint or quartz. But they had fire; they had as much intelligence as an Einstein or a Buddha, and they had a form of mental telepathy that allowed them to live in harmony with the world of animals and plants around them.

Where we Sapients invent a machine to do work that our arms are not strong enough to do, the Neanderthals tamed, trained, or developed an animal or plant. The vine ladders that they scampered up and down on were one example. They were living, growing vines, with roots imbedded in the soil and broad green leaves spreading in the sunlight along the high branches of the giant trees.

They did not hunt, nor did they farm. They had no need of either. They were gatherers, in the ultimate sense. They controlled herds of animals mentally, and led the oldest and weakest to their ritual deaths by some form of telepathic inducement. They kept pets such as dogs, but even there the link between Neanderthal and dog was a mental one.

They had no spoken language; their throats were not built for speech. They communicated among themselves by an elaborate combination of telepathy, whistling, and gestures. I tried as hard as I could, and after several weeks of living among them, I began to be able to make a crude, tentative form of mental contact. The ability was built into my brain, as it was built into theirs by evolution, but it would take a long period of training before I could communicate as easily as their babies did.

The Neanderthals had no fear of strangers. Warfare and conflict were virtually unknown to them. At first I thought that might be because their telepathic abilities made it impossible to attack someone without his sensing it beforehand and being prepared to retaliate. I was wrong, although I had been on the right track.

They were peaceful because their telepathic abilities allowed them to understand each other much more thoroughly than speech permits true understanding. It was not that they constantly read each others’ minds, I gradually learned. But the Neanderthals were trained from birth to communicate their feelings, their emotions, as well as rational thoughts and ideas. When a Neanderthal was angry or upset or afraid, everyone around him knew of it instantly, and they all did their best to get to the cause of the problem and solve it. Similarly, when a Neanderthal was happy, everyone knew it and shared in the joy.

How alone we Sapients are! Locked inside our skulls with our individual personalities, we make feeble attempts at communication through speech, where the Neanderthals shared their thoughts as naturally as warmth flows from a fire. There were no psychotherapists among them — or, rather, they were all psychologists.

They were a gentle people, in spite of their powerful muscular bodies. Their innocent brown eyes reminded me of the doe and fawns I had seen my first day in this time. They did not, probably could not, dissemble. Even their method of slaughtering the weakest members of their herds was so gentle that the word slaughter hardly applies: they merely exerted enough mental control over the animal to stop its heart. The animal collapsed and died within moments, painlessly.

The days lengthened into weeks as I dwelled among them, living with the family of the tallest teen-ager of the four who had first encountered me. Their home, like all the others’, was some forty feet above the ground, inside a sturdy sequoia. The family consisted of the parents, Tohon and his wife Huyana, their son Tunu, and their daughter, Yoki, who was about five or six years old. They had accepted me as a guest, after the whole village — some hundred or so people — gathered in a clearing at the base of “their” trees to discuss what they should do with me.

It was an eerie, unsettling feeling to be standing in the midst of all these Neanderthals, knowing that they were talking about me, but unable to hear a word. Except for a few whistles and an occasional wave of a hand or shake of a head, the discussion was carried out in complete silence.

I could not listen to them, so, instead, I studied their faces. They were not at all like the shambling, beetle-browed savages that twentieth-century Sapients depicted the Neanderthals to be. Their faces were broader than mine, their brows heavier, their chins less prominent, but the totality of their facial features were not all that different from my own. They were no hairier than I was. The men’s faces were beardless, and I learned after several painful attempts at shaving with a flint knife that the Neanderthals removed facial hair with an ointment they obtained from the leaves of a shrub.

Apparently they decided that I would live among them, and Tunu’s father accepted the obligation — or, for all I knew then, they might have considered it an honor.

I saw that very first day how they managed to carve living quarters out of the tree trunks. After Tunu painfully introduced himself and his family to me, pointing to each in turn and carefully pronouncing each name several times in his labored, dry whisper, his father led me to their home.

I followed Tohon up the sturdy ladder of vines to their main room, a spacious womb-like chamber set in the living wood, with a round window on one side and an open doorway that led out onto a branch that was broad enough to allow all five of us to stand on its flattened surface at the same time. Their furniture consisted of stools and table-like things that looked oddly out of place, yet strangely familiar. Then I realized that they were actually giant mushrooms, toadstools, that had been shaped to serve the Neanderthals. It was then that I began to understand that they altered the world around them, vegetable as well as animal, to suit their needs.

Tohon took me out on that broad, green veranda and showed me how they enlarged their living quarters to make room for a guest. He sent Tunu scampering out along the big branch toward a smaller limb where thick clusters of needles grew. The lad came back with a wooden bowl filled with a thick, syrupy liquid that must have been some form of tree sap.

I followed Tohon inside and watched him begin to paint the sap onto the wall of their main room. It smelled of pine resin, but stronger. Off to one side, I could see Huyana and Yoki silently studying an array of herbs and leaves that they had spread across the floor: a lesson in botany, or more likely, nutrition.

And all this was being done in nearly total silence. I had never realized how much we Sapients take for granted our constant chattering. Noise is our companion from our first birth cries to. our last dying words. The Neanderthals lived in a world of quiet, broken only by the natural sounds of wind and rustling leaf, of bird song and animal call. As the time went on and I grew accustomed to this hushed way of life, I began to wonder if the Neanderthals’ lack of violence was associated with their lack of noisemaking equipment.

As I stood watching Tohon’s handiwork, that first day, I could feel my eyes widening with surprise as the liquid he smeared onto the curved wall of the room began to eat into the wood. At first it etched the smooth surface of the wall slowly, giving off the faintest hissing sound and a slightly acrid smell. Then the wood seemed to dissolve; it just began to melt away.

Tunu grinned at me, his nearly lipless mouth pulling back to show a wide expanse of gleaming teeth. I must have looked very surprised; I’m sure my jaw was hanging open.

Tohon gestured urgently to his grinning son, and the two of them began smearing the syrupy liquid with great vigor against the sides and back of the niche that had just been created. Why the stuff melted away the wood and yet seemed to have no effect at all on their bare hands, as they stuck them into the bowl and spread the liquid against the wood, was a mystery to me.

Within a few minutes Tohon seemed satisfied with their work. Tunu took the nearly empty bowl back out along the branch while his father sat cross-legged on the floor and gestured to me to sit beside him.

Huyana served a meal of boiled vegetables and fresh fruit. Their kitchen, I soon found out, was a level below this main room. By the time we finished eating, the acidic sap had done its work, and there was a small but comfortable room for me, literally eroded out of the living wood of the tree trunk, connected to the main room by a short corridor that curved so that my room could not be seen from the main room. No need for doors; privacy was maintained by geometrical arrangement.

Tohon inspected the new room, and for a moment seemed somewhat agitated. Without moving or making a sound, he wrinkled his heavy brow in concentration. Tunu came back with the bowl and wordlessly painted a small round window for me. Tohon nodded, satisfied that the job was completed.

I thought that they had forgotten about my asking for Ahriman, that first day. As the weeks rolled leisurely by and I became accustomed to this almost silent life among the Neanderthals, I nearly forgot about him myself. I spent most of my time trying to learn how to communicate with them, mentally, and gradually I began to get the hang of “speaking” without making sounds. My abilities were ludicrously poor, but I found that some of the Neanderthals were better communicators than others. Tunu, the grinning, cheerful teen-ager, was the easiest for me to converse with. So were many of the other youngsters. I had more trouble with the adults, perhaps because they were more withdrawn and circumspect. And the Neanderthal women, even little Yoki, were virtually a complete blank to me, as far as telepathic communication was concerned. I was certain that this was by intent; well enough for the men to converse with this spindly stranger, but the women decided they would keep their distance, physically and mentally.

Not that Huyana or any of the other Neanderthals, of whatever age or gender, were anything but unfailingly kind and courteous to me. The women merely stayed beyond my reach, as far as communication of any sort was concerned.

At night, as I lay stretched out sleeplessly on a bed of spongy moss, I wondered what Anya was doing and why she had sent me here and how long she would keep me among the Neanderthals. I began to form paranoid fears in my head: Ormazd had decided to keep me here permanently, even though Anya wanted to bring me back to her. Or worse yet, the two of them had agreed to keep me in this sylvan exile; they were laughing at me, alone and helpless among people I could not even speak to.

I thought about Ahriman, and how Ormazd intended to keep him imprisoned in that shell of energy, alive in a timeless stasis, but trapped, smothered, helpless. Ormazd was doing the same thing to me, I knew it. And there was nothing I could do about it. Not a thing. Each night I searched every molecule of my mind for a way to escape this idyllic prison, and each dawn I admitted defeat. There was no escape. Not unless, or until, either Anya or Ormazd decided to allow me to return.

I began to lose track of the days. They were all pretty much the same. A heaven of peace and plenty, without anger, without murder, without war. Yet I could not accept it; I could not rest content.

Then one morning, after I had climbed down the vine ladder from Tohon’s dwelling and stepped out onto the open ground, Tunu came running up to me, breathless with excitement.

“Ahriman!” he gasped aloud.

I blinked with surprise. “Ahriman?” I asked. “He’s coming here?”

Tunu bobbed his head up and down. “Yes, he is coming up the trail.” I was so excited that I did not realize he was speaking telepathically and I was understanding him clearly.

He gestured for me to follow him. I saw that the whole village was pouring out of their tree homes and gathering in the clearing, jostling one another slightly, low whistles flicking back and forth, staring expectantly down the trail. I picked up enough of their telepathic vibrations to understand that they were all quite excited. Ahriman was one of their greatest leaders, a man of high intelligence and accomplishment, a poet and philosopher whose fame was known wherever the Neanderthals lived.

It can’t be the same Ahriman that I have known, I told myself. The mental image I was getting from the crowd was very different from the dark, tormented, angry, vengeful Ahriman that I knew.

But when I saw him, walking on the trail, smiling at the crowd that had gathered to greet him, I saw that it was indeed the same man.

Ahriman. A younger Ahriman than the one I had known, but unmistakably the same one. Taller than any of the other Neanderthals, more powerful in physique, his eyes held the intelligence that I had seen in them in other ages. But they were not yet the reddened, hate-filled eyes of the Ahriman who sought to destroy the continuum. This was the face of a man in his prime, happy with life, content with his environment and his place in it. He had not learned to hate. He had no need for vengeance — not yet.

The crowd gathered around Ahriman as he strode the final yards toward the center of the clearing. I could not make out specific words or meanings from their mental chatter, but I felt an urging from them, a pleading for him to do something — I did not know what — that would please them.

He smiled and nodded his assent. The crowd immediately sat down on the ground, excited, anticipating. I remained standing.

Ahriman’s eyes met mine. His smile did not change. His eyes betrayed no hint of anger or enmity. Nor surprise. Obviously, the others had already told him that there was a stranger in their midst. They must have told him my name as well. And, just as obviously, my name, my appearance, my presence meant nothing to him. He was not afraid of me. He was not enraged. The only emotion I caught from him was a gentle curiosity.

Slowly I sat, too, between Tunu and another teen-aged boy. I closed my eyes and concentrated as hard as I could to catch whatever it was that Ahriman was going to say, telepathically.

There was no need for me to work so hard. He was the most powerful telepathic “voice” I had encountered. I could understand him with almost no effort at all.

He sang.

Not with words or musical sounds as we Sapients use. Ahriman sang with thoughts, mental conceptions that released colors, shapes, memories, impressions in my mind. My eyes flew open and still my head filled with beauty and harmony that I had never known before. I could see the Neanderthals around me, staring blankly, enraptured by the beginning of Ahriman’s song.

I closed my eyes once again, but this time it was only to shut out the conflicting view of the world around me, so that I might share more fully the vision that Ahriman was projecting directly into my mind.

It was a song, a poem, a speculation, a history, a report — all in one. I saw the many places that Ahriman had traveled through since the last time he had been to this village. I realized that he was a wanderer, a nomad who linked the scattered settlements of the Neanderthals the way we Sapients eventually learned to link our communities with electronic circuitry.

I saw all the other Neanderthal villages, in ice cliffs far to the north, along balmy seashores, huts built of mud and straw clustered together in the open treeless steppes. I felt the oneness of all these communities, the linkage among their men and women, the common bonds of blood and affection that they all shared. And Ahriman showed us more; he began to tell us of his own thoughts, the ideas and questions that filled his mind when he gazed up at the star-filled night sky. He showed us the harmony of the stars, the rhythms of the planets as they swept among the fixed points of nighttime fire, the glory of the sun as it was created out of cold dust and gained its strength by bringing all the myriad motes together into one fiery, loving embrace.

Ahriman took us among the stars and helped us to wander in realms of breathless beauty. Then, slowly, with enormous reverence and gentleness, he brought us back to Earth, to this clearing in the forest, to this moment in time.

I saw, as I opened my eyes, that Neanderthals cannot weep. But the tears were streaming down my cheeks as Ahriman ended his song.

CHAPTER 46

The Neanderthals did not applaud. Such noisemaking was not their way. But I, with my dim telepathic ability, could sense the enormous wave of approbation and thanks that swept through the gathered villagers. A few low whistles and grunting mutters accompanied the telepathic appreciation. Ahriman nodded a few times, accepting their approval. Then the crowd broke up and everyone went back to their business.

I got to my feet, after wiping away the tears that had blurred my vision.

“You are Orion,” Ahriman said, silently.

We were alone in the clearing now. All the others had dispersed. He looked at me without any emotion except curiosity. He had never seen me before this day. I was the one with the memories, not him. I recalled how I felt when I had first met him, in that chamber he had created deep underground in the twentieth century. How confused I had been then; he had known everything, and I, nothing. Now I knew of all our encounters, The War and its aftermath, and he was as innocent as a newborn. Yet I still felt confused, uncertain.

“I enjoyed your song,” I said, aloud, knowing that he could understand the meaning of my sounds.

“Thank you.”

I wondered what I should say next. I wondered how deeply into my mind he could probe. The other Neanderthals had apparently been unable to read my thoughts, my memories. It had been difficult enough for me merely to communicate ordinary conversation to them. But Ahriman’s powers of telepathy were many times greater.

“Where are you from?” he asked, and I felt genuine concern. Either he could not search my mind or he was too polite to try.

“Far from here,” I answered. Then I added, “Farther in time than in distance. I come from the future, from thousands of years in the future.”

His heavy brow knitted with puzzlement. “The future?”

“You can see that I am not one of your kind.”

“That is true.”

“I came into being more than a hundred thousand years from now, and have been sent to this time.”

I caught a vague, fleeting thought to the effect that I must be insane, but it passed quickly.

“It is quite true,” I said. “I don’t know how it is done, but I have been sent to this time and place.”

“Sent by whom? For what purpose?”

Ignoring that, I went on, “Somehow you will learn how to transport yourself through time and space. We will meet many times, in different eras…”

“I will travel into the future?” He seemed genuinely fascinated by the possibility.

“Yes.”

“With you?”

With a shake of my head, “We will not travel together, not as companions. But we will meet in the future, time and again.”

His heavy-featured face broke into a wide smile. “Travel into the future! Can time be bent and turned the way a man can knot a length of vine?”

“Ahriman!” I had to tell him. “In that future — in those times to come — we will be enemies.”

His smile vanished. “What? How can…”

“Whenever we meet in the future, I will try to kill you. And you will try to kill me.”

“That’s impossible.” And I could feel that he really meant it. The thought of violence was so repugnant to him that I shared the shuddering revulsion he unconsciously broadcast.

“I wish it were impossible,” I said, “but it has already happened. Many times. We have met; we have fought. More than once, you have killed me.”

He stared into my eyes. In my mind I felt the gentlest questioning touch. I nodded and relaxed and allowed him to see what I had experienced: The War, the flood in the Neolithic, the barbaric splendor of Karakorum, the technological glory of the fusion reactor.

“No,” Ahriman whispered, in that labored, tortured, rasping voice that I had come to know so well. “No…”

He trembled. This mighty hulk of a Neanderthal shook from head to toes, so repulsed and sickened was he by the scenes he saw in my mind. I heard his thoughts just as easily as if he were blaring at me through an electric bullhorn:

“It can’t be… that can’t be me… not me… he’s mad, his mind sick and perverted… no one could possibly… the killing, the sick, sadistic horror… not me. Not me!”

Ahriman turned his back to me and walked rapidly, almost ran, away from the clearing where I stood.

I closed my eyes and tried to clamp down on my thoughts. When I looked again, Ahriman was nowhere in sight, but several of the Neanderthals — men and older boys — stood around the edge of the clearing, staring at me with troubled eyes. Had they caught my thoughts, or Ahriman’s reaction to them? What would they do to me if they knew that I was created to kill the best man among them?

Slowly, reluctantly, I returned to Tohon’s house. Tunu was at the base of the tree, conversing with a few of his friends. He gave me the same cheerful smile as always, and with a few gestures told me that his father was down by the stream, where the fruit trees grew, gathering food for the feast that would honor Ahriman tonight.

I nodded my understanding, then climbed up the vine ladder to the house. Huyana was humming softly to herself as she cooked a spicy-smelling brew over the small fire in the kitchen. The pot was a tough, hollow gourd, larger than any I had ever known to grow naturally. The fire pit was a hollow in the kitchen floor, lined with flat stones and ventilated through a narrow shaft overhead.

Exhausted mentally and disgusted with myself, I barely nodded hello to Huyana. On rubbery legs I made my way through the short curving corridor to my own room and threw myself onto the spongy moss of my bed.

I awoke to Tunu’s gentle shaking. He gave me a quick skirling whistle and pointed to my window. It was almost dark.

“The feast,” Tunu said wordlessly.

I wondered if Ahriman would show up for the celebration in his honor, or had the terrifying visions I had shown him driven him away?

He was there, sitting cross-legged among the elders of the village as I arrived. The big ceremonial bonfire in the middle of the clearing bathed everything in a hot red flickering light. The massive trunks of the giant trees ringed us like the pillars of temples yet to be built, throwing their shadows back into the forest so that the clearing was a circle of light set in the midst of utter darkness.

Unconsciously I had expected drumbeats, music, dancing figures leaping against the lurid light of the huge fire. Instead the Neanderthals were quiet, almost silent, except for a background murmur of mumbles and grunts and occasional low whistles.

In their minds, though, they were laughing and chattering back and forth, exchanging stories, singing happily. I could catch the edges of their communications, like a man with a weak radio receiver catching fragments of broadcasts from a hundred different stations as he turns the dial.

But when I tuned in to Ahriman, I got nothing but a vast and dark silence. I studied his face as he sat there in the firelight. He was as impassive as a statue made of granite. The elders on either side of him did not seem troubled, though. They respected his need for silence and privacy, I understood; they expected him to favor us with another song later in the night.

The bonfire was strictly ceremonial. All the food had been prepared by the women in their individual kitchens. There was no roast venison, no suckling pigs on spits, no tales of bravery and cunning in the hunt. Instead, the Neanderthals ate mostly vegetables and eggs, nuts and berries, and drank fruit juices or clear water brought cold from the stream by the best runners among the youngsters. The little meat they had, which came from the animals they culled from their herds, was offered as a delicacy, a special treat in honor of their guest.

Ahriman gazed at me from his place among the elders. I sat with Tohon and his family, a dozen yards away in the arc of Neanderthals who half-circled the bonfire. I felt the heat from the flames on my face, and I began to sweat — but it was not entirely because of the hot fire.

Through the meal I caught fragments of conversations, back and forth, but nothing from Ahriman. Yet, every time I looked his way, his eyes were on me. The expression on his face was more than somber: it had the pall of death upon it. He had made up his mind about me. He knew that I was not insane, that I had told him the truth. The question now was, what would he do about it?

Finally, when everyone had had enough to eat, the murmuring rose and they all turned toward Ahriman. In my mind I heard them asking, pleading, for another song. For many minutes he merely sat there, his head bowed, as if trying to avoid their demand. But they merely begged harder, even though it was all done in almost total silence. The mental chorus grew stronger, moment by moment; the villagers were not going to allow Ahriman to leave without performing again.

He raised his head at last, and their silent importuning stopped as abruptly as if it had been chopped off with a guillotine. Ahriman looked at me bleakly, then slowly, painfully got to his feet.

The villagers drew in a collective breath of anticipation. For many of them, it was the last breath they ever took.

A pencil-thin red beam from a laser rifle lanced out of the darkness among the trees past Ahriman’s head. He threw his arms across his face and jumped sideways. More laser bolts flashed out from the trees, and I heard the yelling roar of attacking soldiers — Sapients — and saw their white-armored forms rushing toward the clearing.

They were firing pointblank into the Neanderthals, their beams ripping men, women, and children apart the way a honed razor would slice through a rag doll.

I learned that Neanderthals can scream. Pain and terror brings out the same wild animal screeches from them that it does from us.

There were only a dozen or so Sapient soldiers, but they were armed with laser rifles. The Neanderthals scrambled to their feet and ran in all directions, as those searing red beams slashed them apart. Tohon reached for his daughter as a soldier turned his visored, helmeted head toward us. He hesitated an instant, no doubt stunned to find a fellow Sapient among the brutes he had come to slaughter. I was empty-handed and, worse, my mind was a blank, too. I did not know what to do, where to turn.

Tohon began running with Yoki in his arms. The soldier snapped out of his hesitation. He gunned them both down. Their bodies sprawled to the ground, spurting blood.

“No!” I screamed. “Stop!” I waved my arms and ran toward the soldier, yelling and ranting like a maniac. He tried to step aside and get a clear shot at Huyana, who stood paralyzed beside the dead bodies of her husband and daughter. I grabbed for his rifle, and as he tried to pull it back from me, Tunu leaped at the soldier and knocked him off his feet.

I took the rifle as Tunu, his eyes wide and blazing with new-found hate, seized a rock in his two hands and smashed it down on the soldier’s helmet. The plastic armor dented, then cracked, as Tunu pounded at it again and again. Blood oozed from the smashed visor and the trooper went rigid and inert.

I wheeled about and saw the carnage that the soldiers had created. Neanderthals lay sprawled grotesquely everywhere; the survivors were running toward the relative safety of the trees and darkness. The fire burned hot, casting glinting highlights off the white armor of the soldiers. I held a laser rifle in my hands, my finger curled around its trigger.

Yet I could not fire it. I could not shoot at those troopers. Behind those featureless visors might be Marek, or Lissa, or even Adena. I could not fire at them, even to save the defenseless Neanderthals.

Or were they defenseless? One of the troopers was on the ground, a pair of savage dogs viciously snapping at him. Ahriman had grabbed another from behind, pinning his arms to his sides with a mighty bear hug, while another Neanderthal ripped off the soldier’s helmet and choked the life out of him. Then Ahriman took up the soldier’s rifle and began firing at the other troopers.

The Sapients scattered into the shadows of the trees and disappeared as quickly as they had come. For several eternally long minutes we simply stood there, panting with fear and anger. I counted thirty-eight dead, their blood soaking the ground. Tossing the rifle away, I leaned down and took the smashed helmet off the trooper who lay dead at my feet. Her hair billowed out, blonde, matted with her own blood.

Tunu knelt at her side, his mind a keening, shuddering wail of grief and agony. I could not find Huyana at first; then I recognized her body, sliced neatly in two by a laser beam, at the edge of the clearing.

Ahriman strode through the field of dead, a rifle in one mighty hand, until he stood face-to-face with me. His eyes were red with pain.

“Your people, Orion,” he said, in his tortured whisper. “Why?”

I had no answer. There was nothing that I could say or do. I turned away from him, away from the carnage, and began walking into the darkness of the forest.

CHAPTER 47

The black night engulfed me completely. With each step I grew colder, shuddering with the horror within me. The forest was absolutely silent — not an owl’s hoot, not a cricket’s chirp. Nothing but silence, darkness, and cold.

I have no idea of how long I walked, alone, heading nowhere. I could not return to the village, to the accusing faces of the Neanderthals. I could not bear to see Ahriman, to watch him learn how to hate, how to kill, how to make vengeance the only thing he lived for.

I thought it was dawn, when I first saw the light glimmering up ahead of me. But as I walked toward it, miserable with remorse, I saw that the trees were fading away, literally disappearing, and the light was a golden, sourceless radiance that illuminated a flat, featureless expanse that stretched in all directions toward infinity.

In the distance I saw a lone figure standing, waiting for me, clad in gleaming silver. It was Anya, I knew. I walked steadily toward her, unable to quicken my step, unwilling to hasten the final moment.

As I approached, I saw another figure, darkly brooding: Ahriman, still encased in his prison of energy, his eyes blazing fury at me. He looked much older than the Ahriman I had just met. Hatred and pain had aged him more than time ever could.

I searched Anya’s face as I came up to her. I saw the sadness of eternity in her luminous eyes.

“Now you know,” Anya said to me.

Nodding, I replied, “I know everything except the most important answer of all — why?”

“For that you must ask Ormazd.”

“Where is he?”

She made a little shrug and smiled joylessly. “He is here; he can see us and hear us.”

“But he’s too ashamed to show himself, is that it?”

Anya looked almost startled. “Ashamed? Him?”

I lifted my head to the blank golden dome that shone above us. “Present yourself, Ormazd! It’s time for the final reckoning. Show your face, murderer!”

The emptiness seemed to gather in on itself, to contract into a golden bubble, a sphere of gleaming radiance that floated down toward us.

“I am here,” said a voice from that globe.

“In human form,” I demanded. “I want to see a face; I want to be able to watch your expression.”

“You presume much, Orion,” said the golden sphere.

“I’ve served you well enough. I deserve a little consideration.”

The sphere shimmered and faded into nothingness, leaving the tall, golden form of Ormazd standing before us. His smile was part amusement, part tolerance of a lower creature’s insolence.

“Does that please you, Orion?” he asked.

I glanced at Anya. There was nothing in her face but fear.

“Why?” I asked Ormazd. “Why slaughter the Neanderthals? They were harmless…”

“Precisely so. Harmless. Inoffensive. Beautifully adapted to their environment.” He spread his hands in an ancient gesture of resignation.

“Then why destroy them? Why start The War?”

“Because they were an evolutionary dead end, Orion. They would never progress beyond the stage in which you found them.”

“How can you know that?”

He laughed at me. “Orion, pitiful creature. I know! I have examined all the possible paths of the continuum. The Neanderthals would live their idyllic existence for their allotted time, and then be snuffed out like the dinosaurs were.”

Ahriman’s face was contorted with agony. He could hear what we were saying, even though he could not move a muscle to reach us.

“Believe me, Orion,” Ormazd went on, “I examined every possibility. I even transplanted some of the Neanderthals to a different planet, to see if they would evolve at a more efficient rate. The differences were negligible.”

“But that doesn’t justify… killing them!”

“Doesn’t it?” he snapped. “They would all die anyway, Orion. Sooner or later, the blind forces of nature would have wiped them out. I merely substituted a directed force. I hastened their demise. I helped them out of their misery. More efficiently than nature would have done.”

“They weren’t in misery.”

Ormazd gave me a coy grin. “Orion, allow me a metaphor, please!”

“Who gave you the right to perform genocide?” I demanded. “Who made you the giver of life and death?”

He raised a hand, and the golden radiance around us darkened and sparked with jagged bolts of lightning.

“I have the power,” he said, his voice thundering. “That gives me the right.”

Anya put up both her hands and the lightnings vanished. The featureless golden expanse reformed itself.

Ormazd made a little bow to her. “Of course, others have some power, also. Not as much as mine, but enough to do a few simple tricks.”

Anya looked from him to me. “Ask him why he decided to eliminate the Neanderthals, Orion. Don’t let him mislead you. Ask him why he did it.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “I want to know why.”

“Because I chose to.”

“That’s no answer,” I insisted.

“Your scientists argued about evolution for more than a century,” Ormazd said. “Well, I am evolution, Orion. I direct the comings and goings on your little world.”

I glanced at Anya; she gave me a small nod of encouragement.

Ormazd was not finished. “Take a promising little planet called Earth. It is populated by a race of bright, two-legged creatures. They can communicate with each other directly, mind to mind. They can control the lower animals around them and the plants. They have adapted themselves perfectly to their environment. Dull, Orion. Very dull and pointless. They will never progress.”

“Why do they have to…”

He ignored me and continued. “So I wipe the slate clean. It may seem cruel, but it is necessary. I create a race of warriors, soldiers, to do the bloody work of eliminating the natives. You are of that race, Orion. You — all of you Sapients — were designed for killing. You all take delight in it; when you can’t find a reason to kill each other, you go out and slaughter the helpless beasts around you. Mighty hunters, Orion, all of you.”

I remembered how easily, how callously I had killed others of my own kind. And the hunts, where we had covered ourselves with the blood of helpless animals. I trembled with shame, and with anger at the god who made us this way.

“So I set you to the work of eliminating the Neanderthals. I had others of your kind build vast machines on a world you call Titan, a moon of Saturn, machines that can alter the output of the Sun enough to cause Ice Ages on Earth. The glaciers finish the job of scouring the planet clean of its natives — and of the murderous creatures whom I created.”

“But that’s not the way it happened.”

“No, Orion, it isn’t.” He seemed amused by it all. “You helped them to survive. You showed that final little squad of bloodthirsty warriors how to live on Earth. Instead of a self-destructing army of killers, I got a self-perpetuating race of Homo sapiens sapiens. Thanks to you, Orion.”

“We were supposed to die in the Ice Age.” The knowledge hollowed out my insides, made me feel as if I were falling from heaven to hell.

“Yes. Of course. I was going to create a truly superior race! You can’t even imagine the creatures that I would have fathered. Not in your most ecstatic dreams! The angels that your kind fantasize about are nothing compared to what I would have created!”

Anya interrupted his ranting with a voice as cool and hard as silver. “But the Sapients lived, and took over the Earth. And you made such excellent warriors of them that you could not dislodge them.”

“Yes,” Ormazd admitted, glaring at me. “And at the same time I became aware that this one—” he tilted his golden-maned head toward Ahriman’s dark, imprisoned form — “had survived the slaughter and somehow gained powers almost equal to my own.”

“So you created me,” I realized.

“I created you to hunt down Ahriman before he found the way to destroy all that I had built. Yes, I created you — too well.”

My head was spinning. “But if you knew all this, if you could examine all the pathways of the continuum and foresaw what would happen…”

“Linear thinking, Orion,” said Anya. “Events happen in parallel, not in sequence. What you experience as time, as a progression from past through present into future, is really all happening simultaneously. Cause and effect are interchangeable, Orion. Tomorrow and yesterday co-exist.”

“I still don’t understand…”

“It’s not necessary for you to understand,” Ormazd said. “In your own stumbling way, you have done what I wanted done. Ahriman is trapped here, forever. The continuum is safe.”

“You are safe,” Anya said to him.

“And you,” he countered.

She turned to me again. “You still have not found out why he has done all this, Orion. He constantly outwits you about the ultimate question.”

I felt utterly helpless.

“Shall I tell him?” she asked Ormazd.

He folded his arms across his chest. “You will, no matter what I say.”

Anya’s smile was bitter, rueful. “Orion, he created you — he created what you call the human race and used it to destroy the Neanderthals, because without the humans, we gods would never have come into being.”

I heard her words, but the meaning was just as opaque to me as if she had said nothing.

“Ormazd saw that the Neanderthals would eventually die away, leaving nothing. So he created the Sapients to eliminate them, to scour the Earth clean and prepare the way for a new race…”

“Better than angels,” I mumbled.

“But what actually has happened,” she went on, “is that you humans learned how to manipulate your own evolution, learned how to engineer the genes of your cells. You took control of your own destiny and eventually, after many millennia, you metamorphosed into — us.”

“We became gods?”

“You evolved into creatures such as we are,” Anya said. “Creatures of pure energy, who can control and manipulate that energy to take whatever form we wish. Creatures who understand the innermost workings of the continuum, who can move through time and space as easily as you walk through a forest.”

I turned back to Ormazd. “We became you.”

He frowned at the two of us.

“We created you!” I shouted.

“Now you understand why Ormazd determined to destroy the Neanderthals. If they lived, if you humans had never been created, we ourselves would never have come into existence.”

“But you do exist!”

“Yes, and we are bound by the same inexorable rules that bind all the continuum. Ormazd had to do what he did; otherwise, this continuum, this universe, would collapse and perish.”

They could both see the utter confusion that had my mind reeling. Past and future, life and death — it was all a vast dizzying whirl, the entire universe spinning wildly, galaxies forming like eddies in a swift stream, spawning stars and planets and creatures who struggle and die…

“It is the truth, Orion.” Anya’s calm voice cut through my agitation.

“You can see the necessity of it,” said Ormazd.

“The Neanderthals had to die so that we could live, and evolve into you.”

Ormazd nodded grimly. “That is not the way I had planned it, at first. But it worked out well enough.”

I could not look at Ahriman, not now. Instead, I asked Ormazd, “And what is to become of me?”

His expression lightened. He almost smiled at me, like a benign, generous creator. “I will grant you the gift of life, Orion. A full, rich, human lifespan in any era you choose.”

“And then death.”

His brows arched. “If you choose the right era, a human lifespan can be very long indeed. Centuries.”

“And you?” I asked Anya.

Before she could reply, Ormazd said, “We have evolved out of humankind, Orion. We are not human, any more than you are a hominid ape.”

“So I would live on Earth without you,” I said to her.

“I can give you more than one lifetime,” Ormazd said. “You can live for thousands of years, if you desire to.”

My heart felt like a stone sinking to the bottom of the deepest ocean trench. “One lifetime or many — without you, Anya, what good is it?”

She took a step toward me, held out her hand.

But I turned toward Ahriman, glowering helplessly in his eternal prison. “For this I helped to annihilate his entire race. For this I’ve led him into this living hell.”

“You saved your own race,” Ormazd said.

“I saved you, and your kind.” Turning to Anya again, I said, “Free him! Use the power you have to set him free.”

She gaped at me.

“What are you saying?” Ormazd cried.

“Let Ahriman go free,” I said. “Kill me if I’ve outlived my usefulness, but give him back his life, his people.”

“Never!” Ormazd snapped.

But I was pleading to Anya. “Even if it means the end of everything, do it! Free him! Let him and his people have their time on Earth. Let him live.”

“That would mean the destruction of us all!” Ormazd roared. “I won’t allow it!”

“If we can’t live together,” I said to Anya, “then let us die together.”

Her gray eyes struck sparks off my soul. She looked from me to Ormazd, and then turned to Ahriman.

“No! Don’t!” Ormazd screamed. “Telepathy… he knows all that we know, now. He has seen what’s in our minds; he has taken in our knowledge of the continuum!”

“Yes,” Anya said. “He has.”

“He’ll use that knowledge to rip the continuum apart!” Ormazd’s voice was a frenzied shriek. His image was wavering, shimmering.

“Orion is right,” Anya replied, as calmly as if she were discussing abstract philosophy. “Ahriman’s people deserve their moment of life. We have existed long enough.”

“I won’t let you!” Ormazd bellowed. He became a shining globe of golden radiance again, but Anya remained in her human form and stretched her hands out toward Ahriman.

Lightning lashed blindingly. I heard Ormazd’s voice roaring as I squeezed my eyes shut and felt my flesh bubbling from the tremendous energy flow being released. The radiance burned through my closed lids, boiled my eyes away, seared so deeply into my brain that I sensed nothing but flaming hot light as the very atoms of my body exploded into showers of ephemeral bursts of energy.

Without eyes, without body, I could see the continuum collapsing in on itself, all the material and energy of the whole universe rushing together in one titanic, dark whirlpool of space-time, a convoluted multidimensional black hole into which Planets, stars, galaxies were sucked in, flayed, dismembered and digested into a primeval fireball.

And then it all exploded in a soundless, measureless spasm of new creation.

EPILOGUE

I am not superhuman.

I do have abilities that are far beyond those of any normal man’s, but I am just as human and mortal as anyone of Earth.

Yet I am a solitary man. My life has been spent alone, my mind clouded with strange dreams and, when I am awake, half memories of other lives, other existences, that are so fantastic that they can only be the compensations of a lonely, withdrawn subconscious mind.

As I did almost every day, I took my lunch hour late in the afternoon and made my way from my office to the same small restaurant in which I ate almost every day. Alone. I sat at my usual table, toying with my food and thinking about how much of my life is spent in solitude.

I happened to look up toward the front entrance of the restaurant when she came in — stunningly beautiful, tall and graceful, hair the color of midnight and lustrous gray eyes that held all of eternity in them.

“Anya,” I breathed to myself, even though I had no idea who she was. Yet something within me leaped with joy, as if I had known her from ages ago.

She seemed to know me as well. Smiling, she made her way directly to my table. I got up from my chair, feeling elated and confused at the same time.

“Orion.” She extended her hand.

I took it in mine, and bent over to kiss it. Then I held a chair out for her to sit. The waiter came over and she asked for a glass of red wine. He trundled off to the bar.

“I feel as if I’ve known you all my life,” I said to her.

“For many lifetimes,” she said, her voice softly feminine. “Don’t you remember?”

I closed my eyes in concentration and a swirl of memories rushed in on me so rapidly that it took my breath away. I saw a great shining globe of golden light, and the dark brooding figure of a fiercely malevolent man, a forest of giant trees and a barren, windswept desert and a world of unending ice and snow. And her, this woman, clad in silver armor that gleamed against the darkness of infinity.

“I… remember… death,” I heard myself stammer. “The whole world, the entire universe… all of space-time collapsed in on itself.”

She nodded gravely. “And rebounded in a new cycle of expansion. That was something that neither Ormazd nor Ahriman foresaw. The continuum does not end; it begins anew.”

“Ormazd,” I muttered. “Ahriman.” The names touched a chord in my mind. I felt anger welling up inside me, anger tinged with fear and resentment. But I could not recall who they were and why they stirred such strong emotions within me.

“They are still out there,” Anya said, “still grappling with each other. But they know, thanks to you, Orion, that the continuum cannot be destroyed so easily. It perseveres.”

“Those other lives I remember — you were in them.”

“Yes, as I will be in this one.”

“I loved you, then.”

Her smile lit the world. “Do you love me now?”

“Yes.” And I knew it was so. I meant it with every atom of my being.

“And I love you, too, Orion. I always have and I always will.”

“But I’m leaving soon.”

“I know.”

Past her shoulder, I could see through the restaurant’s window all the gaudy crescent of Saturn hanging low on the horizon, the thin line of its rings slicing through its bulging middle. Higher up, the sky of Titan was its usual dull orange overcast. The starship was parked in orbit up there, waiting for us to finish our final preparations and board it.

“We’ll be gone for twenty years,” I said.

“To the Sirius system, I know.”

“It’s a long voyage.”

“Not as long as some we’ve already made, Orion,” she said, “or others that we will make someday.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll explain it during the voyage.” She smiled again. “We’ll have plenty of time to remember everything then.”

My heart leaped in my chest. “You’re going too?”

“Of course,” she laughed. “We have endured the collapse and rebirth of the universe, Orion. We have shared many lives and many deaths. I’m not going to be separated from you now.”

“But I haven’t seen you at any of the crew briefings. You’re not on the list of…”

“I am now. We will journey out to the stars together, my beloved. We have a long and full lifetime ahead of us. And perhaps even more than that.”

I leaned across the table and kissed her lips. My loneliness was ended, at last. I could face anything in the world now. I was ready to challenge the universe.