Orion in the Dying Time

by Ben Bova

  It carried me up above its head and I saw those narrow yellow reptilian eyes staring coldly at me, first one and then the other. Its teeth were not made for rending flesh but those jaws could crush my body quite easily, I knew. That was just what the beast was going to do. Its yellow collar frills relaxed slightly; the monster no longer felt threatened.

  I strained to break free of the demon's claws, but I was just as helpless as the baby had been moments before.

  "Orion! Here!"

  Anya's voice made me glance down while I struggled in the lizard's powerful grip. She had come up behind me and was pulling my knife out of the lizard's knee. Before the beast understood what was happening, she threw the dagger as expertly as any assassin. It pierced the soft folds beneath the lizard's jaw with a satisfying thunk.

  With its free hand the dragon started to reach for the steel in its throat. But I was closer and faster. I grabbed the projecting hilt of the dagger and began working the blade across the lizard's jawline, back toward the frills that had snapped fully erect once again. It shrieked and released me, but I clutched at its neck and swung up behind its head, pulling the dagger free and jamming it in beneath the base of the skull.

  It collapsed as suddenly as a light being switched off. I had severed its spinal cord. The two of us came crashing down to the grassy ground. I felt myself bounce and then everything went blank. I opened my eyes and focused blearily on Anya's beautiful face. She was kneeling over me, deep concern etched across her classic features. Then she smiled.

  "Are you all right?" she asked.

  I ached in every part of my body. My chest and thighs were slashed from the lizard's claws. But I consciously clamped down on the capillaries to stop the bleeding and closed off the pain centers in my brain. I made myself grin up at her.

  "I'm alive."

  She helped me to my feet. I saw that only a few moments had passed. The big lizard was now nothing more than a huge mound of brightly colored scales stretched out across the grass.

  The crew of slaves, however, was something else. The slaves were terrified. And instead of being grateful, they were angry.

  "You have slain one of the guardians!" said a scrawny bearded man, his eyes wide with terror.

  "The masters will blame us!" one of the women wailed.

  "We will be punished!"

  I felt something close to contempt for them. They had the mentality of true slaves. Instead of thanking me for helping them, they were fearful of their master's wrath. Without a word I went to the dead beast and pulled my dagger from the back of its neck.

  Anya said to them, "We could not stand idly and watch the monster kill the baby."

  The baby, I saw, was alive. The mother was sitting silently on the grass, holding the child to her emaciated breast, her huge brown eyes staring at me blankly. If she was grateful for what I had done, she was hiding it well. Two long red weals scarred her ribs and back. The baby also had a livid welt across its naked flesh.

  But the scrawny man was tugging at his tangled gray beard and moaning, "The masters will descend upon us and kill us all with great pain. They will put us in the fire that never dies. All of us!"

  "It would have been better to let the baby die," said another man, equally gaunt, his hair and beard also filthy and matted. "Better that one dies than all of us are tortured to death. We can always make more babies."

  "If your masters do not find you, they cannot punish you," I said. "If the two of us can kill one of these overgrown lizards, then all of us can work together to protect ourselves against them."

  "Impossible!"

  "Where could we hide that they will not find us?"

  "They have eyes that see in the night."

  "They can fly through the air and even cross the great river."

  "Their claws are sharp. And they have the eternal fire. "As they spoke they clustered around Anya and me, as if seeking protection. And they constantly looked up into the sky and scanned the horizon, as if seeking the first sign of avenging dragons. Or worse.

  Anya asked them in a gentle voice, "What will happen to you if the two of us go away and leave you alone?"

  "The masters will see what has happened here and punish us," said the beard tugger. He seemed to be their leader, perhaps merely by the fact that he was their eldest.

  "How will they punish you?" I asked.

  He shrugged his bony shoulders. "That is for them to decide."

  "They will flay the skin from our bodies," said one of the teenagers, "and then cast us into the eternal fire."

  The others shuddered. Their eyes were wide and pleading.

  "Suppose we stayed here with you until your masters find us," I asked. "Will they punish you if we tell them that we killed the beast and you had nothing to do with it?"

  They gaped at us as if we were stupid children. "Of course they will punish us! They will punish every one of us. That is the law."

  I turned to Anya. "Then we've got to get away."

  "And bring them with us," she agreed.

  I scanned the area where we stood. The Nile had cut a broad, deep valley through the limestone cliffs that rose like jagged walls on either side of the river. Atop the cliffs, according to Anya, was a wide grassy plain. If this region would truly become the Sahara one day, then it must stretch for hundreds of miles southward, thousands of miles to the west. A flat open savannah, with only an occasional hill or river-carved valley to break the plain's flat monotony. Not good country to hide in, especially from creatures that can fly through the air and see in the dark. But better than being penned between the river and the cliffs.

  I had no doubt that the slaves were telling the truth about their reptilian masters. The beast Anya and I had just slain was a dinosaur, that seemed certain. Why not winged pterosaurs, then, or other reptiles that can sense heat the way a pit viper does?

  "Are there trees nearby?" Anya was asking them. "Not like the garden, but wild trees, a natural forest."

  "Oh," said the scrawny elder. "You mean Paradise."

  Far to the south, he told us, there were forest and streams and game animals in endless abundance. But the area was forbidden to them. The masters would not let them return there.

  "You lived there once?" I asked.

  "Long, long ago," he said wistfully. "When I was even younger than Chron here." He pointed at the smaller of the two teenage boys.

  "How far away is it?"

  "Many suns."

  Pointing southward, I said, "Then we head for Paradise."

  They made no objection, but it was clear to see that they were terrified. The spirit had been beaten out of them almost totally. Yet even if they did not want to follow my lead, they had no real alternative. Their masters had frightened them so completely that it made no difference to them which way they went; they were certain that they would be caught and punished most horribly.

  My first aim was to get away from the carcass of the lizard. It would take a while for whoever was in charge of the garden—Set, I supposed—to realize that one of his trained animals had been killed and a crew of slaves was loose on the landscape. We had perhaps a few hours, and by then it would be nightfall. If we could move quickly enough, we might have a chance to survive.

  We climbed the cliff face. It was not as difficult as I had feared; the stone was broken and tiered into what seemed almost like stairways. They puffed and gasped and struggled their way up to the top with me leading them and Anya bringing up the rear.

  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 compl
ain, 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 wor
k?"

  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.