Orion in the Dying Time o-3

by Ben Bova

  “I tried to return to the other Creators,” she said, her voice low, almost sad. “But the way was blocked. I tried to move us both to a different time and place, anywhere in the continuum except where we were. But Set’s device was preset for this spacetime and it had too much energy driving it for me to break through and direct us elsewhere.”

  “You’re conscious and aware of what you’re doing when you—change form?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could you do it now?”

  “No,” she admitted somberly. Gesturing toward our little campfire and the scraps of dinosaur bones on the ground, she said, “There isn’t enough energy available. We barely have energy input to keep our human forms going.”

  Her voice smiled when she said that, but there was an underlying sadness to it. Perhaps even fear.

  “Then you’re trapped in this human form,” I said.

  “I chose this human form, Orion. So that I could be with you.”

  She meant it as a sign of love. But it made me feel awful to know that because of me she was just as trapped and vulnerable as I was.

  Within a week we were up in the hilly country where the air was at least drier, if not much cooler, than it had been in the swamps below.

  Night after night I found myself searching the skies, seeking my namesake constellation and trying to avoid the feeling that the baleful red star was watching me like the eye of some angry god—or devil.

  Anya always woke near midnight to take the watch and’ let me sleep. One night she asked, “What do you expect to see in the stars, my love?”

  I felt almost embarrassed. “I was looking for myself.”

  She pointed. “There.”

  It was not Orion. Not the familiar constellation of the Hunter that I had known. Rigel did not yet exist. Brilliant red Betelgeuse was nowhere to be seen. Instead of the three stars of the belt and the sword hanging from it, I saw only a faint, misty glow.

  My blood ran cold. Not even Orion existed in this lonely place and time. We had no business being here, so far from everything that we had known. We were aliens here, outcasts, abandoned by the gods, hunted by forces that we could not even begin to fight against, doomed to be extinguished forever.

  An intense brooding misery filled my soul. I felt completely helpless, useless. I knew that it was merely a matter of time until Set tracked us down and made an end of us.

  No matter how hard I tried, I could not shake this depression. I had never felt such anguish before, such despair. I tried to hide it from Anya, but I saw from the anxious glances she gave me that she knew full well how empty and lifeless I felt.

  And then we came across the duckbills’ nesting ground.

  It was the broad, fairly flat top of a gently sloped hill. There were so many duckbill tracks marching up the hillside that their heavy hooves had worn an actual trail into the bare dusty ground.

  “The creatures must come up here every year,” Anya said as we climbed the trail toward the top of the hill.

  I did not reply. I could not work up the enthusiastic curiosity that was apparently driving Anya. I was still locked in gloom.

  We should have been warned by the noisy whistling and hissing of dozens of pterosaurs flapping their leathery wings up above the summit of the hill, swooping in for landings. As Anya and I climbed up the easy slope of the hill we heard their long bony bills clacking as if they were fighting among themselves.

  A faint half memory tugged at me. The way the pterosaurs were behaving reminded me of something, but I could not recall what it was. It became clear to me the instant we reached the crest of the hill.

  It was a boneyard.

  Up on the bare ground of the hilltop there were hundreds of nests where the duckbills had been laying their eggs for uncounted generations.

  But the tyrannosaurs had been there.

  A gust of breeze brought the stench of rotting flesh to our nostrils. The pterosaurs flapped and hissed at us, tiny claws on the front edges of their wings quite conspicuous. I realized that they were behaving like vultures, picking the bones of the dead. I swatted at the nearest of the winged lizards with the spear I carried and they all flapped off, hissing angrily, hovering above us on their wide leathery wings as if waiting for us to leave so they could resume their feast.

  I thought Anya would break into tears. Nothing but bones and scraps of rotting flesh, the rib cages of the massive animals standing like the bleached timbers of wrecked ships, taller than my head. Leg bones my own body length. Massive flat skulls, thick with bone.

  “Look!” Anya cried. “Eggs!”

  The nests were shallow pits pawed into the ground where oblong eggs the length of my arm lay in circular patterns. Most of them had been smashed in.

  “Well,” I said, pointing to a pair of unbroken eggs that lay side by side on the bare ground, “here’s dinner, at least.”

  “You couldn’t!” Anya seemed shocked.

  I cast an eye at the pterosaurs still flapping and gliding above us.

  “It’s either our dinner or theirs.”

  She still looked distressed.

  “These eggs will never hatch now,” I told her. “And even if they did, the baby duckbills would be easy prey to anything that comes along without their mothers to protect them.”

  Reluctantly Anya agreed. I went down the hill to gather brushwood for a fire while she stayed at the nests to protect our dinner against the pterosaurs.

  It struck me, as I picked dead branches from the ground and pulled twigs from bushes, that the tyrannosaurs had been unusually efficient in their assault on the duckbills. As far as I could see they had killed every one of the herbivores. That did not seem natural to me. Predators usually kill what they can eat and allow the rest of their prey to go their way. Were the tyrannosaurs nothing but killing machines after all? Or were they being directed by someone—such as Set or his like?

  Had they followed the migrating herd we had seen so that they could find the duckbills’ nesting ground and kill all the dinosaurs nesting there? Obviously the hilltop was being used by more than the forty-some duckbills we had seen in the swamp. There were more than a hundred nests up there. But they had all been slaughtered by the tyrannosaurs.

  When I returned to the hilltop with an armload of firewood, Anya showed me the answer to my question.

  “Look here,” she said, pointing to the edge of one of the nests.

  I dropped the tinder near the nest where our prospective dinner waited and went to where she stood.

  Footprints. Three-clawed toes, but much too small to be a tyrannosaur’s. Human-sized. Or humanoid, rather.

  “One of Set’s troops?”

  “There are more,” Anya said, gesturing toward the other nests. “I think they deliberately smashed the eggs that weren’t broken when the tyrannosaurs attacked.”

  “That means Set—or someone like him—is here, in this time and place.”

  “Attacking the duckbills? Why?”

  “More important,” I said, “whoever it is, he’s probably searching for us.”

  Anya raised her eyes and scanned the horizon, as if she could see Set or his people heading toward us. I looked, too. The land was flat and depressingly green, nothing but the same tone of green as far as the eye could see. Not a flower, not a sign of color. Even the streams meandering through the area looked a sickly, weed-choked green. Mangroves lined the waterways and giant ferns clustered thickly, waving in the warm wind. Whole armies could be hidden in that monotonous flat bayou country and we could not have seen them.

  It struck me all over again how helpless we were, how useless in the Creators’ struggle to overthrow Set and his kind. Two people alone in a world of dinosaurs. I shook my head as if to clear it of cobwebs but I could not shake this feeling of depression.

  Anya showed no signs of dismay, however. “We’ve got to find their camp or headquarters,” she said. “We’ve got to find out what they are doing in this era, what their goals are.”

  I
heaved a big hungry sigh. “First,” I countered, “we’ve got to have dinner.”

  Returning to the two unbroken eggs, I started to build a small fire, knowing now that there were eyes out there in the distance that could detect it and locate us. Yet we had to eat, and neither of us was ready to face raw eggs or uncooked meat. Using a duckbill’s pointed scapula, I scraped out a pit in the soft dirt so that the meager flames could not be seen above the crest of the hill by anyone watching from below. Yet I knew that even primitive heat detectors could probably spot our fire from its thermal signature against the cooler air of the late afternoon.

  “Orion! Quickly!”

  I turned from my blossoming fire, grabbing for the nearest bone to use as a weapon, and saw Anya staring tensely at our eggs. One of them was cracked. No, cracking. As we watched, it split apart and a miniature duckbilled dinosaur no more than two feet long crawled out of the shell on four stubby legs.

  Anya dropped to her knees in front of it.

  The baby dinosaur gave a weak piping whistle, like the toot a child might make on a tin flute.

  “Look, it has an egg tooth,” Anya said.

  “It’s probably hungry,” I thought aloud.

  Anya dashed over to my tiny fire and pulled out a couple of twigs that still had some pulpy leaves on them.

  Stripping the leaves off, she hand-fed them to the little duckbill, which munched on them without hesitation.

  “She’s eating them!” Anya seemed overjoyed.

  I was less thrilled. “How do you know it’s a female?”

  She ignored my question. Eating the other egg was out of the question now, even though it never opened that evening and was still not open the following morning. Our dinner consisted of a single rat-sized reptile that I managed to run down before darkness fell, and a clutch of melons that I picked from a bush, the first recognizable fruit I had seen.

  In the morning Anya made it clear that she had no intention of leaving our baby duckbill behind.

  “We’ll have to feed it,” I complained.

  “It eats plants,” she countered. “It’s not like a mammal that needs its mother’s milk.”

  I was anxious to get away from this hilltop massacre site and leave it to the scavenging pterosaurs. Our best defense against whoever had directed the attack on the duckbills was to keep moving. Anya agreed, but our pace that morning was terribly slow because the little duckbill could not trot along with any real speed. It seemed to show no curiosity about the world around it, as a puppy would. It merely followed Anya the way ducklings fixate on the first moving object they see, believing it to be their mother.

  Anya seemed quite content with motherhood. She picked soft pulpy leaves for her baby and even chewed some of them herself before feeding the little beast.

  I had brought something quite different from the duckbill boneyard: a forearm bone that fit my hand nicely and had the proper size and heft to be an effective club. We had to make tools and weapons if we were to survive.

  Why we had to survive, what our goal might be beyond mere physical survival, was a total blank to me. Oh, I knew we were supposed to be battling against Set and whatever plans he had for this period in time. But how the two of us, alone and practically defenseless, were supposed to overcome Set and his people—that was beyond my reckoning.

  Despite my misgivings, Anya set us out on the tracks of the tyrannosaurs.

  “The humanoids went with them,” she said, pointing at the smaller tracks set in between the giant prints of the tyrants.

  “Some distance behind them,” I guessed.

  “I suppose so. We must find those humanoids, Orion, and learn from them what Set is doing.”

  “That won’t be easy.”

  She smiled at me. “If it were easy, it would have already been done. You and I are not meant for easy tasks, Orion.”

  I could not make myself smile back at her. “If they can truly control the tyrannosaurs, we haven’t a chance in hell.”

  Anya’s smile wilted.

  We quickly saw that the tyrannosaur tracks led back toward the swamps we had quit only a few days earlier. I felt miserably disheartened to be returning to that fetid, humid, steaming gloom. I wanted to run as far away from there as possible. For the first time in my lives I was feeling real fear, a terror that was dangerously close to panic.

  Anya overlooked my brooding silence. “It makes sense that Set’s headquarters here would be very close to the place where we entered this spacetime. Maybe we can use his warping device in reverse and return to the Neolithic when we’re finished here.”

  “Return to his fortress?”

  She ignored my question. “Orion, do you realize that the tyrannosaurs left their usual habitat there in the lowlands, marched up to the duckbills’ nesting area to slaughter them, and then returned immediately back to the swamps? They must have been under Set’s control.”

  I agreed that it did not seem likely that the giant carnivores would trek all the way to the nesting site and back without some form of outside stimulus.

  We camped that evening by a large, placid lake, on a long curving beach of clean white sand so fine it almost felt like powder beneath our feet. The beach was some twenty to thirty yards wide, then gave way to a line of gnarled, twisted cypresses festooned with hanging moss and, behind them, tall coconut palms and feathery fringe-leafed ferns that rose like gigantic swaying fans.

  The sand was far from smooth, though. It was crisscrossed with the prints of innumerable dinosaurs: blunt deep hooves of massive sauropods, birdlike claws of smaller reptiles, and the powerful talons of carnosaurs. They all came to this shore to drink—and, some of them, to kill.

  As the sun dropped toward the horizon, turning sky and water both into lovely pastel pinks and blue greens, I saw a streak of brilliant red and orange drop out of the sky and plunge into the lake. In half a moment it popped to the surface with a fish flapping in its toothy jaws.

  The thing looked more like a lizard than a bird, with its long, toothed snout and longer tail. But it was feathered, and its forelimbs were definitely wings. Instead of taking off again, though, it paddled to the water’s edge and waddled up onto the shore, then turned to face the setting sun and spread its wings wide, as if in worship.

  “It can’t fly again until it dries its wings,” Anya surmised.

  “I wonder how it tastes,” I muttered back to her.

  If the lizard-bird heard our voices or felt threatened by them, it gave no indication. It simply stood there on the shore of the gently lapping wavelets, drying its feathers and digesting its fish dinner.

  Suddenly I realized that we could do the same. “How would you like to eat fish tonight?” I asked Anya.

  She was sitting by a clump of bushes, feeding the little duckbill again. It seemed to eat all day long.

  Without waiting for her to reply, I waded out into the shallow calm water, turning hot pink in the last rays of the dying sun. The lizard-bird clacked its beak at me and waddled a few paces away. It took only a few minutes for me to spear two fish. I felt happy with the change in our diet.

  Anya had spent the time gathering more shrubs for our baby duckbill to nibble. And a handful of berries. The dinosaur ate them with seeming relish.

  “If they don’t hurt him, perhaps we can eat them, too,” she said as I started the fire.

  “Maybe,” I acknowledged. “I’ll sample one and see how it affects—”

  The duckbill suddenly emitted a high-pitched whistle and scooted to Anya’s side. I scrambled to my feet and stared into the gathering darkness of the woods that lined the lakeshore. Sure enough, I heard a crashing, crunching sound.

  “Something heading our way,” I whispered urgently to Anya. “Something big.”

  There was no time to douse the fire. We were too far from the edge of the trees to get to them safely. Besides, that was where the danger seemed to be coming from.

  “Into the water,” I said, starting for the lake.

  Anya st
opped to pick up the duckbill. It was as motionless as a statue, yet still a heavy armful. I grabbed it from her and, tucking its inert body under one arm, led Anya out splashing into the lake.

  We dove into the water as soon as we could, me holding the duckbill up so it could breathe. It wiggled slightly, but apparently had no fear of the water. Or perhaps it was more terrified of whatever was heading our way from the woods. The lake water was tepid, too warm to be refreshing, almost like swimming in lukewarm bouillon.

  We went out deep enough so that only our heads showed above the surface. The duckbill crawled onto my shoulder with only a little coaxing and I held him there with one arm, treading water with Anya beside me, close enough to grasp if I had to.

  The woods were deeply shadowed now. The trees seemed to part like a curtain and a towering, terrifying tyrannosaur stepped out, his scaly hide a lurid red in the waning sunset.

  The tyrant took a few ponderous steps toward our campfire, seemed to look around, then gazed out onto the water of the lake. I realized with a sinking heart that if it saw us and wanted to reach us, it had merely to wade out and grab us in those monstrous serrated teeth. The water that was deep enough for us to swim in would hardly come up to its hocks.

  Sure enough, the tyrannosaur marched straight to the water’s edge. Then it hesitated, looking ridiculously like a wrinkled old lady afraid of getting her feet wet.

  I held my breath. The tyrannosaur seemed to look straight at me. The trembling package of frightened duckbill on my shoulder made no sound. The world seemed to stand still for an eternally long moment. Not even the lapping waves seemed to make a noise.

  Then the tyrannosaur gave an enormous huffing sigh, like a blast from a blacksmith’s forge, and turned away from the lake. It stamped back into the woods and disappeared.

  Almost overcome with relief, we swam shoreward and then staggered out of the water and threw ourselves onto the sandy ground.

  Only to hear an eerie hooting whistle coming out of the twilight on the lake.

  Looking around, I saw the enormous snaky neck of an aquatic dinosaur rising, rising up from the depths of the lake, higher and higher like an enormous escalator of living flesh silhouetted against the glowing pastel sunset. Our duckbill wriggled free of my arms and ran to worm his body as close to Anya as he could.