Orion in the Dying Time o-3

by Ben Bova

  “The Loch Ness Monster,” I whispered.

  “What?”

  Suddenly it all became clear to me. The damned tyrannosaur would have waded into the lake after us, except that the lake was inhabited by even bigger dinosaurs who had made it their territory. As far as the tyrannosaur was concerned, anything in the water was meat for the beastie who lived in the lake. That was why it had left us alone.

  The lake dinosaur hooted again, then ducked its long neck back beneath the waves.

  I rolled onto my back and laughed uncontrollably, like a madman or a soldier who becomes hysterical after facing certain unavoidable death and living through it. We had literally been between the devil and the deep blue sea without even knowing it.

  Chapter 18

  My laughter subsided quickly enough. We were truly trapped and I knew it.

  “I don’t see anything funny,” Anya said in the purpling shadows of the twilight.

  “It isn’t funny,” I agreed. “But what else can we do except laugh? One or more tyrannosaurs are patrolling through the woods, one or more even bigger monsters prowling through the lake, and we’re caught in between. It’s beyond funny. It’s cosmic. If the Creators could see us now, they’d be splitting their sides laughing at the stupid blind ridiculousness of it all.”

  “We can get past the tyrannosaur,” she said, a hint of cold disapproval, almost anger, in her voice. I noticed that she assumed there was only the one monster lurking in the woods, waiting for us.

  “You think so?” I felt bitterly cynical.

  “Once it’s fully night we can slip through the woods—”

  “And go where? All we’ll be accomplishing is to make Set’s game a little more interesting.”

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Transform yourself into your true form and leave me here alone.”

  She gasped as if I had slapped her. “Orion—you… you’re angry with me?”

  I said nothing. My blood seethed with frustration and fury. I raged silently at the Creators for putting us here. I railed inwardly at myself for being so helpless.

  Anya was saying, “You know that I can’t metamorphose unless there’s sufficient energy for the transformation. And I won’t leave you no matter what happens.”

  “There is a way for you to escape,” I said, my anger cooling. “I’ll go into the woods first and lead the tyrannosaurs away from you. Then you can get through safely. We can meet back at the duckbill nests—”

  “No.” She said it flatly, with finality. Even in the gathering darkness I could sense the toss of her ebony hair as she shook her head.

  “We can’t—”

  “Whatever we do,” Anya said firmly, “we do together.”

  “Don’t you understand?” I begged her. “We’re trapped here. It’s hopeless. Get away while you can.”

  Anya stepped close to me and touched my cheek with her cool, soft hand. Her gray eyes looked deeply into mine. I felt the tension that had been cramping my neck and back muscles easing, dissolving.

  “This is unlike you, Orion. You’ve never given up before, no matter what we faced.”

  “We’ve never been in a situation like this.” But even as I said it, I felt calmer, less depressed.

  “As you said a few days ago, my love, we still live. And while we live we must fight against Set and his monstrous designs, whatever they are.”

  She was right and I knew it. I also knew that there was no way for me to resist her. She was one of the Creators, and I was one of her creatures.

  “And whatever we do, my unhappy love,” Anya said, her voice dropping lower, “we will do together. To the death, if necessary.”

  My voice choked with a tangle of emotions. She was a goddess, yet she would never abandon me. Never.

  We stood facing each other for a few moments more, then decided to start walking around the edge of the lake, for lack of any better plan. The duckbill trotted after us, silently following Anya.

  How can two human beings fight a thirty-ton tyrannosaur with little more than their bare hands? I knew the answer: They can’t. Something deep in my mind recalled that I had killed Set’s carnosaurs in the Neolithic with not much more than bare hands. Yet somehow the tyrannosaurs seemed far beyond that challenge. I felt hopeless, powerless; not afraid, I was so depressed I was beyond fear.

  So we walked through the deepening night, the glistening froth of the gently breaking waves on our right, the sighing trees of the woods on our left. The moon rose, a crescent slim as a scimitar, and later that blood red star raised its eerie eye above the lake’s flat horizon.

  Anya was thinking out loud, in a half whisper: “If we can find one of Set’s people, capture him and learn from him where Set’s camp is and what he’s trying to achieve here, then we could form a plan of action.”

  I made a grunting noise rather than saying out loud how naive I thought she was being.

  “They must have tools, weapons. Perhaps we could capture some. Then we’d be better prepared…”

  It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her what I really thought of her daydreaming.

  “I haven’t seen any weapons or tools of any kind on them,” I muttered.

  “Set has a technology as powerful as our own,” she said. I knew that by “our own” she meant the Creators.

  “Yes, but his troops go empty-handed—except for their claws.” Then I realized: “And the reptiles they control.”

  Anya stopped in her tracks. “The tyrannosaurs.”

  “And the dragons, back in Paradise.”

  “They use the animals the way we use tools,” she said.

  Our baby duckbill snuffled slightly, just to let us know that it was there in the darkness, I think. Anya dropped to one knee and picked it up.

  My mind was racing. I recalled another kind of intelligent creature who controlled animals with their minds. The Neanderthals and their leader, Ahriman. My memory filled with half-forgotten images of the suicidal duel he and I had fought over a span of fifty thousand years. I squeezed my eyes shut and stood stock still, straining every cell of my brain to recall, remember.

  “I think,” I said shakily, “I might be able to control an animal the same way that the humanoids do.”

  Anya stepped closer to me. “No, Orion. That ability was never built into you. Not even the Golden One knows how to accomplish that.”

  “I’ve looked deeply into the mind of Ahriman,” I told her. “Many times. I lived with the Neanderthals. I think I can do it.”

  “If only you could!”

  “Let me try—on your little friend here.”

  We both sat cross-legged on the sand, Anya with the sleepy duckbill in her lap. It curled up immediately, tail wrapping over its snout, and closed its eyes.

  I closed mine.

  It was a simple mind, yet not so primitive that it did not have a sense of self-preservation. In the cool of the evening it sought Anya’s body warmth and the sleep it needed to prepare itself for the coming day. I saw nothing, but a symphony of olfactory stimuli flooded through me: the warm musky scent of Anya’s body, the tang of the lake’s sun-heated water, the drifting odor of leaves and bark. My own mind felt surprise that there were no flowers to add their fragrances to the night air, but then I realized that true flowering plants did not yet exist here.

  I opened the duckbill baby’s eyes and saw its world, murky and indistinct, blurred with the need to sleep. An overwhelming reluctance to get up and leave the protection of Anya’s mothering body welled through me, but I rose shakily to all fours and slithered off Anya’s warm lap. I half trotted to the lapping edge of the water, sniffed at it and found no danger in it, then waded in until my tiny hooves barely touched the muddy bottom. Then I turned around and made my way gladly back to the motherly lap.

  “She’s all wet!” Anya complained, laughing.

  “And sound asleep,” I said.

  For many minutes we sat facing each other, Anya with the little dinos
aur sighing rhythmically in her lap.

  “You were right,” she whispered. “You can control it.”

  “It’s only a baby,” I said. “Controlling something bigger will be much more difficult.”

  “But you can do it,” Anya said. “I know you can.”

  I replied, “You were right, too. Our little friend is a female.”

  “I knew it!”

  Looking toward the darkened woods, I let my awareness sift in through the trees and mammoth ferns, swaying and whispering in the night wind. There were tyrannosaurs out there, all right. Several of them. They were asleep now, lightly. Perhaps we could make our way past them. It was worth a try.

  “Are their masters with them?” Anya asked when I suggested we try to get away.

  “I don’t sense them,” I said. “That doesn’t mean they aren’t there.”

  We waited while I sensed the tyrannosaurs drifting deeper into sleep. Crickets chirped in the woods, the slim crescent moon rose higher, followed by the baleful red star.

  “When can we start?” Anya asked, absently stroking the baby dinosaur on her lap.

  I rose slowly to my feet. “Soon. In a few—”

  That eerie hooting echoed through the night. Turning toward the lake, I saw the long snaky neck of the enormous aquatic dinosaur silhouetted against the stars and the filmy white haze that would one day be the constellation of Orion. From far away came an answering call floating through the darkness.

  A cool breeze wafted in from the lake. It seemed to clear my mind like a wind blows away a fog.

  I helped Anya to her feet. The baby duckbill hardly stirred in her arms.

  “Do you think,” I asked her, “that Set could influence my mind the way his people control the dinosaurs?”

  “He probed your mind there in his castle,” she said.

  “Could that have caused me to feel so”—I hesitated to use the word—“so depressed?”

  She nodded solemnly. “He uses despair like a weapon, to undermine your strength, to lead you to destruction.”

  I began to understand the whole of it. “And once you realized it, you counteracted it.”

  Anya replied, “No, Orion, you counteracted it. You did it yourself.”

  Did I? Anya was kind to say so, perhaps. But I wondered how large a role she played in my mental revival.

  With the blink of an eye I dismissed the matter. I did not care who did what. I felt strong again, and that terrible despair had lifted from me.

  “The tyrannosaurs are sleeping soundly,” I told Anya. “We can get past them if we’re careful.”

  As I put a hand to her shoulder I heard a frothing, bubbling, surging sound from out in the lake. Turning, I expected to see one or more of the huge dinosaurs splashing out there.

  Instead, the waters seemed to be parting far out in the lake, splitting asunder to make way for something dark and massive and so enormous that even the big dinosaurs were dwarfed by it.

  A building, a structure, an edifice that rose and rose, dripping, from the depths of the lake. Towers and turrets and overhanging tiers so wide and massive that they blotted out the sky. Balconies and high-flung walkways spanning between slim minarets. Tiny red lights winked on as we watched level upon level still rising up out of the water, mammoth and awesome.

  Anya and I gaped dumbfounded at the titanic structure rising from the lake like the palace of some sea god, grotesque yet beautiful, dreadful yet majestic. The water surged into knee-high waves that spread across the lake and broke at our feet, then raced back as if eager to gather themselves at the base of the looming silent castle of darkness.

  I saw that one tower rose higher than all the others, pointing straight upward into the night sky. And directly above it, like a beacon or lodestone, rode the blood red star at zenith.

  “What fools we’ve been!” Anya whispered in the shadows.

  I glanced at her. Her eyes were wide and eager.

  “We thought that Set’s main base was back in the Neolithic, beside the Nile. That was merely one of his camps!”

  I understood.

  “This is his headquarters,” I said. “Here, in this era. He’s inside that huge fortress waiting for us.”

  Chapter 19

  There was no thought of running away. Set was in that brooding, dripping castle. So was the core tap that reached down to the earth’s molten heart to provide the energy for Set and all his works. We needed that energy if we were to accomplish anything, even if it was merely to escape from this time of dinosaurs.

  More than mere escape was on my mind, though. I wanted to meet Set again, confront him, hunt him down and kill him the way he had tried to hunt us down and kill us. He had enslaved my fellow humans, tortured the woman I love, drained me of the will to fight, to live. Now I burned with a yearning to wrap my fingers around his scaled neck and choke the life out of him.

  I was Orion the Hunter once again, strong and unafraid.

  In the back of my mind a voice questioned my newfound courage. Was I being manipulated by Anya? Or was I merely reacting the way I had been created to react?

  The Golden One had often boasted to me that he had built these instincts for violence and revenge into me and my kind. Certainly the human race has suffered over the millennia for having such drives. We were made for murder, and the fine facade of civilization that we have learned to erect is merely a lacquered veneer covering the violence that simmers behind the mask.

  What of it? I challenged the voice in my mind. Despite it all the human race has survived, has endured all that the gods of the continuum have forced upon us. Now I must face the devil incarnate, and those human instincts will be my only protection. Once more I must use the skills of the hunter: cunning, strength, stealth, and above all, patience.

  “We’ve got to get inside,” Anya said, still staring wide-eyed at the castle of darkness.

  I agreed with a nod. “First, though, we’ve got to find out what Set is trying to do here, and why.”

  Which meant that we must hide and observe: see without being seen. Anya recognized the sense of that, although she was impatient with such a strategy. She wanted to plunge boldly into that fortress, just the two of us. She knew that was a hopeless fantasy and agreed that we must bide our time. Yet her agreement was reluctant.

  I took the baby duckbill from her arms and led us back into the trees, keeping wide of the tyrannosaurs sleeping there in well-separated locations. The little dinosaur seemed heavier than it had been earlier. Either I was tired or it was gaining weight very rapidly.

  We pushed our way through the thick underbrush as quietly as possible. The duckbill remained asleep—as did the tyrannosaurs lurking nearby.

  “This baby of yours is going to be a problem,” I whispered to Anya, following behind me as I pushed leafy branches and ferns aside with my free hand.

  “Not at all,” she whispered back. “If you show me how to control her, she can be a scout for us. What is more natural in this world than a baby dinosaur poking around in the brush?”

  I had to admit that she was at least partially right. I wondered, though, if the duckbills were ever seen alone. They seemed to be herd animals, like so many other herbivores that found safety in numbers.

  We stopped at a spot where a heavy palm tree had toppled over and fallen onto a boulder as tall as my shoulders. Thick bushes grew behind the fallen bole and heavy tussocks of reeds in front of it. With our spears Anya and I scratched a shallow dugout into the sand, just long enough for us to stretch out flat on the ground. With the heavy log above us, the boulder to one side, and the bushes screening our rear, it was almost cozy. We could peer through the reeds and tufts of ferns to see the beach and the lake beyond it.

  “No fire as long as we’re camped here,” I said.

  Anya smiled contentedly. “We’ll eat raw fish and try the berries and fruits from the different bushes.”

  Thus we began what became many weeks of watching the castle in the lake. Each morning it submerged
, the entire titanic structure sinking slowly into the frothing water as if afraid of being seen by the rising sun. Each night it rose up again, dripping and dark like a brooding, malevolent giant.

  We hunted and fished while the castle was submerged. We avoided the tyrannosaurs prowling through the woods and the more open flat land beyond. In all truth they did not seem to be particularly searching for us. Just the opposite. We were being ignored.

  I began to teach Anya how to control our duckbill, which was rapidly growing out of its babyhood. She had named the little beast Juno, and when I asked her why, she laughed mysteriously.

  “A joke, Orion, that only the Creators would appreciate.”

  I knew that the Creators sometimes assumed the names of ancient gods. The Golden One referred to himself as Ormazd sometimes, at other times he had called himself Apollo, or Yawveh. Anya herself was worshiped as Athena by the Achaians and Trojans alike. Apparently there was a Juno among the Creators, and it amused Anya to name our heavy-footed round-backed duckbill after her.

  After many days I began to realize that the castle was rising out of the water a bit later each night and lingering a few minutes longer into the dawn each morning. This puzzled me at first, but I was more interested in the comings and goings from the castle than its risings and submergings. In the dawn’s early light we could see more clearly what was happening, and why.

  Each time the castle rose out of the water a long narrow ramp slid out from a gate set into its wall like a snake’s probing tongue and reached to the shore of the lake, almost a quarter of the way around its roughly circular circumference from the beach where Anya and I lay watching. Invariably, a dozen or so of the humanoid servants of Set, red-scaled and naked as they had been in the Neolithic, marched down that narrow ramp, across the sandy beach, and into the trees.

  Tyrannosaurs waited for them there, gathered to this lake by forces unknown to us. In the dark of night or the glimmering gray of dawn, the humanoids selected a dozen or so of the monstrous brutes and headed off, away from the lake.