by Ben Bova
I sensed a ponderous shaking of his head. “For all time. I wonder if you realize what that means. None of us, not even Ormazd, can grasp all of time in his hands.”
“That is my task,” I said.
He made that ghastly chuckling sound again. “Then why don’t you do your duty, here and now? Kill me.”
I hesitated.
“You are afraid.”
“No,” I answered honestly. Fear never touched me. I was calculating how to get to him. I knew that he was far stronger than I. With nothing but the pitiful stone knife in my hand, how could I hope to attack him?
“I grow weary of waiting,” Ahriman said.
The shadows exploded. His vast bulk suddenly leaped at me and I was smashed against the mud wall of the dugout, Ahriman’s powerful fingers at my throat. We crashed through the flimsy wall and the makeshift root of leafy branches fell in on us as we struggled in the dust. I slashed wildly at him with the knife, to no avail.
I saw his face inches from mine, a wide leering grin pulling his lips apart, his teeth gleaming wickedly, a brutal snarl growling up from his throat, his eyes blazing with triumphant fury. The strength was seeping out of my muscles. My arms grew weak, my attempts to fend him off feeble. Darkness started to cloud my vision, and I knew that I was about to die.
Something thudded into the ground close to me. Then I felt a muffled shock, as if a hard object had hit Ahriman’s body, atop me. His fingers around my throat slackened and I heard him growl. His weight rolled off my body. My vision cleared slightly as I drew in a deep, welcome breath of cool air and I saw him standing above me, a spear dangling from his side, blood oozing from the wound, snarling defiance.
Another spear hurtled through the morning air and he caught it with one hand. Turning, I saw that Dal had thrown it. The other men of the clan were running up toward where he was standing, more spears in their hands. Their faces showed more surprise than fear; as long as their leader was willing to stand up to this strange intruder, they would too — at a distance.
Ahriman flipped the spear around in his hand and pulled his arm back to throw it at Dal. I kicked at his legs and toppled him. The men gave a blood-curdling screech and charged at us.
I scrambled to get on top of the Dark One, but he cuffed me to my knees with a tremendous backhand blow, yanked the spear out of his bleeding side and threw it at the attacking clansmen. Even so haphazardly thrown, it had the force to go right through one of the men, chest to back, lift him off his feet and throw him cruelly to the ground.
That stopped the men of the clan dead in their tracks. All except Dal, who rushed in barehanded except for his puny knife and leaped at Ahriman. The Dark One knocked him away, lumbered to his feet, and staggered off toward the cliffs.
For several moments no one moved. I pulled myself painfully up onto my hands and knees. Dal sat up slowly, shaking his woozy head. A bruise was welling up along his jaw, where Ahriman had hit him.
The other men stood as if transfixed, staring now at the two of us, now at the body of their slain comrade. Ahriman had disappeared into the shadows of the cliffs, where the dawning light had not yet reached.
“Who was that?” Dal asked, at last. He ran two fingers over the lump on his jaw and winced.
“An enemy,” I said.
The other men came up to us, all of them chattering at once. Ava pushed her way through them and knelt at Dal’s side. She inspected him in the brightening sunlight and concluded that no bones were broken. Then she turned to me.
“I’m all right,” I said, getting to my feet. My throat burned, though, and my voice was hoarse.
The others were staring at me.
“Your throat bears the marks of the enemy,” Ava said, examining me. “I can see the print of each of his fingers.” She put her hands to my throat. “His hands are enormous!”
“Who is he?” Dal wanted to know.
“The enemy of all men,” I replied. “The enemy of every human being. He is the Dark One, an enemy whose only desire is to kill us all.”
They had all seen Ahriman, but I described him as closely as I could. I did not want them to begin thinking of the Dark One as a spirit or a demon who was beyond human resistance. I praised them for driving him away, for wounding him and saving me from his choking hands.
“We can follow his spoor and track him to his lair,” Ava said, pointing to the bloodstains Ahriman had left on the grass.
The men showed a distinct aversion to the idea. Even Dal, so fearless a few moments earlier, backed away.
“No,” I said. “He will have gone deep into the caves by now. We wouldn’t be able to find him. He might even have set traps for us. Better to stay here in the sunlight. He won’t come back.” Not for a while, at least, I added silently.
The rest of the men gathered around their fallen comrade and lifted him tenderly from the ground to carry him back to his hut. I could hear Ahriman’s size and ferocity growing as they talked among themselves, and their own courage and strength increasing to keep pace.
Dal lingered near me, Ava at his side.
“You saved my life,” I said to him. “I thank you.”
He shook his head, troubled. “You are one of us. I did what had to be done.”
“It was more than any of the others did.”
“I am their leader.”
I remembered an aphorism: From those to whom much is given, much is expected. Dal was a true leader, and a good one. But still he looked troubled.
“Ahriman is no more of a spirit or a demon than I am,” I said. “He is a man, like me.”
“He took a spear in his side and pulled it loose as if it was nothing more than a burr annoying him.”
“He has great strength,” I admitted.
Reflexively Dal touched the bluish bruise on his jaw. “That is true. He drove that spear through Radon even while he was on his back.”
“But he ran away.” I didn’t want Dal to fear Ahriman more than was necessary.
His troubled eyes locked on mine. “You did not tell me that you were being pursued by an enemy.”
“I didn’t know he was here,” I half-lied. “I thought I had left him far away from here.”
Sensing the beginning of an argument, Ava stepped between us. “Come and eat with us. The sun has already climbed over the hills. It will be a beautiful day.”
But now Dal eyed me with new suspicion, even though I felt a bond of respect and admiration for the man who had attacked the Dark One with reckless courage, and thereby saved my life.
CHAPTER 28
The next few weeks were peaceful enough. Three more clans filtered into the valley, a total of a hundred and six additional people. Roughly two-thirds of them were adults, the remainder children ranging from nursing babies to gawky pre-adolescents. In this Neolithic society where life was so short, teen-agers became adults as soon as they reached sexual maturity. Twelve-year-olds bore children. Forty-year-olds were often too feeble and toothless to hunt or eat and were tenderly slain by their clansfolk.
“We stay here in the valley,” Ava told me, “until the grain turns to gold. Then we harvest it and carry it with us for the winter.” Frowning, she added, “Unless the snows come before the grain ripens.”
And in a flash of understanding I knew why Ahriman was here and what he planned to do.
This was another of the crucial nexus points in human history. These clans, these ragged, dirty, wandering hunters, were going to make the transition from hunting to farming. They were going to create the Neolithic Revolution, the step that turned humankind from nomadic savages to civilized city-builders. Ahriman was going to try to strangle that development, prevent it from happening.
If he could keep these primitive hunters from taking that step, he could eventually wipe out all of the scattered human tribes who wandered across this Neolithic landscape. I had no doubt of that. He could annihilate the human race, clan by clan, tribe by tribe, until the Earth was scoured clean of the last human being. Th
en he would be triumphant.
But if humankind made the transition to agriculture, if humans began the vast population explosion that led to the civilizations of Egypt, Sumeria, the Indus Valley and China, then not even Ahriman with all his powers could hope to wipe out the entire race. Humankind would be on the path toward mastery of this planet, no longer a few scattered half-starving tribes of nomadic hunters, but settled prosperous farmers with a steeply growing population.
Would agriculture be invented here, in this valley where Dal’s clan and his allies spent the summer? I could not believe that if Ahriman prevented that invention here, it would not occur elsewhere, in some other clan, at some other favored spot. But then I realized that, with his mastery of time, Ahriman could visit each and every spot where the invention was about to take place and stamp out the idea each and every time it arose. With a growing weariness hanging like a heavy weight around my soul, I realized that Ormazd would send me to each of those times and places, to do never-ending battle against the Dark One.
Contemplating that was more than I could bear. Almost. I consoled myself with the thought that since Ahriman was here, this must be the place where the idea of agriculture truly originated. If I stopped him here, there would be no need to fight him elsewhere — in this era. Obviously we had met at least once more in an earlier time. Perhaps during The War that he referred to.
Dal’s new suspicion of me quickly spread to the rest of the clan, and the other clans that joined us in the valley stayed well clear of me. I was regarded as something between a god and a human, feared and respected. They all knew that I could teach them wonderful things, but although they came to learn how to make bows and arrows and spear-throwers, and even how to pen game animals against the cliffs and begin herding them instead of simply killing them immediately, they still kept me away from their day-to-day social lives.
All except Ava. She spent long hours with me, learning whatever I could teach her about the stars, about spinning and weaving the wool from goats and sheep, about simple rules of cleanliness and infection.
But each evening she would return to Dal’s hut and cook his supper. She invited me to join them often enough, but Dal made it clear that he was uncomfortable with me and more than a little jealous of the time Ava spent with me. I usually ate alone, outside my rebuilt hut, cooking the meat and vegetables the clanspeople gave me in exchange for my lessons on tool-making and animal husbandry. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so tragic, to think of these primitives learning from me. Actually, all I did was expose them to ideas that had not occurred to them. Once the basic idea got into their minds, they went off and did things much better than I ever could have. They taught themselves to make accurate arrows, to build corrals, to spin wool. I merely planted the seeds; they cultivated them and reaped the harvest.
Life in the valley was pleasant and easy. The days lengthened into golden summer, but without oppressive heat and humidity. The grain grew tall and ripened, filling the valley with golden fronds that swayed in the gentle summer breezes. The color of Ormazd, I thought, and realized that it was good. The nights were cool and often tossed by sighing winds. I spent hours showing Ava the phases of the Moon, the paths of the planets, the rise and fall of the constellations. I pointed out the Summer Triangle of stars high in the night sky: Deneb, Altair, and Vega. She learned quickly, and the questions she asked showed that she was eager to learn more.
Dal accompanied us during those nights. At first it was because he did not trust me alone with Ava, and I could hardly blame him for that. But despite himself he began to grow interested in the lore of the sky.
“Do you mean you can tell when the seasons will change before the change really begins?” He was skeptical.
“Yes,” I replied. “The stars can tell you when to plant seed and when to harvest the grain.”
He frowned in the moonlight. “Plant seed? What do you mean?”
That brought us to long nights of talk about how plants grow. I think I might have been the first human being to explain the similarity between the birds and bees, plant growth and human sexuality. But I did it in reverse of the way twentieth-century parents gave the explanation to their children: I used human sexuality — which Dal and Ava understood perfectly well — to explain how plants grew from seeds.
Like children, they found the idea difficult to accept. “Do you mean that if we put some tiny seeds into the ground, a whole field of grain would grow there?”
When I said yes, Dal merely shook his head in disbelief. But Ava looked thoughtful, her gray eyes focused on the future.
Except for that one blood-crazed night of the hunting ritual, Ava and I had hardly touched each other. Not that I did not want her. But she was Dal’s woman, and her interest in me was the kind for which a word would not be invented for another hundred centuries: Platonic. Ava sought knowledge from me, not love or even companionship.
One afternoon, while Dal was leading a hunting party out toward the far end of the valley, where they could trap animals against the cliffs easily, I saw Ava staring soberly at the ripening fields of grain. She had filled out a bit, as had everyone. Now that we no longer had to trek each day, and as game was plentiful, we had all gained weight.
But Ava’s face was knotted into such a serious frown that I decided to ask her what the trouble was.
“Ava, what bothers you?”
She seemed startled. “What? Oh — it’s you.”
“Is something wrong?” I asked.
“Wrong? No… not really.” She turned her gaze back to the grain, swaying gently in the summer breeze beneath the golden sun.
“You don’t believe what I told you a few nights ago,” I guessed, “that you can plant the seeds of the grain and grow crops from them.”
With a wan smile, she said, “No, Orion. I do believe you. What you say makes sense to me. I was just thinking that…” she hesitated, and I could see from the concentrated expression on her face that she was struggling to put her ideas in order.
I waited in silence. Her face was beautiful, and I longed to take her in my arms. But she had no desire for me, and I knew it.
“Suppose,” she began again, slowly, haltingly, “Suppose we really could do it… grow grain the way you said. Suppose we stayed here in this valley — all the time, winter and summer. We could grow the grain; we could pen up the animals against the cliffs. We wouldn’t have to go out each day and hunt. We could stay here and live much more easily.”
I nodded. The transition from hunting and gathering to a settled agricultural life had begun, at least in the mind of one Neolithic woman.
“But suppose the grain didn’t grow?” she asked me.
“It grows every year, doesn’t it? It’s always here when you return to this valley.”
She agreed, but reluctantly. “It begins to grow when we are away. If we stayed here all the time, would the grain still grow the way it does now?”
“Yes,” I said. “You will even find ways to make it grow better.”
“But doesn’t the grain’s spirit need to be alone? Won’t the grain die if we stay here always?”
“No,” I assured her. “The spirit of the grain will grow stronger if you help that spirit by tending the grain, by killing the weeds that choke it, by spreading the seed to new parts of the valley, where the grain does not yet grow.”
She wanted to believe me, I could see. But the old superstitions, the ingrained ways of thought, the stubborn fear that change — any change — would bring down the anger of the gods, all were struggling within her against the bright promise of this new idea.
“I’m going to take a walk,” I said, with a sudden inspiration. “Will you come with me?”
She agreed and I started out across the waist-high field of golden grain, toward the cliffs that the glacier had scooped out on the far side of the valley.
We talked as we made our way to the base of the cliffs, Ava going over the whole idea of agriculture and herding, again and aga
in, trying to find out where the weak points were, where there might be a hidden flaw in the scheme, a trap that could bring ruin to the clan.
I could have told her that once the clan stopped its roaming and gave up hunting, it would lead to settled farming villages, to an hierarchical society of peasants and kings, to class divisions between rich and poor. I could have told her that the occasional tribal clashes she was familiar with would escalate into wars between villages, then between cities, and ultimately wars in which all the world was bathed in blood. I could have told her about teeming cities and pollution and the threats of overpopulation, nuclear holocaust, environmental collapse.
But I said nothing. Here in the bright morning of human civilization, I remained silent and let Ava examine the new idea for herself.
We reached the base of the cliffs. I squinted up toward their top, outlined against the bright summer sky.
“I think I’ll climb up to the top. Want to come with me?”
“Up there?” She laughed. “No one can climb up those cliffs, Orion. You are teasing me.”
“No, I’m not. I think we can make it to the top.”
“It’s too steep. Dal tried it once and had to give up. No one can climb these cliffs.”
I shrugged. “Let’s try it together. Maybe the two of us can get to the top, whereas one man alone would fail.”
She gave me a curious stare. “Why? Why do you want to climb where no one has climbed before?”
“That’s just it,” I said. “Because no one has done it before. I want to be the first. I want to see how the world looks when I’m standing in a place where no one has ever stood before.”
“That sounds crazy.”
“Haven’t you ever done something simply because you wanted to do it? Haven’t you ever had the desire to do something that no one has ever done before?”
“No,” she said. But not very convincingly. She looked up the face of the cliffs and her gray eyes were filled with wondering. “We always do things the way they have always been done. That’s the best way, just as our fathers and their fathers did, it.”
