Orion o-1

by Ben Bova

  Dal had already yanked a spear from the body of a fallen clansman and was running toward one of the enemy warriors. Ava dashed in behind him, scooped up a fallen spear, and advanced to his side. Another spear whizzed past my head. A trio of the strange warriors dashed into one of the huts. Screams of pain and terror wailed from it.

  All this happened in seconds. I rushed for my own hut, knocked down two warriors who tried to stop me, and grabbed my bow and a handful of arrows. I could hear more shouting and sobbing outside, and Dal’s voice clear and commanding over the din of confusion and battle.

  As I ducked back into the night air outside my hut, a painted warrior sprang at me, his spear leveled at my chest. I sidestepped and floored him with a lethal chop to his neck. Over his body I stepped, out into the flame-filled screaming furor of the battle, my reflexes accelerating into overdrive, every sense alert and sharpened to its finest pitch. I felt a wild exhilaration: the waiting was over, the battle had been joined.

  I notched an arrow and sent it through a warrior’s skull. Dal and Ava were off to my right, using their spears to fend off four spear-wielding warriors. I knocked off one of them just as Dal ripped another’s belly open. Ava dropped to one knee as a warrior charged her and spitted him from below. The screaming man fell atop her, but she wriggled out immediately, took his spear and rejoined the fight. By that time I had put an arrow through the neck of the fourth warrior.

  In the light of the blazing grain I could see many of the clanspeople on the ground. But there were more of us on our feet, fighting. The invading warriors were falling back now, throwing their torches at us to slow our pursuit.

  Sheer maddened anger drove me forward. I raced at them, bellowing mindlessly as I fired my remaining arrows into them and then took a spear from a fallen warrior and charged them with all the fury that had been pent up inside me, waiting for this release. I knocked down the first one to stand before me with a sidelong swipe of my spear against his skull, using the weapon like a quarterstaff. Another loomed to my side, and I drove the spear point into his guts. He screamed as I yanked it free and slashed it across the face of the next one.

  It seemed longer, but within mere seconds my spear was bloodied along its whole length, slippery in my grasp, as I slaughtered anyone who came within reach. The remaining warriors bolted, wide-eyed with newfound fear, and I raced after them, killing, killing, killing again as I caught up with them, one by one. Behind me I could hear the shouts of Dal and the others growing fainter.

  I followed the retreating warriors toward the distant cave-dotted cliffs. One of them stumbled and fell in front of me; I drove my spear through him and felt it bite into the dirt. He shrieked with his last breath. Tugging hard, I yanked it free again and resumed my chase after the others.

  The invaders were scattering in all directions, their weapons thrown away as they ran for their lives to escape my bloody rage. I slowed and turned. Far behind me, Dal and the others had turned their attention to the fires that the invaders had started in the grain fields. I saw Ava, smeared with blood of her enemies, standing triumphantly and waving both arms over her head, urging me to come back.

  But I pressed onward, toward those caves, where I knew Ahriman lurked. It was the Dark One who had organized this raid, no one else. He was there, and I moved relentlessly to find him, my hands already soaked in the blood of his cohorts. Like an automaton running wild, I stalked the Dark One, longing with every ounce of my being to add his blood to that which was already darkening my spear.

  It was black by the base of the cliffs; not even the glow from the burning field cast much light there. But in that hushed gloom, where even the insects and beasts of the night lay silenced and frightened by the rush of fighting men, I heard breathing and the soft tread of bare feet on stony ground.

  There were three of them, off to my left, waiting to attack me — and another two, further to my right, ready to circle behind me and close the trap.

  I moved forward, as if unaware of their presence. But the instant they leaped toward me, I whirled around and swung my spear at their legs like a scythe, cutting the three of them down. As they fell in a jumbled heap, I hefted the bloody spear in my right hand and threw it at the nearer of the two who were circling behind me. The solid thunk of it hitting his chest was louder than the desperate little gasp he gave out as he died. I killed the three on the ground quickly, with my bare hands, while the only remaining warrior fled for his life.

  I took all three of their spears and headed toward the nearest cave. I had no way of telling if Ahriman was there; all I knew was that I was certain he would be.

  The cave was pitch dark inside, not a single glowing ember lit its yawning blackness. But I plunged into it anyway, hot with reckless fury.

  It was the cave bear’s warning growl that saved my life. If the beast had been as intent on killing as I was, it would have waited until I had blundered into its grasp and then crushed me with its mighty paws. But it was only an animal defending its lair; it had none of the malicious hatred that human beings carry within them. It growled before it slashed out at me. I lunged forward at the sound with all three of the spears bundled together in my grip. I was lucky. I hit the bear’s heart or lungs. One of the spears snapped in my hands, but the other two penetrated and the animal died with a hideous shriek of agony.

  Suddenly the blood lust cooled within me. I was dripping with sweat, covered with blood from head to toe, trembling with physical exertion and emotional exhaustion. Killing other humans had meant nothing to me, but killing the bear had snapped me out of my battle fury. There, in the utter darkness of the beast’s cave, I doubled over, hands on knees, panting and almost weeping with shame and regret.

  For several minutes I remained there. Gradually my strength returned, and with it my resolve. Ahriman was here, I knew it. I could feel it. The bear might have been one of his defenses, to be used against me as he had used the rats in a man-made cave to kill the woman I loved.

  I wrestled one of the spears from the bear’s still warm body, stepped over the carcass, and started to grope my way into the ever deeper darkness of the dank cave. Eyesight was useless in this black pit, but all my other senses were fully alert, stretched as far as they could reach.

  But just as I could see nothing, I heard nothing. Not a sound, except my own ragged breathing and the almost inaudible padding of my bare feet on the cave floor. My left hand slid along the rough stone wall; my right held the spear. I advanced cautiously, probing the darkness like a blind man, seeking the enemy that I knew lurked somewhere up ahead of me.

  The sudden glare of blinding light paralyzed me, and then a tremendous blow to my head thrust me into darkness once more.

  CHAPTER 30

  I felt the chill of death, and when I opened my eyes, I saw that we were in a cave of ice. Cold, glittering, translucent ice surrounded us. The floor and walls were smooth, polished, blue-white. The ceiling, high above, was craggy with frozen stalactites. I could see my breath puffing from my open mouth. I shivered involuntarily.

  We were far underground, beneath the rocky surface of Ararat. A natural hiding place for the Dark One. Ahriman sat, incongruously, behind a heavy, broad slab of wood, like a thick slice taken from a full-grown tree. The top of the slab was burnished down to a gloss so fine that I could see the reflection of his dark, brooding face and powerful neck and shoulders in it.

  I was sitting up, my back propped against an outcropping of stone. My head thundered from the blow I had received, but with a conscious effort I eased the tension in my neck muscles and directed the capillary blood flow to reduce the swelling. The pain began to slacken.

  Behind Ahriman’s menacing bulk I could see a dully gleaming canister. It seemed to be made of wood also, but a dense, black wood that almost looked like metal. Its top half was hinged open. It looked to me more like a coffin than anything else.

  Ahriman sat silently behind the wood slab of a desk, staring into its gleaming surface as if he could see things i
n it that I could not. I shifted slightly, testing my reflexes. I was not bound; my arms and legs were free and seemed to respond to my commands with no difficulty.

  He looked up at me, his eyes glaring. The Dark One wore a skintight suit of metallic fiber, sealed at the throat with a gleaming stone whose colors changed and shifted even as I watched. The metallic suit glittered in the cave’s soft lighting. I looked up, but could see no lamps, only a glow that seemed to be coming from the ice itself.

  “Bioluminescence,” Ahriman said. His voice was a grating, painful whisper.

  I nodded, more to test my aching head than to agree with him. The pain was receding quickly.

  “Your people put out the fires quickly enough,” he said. “The grain is rich with moisture. I should have waited a week, it would have been drier then.”

  “Where did you get those warriors?” I asked.

  A grim smile flickered across his almost lipless face. “That was easy. There are plenty of tribes of your people who are eager for the chance to murder and loot. They think of it as glory. They go back to their miserable hovels with a clutch of heads they’ve cut off and tell their wives and children what powerful men they are.”

  “You tempt them to do so.”

  “They don’t need much temptation. Killing is a part of their way of life; it’s built into them.”

  “You’re going to fail here, you know,” I told him. “We will meet again.”

  “Yes, you told me. You have met me twice before.”

  “Which means you will fail here. You will not succeed in preventing these people from developing agriculture…”

  He raised a single massive hand to stop me in mid-sentence.

  “How certain you are,” Ahriman whispered harshly. “How absolutely sure that you will triumph, that you are right, that the Golden One represents truth and victory.”

  “Ormazd is…”

  “Ormazd is not even his true name, any more than mine is Ahriman. They are merely fabrications, lies, inventions, simplifications that are necessary because your mind was never made to grasp the entire truth in all its endless facets.”

  Anger began to warm me from within. “I know enough of the truth to understand what you intend.”

  “The destruction of your kind is what I intend,” Ahriman said, “even if it takes all of time to accomplish it. Even if it means tearing apart the continuum and destroying the whole universe of space-time. I have nothing to lose. Do you understand that, Orion? I have nothing to lose. ”

  His red eyes were burning at me. I felt the power of his anger, his hatred, and something more — something that I could not identify, something that felt like sorrow, eternal and everlasting.

  But I spat back, “You’ll never win! No matter what you do, it’s you who’ll be destroyed.”

  “Really?”

  “You will fail here, just as you failed in other times. You can’t stop the human race.”

  He leaned his powerful arms on the tree-slab desk and hunched forward, looming before me like a dark thundercloud.

  “You pitiful fool, you don’t understand the nature of time even yet, do you?”

  Before I could reply, he went on, “Just because we have met before, in other centuries, in other places, does not mean that you will defeat me here. Time is not a railroad track that’s laid down in place, one section at a time, and fixed solidly, unmovably. Time is like a river, or better yet, an ocean. It moves, it shifts; it washes away a bit of the land here and throws up a new island there. It is not immutable. If I succeed here, the eras in which you and I have already met will dissolve back into primeval chaos, as if they never happened.”

  I stared at him for long, silent moments. Then I said, “I don’t believe you. You’re lying.”

  He shook his head slowly, ponderously. “I can win here, Orion. I will. And all of the space-time will be disrupted. The continuum will crumble, and those times and places where we met will cease to exist.”

  “It can’t be true!”

  “But it is. And you know it is. I will destroy all of you, you who call yourselves Homo sapiens sapiens. All of you who are Ormazd’s creations. You and he will dissolve into nothingness together, and my people will triumph at last.”

  “Never,” I said, but so softly that I barely heard it myself.

  Ahriman ignored me, gloating, “Your little band of savages will not make the transition from hunting to agriculture. Nor will any other of your tribes. Your people will remain a small, weak, starving collection of scattered hunting tribes — with the instinct for war built into you.”

  He stressed that last phrase, savored it, hissed it at me as if it were a justification for everything he had done, every life he had taken, every evil he had committed.

  “It will be easy enough to get your bloodthirsty tribes to slaughter each other, given enough time,” Ahriman went on. “All that I need do is lead them into collision courses, bring two tribes together unexpectedly. Your own savage instincts will do the rest for me.”

  “The clans don’t always fight when they meet,” I argued. “They’re working together in the valley…”

  “Only because they know each other. And only because food is plentiful in the valley. But they are such wasteful, wanton fools. Already they have thinned out the game herds and driven some beasts into extinction. Food will become scarcer for them, I promise you.”

  “If they don’t turn to agriculture,” I muttered.

  “They won’t. And when one of your wandering bands of hunters bumps into a strange group, they will annihilate each other.”

  I shook my head stubbornly, refusing to believe him. “There are too many human tribes for you to destroy them all. They’re spread out all across the world…”

  “Not so,” Ahriman said. “The glaciers cover a good part of the northern hemisphere. And even if they did not, what difference does it make to me? I have all the time in the world to kill off your wandering tribes of savages. Think of it! Centuries, millennia, eons! A long, delicious feast of killing.”

  His pain-red eyes glowed with the thought. I sat still, silently calculating my chances for leaping across the desk and crushing his throat before he could stop me.

  “And in the end,” Ahriman went on, his face as close to happiness as it could ever be, “when your primitive blood-drinkers have finally slaughtered each other, the wrenching of the continuum will be so severe that the Earth, the sun, the stars and galaxies themselves will all collapse in on themselves. A temporal black hole. The end of everything, at last.”

  I jumped for his throat. But from the expectant leer on his dark face I realized that he had made the same calculation that I had, and placed himself just far enough from me to give himself time to block my lunge. I saw his powerful hands clench into fists and launch themselves straight at my face. Pain exploded in my brain. I blacked out again.

  I awoke to the sound of trickling water. I lay on hard stone, in utter darkness. It took a long time before the throbbing in my head stopped, even though I exerted every effort to control my nervous system and shut off the pain.

  When I tried to sit up, I bumped my head against solid rock. I probed upward with both hands and found that I was tucked into a narrow cleft of stone. I felt a blank rock wall on my right; on my left, an edge that dropped off into nothingness.

  Ahriman was gone, I knew. Off to accomplish his task of either driving the clans out of the valley or killing them altogether. I had to get free and prevent him from winning.

  Vision was useless; there was no light at all. The trickling water noise came from below me. Carefully, I turned myself over onto my stomach and groped down along the ledge as far as my arm would reach. No bottom. I poked around for a loose pebble, found one, and dropped it over the edge. Straining my ears and concentrating all my attention did no good. I waited for what seemed like hours, but heard no splash. I found a larger piece of rock and tried it again. The seconds moved slowly, slowly — and then I heard a faint plonk. There wa
s water down there, far below.

  I began inching forward, not knowing if I was moving in the right direction. The rock seemed to slope slightly upward, but that did not necessarily mean it was heading toward the surface, I knew. But there was nothing else I could think of. So I crawled, blind as a mole, inching along without knowing where I was heading. No sounds reached me except my own breathing and the scrabbling noises of my body scuffing along the rock ledge, and the far-off murmur of running water.

  Slowly I began to realize that the rock was getting warmer. It reminded me of the underground cell that Ahriman had trapped me in the first time we had met. But this was a natural cave, not a bubble of captured energy. The heat was coming from a natural source. Magma from the volcano, I reasoned. Perhaps I was moving deeper underground, rather than toward daylight.

  I stopped, panting in the dank, heavy air, and tried to think it out. That got me nowhere; I simply did not have enough information. Then I tried to put myself in Ahriman’s place. What was he going to do? Destroy the Goat Clan, came the answer.

  How? I asked myself. The attack on the clans had failed. They would be on guard now. Instead of driving them out of the valley, the attack probably made them realize how precious the grain fields were. They might well have decided by now to stay in the valley year-round, to protect the grain against marauders.

  But Ahriman is no fool, I told myself. He would have foreseen that.

  Then the true purpose of the attack must have been to entice the clans into staying in the valley. But that did not make sense — unless Ahriman planned to destroy the clans and the valley itself, together!

  How? Earthquake? Could the Dark One control tectonic forces? I didn’t know. But the answer came to me soon enough, as I lay there in my lightless prison of rock. I heard a loud, slapping, sloshing noise from far below me. A wave was surging through the underground river that flowed down there in the darkness.

  “A flood,” I said aloud, my voice strangely hoarse and muffled against the close confines of rock. My thoughts raced. Underground heat to melt the underground ice. The stream that runs through the valley will burst out of the mountainside in an uncontrollable flood. The clans will never have a chance of getting out. The valley will be drowned, together with everyone in it.