Orion in the Dying Time Part 11

Her lovely face was set in a bitterly tragic expression, half apology, half desperation. It rippled and flickered before my streaming eyes, blurring, dimming, waning into a transparent ghostly shadow.

There in my arms, Anya changed her form. She began to glow, her solid body dissolving away into nothingness, transforming herself into a radiant sphere of silvery light tinged ruddy by the glow from beneath us.

I realized that she truly was a G.o.ddess, as advanced beyond my human form as I am beyond the form of the algae. The human body that she had worn, that she had suffered in, was a sacrifice she made because she loved me. Now, faced with searing death, she reverted to her true form, a globe of pure energy that pulsated and dwindled even as I watched it.

"Farewell," I heard in my mind. "Farewell, my darling."

The silvery globe disappeared and I was left alone, abandoned, plunging toward h.e.l.l itself.

My first thought was, At least she'll be safe. She can escape, perhaps even get back to the other Creators, I told myself. But I could not hide the bitterness that surged through me, the black sorrowing anguish that filled every atom of my being. She had abandoned me, left me to face my fate alone. I knew she was right to do it, yet a gulf of endless grief swallowed me up, deeper and darker than the pit I was falling through.

I roared out a wordless, mindless scream of rage: fury at Set and his satanic power, at the Creators who had made me to do their bidding, at the G.o.ddess who had abandoned me.

Anya had abandoned me. There was a limit to how much a G.o.ddess would face for love of a mortal. I had been a fool even to dream it could be otherwise. Pain and death were only for the miserable creatures who served the Creators, not for the self-styled G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses themselves.

Then a wave of absolute cold swept through me, like the breath of the angel of death, like being plunged into the heart of an ancient glacier or the remotest depths of intergalactic s.p.a.ce. Darkness and cold so complete that it seemed every molecule in me was instantly frozen.

I wanted to scream. But I had no body. There was no s.p.a.ce, no dimension. I existed, but without form, without life, in a nullity where there was neither light nor warmth nor time itself.

In the nonmaterial essence that was my mind I saw a globe, a planet, a world spinning slowly before me. I knew it was Earth, yet it was an Earth such as I had never known before. It was a sea world, covered with a global ocean, blue and sparkling in the sun. Long parades of purest whitest clouds drifted across the azure sea. The world ocean was unblemished by any islands large enough for me to see, unbroken by any landma.s.s. The poles were free of ice and covered with deep blue water just as the rest of the planet was.

The Earth turned slowly, majestically, and at last I saw land. A single continent, brown and green and immense: Asia and Africa, Europe and the Americas, Australia and Antarctica and Greenland, all linked together in one gigantic landma.s.s. Even so, much of the land was covered with shallow inland seas, lakes the size of India, rivers longer than the eternal Nile, broader than the mighty Amazon.

As I watched, disembodied, floating in emptiness, the vast landma.s.s began to break apart. In my mind I could hear the t.i.tanic groaning of continent-sized slabs of basalt and granite, see the shuddering of earthquakes, watch whole chains of mountains thrusting upward out of the tortured ground. A line of volcanoes glowered fiercely red and the land split apart, the ocean came rus.h.i.+ng in, steaming, frothing, to fill the chasm created by the separating continents.

I felt myself falling once again, speeding toward that spinning globe even as its continents heaved and buckled and pulled apart from one another. I felt my senses returning, my body becoming substantial, real.

Then utter darkness.

My eyes focused on a flickering glow. A soft radiance that came and went, came and went, in a gentle relaxed rhythm. I was lying on my back, something spongy and yielding beneath me. I was alive and back in the world again.

With an effort I focused on this world around me. The glow was simply sunlight s.h.i.+ning through the swaying fronds of gigantic ferns that bowed gracefully in the pa.s.sing hot breeze. I started to pull myself up to a sitting position and found that I was too weak to accomplish it. Dehydrated, exhausted, even my blood pressure was dangerously low from sapping so much liquid to protect my skin from being roasted.

Above me I saw these immense ferns swaying. Beyond them a sky of pearl gray featureless clouds. The air felt hot and clammy, the ground soft and wet like the spongy moss of a swamp. I could hear insects droning loudly, but no other sounds.

I tried to at least lift my head and look around, but even that was too much for me.

Almost, I laughed. To save myself from the fiery pit of h.e.l.l only to die of starvation because I no longer had the strength to get off my back-the situation had a certain pathetic irony to it.

Then Anya bent over me, smiling.

"You're awake," she said, her voice soft and warm as suns.h.i.+ne after a rain.

A flood of wonder and joy and fathomless inexpressible grat.i.tude hit me so hard that I would have wept if there had been enough moisture in me to form tears. She had not abandoned me! She had not left me to die. Anya was here beside me, in human form, still with me.

She was clad in a softly draped thigh-length robe the color of pale sand, fastened on one shoulder by a silver clasp. Her hair was perfect, her skin unblemished by the roasting heat and slas.h.i.+ng claws we had faced.

I tried to speak, but all that escaped my parched throat was a strangled rasping.

She leaned over me and kissed me gently on my cracked lips, then propped up my head and put a gourd full of water to my lips. It was green and crawling with swamp life, but it tasted as cool and refres.h.i.+ng as ambrosia to me.

"I had to metamorphose, my love," she told me, almost apologetically. "It was the only way we could survive that terrible heat."

I still could not speak. Which was just as well. I could not bear the idea of confessing to her that I had thought she had abandoned me.

"In my true-" She hesitated, started over again: "In that other form I could absorb energy coming from the core tap and use it to protect us."

Finally finding my voice, I replied in a frog's croak, "Then you didn't... cause the jump...."

Anya shook her head slightly. "I didn't direct the s.p.a.cetime transition, no. Wherever and whenever we are now, it is the time and place that Set's warping device was aimed at."

Still flat on my back, with my head in her lap, I rasped, "The Cretaceous Period."

Anya did not reply, but her perceptive gray eyes seemed to look far beyond this time and place.

I took another long draft of water from the gourd she held.

A few more swallows and I could speak almost normally. "The little I gleaned from Set's mind when he was probing me included the fact that something is happening, or has happened, or maybe will happen here in this time-sixty to seventy million years in the past from the Neolithic."

"The Time of Great Dying," Anya murmured.

"When the dinosaurs were wiped out."

"And thousands of other species along with them, plant as well as animal. An incredible disaster struck the earth."

"What was it?" I asked.

She shrugged her lovely shoulders. "We don't know. Not yet."

I pushed myself up on one elbow and looked directly into her divinely beautiful gray eyes. "Do you mean that the Creators-the Golden One and all the others-don't know what took place at one of the most critical points in the planet's entire history?"

Anya smiled at me. "We have never had to consider it, my love. So take that accusative frown off your face. Our concern has been with the human race, your kind, Orion, the creatures we created...."

"The creatures who evolved into you," I said.

She bobbed her head once in acknowledgment. "So, up until now we have had no need to investigate events of sixty-five million years previous to our own era."

My strength was returning. My flesh was still seared red and slashed here and there by the claws of Set's reptilians. But I felt almost strong enough to get to my feet.

"This point in time is crucial to Set," I said. "We've got to find out why."

Anya agreed. "Yes. But not just this moment. You lie there and let me find us something to eat."

I saw that she was bare-handed, without tools or weapons of any kind.

She sensed my realization. "I was not able to return to the Creators' domain, my love. Set has still blocked us off from any contact there. The best I could do was to ride along the preset vector of his warping device." She glanced down at herself, then added with a modest smile, "And use some of its energy to clothe myself."

"It's better than roasting to death," I replied. "And your costume is charming."

More seriously, Anya said, "We're alone here, cut off from any chance of help, and only Set knows where and when we are."

"He'll come looking for us."

"Perhaps not," Anya said. "Perhaps he feels we're safely out of his way."

Painfully I raised myself to a sitting position. "No. He will seek us out and try to destroy us completely. He'll leave nothing to chance. Besides, this is a critical nexus in s.p.a.cetime for him. He won't want us free to tamper with his plans-whatever they are."

Scrambling to her feet, Anya said, "First things first. Food, then shelter. And then-"

Her words were cut off by the sounds of splas.h.i.+ng, close enough to startle us both.

For the first time I took detailed note of where we were. It looked like a swampy forest filled with enormous ferns and the gnarled thick trunks of mangrove trees. Heavy underbrush of grotesque-looking spiky cattails pressed in on us. The very air was sodden, oppressive, steaming hot. No more than ten yards away the spongy ground on which we rested gave way to muddy swamp water flowing sluggishly through stands of reeds and the tangled mangrove roots. The kind of place that harbored crocodiles. And snakes.

Anya was already on her feet, staring into the tangled foliage that choked the water and cut off our view a scant few feet before us. I forced myself up, tottering weakly, and gestured for Anya to climb up the nearest tree.

"What about you?" she whispered.

"I'll try," I breathed back.

Several of the tree trunks leaned steeply and were wrapped with parasitic vines that made it almost easy for me to climb up, even as weak as I was. Anya helped me and we crept out onto a broad branch and stretched ourselves flat on its warm, rough bark. I felt insects crawling over my skin and saw a blue-glinting fly or bee or something something the size of a sparrow buzz past my eyes with an angry whizzing of wings. the size of a sparrow buzz past my eyes with an angry whizzing of wings.

The splas.h.i.+ng sounds were coming closer. Set's troops, already searching for us? I held my breath.

It looked as if a hillside had come loose from the ground and was plodding through the swamp. Mottled mud brown, olive green, and gray, a fifteen-foot-high ma.s.s of living scale-covered flesh pushed through the dense foliage and into the clear area of the swamp where the green-sc.u.mmed water flowed sluggishly.

And I almost laughed. It had a broad flat shout, like a duck's bill. The curvature of its mouth gave it a silly-looking grin permanently built into its face, like an idiotic cartoon character.

No matter the expression on its face, though, the dinosaur was cautiously looking around before it came further out into the open. It reared up on its hind legs, taller than the branch on which we hid, and looked around, sniffing like the huffing of a steam locomotive. Its feet were more like hooves than clawed fighting weapons. Its yellow-eyed gaze swept past the tree where Anya and I were clinging.

With a snort like the air brakes of a diesel bus, the duckbill dropped down to all fours and emerged fully into the lethargic stream. It was some thirty feet long from its snout to the tip of its tail. And it was not alone.

There was a whole procession of duckbilled dinosaurs, a parade of forty-two of them by my count. With ma.s.sive dignity they plodded along the swampy stream, sinking knee deep in the muddy water with each ponderous step.

We watched, fascinated, as the dinosaurs marched down the stream and slowly disappeared into the tangled foliage of the swamp.

"Dinosaurs," Anya said, once they were out of sight and the forest's insects had resumed their chirruping. There was wonder in her voice, and not a little awe.

"We're in the Cretaceous," I told her. "Dinosaurs rule the world here."

"Where do you think they were heading? It looked like a purposeful migration-"

Again she stopped short, held her breath. All the sounds of the forest had stopped once again.

I was still lying p.r.o.ne on the broad tree branch. Anya flattened out once again behind me. We could hear nothing; somehow that bothered me more than the splas.h.i.+ng sounds the duckbills had made.

The foliage parted not more than thirty yards from where we were hiding and the most hideous creature I have ever seen emerged from the greenery. An enormous ma.s.sive head, almost five feet long from snout to base, most of it a gaping mouth armed with teeth the size of sabers. Angry little eyes that somehow looked almost intelligent, like the eyes of a hunting tiger or a killer whale.

It pushed slowly, cautiously into the sluggish stream that the duckbills had used as a highway only a minute earlier.

Tyrannosaurus rex. No doubt of it. Tremendous size, dwarfing Set's fighting carnosaurs that we had seen in Paradise. Withered vestigial forelegs hanging uselessly on its chest. It reared up to its full height, taller than all but the biggest trees, and seemed to peer in the direction that the duckbills had gone. Then it stepped out into the muddy stream on two powerful hind legs, its heavy tail held straight out as if to balance the enormous weight of that fearsome head.

I could feel the terrified tension in Anya's body, pressing against mine. I myself was as rigid as a frightened mouse confronted by a lion. The tyrannosaur loomed over us, its scales striped jungle green and dark gray. Its feet bore claws bigger and sharper than reapers' scythes.

Slowly, stealthily, it moved upstream in the tracks of the duckbills. Just when I was about to breathe again, a second tyrannosaur pushed through the foliage as silently and carefully as the first. And then a third.

Anya nudged me with an elbow and, turning my head slightly, I saw two more of the enormous brutes emerging from the tangled trees on the other side of us.

They were hunting in a team. Stalking the duckbills with the care and coordination of a pack of wolves.

They pa.s.sed us by. If they saw us or sensed us in any way, they gave no indication of it. I had always pictured the tyrannosaurus as a brainless ravening killing machine, snapping at any piece of meat it came across, regardless of its size, regardless of whether the tyrant was hungry or not.

Obviously that was not the case. These brutes possessed some intelligence, enough to work cooperatively in tracking down the duckbills.

"Let's follow them," Anya said eagerly after the last of them had disappeared into the reeds and giant swaying ferns that closed off our view of the waterway.

I must have looked at her as if she were crazy.

"We can stay a good distance away," she added, her lips curving slightly at the expression on my face.

"I have the impression," I replied slowly, "that they can run a good deal faster than we can. And I don't see a tree for us to climb that's tall enough to get away from them."

"But they're after the duckbills, not us. They wouldn't even recognize us as meat."

I shook my head. Brave I may be, but not foolhardy. Anya was as eager as a huntress on the trail of her prey, avid to follow the tyrannosaurs as closely as possible. I feared those monstrous brutes, feared that they would swiftly make us the hunted instead of the hunters.

"We have no weapons, nothing to defend ourselves with," I said. Then I added, "Besides, I'm still weak from..."

Her face went from smug superiority to regretful apology in the flash of instant. "I forgot! Oh, Orion, I'm such a fool... forgive me... I should have remembered...."

I stopped her babbling with a kiss. She smiled and, still looking shamefaced, told me to wait for her while she found something for us to eat. Then she scampered down the tree trunk and headed off across the mossy muddy swampland.

I lay on my back as the sun filtered down through the leaves. A tiny gray furred thing raced across a branch slightly above me, ran down the tree's trunk to the branch where I lay, and stared at me for half a moment, beady eyes black and s.h.i.+ning, long hairless tail twitching nervously. It made no sound at all.

I said to it, "Greetings, fellow mammal. For all I know, you are the grandfather to us all."

It dashed back up the trunk and disappeared in the leafy branches above me.

Clasping my hands behind my head, I waited for Anya to return. She had escaped the core-tap pit by reverting to her true form of pure energy, absorbing the heat that had been roasting our flesh, using Set's own warping device to fling us into this time and place. And reconstructing herself back into human form, unscratched and even newly clothed in the bargain.

An ancient aphorism came unbidden to my mind: Rank hath its privileges. A G.o.ddess, a highly advanced creature evolved from human stock but so far beyond humanity that she had no need of a physical body-that kind of creature could happily go thras.h.i.+ng through a Cretaceous landscape after a pack of tyrannosaurs. Death meant nothing to her.

It was different for me. I have died and been returned to life many times. But only when the Creators willed it. I am their creature, they created me. I am fully human, fully mortal. I have no way of knowing if my death will be final or not, no way of a.s.suring myself that I will be rescued from permanent oblivion and brought to life once more.

The Buddhists would teach, millions of years ahead, that all living creatures are bound up on the great wheel of life, dying and being reincarnated over and over again. The only way out of this constant cycle of pain is to achieve nirvana, total oblivion, escape from the world as complete and final as falling into a black hole and disappearing from the universe forever.

I did not want nirvana. I had not given up all my desires. I loved a G.o.ddess and I desperately wanted her to love me. She said she did, but in those awful timeless moments when she left me falling down that endless burning pit, I realized all over again that she is not human, not the way I am, despite her outward appearance.

I feared that I would lose her. Or worse yet, that she would grow tired of my human limitations and leave me forever.