Orion in the Dying Time (10 page)

I had long since clamped down on the nerve impulses signaling pain and fatigue to my brain, but my arm felt heavier with each stroke, slower. A reptilian's claws raked my chest, another tore at my face. It was the end.

Almost.

In the midst of the blood and battle I finally realized that they were not trying to kill us. They were dying by the dozens to obey Set's implacable command. He wanted us alive. Quick death was not his plan for us.

I would not let him get his vicious hands on Anya again. With the last painful gasp of my ebbing strength I grasped Anya around the waist and pushed the two of us over the top of the railing and into the yawning, gaping mouth of the red-hot pit that ended in the surging molten fury of the earth's seething core.

Down and down we plummeted. Down toward the molten, surging heart of the earth.

And death.

BOOK II

PURGATORY

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne

In a strange city lying alone

Far down within the dim West,

Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best

Have gone to their eternal rest.

CHAPTER 13

Down and down and down we plunged.

Lit by the sullen red glower from deep below us, Anya and I were weightless, in free-fall, like parachutists or astronauts in zero gravity. We seemed to be hanging in mid-air, floating eerily on nothingness, slowly roasting in the blistering heat welling up from below. A fiery wind like the blast from a bellowing rocket engine howled past us. We could not breathe, could not speak.

I willed my body to draw oxygen from the vacuoles within its cells: a temporary expedient, but it was better than drawing in a breath of burning air that would sear my lungs. I hoped Anya could do the same.

The brief glimpse into Set's mind that I had obtained told me that this seemingly endless tube we were falling through reached down toward the earth's core, where the raging heat powered a warping device that might fling us into another spacetime. That was our only chance to escape Set and the slow death he had planned for us. That, or death itself in the searing embrace of molten iron that was rushing up toward us.

I gripped Anya tightly to me and she wrapped her arms around my neck. There were no words. Our embrace said everything we needed to say. I thought that Set and his reptilian minions could never know this kind of closeness, this sharing of body contact, flesh to flesh, that is uniquely mammalian.

Squeezing my eyes shut, I tried to recall the sensations of previous passages through spacetime warps. With all my strength I tried to make contact with the Creators, to will the two of us into the safety of their domain in the far future. But it was useless. We continued to plummet toward the earth's core, clinging to each other in our free-fall weightlessness as the heat boiling up from below began to cook our flesh.

Energy. It takes the titanic energy of a planet's fiery core or the churning radiant surface of a star to distort the flow of spacetime and create a warp in the continuum. The closer we got to the molten iron at the bottom of Set's core tap, the closer we got to the energy needed for the warp. Yet that same energy was killing us, driving the breath from our bodies, charring our flesh.

We had no choice. I forced my body to drain every drop of moisture it could generate to cover my body with sweat, desperately hoping that the thin film of moisture would absorb the heat blasting at me and save me from being broiled alive, at least for a few moments longer.

Anya's face, so close to my own, began to shimmer in the burning heat. I thought my eyes were melting away, but then I felt her fading into nothingness in my arms. Her body seemed to waver and grow transparent.

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 goddess, 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 hell 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 goddess who had abandoned me.

Anya had abandoned me. There was a limit to how much a goddess 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 gods and goddesses 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 space. 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 space, 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 landmass. 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 landmass. 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 landmass

began to break apart. In my mind I could hear the titanic 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 rushing 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 shining through the swaying fronds of gigantic ferns that bowed gracefully in the passing 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 hell 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 sunshine after a rain.

A flood of wonder and joy and fathomless inexpressible gratitude 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 slashing 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 refreshing 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 spacetime 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 spacetime 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 splashing, 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 the size of a sparrow buzz past my eyes with an angry whizzing of wings.

The splashing 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 mass of living scale-covered flesh pushed through the dense foliage and into the clear area of the swamp where the green-scummed water flowed sluggishly.

And I almost laughed. It had a broad flat snout, 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.