Orion in the Dying Time (11 page)

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 massive 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 prone on the broad tree branch. Anya flattened out once again behind me. We could hear nothing; somehow that bothered me more than the splashing 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 massive 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 passed 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 shining, 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 goddess, 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 thrashing 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 assuring 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 goddess 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.

CHAPTER 14

For three days we remained in the steaming swamp while I recuperated and regained my strength. I felt certain that Anya and I were the only human beings on the whole earth in this time—although she was actually more than merely human.

The swamp was miserably hot and damp. The ground squelched when we walked; every step we took was a struggle through thick ferns and enormous broad leaves bigger than any elephant's ear that clung wetly to our bodies when we tried to push through them. Vines looped everywhere, choking whole trees, spreading across the spongy ground to trip us.

And it stank. The stench of decay was all around us; the swamp smelled of death. The constant heat was oppressive, the drenching humidity sapped my strength.

I felt trapped, imprisoned, in a glistening world of sodden green. The jungle pressed in on us like a living entity, squeezing the breath from our lungs, hiding the world from our view. We could not see more than a few yards ahead in any direction unless we waded out into the oozing mud of midstream, and even then the jungle greenery closed off our view so quickly that a herd of brontosaurs could have been passing by without our seeing them.

There was little to eat. The plants were all strange to us; hardly any of them seemed to bear anything that looked edible. The only fish I could see in the dark water were tiny flitting glints of silver, too small and fast for us to catch. We subsisted on frogs and wriggling furry insect grubs, nauseating but nourishing enough. Barely.

It rained every evening, huge torrents of downpour from the gray towering clouds that built up during the sopping heat of the afternoons. My skin felt wet all the time, as if it were crawling, puckering, in the unremitting humidity. After three days and nights of being soaked and steamed, even Anya began to look bedraggled and unhappy.

The sky was gray almost all the time. The one night it cleared enough to see the stars, I wished it had not. Peering through the tangled foliage while Anya slept, I tried to find the familiar patterns of recognizable constellations. All that I saw was that dismal red star hanging high in the dark sky, as if spying down on us.

I searched for Orion, my namesake among the stars, and could not find the constellation. Then I saw the Big Bear, and my heart sank. It was different, changed from the Dipper I had known in other eras. Its big square "bowl" was slim and sharp-angled, more like a gravy pitcher than a ladle. Its curving handle was sharply bent.

We were so many millions of years removed from any period I had known that even the eternal stars had changed. I stared at the mutated Dipper, desolate, downcast, filled with a dreadful melancholy such as I had never known before.

Other than an occasional shrewlike gray furry creature that seemed to live high in the trees, we did not even see another mammal. Reptiles, though, were everywhere.

One morning Anya was filling a gourd at the edge of the muddy stream when suddenly a gigantic crocodile erupted from the water where it had been lurking, its massive green scaly body hidden perfectly among the reeds and cattails with nothing but its horn-topped eyes and nostrils showing above the surface. Anya had to run as fast as she could and clamber up the nearest tree to escape the crocodile's rush; despite its spraddling short legs, it nearly caught her.

There were turtles in the swamp and long-tailed lizards the size of pigs and plenty of snakes gliding through the water and slithering up the trees.

This world of the Cretaceous, however, was truly ruled by dinosaurs. Not all of them were giants. The second day Anya, using a thick broken branch for a club, tried to kill a two-legged dinosaur that was only as big as an overgrown chicken. It scampered away from her, whistling like a teakettle. Accustomed to dodging its larger cousins, it easily escaped Anya's attempts to catch it.

From our tree perch I saw one afternoon a waddling reptile plated with bony armor like an armadillo, although it was almost the size of a pony. It dragged a short tail armed with evil-looking spikes.

Insects buzzed and crawled around us all the time but, oddly, none seemed to bother us. I thought this strange at first, until I realized that there were so few mammals in this landscape that hardly any insects had developed an interest in sucking warm blood.

The third night I told Anya that I felt strong enough to travel.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. It's time we left this soggy hellhole."

"And go where?" she asked.

I shrugged. The evening cloudburst had just ended. We sat huddled on a high branch beneath a rude makeshift shelter of giant leaves that I had put together. It had not been much help; the torrents of rain had wormed through the leaves and wet us anyway. The last remnants of the rain dripped from a thousand leaves and turned our green world into a glittering, dewy symphony of pattering little splashes. Anya's once-sparkling robe was sodden and gray. My leather vest and kilt clung to me like clammy, smelly rags.

"Anywhere would be better than this," I replied.

She agreed with a nod.

"And probably as far away from this location as we can get," I added.

"You're worried about Set?"

"Aren't you?"

"I suppose I should be. I can't help thinking, though, that he won't bother with us. We're trapped here, why spend the effort to seek us out and kill us? We're going to die here, my love, in this forsaken miserable time, and no one will save us."

In the shadows of dusk her lovely face seemed somber, her voice low with dejection. I had been content to live a normal human lifetime with Anya in the Neolithic, but the cool forest of Paradise was very different from this rotting fetid jungle. Even though the people there had turned traitor against us, there were human beings in Paradise. Here we were totally alone, with no human companionship except each other.

"We're not dead yet," I said. "And I don't intend to give Set any help in killing us."

"Why would he bother?"

"Because this is a crucial nexus for him," I told her. "He knows where his spacetime warp was set, he knows we're here. As soon as he has the device operating again he'll come looking for us, to make certain that we don't upset whatever it is he's planning for this point in the continuum."

Anya saw the logic of it, but still she seemed reluctant to take action.

"We'll be better off out of this damned swamp," I added. "This is no place to be. Let's start out tomorrow morning, first light. We'll head upland, to where it's cooler and dryer."

In the deepening shadows I saw her eyes sparkle with sudden delight. "We can follow the path that the duckbills took. They were heading toward higher ground, I'm certain."

"With the tyrannosaurs after them," I muttered.

"Yes," Anya said, some of her old enthusiasm back in her voice. "I'm curious to see if they caught up with the duckbills."

"There are times," I said, "when you seem absolutely bloodthirsty."

"Violence is part of human makeup, Orion. I am still human enough to feel the excitement of the hunt. Aren't you?"

"Only when I'm the hunter, not the hunted."

"You are my hunter," she said.

"And I've found what I was searching for." I pulled her to me.

"Being the prey isn't all that terrible," Anya whispered in my ear. "Sometimes."