Bova, Ben - Orion 3 - Orion in the Dying Time

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Orion in the Dying Time (UC)

by Ben Bova

/////

To Lester del Rey, mentor

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this

book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely

coincidental.

ORION IN THE DYING TIME

thereof, in any form.

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc. 49 West 24th Street New York, NY

10010

Cover art by Boris Vallejo ISBN: 0-812-51429-7

First edition: August 1990

First mass market printing: August 1991

Printed in the United States of America 0987654321

"An intelligence knowing, at a given instance of time, all forces acting in

nature, as well as the momentary position of all things of which the universe

consists, would be able to comprehend the motions of the largest bodies of the

world and those of the lightest atoms in one single formula, provided his

intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to him

nothing would be uncertain, both past and future would be present in his

eyes."

—Pierre-Simon de Laplace

What if there were more than one such person?

Prologue

Jith Anya beside me, I walked out of the ancient temple into the warming

sunshine of a new day. Ml around usa lush green garden grew: flowering shrubs

and bountiful fruit trees as far as the eye could see. Slowly we walked along

the bank of the river, the mighty Nile, flowing steadily through all the eons.

"Where in time are we?" I asked. "The pyramids have not been started yet. The

land that will someday be called the Sahara is still a wide 7 grassland

teeming with game. Bands of hunting people ' roam across it freely."

"And this garden? It looks like Eden." She smiled at me. "Hardly that. It is

the home of the f creature whose statue stood on the altar." ?".' I

glanced back at the little stone temple. It was a p; simple building, blocks

of stone fitted atop one another, ; with a flat wooden slat roof.

2 "Someday the Egyptians will worship him as a power-Jfu\ and

dangerous god," Anya told me. "They will call him Set."

"He is one of the Creators?"

;\ "No," she said. "Not one of us. He is an enemy: one of ; those who seek to

twist the continuum to their own t purposes."

PROLOGUE

"As the Golden One does," I said.

She gave me a stern look. "The Golden One, power mad as he is, at least works

for the human race."

"He created the human race, he claims."

"He had help," she replied, allowing a small smile to dimple her cheeks.

"But this other creature. . . Set, the one with the lizard's face?"

Her smile vanished. "He comes from a distant world, Orion, and he seeks to

eliminate us from the continuum."

"Then why are we here, in this time and place?"

"To find him and destroy him, my love," said Anya. "You and I together, Hunter

and Warrior, through all spacetime."

I looked into her glowing eyes and realized that this was my destiny. I am

Orion the Hunter. And with this huntress, that warrior goddess, beside me, all

the universes were my hunting grounds.

BOOK I

PARADISE

A book of verses underneath the bough A jug of wine, a loaf of bread—and thou

Beside me singing in the wilderness— Oh, wilderness were paradise enow!

Chapter 1

nya pulled off her glittering silvery robe and flung it the grassy ground.

Beneath it she wore a metallic suit of the kind I vaguely remembered from

another time, long ages ago. It fit her skintight, from the tops of her silver

boots to the high collar that circled her neck. She was a dazzling goddess

with long dark hair that tumbled past her shoulders and fathomless gray eyes

that held all of time in them.

I wore nothing but the leather kilt and vest from my previous existence in

ancient Egypt. The wound that had killed me then had disappeared from my

chest. Strapped to my right thigh, beneath the kilt, was the dagger that I had

worn in that other time. A pair of rope sandals was my only other possession.

Anya said, "Come, Orion, we must hurry away from this place."

I loved her as eternally and completely as any man has ever worshiped a woman.

I had died many deaths for her

4 BEN BOVA

sake, and she had defied her fellow Creators to be with me time and again, in

every era to which they had sent me. Death could not part us. Nor time nor

space.

I took her hand in mine and we headed off along a wide avenue between the

heavily laden trees.

For what seemed like hours, Anya and I walked through the garden, away from

the bank of the ageless Nile flowing patiently through this land that would

one day be called Egypt. The sun rose high but the day remained deliciously

cool, the air clean and crisp as a temperate springtime afternoon. Cottony

clumps of cumulus clouds dotted the deeply blue sky. A refreshing breeze blew

toward us from what would one day be the pitiless oven of the Sahara.

Despite her denying it, the garden did remind me of the legends I had heard of

Eden. On both sides of us row upon row of trees marched as far as the eye

could see, yet no two were the same. Fruits of all kinds hung heavy on their

boughs: figs, olives, plums, pomegranates, even apples. High above them all

swayed stately palms, heavy with coconuts. Shrubs were set out in carefully

planned beds between the trees, each of them flowering so profusely that the

entire park was ablaze with color.

Yet not another soul was in sight. Between the trees and shrubbery the grass

was clipped to such a uniformly precise height that it almost seemed

artificial. No insects buzzed. No birds flitted among the greenery.

"Where are we going?" I asked Anya.

"Away from here," she replied, "as quickly as we can."

I reached toward a bush that bore luscious-looking mangoes. Anya grabbed at my

hand.

"No!"

"But I'm hungry."

"It will be better to wait until we are clear of this park. Otherwise .. ."

She glanced back over her shoulder.

ORION IN THE DYING TIME 5

"Otherwise an angel will appear with a flaming sword?" I teased.

Anya was totally serious. "Orion, this park is a botanical experimental

station for the creature whose statue we saw in the temple."

"The one called Set?"

She nodded. "We are not ready to meet him. We are completely unarmed,

unprepared."

"But what harm would it be to eat some of his fruit? We could still hurry

along as we ate."

Almost smiling, Anya said, "He is very sensitive about his plants. Somehow he

knows when someone touches them."

"And?"

"And he kills them."

"He doesn't drive them into the outer darkness, to earn their bread by the

sweat of their brows?" I noticed that even though my tone was bantering, we

were walking faster than before.

"No. He kills them. Finally and eternally."

I had died many times, yet the Creators had always revived me to serve them

again in another time, another place. Still I feared death, the agony of it,

the separation and loss that it brought. And a new tendril of fear flickered

along my nerves: Anya was afraid. One of the Creators, a veritable goddess who

could move through eons of time as easily as I was walking along this garden

path—she was obviously afraid of the reptilian entity whose statue had adorned

the temple by the bank of the Nile.

I closed my eyes briefly to picture that statue more clearly. At first I had

thought it was a representation of a man wearing a totem mask: the body was

human, the face almost like a crocodile's. But now as I scanned my memory of

it I saw that this first impression had been overly simple.

The body was humanoid, true enough. It stood on two

6 BEN BOVA

legs and had two arms. But the feet were claws with three toes ending in

sharply hooked talons. The hands had two long scaly-looking fingers with an

opposed thumb for the third digit, all of them clawed. The hips and shoulders

connected in nonhuman ways.

And the face. It was the face of a reptile unlike anything I had seen before:

a snout filled with serrated teeth for tearing flesh; eyes set forward in the

skull for binocular vision; bony projections just above the eyes; a domed

cranium that housed a brain large enough to be fully intelligent.

"Now you begin to realize what we are up against," Anya said, reading my

thoughts.

"The Golden One sent us here to hunt down this thing called Set and destroy

him?" I asked. "Alone? Just the two of us? Without weapons?"

"Not the Golden One, Orion. The entire council of the Creators. The whole

assemblage of them."

The ones whom the ancient Greeks had called gods, who lived in their own

Olympian world in the distant future of this time.

"The entire assemblage," I repeated, "That means you agreed to the task."

"To be with you," Anya said. "They were going to send you alone, but I

insisted that I come with you."

"I am expendable," I said.

"Not to me." And I loved her all the more for it.

"You said this creature called Set—"

"He is not a creature of ours, Orion," Anya swiftly corrected. "The Creators

did not bring him into being, as we did the human race. He comes from another

world and he seeks to destroy the Creators."

"Destroy ... even you?"

She smiled at me, and it was if another sun had risen. "Even me, my love."

ORION IN THE DYING TIME 7

"You said he can cause final death, without hope of revival."

Anya's smile disappeared. "He and his kind have vast powers. If they can alter

the continuum deeply enough to destroy the Creators, then our deaths will be

final and irrevocable."

Many times over the eons I had thought that the release of death would be

preferable to the suffering toil of a life spent in pain and danger. But each

time the thought of Anya, of this goddess whom I loved and who loved me, made

me strive for life. Now we were together at last, but the threat of ultimate

oblivion hung over us like a cloud blotting out the sun.

We walked on until the lines of trees abruptly ended. Standing in the shade of

the last wide-branched chestnut, we looked out on a sea of grass. Wild uncut

grass as far as the limestone cliffs that jutted into the bright summer sky,

marking the edge of the Nile-cut valley. Windblown waves curled through the

waving fronds of grass like green surges of surf rushing toward us.

Silhouetted against the distant cliffs I saw a few dark specks moving slowly.

I pointed toward them and Anya followed my outstretched arm with her eyes.

"Humans," she muttered. "A crew of slaves."

"Slaves?"

"Yes. Look at what's guarding them."

Chapter 2

I focused my eyes intently on the distant figures. I have always been able to

control consciously all the functions of my body, direct my will along the

chain of neural synapses instantly to make any part of my body do exactly what

I wished it to do.

Now I concentrated on the line of human beings trudging across the grassy

landscape. They were being led by something not human.

At first it reminded me of a dinosaur, but I knew that the great reptilians

had become extinct millions of years before this time. Or had they? If the

Creators could twist time to their whim, and this alien called Set had

comparable powers, why not a dinosaur here in the Neolithic era?

It walked on four slim legs and had a long whiplike tail twitching behind it.

Its neck was long, too, so that its total length was nearly twenty feet, about

the size of a full-grown African bull elephant. But it was much less bulky,

slimmer,

ORION IN THE DYING TIME 9

more graceful. I got the impression that it could run faster than a man.

Its scales were brightly colored in bands of red, blue, yellow, and brown.

Horny projections of bone studded its back like rows of buttons. The head at

the end of that elongated neck was small, with a short stubby snout and eyes

set wide apart on either side of a rounded skull. Its eyes were slitted,

unblinking.

It strode up at the front of the little column of humans, and every few

moments turned its long neck back to look at the slaves it led.

And they were slaves, that was obvious. Fourteen men and women, wearing

nothing but tattered loincloths, emaciated ribs showing clearly even at the

distance from which we watched. They seemed exhausted, laboring for breath as

they struggled to keep up to the pace set by their reptilian guard. One of the

women carried a baby in a sling on her back. Two of the men looked like

teenagers to me. There was only one gray head among them. I got the impression

they rarely lived long enough to become gray.

Hiding behind the bole of the chestnut tree at the edge of the garden, we

watched the pitiful little parade for several silent moments.

Then I asked, "Why slaves?"

Anya whispered, "To tend this garden, of course. And the other desires of Set

and his minions."

The woman with the baby stumbled and fell to her knees. The giant reptile

instantly wheeled around and trotted up to her, looming over her. Even from

this distance I could hear the faint wailing of the baby.

The woman struggled to her feet, or tried to. Not fast enough for the guard.

Its slim tail whipped viciously across her back, striking the baby as well.

She screamed and the baby shrieked with pain and terror.

Again the tail flicked back and struck at her. She fell facedown on the grass.

BEN BOVA

I strained forward, but Anya grasped ray arm and held me back.

"No," she whispered urgently. "There's nothing you can do."

The huge lizard was standing over the prostrate mother, bending its neck to

sniff at her unmoving form. The baby still wailed. The other men and women

stood unmoving, mute as statues.

"Why don't they fight?" I seethed.

Anya replied, "With their bare hands against that monster?"

"They could at least run away while its attention is diverted. Scatter—"

"They know better, Orion. They would be hunted down like animals and killed

very slowly."

The lizard was squatting on its two rear legs and tail now, nudging the

woman's body with one of its clawed forepaws. She did not move.

Then the beast pulled the infant out of the sling and lifted it high, swinging

its head upward as it did so. I realized it was going to crunch the baby in

its jaws.

Nothing could hold me back now. I bolted out from the protection of the trees

and raced pell-mell toward the monster, bellowing loudly as I could while I

ran. All my bodily senses went into hyperdrive, as they always do when I face

danger. The world around me seemed to slow down, everything moved with an

almost dreamlike languor.

I saw the lizard holding the squalling baby aloft, saw its head turning toward

me on the end of that long snaky neck, saw its narrow slit eyes register on

me, its head bobbing back and forth as if it were saying no. In reality it was

merely trying to get a fix with both eyes on what was making the noise.

I saw the baby still clutched in the lizard's claws, its tiny legs churning in

the empty air, its blubbering face contorted and red with crying. And the

mother, her naked

ORION IN THE DYING TIME

back livid with the welts from the beast's tail, was pushing herself up on one

elbow in a futile effort to reach her baby.

The lizard dropped the baby and turned to face me, hissing. Its tongue darted

out of its tiny mouth as its head bobbed left and right. The tail flicked as

it dropped to all fours.

I had my dagger in my right hand. It seemed pitifully small against the talons

on the monster's paws, but it was the only weapon I possessed. As I closed the

distance between us I saw the other humans standing behind the lizard. My

brain registered that they were totally cowed, unmoving, not even trying to

get away or distract the beast in any manner. 1 would get no help from them.

The lizard took a few trotting steps toward me, then reared up on its hind

legs like an enraged bear. It towered over me, advancing on those monstrous

clawed hind legs while its neck bent down between its wide-spread forelegs,

hissing at me. Its teeth were small and flat, I saw. Not a flesh-eater. Just a

killing machine.

Suddenly bright yellow frills snapped open on both sides of its neck, making

its head appear twice as large; a trick for frightening enemies, but I knew it

for what it was.

I ran straight at the big lizard and saw its long tail whipping toward my

left. Like a slow-motion dream I watched its tip swinging toward me. I gauged

its speed and jumped over it as it snapped harmlessly beneath my feet. My

impetus carried me straight toward the lizard's scaled underside and I sank my

dagger blade into its belly with every ounce of my strength.

It screeched like a steam whistle and reached to grab me. I ducked under the

clutching claws and plunged my dagger into its hide again.

In the heat of battle I had forgotten about its tail. It caught me this time,

knocking me off my feet. I hit the ground with a thud that made me grunt with

pain and surprise. The lizard reached for me again, but with my

BEN BOVA

senses in hyperdrive I could see its every move easily and rolled away from

those clutching claws.

The tail slashed at me again. I stepped inside its arc and carved a bloody

slice down the lizard's thigh. My blade caught bone and I worked it in deeper,

hoping to disable its knee joint and cripple it. Instead 1 felt its claws

circle around me, cutting into my midsection as it yanked me high into the

air. The dagger was wrenched from my grasp, still stuck in its knee.

It carried me up above its head and I saw those narrow yellow reptilian eyes

staring coldly at me, first one and then the other. Its teeth were not made

for rending flesh but those jaws could crush my body quite easily, I knew.

That was just what the beast was going to do. Its yellow collar frills relaxed

slightly; the monster no longer felt threatened.

I strained to break free of the demon's claws, but I was just as helpless as

the baby had been moments before.

"Orion! Here!"

Anya's voice made me glance down while I struggled in the lizard's powerful

grip. She had come up behind me and was pulling my knife out of the lizard's

knee. Before the beast understood what was happening, she threw the dagger as

expertly as any assassin. It pierced the soft folds beneath the lizard's jaw

with a satisfying thunk.

With its free hand the dragon started to reach for the steel in its throat.

But I was closer and faster. I grabbed the projecting hilt of the dagger and

began working the blade across the lizard's j awl me, back toward the frills

that had snapped fully erect once again. It shrieked and released me, but I

clutched at its neck and swung up behind its head, pulling the dagger free and

jamming it in beneath the base of the skull.

It collapsed as suddenly as a light being switched off. I had severed its

spinal cord. The two of us came crashing down to the grassy ground. I felt

myself bounce and then everything went blank.

Chapter 3

I opened my eyes and focused blearily on Anya's beautiful face. She was

kneeling over me, deep concern etched across her classic features. Then she

smiled.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

I ached in every part of my body. My chest and thighs were slashed from the

lizard's claws. But I consciously clamped down on the capillaries to stop the

bleeding and closed off the pain centers in my brain. I made myself grin up at

her.

"I'm alive."

She helped me to my feet. I saw that only a few moments had passed. The big

lizard was now nothing more than a huge mound of brightly colored scales

stretched out across the grass.

The crew of slaves, however, was something else. The slaves were terrified.

And instead of being grateful, they were angry.

"You have slain one of the guardians!" said a scrawny

BEN BOVA

bearded man, his eyes wide with terror.

"The masters will blame us!" one of the women wailed.

"We will be punished!"

I felt something close to contempt for them. They had the mentality of true

slaves. Instead of thanking me for helping them, they were fearful of their

master's wrath. Without a word I went to the dead beast and pulled my dagger

from the back of its neck.

Anya said to them, "We could not stand idly and watch the monster kill the

baby."

The baby, I saw, was alive. The mother was sitting silently on the grass,

holding the child to her emaciated breast, her huge brown eyes staring at me

blankly. If she was grateful for what I had done, she was hiding it well. Two

long red weals scarred her ribs and back. The baby also had a livid welt

across its naked flesh.

But the scrawny man was tugging at his tangled gray beard and moaning, "The

masters will descend upon us and kill us all with great pain. They will put us

in the fire that never dies. All of us!"

"It would have been better to let the baby die," said another man, equally

gaunt, his hair and beard also filthy and matted. "Better that one dies than

all of us are tortured to death. We can always make more babies."

"If your masters do not find you, they cannot punish you," I said. "If the two

of us can kill one of these overgrown lizards, then all of us can work

together to protect ourselves against them."

"Impossible!"

"Where could we hide that they will not find us?"

"They have eyes that see in the night."

"They can fly through the air and even cross the great river."

"Their claws are sharp. And they have the eternal fire."

ORION IN THE DYING TIME

As they spoke they clustered around Anya and me, as if seeking protection. And

they constantly looked up into the sky and scanned the horizon, as if seeking

the first sign of avenging dragons. Or worse.

Anya asked them in a gentle voice, "What will happen to you if the two of us

go away and leave you alone?"

"The masters will see what has happened here and punish us," said the beard

lugger. He seemed to be their leader, perhaps merely by the fact that he was

their eldest.

"How will they punish you?" I asked.

He shrugged his bony shoulders. "That is for them to decide."

"They will flay the skin from our bodies," said one of the teenagers, "and

then cast us into the eternal fire."

The others shuddered. Their eyes were wide and pleading.

"Suppose we stayed here with you until your masters find us," I asked. "Will

they punish you if we tell them that we killed the beast and you had nothing

to do with it?"

They gaped at us as if we were stupid children. "Of course they will punish

us! They will punish every one of us. That is the law."

I turned to Anya. "Then we've got to get away."

"And bring them with us," she agreed.

I scanned the area where we stood. The Nile had cut a broad, deep valley

through the limestone cliffs that rose like jagged walls on either side of the

river. Atop the cliffs, according to Anya, was a wide grassy plain. If this

region would truly become the Sahara one day, then it must stretch for

hundreds of miles southward, thousands of miles to the west. A flat open

savannah, with only an occasional hill or river-carved valley to break the

plain's flat monotony. Not good country to hide in, especially from creatures

that can fly through the air and see in the dark. But better than being penned

between the river and the cliffs.

BEN BOVA

I had no doubt that the slaves were telling the truth about their reptilian

masters. The beast Anya and I had just slain was a dinosaur, that seemed

certain. Why not winged pterosaurs, then, or other reptiles that can sense

heat the way a pit viper does?

"Are there trees nearby?" Anya was asking them. "Not like the garden, but wild

trees, a natural forest."

"Oh," said the scrawny elder. "You mean Paradise."

Far to the south, he told us, there were forest and streams and game animals

in endless abundance. But the area was forbidden to them. The masters would

not let them return there.

"You lived there once?" I asked.

"Long, long ago," he said wistfully. "When I was even younger than Chron

here." He pointed at the smaller of the two teenage boys,

"How far away is it?"

"Many suns."

Pointing southward, I said, "Then we head for Paradise."

They made no objection, but it was clear to see that they were terrified. The

spirit had been beaten out of them almost totally. Yet even if they did not

want to follow my lead, they had no real alternative. Their masters had

frightened them so completely that it made no difference to them which way

they went; they were certain that they would be caught and punished most

horribly.

My first aim was to get away from the carcass of the lizard. It would take a

while for whoever was in charge of the garden—Set, I supposed—to realize that

one of his trained animals had been killed and a crew of slaves was loose on

the landscape. We had perhaps a few hours, and by then it would be nightfall.

If we could move quickly enough, we might have a chance to survive.

We climbed the cliff face. It was not as difficult as I had feared; the stone

was broken and tiered into what seemed

ORION IN THE DYING TIME

almost like stairways. They puffed and gasped and struggled their way up to

the top with me leading them and Anya bringing up the rear.

At the summit I saw that Anya had been right. An endless rolling plain of

grass stretched out to the horizon, green and lush and seemingly empty of

animal life. A broad treeless savannah that extended all the way across the

northern sweep of Africa to the very shore of the Atlantic. To the south,

according to the gray-bearded slave, was the forest land he called Paradise.

Pointing with my left hand, I commanded, "Southward."

I set as brisk a pace as I could, and the slaves half trotted behind me,

gasping and groaning. They did not complain, perhaps because they did not have

the breath to. But each time I glanced back over my shoulder to see if they

were keeping up, they were glancing back over their shoulders in fear of the

inevitable.

I had hardly worked up a sweat despite the warm sun slanting down on us from

near the western horizon. I associated the sun with the Golden One, the

Creator who called himself Ormazd in one era and Apollo in another, the half-

mad megalomaniac who had created me to hunt down his enemies across the span

of the eons.

"You must let them rest," Anya said, jogging easily beside me through the

knee-high wild grass. "They are exhausted."

I reluctantly agreed. Up ahead I saw a small hill. Once we reached its base I

stopped. All of the slaves immediately sprawled on the ground, wheezing

painfully, rivers of sweat cutting grimy streaks through the dirt that crusted

their bodies.

I climbed to the hilltop, less than thirty feet high, and scanned the view.

Not a tree in sight. Nothing but trackless savannah in every direction. In a

way it was thrilling to be in a time and place where no human feet had yet

beaten out

BEN BOVA

paths and trails. The sky was turning a blazing vermilion now along the

western horizon. Higher up, the blue vault was deepening into a soft violet.

There was already a star shining up there, even though we were far from

twilight.

A single star, brighter than any I remembered seeing in any era. It did not

twinkle at all, but shone with a constant ruddy, almost brownish light, bright

and big enough to make me think that I could see a true disk instead of a mere

pinpoint of light. The planet Mars? No, it was brighter than Mars had ever

been, even in the clear skies of Troy, thousands of years in this era's

future. And its color was darker than the bright ruby red of Mars, a brooding

brownish red, almost like drying blood. Nor could it be Antares: that great

red giant in the Scorpion's heart twinkled like all other true stars.

A shriek of fear startled me out of my astronomical musings.

"Look!"

"He comes!"

"They are searching for us!"

I followed the outstretched emaciated arms of my newfound companions and saw a

pair of winged creatures crisscrossing the darkening sky to the northeast of

us. Pterosaurs, sure enough. Enormous leathery wings flapping lazily every few

heartbeats, then a slow easy glide as their long pointed beaks aimed down

toward the ground. They were searching for us, no doubt of it.

"Stay absolutely still," I commanded. "Lie down on the ground and don't move!"

Winged reptiles flying that high depended on their vision above all other

senses. My crew of scrawny slaves were as brown as dirt. If they did not

attract attention by moving, perhaps the pterosaurs would not recognize them.

They hugged the ground, half-hidden even from my view by the long grass.

But I saw the long rays of the setting sun glittering off

ORION IN THE DYING TIME

Anya's metallic suit. For an instant I wanted to tell her to move into the

shadow of the hill. But there was no time, and the motion would have caught

the beady eyes of the searching pterosaurs. So I stretched myself out flat on

the crest of the little hill and hoped desperately that the winged reptiles

were not brainy enough to realize that a metallic glinting was something they

should investigate further.

It seemed like hours as the giant fliers soared slowly across the sky,

crisscrossing time and again in an obvious hunting pattern. They may have

looked ugly and ungainly on the ground, with their long beaks and balancing

bony crests extending rearward from their heads, but in the air they were

nothing less than magnificent. They flew with hardly any effort at all,

soaring along gracefully on the warm air currents rising from the grassy

plain.

They passed us by at last and disappeared to the west. Once they were out of

sight I got to my feet and started southward again. The slaves followed

eagerly, without a grumble. Fear inspired them with new strength.

As the sun touched the green horizon I spotted a clump of trees in the

distance. We hurried toward them and saw that a small stream had cut a shallow

gorge through the grassland. Its muddy banks were overshadowed by the leafy

trees.

"We can camp here for the night," I said. "Under the trees, with plenty of

water."

"And what do we eat?" whined the elder.

I looked down at him, more in exasperation than anger. A true slave, waiting

for someone to provide him with food rather than trying to get it for himself.

"What is your name?" I asked.

"Noch," he said, his eyes suddenly fearful.

Clasping his thin shoulder in my hand, I said, "Well, Noch, my name is Orion.

I am a hunter. Tonight I will find you something to eat. Tomorrow you begin to

learn for yourselves how to hunt."

BEN BOVA

Cutting a small branch from one of the trees, I whittled as sharp a point as I

could on one end while the young Chron watched me avidly.

"Do you want to learn how to hunt?" I asked him.

Even in the shadows of dusk I could see his eyes gleam. "Yes!"

"Then come with me."

It could hardly be called hunting. The small game that lived by the stream had

never encountered humans before. The animals were so tame that I could walk

right up to them and spear one of them as it drank at the water's edge. Its

companions scampered away briefly, but soon returned. It took only a few

minutes to bag a brace of raccoons and three rabbits.

Chron watched eagerly. Then I let him have the makeshift spear, and after a

few clumsy misses, he nailed a ground squirrel, squealing and screeching its

last breath.

"That was the enjoyable part," I told him. "Now we must skin our kills and

prepare them for cooking."

I did all that work, since we had only the one knife and I had no intention of

letting any of the others touch it. As I skinned and gutted our tiny catch, to

the avid eyes of the whole little tribe, I worried about a fire. If there were

reptiles out there that could sense heat the way a rattlesnake or a cobra

does, even a small cooking fire would be like a blazing beacon to them.

But there seemed to be no such reptiles in the area. The pterosaurs had passed

us by hours earlier, and I had seen no other reptilians in this open savannah,

not even the tiniest of lizards. Nothing but small mammals—and we few humans.

I decided to risk a fire, just large enough for cooking our catch, to be

extinguished as soon as the cooking was done.

Anya surprised me by showing she could light a fire with nothing more than a

pair of sticks and some sweat.

ORION IN THE DYING TIME

The others gaped in astonishment as wisps of smoke and then a flicker of flame

rose from Anya's rubbing sticks.

Gray-bearded old Noch, kneeling next to her, said in an awed voice, "I

remember my father making fire in the same way—before he was killed by the

masters and I was taken away from Paradise."

"The masters have the eternal fire," said a woman's voice from out of the

flickering shadows.

But none of the others seemed concerned with that now, not with the delicious

aroma of roasting meat making them salivate and their stomachs rumble.

After we had eaten and most of the tribe had drifted off into sleep I asked

Anya, "Where did you learn to make fire?"

"From you," she answered. Looking into my eyes, she added, "Don't you

remember?"

I could feel my brows knitting with concentration. "Cold—I remember the snow

and ice, and a small team of men and women. We were wearing uniforms.. .."

Anya's eyes seemed to glow in the night shadows. "You do remember! You can

break through the programming and remember earlier existences."

"I don't remember much," I said.

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OrionintheDyingTime(UC)byBenBova/////ToLesterdelRey,mentorThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisbookarefictitious,andanyresemblancetorealpeopleoreventsispurelycoincidental.ORIONINTHEDYINGTIMECopyright©1990byBenBovaAllrightsreserved,includingtherighttoreproducethisbook,orportio...

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Bova, Ben - Orion 3 - Orion in the Dying Time

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