We made it to the top, where the setting sun was still above the horizon. Looking below, I could see that most of the valley was in shadow now. And the stream was spreading its growing fingers in all directions, rapidly flooding the grain fields and edging toward the huts the clans had built. The waterfall at the far end of the valley was lost in mist now, and I could hear its thundering roar even from this distance.

Working quickly, we tied the ropes to trees and dropped them down to the people waiting below. I ordered the boys to remain where they were, then rappelled down the cliff and started the others climbing upward.

Dal watched with unabashed admiration as the people hauled themselves up the steep rocky wall, pulling hand-over-hand along the ropes.

"Have you seen Ava?" I asked.

"No..."

"Here we are!" she called.

I looked up to see her and the two girls carrying big leather sacks on their backs, grinning wearily as they neared us.

"We've got as much of the cut grain as we could carry," she said happily. "All the seeds that you told us about, Orion. And roots and berries, everything we could find. We're bringing it with us. We'll plant the seed next spring."

I could feel myself smiling broadly. Glancing up at the smoldering volcano, I thought that Ahriman had lost. The idea of agriculture had found good soil here, and it had taken root. And the legends that would be handed down from generation to generation for hundreds of centuries before writing was invented would garble the story of Ararat: it was a woman, not Noah, and she saved the species of grain and fruits that would feed the human race, not of animals who could escape the flood under their own power. Mythology was usually based on a kernel of fact, but what distortions the male-dominated tribes would make of this story!

All through the deepening twilight the clans people worked as they had never worked before. The volcano's rumblings grew stronger, angrier, and it began to spout black smoke streaked with red flame. The sky turned black, and flashes of lightning strobed the darkness, frightening the people even more. By ones and twos and threes they climbed, scrabbled, groped, inched their way up the ropes we had set out along the cliff face, and hauled themselves up to the safety of the top. The sturdiest of the teen-agers and young men helped the older and less agile. Babies rode on men's backs. I made the journey up and back down again several times, helping everyone I could.

Dal sat on the rock at the base of the cliff, keeping the people organized down there, calming their fears and holding their panic at bay.

Ararat was growling at us now, and its sullen red glow lit the evening hours for us. I could see boulders the size of a house flying up out of its crater, and burning tongues of lava spilling over the lip of the volcano's cone. The ground trembled with each roar of the mountain, but there was no true earthquake-not yet.

Slightly more than half the people had made it to the top of the cliff when the flood burst upon the valley. The rock wall where the stream had been gushing forth exploded in a mammoth shower of water and steam, hurling boulders halfway down the valley. The cistern where I had been earlier that day had not only reached its overflow point, but the heat from the tectonic forces that Ahriman had unleashed had turned the cistern into a mammoth tea kettle. The water had finally come to a boil and the expanding steam blew open the side of the mountain like a kiloton charge of explosives.

A wall of white water blasted down the valley, roaring like all the demons of hell let loose at once. Steam hissed into the dark sky and a hot rain began to fall on us.

I was halfway down the cliff, returning to help another pair of people up to safety, when it happened. I could see it all clearly, despite the darkness, and I saw the people still down at the base of the cliff standing frozen in terror as that all-consuming wave hurtled toward us.

"Move, move, move!" I bellowed, letting go of the rope and jumping the rest of the way down the cliff, landing with a shock on the balls of my feet and rolling over twice to absorb the impact.

The people jerked to frantic life, dozens of men and women suddenly scratching up the cliff to save their lives. Others clambered down from the top, risking their lives without a moment's thought to help their friends and relatives.

Dal got to his feet and leaned heavily on a spear. He was staring at the angry flood of frothing hot water as it surged toward us, swallowing everything in its path.

The volcano erupted truly now, and the ground shook hard enough to knock people loose from the ropes as they climbed up the cliff. They fell; bones broke. Screams of agony and terror pierced the darkness over the roar of the flood and the volcano.

I helped those I could, racing among the fallen to set them on their feet and start them up toward the top again. Teen-aged boys scrambled down to help others.

Then I saw Dal standing there watching us, his face set in a stubborn mask of self-control. He neither frowned nor cried for help. He leaned on his gnarled spear shaft, his injured leg held out stiffly, as he watched his people climbing to safety. Behind him, the raging hot waters of the flood roared and thundered closer, closer.

CHAPTER 32.

With a yell, I grabbed one of the dangling vine ropes and ran for Dal. He raised one arm to protest, but I grabbed him and looped the rope under his shoulders before he could stop me.

"Hold on to the spear," I shouted over the roar of the approaching flood. "Use the strength of your arms to make up for your bad leg."

"I can't make it!" he shouted back. "Save yourself, Orion!"

"We'll both make it. Come on!"

I half-carried, half-tugged him to the base of the cliff and gave him an upward shove. Whoever was on the other end of the rope, up at the top, understood what I was trying to do and began hauling in the rope. Dal used his spear like a crutch as I scrabbled up the cliff beside him. The rain was making the rock slippery, and I nearly fell more than once.

We were barely a quarter of the way up the cliff face when the flood smashed against the base of the rocks, splashing boiling hot foam against me and sending Dal spinning on the end of the rope. He lost his spear and screamed with sudden pain. I automatically clamped down on my own pain receptors as the boiling water seared my legs. Grabbing Dal, I pushed and grunted and shoved the two of us higher. The water clawed at us, trying to drag us down into its steaming clutches.

I got one hand on the rope and gripped Dal around the shoulders with my other arm. Slowly, slowly, we inched up the cliff as the water rose behind us, seeking us, pulling at us, cooking the flesh of our legs as we desperately climbed toward safety.

Suddenly I heard Ava's voice shouting commands, and we were lifted by what could only be the strength of many hands. Miraculously, it seemed, that strength hauled us roughly up the cliff, out of the water's boiling grip, and landed us wet, burned, exhausted at the top of the cliff.

I lay there like a fish hauled out of the sea, squinting up through the hot rain at a ring of faces peering down.

"Are you all right?" Ava asked over and over. "Are you all right?"

It was Dal that she was talking to. I sat up, wincing, as I allowed the pain receptors in my legs to resume their normal function. Both legs were scalded, but the damage did not seem too serious. Ava was kneeling beside Dal, already smearing some kind of ointment over his reddened legs.

He turned to me. "You saved me, Orion."

"As you once saved me."

"I owe you my life," he said.

With a shake of my head, I said, "No, you owe your life to your people. Lead them well, Dal. Find another valley and make it your own."

Ava turned to me. "We will. We will live as you told us to live, Orion. We will start a new life."

I should have felt happy, but there was nothing inside me except the pain of realizing that Ava would go with Dal, that she had to, and that I would be left alone once again.

I turned to peer through the darkness at the flood surging below us. It frothed and lapped at me, as if angry that I had escaped and trying to reach higher to get at me.

"You'd better take the clans to higher ground," I said, "until the flood goes down."

"Up the mountain," Dal agreed.

"But it's shaking, burning," Ava said.

"That won't hurt us," said Dal, sure of himself once again. "When the flood is over, we will find a new valley to live in."

"Good," I said. The rain was slackening, but I could still hear the flood waters boiling below us. "You'd better get going now, without delay."

"But what about you?" Ava asked.

"I'll stay here. You don't need me any longer."

"But..."

"Go," I commanded.

Reluctantly, they left. They made a litter for Dal and said a brief little prayer for those who had been killed, and then the band moved off, many of them limping, toward higher ground.

I sat there, willing my scalded legs to heal, waiting for the inevitable. I looked out across the valley in the deepening darkness, lit now only by the surly glow of the volcano's fiery grumbling. The flood waters hissed and growled below me. I could feel the steam wafting up from their surface. The whole valley had been turned into a boiling cauldron. Ahriman had done his work well-but not well enough.

"You think you've won." It was his labored, rasping voice in the darkness.

Turning toward him, I said, "I know I've won."

His ponderous bulk seemed to congeal out of the shadows to loom over me as I sat on the ground, my legs poking straight out awkwardly.

"Nothing will grow in that valley for a long, long time," he said. "Your superstitious little band of hunters will be so afraid of returning to it that..."

"They won't have to return," I interrupted. "They've brought the seeds of their grains with them."

His red eyes flashed. "What?"

"And they have the seed of a new idea in their heads," I went on. "You've lost, Ahriman. Those hunters will survive. They'll turn into farmers and flourish."

He did not bother to argue or to deny the truth of what I had told him. He did not rant or shout with rage. He stood there in silence for a long time, thinking, calculating, planning.

"It's checkmate. Dark One," I said. "There's no way you can stop them now. You've done your worst, and they've stood up to it."

"Because of you," he rumbled.

"I helped them, yes."

"For the last time, Orion." He strode swiftly to me and picked me right up off the ground, his powerful hands squeezing my ribs like a pair of steel vises. He held me up in the air, my legs dangling uselessly.

"For the last time!" Ahriman shouted, and he threw me over the edge of the cliff, down into the boiling water below.

But in that last instant I grabbed him around his bull neck and held on with all my strength. For half an instant we hung there on the edge of the cliff, the two of us teetering there in the darkness, and then we toppled together downward into the raging water.

The boiling water was a shock of agony as we plunged into its depths. We've beaten you again, I exulted silently as the water hissed and bubbled all around me. And maybe this time is the final encounter; maybe this time I've finished you once and for all.

The water surged over me, dragging me down into its hot depths, boiling me, flaying the flesh from my bones. I gave way to pain and death, my last hope being that this would truly be the end of it all.

INTERLUDE.

The gray-eyed goddess who called herself Anya took on her human form and stood at the crest of an ice cliff, her body encapsulated in an invisible bubble of energy that protected it from the frigid cold of this frozen world.

Far below her she could see an army of humans and their robots working furiously, scurrying like ants across the iron-hard plain, as they built the fragile towers that soared high into the inky sky.

Turning, she saw the mammoth bulk of Saturn hanging overhead, resplendent in its gaudy colors and impossibly beautiful rings. The sky was as clear as the pristine vacuum of space itself, and she could see three of Saturn's smaller moons etched boldly against the star-strewn blackness of the heavens.

She felt the Golden One's presence before his human form materialized beside her. She held her seething anger in check until he completed the transformation and stood on the ice cliff's edge in solid flesh, clad in a radiant golden robe decorated with starbursts that shimmered with all the colors of the spectrum when the robe moved.

"You kept me separated from him," Anya said, unable to hold back her temper any longer.

The Golden One did not look at her. Instead, he watched the work of the builders far below them.

"My creatures have learned how to build creatures of their own," he murmured, almost as if talking to himself. "But how limited their robots are. How clumsy."

Anya knew that she could not touch him, but she stepped in front of the Golden One, confronting him. "You forced me to stay apart from him. I lived a whole lifespan with those savages..."

"Did you enjoy it?"

She spat an exasperated sigh into the frigid night.

The Golden One smiled. "You said you loved those creatures. You were willing to live hundreds of lifespans among them."

"With him! With Orion."

"No," said the Golden One. "You were becoming too attached to him. And he to you. I told you that you were weakening him. I cannot allow that."

"It was cruel of you," she said, her voice sinking lower. "To be so close to him and yet unable to truly love him. It was very very cruel to treat him that way." cruel to treat him that way."

"He has a mission to accomplish. I created Orion for that goal. I can't have him sidetracked by the hormones that pump through the body I gave him."

Anya began to reply, but hesitated and then fell silent. The Golden One turned back to watch the work proceeding on the plain below them.

"They call this world Titan. They think of it as a frigid wasteland, dark and dangerous. If they didn't wear those ludicrous suits and helmets, they would die instantly."

"But you are the one who forced them to come here, to build those towers."

"Yes, and when they're finished with that, I'll get them to alter the atmosphere enough to make it opaque to their space probe instruments. They must not discover these towers too soon."

Anya stared at him, puzzled.

"The creatures down there are from a period much closer to The End," the Golden One explained. "They are the distant ancestors of the humans who will discover these towers and puzzle over their meaning."

"What are the towers for? Why are they being built?"

"Why, to please me, of course."

She gave him an angry glare. "Your ego grows larger and larger. You really think you are a god, don't you, O mighty Ormazd?"

His smile faded only slightly. "The machinery in those towers will make subtle alterations in the climate of Earth. The planet will experience what my creatures will call an Ice Age. It's all part of my plan. The Dark One can manipulate rivers and volcanoes? I will manipulate the output of the Sun and the climate of Earth for hundreds of thousands of years!"

"And you will keep that knowledge from your own creatures?" she asked.

"Yes. They are not prepared to understand."