CHAPTER 43.

Outlived my usefulness. I realized that if Ormazd had created me, had placed me in all those different eras to hunt down Ahriman, had brought me through death many times over-he could also end my existence, totally and forever.

I stared at him. "Is that the reward you will give me? Final death?"

"Orion, try to understand," he said, almost placatingly. "What you desire is truly impossible. Anya is not a human being, no more than I am. We take on human form to make ourselves familiar to you."

"But Adena... Agla..."

"They are are human," Anya said. "Adena was created in a time that is far in the future of any era you have known..." human," Anya said. "Adena was created in a time that is far in the future of any era you have known..."

"Fifty thousand years in the future from the twentieth century," I said, recalling what Ormazd had told me when I had first met him.

"Exactly," Anya said. "She was created at the same time you yourself were."

"Then..."

"And the others, Aretha, Ava, Agla-they were born of human mothers, just as all humans have been, since Adena's band of soldiers struggled to survive in the Age of Ice."

"But they were you."

"Yes. I inhabited their bodies for their entire lifetimes. I became human."

"For me?"

"Not at first. In the beginning it was merely... curiosity, a novelty, a chance to see what Ormazd's handiwork was like. But then I began to feel what they they feel-the pain, the fear-and then I found you, and I began to understand what love is." feel-the pain, the fear-and then I found you, and I began to understand what love is."

I turned to Ormazd. "You would prevent us from being together?"

His taunting grin had long disappeared. He seemed deeply concerned now, somber. "I can give you a full, rich lifetime, Orion. Many lifetimes, if you wish. But I cannot make you into one of us. That is impossible."

"Because you refuse to make it possible," I replied, bitterly.

He shook his head. "No. It is impossible because not even I can accomplish it. I cannot transform a bacterium into a bird. I cannot turn a man into a god."

Turning back to Anya, I pleaded, "Is he telling me the truth? There's nothing that can be done?"

"Try to understand, Orion," she said gently.

"How can I understand?" I felt rage boiling within me. I glanced at the imprisoned form of Ahriman and knew a little of the hatred burning in his eyes. "You haven't allowed me to understand. You created me to do a job for you, and now that it's finished, you're finished with me."

"No," Anya said. "That's not..."

But Ormazd overrode her. "Accept what cannot be changed, Orion. You have done well. The human race will worship you, through all of time, in one form or another. They will forget about me, but they will always remember Prometheus."

"Why?" I asked. "Why did you create me? Why create humankind? Why fight The War against Ahriman's people? Why did you cause all this agony and bloodshed?"

Ormazd fell silent. His golden radiance gathered around him almost like a protective cloak as he lowered his head and refused to answer me.

But Anya's gray eyes flashed with silver flame. She stared at Ormazd until he lifted his eyes to meet hers.

"He deserves to be answered, God of Light," she said, in a voice I could barely hear.

Ormazd did not reply. He merely shook his head slowly in refusal.

"Then I will tell him," Anya insisted.

"What good will it do?" Ormazd said. "He already hates me. Do you want him to hate you, too?"

"I want him to understand," she said.

"You are a fool."

"Perhaps I am. But he deserves to know the entire truth."

The golden glow of Ormazd's aura began to pulsate and redden at its fringes. The light grew brighter, brighter, until it was impossible to look directly at him. His human body faded into the brilliance and the radiant golden sphere, a miniature fiery sun, then rose above our heads and dwindled in the featureless distance until it was no more than a star-like point of light against the far sky.

I turned back toward Anya.

"Are you prepared to see the truth, Orion?" she asked. Her eyes held all the sadness of time in them.

"Will it mean that I must lose you?" I asked.

"You must lose me in any case, Orion. Ormazd spoke truthfully: you cannot become one of us."

I was tempted to ask her to end it all right there and then, to put me out of existence, out of pain. But, instead, I heard my voice replying, "If I must exist without you, then at least let me know why I was created."

"You were created to hunt Ahriman," she answered.

"Yes, but why why? I don't believe the story Ormazd told me. Ahriman couldn't possibly destroy the universe. It's all nonsense."

"No, my love," Anya said gently. "It is all quite true."

"Then show me! Let me understand."

Her beautiful face was utterly serious as she nodded to me. "You will have to enter the time stream again. I must send you to a place in space-time that is before the Age of Ice, before human beings existed on Earth."

"Very well, send me. I'm willing."

She drew a slow, hesitant breath. "I will not be there with you. Not in any form. You will be alone-except for..."

"Except for whom?"

You will see," Anya said. "Suffice it for now to know that there will be no other human beings on Earth, no creatures like yourself."

I realized. "Ormazd won't have created them yet."

"That's right."

"But there will be others there," I guessed. And then a flash of recognition lit my mind. "Ahriman's people! They They will be on Earth!" will be on Earth!"

Anya did not reply, but I could see in her eyes that it was true. I turned my gaze from her to Ahriman, imprisoned in his web of energy, and saw his eyes burning with a fury that could destroy worlds, if ever it got free.

CHAPTER 44.

Anya instructed me to close my eyes, and not open them again until I felt the wind against my skin. For a moment I stood there, unmoving, my gaze fixed on her lovely, somber face.

This would be the last time I'd see her, I knew. There would be no return from this journey.

I wanted to take her in my arms, to kiss her and tell her for one last time that I loved her more than life itself. But she was a goddess, not a human woman. I could love her as Agla the witch, or Ava the huntress. I could love Aretha, whom I barely knew, or Adena, as she led her troops in battle. But this silver-clad goddess was beyond me, and I knew it. Ormazd had been right: a bacterium cannot become a bird; a goddess cannot fall in love with a monkey.

I closed my eyes.

"Keep them closed until you feel the wind against you," her sweet voice told me.

I nodded to show her I understood. Then I felt the softest touch against my cheek. Her fingertips, perhaps. Or perhaps the faintest brush of her lips. I burned for her, but found myself paralyzed. I could not unclench my fists, could not move a step. My eyes would not open even if I willed them to.

"Good-bye, my love," she whispered. But I was unable to answer.

For the briefest instant I remained locked in frozen darkness, deprived of all sensory inputs. I could see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing.

My hearing returned first. A soft, sighing sound came to me, the whisper of something I had not heard for so long that I thought I had forgotten it: a gentle breeze rustling the leafy limbs of trees.

I felt that breeze on my face, warm, kind, loving. Opening my eyes, I saw that I stood in the midst of a forest of gigantic trees-sequoias, from the looks of them. Their immense boles were wider than a house, and they stretched up toward the blue, cloud-flecked sky like the pillars of a giant's cathedral.

Except for the sighing of the breeze, the forest seemed silent to me. But as I stood there lost in wonder beneath the shade of those gigantic leafy boughs, I began to recognize the sounds of life in the background: bird calls echoing through the forest, the gurgling of a fast-rushing stream off in the distance, the scampering of a small furry creature through the sparse underbrush between the enormous tree trunks.

What a world this was! How Dal and Ava and their clan would have loved it here. Even Subotai and the High Khan, crusty old warriors though they were, would have happily settled themselves here. Everything a man could desire was here-except other people.

I wandered through the forest for hours, picking berries from a bush, drinking from that noisy brook, reveling in the peace and joy of a world untainted by war and killing.

Slowly I began to wonder if Anya had not sent me here to get rid of me as gently as she could. It was a good world, an easy place to live in except for the absence of companions. Was this her way of exiling me, removing me from her presence? A pleasant Coventry? A warm and lovely Siberia? I would live out my solitary existence here in comfort, and when I finally died, I would no longer trouble her. Like putting a pet to sleep when you no longer need or want it.

I shook my head. No, she would not lie to me. She sent me here so that I might understand the whole scheme of things. She placed me here for a reason, not merely to get me out of her way, I told myself. I insisted to myself. I had to believe that. There was nothing else for me to cling to.

The sun was setting behind hills that I could barely make out, far off in the distance, through the stout columns of the trees. The shadows lengthened into dusk, but the air was still warm and fragrant with flowers. I wore a sleeveless shirt and knee-length pants made of hides. My feet were shod with thonged sandals of leather. Yet, even as twilight deepened into night, I did not feel cold. The ground was mossy and soft; I stretched out on it and fell asleep almost at once.

In my dreams I saw this early Earth as a god might see it, as Anya and Ormazd undoubtedly saw it, a beautiful blue sphere set against the cold darkness of unfathomable space, decked with bands and swirls of clouds that gleamed purest white. I recognized the rough outlines of Europe and Africa, the Americas and Asia, set against the glittering deep blue of the oceans. The Atlantic seemed narrower than it should be, and Australia was not yet an island, but this was Earth, clearly enough.

The Arctic was clear of ice, its waters as blue and inviting as those girdling the Equator. Antarctica was dazzling white, though. Nowhere did I see cities, or roads, or the gray domes and sooty plumes of human habitation.

It was an Earth empty of human life, devoid of intelligence-almost.

I awoke feeling physically refreshed, yet puzzled to the point of worry. There had to be people here; if not the human creations of Ormazd, then Ahriman's people. That was why Anya had sent me here: to find them and see them for what they truly were.

I got to my feet, washed in the cold stream and ate a breakfast of berries and eggs. I could not bring myself to kill any of the animals that chattered and called through the echoing forest. I had no tools, no weapons, and no inclination to start making them.

Instead, I began walking along the stream's bank, up the gently rising ground, surrounded by the skyscraper trees that threw dappled patterns of sunlight and shadow across the mossy ground. The stream gurgled and splashed across rocks. On the far side I saw a doe and her two fawns watching me, ears twitching and eyes so big and liquid brown.

"Good morning," I called to them. They did not run away. They merely watched me until, satisfied that I was no threat, they returned to browsing on the shrubbery that grew by the stream's edge.

As I walked further upstream, more deer came into view, stepping carefully on their slim legs, gazing at me with their innocent eyes. There must be predators somewhere nearby, I thought. Yet I had not heard a cat's roar nor the growling and baying of canines during the night.

Although the ground was rising as I walked upstream, the going was quite easy. Undergrowth was sparse, and the ground was covered with green, springy mosses and needles from the trees. More and more groups of deer and smaller animals clustered by the water's edge, where the shrubbery grew more thickly. It almost seemed to me like a park, a deliberately designed game preserve. Built by whom? I wondered. For whom?

By mid-morning I found the answer to those questions.

Birds were chattering and rustling up in the limbs of the giant trees. I looked up and saw them gathering, flocking, birds of every kind and color: brilliant red cardinals, bluebirds, brown sparrows, red-shouldered blackbirds, glossy crows, robins, wrens, birds of yellow and green and white. Hundreds of them, thousands, sitting and jabbering on the branches, swooping back and forth. Not a predator among them. No hawks or falcons, no ravens or eagles.

As I stood among the trees, my head tilted back in amazement, they all became still and quiet. As if expecting something. And then, one by one, they began gliding down from their lofty perches, wings outspread and hardly flapping at all, gliding down toward the ground, and swooping right past me.

I followed their flight with my eyes and saw, off in the distance, where they were heading.

Several men stood in a small clearing among the massive trees, reaching into pouches they wore slung over their shoulders and tossing handfuls of their contents onto the ground.

Human beings! I was staggered. Anya had said there were no humans here, and yet there were three-no, four of them, feeding a forest full of birds!

I approached them slowly, staying in the shadows of the trees, partly to get out of the way of the stream of birds swooping down toward the feeding area, partly because for some instinctive reason I did not want to startle them by revealing myself too soon.

As I came nearer, I saw who they were, and my heart sank. Ahriman's people. The ones that Adena's troopers called the brutes. They did not seem terribly brutal, sprinkling birdseed on the ground around them, letting birds perch on their broad shoulders, laughing as they fed the multihued flocks.

I studied them from the cover of a giant tree trunk. They were Ahriman's people, not my own kind. Broad faces with high cheekbones and thin, almost lipless mouths. Wide, thick, well-muscled torsos. Heavy arms and legs.

Suddenly my insides seemed to go hollow. I realized who they were, what they were. Neanderthals.

I sank to my knees and leaned my head against the smooth bark of the mammoth tree. Neanderthals. The other race of intelligent primates who had lived on Earth during the Ice Ages.

Squeezing my eyes shut to concentrate, I tried to recall what little I knew of twentieth-century anthropology. The Neanderthals were regarded as quite human, and just as intelligent as my own kind of human being. The scientists had named them Homo sapiens neanderthalensis Homo sapiens neanderthalensis as opposed to our own as opposed to our own Homo sapiens sapiens Homo sapiens sapiens.

The Neanderthals had evolved out of the four-million-year-long line of primate apes, replacing the earlier hominids such as Homo erectus Homo erectus. And then, quite abruptly, the Sapients appeared-my own line of human beings, the ones whom Ormazd claimed to have created-and the Neanderthals became extinct. No anthropologist could explain why they disappeared; it happened very abruptly, as evolutionary time goes. Before the Age of Ice, Neanderthals were the highest and most widespread primates on Earth. When the glaciers melted, they were gone, and the high-domed, slim-bodied Sapients were the only intelligent species on the planet.

I knew what had happened. As I knelt there in that primeval forest, the knowledge made me sick.

It can't be, I told myself. There must be more to it than you think. Anya would not have sent you here merely to show you the horror of genocide. Not even Ormazd could be that callous.

I did not want to believe what I knew to be true. I gathered my strength and pulled myself to my feet. There must be something else, something still hidden from me, something that I had yet to learn.