by Ben Bova
Ava dropped back to walk with me one hot afternoon. I had taken to remaining toward the rear of the procession. For some unfathomable inner reason I had the uncanny feeling that we were being followed, watched. But, whenever I looked back, I could see no one, nothing, as far as the horizon. Yet the feeling remained, prickling the back of my neck.
“Soon we’ll be at our valley,” Ava told me, smiling.
“ Ourvalley?” I asked.
She nodded, looking as pleased as a traveler who was at last making her way home.
“The valley is a good place. Others will come there to share it with us. Plenty of water and grain and good hunting. Everyone is happy in our valley.”
When we finally reached it, nearly a week later, I saw that it was truly a lovely, sheltered Eden.
We stood by the bank of a gently meandering stream that afternoon, looking down across the valley. The stream dropped down in a series of terraced stone steps to the floor of the valley, then made its way along its length and disappeared into the cliffs at the other end. I saw that those cliffs actually formed the base of the big, double-peaked mountain that smoked quietly, far up at the top where snow still lay glittering white under the late springtime sun.
I could see why the clan was so happy to be here. The valley was sunny and green. From its U-shaped cross section I could tell that it had been scooped out by a glacier, probably from the looming mountain, which had now melted away. It was a very snug niche, quite defensible against invaders. The only easy access to the valley was down the stone terracing of the waterfall, the way we were entering. The trail was slippery, but not terribly difficult to get down. On the other sides the valley walls rose fairly steeply to heights of at least several hundred feet.
Our clan was the first to arrive that year. Dal’s people raced down the wet stone terraces, laughing and happy, to the valley floor. Before the day ended they had felled some trees and chased some game. By nightfall they had erected a few primitive huts with mud walls and tree branches and hides for roofs. The huts were dug into the ground, more underground than above it, but to Dal’s people they seemed like palaces.
One note of sadness touched us that night. The boy who had been injured in the hunt sank into a fevered coma. I had thought at first that the gash on his leg would heal soon enough, but it had become infected despite all that Ava could do in the way of poultices and bandages made from leaves. By the time we had reached the valley, the poor youngster could barely walk; his leg was swollen and inflamed. That night he was delirious, burning with fever. Finally he grew quiet and still. His mother sat at his side all night long. At dawn her keening cry told us all that her son was dead.
The clan buried him that afternoon, with Ava leading a ritual that included lining his shallow grave with all the possessions that the lad had accumulated in fourteen summers: a few stone tools, a handful of smooth pebbles, the winter furs that he had still carried with him. Each member of the clan dropped a flower into the grave while his mother stood quietly and watched. Her weathered cheeks were dry; she had finished her crying. Ava told me later that the boy’s father had been killed two years earlier, and the woman — whose name was Mara — had no other living children. She was too old to expect to find a new husband. She would probably not survive the next winter.
I wondered how they would get rid of her, but didn’t have the courage to ask.
The following morning I walked the length of the valley, following the stream that ran through it. The land must have been tilted by an earthquake, because the stream ran in what seemed to me to be a backwards direction: from the end of the valley where we had entered, it splashed down the stone terraces and ran toward the base of the double-peaked mountain. I would have thought that water would flow from the mountain’s snowcap outward, in the opposite direction.
As I walked slowly back toward the collection of mud huts that the clan had built, I saw Ava off among the flowering bushes by the base of the steeply rising valley wall. I angled off my original path and went toward her. I could see that she was gathering herbs and roots for her store of medicines. Little good that they did for Mara’s son, Ava’s cures were all that these people had to counter disease and injury.
“Hello,” I called to her.
She looked up from the foliage she was studying. “What’s the matter?” she called back.
Striding through the knee-high brush, I answered, “Nothing’s wrong. I was walking down by the stream and I saw you here.”
Ava’s smile was more puzzled than welcoming. Apparently the idea of taking a leisurely stroll and stopping off to chat with a friend was not commonplace among these folk.
“You’re gathering herbs for medicines,” I said.
“Yes.” Her smile faded. “I wasn’t able to save Mara’s son. The devil within him was too powerful for me. I must find stronger medicine.”
Twenty thousand years later, I knew, medical researchers would still be hunting along the same trail.
“You did everything that was possible to do,” I said gently.
She eyed me. “You did nothing to help.”
“Me?”
“You are a man of great powers, Orion. Why didn’t you try to help the boy?”
I was shocked. “I… my skills are in hunting, not medicine.”
Those deep gray eyes of hers seemed to see straight through to my soul. “You have great knowledge; you know things that none of us know. I had thought that your knowledge included healing.”
“It doesn’t.” I felt awkward, apologetic. “I’m sorry, but I just don’t have that knowledge.”
She pushed a strand of coppery hair from her face, still looking unconvinced.
“I told you before,” I said, “I’m only a man.”
Ava shook her head. “I don’t believe that. You are different from any man I have ever seen.”
“How am I different?” I spread my arms, as if to show her that I was built the same as anyone else.
“It is not your body,” she said. “I have tested your body; I have taken your seed. You are strong, but your body is not different from Dal’s or other men.”
My blood ran suddenly cold. So our night of lovemaking had not been wild passion on her part, but a carefully considered experiment. Within my mind I heard a self-mocking laugh: She merely wanted to see what you were made of.
“Your difference,” Ava was saying, “is in your spirit, your soul. You know so much more than we do!”
“I know some things, true enough,” I said, trying to ignore the laughter ringing within me. “But there is much that I do not know.”
“Teach me!” she blurted. “Teach me all the things you know!”
That took me by surprise. Suddenly she was eager for knowledge, avid.
“There are so many things I must learn, so many things I don’t know. Teach me. Share your knowledge with me,” she pleaded.
“I can teach you some things, Ava,” I replied. “But much of what I know would make no sense to you. It wouldn’t be useful to you or to the clan.”
“But you will teach me?”
“If you wish.”
“I do!” Her eyes were wide with excitement.
“But why do you want to learn?” I asked.
She stared at me, momentarily speechless. “Why? To know, to understand — that is the important thing. The more I know, the more I can help the clan. If I had known enough about healing, I could have saved Mara’s son.”
It was my turn to fall silent. Beneath her unwashed skin and rude clothes, Ava was as fully human as Marie Curie, and as inquisitive. More than that, she realized that knowledge was the key to power, that understanding the world around her would help her to learn how to manipulate that world to her own ends. But she misinterpreted my silence. Haltingly, she said, “There is nothing I can give you in return for your knowledge…”
So the idea of trading sex for power had not occurred to her. I almost smiled at the realization that the world’s oldest profession
had not yet been invented.
“There are things you know that I don’t,” I replied. “We will exchange knowledge for knowledge. Fair enough?”
“Yes!” She was almost breathless with enthusiasm.
“All right,” I said. “To begin with, tell me what the names of these flowers are and what healing properties they have.”
We spent the afternoon walking through the shrubbery and trading information. I told her that there were substances called metals which could make better tools than the stones and flints the clan used. She explained her wildflower apothecary to me. Gradually I began to lead the conversation toward a discussion of the other clans who came to the valley and the tribes who were their enemies.
“Do all the clans have hair the color of yours?” I asked.
“No, not at all. Some have dark hair, such as your own.”
“And the color of their skin? Are they all the same as ours?”
She nodded. “In the summer sun the skin gets darker, but in the winter it lightens again.”
“Have you ever seen a man whose skin is the color of the ashes that remain when a fire burns out? A man who is almost as tall as I am, but much wider, with enormously strong arms and eyes that burn red?”
She backed away from me. “No,” she said fearfully. “And I hope I never do.”
“Have you ever heard of such a man?” I pressed. “Sometimes he is called Ahriman. Sometimes he is called the Dark One.”
Ava was clearly afraid of the very idea. “He sounds like a demon.”
“He is a man. An evil man.”
She looked at me with a new suspicion in her eyes. “A man. Just as you say you are a man.”
I let the matter drop. She did not press it. Instead, we began talking about the valley and how much the clan enjoyed spending their summers here. I casually mentioned that they could spend the whole year here, if they prepared for the winter properly. She was instantly curious, and I began to describe how to make warm winter clothing from hides and fur pelts.
She knew about that. But: “What would we eat during the time of snows? All the game animals move to the warmer places. We follow them.”
“Instead of killing them,” I explained, “you could trap some of them and keep them in fenced-off areas. Let them breed young for you, and you will have meat all year round, without moving away from this spot.”
Ava laughed. She knew a crack-brained theory when she heard one. “And what will the animals eat during the winter? The grass dies.”
“Cut the grass and grain that the animals eat during the summer, when it is high, and store it in huts during the winter to feed to the animals.” Her laughter stopped. She didn’t accept the idea; it was too new and fantastic to be swallowed at one sitting. But she accepted the possibility of thinking about it. And that was more important.
We had walked to the face of the cliffs that formed the base of the double-peaked volcano. I decided it was my turn to ask a question. “Does the mountain have a name?”
“Yes,” Ava replied, squinting up into the bright sky to scan its rugged, snow-covered peaks.
“Is the name too sacred to be spoken?”
She turned her gaze back toward me, a new respect in her eyes because I understood the concept of sanctity.
“The smoking mountain can make the ground tremble when its spirit grows angry. The elders tell us that many, many years ago, before they themselves were born, the mountain spilled fire upon the people who lived in this valley and drove them away.”
“But they came back.”
“Not until long years had passed. They feared the mountain, and they taught that fear to their children and their children’s children.”
I glanced up at the snowcapped peaks. For them first time since I had originally seen them, no smoke came from the volcano.
“It seems to be resting now.”
Ava grinned. “Yes, sometimes it rests. But it can still breathe fire when its spirit grows angry.”
“Would it make the mountain’s spirit angry tell me its name?” I asked.
Her beautiful face pulled itself into a slight frown. “Why do you want to know?”
Smiling, I replied, “Like you, I am curious. I seek answers to questions.”
She understood that, the drive to learn, to know. Ava took a step closer to me and whispered the name of the mountain:
“Ararat.”
CHAPTER 27
Dal was not happy with us when Ava and I returned from our long walk. And he grew increasingly unhappy over the next few days as the two of us spent more and more time together.
At night I took Ava away from the lights of the clan’s fires — each family had its own small cooking fire in front of its hut now, instead of one single campfire. Off in the darkness I showed her the stars and began to teach her how the constellations formed a vast celestial clock and calendar.
She grasped the concept quickly, and even noted, after a few nights, that at least one of the stars seemed to have moved slightly out of place.
“That’s Mars,” I told her. “It is not a star like all the others you see. It is a world, something like our own world here, but incredibly far away.”
“It is red, like blood,” Ava murmured in the darkness.
“Yes,” I agreed. “Its soil is red sand. Even its sky is pink with reddish dust, almost the color of your hair.”
“The people there must be angry and warlike,” she said, “to have made their whole world the color of blood.”
My heart sank at the thought that I was helping to invent astrology. But I consoled myself with the notion that such ideas did not occur only once, in a single time and place. Concepts as obvious as astrology would be invented time and again, no matter how ludicrously wrong they may be.
That night we stayed up until dawn, watching the stars wheel across heaven in their majestic cosmic clockwork. And when Venus arose, the Morning Star shining as brilliantly beautiful as anything human eyes could ever see, I heard Ava’s sigh of pleasure in the predawn darkness.
I wanted to take her in my arms and kiss her. But she must have sensed what was in my mind, and she moved slightly away from me.
“I am Dal’s woman,” she whispered. “I wish it was not true, but it is.”
I wanted to tell her that I loved her, but with a shock I realized there was no word for such a concept in their language. Romance was yet to be invented. She was Dal’s woman, and women did not change mates in this early era.
We walked back to the huts and the embers of the cook fires. Dal sat on the ground in front of his hut, looking miserable, angry, worried and sleepy, all at the same time. He scrambled to his feet when he saw us, and Ava smiled at him and took his arm. They ducked through the low entrance to their hut without either of them saying a word to me.
I stood there alone for a few moments more, then turned and went off to my own dugout, which Dal had insisted the clan build for me — a good hundred yards away from the nearest hut of a clan family.
When I stepped down to the entrance and ducked through it into the shadowy interior of the single room, I immediately sensed that someone else was already inside. Dawn was just beginning to tint the eastern sky, and there were no windows in the hut — nothing but the open doorway to let in light or air. But I knew that I was not alone in the inky shadows of the dugout. I could feel a presence, dark and menacing. I could hear a slow, deep, labored breathing.
“Ahriman,” I whispered.
Something moved slightly in the darkest corner of the room. My hand went to the stone knife at my waist. A silly, useless gesture, I knew, but my hand moved of its own accord.
“You expected me to be here, didn’t you?” His harsh, tortured voice sent a chill along my spine.
Stepping to one side of the doorway, so that I would not be silhouetted against the growing light outside, I replied, “You’ve been trailing us for many weeks.”
“Yes.”
I could barely make out his form, bulking
darkly in the shadows. “You plan to bring harm to these people?” I probed.
He moved slightly. “What harm can I do? I am only one man, against your entire race…”
“Don’t call yourself a man,” I snapped.
He gave out a wheezing, gasping sound that almost sounded like laughter. “Orion, you fool! Don’t call yourself a man.”
“I am a human being,” I said, “not one of your kind.”
“You are not one of my kind, true enough,” Ahriman said, each word labored and grim. “I am the only one of my kind left. Your cohorts killed all the others.”
“And you seek vengeance.”
“I seek justice.”
“Even if it means destroying the continuum of space-time.”
“That is the only way to obtain the justice I seek. To tear down the pillars that support the world. To bring it all to an end. To destroy the one who fashions himself as the Golden God.”
“Ormazd.”
“Yes, Ormazd. The master slaughterer. Your master, Orion. Your creator.”
“You can’t touch him; he’s too powerful for you, so you take out your spite on these poor ignorant savages.” I could feel hatred boiling inside me.
He countered, “You call yourselves humans. You think you own this planet.”
“We do! This is our world.”
“Temporarily,” Ahriman’s voice rumbled darkly. “Only temporarily. He built you to conquer this planet, but I will see to it that you are destroyed — utterly and forever.”
“No,” I said. “I have already stopped you twice. I will stop you here, as well.”
He paused, as if gathering his forces before speaking again. “Twice, you say? We have met twice before?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s true,” he muttered, more to himself than to me. “You are moving back toward The War.”
I kept silent.
“The Golden One is very clever. He is moving you backward through the continuum. You have not seen The War yet. You don’t know what took place then.”
“I know that my task is to hunt you down and kill you, finally, for all time.”