by Ben Bova
“Well done, Orion,” he said to me, beaming. “You have succeeded at last.”
I felt an overpowering satisfaction at his words, the kind of emotion a puppy must feel when its master pats it on the head. Yet, deep within me, there was a nagging resentment.
“My duty was to kill Ahriman,” I heard myself say.
Ormazd waved a self-confident hand. “No matter. He is as good as dead. He can’t harm us now.”
“Then… my task has been accomplished?”
“Yes. Quite fulfilled.”
“What happens to me now? What happens to him?”
Ormazd’s satisfied smile faded. “He remains here, in this stasis, safely out of the stream of the continuum. He can do us no harm now. The continuum is safe, at last.”
“And me?” I asked.
He looked slightly puzzled. “Your task is finished, Orion. What would you have me do with you?”
My throat froze. I could not speak.
“What is it that you want?” Ormazd asked me. “What reward can I give you for your faithful service?”
He was playing with me, I could see. And I could not find the courage to tell him that I wanted Aretha, Agla, Ava, Adena — the gray-eyed goddess whom I loved and who loved me. Suddenly I wondered if she hadn’t been a part of Ormazd’s plan, a stimulus to move me through the pain of death in my hunt for Ahriman, an unattainable prize to lure me through space-time in the pursuit of Ormazd’s goal.
“Well, Orion?” Ormazd asked again, grinning at me. “What is it that you desire?”
“Is she… does she really exist?”
“Who?” Ormazd’s grin became feline. “Does who really exist?”
“The woman — the one who called herself Adena when she led a squad of your troops in The War.”
“Adena exists, certainly,” he replied. “She is as real as you are. And as human.”
“Ava… Agla…”
“They all exist, Orion. In their own time. They are all human beings, living their lifespans in their own particular times.”
“Then she’s not…”
The air beside Ormazd began to shimmer, as if a powerful beam of heat had suddenly been turned on. It wavered and sparkled. Ormazd edged back a step as the air seemed to congeal, to take on a silvery radiance and then solidify into the form of a tall, slender, beautiful woman, clad in glittering metallic silver.
“Stop toying with him, Ormazd,” she said sternly. Then she looked at me, and our eyes met. “I exist, Orion. I am real.”
The breath froze in my lungs. I could not utter a word.
But Ormazd could. “Is she the one you meant? Have you fallen in love with a goddess, Orion?” He laughed.
“You find it ridiculous that your creature should love me?” she asked, cutting through his laughter. “Then how amusing it must be to think that I love him.”
Ormazd shook his head. “That is impossible.”
“Is it?”
I found my voice at last. “Your name… what is your true name?”
Her tone softened as she told me, “I am all those women you have met, Orion, in each of the times you have found yourself. Here, I call myself Anya.”
“Anya.”
“Yes,” she said. “And despite the scoffing of your creator, I do love you, Orion.”
“And I love you, Anya.”
“Impossible!” snorted Ormazd. “Can a human being love a worm? You are a goddess, Anya, not one of these creatures of flesh.”
“I became one of them. I have learned to be human,” she said.
“But you are not human,” he insisted. “Any more than I am.” Ormazd’s form shimmered, blurred slightly. “Show him your true self.”
Anya shook her head slightly.
“You refuse? Then look upon me, Orion, and see your creator as he truly exists!”
Ormazd’s body flowed and blurred and began to burn with an inner golden light so powerful that I could not look directly at it. It cast no heat at all; if anything, the air around me seemed to grow colder. But the brilliance was painful. I had to lower my eyes, bow my head, put my arms up to shield my vision from that overpowering glare.
“I am Ormazd, the God of Light, the creator of humankind,” his voice bellowed.
Through nearly closed eyes I saw a great shining globe of light, radiant as the sun, hovering in the place where the golden-maned man had stood moments before.
“On your knees, creature! Worship your creator!”
I could feel the power of his brilliance pushing against me like a palpable force, like the pitiless blasting radiation from the fusion chamber, so many centuries away.
But Anya gripped my arm and held me steady. She looked straight into Ormazd’s glowing form.
“He has served you well, Ormazd,” she said. “This is no way to treat him.”
The glowing globe dimmed, shrank, and became a human form once again.
“I wanted him to realize,” Ormazd said, in a tone as calm and conversational as you might hear in a quiet church rectory, “with whom he is dealing.”
Anya smiled grimly. “And you should realize, O God of Light, with whom you are dealing. I have seen Orion’s courage. You cannot overawe him.”
“I built that courage into him,” he snapped.
“Then stop trying to overpower it!”
“Wait!” I said. “Wait. There’s so much to this that I don’t understand.”
“How could you?” Ormazd sneered.
I glanced back at Ahriman, who watched us with pain-filled eyes.
“You created me to hunt down Ahriman and kill him,” I said to Ormazd.
“Yes. But removing him from the continuum’s time stream is just as good. He will remain here, safely held in stasis, forever.”
“In each of the eras I was sent, I found a woman — the same woman — it was you, Anya, each time.”
“That is true,” she said.
“But Ormazd told me that each of those women was as human as I, and lived a human lifespan in that particular time…”
“He doesn’t understand the difference between time flow and stasis,” Ormazd said.
“Then we should explain it to him.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to,” Anya said.
Ormazd made a disgusted face. “Why bother with explanations to a creature that has outlived his usefulness?”
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 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 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? 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 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 wer
e 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.