Ben Bova - Orion in the Dying Time

Despite the fearsome stories some men like to tell about human savagery and lust, despite the cynical boasts of the Golden One about how he built ferocity into his creation of Homo sapiens, human beings have always chosen cooperation over competition when they had the choice. By giving the tribes the chance to extend ties of kinship we extended ties of loyalty.

Even shy Reeva found herself a new mate: Kraal himself. Since her baby had been killed by the snakes Reeva had seemed to become even more withdrawn, quieter, brooding, almost morose. Then one bright morning Kraal told me that Reeva had agreed to be his wife. His gap-toothed grin was a joy to see.

Yet I felt uneasy. I asked Anya about it, and she shrugged.

“Reeva seeks protection,” she told me. “If she can’t have it from you, she’ll get it from the next most powerful male available.”

“Protection?” I wondered. “Or power?”

Anya looked at me thoughtfully. “Power? I hadn’t considered that.”

It was a happy time for Anya and me. Despite the lurking threat of Set and his monsters we lived together joyfully in Paradise. Each day was fresh and new, each night was a pleasure of loving passion. We felt that we were accomplishing something important, helping these struggling tribes to defend themselves against true evil. Time became meaningless for us. We had our cause, we had our work, and we had each other. What more could we ask of Paradise?

After seven months of constant travel through the forest of Paradise, we had built up a loose alliance of several dozen tribes under the nominal leadership of Kraal. Most of the people of those tribes went on living exactly as they had before we met them—except that they now had new tools, new foods, new mates, new ideas stirring them. Only a few young men or women from any single tribe actually traveled with us.

Had we done enough?

I knew that we had not. All through those long months we did not see a dreaded giant snake or dragon. Each time I looked up through the leafy trees I saw only the sky, empty except for clouds. No pterosaurs seeking us. Yet I felt deep within me that Set knew exactly where we were, day by day. Knew precisely what we were doing. With the absolute certainty of inbuilt instinct I realized that Set was preparing to smash us.

How and when I did not know. It dawned on me that I had better find out.

That night Kraal’s wandering band camped in a parklike glade beneath lofty pine trees. Their trunks rose straight and tall as the pillars of a cathedral. The ground beneath them was bare of grass but covered with a thick, soft, scented layer of pine needles. We spread our hides and robes and prepared for sleep.

There were about forty of us who roamed the forest of Paradise under Kraal’s nominal leadership, offering metal tools and medicines, knowledge and marriageable young men and women in exchange for loyalty and the promise to resist the reptilian masters when next they raided.

A massive gray boulder sat at one end of the glade, gray and imperturbable in the last golden rays of the setting sun. I glanced at Anya, then turned and asked Kraal to follow us up to its top.

We scrabbled up from one rock to another until we stood atop the big boulder, looking down on the others as they huddled in small groups around their cooking fires.

“If the dragons come again to steal slaves for Set,” I asked, “how will we be able to bring all the tribes together to fight against them?”

Kraal made a sighing, grunting sound, his way of showing that he was thinking hard. Anya remained silent.

“When we hunt deer or goats,” I mused, “we send men out into the brush to search for the game we seek. But what can we do when the dragons come hunting for us?”

Kraal swiftly saw where I was leading. “We could pick men to go to the edge of Paradise and watch for the dragons’ approach!”

Anya nodded encouragement to him.

“That would take many men,” I said. “And we would need fast runners to carry the news from one group to another.”

Thus we created the idea of scouts and messengers, and began training men and women for such duties. We wanted youngsters who were fleet of foot, but not so foolhardy that they would try to attack a dragon by themselves—or so flighty that they would report dragons when they saw nothing more than clouds on the horizon.

After a few weeks of training I myself took the first group of scouts northward, toward the edge of Paradise, where the forest merged with the broad treeless savannah that would eventually become the Sahara.

Anya wanted to come with me but I convinced her that she was needed more at Kraal’s side, helping him to win more tribes over to our cause, teaching the women the arts of healing and baking.

“I don’t want to leave Kraal entirely alone,” I said, “without either one of us close by him.”

Anya’s eyes widened slightly. “You don’t trust him?”

It was the first time that I realized so. “It’s not a matter of trust, exactly. What we’re doing is new to Kraal—new to all of them. One of us should be at his side at all times. Just in case.”

“I’d rather be sticking a spear into a lizard’s ribs,” she said.

I laughed. “There’ll be plenty of chances for that, my love. I have the feeling that Set knows exactly what we’re doing and he’s merely biding his time to strike us when and where he chooses.”

Anya reached up to touch my cheek. “Be very careful, Orion. If you are killed by Set… it will be the end. Forever.”

There had been times when I longed for eternal death, for the final release from the agony of living. But not now. Now with Anya here in Paradise with me.

I kissed her, long and deep and hard. And then we parted.

Young Chron had become something of an acolyte to me, at my elbow practically every moment of the day. Naturally he volunteered for this first scouting mission. I had to admit that he possessed exactly the qualities we needed in a scout: courage tempered by good sense, keen eyes, and young legs.

There were five of us, and we spent more than a week moving northward through the forest. We headed for the bowl of rock where we had first camped, months earlier. From there, we knew, it was little more than a day’s trek to the edge of the grassland.

“Will the god speak to us, Orion?” Chron asked as we tramped through the woods. I had spread our group out in tactical formation: two up ahead, spaced apart the distance that a shout would carry, then the two of us, and finally a one-man rear guard trailing behind us.

“I don’t think so,” I replied absently. “We won’t stay long enough for that.”

My attention was on the birds and insects that called and chirped and hummed all around us. As long as they made their usual noises we were probably safe. Silence meant danger in this forest.

A pair of blackbirds seemed to be following us, flapping from tree to tree, cawing noisily from high above us. Looking past them, I saw that the sky was darkening. There would be rain soon.

The clouds burst near sundown and we made a miserable, drenched camp without fire that night. The rain poured down so hard it seemed like solid sheets of water pelting us. We sat beneath a spreading oak, huddled together and hunched over like a quintet of pathetic apes while the rain sluiced over us and chilled us to the bone. We dined on crickets that we found in the grass, silent and inert in the cold. They crunched in my mouth and tasted oddly sweet.

Finally the downpour stopped and the forest came alive once more with the droning of insects and the drip, drip, dripping of rainwater from countless thousands of leaves. A fog rose up, gray and cold, wrapping its ghostly tendrils around us, making our soaked, chilled bodies even more wretched.