Ben Bova - Orion in the Dying Time

And the dinosaurs. Every last one of them. Gigantic fierce Tyrannosaurus and gentle duckbill, massive Triceratops and birdlike Stenonychosaurus—all gone, totally, forever gone.

I did not mean to kill them. Yet I felt a cosmic guilt. My rage against Set and his kind had resulted in all this suffering, all this death. My personal revenge had been won at the price of scrubbing the earth nearly clean of life.

I looked again at the new earth. Ice caps glittered at its poles. The rough outlines of the continents looked familiar now, although they were still not spaced across the globe in the way I remembered. The Atlantic was still widening, red-tipped volcanoes glowing down the length of the fissure that extended from Iceland to the Antarctic. North and South America were not yet connected, and the basin that would one day be the Mediterranean was a dry and grassy plain.

I saw a forest of leafy trees standing straight and tall against the morning sun. The sky was clear. The bombardment of Shaydan’s fragments had ended at last.

A gentle stream flowed through the woods. Grass grew on the ground right down to its banks. Flowers nodded brightly red and yellow and orange in the breeze while bees busily attended them. A turtle slid off a log and splashed into the stream, startling a nearby frog who hopped into a waterside thicket.

Birds soared by in fine feathery plumage. And up on a high branch sat a tiny furred ratlike animal, its beady black eyes glittering, its nose twitching worriedly.

This is all that’s left of life on Earth, I thought to myself. After the catastrophe that I caused, the planet has to make a new beginning.

I realized that just as Set had scoured the Earth to make room for his own kind of reptilian life, I had inadvertently put the planet through another holocaust that would eventually lead to my kind of life. That ratlike creature was a mammal, my ancestor, the ancestor of all humankind, the progenitor of the Creators themselves.

Once again I realized that I had been used by the Creators. I had given my body, my life, not merely to destroy Shaydan but to scrub the Earth clean and prepare it for the rise of the mammals and the human race.

“Just as I was going to do.”

It was Set’s voice speaking in my mind.

“I am not dead, Orion. I live here on Earth with my servants and slaves—thanks to you.”

Set lived.

That single thought burned through my consciousness like a hot branding iron searing my flesh. He had survived the destruction of his race, of his planet, of his star. He still lived. On Earth.

I had destroyed Sheol and Shaydan, wiped out most of the life-forms on Earth. In vain. I had failed to kill Set.

“I will find you,” I said silently. Bodiless, with nothing but my essential awareness, I threw out the challenge to my deadly enemy. “I will find you and destroy you for all time.”

“Come and try,” came Set’s immediate answer. “I look forward to meeting you for the final time.”

His consciousness shone like a beacon against the black void of spacetime. I knew where and when he was. Concentrating every bit of willpower I possessed, I focused on Set. I willed myself through the tangled skein of the continuum to the place and time where he existed.

A flash of absolute cold, a moment of utter darkness and cryogenic chill, then I opened my eyes and took in a deep breath of life.

I was lying on my back, my naked body resting on warm soft earth. Tall trees rose all around me and the soft breeze brought scents of flowers and pine. I heard the melodious trill of a bird. My hands clutched at the ground and I pulled sweet-smelling grass to my face.

Yes. Paradise once again.

I sat up and looked around. The ground sloped gently before me. A brown bear shambled in the distance, trailed by two balls of fur that were her cubs. She stopped and raised her head, sniffing the air. If my scent alarmed her, she gave no notice. She just resumed her slow pace away from me, the cubs trotting along behind.

I am Orion the Hunter, reborn. Naked and alone, my mission is to find the monster Set and kill him. Kill him as he intends to kill me. Destroy him and his kind forever as he intends to destroy my kind, the human race, forever.

Smiling grimly to myself, I got to my feet and started walking slowly down the gentle slope, through the tall straight trees that dappled the afternoon sunshine with their swaying leafy branches. If this truly was part of the forest of Paradise, then Set would be at his fortress by the Nile.

The sun was too high in the sky to judge directions, so I merely followed the first stream I came to, figuring that it would eventually lead to the Nile. I knew I had a long walk ahead of me, but I had learned from Set that time means little to one who can catapult himself through the continuum at will. Patience, I counseled myself. Patience.

For days on end I walked alone, seeing neither another human being nor any of Set’s reptilians. This was a sparsely populated time, I recalled. There were probably fewer than a million humans living in the early Neolithic; their first great population explosion would not take place until they developed agriculture. How many of his own kind had Set been able to bring from Shaydan, I asked myself? Hundreds? Thousands?

I knew he had transported dinosaurs from the Mesozoic Age to this time and place: the giant lizards and fighting dragons I had met earlier were sauropods and carnosaurs from the Cretaceous.

The forest of Paradise was far from empty, however. The woods teemed with life, from tiny burrowing mice to growling, roaring lions. Using nothing but stones and wood, I quickly fashioned myself a serviceable spear and hand ax. By the second day I had a raw pelt of deerskin to wear as a loincloth. By the second week I had added a vest and leg wrappings tied with beef gut.

I felt completely alone, of course. Yet I did not mind the solitude. It was a relief, a welcome respite from the turmoil I had been through and the dangers I knew lay ahead of me. I did not try to contact the Creators, remembering that such mental signals served as beacons that allowed Set to pinpoint my location. I wanted to remain hidden from him as much as I could. For the time being.

He knew I was here. Day after day I saw long-winged pterosaurs gliding high in the bright blue skies. As long as I remained in the forest I was safe from their prying eyes, I reasoned. They could not see me through the leafy canopy of the trees.

I wondered where the Creators were, if they knew what I was up to. Or were they scattering across the galaxy in this spacetime, still fleeing Set after Anya’s capitulation to him?

I thought of Anya, of how she had betrayed me at one point in time yet swore she loved me at another. Was she watching over me now or running for her life? I had no way of knowing and in truth I did not care. All that would be settled later, after I had dealt with Set. If I survived, if I succeeded in killing him once and for all, then I could confront Anya and the other Creators. Until then I was on my own, and that’s the way I wanted it.

Try as I might, I could not understand how the Creators could be running for their lives in one era and yet living peacefully in their mausoleum of a city in the distant future. Nor how Set’s home world could be utterly destroyed and yet he alive and burning for revenge against me here in the Neolithic.