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inventions, simplifications that are necessary because your mind was never made to grasp the entire truth
in all its endless facets."
Anger began to warm me from within. "I know enough of the truth to understand what you intend."
"The destruction of your kind is what I intend," Ahriman said, "even if it takes all of time to accomplish it.
Even if it means tearing apart the continuum and destroying the whole universe of space-time. I have
nothing to lose. Do you understand that, Orion?I have nothing to lose. "
His red eyes were burning at me. I felt the power of his anger, his hatred, and something
more something that I could not identify, something that felt like sorrow, eternal and everlasting.
But I spat back, "You'll never win! No matter what you do, it's you who'll be destroyed."
"Really?"
"You will fail here, just as you failed in other times. You can't stop the human race."
He leaned his powerful arms on the tree-slab desk and hunched forward, looming before me like a dark
thundercloud.
"You pitiful fool, you don't understand the nature of time even yet, do you?"
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Before I could reply, he went on, "Just because we have met before, in other centuries, in other places,
does not mean that you will defeat me here. Time is not a railroad track that's laid down in place, one
section at a time, and fixed solidly, unmovably. Time is like a river, or better yet, an ocean. It moves, it
shifts; it washes away a bit of the land here and throws up a new island there. It is not immutable. If I
succeed here, the eras in which you and I have already met will dissolve back into primeval chaos, as if
they never happened."
I stared at him for long, silent moments. Then I said, "I don't believe you. You're lying."
He shook his head slowly, ponderously. "I can win here, Orion. I will. And all of the space-time will be
disrupted. The continuum will crumble, and those times and places where we met will cease to exist."
"It can't be true!"
"But it is. And you know it is. I will destroy all of you, you who call yourselvesHomo sapiens sapiens .
All of you who are Ormazd's creations. You and he will dissolve into nothingness together, and my
people will triumph at last."
"Never," I said, but so softly that I barely heard it myself.
Ahriman ignored me, gloating, "Your little band of savages will not make the transition from hunting to
agriculture. Nor will any other of your tribes. Your people will remain a small, weak, starving collection
of scattered hunting tribes with the instinct for war built into you."
He stressed that last phrase, savored it, hissed it at me as if it were a justification for everything he had
done, every life he had taken, every evil he had committed.
"It will be easy enough to get your bloodthirsty tribes to slaughter each other, given enough time,"
Ahriman went on. "All that I need do is lead them into collision courses, bring two tribes together
unexpectedly. Your own savage instincts will do the rest for me."
"The clans don't always fight when they meet," I argued. "They're working together in the valley..."
"Only because they know each other. And only because food is plentiful in the valley. But they are such
wasteful, wanton fools. Already they have thinned out the game herds and driven some beasts into
extinction. Food will become scarcer for them, I promise you."
"If they don't turn to agriculture," I muttered.
"They won't. And when one of your wandering bands of hunters bumps into a strange group, they will
annihilate each other."
I shook my head stubbornly, refusing to believe him. "There are too many human tribes for you to
destroy them all. They're spread out all across the world..."
"Not so," Ahriman said. "The glaciers cover a good part of the northern hemisphere. And even if they
did not, what difference does it make to me? I have all the time in the world to kill off your wandering
tribes of savages. Think of it! Centuries, millennia, eons! A long, delicious feast of killing."
His pain-red eyes glowed with the thought. I sat still, silently calculating my chances for leaping across
the desk and crushing his throat before he could stop me.
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"And in the end," Ahriman went on, his face as close to happiness as it could ever be, "when your
primitive blood-drinkers have finally slaughtered each other, the wrenching of the continuum will be so
severe that the Earth, the sun, the stars and galaxies themselves will all collapse in on themselves. A
temporal black hole. The end of everything, at last."
I jumped for his throat. But from the expectant leer on his dark face I realized that he had made the
same calculation that I had, and placed himself just far enough from me to give himself time to block my
lunge. I saw his powerful hands clench into fists and launch themselves straight at my face. Pain exploded
in my brain. I blacked out again.
I awoke to the sound of trickling water. I lay on hard stone, in utter darkness. It took a long time before
the throbbing in my head stopped, even though I exerted every effort to control my nervous system and
shut off the pain.
When I tried to sit up, I bumped my head against solid rock. I probed upward with both hands and
found that I was tucked into a narrow cleft of stone. I felt a blank rock wall on my right; on my left, an
edge that dropped off into nothingness.
Ahriman was gone, I knew. Off to accomplish his task of either driving the clans out of the valley or
killing them altogether. I had to get free and prevent him from winning.
Vision was useless; there was no light at all. The trickling water noise came from below me. Carefully, I
turned myself over onto my stomach and groped down along the ledge as far as my arm would reach.
No bottom. I poked around for a loose pebble, found one, and dropped it over the edge. Straining my
ears and concentrating all my attention did no good. I waited for what seemed like hours, but heard no
splash. I found a larger piece of rock and tried it again. The seconds moved slowly, slowly and then I
heard a faintplonk . There was water down there, far below.
I began inching forward, not knowing if I was moving in the right direction. The rock seemed to slope
slightly upward, but that did not necessarily mean it was heading toward the surface, I knew. But there
was nothing else I could think of. So I crawled, blind as a mole, inching along without knowing where I
was heading. No sounds reached me except my own breathing and the scrabbling noises of my body
scuffing along the rock ledge, and the far-off murmur of running water. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]