Orion

They were firing pointblank into the Neanderthals, their beams ripping men, women, and children apart the way a honed razor would slice through a rag doll.

I learned that Neanderthals can scream. Pain and terror brings out the same wild animal screeches from them that it does from us.

There were only a dozen or so Sapient soldiers, but they were armed with laser rifles. The Neanderthals scrambled to their feet and ran in all directions, as those searing red beams slashed them apart. Tohon reached for his daughter as a soldier turned his visored, helmeted head toward us. He hesitated an instant, no doubt stu

Tohon began ru

“No!” I screamed. “Stop!” I waved my arms and ran toward the soldier, yelling and ranting like a maniac. He tried to step aside and get a clear shot at Huyana, who stood paralyzed beside the dead bodies of her husband and daughter. I grabbed for his rifle, and as he tried to pull it back from me, Tunu leaped at the soldier and knocked him off his feet.

I took the rifle as Tunu, his eyes wide and blazing with new-found hate, seized a rock in his two hands and smashed it down on the soldier’s helmet. The plastic armor dented, then cracked, as Tunu pounded at it again and again. Blood oozed from the smashed visor and the trooper went rigid and inert.

I wheeled about and saw the carnage that the soldiers had created. Neanderthals lay sprawled grotesquely everywhere; the survivors were ru

Yet I could not fire it. I could not shoot at those troopers. Behind those featureless visors might be Marek, or Lissa, or even Adena. I could not fire at them, even to save the defenseless Neanderthals.

Or were they defenseless? One of the troopers was on the ground, a pair of savage dogs viciously snapping at him. Ahriman had grabbed another from behind, pi

The Sapients scattered into the shadows of the trees and disappeared as quickly as they had come. For several eternally long minutes we simply stood there, panting with fear and anger. I counted thirty-eight dead, their blood soaking the ground. Tossing the rifle away, I leaned down and took the smashed helmet off the trooper who lay dead at my feet. Her hair billowed out, blonde, matted with her own blood.

Tunu knelt at her side, his mind a keening, shuddering wail of grief and agony. I could not find Huyana at first; then I recognized her body, sliced neatly in two by a laser beam, at the edge of the clearing.

Ahriman strode through the field of dead, a rifle in one mighty hand, until he stood face-to-face with me. His eyes were red with pain.

“Your people, Orion,” he said, in his tortured whisper. “Why?”

I had no answer. There was nothing that I could say or do. I turned away from him, away from the carnage, and began walking into the darkness of the forest.

CHAPTER 47

The black night engulfed me completely. With each step I grew colder, shuddering with the horror within me. The forest was absolutely silent — not an owl’s hoot, not a cricket’s chirp. Nothing but silence, darkness, and cold.

I have no idea of how long I walked, alone, heading nowhere. I could not return to the village, to the accusing faces of the Neanderthals. I could not bear to see Ahriman, to watch him learn how to hate, how to kill, how to make vengeance the only thing he lived for.

I thought it was dawn, when I first saw the light glimmering up ahead of me. But as I walked toward it, miserable with remorse, I saw that the trees were fading away, literally disappearing, and the light was a golden, sourceless radiance that illuminated a flat, featureless expanse that stretched in all directions toward infinity.

In the distance I saw a lone figure standing, waiting for me, clad in gleaming silver. It was Anya, I knew. I walked steadily toward her, unable to quicken my step, unwilling to hasten the final moment.

As I approached, I saw another figure, darkly brooding: Ahriman, still encased in his prison of energy, his eyes blazing fury at me. He looked much older than the Ahriman I had just met. Hatred and pain had aged him more than time ever could.

I searched Anya’s face as I came up to her. I saw the sadness of eternity in her luminous eyes.

“Now you know,” Anya said to me.

Nodding, I replied, “I know everything except the most important answer of all — why?”

“For that you must ask Ormazd.”

“Where is he?”

She made a little shrug and smiled joylessly. “He is here; he can see us and hear us.”

“But he’s too ashamed to show himself, is that it?”

Anya looked almost startled. “Ashamed? Him?”

I lifted my head to the blank golden dome that shone above us. “Present yourself, Ormazd! It’s time for the final reckoning. Show your face, murderer!”

The emptiness seemed to gather in on itself, to contract into a golden bubble, a sphere of gleaming radiance that floated down toward us.

“I am here,” said a voice from that globe.

“In human form,” I demanded. “I want to see a face; I want to be able to watch your expression.”

“You presume much, Orion,” said the golden sphere.

“I’ve served you well enough. I deserve a little consideration.”

The sphere shimmered and faded into nothingness, leaving the tall, golden form of Ormazd standing before us. His smile was part amusement, part tolerance of a lower creature’s insolence.

“Does that please you, Orion?” he asked.

I glanced at Anya. There was nothing in her face but fear.

“Why?” I asked Ormazd. “Why slaughter the Neanderthals? They were harmless…”

“Precisely so. Harmless. Inoffensive. Beautifully adapted to their environment.” He spread his hands in an ancient gesture of resignation.

“Then why destroy them? Why start The War?”

“Because they were an evolutionary dead end, Orion. They would never progress beyond the stage in which you found them.”

“How can you know that?”

He laughed at me. “Orion, pitiful creature. I know! I have examined all the possible paths of the continuum. The Neanderthals would live their idyllic existence for their allotted time, and then be snuffed out like the dinosaurs were.”

Ahriman’s face was contorted with agony. He could hear what we were saying, even though he could not move a muscle to reach us.

“Believe me, Orion,” Ormazd went on, “I examined every possibility. I even transplanted some of the Neanderthals to a different planet, to see if they would evolve at a more efficient rate. The differences were negligible.”

“But that doesn’t justify… killing them!”

“Doesn’t it?” he snapped. “They would all die anyway, Orion. Sooner or later, the blind forces of nature would have wiped them out. I merely substituted a directed force. I hastened their demise. I helped them out of their misery. More efficiently than nature would have done.”

“They weren’t in misery.”

Ormazd gave me a coy grin. “Orion, allow me a metaphor, please!”

“Who gave you the right to perform genocide?” I demanded. “Who made you the giver of life and death?”

He raised a hand, and the golden radiance around us darkened and sparked with jagged bolts of lightning.