“You tempt them to do so.”
“They don’t need much temptation. Killing is a part of their way of life; it’s built into them.”
“You’re going to fail here, you know,” I told him. “We will meet again.”
“Yes, you told me. You have met me twice before.”
“Which means you will fail here. You will not succeed in preventing these people from developing agriculture…”
He raised a single massive hand to stop me in mid-sentence.
“How certain you are,” Ahriman whispered harshly. “How absolutely sure that you will triumph, that you are right, that the Golden One represents truth and victory.”
“Ormazd is…”
“Ormazd is not even his true name, any more than mine is Ahriman. They are merely fabrications, lies, 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?”
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 yourselves Homo 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.
“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 faint plonk. 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.
Slowly I began to realize that the rock was getting warmer. It reminded me of the underground cell that Ahriman had trapped me in the first time we had met. But this was a natural cave, not a bubble of captured energy. The heat was coming from a natural source. Magma from the volcano, I reasoned. Perhaps I was moving deeper underground, rather than toward daylight.
I stopped, panting in the dank, heavy air, and tried to think it out. That got me nowhere; I simply did not have enough information. Then I tried to put myself in Ahriman’s place. What was he going to do? Destroy the Goat Clan, came the answer.