The Golden One watched, fascinated, with Anya at his side as the ammonia sea hurled itself across the sloping plain and then stopped, as if exhausted, just short of the ringwall that protected the building site. The sea seemed to shudder within itself as its farthest tendrils lapped against the foot of the curving stone ringwall. Behind it, the humans and their robots worked ceaselessly.
“I’m going to him,” Anya said at last, breaking their silence. “You can’t keep me from him.”
“I cannot allow you to weaken him,” said the Golden One. “His mission is to kill Ahriman.”
“I will help him,” she promised.
“How? By luring him to some half-baked paradise where the two of you can frolic like primitives while the Dark One destroys us all?”
She stood up straighter in front of the Golden One, her fists clenched, her eyes blazing. “I will help him to find the Dark One and kill him. You have not made him strong enough to do that by himself. But the two of us together can achieve what you want.”
The Golden One gazed at her for long moments, pondering.
“I will go to him whether you wish me to or not,” Anya threatened.
“Even if you do, I can see to it that you remain apart.”
She weakened. “Let me help him. Let me be with him.”
“I don’t like the attachment for him that you’ve allowed yourself.”
“I’ll come back to you,” she said softly. “After we’ve killed the Dark One. I will return to you, if that’s what you want.”
“That is what I demand.”
“Then that is what I will have to do, isn’t it? I don’t really have a choice.”
“No, you don’t.”
Her voice so low that he heard it only as a whisper in his mind, Anya pleaded, “Let me be with him one more time. One more lifespan.”
“I will allow you to go only because you can help him to conquer the Dark One.”
“Yes. We will. Together.”
“And then you will return to me.”
She nodded.
The Golden One folded his arms across his chest. His robe swirled and the starbursts on it flared and glittered against the darkness. The two of them winked out of sight, like fireflies on a summer night. Down below, on the plain, the space-suited humans and their robots worked as blindly as ever, driven by needs they could not begin to understand.
PART FOUR: THE WAR
CHAPTER 33
From the searing heat of hell I plunged into a cold so bitter that it felt like burning. I opened my eyes to find myself crouched against a raging wind, snow flying in my face, the ground covered with ice and heavy banks of snow.
The wind howled and roared. I could feel my face freezing as I closed my eyes to slits against the snow that pelted me like stinging darts.
Stumbling, sliding, stooping low against the biting wind, I groped toward the only protection I could find — a looming snow bank that reared up massively in this bewildering blizzard of white.
I sank down on my haunches and leaned my back against its protection. The cold was inescapable, but at least I was protected from the slashing force of the wind. Looking down through lashes already thick with ice, I saw that I was dressed in what looked like white armor, from throat to foot, although the material seemed to be plastic rather than metal. I realized that, except for my freezing head, I was protected and comfortably warm. The suit was heated. My hands were sheathed in gloves so thin and flexible that they might have been another layer of skin, but they kept my hands warm, nonetheless. Somewhere there must have been a helmet that went with this outfit, but now it was lost in the howling blizzard that was covering the world with featureless white.
I sat there, puzzled and slowly freezing, for what seemed like hours. I shifted the blood flow in my capillaries to keep my head as warm as possible, but that merely postponed the inevitable. In this sub-zero blizzard I was merely using up my body’s internal store of energy to delay frostbite and eventual death. I had to find shelter.
But where? The snow blanketed everything. I could not even tell where the horizon might be; all was blurred in endless snow and ice.
And what era was this? Everything that had happened to me so far told me that I was moving backward in time toward The War. If so, I should be in an era that preceded the Neolithic. The blinding storm raging around me made me suspect that I had been sent back into the Ice Age. But my clothing told me differently. I was wearing the products of a highly sophisticated technology — minus the helmet, of course. The midsection of my armored suit was studded with plastic pouches that contained elaborate electronic equipment that I could not even begin to understand. Always before, I had been dressed in a manner appropriate to the era in which I had been placed, but this was no Ice Age hunter’s furs.
Where was I? And when?
Those questions were secondary, though, to the problem of survival. One by one, I tried the various pieces of equipment from the pouches around my waist. Most of them made no sense to me at all. One looked vaguely like a telephone or communicator of some sort; it was palm-sized, with a small grill at its base and a tiny plastic oval at the top that looked suspiciously like a miniature video screen. I tapped the three pressure pads that ran across its middle, one by one. They were color-coded red, yellow, and blue. Nothing happened.
In my haste to examine the equipment I put the communicator down on the snow beside me, alongside the other gear I had pulled out of the pouches. I went on yanking them out, trying to determine what they were for, how they worked — to no avail.
Except for the last one. That one was obvious. It was shaped like a pistol and holstered at my right side. Its barrel was a crystal rod circled by metallic cooling fins. Its grip bulged slightly in my hand and felt warm to the touch; no doubt a power pack of some sort was built into it. I curled my finger around its trigger, pointed the gun straight up, and squeezed slowly. It hummed softly for a moment and then fired out a blood-red beam so bright that I had to turn my eyes away from it. For several moments the afterimage burned in my vision. I almost welcomed it, a relief from the deathly white that covered the world around me.
I tried it again, this time averting my eyes from looking directly at the beam as it lanced through the snow-filled air. The beam disappeared in the gray clouds. I got the impression that it could bore a hole through the armor I wore, or through a mountainside, for that matter.
As I slid the gun back into its holster I heard a chirping sound which quickly turned into a steady little whistle. I pulled out the gun again and checked it over; it was neither vibrating nor making the noise. For a moment or two I thought it might have been my ears, perhaps the aftereffect of firing the pistol. But then I glanced down at the various bits of equipment scattered in the snow around me. Already the freshly falling snow was covering them with white — all except the communicator, I saw.
I snatched it and brought it to my ear. Not only was it slightly warm, but the tiny electronic wail was coming from it. The red pressure pad was glowing! Someone was trying to make contact with me!
I punched those buttons and jabbered into the little device for what seemed like hours. No use. All I could get out of it was that steady shrill whistle. I got to my feet, thinking that perhaps voice or picture transmission was being blocked by the snow bank I had huddled against. No difference, except that when I turned around, the whistle changed its pitch.