Human beings! I was staggered. Anya had said there were no humans here, and yet there were three — no, four of them, feeding a forest full of birds!
I approached them slowly, staying in the shadows of the trees, partly to get out of the way of the stream of birds swooping down toward the feeding area, partly because for some instinctive reason I did not want to startle them by revealing myself too soon.
As I came nearer, I saw who they were, and my heart sank. Ahriman’s people. The ones that Adena’s troopers called the brutes. They did not seem terribly brutal, sprinkling birdseed on the ground around them, letting birds perch on their broad shoulders, laughing as they fed the multihued flocks.
I studied them from the cover of a giant tree trunk. They were Ahriman’s people, not my own kind. Broad faces with high cheekbones and thin, almost lipless mouths. Wide, thick, well-muscled torsos. Heavy arms and legs.
Suddenly my insides seemed to go hollow. I realized who they were, what they were. Neanderthals.
I sank to my knees and leaned my head against the smooth bark of the mammoth tree. Neanderthals. The other race of intelligent primates who had lived on Earth during the Ice Ages.
Squeezing my eyes shut to concentrate, I tried to recall what little I knew of twentieth-century anthropology. The Neanderthals were regarded as quite human, and just as intelligent as my own kind of human being. The scientists had named them Homo sapiens neanderthalensis as opposed to our own Homo sapiens sapiens.
The Neanderthals had evolved out of the four-million-year-long line of primate apes, replacing the earlier hominids such as Homo erectus. And then, quite abruptly, the Sapients appeared — my own line of human beings, the ones whom Ormazd claimed to have created — and the Neanderthals became extinct. No anthropologist could explain why they disappeared; it happened very abruptly, as evolutionary time goes. Before the Age of Ice, Neanderthals were the highest and most widespread primates on Earth. When the glaciers melted, they were gone, and the high-domed, slim-bodied Sapients were the only intelligent species on the planet.
I knew what had happened. As I knelt there in that primeval forest, the knowledge made me sick.
It can’t be, I told myself. There must be more to it than you think. Anya would not have sent you here merely to show you the horror of genocide. Not even Ormazd could be that callous.
I did not want to believe what I knew to be true. I gathered my strength and pulled myself to my feet. There must be something else, something still hidden from me, something that I had yet to learn.
I have always been able to control my body, down to the most peripheral nerve cell. I have never lacked courage — most probably because I never had the imagination to see, ahead of time, what pain and danger I was facing. Action has always been easier for me than reflection.
Yet the most difficult action I ever had to take was to step out from behind the concealment of that tree and show myself to the four young Neanderthal men who were in the clearing, feeding the flocks of birds.
I took a deep breath, calmed my racing heart, and began walking toward them. They were youngsters, probably no more than teen-agers, their hair dark and full, their faces smooth and unlined. They were laughing and whistling to one another as they tossed birdseed around the mossy ground. One of them was holding out both his hands and half a dozen birds perched on them, pecking at the seeds in his palms.
The birds noticed me before the lads did. With a great swirling, fluttering, flashing of colors they flew off in all directions as I approached. Not a peep out of them; no sound except the beating of frightened wings.
The four young Neanderthals, suddenly alone except for a few drifting feathers, turned to gape at me.
I held up both my hands, palms outward, as I approached.
“I am Orion,” I said. “I come in peace.”
They glanced at one another, more puzzled than frightened. They made no move to stop me from coming nearer, nor did they seem in any way inclined to run from me. They whistled back and forth among themselves, low, musical sounds not unlike the calls of birds — or the whistling language of dolphins.
I stopped and let my hands fall to my sides. “Do you live nearby?” I asked. “Will you take me to your village?” I knew that they could not understand my words, any more than I could interpret their whistles. But I had to establish at least the beginnings of communication.
The four of them looked me up and down, then walked around me as if I were a clothing display. In utter silence. Yet I had the feeling that they were conversing with one another, without the need for sounds.
They were more than a full head shorter than I, all four of them, although already their barrel chests and powerful arms were much bigger than my own. I felt puny beside them. The tallest one, who almost came up to my chin, grinned at me. There was no hint of fear or distrust in his deep brown eyes. Merely curiosity.
He stared at me in silence for several moments, and I could almost hear the questions in his mind: Who are you? Where do you come from? What are you doing here?”
Like an English tourist, I spoke slowly and loudly in my effort to make him understand. “My name is Orion. Orion.” I touched my chest with a forefinger and repeated, “Orion.”
“Ho-rye-un,” the youngster said, in the same painful whisper that I had heard so often from Ahriman.
“Where is your village?” I asked. “Where do you live?”
No response.
I tried a different tack. “Do you know Ahriman? Where is Ahriman?”
The lad’s eyes flicked to his comrades and I could feel some form of mental communication vibrating from one to another. Ahriman echoed in my mind. Ahriman.
After a moment or so, the teen-ager stared into my eyes and frowned in concentration. I concentrated, too, trying to receive whatever mental message he was trying to send. I got nothing but the vaguest impression of the forest around us, trees and not much else.
With a very human shrug, the lad whistled a few notes to his companions, then gestured for me to come along with him. The five of us started along a well-worn trail that began in that clearing and headed deeper into the woods.
CHAPTER 45
The Neanderthals’ “village,” it turned out, was in the trees. Not among them, but actually inside the giant boles of those tall, massive sequoias. They had carved out elaborate living quarters for themselves, high above the ground, with long ladders made of vines hanging inside the trunks and leading up to their rooms. The broad, sturdy branches that radiated outward some forty or fifty feet above the ground served as patios and verandas for these dwellings.
At first I thought that their technology was pitifully limited. I could see nothing more sophisticated than stone axes and chisels, and smaller tools made of flint or quartz. But they had fire; they had as much intelligence as an Einstein or a Buddha, and they had a form of mental telepathy that allowed them to live in harmony with the world of animals and plants around them.
Where we Sapients invent a machine to do work that our arms are not strong enough to do, the Neanderthals tamed, trained, or developed an animal or plant. The vine ladders that they scampered up and down on were one example. They were living, growing vines, with roots imbedded in the soil and broad green leaves spreading in the sunlight along the high branches of the giant trees.
They did not hunt, nor did they farm. They had no need of either. They were gatherers, in the ultimate sense. They controlled herds of animals mentally, and led the oldest and weakest to their ritual deaths by some form of telepathic inducement. They kept pets such as dogs, but even there the link between Neanderthal and dog was a mental one.