He raised his head at last, and their silent importuning stopped as abruptly as if it had been chopped off with a guillotine. Ahriman looked at me bleakly, then slowly, painfully got to his feet.
The villagers drew in a collective breath of anticipation. For many of them, it was the last breath they ever took.
A pencil-thin red beam from a laser rifle lanced out of the darkness among the trees past Ahriman’s head. He threw his arms across his face and jumped sideways. More laser bolts flashed out from the trees, and I heard the yelling roar of attacking soldiers — Sapients — and saw their white-armored forms rushing toward the clearing.
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 stunned to find a fellow Sapient among the brutes he had come to slaughter. I was empty-handed and, worse, my mind was a blank, too. I did not know what to do, where to turn.
Tohon began running with Yoki in his arms. The soldier snapped out of his hesitation. He gunned them both down. Their bodies sprawled to the ground, spurting blood.
“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 running toward the relative safety of the trees and darkness. The fire burned hot, casting glinting highlights off the white armor of the soldiers. I held a laser rifle in my hands, my finger curled around its trigger.
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, pinning his arms to his sides with a mighty bear hug, while another Neanderthal ripped off the soldier’s helmet and choked the life out of him. Then Ahriman took up the soldier’s rifle and began firing at the other troopers.
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.”