In the back of my mind I wondered how a Creator who could manipulate time the way I can travel across distance needed to have me at Ararat’s summit within a certain span of hours. Why couldn’t Anya wait there for me as long as she needed to, and then return to the placetime where she started from? It made no sense to me.
Yet I forged onward. The last of my horses gave out as I urged her on up the slope of the mountain. I slogged forward on foot, the snowcapped peak before me, shrouded in clouds and swirling gusts of snow that cast sparkling rainbows when the sun struck them.
I was half dead myself by the time I reached the summit, stumbling through waist-high drifts of snow. I had not eaten in days. My body had repaired the wounds I had suffered, but that sapped energy too, and I felt weak as a newborn baby as I staggered to the flat mesa at the crown of Ararat. The mountain was twin-peaked, so I had chosen the higher of the two. Summit meant highest point, I reasoned. There was an old volcanic vent there, silent and cold as the snow heaped upon it.
It was a whirling world of mist and snow, cold and wet and white. I could feel my body’s heat leaching out of me, draining away into the deep cold wet snow, sucked away by the misty icy wind. I searched for hours or perhaps days through that white snowy wilderness. Alone. I was entirely alone. Was I too late? Or too early? It did not matter to me. I would meet Anya here or die.
At last I could not stand any more. I sank into the numbing snow, lost and alone, ready to die once again.
I was freezing. I could sense my body shutting itself down, trying to protect my cells from freezing—to no avail. The cold was seeping into me, the spark of life ebbing away.
I remembered another time, another place, when almost all the world was covered with snow and sheets of ice miles thick that stretched from the poles toward the equator. I had lived then, and died then, in the endless cold of a global winter. Died for her, for Anya, for the goddess I loved.
It was impossible to judge distances in that featureless misty snowscape. Somewhere out there I thought I saw a light, perhaps just the sparkle of crystals caught by a stray beam of sunshine breaking through the ice fog. Perhaps—
I struggled to my knees, to my frozen numbed feet. Shambling toward the sparkling light like a lurching snow monster, I saw that it was a glimmering silver sphere, no larger than my fist, hovering in the icy mist.
I nearly collapsed more than once, but at last I reached it. The sphere hung in midair, shimmering like a soap bubble. I tried to look into it, as if it were a magician’s crystal ball.
“Orion,” I heard Anya’s voice call faintly. “Orion, are you there? I can’t maintain the discontinuity much longer.”
“I’m… here.” My throat was raw, flaming. My voice sounded as if it came from the pits of hell.
“Orion! I can barely see you! Oh, my poor suffering darling!”
“I’m here,” I repeated. In that tiny glowing silver sphere I thought I could vaguely make out her form, standing alone, dressed in her metallic uniform, some kind of silvery helmet in one hand.
“I wish I could help you. I wish I could reach you.”
“Just to know… you…” I had to force the words out. “It’s enough.”
“The crisis is upon us, Orion. We need your help.”
I would have laughed if I had the strength. I was dying and they needed my help.
“You must return to Pella. You must obey Hera. It’s important. Vital!”
“No. She’s contemptible.”
“I can do nothing if you don’t obey her. No matter how it seems, I love you and I want to help you, but you must follow Hera’s commands.”
“She’ll… murder… Philip.”
“It must be. What she wants is what must be. Otherwise the entire strand of your present spacetime will unravel. We can’t afford to have that, Orion! The crisis is too deep. We can’t deal with anything more.”