She was clad in a softly draped thigh-length robe the color of pale sand, fastened on one shoulder by a silver clasp. Her hair was perfect, her skin unblemished by the roasting heat and slashing claws we had faced.
I tried to speak, but all that escaped my parched throat was a strangled rasping.
She leaned over me and kissed me gently on my cracked lips, then propped up my head and put a gourd full of water to my lips. It was green and crawling with swamp life, but it tasted as cool and refreshing as ambrosia to me.
“I had to metamorphose, my love,” she told me, almost apologetically. “It was the only way we could survive that terrible heat.”
I still could not speak. Which was just as well. I could not bear the idea of confessing to her that I had thought she had abandoned me.
“In my true—” She hesitated, started over again: “In that other form I could absorb energy coming from the core tap and use it to protect us.”
Finally finding my voice, I replied in a frog’s croak, “Then you didn’t… cause the jump….”
Anya shook her head slightly. “I didn’t direct the spacetime transition, no. Wherever and whenever we are now, it is the time and place that Set’s warping device was aimed at.”
Still flat on my back, with my head in her lap, I rasped, “The Cretaceous Period.”
Anya did not reply, but her perceptive gray eyes seemed to look far beyond this time and place.
I took another long draft of water from the gourd she held.
A few more swallows and I could speak almost normally. “The little I gleaned from Set’s mind when he was probing me included the fact that something is happening, or has happened, or maybe will happen here in this time—sixty to seventy million years in the past from the Neolithic.”
“The Time of Great Dying,” Anya murmured.
“When the dinosaurs were wiped out.”
“And thousands of other species along with them, plant as well as animal. An incredible disaster struck the earth.”
“What was it?” I asked.
She shrugged her lovely shoulders. “We don’t know. Not yet.”
I pushed myself up on one elbow and looked directly into her divinely beautiful gray eyes. “Do you mean that the Creators—the Golden One and all the others—don’t know what took place at one of the most critical points in the planet’s entire history?”
Anya smiled at me. “We have never had to consider it, my love. So take that accusative frown off your face. Our concern has been with the human race, your kind, Orion, the creatures we created….”
“The creatures who evolved into you,” I said.
She bobbed her head once in acknowledgment. “So, up until now we have had no need to investigate events of sixty-five million years previous to our own era.”
My strength was returning. My flesh was still seared red and slashed here and there by the claws of Set’s reptilians. But I felt almost strong enough to get to my feet.
“This point in time is crucial to Set,” I said. “We’ve got to find out why.”
Anya agreed. “Yes. But not just this moment. You lie there and let me find us something to eat.”
I saw that she was bare-handed, without tools or weapons of any kind.
She sensed my realization. “I was not able to return to the Creators’ domain, my love. Set has still blocked us off from any contact there. The best I could do was to ride along the preset vector of his warping device.” She glanced down at herself, then added with a modest smile, “And use some of its energy to clothe myself.”
“It’s better than roasting to death,” I replied. “And your costume is charming.”
More seriously, Anya said, “We’re alone here, cut off from any chance of help, and only Set knows where and when we are.”
“He’ll come looking for us.”
“Perhaps not,” Anya said. “Perhaps he feels we’re safely out of his way.”
Painfully I raised myself to a sitting position. “No. He will seek us out and try to destroy us completely. He’ll leave nothing to chance. Besides, this is a critical nexus in spacetime for him. He won’t want us free to tamper with his plans—whatever they are.”