It was different for me. I have died and been returned to life many times. But only when the Creators willed it. I am their creature, they created me. I am fully human, fully mortal. I have no way of knowing if my death will be final or not, no way of assuring myself that I will be rescued from permanent oblivion and brought to life once more.
The Buddhists would teach, millions of years ahead, that all living creatures are bound up on the great wheel of life, dying and being reincarnated over and over again. The only way out of this constant cycle of pain is to achieve nirvana, total oblivion, escape from the world as complete and final as falling into a black hole and disappearing from the universe forever.
I did not want nirvana. I had not given up all my desires. I loved a goddess and I desperately wanted her to love me. She said she did, but in those awful timeless moments when she left me falling down that endless burning pit, I realized all over again that she is not human, not the way I am, despite her outward appearance.
I feared that I would lose her. Or worse yet, that she would grow tired of my human limitations and leave me forever.
CHAPTER 15
For three days we remained in the steaming swamp while I recuperated and regained my strength. I felt certain that Anya and I were the only human beings on the whole earth in this time—although she was actually more than merely human.
The swamp was miserably hot and damp. The ground squelched when we walked; every step we took was a struggle through thick ferns and enormous broad leaves bigger than any elephant’s ear that clung wetly to our bodies when we tried to push through them. Vines looped everywhere, choking whole trees, spreading across the spongy ground to trip us.
And it stank. The stench of decay was all around us; the swamp smelled of death. The constant heat was oppressive, the drenching humidity sapped my strength.
I felt trapped, imprisoned, in a glistening world of sodden green. The jungle pressed in on us like a living entity, squeezing the breath from our lungs, hiding the world from our view. We could not see more than a few yards ahead in any direction unless we waded out into the oozing mud of midstream, and even then the jungle greenery closed off our view so quickly that a herd of brontosaurs could have been passing by without our seeing them.
There was little to eat. The plants were all strange to us; hardly any of them seemed to bear anything that looked edible. The only fish I could see in the dark water were tiny flitting glints of silver, too small and fast for us to catch. We subsisted on frogs and wriggling furry insect grubs, nauseating but nourishing enough. Barely.
It rained every evening, huge torrents of downpour from the gray towering clouds that built up during the sopping heat of the afternoons. My skin felt wet all the time, as if it were crawling, puckering, in the unremitting humidity. After three days and nights of being soaked and steamed, even Anya began to look bedraggled and unhappy.
The sky was gray almost all the time. The one night it cleared enough to see the stars, I wished it had not. Peering through the tangled foliage while Anya slept, I tried to find the familiar patterns of recognizable constellations. All that I saw was that dismal red star hanging high in the dark sky, as if spying down on us.
I searched for Orion, my namesake among the stars, and could not find the constellation. Then I saw the Big Bear, and my heart sank. It was different, changed from the Dipper I had known in other eras. Its big square “bowl” was slim and sharp-angled, more like a gravy pitcher than a ladle. Its curving handle was sharply bent.
We were so many millions of years removed from any period I had known that even the eternal stars had changed. I stared at the mutated Dipper, desolate, downcast, filled with a dreadful melancholy such as I had never known before.