CHAPTER 17
Gradually, as we walked the rising land, Anya and I began to fashion a few primitive tools. I could not find flint anywhere, but I did pick up a stone that fit nicely into the palm of my hand and worked each night scraping one side of it against other stones to make a reasonably sharp edge. Anya looked for fairly straight branches among the windfalls from the trees we passed and used our nightly fire to harden their ends into effective spear points.
I worried about making a fire each night. We needed it to cook what little food we could find, of course. In another age I would have wanted it to help ward off predators while we slept. But here in this world of dinosaurs and snakes, this world ruled by reptiles instead of mammals, I wondered if a fire might not attract heat-seeking predators instead of frightening them away.
Besides, there was still Set to consider. Certainly no one except Anya and I would light a fire each night in this Cretaceous landscape. It would stand out like a beacon to anyone with the technology to scan wide areas of the globe.
Yet we needed a nightly fire, not merely for cooking or safety but for the psychological comfort that it provided. Night after night we huddled close together and stared into the warm dancing flames, knowing that it would be more than sixty million years before any other humans would create a campfire.
The skies were clearer in the uplands, away from the deep swamp. But the stars were still unfamiliar to me. Night after night I searched for Orion, in vain.
I began to show Anya my prowess as a hunter. Using the spears she made, I started to bag bird-sized dinosaurs and, occasionally, even bigger game such as four-legged grazers the size of sheep.
One night I asked Anya a question that had been nagging at me ever since we had come to this time of dinosaurs. “When you changed your form… metamorphosed into a sphere of energy”—the idea of that being her true self still bothered me—”where did you go? What did you do?”
The firelight cast flickering shadows across her face, almost the way she had shimmered and glittered when she had left my arms as we fell down the well of Set’s core tap.
“I tried to return to the other Creators,” she said, her voice low, almost sad. “But the way was blocked. I tried to move us both to a different time and place, anywhere in the continuum except where we were. But Set’s device was preset for this spacetime and it had too much energy driving it for me to break through and direct us elsewhere.”
“You’re conscious and aware of what you’re doing when you—change form?”
“Yes.”
“Could you do it now?”
“No,” she admitted somberly. Gesturing toward our little campfire and the scraps of dinosaur bones on the ground, she said, “There isn’t enough energy available. We barely have energy input to keep our human forms going.”
Her voice smiled when she said that, but there was an underlying sadness to it. Perhaps even fear.
“Then you’re trapped in this human form,” I said.
“I chose this human form, Orion. So that I could be with you.”
She meant it as a sign of love. But it made me feel awful to know that because of me she was just as trapped and vulnerable as I was.
Within a week we were up in the hilly country where the air was at least drier, if not much cooler, than it had been in the swamps below.
Night after night I found myself searching the skies, seeking my namesake constellation and trying to avoid the feeling that the baleful red star was watching me like the eye of some angry god—or devil.
Anya always woke near midnight to take the watch and’ let me sleep. One night she asked, “What do you expect to see in the stars, my love?”
I felt almost embarrassed. “I was looking for myself.”
She pointed. “There.”
It was not Orion. Not the familiar constellation of the Hunter that I had known. Rigel did not yet exist. Brilliant red Betelgeuse was nowhere to be seen. Instead of the three stars of the belt and the sword hanging from it, I saw only a faint, misty glow.