I felt myself falling once again, speeding toward that spinning globe even as its continents heaved and buckled and pulled apart from one another. I felt my senses returning, my body becoming substantial, real.
Then utter darkness.
My eyes focused on a flickering glow. A soft radiance that came and went, came and went, in a gentle relaxed rhythm. I was lying on my back, something spongy and yielding beneath me. I was alive and back in the world again.
With an effort I focused on this world around me. The glow was simply sunlight shining through the swaying fronds of gigantic ferns that bowed gracefully in the passing hot breeze. I started to pull myself up to a sitting position and found that I was too weak to accomplish it. Dehydrated, exhausted, even my blood pressure was dangerously low from sapping so much liquid to protect my skin from being roasted.
Above me I saw these immense ferns swaying. Beyond them a sky of pearl gray featureless clouds. The air felt hot and clammy, the ground soft and wet like the spongy moss of a swamp. I could hear insects droning loudly, but no other sounds.
I tried to at least lift my head and look around, but even that was too much for me.
Almost, I laughed. To save myself from the fiery pit of hell only to die of starvation because I no longer had the strength to get off my back—the situation had a certain pathetic irony to it.
Then Anya bent over me, smiling.
“You’re awake,” she said, her voice soft and warm as sunshine after a rain.
A flood of wonder and joy and fathomless inexpressible gratitude hit me so hard that I would have wept if there had been enough moisture in me to form tears. She had not abandoned me! She had not left me to die. Anya was here beside me, in human form, still with me.
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.”
Scrambling to her feet, Anya said, “First things first. Food, then shelter. And then—”
Her words were cut off by the sounds of splashing, close enough to startle us both.
For the first time I took detailed note of where we were. It looked like a swampy forest filled with enormous ferns and the gnarled thick trunks of mangrove trees. Heavy underbrush of grotesque-looking spiky cattails pressed in on us. The very air was sodden, oppressive, steaming hot. No more than ten yards away the spongy ground on which we rested gave way to muddy swamp water flowing sluggishly through stands of reeds and the tangled mangrove roots. The kind of place that harbored crocodiles. And snakes.
Anya was already on her feet, staring into the tangled foliage that choked the water and cut off our view a scant few feet before us. I forced myself up, tottering weakly, and gestured for Anya to climb up the nearest tree.
“What about you?” she whispered.
“I’ll try,” I breathed back.
Several of the tree trunks leaned steeply and were wrapped with parasitic vines that made it almost easy for me to climb up, even as weak as I was. Anya helped me and we crept out onto a broad branch and stretched ourselves flat on its warm, rough bark. I felt insects crawling over my skin and saw a blue-glinting fly or bee or something the size of a sparrow buzz past my eyes with an angry whizzing of wings.
The splashing sounds were coming closer. Set’s troops, already searching for us? I held my breath.