“But why me?” I pleaded. “Why have I been taken from my own time to hunt down Ahriman? I haven’t the strength to kill him — you must know that! Why can’t you deal with him yourself? Why must I die when I don’t even understand…”

“You do not understand!” Ormazd’s voice was suddenly thunder, and the brightness radiating from him became too painful to look at directly. “You are the chosen instrument for the salvation of the human race. Ask no pointless questions, and do as you must.”

I had to shield my eyes with my upraised hands, but I pressed on. “I have a right to know who I am and why I am being made to do this.”

Ormazd’s blazing eyes felt hotter than the nuclear fires that had killed me ten thousand years in the future.

“You doubt me?” he rumbled. It was not a question, it was a threat.

“I accept you. But that is different from understanding. I had a life of my own once, didn’t I? If I must die…”

“You will die and be reborn as often as is necessary.”

“No!”

“Yes. You must die to be reborn. There is no other way to step through time, not for you and your kind. For mortals there is no way to move across time except through death.”

“But the woman, Agla… Aretha — what other?”

For many moments Ormazd was silent, his lips drawn into a tight line. Then he spoke again, more softly. “She is in danger from the Dark One. Ahriman seeks to destroy her, and me, and all of the continuum. If you wish to save her, you must kill Ahriman.”

“Is it true that you, your race—” I hesitated, then plunged on — “that you annihilated Ahriman’s race, all of his kind, except for him?”

“He told you that?”

“Yes.”

“He is the Prince of Lies.”

That was no answer, I realized. But it was all the answer I was going to get.

“When was The War?” I asked. “What happened?”

“That is something that you must discover for yourself,” Ormazd replied, his image beginning to waver and fade before my eyes. Then he added, “And for me.”

I Was stunned. “Wait! Do you mean that you yourself don’t know what happened? You don’t know what took place in The War? What your race did to his?”

But he was only a pinpoint of light now, dwindling into the all-engulfing blackness. I heard his voice calling, from far away:

“Why do you believe that my race is not the same as yours, Orion? Are we not father and son?”

With a shock I realized that I was staring at the dark night sky. Twinkling stars gazed back at me from the depth of space as I clung to the tree’s rough bark and searched the bowl of heaven for understanding, for meaning. I sought out the constellation of Orion, but it was nowhere in sight.

For days on end I trailed the Goat Clan as it marched across the Neolithic landscape. I had to get them to accept me, but they were totally xenophobic; either you were born a member of the clan or married a member of the clan — or you were an outsider, to be shunned and feared.

But Ormazd’s command was clear. I must save this clan from Ahriman’s plan, whatever it might be; I must use this clan to trap the Dark One.

And the woman — the gray-eyed one whose beauty could not be hidden even by layers of grime and ignorance — I knew she was the one I had known as Agla, and even before then, as Aretha. But she gave no hint of recognizing me. Was she reborn each time I was, but without any memories at all of her previous lives? Why would Ormazd do that?

I thought I knew the answer. She was my local barometer, as native to this time and place as any other member of her clan. If I could get her to accept me, the rest of the clan would.

And I wanted her to accept me. I wanted her to love me, as she had loved me ten thousand years ago, as I have loved her through all time.

But they were a superstitious, fearful troop of savages whose prime instinct was to flee from the unknown — and kill strangers.

I watched them from afar. They spent much of their days hunting, the younger women beating the bushes for rabbits, squirrels, and anything else they could find, while the men roamed farther afield, looking for bigger game and generally finding none. The older women stayed by their campfire, tending the children and gathering edible plants and berries.

By dusk they were all gathered around their fire, the women cooking their meager meals, the men chipping new tools from stores of flint they carried in leather bags or hardening their spear points in the flames. They were a self-contained, self-sufficient group, living off the land, staying just above the starvation-level as long as they did not produce too many children.

Twentieth-century ecologists despaired of “modern” man’s so-called throwaway culture and pointed to primitive tribes who, they claimed, lived in harmony with nature. Here I was watching the origins of the throwaway culture. These Neolithic hunters walked to a campsite, cut down brush and stripped trees of their smaller limbs to build a fire, killed whatever game they could find and tossed their bones away when they were finished gnawing on them. They left discarded flakes of flint, tools and weapons that were no longer useful, wherever they dropped them.

The smoke from their fires did not damage the purity of the Neolithic air. Their scattered refuse piles did not contaminate the soil. Their pitiful little camps did not harm the water table, nor did their hunting endanger any animal species. But the attitudes of these simple nomadic hunters would become the ingrained attitudes of all the generations of humans that followed them. What was acceptable for a few scattered bands of primitive hunters became a major environmental problem when those hunters’ descendants began to number in the billions.

But, despite myself, I had to smile as I watched them, day after day, and thought of the absurd assumptions that twentieth-century ecological moralists made about primitive peoples.

This was not accomplishing my mission, however. After several days of observing them, mostly from hiding, but now and then blatantly enough so that they could see me and know I was trailing them, I hit upon a scheme that would get them to accept me — I hoped.

I had boasted to them of my skill as a hunter. It had been mostly empty words; the only hunting I had ever done had been at Ogotai’s side in the great Mongol killing drive. But I knew that my reflexes and senses were far enough beyond theirs to give me a great advantage over them in anything that required physical exertion and skill. After watching them stalking game and building their primitive snares, and usually failing to catch anything, I knew that I could improve on their methods.

So I began taking game from the countryside and leaving it at their smoldering campfire while they slept. Innocents that they were, they posted no guards as they slept out in the open. The fire protected them from dangerous night-stalking beasts, and other human tribes must have been too far away to pose a threat to them. It was easy for me to leave a brace of fowl or a rabbit or two that I had flushed out of the brush and killed by throwing small rocks at them.

It took me several tries, but eventually I fashioned a crude bow and learned how to make arrows that would fly halfway accurately. I brought down a young doe with my new weapon, although I had to finish the job with my knife. I left the catch at their campfire just before dawn.

I watched them each morning, from a distance and always from concealment behind rocks or bushes. They were startled at first, wondering how the dead game appeared in their midst. They discussed it for hours at a time, some members of the clan apparently believing that others had done the deed. But no one admitted to it, and after a few mornings of finding the gifts by their campfire, they began to realize that it was the work of an outsider.