It was a brown, arid world, but not without its beauty.
I stood on the crest of a dusty hill clawed by arroyos, looking out on a desert valley. Millions of years ago this had been sea bottom, but now the nearest body of open water was a thousand kilometers away. Yet there was life here: cactus and dry brown brush, poisonous lizards and tiny darting rodents with beady eyes and long hairless tails. Birds chattered from the few scrawny trees. Insects glinted in the harsh hot sunlight.
There was a patch of green down in that valley, with a village at its edge. A tiny knot of buildings made of sun-dried mud bricks, roofed with gnarled thin branches. Men and women were in the fields nearby, bent over their crops.
At first glance I did not notice any machinery, any sign that this human settlement was more advanced than the Stone Age. But then I caught the glint of sunlight on solar collectors atop the roof of a larger building. I saw a geodesic dome, a small one, but large enough to house a communications antenna.
There were no roads in sight, only footpaths out to the fields where the crops were growing.
I had nothing with me but the tatters of an old uniform and an ancient dagger that I kept strapped to my thigh. With a smile of satisfaction, I started down the eroded bare dirt of the hillside, heading for the village.
I arrived as the sun touched the western horizon and the workers were coming back from the fields.
They were startled to see a stranger.
“Who’re you?” asked the young woman in their lead. She looked to be still in her teens. Sandy hair, sky blue eyes, a scattering of freckles across her pert nose.
“My name is Orion.”
“Where’re you from? How’d you get here?”
I waved a hand vaguely toward the hills. “I’ve come a long way. I’m glad I found your village.”
She gave me a strange look, part suspicion, part curiosity.
“You said your name is Orion?”
“Does the name mean anything to you?” I asked.
She shook her head uncertainly. The others had gathered around us. I looked over their familiar faces. Clones of Frede, Magro, little Jerron. I saw that the oldest woman among them was pregnant.
“We don’t get many visitors out here,” Frede’s daughter said to me. “Just inspectors from the Commonwealth, once every other year or so.”
“What do you call this planet?” I asked them.
“Its official name is Krakon IV,” said one of the teenaged boys.
“Yes, I know that. But what is your name for it?”
They glanced at each other. “We just call it Home.”
I smiled at them. Home. Their faces were streaked with sweat and they looked tired from their day’s work, but they seemed healthy and contented. Their clone parents had found a Home for themselves, far from the wars that they once knew.
“Well, come into the village,” Frede’s daughter said. “My mother and the elders will want to see you.”
Healthy, contented, and not afraid of strangers. The whole village came out to see the new arrival: gray- haired adults, scampering children, young women holding babies in their arms.
Frede’s eyes widened when she recognized me. She ran up and flung her arms around my neck.
“Orion!” she cried. “Orion!”
She could still embarrass me. Gently I untangled from her embrace, while the entire village watched, grinning.
“Why are you here?” she asked, suddenly wary. Her eyes were still bright and alert, although her hair had streaks of gray in it.
“I wanted to see how you’re doing, nothing more.”
She sighed with relief. They feasted me that night. I saw that the primitive look of the village was deliberate. They had decided to live with their environment as much as possible. Electricity from sunlight, engineered microbes to fix nitrogen for their crops and drive away insect pests, a self-contained nuclear pump to bring up water for irrigation.
“Maybe one day we’ll build ourselves an aircar or two,” Frede said as we sat at table in their main hall. “But for now, we can walk wherever we need to go.”
“You seem contented.”
She pointed to a young woman with a baby in her lap. “That infant’s my granddaughter, Orion. Our second generation can bear children naturally.”
Jerron had died, she told me, of a heart attack. “Magro’s our medic now. He’s got up-to-date equipment, but Jerron’s heart just quit. Nothing anyone could do. We buried him out in the fields. He was our first death.”
After dinner, Frede and I took a slow walk beneath the bright stars of their night sky.
“You mean you came all this way, to this lonely little frontier world, just to see us?”
“Why else?”
“I thought for a moment,” she confessed, “that you’d come to recruit us as soldiers again.”
“You’re getting a bit old for that,” I said.
“Our children aren’t.”
“There’s no need for soldiers. The peace between the Commonwealth and the Hegemony has held for almost twenty years now.”
“And you haven’t aged a bit.”
“I age much more slowly than you.”
She was silent for a while as we walked out to the edge of their cultivated fields.
“You’re on your way to find her, aren’t you? The woman you love.”
I nodded in the moonless dark. “Yes. I’ve got to find her, no matter how long it takes.”
“Do you need help? Is that why you’ve come?”
“No, no. You can’t help me. I’ve got to do this alone.”
“Can’t you stay here with us? With me?”
I looked down at her starlit face and saw that she was totally serious.
“I wish I could,” I said as tenderly as I could manage. “But I’ve got to find her. Wherever she is in time and space, I’ve got to go to her.”
Frede shook her head sadly. “You’ve done so much for us, Orion. Can’t we do anything for you?”
I smiled. “Live in peace, Frede.”
For me, I knew, there would be no peace. Anya was out there somewhere among the stars and I had to find her before all the timestreams of the universe unraveled and collapsed into a chaos that would shatter the continuum forever.
I was no longer Aten’s creature, bound to do his bidding through all the ages of the continuum. I am my own man now, I told myself. But I am still Orion, the Hunter. And my hunt is just beginning.
