“I have the power,” he said, his voice thundering. “That gives me the right.”

Anya put up both her hands and the lightnings vanished. The featureless golden expanse reformed itself.

Ormazd made a little bow to her. “Of course, others have some power, also. Not as much as mine, but enough to do a few simple tricks.”

Anya looked from him to me. “Ask him why he decided to eliminate the Neanderthals, Orion. Don’t let him mislead you. Ask him why he did it.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “I want to know why.”

“Because I chose to.”

“That’s no answer,” I insisted.

“Your scientists argued about evolution for more than a century,” Ormazd said. “Well, I am evolution, Orion. I direct the comings and goings on your little world.”

I glanced at Anya; she gave me a small nod of encouragement.

Ormazd was not finished. “Take a promising little planet called Earth. It is populated by a race of bright, two-legged creatures. They can communicate with each other directly, mind to mind. They can control the lower animals around them and the plants. They have adapted themselves perfectly to their environment. Dull, Orion. Very dull and pointless. They will never progress.”

“Why do they have to…”

He ignored me and continued. “So I wipe the slate clean. It may seem cruel, but it is necessary. I create a race of warriors, soldiers, to do the bloody work of eliminating the natives. You are of that race, Orion. You — all of you Sapients — were designed for killing. You all take delight in it; when you can’t find a reason to kill each other, you go out and slaughter the helpless beasts around you. Mighty hunters, Orion, all of you.”

I remembered how easily, how callously I had killed others of my own kind. And the hunts, where we had covered ourselves with the blood of helpless animals. I trembled with shame, and with anger at the god who made us this way.

“So I set you to the work of eliminating the Neanderthals. I had others of your kind build vast machines on a world you call Titan, a moon of Saturn, machines that can alter the output of the Sun enough to cause Ice Ages on Earth. The glaciers finish the job of scouring the planet clean of its natives — and of the murderous creatures whom I created.”

“But that’s not the way it happened.”

“No, Orion, it isn’t.” He seemed amused by it all. “You helped them to survive. You showed that final little squad of bloodthirsty warriors how to live on Earth. Instead of a self-destructing army of killers, I got a self-perpetuating race of Homo sapiens sapiens. Thanks to you, Orion.”

“We were supposed to die in the Ice Age.” The knowledge hollowed out my insides, made me feel as if I were falling from heaven to hell.

“Yes. Of course. I was going to create a truly superior race! You can’t even imagine the creatures that I would have fathered. Not in your most ecstatic dreams! The angels that your kind fantasize about are nothing compared to what I would have created!”

Anya interrupted his ranting with a voice as cool and hard as silver. “But the Sapients lived, and took over the Earth. And you made such excellent warriors of them that you could not dislodge them.”

“Yes,” Ormazd admitted, glaring at me. “And at the same time I became aware that this one—” he tilted his golden-maned head toward Ahriman’s dark, imprisoned form — “had survived the slaughter and somehow gained powers almost equal to my own.”

“So you created me,” I realized.

“I created you to hunt down Ahriman before he found the way to destroy all that I had built. Yes, I created you — too well.”

My head was spinning. “But if you knew all this, if you could examine all the pathways of the continuum and foresaw what would happen…”

“Linear thinking, Orion,” said Anya. “Events happen in parallel, not in sequence. What you experience as time, as a progression from past through present into future, is really all happening simultaneously. Cause and effect are interchangeable, Orion. Tomorrow and yesterday co-exist.”

“I still don’t understand…”

“It’s not necessary for you to understand,” Ormazd said. “In your own stumbling way, you have done what I wanted done. Ahriman is trapped here, forever. The continuum is safe.”

“You are safe,” Anya said to him.

“And you,” he countered.

She turned to me again. “You still have not found out why he has done all this, Orion. He constantly outwits you about the ultimate question.”

I felt utterly helpless.

“Shall I tell him?” she asked Ormazd.

He folded his arms across his chest. “You will, no matter what I say.”

Anya’s smile was bitter, rueful. “Orion, he created you — he created what you call the human race and used it to destroy the Neanderthals, because without the humans, we gods would never have come into being.”

I heard her words, but the meaning was just as opaque to me as if she had said nothing.

“Ormazd saw that the Neanderthals would eventually die away, leaving nothing. So he created the Sapients to eliminate them, to scour the Earth clean and prepare the way for a new race…”

“Better than angels,” I mumbled.

“But what actually has happened,” she went on, “is that you humans learned how to manipulate your own evolution, learned how to engineer the genes of your cells. You took control of your own destiny and eventually, after many millennia, you metamorphosed into — us.”

“We became gods?”

“You evolved into creatures such as we are,” Anya said. “Creatures of pure energy, who can control and manipulate that energy to take whatever form we wish. Creatures who understand the innermost workings of the continuum, who can move through time and space as easily as you walk through a forest.”

I turned back to Ormazd. “We became you.”

He frowned at the two of us.

“We created you!” I shouted.

“Now you understand why Ormazd determined to destroy the Neanderthals. If they lived, if you humans had never been created, we ourselves would never have come into existence.”

“But you do exist!”

“Yes, and we are bound by the same inexorable rules that bind all the continuum. Ormazd had to do what he did; otherwise, this continuum, this universe, would collapse and perish.”

They could both see the utter confusion that had my mind reeling. Past and future, life and death — it was all a vast dizzying whirl, the entire universe spinning wildly, galaxies forming like eddies in a swift stream, spawning stars and planets and creatures who struggle and die…

“It is the truth, Orion.” Anya’s calm voice cut through my agitation.

“You can see the necessity of it,” said Ormazd.

“The Neanderthals had to die so that we could live, and evolve into you.”

Ormazd nodded grimly. “That is not the way I had planned it, at first. But it worked out well enough.”

I could not look at Ahriman, not now. Instead, I asked Ormazd, “And what is to become of me?”

His expression lightened. He almost smiled at me, like a benign, generous creator. “I will grant you the gift of life, Orion. A full, rich, human lifespan in any era you choose.”

“And then death.”

His brows arched. “If you choose the right era, a human lifespan can be very long indeed. Centuries.”

“And you?” I asked Anya.

Before she could reply, Ormazd said, “We have evolved out of humankind, Orion. We are not human, any more than you are a hominid ape.”

“So I would live on Earth without you,” I said to her.

“I can give you more than one lifetime,” Ormazd said. “You can live for thousands of years, if you desire to.”

My heart felt like a stone sinking to the bottom of the deepest ocean trench. “One lifetime or many — without you, Anya, what good is it?”

She took a step toward me, held out her hand.

But I turned toward Ahriman, glowering helplessly in his eternal prison. “For this I helped to annihilate his entire race. For this I’ve led him into this living hell.”