Orion in the Dying Time by Ben Bova Page A

parting with it was painful.
    The master made a hissing noise, almost a sigh, and handed my dagger to Kraal. He took it, shamefaced.
    The other master turned toward the approaching dragons and raised one hand. They stopped short of the huts, their breath whooshing in and out like spurts of flame in a furnace. The monsters would have wrecked several huts if they had tried to come all the way to this meeting ground in the center of the village. Their masters were keeping their word: no harm would come to the village as long as Kraal's people cooperated.
    "You can't let them take him!" Chron shouted at the villagers. There were tears in his eyes and his voice cracked with frustrated rage.
    I made myself smile at him. "There's nothing you can do, Chron. Accept the unavoidable." Then I swung my gaze to Kraal and Reeva. "I'll be back."
    Kraal looked down at his bare crusted feet but Reeva glared defiantly at me.
    "I'll be back," I repeated.
    The masters walked me past the huts. With soft whistles they got the big dragons to crouch down and we climbed up on their backs, me behind the one who had taken my dagger. If he—or she, I had no way of telling—was worried that I would grab him around the throat and strangle him, he gave no sign of it.
    The dragons lumbered off past the village. I turned for one last look at it, over my shoulder. The villagers were still clustered in the central meeting ground, standing stock still, as if frozen. Chron raised his spear above his head in defiance. It was a pretty gesture, the only thing he could do.
    The entire village had been cowed, all except that one teenage boy. I wondered how long he could survive if Reeva decided he was dangerous to her.
    Then the trees blotted out the village and I saw it no more. The dragons jounced along at a good pace, jogging on their two legs between the trees, flattening the foliage on the ground. There was no saddle, no reins. I clung to the dragon's hide with both arms and legs, clutching hard to hang on. We rode behind their massive heads, so there was no worry about being knocked off by tree branches. If the dragon could get through, we could easily enough.
    The humanoid masters were clad only in their scaly skins, without even a belt or pouch in which to hold things. They seemed to have no tools at all, no weapons except their formidable claws and teeth. And the fearsome dragons we were riding, of course.
    I began to wonder if they had language, then wondered even more deeply how a race could be intelligent without language. Clearly Set had communicated with me telepathically. Did these silent replicas of him use telepathy instead of speech?
    I tried speaking to them, to no avail. No matter what I said, it made absolutely no impression on the reptilian sitting four inches in front of me. As far as I could tell he was stone deaf.
    Yet they controlled the dragons without any trouble at all. It had to be some form of telepathy, I concluded. I remembered the Neanderthals, who also communicated with a form of telepathy, although they could make the sounds of speech if they had to.
    We pounded through the forest without stop. Night fell but we barely slowed our pace. If the dragons had a need for sleep, they did not show it, and for all I knew, the masters riding them might have been sound asleep; I had no way of telling. Did they know that I can go without sleep for weeks at a time, if necessary? Or did they conclude that I could sleep without falling off the back of this gallumphing latter-day dinosaur?
    I decided to find out.
    I let myself slide off the dragon's back. Hitting the ground on the balls of my feet, I jumped out of the way of the beast pounding along behind me and dashed into the thick brush.
    The dragons immediately stopped and reared up. I could hear their snuffling panting in the darkness of the night, like giant steam engines puffing. It was cloudy, threatening rain, so dark that I could not see them at all.
    No sound came from the masters