Orion in the Dying Time (21 page)

"And manipulate the continuum," I commented.

"We've been forced to," she admitted. "There's no way we can stop without having the whole fabric of spacetime come crashing down on us."

"And that would mean . . . ?"

"Oblivion. Extinction. We'd be erased from existence, along with the whole human race."

"But they've spread throughout interstellar space, you said."

"Yes, but their origin is here. Their world line begins on Earth and then spreads throughout the galaxy. Still, it's all the same. Expunge one part of that geodesic and it all unravels."

Our invisible craft was winging toward the night side of the planet. We reclined in utter physical comfort while racing higher and faster than any bird could fly across the breadth of Earth's widest ocean.

"Do you maintain contact with the other humans, the ones who went out to the stars?"

"Yes," Anya replied. "They still send their representatives back here to check the genetic drift of their populations. We have established a baseline in the Neolithic, just prior to the development of agriculture. That is our 'normal' human genotype, against which all others are measured."

I thought of the slaves I had met in Set's garden, of crippled Pirk and scheming Reeva and the pliable, cowardly Kraal. And I heard Set's hissing laughter. Normal human beings, indeed.

I fell silent and so did Anya. We were returning to the city; as far as I could tell it was the only populated city remaining on Earth. We had glided over the mute, abandoned ruins of ancient cities, each of them protected from the ravages of time by a glowing bubble of energy. Some of them had already been thoroughly destroyed by war. Others were simply empty, as if their entire population had decided one day to leave. Or die.

More than one sprawling city had been inundated by the rising seas. Our energy sphere carried us through watery avenues and broad plazas where fish and squid darted in the hazy sunlight that filtered down from the surface.

As our journey ended and we approached the only living city on Earth, the vast museum-cum-laboratory where the Golden One and the other Creators labored to hold their universe together, I tried to work up the courage to ask Anya the question that was most important to me.

"You . . . that is, we . . ." I stuttered.

She turned those lustrous gray eyes to me and smiled. "I know, Orion. We have loved each other."

"Do you . . . love me now?"

"Of course I do. Didn't you know?"

"Then why did you betray me?"

The words blurted out of my mouth before Set could stop them, before I even knew I was going to say them.

"What?" Anya looked shocked. "Betray you? When? How?"

My entire body spasmed with red-hot pain. It was as if every nerve in me was being roasted in flame. I could not speak, could not even move.

"Orion!" Anya gasped. "What's happened to you?"

To all outward appearances I was in a catatonic state, rigid and mute as a granite statue. Inwardly I was in fiery agony, yet I could not scream, could not even weep.

Anya touched my cheek and flinched away, as if she could sense the fires burning within me. Then she slowly, deliberately, put her fingers to my face once again. Her hand felt cool and soothing, as if it were draining away all the agony within my body.

"I do love you, Orion," she said, in a voice so low it was nearly a whisper. "I have taken human form to be with you because I love you. I love your strength and your courage and your endurance. You were created to be a hunter, a killer, yet you have risen beyond the limits that Aten placed on your mind."

Set's broiling anger seethed through me, but the pain was dying away, easing, as he spent his energies shielding his presence from Anya's probing eyes.

"We have lived many lives together, my darling," Anya said to me. "I have faced final destruction for your sake, just as you have suffered death for mine. I have never betrayed you and I never will."

But you did! I screamed in silence. You will! Just as I will betray you and kill you all.

CHAPTER 28

He's catatonic," sneered the Golden One.

"He is under someone's control," Anya replied.

She had brought me not to the Golden One's laboratory but to the tower-top apartment where I had been quartered before Anya and I had begun our trip around the world.

I could walk. I could stand. I suppose I could have eaten and drunk. I could not speak, however. My body felt wooden, numb, as I stood like an automaton in the middle of the spacious living room, arms at my sides, eyes staring straight into a mirrored wall that showed me my own blank face and rigid posture.

The Golden One was wearing a knee-length tunic of glowing fabric that clung to his finely muscled body. He planted his fists on his hips and snorted with disgust.

"You wanted to treat him with tender loving kindness and you bring him back to me catatonic."

Anya had changed into a sleeveless chemise of pure white, cinched at the waist by a silver belt.

"His mind is being controlled by whoever had tortured his body," she said, brittle tension in her tone.

"How did he get here?" the Golden One wondered, strutting around me like a man inspecting a prize animal. "Did he escape from his torturers or was he sent here?"

"Sent, I would think," said Anya.

"Yes, I agree. But why?"

"Call the others," I heard myself say. It was a strangled groan.

The Golden One looked sharply at me.

"Call the others." My voice became clearer, stronger. Set's voice, actually, not under my own control.

"The other Creators?" Anya asked. "All of them?"

I felt my head bob up and down once, twice. "Bring them here. All of them." Then I added, "Please."

"Why?" the Golden One demanded.

"What I have to tell you," Set answered through me, "must be told to all the Creators at once."

He looked at me suspiciously.

"They must be in human form," Set made me say. "I cannot speak to globes of energy. I must see human faces, human bodies."

The Golden One's tawny eyes narrowed. But Anya nodded to him. I remained silent, locked in Set's powerful control, unable to move or to say more.

"It will be uncomfortable to have us all in here, jostling and perspiring," he said, some of his old scornful tone returning.

"The main square," Anya suggested. "Plenty of room for all of us there."

He nodded. "The main square then."

There were only twenty of them. Twenty majestic men and women who had taken on the burdens of manipulating spacetime to suit themselves. Twenty immortals who found themselves laboring forever to keep the continuum from caving in on them.

They were splendid. The human forms in which they presented themselves were truly godlike. The men were handsome, strong, some bearded but most clean shaven, eyes clear, limbs straight and smoothly muscled. The women were exquisite, graceful the way a panther or cheetah is, with coiled power just beneath the surface. Their skin was flawless, glowing, their hair lustrous, their eyes more beautiful than gemstones.

They wore a variety of costumes: glittering uniforms of metallic fibers, softly draped chitons, long swirling cloaks, even suits of filigreed armor. I felt shabby in a simple short-sleeved tunic and briefs.

The square on which we assembled was a harmonious oblong laid out in the Pythagorean dimension. Marble pillars and steles of imperishable gold rose at its corners. One of the square's long sides was taken up by a Greek temple, so similar to the Parthenon in its original splendor that I wondered if the Creators had copied it or translated it through spacetime from the Acropolis to place it here. On the other side was a splendidly ornate Buddhist temple, with a gold seated Buddha staring serenely across the square at marble Athena standing with spear and shield. The two short ends of the square bore a steeply rising Sumerian ziggurat at one end and an equally precipitous Mayan pyramid at the other, so similar to each another that I knew they must both have originated in the mind of a single person.

Above the square the sky was a perfect blue, shimmering ever so slightly from the dome of energy that covered the entire city.

A sphinx carved from black basalt rested in the middle of the square's smooth marble pavement, its shoulders slightly higher than my head, its female face hauntingly, disturbingly familiar. Yet I could not place it. It was not the face of any of the women among the twenty Creators who gathered around me.

I stood with my back to the sphinx, penned inside a cylinder of cool blue-flickering energy. The Golden One was taking no chances with me, he thought. He suspected that I had been sent here by an enemy. The energy screen was to keep me safely confined.

Set was amused by his precaution. "Foolish ape," he said within me. "How he overestimates his own powers."

The Creators were curious about why they had been summoned here, and not entirely pleased. They clustered in little groups of two and three, talking to each other in low tones, apparently waiting for others to appear. They are like monkeys, I realized. Chattering constantly, huddling together for emotional support. Even in their apotheosis they remained true to their simian origins.

Then a gleaming globe of pure white drifted over the roof of the Parthenon and settled slowly as the assembled Creators edged back to make room for it. When it touched the marble pavement of the square, it shimmered briefly and seemed to contract in on itself to produce the grave, dignified, bearded figure of the one I called Zeus.

The other Creators grouped themselves around him as he faced the Golden One and Anya. Clearly, Zeus was their spokesman, if not their leader.

"Why have you called us here, Aten?"

"And demanded that we assume human form?" red-haired Ares grumbled.

Aten, the Golden One, replied, "Most of you know my creature Orion. He has apparently been sent here by someone to deliver a message to all of us."

Zeus turned to me. "What is your message, Orion?"

Every instinct in me screamed at me to warn them, to tell them to flee because I had been sent here to destroy them and all their works. Yet I wanted to break free of the force field that surrounded me and smash in their faces, tear their flesh, rend them limb from limb. Agonized, my mind filling with horror, I stood there mutely as the battle raged inside me between my inbuilt reflex to serve the Creators and the burning hatred for them that was as much my own as Set's.

"Orion!" commanded the Golden One sharply. "Tell us what you have to say. Now!"

He himself had built the instinct to obey him into my mind, burned that obligatory response through my synapses, hard-wired my brain for obedience. Yet I felt Set's overpowering presence counterbalancing that instinct, driving me toward murder. My body was a battlefield where they raged and fought for control, leaving me unable to choose between them, unable to move, unable even to speak.

Zeus made a sardonic smile. "Your toy is out of order, Aten. You've called us here for nothing."

They all laughed. The sneering, self-important, callous, heartless, overbearing would-be gods and goddesses laughed, completely unaware that death was inches away from them, totally uncaring and insensitive to the agony I was going through. I was suffering the pains of hell. For what? For them!

Annoyed, the Golden One grumbled, "There's always been something wrong with this one. I suppose I'll have to dispose of it and make a better one."

Anya looked dismayed but said nothing. The Creators began to turn their backs on me and walk away, many of them still laughing. I hated them all.

"I bring you a message," I said, with Set's powerful booming voice.

They stopped and turned back to stare at me.

"I bring you a message of death."

The sky began to darken. No clouds; the open sky overhead swiftly changed from summer blue to deep violet and finally to impermeable black. I realized that Set had tapped into the generators that powered the dome shield over the city and perverted all the energy that fed it into turning the dome opaque. At a stroke he had trapped the Creators in their own city and cut them off from the energy they required to change their form from human back into glowing spheres of pure energy.

The square was bathed in an eerie red glow; the absolute blackness of the dome seemed to be tightening, drawing closer like the net of a snare or a hangman's noose.

"You are trapped here," Set's voice bellowed from my lips. "Meet your death!"

The flickering blue force field around me winked off, the energy drawn into my own body. It felt like hot knives carving me for an instant, but then I was stronger than ever. And I was free—free to slaughter them all.

I stepped out from the spot where I had been imprisoned, stepped directly toward the Golden One, my hands twitching like the claws of a predatory reptile. He seemed totally unafraid of me, one brow cocked slightly in that smug, sneering manner of his.

"Stop, Orion. I command you to stop."

As if I had been plunged into a smothering, suffocating pool of quicksand, my steps slowed, faltered. It was like trying to move through wet concrete. Then I felt a new surge of strength boil up within me like the hot wind of hell rising from the depths of the earth. I lunged through the invisible barrier grinning as I saw the Golden One's face go from smug superiority to sudden astonished fright.

Everything slowed down around me as my senses shifted into hyperdrive. I saw beads of sweat breaking out on the broad smooth brow of the Golden One, saw Zeus's eyes wide and round with unaccustomed fear, powerful Ares stumbling backward away from me, Aphrodite and Hera turning to run away from me, their beautiful robes billowing, the other Creators gaping, desperate, unable to change shape and escape me.

My hands reached out, clawlike, for the Golden One's throat.

"Orion, no!" Anya shouted. In the slow-motion world of my hyperdrive state her voice sounded like the long reverberating peal of a distant bell.

I turned toward her as the Golden One backed away from me.

"Please, Orion!" Anya begged. "Please!"

I stopped, staring at her lovely tormented face. In those fathomless silver-gray eyes I saw no fear of me at all. I knew I had to kill her, kill them all. I loved her still, yet the memory of her betrayal burned my soul like a branding iron. Had that love been built into me, too, like my other instincts? Was it her way to control me?

I stood in the middle of a triangle, pulled three different ways at once. The Golden One first; death to my creator, the one who made me to endure pain and sorrow that he would not face himself. My hands stretched again for his throat, even while he backpedaled in dreamlike slow motion. The other Creators were scattering, although the square was completely blocked now by the energy screen that Set had turned into a black impassable barrier.

Anya was reaching toward me, her simple words enough to freeze me in my tracks. Yet within me Set was urging me on with all the whips and scourges at his power.

Love. Hate. Obedience. Revenge. I was being torn apart by the forces that they wielded over me. Time hung suspended. The Golden One, his face a rictus of fury and fear, had focused his mind on me like a powerful laser beam, exerting every joule of energy he could command to bend me to his will. The more his mighty power blazed at me, the more Set poured his ferocious energy into me, draining the generators that powered the city, driving me to overcome the Golden One's conditioning, pushing me to grasp his throat in my hands and crush it.

Between them they were tearing me apart. It was like being riddled in a crossfire between two maddened armies, like being stretched into a bloody ribbon of flayed flesh on a sadistic torturer's rack.

Anya stood to one side of me, her eyes pleading, her lips open in a cry that I could no longer hear.

Obey me! commanded the Golden One inside my head.

Obey me! Set thundered at me silently.

Each of them was pouring more and more of his energy into me, like a pair of enormous lasers focused on a helpless naked target.

"Use their energy!" Anya's voice reached me. "Absorb their energy and use it for yourself!"

From the deepest recesses of my soul came an echoing response, a newly awakened voice, tortured, tormented, filled with anguish. What about me? it cried. What about Orion? Me, myself. Must I be a weapon of deliberate genocide? Must I forever be a toy, a puppet manipulated by my creator or by his ultimate enemy? When will Orion be free, be totally and completely human?

"NEVER!" I roared.

I could feel Set's surprise and the Golden One's shock. I could sense Anya breathlessly watching to see what I would do.

All that energy pouring into me. All that power: the overwhelming brilliance of the Golden One, the hell-hot fury of Set. All focused on me. While Anya watched, bright-eyed.

"Never!" I shouted again. "I will never obey either one of you again! I free myself of you both! Now!"

I spread my arms and felt as if binding chains had snapped and been thrown off.

"I'm free of you both!" I snarled at them: the Golden One standing stunned before me, Set raging within my own skull. "You can both go to hell!"

The Golden One's mouth hung open. Anya's expectant expression began to turn into a smile and she started to step toward me.

But Set's furious voice within me seethed, "No, traitorous ape. Only you shall go to hell."