Orion in the Dying Time (28 page)

A golden globe appeared, and then a pure white one. And one of deepest ruby red, all of them firing twisting, sputtering shafts of electricity into Set's body. He dropped me, screeching and hissing, his tail lashing wildly, his hands clutching at empty air. He staggered backward toward the fountain of lava, his body wrenching and thrashing as his screams pierced through me like hot knives.

More globes appeared, copper and emerald green, bronze and gleaming brass, each of them adding its lightning blast to Set's tortured form, pushing him bodily into the seething fountain of fiery lava.

With a final shriek of agony and despair Set plunged into the bubbling molten metal, the red scales of his body disappearing in the blazing, searing fountain of hell that he himself had created.

CHAPTER 37

I lay on my burning back, more dead than alive.

The globes of energy hovered around me and took on human forms: Anya, Zeus, red-haired Ares, beautiful Aphrodite, dark-eyed Hera. And the Golden One, of course, looking as smug as ever.

He stepped forward, smiling, his golden mane glowing against the night, a long cloak of gold and white wrapped around his muscular body.

"We've done well," he said cheerfully. "That devil will never bother us again."

"Orion has done well," Anya countered, kneeling beside me on the blood-soaked ground of the courtyard. I felt dizzy, weak. I was consciously suppressing the pain from my burns, yet I knew that my wounds were deep, perhaps fatal. But once she touched my grimy brow with her cool fingers I felt new strength flowing into me.

"Oh, he played his part. It all went according to my plan."

Zeus cocked an eyebrow. "Come now, Aten, if it hadn't been for Orion, We would never have been able to penetrate Set's defenses."

With some vehemence in her voice, Anya added, "Orion distracted the monster long enough for me to take control of his energy source and destroy it."

I looked around the shattered courtyard. Dead carcasses of sauropods and carnosaurs lay like small hills. Bodies of slain Shaydanians sprawled among them. The curving fortress wall was half smashed down. The searing fountain of lava had disappeared.

"It was a time stasis," Anya said to me softly. "Set intended to plunge you into that fountain of hell and leave you in it forever."

"Instead . . ." My voice was a strangled dry croak.

"Instead we pushed him into his own hell," she said. "While you distracted him, we were able to shut off his energy source and return from our hiding places to attack him."

"He's dead."

"He is in stasis," said Zeus. "Roasting for eternity."

Alarmed, I propped myself up on one elbow. "Then he could be released?"

Aten made a sneering smile. "None of us will release him! Would you, Orion?"

I shook my woozy head, muttering. "It would have been better to kill him."

"Not so easily done, my love. Be satisfied that we have won."

"Lots of the dinosaurs got loose," I remembered.

"Good hunting for your Mongol friends," said Aten. He pulled his cloak tighter about him. It began to shimmer.

"Wait!" I called.

The Creators looked down at me, their faces curious or annoyed.

"What about Subotai? He is here with only his personal guard, less than a thousand men."

"Quite enough, I should think," said Zeus.

"I promised him that I would bring his entire army here. That means all his people, their women, their flocks and herds, their yurts and all their belongings."

"Why bother?" asked Aten scornfully. "The barbarian general accomplished nothing. He's useless to us."

Struggling up to a sitting position, I answered, "He is my friend. I promised him."

"Ridiculous." Aten sneered.

"That's not for you to decide alone," Anya snapped.

"I'm afraid I agree with Aten," said Zeus. "It would serve no useful purpose."

"It's difficult enough trying to keep the continuum from unraveling," said sharp-featured Hermes. "Why make a change that we don't have to make?"

"I'll do it myself," I said.

They all stared at me.

"You?" Aten laughed. "A toy that I created, acting like a god?"

"Which of you brought Subotai and his thousand men to this time and place?" I demanded.

They glanced around at one another, finally focusing all their glances on Anya.

She shook her head, smiling. "Not I. I was hiding deep underground, waiting for the moment to strike at Set's core tap. The rest of you were scattered among the stars."

"You can't mean that Orion did it himself!" Aten almost shouted.

Anya nodded. "He must have. None of us did."

"I did it myself," I said.

Zeus smiled without humor. "Orion, you are learning the powers of a god."

"There are no gods," I replied grimly. "Only beings such as yourselves—and Set."

They stirred uneasily.

"If Orion wants to bring Subotai's people here, I say he has earned that right," Anya said firmly.

No one contradicted her.

I closed my eyes, grateful for her in so many ways that I could not even begin to count them. In that one fleeting instant I saw history unreeling before me like a spool of film spinning at blurring speed.

I saw Subotai's people settling across this broad grassy savannah that stretched from the Red Sea to the Atlantic.

I saw Mongol warriors spitting carnosaurs on their lances, brown-skinned men in stained leathers and steel helmets, riding tough little Gobi ponies, who would give rise in later generations to splendid tales of knights in shining armor slaying fire-breathing dragons to save enchanted princesses.

I saw those Mongols learning agriculture from the natives of Paradise, intermarrying with them generation after generation as the glaciers retreated northward from Europe, taking the rains with them and turning the broad grasslands into the parched desert called Sahara.

I saw the great-great-grandchildren of Subotai's army moving to the Nile valley, leaving the withering savannah, inventing irrigation and civilization. That made me smile: the so-called barbarian Mongols fathering the earliest civilization on Earth.

And I saw tortured Sheol breathe its final burst of flame and collapse at last into a gaudy ovoid of a planet, spinning madly, striped in brilliant colors, still heated from within by the energy of its final collapse, circled by dozens of fragments of the shattered Shaydan. I knew Zeus would be pleased to have the planet named after him.

And I saw, with a sinking heart, that all the slaughter I had done, the destruction of Sheol and the planet Shaydan, the time of great dying that I had rained upon the earth, the extinction of the dinosaurs and countless other forms of life—all this had been part of the Golden One's plan.

I heard his haughty laughter as I watched once again the reign of death that I had inflicted upon the earth.

"I am evolution, Orion," he boasted. "I am the force of nature."

"All that killing," I heard myself sob.

"It was necessary. My plans span eons, Orion. The dinosaurs were just as great an obstacle to me as they were to Set. They had to be removed, or else I could never have brought the human race into being. You wiped them out, Orion. For me! You think you are almost a god, but you are still my creature, Orion, my toy. Mine to use as I see fit."

EPILOGUE

In the timeless city beneath the golden energy dome Anya healed me of my wounds, both physical and spiritual. The other Creators left us alone in that empty mausoleum of a city, alone among the temples and monuments that the Creators had built for themselves.

My burns healed quickly. The gulf between us caused by her seeming betrayal, less so. I realized that Anya had to make me think she had abandoned me, otherwise Set would have seen her trap when he probed my mind. Yet the pain was still there, the awful memory of feeling deserted. As the days quietly passed and the nights, the love we felt for each other slowly began to bridge even that gap.

Anya and I stood on the outskirts of the city before the massive bulk of the enormous pyramid of Khufu, its dazzling white coat of polished limestone gleaming gloriously in the morning light, the great Eye of Amon just starting to form as the sun moved across the sky toward the position that created the shadow sculpture.

I felt restless. Even though we had the entire empty city to ourselves, I could not overcome the uncomfortable feeling that we were not truly alone. The other Creators might be scattered across the universes, striving to maintain the spacetime continuum that they themselves had unwittingly unraveled, yet I had the prickly sensation in the back of my neck that told me we were being watched.

"You are not happy here," Anya said as we walked unhurriedly around the base of the huge, massive pyramid.

I had to admit she was right. "It was better when we were back in the forest of Paradise."

"Yes," she agreed. "I liked it there, too, even though I didn't appreciate it at the time."

"We could go back there."

She smiled at me. "Is that what you wish?"

Before I could answer, a shimmering sphere of glowing gold appeared before us, hovering a few inches above the polished stone slabs that made up the walkway around the pyramid's base. The globe touched lightly on the paving, then contracted to form the human shape of Aten, dressed in a splendid military tunic of metallic gold with a high choker collar and epaulets bearing a sunburst insignia.

"Surely you're not thinking of retiring, Orion," he said, his tone just a shade less mocking than usual, his smile radiating more scorn than warmth.

Turning to Anya, he added, "And you, dearest companion, have responsibilities that cannot be avoided."

Anya moved closer to me. "I am not your 'dearest companion,' Aten. And if Orion and I want to spend some time alone in a different era, what is that to you?"

"There is work to be done," he said, the smile fading, his tone more serious.

He was jealous of me, I realized. Jealous of the love that Anya and I shared.

Then the old smug cynicism came back into his face. He cocked a golden eyebrow at me. "Jealous?" he read my thoughts. "How can a god be jealous of a creature? Don't be ridiculous, Orion."

"Haven't I done enough for you?" I growled. "Haven't I earned a rest?"

"No. And no. My fellow Creators tell me that you have grown much like us in your powers and wisdom. They congratulate me on producing such a useful . . . creature."

He was going to say "toy" until he noticed my fists clenching.

"Well, Orion," he went on, "if you are going to assume godlike powers, then you must be prepared to shoulder godlike responsibilities, just like the rest of us."

"You told me that I was your creature, a tool to be used as you see fit."

He shrugged, glancing at Anya. "It comes out to the same thing. Either you bear responsibilities like the rest of us or you obey my commands. Take your choice."

Anya put her hand on my shoulder. "You have the right to refuse him, my love. You have earned that right."

Smirking, Aten replied, "Perhaps so. But you, goddess, cannot evade your responsibilities. No more than I can."

"The continuum can struggle along without me for a while," she said, almost as haughty as Aten himself.

"No, it can't." Suddenly he was utterly serious. "The crisis is real and urgent. The conflict has spread across the stars and threatens the entire galaxy now."

Anya paled. She turned her fathomless silver-gray eyes to me, and I saw real pain in them.

I knew that we could escape to Paradise if we wanted to. To those who can control time, what matter days or years or even centuries spent in one era or another? We could always return to this exact point in spacetime, this individual nexus in the continuum. The crisis that Aten feared would still be waiting for us.

Yet how could we be happy, knowing that our time in Paradise was limited? Even if we remained there for a thousand years, the task awaiting us would loom in our minds like the edge of a cliff, like a sword hanging over our heads.

Before Anya could reply I said, "Paradise will have to wait, won't it?"

She nodded sadly. "Yes, my love. Paradise will have to wait."

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The epigraphs that begin each section of this novel are from the
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
; "The City in the Sea" by Edgar Allan Poe;
Paradise Lost
by John Milton; and "Ulysses" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

The legend of the Light-Stealer and the Punisher is adapted from ideas originally developed by Isaac Asimov in his essay, "Planet of the Double Sun," and is used here with his kind and generous permission.

AFTERWORD

The story of Orion began in my mind many years ago when I first contemplated the concept that the myths and legends of ancient times must have been based on actual persons and events, at least in part.

Gilgamesh, Prometheus, the Phoenix that perishes in flames yet rises anew from the ashes—how much of these tales are fanciful elaborations and how much of them are real? We will never know, of course. The dusty debris of history has covered up the original events—whether they were actual adventures of living men and women or the total invention of some clever moralist.

Be that as it may, the true significance of a myth or legend lies not in its actuality but in its ability to instruct and inspire listeners (or readers). Over the course of time since the development of speech countless human beings have lived through uncountable adventures. Only a precious few have served as the nuclei for the myths that have moved all the generations that followed.

As Joseph Campbell and others have pointed out, some myths are universal to all human tribes. They have such a powerful statement to make that every known human society has adapted a variation of the same myth. For example, every culture has a Prometheus myth that tells how a god gave fire to a freezing, starving humankind and how, with fire, humans became almost godlike in their power while their benefactor was punished by his fellow gods.

As I wrote the continuing tale of Orion I found that the story moved between mythology and history, between legend and archeology. In this present volume, the saga moves into realms of natural history, both biological and astronomical.

Underlying all of that, however, is the deeper current of the novels, a level that I had no inkling of when I first began to write of Orion's fantastic adventures. That level is, of course, the relationship of humankind to its gods.

The original novel, Orion, was driven by my curiosity about the Neanderthals. Paleontologists have found that there were two fully intelligent species of Homo sapiens on Earth some fifty thousand years ago: the Neanderthals and ourselves. The Neanderthals disappeared, and their disappearance is the subject of that first novel about Orion.

In writing it, however, the deeper theme arose from my subconscious. Given a far-future version of humankind, distant descendants of ours with vastly superior knowledge and technology at their disposal, they could invent the means to travel back through time and create the human race.

They would seem to their creatures as gods. What is more, given that possibility, we no longer need the supernatural gods that populate our religions. We have met our Creator, as Pogo would say, and he is us!

How apt and fitting. Many philosophers and modern-day psychologists have theorized that our gods are the creation of the human mind, an attempt to impose order and justice on a seemingly indifferent universe. Turn the concept full circle and we have human descendants from the distant future creating the human race itself. The gods that people worship have always seemed to have the same foibles and vanities that you and I have. The patriarchal God of the Old Testament appears to me very much like a spoiled, petulant nine-year-old boy. Perhaps that is because the gods are just as human as we.

All it takes is time travel.

Thus we have Orion, a human being purposely built by such a Creator to serve and obey, a hunter who was created to find and kill the enemies of his Creator. In time he begins to realize that the so-called gods are as human and fallible as he is himself. In time he begins to learn how to be a god himself. Or tries to.

Orion, then, is humankind's representative, attempting to understand what the gods demand of him. Each step forward in his understanding brings him a step closer to godhood—a progress that some of the "gods" approve of, while others do not.

So much for the underlying tensions that drive the saga of Orion. Now for the particulars of this novel.

Among the myths that every human culture seems to share there is the myth of supernatural beings who are entirely evil: devils, demons, the Satan and Beelzebub that Dante and Milton wrote of. Their descriptions have always seemed decidedly reptilian to me.

To create a satanic reptile for this novel meant that I had to deal with the possibility of a species of reptile that is fully as intelligent as H. sapiens. No, actually my Set—to give him his ancient Egyptian name—would have to be as intelligent as my fictitious Creators, the godlike human descendants from our future.

For years I have been intrigued by the possibility of reptilian intelligence. Intelligent lizards are an old standby of science fiction, including my very first published novel of thirty years ago. Yet it always seemed unlikely to me that reptiles could be intelligent, regardless of their utility as "alien" creatures for science-fiction tales.

In the past decade several paleontologists have suggested that if the dinosaurs had not been extinguished in the great wave of extinctions that swept the earth some sixty-five million years ago, they might ultimately have given rise to an intelligent species. Dale A. Russell, of the Canadian National Museum of Natural Sciences at Ottawa, is the leading champion of this idea. He proposes that a small Cretaceous bipedal carnosaur, Stenonychosaurus inequalus, might have evolved into a big-brained, erect-walking intelligent reptile, given time.

Yet it seemed to me that time and brain size were not the only requirements for the development of intelligence. Intelligence requires interaction among individuals, communication. Had Albert Einstein been left in a wilderness at birth and never met another human being, he would never have developed the ability to speak, let alone do physics.

Most modern reptile species lay their eggs and never return to them, leaving the hatchlings to fend for themselves. So did most of the dinosaurs, although at least one species of duckbilled dinosaurs apparently cared for their young. For this novel I proposed that the reptilians that evolved on the fictitious planet Shaydan orbiting the equally fictitious star Sheol evolved intelligence through motherly care and a form of telepathy.

The telepathy is something of a cheat, I admit. But think of your own childhood experiences. Did not your mother have moments of startling telepathic powers?

The astronomical setting for this novel is accurate—up to a point. It is entirely possible to "rebuild" the solar system with a small unstable dwarf star at the same distance from the sun that the planet Jupiter is now. The gravitational perturbations on the earth and the other inner planets of our solar system would be negligible. The sun's companion star could have one or more planets orbiting around it, just as the planet Jupiter now possesses sixteen or more moons.

Ask any astronomer, though, and he or she will tell you that there is no way Jupiter could be the remnant of a star that exploded. No natural way, is what they implicitly are saying. For the novelist, however, it is possible to use deliberate changes caused by forces other than blind nature. In this novel the dwarf star Sheol evolves into our familiar planet Jupiter through the determined efforts of Orion and the Creators.

The breakup of Sheol's one planet causes a rain of meteors on Earth that triggers the Time of Great Dying, the titanic wave of extinctions that wiped out not merely the dinosaurs but thousands of other species of land, sea, and air some sixty-five millions years ago. The end of the Cretaceous saw the slate of life on Earth wiped almost clean.

The nearly emptied world that existed after the great Cretaceous calamity contained abundant empty ecological niches that new forms of life could move into. The age of mammals began, leading ultimately to the earliest hominids.

A great cataclysm did indeed shake the earth some sixty-five million years ago. It caused the end of the Cretaceous Period, just as a similar disaster some two hundred fifty million years ago caused the end of the Permian Period and led to the rise of the dinosaurs.

The dinosaurs began in a planetwide catastrophe that scrubbed away more than half the species then occupying the earth. They died in a paroxysm of similar proportions. The available evidence strongly points to a bombardment of meteors and/or comets that was either accompanied by or actually triggered tectonic shifts of the landmasses that altered sea levels and climate all around the globe.

Stephen Jay Gould and his fellow biologists tell us that these disasters were works of blind nature, brief moments in the grand flow of the eons that forced evolution into new pathways. To the novelist, however, it is irresistibly tempting to assign these evolutionary forces to purposeful characters. It makes for a much more interesting story. It allows us to contemplate the works of nature in moral terms. It turns the blindly uncaring forces of nature into choices made by thinking, feeling characters who know the differences between good and evil.

For myself, I think there is probably much more to the Time of Great Dying than a cataclysmic rain of fire from the heavens, dramatic though that may be. As the Cretaceous was nearing its end a new form of life arose on Earth: a life-form so ubiquitous and lowly that we seldom give it much thought unless we are forced to deal with it directly. That life-form is grass.

Grasses are one of the most successful forms of life on Earth. All the cereal grains that feed humankind are types of grasses, for example. They first appeared on Earth in the late Cretaceous and shouldered earlier forms of vegetation out of existence.

Did grass kill the dinosaurs? Animals that feed on grasses today are equipped with very specialized teeth and digestive systems to crop and metabolize a food that contains a high percentage of tough silica. Could the herbivorous dinosaurs handle the grasses that replaced the earlier vegetation? If they could not and starved, the carnivorous dinosaurs that preyed on the herbivores would have died off, too.

This is mere speculation, however. And it does not explain why so many other life-forms—from plankton to plesiosaurs—died off at the same time. Yet it is instructive to consider that the so-called Time of Great Dying was also a period of birth for new life-forms, the grasses in particular.

So much for what we know of paleontology, and what we speculate. This book is a novel, a work of fiction, and of science fiction at that.

The basic scientific underpinning for this tale is as sound as careful research can make it, although I have taken liberties with agreed-upon scientific canon where I felt it necessary for the sake of the story. As I have throughout all of Orion's adventures, I have endeavored to use the stuff of myth and legend as a means to explore the human soul; more particularly, to explore the relationship of humankind and its gods.

With an exploding star and a shattered planet we link astronomical events with death and birth on Earth. Intelligent reptiles give rise to the legends of devils that haunt the dark hours of every human culture. Dinosaurs that somehow survived into prehistoric human times lead to our legends of dragons.

And a single human being, created to obey the whims of the gods, strives not merely to survive but to understand, not blindly to obey but to learn how to be a god himself.

These are the ingredients of science fiction. The science must be accurate, yet the author must be free to invent new possibilities—as long as no one can show that they are totally impossible in the real world. The characters must be believable, no matter how fantastic their adventures. They must feel and love and bleed even as you and I do, otherwise we do not have a story to read, we have a treatise.

This is what I am trying to do with these tales of Orion. His story is not completed yet.

Ben Bova

West Hartford, Connecticut