I did not withdraw from Anya’s mind. I was driven out of it, repelled like an invading bacterium, thrown out like an unwanted guest.
For hours I howled like a chained beast in my dark coffin of a cell, unable to move, to stand, unable even to pound the walls until my fists became bloody pulps. I huddled there in a fetal position, wailing and bellowing to a blindly uncaring universe. Betrayed. Abandoned by the only person in the continuum whom I could love, left to my fate as callously as if I were nothing more to her than the husk of a melon she had tasted and then thrown away.
Anya and the other Creators were fleeing for their lives, reverting to their true physical forms, globes of pure energy that can live among the stars for all eternity. They were abandoning the human race, their own creations, to be methodically wiped out by Set and his reptilian brethren.
What did it matter? I wept bitterly, thinking of how foolish I had been ever to believe that a goddess, one of the Creators, could love a man enough to risk her life for his sake. Anya had been all fire and courage and adventure when she had known that she could escape whatever danger we faced. Once she realized that Set had the power to truly end her existence, her game of playing human ended swiftly.
She had chosen life for herself and her kind, and left me to die.
I lost track of time, languishing and lamenting in my cell. I must have slept. I must have eaten. But my conscious mind had room for nothing but the enormity of Anya’s betrayal and the certainty of approaching death.
Let it come, I told myself. The final release. The ultimate end of it all. I was ready to die. I had nothing to live for.
I don’t consciously recall how or when it happened, but I found myself on my feet once more, standing in Set’s audience chamber again, facing him on his elevated throne.
Blinking stupidly in the dull flickering ruddy light of the torches flanking his throne, I realized that I could move my arms and legs. I was not fettered by Set’s mental control.
His enormous bulk loomed before me. “No, there are no chains of any kind holding you,” his words formed in my mind. “We have no need of them now. You understand that I can crush you whenever I choose to.”
“I understand,” I replied woodenly.
“For an ape you show promising intelligence,” his mocking voice echoed within me. “I see that you have pieced together the fact that I intend to bring my people to this world and make Earth our new home.”
“Yes,” I said, while my mind wondered why.
“Most of my kind are content to accept their fate upon Shaydan. They realize that Sheol is an unstable star and will soon explode. Soon, that is, in terms of the universe’s time scale. A few million years from now. Soon enough.”
“You are not content to accept your fate upon a doomed planet,” I said to him.
“Not at all,” Set replied. “I have spent most of my life shaping this planet Earth to my purposes, fashioning its life-forms into a fitting environment for my people.”
“You travel through time, just like the Creators.”
“Better than your puny Creators, little ape,” he answered. “Their pitiful powers were based on the tiny slice of energy that they could obtain from your yellow sun. They allowed most of the sun’s energy to waft off into space! Unused. Wasted. A foolish mistake. A fatal mistake.”
He hissed with pleasure as he continued, “My own people have depended on the wavering energy from dying Sheol. I alone understood how much energy can be tapped from the molten core of a planet as large as Earth. Taken in its totality, a star’s energy output is millions of times stronger. But no one uses the total output of a star, only the miserable fraction that their planet intercepts.”
“But a core tap…” I muttered.
“Tapping the planet’s molten core gives me more energy, enormously concentrated energy, constant and powerful enough to leap across the eons of spaced me as easily as you can hop across a puddle. That is why I have won this planet for myself and your Creators are running for their lives, scattering out among the distant stars.”
I said nothing. There was nothing for me to say. My only question was when Set would put me to death, and how long it would take.
“I have no intention of killing you soon,” he said in my mind, knowing my thoughts without my speaking them. “You are my prize of victory over your Creators, my trophy. I will exhibit you all across Shaydan.”
I looked up into his red snake’s eyes and realized what he had in mind. Most of his kind did not believe that they could be saved by migrating to Earth. Set intended to show me to them, to prove that he was master of the planet, that there would be no resistance to their relocation.
“Good again, thinking ape! You perceive my motives and my intentions. I will be the savior of my kind! The conqueror of an entire world and the savior of my people! That is my accomplishment and my glory.”
“A glorious accomplishment indeed,” I heard myself answer. “Exceeded only by your vanity.”
“You grow bolder, knowing that I do not intend to kill you immediately.” I could sense anger in his words. “Be assured that you will die, in a manner and at a time that will not merely please me, but will convince all of Shaydan that I am to be obeyed by one and all. Obeyed and adored.”
“Adored?” I felt shock at his words. “Like a god?”
“Why not? Your bumbling Creators allowed themselves to be worshiped by their human spawn, did they not? Why should not my own people adore me for saving our race? I alone have conquered the Earth. I alone have opened the gates to Shaydan’s salvation.”
“By killing off billions of Earth’s creatures.”
Set shrugged his massive shoulders. “I created most of them, they are mine to do with as I please.”
“You didn’t create humankind!”
He hissed laughter. “No, I did not. Those who did are fleeing to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. The human race has lost its reason for existence, Orion. Why should they be allowed to last beyond their usefulness, any more than the dinosaurs or the trilobites or the ammonites?”
I will not be allowed to outlive my usefulness, either, I thought. Once I ceased being useful to the Creators they abandoned me. Once I cease being useful to Set he will kill me.
“Before you die, overgrown monkey,” Set went on tauntingly, “I will allow you to satisfy your apish curiosity and see the world of Shaydan. It will be the final satisfaction of your existence.”
Set lumbered off his throne and led me down long dim corridors that sloped downward, always downward. The light was so deeply red, so dim to my eyes, that I might as well have been blind. The walls seemed blank, although I felt certain they were decorated with mosaics the way the upper corridors had been. I simply could not perceive them.
Set’s massive form marched in front of me, the scales of his broad heavily muscled back glinting in the gloomy light, his tail swinging left and right in time to the strides of his clawed feet. Those talons clicked on the hard floor. Absurdly, his swinging tail and clicking claws made me think of a metronome. A metronome counting off the final moments of my life.
We passed through laboratories and workrooms filled with strange equipment. And still we went on, downward, deeper. I tried to see these interminable corridors through Set’s eyes, but his mind was completely shielded from me. I could not penetrate it at all.
He felt my attempt, though.
“You find the light too dim?” he asked in my mind.
“I am nearly blind,” I said aloud.
“No matter. Follow me.”
“Why must we walk?” I asked. “You have the ability to leap across spacetime, yet you walk from one end of your castle to another? No elevators, no moving belt-ways?”
“Jabbering monkey, we of Shaydan use technology to help us do those things we could not do unaided. Unlike your kind, however, we do not have a simian fascination with toys. What we can accomplish with our unaided bodies we do for ourselves. In that way we help to maintain a balance with our environment.”
“And waste hours of time and energy,” I grumbled.
I sensed a genuine amusement from him. “What matter a few hours to one who can travel through spacetime at will? What matter a bit of exertion to one who is assured of feeding?”
I realized that it had been too long since my last meal. My stomach felt empty.
“One of your mammalian shortcomings,” Set told me, sensing my thought. “You have this absurd need to feed every few hours merely to maintain your body temperature. We are much more in harmony with our environment, two-footed monkey. Our need for food is modest compared to yours.”
“Regardless of the environmental fitness of my kind,” I said, “I am hungry.”
“You will eat on Shaydan,” Set answered in my mind. “We will both feast on Shaydan.”
At last we entered a large circular chamber exactly like the one at the heart of his fortress in the Neolithic. Perhaps the same one, for all I could tell, although now it showed no signs of the battle Anya and I had put up there.
At the thought of Anya, even the mere mention of her name, my entire body tensed and a flame of anger flared through me. More than anger. Pain. The bitter, racking anguish of love that had been scorned, of trust that had been shattered by deceit.
I tried to put her out of my mind. I studied the chamber around me. Its circular walls were lined with row after row of dials and gauges and consoles, machines that controlled and monitored the titanic upwelling energy rising from the core tap. In the center of the chamber was a large circular hole, domed over with transparent shatterproof plastic, I saw, not merely the metal railing that had been there in the Neolithic fortress.
The chamber pulsated with energy. Set’s entire castle was hot, far hotter than any human being would feel comfortable in. But this chamber was hotter still; some of the heat from the earth’s molten core leaked through all the machines and safety devices and shields to make this chamber the anteroom of hell.
Set reveled in it. He strode to the plastic dome and peered down into the depths of the core tap, its molten energy throwing fiery red highlights across the horns and flaring cheekbones of his red-scaled face. Like a sunbather stretching out on a beach, Set spread his powerful arms around that scarlet-tinged dome in a sort of embrace, soaking up the heat that penetrated through it.
I stood as far from it as I could. It was too hot for my comfort. Despite my efforts to control the temperature of my body, I still had to allow my sweat glands to do their work, and within seconds I was bathed in a sheen of perspiration from head to toe.
After several moments Set whirled back toward me and pointed to a low platform on the other side of the circular chamber. Its square base was lined by a series of black tubular objects, rather like spotlights or the projectors used to cast pictures against screens. Above the platform the low ceiling was covered with similar devices.
Wordlessly we stepped onto the platform. Set stood slightly behind me and to one side. He clamped a taloned hand on my shoulder; a clear sign of possession for any species that has hands. I gritted my teeth, knowing that I was no match for him either physically or mentally. Not by myself. A human being without tools is not a noble savage, I realized; he is a helpless naked ape, soon to be dead.
Halfway across the room I could see our reflection in the plastic dome that topped the core tap. Distorted weirdly on its curving surface, my own grim face looked pale and weak with Set’s powerful shoulders and expressionless reptilian head rising above me. And his claws clamped on my shoulder.
Suddenly we were falling, dropping in utter darkness as if the world had disappeared from beneath our feet. I felt a bitter cryogenic cold as I whirled in nothingness, disembodied yet freezing, falling, frightened.
“Forgive me.”
Anya’s voice reached my awareness. A faint, plaintive call, almost sobbing. Just once. Only those two words. From somewhere in the interstices between spacetimes, from deep in the quantized fabric of the continuum, she had reached out with that pitifully fleeting message for me.
Or was it my imagination? My own self-pitying ego that refused to believe she could willingly abandon me? Forgive her? Those were not the words of a goddess, I reasoned. That was a message fashioned by my own emotions, my own unconscious mind trying to build a fortress around my pain and grief, trying to erect a castle to replace the desolation at the core of my soul.
The instant of cold and darkness passed. My body took on dimensions and form once more. Once again I stood on solid ground, with Set’s claws pressing on my left shoulder.
We were on the planet Shaydan.
I was lost in murk. The sky was dark, covered with sick-looking low clouds the gray-brown color of death. A hot dry wind moaned, lashing my skin with fine particles of dust. Squinting against the blowing grit, I looked down at my feet. We were standing on a platform, but beyond its edge the ground was sandy and covered with small rocks and pebbles. A bit of scrawny bush trembled in the wind. A desiccated gray tangle of weeds rolled past.
It was hot. Like an oven, like the baking dry heat of a pottery kiln. I could feel the heat soaking into me, sapping my strength, almost singeing the hairs on my bare arms and legs. I felt heavy, sluggish, as if loaded down with invisible chains. The gravity here is stronger than on Earth, I realized. No wonder Set’s muscles were so powerful; Earth must seem puny to him.
I could not see more than a few feet in any direction. The very air was thick with a yellow-gray haze of windblown dust. It was difficult for me to breathe, like sucking the blistering sulfurous fumes of a fire pit into my lungs. I wondered how long I could survive in this atmosphere.
“Long enough to accomplish my goal,” Set answered my thought.
I tried to speak, but the gagging air caught in my throat and I coughed instead.
“You find Shaydan less than beautiful, chattering monkey?” He radiated amused contempt. “Perhaps you would feel differently if you could see it through my eyes.”
I blinked my tearing eyes and suddenly I was seeing this world through Set’s eyes. He allowed me into his mind. Allowed? He forced me, plucked my consciousness as easily as picking fruit from a tree. He kidnapped my awareness.
And I saw Shaydan as he did.
The mosaics I had seen in his castle immediately made sense to me. Through the eyes of this reptilian, born in this environment, I saw that we were standing in the middle of an idyllic scene.
What had been haze and mist to me was perfectly transparent to Set. We were standing at the summit of a little knoll, looking out over a broad valley. A city stood off near the horizon, its buildings low and hugging the ground, colored as the ground itself was in shades of green and brown. A single road led from the city to the knoll where we stood. The road was lined with low trees, so small and wind-tangled that I wondered if they were truly trees or merely large bushes.
What had seemed like a scorching, searing wind that drove stinging particles of dust now felt like a gentle caressing breeze. I knew that my own skin was being sandpapered by the flying dust, but to Set it was nothing more than the long-remembered embrace of his home world.
I saw that we stood on a platform exactly like the one in Set’s castle back on Earth. Perhaps it was the very same one: it may have been translated through spacetime with us. The same black tubular projectors lined its four sides, except for the place where steps allowed one to mount or descend.
Looking up, I saw other projectors overhead, mounted on tall slim poles spaced evenly around the platform.
Beyond them was Sheol, so close that it covered more than a quarter of the sky, so huge that it seemed to be pressing down on me, hanging over me like some enormous massive doom that was squeezing the breath out of my parched lungs.
The star was so close that I could see mottled swirls of hot gases bubbling on its surface, each of them larger than a whole world. Sickly dark blotches writhed here and there, tendrils of flame snaked across the surface of the star. Its color was so deeply red that it almost seemed to be projecting darkness rather than light. It seemed to be pulsating, to be breathing in and out irregularly, gasping with an enormous shuddering vibration that racked its whole wide expanse.
This was a dying star. And because it was dying, the planet Shaydan was doomed also.
“Enough.”
With that one word Set pushed me out of his mind. I stood half-blind, cringing at the stinging whips of the scorching, cutting wind, alone on the world of my enemies.
But Set had not cut the mental link between us fast enough for me to be ejected from his mind empty-handed. While I had gazed upon the face of Sheol through his eyes, I had learned what he knew of the star and the other worlds that formed our solar system.
The sun had been born with this companion, a double-star system. While the sun was a healthy bright yellow star with long eons of stable life ahead of it, its smaller companion was a sickly dull reddish dwarf, barely massive enough to keep its inner fusion fires going, unstable and doomed to extinction.
Huddled close to the sun were four worlds of rock: the closest named after the messenger of the gods because it sped back and forth in the sky so swiftly; the next named for the goddess of love because of its beauty; the third was Earth itself, and the fourth, rust red in appearance, received the name of a war god.
More than twice as far from the sun as the red planet lay the orbit of the feeble dwarf star that Set and his kind called Sheol. A single planet orbited around Sheol, Set’s world of Shaydan. Doomed world of a doomed star.
Unwilling to accept the death of his kind, Set had spent millennia examining the other worlds of the solar system. Using the seething energy of his planet’s core, Set learned how to travel through spacetime, how to move himself through the vastness between the worlds, and through the even greater gulfs between the years.
He found that beyond Sheol lay the giant worlds, planets of gas so cold they were liquefied, gelid, too far from the sun to be abodes for his kind.
Of the four rocky worlds orbiting close to the warm yellow star, the first was nothing but barren rock pitilessly blasted by the heat and hard radiation of the nearby sun. The next was beautiful to gaze upon from afar, but below its dazzling clouds was a hellish world of choking poisonous gases and ground so hot it melted metal. The red planet was cold and bare, its air too thin to breathe, the life that had once flourished upon its surface long since died away. Worse yet, it was too small to have a molten core; there was no energy to tap on the red planet.
That left only the third planet from the yellow sun. From earliest times it had been the abode of life, a safe harbor where liquid water—the elixir of life—flowed in streams and lakes and seas, fell out of the sky, thundered across planet-girdling oceans. And this watery world was massive enough to hold a molten core of metal at its heart, energy enough to warp spacetime again and again, energy enough to bend the continuum in response to Set’s will.
The earth harbored life of its own, but Set saw this as a challenge rather than an obstacle. With enough energy and a central driving purpose, he could accomplish anything. Far back into the earliest time of the planet’s existence he traveled, sampling the millennia and the eons, studying, watching, learning. While the others of his kind watched Sheol shuddering and writhing in the beginnings of its death throes, Set pondered carefully and drew his plans.
Reaching far back in time, to the point where life was just beginning to emerge from the waters and stake its claim on dry land, Set scrubbed the earth clean of almost every one of its life-forms and seeded the planet with reptilian stock. Long eons passed and those reptiles took command of the ground, the seas, and the air. They changed the planet’s entire ecosystem, even altered the composition of its atmosphere.
Now they were marked for destruction. The time had come for the descendants of Set’s seed, the dinosaurs, to give way to Set’s own people, the inhabitants of Shaydan. Set began the elimination of the dinosaurs and thousands of other species, cleansing the Earth once again to prepare it for his own kind.
A problem arose. From the distant future of the time where Set worked, the descendants of chattering inquisitive monkeys had evolved into powerful creatures who could also manipulate space time. Like monkeys, they busied themselves altering the continuum to suit themselves, even creating a breed of warriors to be sent to various points in spacetime to shape the continuum to their liking.
I realized that I was one of those warriors. The Creators had sent me to deal with Set, underestimating his abilities so tragically that now they were scattering out to the stars, abandoning the Earth and all its life to Set’s merciless hand.
Set had won a cosmic victory. The Earth was his. The human race was to be exterminated completely. I was to be exhibited around the planet Shaydan as proof of Set’s triumph and then ceremonially destroyed.
I knew that there was no way I could avoid my fate. With Anya gone, her back turned to me, I hardly had the will to keep on living.
I had died many times, but always the Creators had resurrected me to continue doing their bidding. I knew the pain that death brings, and the fear that comes with it every time, no matter how often. Is this the final destruction? Is the end of me? Will I be erased forever from the book of life?
Always in the past the Creators had restored me. But now they themselves were fleeing across the stars in fear of their lives.
I marveled that Set, as thorough and merciless as he was, would allow them to continue living.
The ability to manipulate spacetime gives you control if the clock that counts out the hours, days, seasons, years. The ability to control time removes the frantic hurry from existence, teaches patience and prudence, allows the leisure to examine each step in life from every possible angle before proceeding further.
Set had traveled across millennia, across eons, to prepare his plans for the migration of his people to Earth. He felt no need for haste, no urge to speed.
Now he moved in a calm, deliberate manner to show me to his people even while Sheol seethed and writhed in the sky above.
Most of the time I was as good as blind in the murky atmosphere of Shaydan. The planet was slightly more massive than Earth; its more powerful gravity pulled on me, dragged my feet, made me feel tired and strained all the time. The merciless wind whipped at me and drove stinging particles of grit against my flesh. I was constantly exhausted, half-starved, my skin red and raw as if I were being lashed every hour of the day.
On rare occasions Set would allow me to see the world through the eyes of his people, and once again I saw a calm and beautiful desert world, severe but entrancing with its bold wind-sculpted rock mountains and bright yellow sky.
Set never allowed me into his own mind again. Did he realize that I had learned from him things that he would rather I did not know?
Slowly, as we traveled across the breadth of Shaydan, going from city to city in a seemingly endless round of visits and conferences, I began to understand the true nature of the people of Shaydan.
The fact that reptiles could evolve intelligence had puzzled me since I had first stepped out into the Neolithic garden along the Nile. Obviously Set and his kind had developed large complex brains, as mammals had done on Earth. Yet intelligence is more than a matter of brain size. If size were all that mattered, elephants and whales would be the intellectual equals of humankind, rather than the mental equals of dogs or pigs.
I had always thought that no matter what the size of their brains, reptiles who lay eggs the way the dinosaurs did and leave them to hatch on their own could never achieve the kind of parent-child communication necessary for the development of true intelligence. Yet obviously Set and his people had somehow overcome this obstacle.
Intelligence, I was convinced, depended on communication. Apes learn by watching their elders. Human babies learn at first by watching, then later through speech and finally reading. Set continually complained about the human race’s constant monkeylike chattering. He derided our need to speak to one another, no matter whether the information being conveyed was monumental or trivial.
The people of Shaydan did not speak. They communicated with one another in silence, mentally, just as Set communicated with me. That I understood. But how did this telepathic ability arise in the first place?
I tried to ferret out the answer to this puzzle as Set exhibited me across the length and breadth of Shaydan. I watched as best as I could in the dimness of my captivity. Listening did me no good at all because the reptilians did not speak. But whenever Set allowed me to view his world through the eyes of one of his people, I tried to pluck out as much information about them as I could.
Our visits reminded me of a medieval king with his royal entourage touring his domain. We traveled on the backs of four-legged reptiles, not unlike compact versions of the sauropods of Earth. The civilization of Shaydan was apparently arranged into many distinct communities, each of them centered on a modest-sized city built of stone, baked clay, and other nonorganic materials. I saw no metals, or wood, in any of the buildings.
We traveled from city to city in a procession, with Set at its head flanked by two of his people on their own mounts. I rode behind Set, and trailing me came a dozen more riders and pack animals carrying food and water for our journey. Each trip took nearly a week, as near as I could calculate in the murky, dust-filled air. For the planet kept its face always turned to its star, Sheol, and all the cities of this world were on the daylit side of Shaydan.
Every moment of that endless day the remorseless grit-laden wind flayed my flesh, half-blinded my squinting reddened eyes. Set and his people had scales to protect their flesh and transparent lids to cover their eyes; he pointed this out to me as another proof of reptilian superiority over mammals. I had neither the strength nor the will to argue.
There was no magnificent panoply, no gorgeous robes and billowing silks, no gleaming gold or silver among his entourage. The reptilians wore nothing except their scaly hides: Set deep carmine, his minions lighter shades of red. Our mounts were dusty dull tones of brown. I still dressed in my ancient leather kilt and vest; I had nothing else.
Water was not abundant on Shaydan. It was a desert world, with meager streams and rare lakes. Nothing as large as a sea or an ocean. The food they gave me to eat consisted of raw leafy vegetables and occasional chunks of meat.
“We keep herds of meat animals,” Set replied to my unspoken question. “We harvest them carefully and keep their numbers in balance with the environment. When the time comes to slay them, we put them to sleep mentally and then stop their hearts.”
“Very humane,” I said, wondering if he would understand my wordplay. If he did he gave no indication of it.
The cities we entered were not walled. From the weathered looks of their sturdy, domelike buildings, the cities were very old. Even in the wind-whipped dusty atmosphere of this hellish world it must have taken millennia to wear down such solid stone structures to the smooth rounded shapes they now presented. I saw no new buildings at all; everything seemed to be of the same age, and extremely ancient.
No blaring trumpets announced our approach to a new city, and no noble retinue came out to greet us. Still, crowds gathered at each city as we approached, lining the road to the city and the streets within it to bow solemnly as we passed and then stare wordlessly at us. More throngs clustered in the main city square where we invariably were met by the local leaders.
All in total silence. It was eerie. The people of Shaydan neither spoke nor made noise of any kind. No applause, not even the snapping of fingers or the clicking of claws. They would watch in complete silence as we stopped in the main square and dismounted. Sometimes a reptilian would point at me. Once or twice I thought I heard a hiss—laughter? Otherwise it was in total silence that we would be led into the largest building on the square. No sound at all except the eternal keening of the stinging wind. In silence a quartet of guards would march behind me as I stumbled, drag-footed and exhausted, behind Set and the city officials who would come out to greet him.
All of these people, Set’s entourage and the people of each city, looked to me like smaller copies of Set himself. Squinting in the gloomy dusty haze that passed for broad daylight among them, I began to notice minor variations from one city to another. Their scales were lime green here, shades of violet there. I even saw a whole city full of reptilians whose scales were patterned almost like a highlander’s tartan.
In each city, however, all the people were the same color. It was as if they all wore the same uniform, except that this coloration was the natural pigment of their scales. There were some variations in tone; the smaller a reptilian, the lighter the tone of its coloring, I found. Were size and color indicators of an individual’s age? I wondered. Or did they show an individual’s rank?
I received no answer from Set to my unspoken questions.
Regardless of the local color, in every city, once we dismounted, we were led into the largest building on the main square. The rounded domes of the city structures were only a small part of their true extent. Most of the cities were underground, their buildings interconnected by broad tunnels and buried arcades.
We were always brought to a large oblong room where a reptilian of Set’s own size sat on a raised dais at the far end. Obviously the local patriarch. The audience chamber would then be filled with smaller citizens of the city, lighter in color, lesser in rank. So I supposed.
Set would stand before the patriarch with me at his side, feeling puny and tired in the heavy gravity. More than once I slumped to the floor, Set would ignore it and allow me to lie there, and I felt grateful for the chance to rest. To Set, of course, it was a perfect exhibition of the weakness of the native life-forms on Earth, an obvious proof that his plan was achievable.
The chambers were as dimly lit as every other room I had been in; artificial light so deeply into the red end of the spectrum that it seemed to radiate darkness. And the heat. These reptilians basked in heat that made me almost giddy despite my efforts to keep my internal temperature under control.
Now and then Set would allow me to see the chamber through the eyes of one of his entourage. I waited eagerly for such moments. Then I would see a splendid audience hall, its majestic walls ablaze with mosaics showing the ancient history and lineage of the patriarch sitting before us. And while my borrowed vision drank in the scene all around me, I busily delved into the mind of my temporary host, trying to learn as much as I could without alarming either him or his master, Set.
Sometimes our audience took only a few minutes. More often Set stood before the patriarch’s dais for hours on end, silently conversing, hardly moving a muscle or twitching his tail. I knew he was exhibiting me as proof that the people of Shaydan could emigrate to Earth with impunity. I did not find out, however, what success he was meeting with. Did the brief interviews indicate quick agreement or adamant refusal? Did the long hours of mute discourse mean that Set and his host were arguing bitterly or that they were happily discussing every detail of the plan to colonize Earth?
Gradually, as we trekked from city to city across the broad desiccated face of Shaydan, as I was granted glimpses into the minds of Set’s followers, I began to piece together a rudimentary understanding of these people and their civilization.
Despite my physical weakness my mind was still active. In fact, I had little else to do except try to fathom as much as I could glean about my captor and his world. It helped me to forget my constant hunger and the pain of that remorseless lashing wind. My body was under Set’s control, but my mind was not. I probed whenever I could. I watched and studied. I learned.
The beginning point, of course, was that they are reptiles. Or the Shaydanian equivalent of terrestrial reptiles. They do not actively control their body temperature as mammals do, although they maintain their body heat rather well and can be active and alert even during the chill of night.
They reproduced by laying eggs, originally. Like the reptiles of Earth, virtually all of the species of Shaydan left their nests once the eggs were laid and never returned to see their young.
What came out of those eggs were miniature versions of adult reptiles, fully equipped with teeth and claws and all the instincts of their parents. The hatchlings possessed everything their parents had except size. Successful offspring who made it into adulthood grew to great size, and the older the individual, the larger he grew and the deeper the color of his scales. The only limitations imposed on a Shaydanian’s size were the ultimate physical limits of bone and muscle’s ability to support increasing weight.
This meant that Set and the other patriarchs that we met at each city must have been considerably older than the others around them. How old was Set? I began to wonder. Centuries, at least. Perhaps millennia.
Newly hatched Shaydanians inherited all the physical characteristics of their parents—including not merely brain structure, but the ability to communicate telepathically. Eons earlier, this trait must have arisen as a mutation, and then was passed on to the following generations. Telepathic individuals lived longer and produced more offspring, who were also telepathic. As the generations went by, the telepaths drove their less-talented brethren into extinction. Perhaps they did it by violence, just as the Creators once drove the Neanderthals into oblivion, almost.
Telepathic communication led the way to intelligence. While laying her eggs, a Shaydanian mother imprinted her unformed offspring with all the experiences of her life. Each generation of telepathic reptile imparted all the knowledge of every previous generation to its young. Once a new hatchling could learn, in the egg, all the experiences that every generation of its ancestors had lived through, it was armed mentally as well as physically to deal with the world around it.
The civilization that these intelligent reptilians built on Shaydan had existed for millions of terrestrial years. Each community was led by its eldest member. Their ages ran to thousands of years. To creatures who could open their minds completely to one another, distrust was unknown. Disagreements between individuals were decided by the patriarch—indeed, that seemed to be his main reason for existence.
Each community worked with the tireless self-effacing efficiency of an ant’s nest or a beehive. There were no wars because each community lived within the bounds of its environment. The children of Shaydan lived in harmony.
Until they realized that their star, Sheol, would one day destroy them.
The patriarchs consulted among themselves about how to face this dreadful certainty. Most of them felt that doom was inevitable and the only thing that could be done was to accept the fact. A few even recommended suicide, insisting it was better to die with dignity at one’s own choosing rather than wait for the cataclysm to strike them down.
Yet the urge to live was strong among them. They began to dig in, to extend their cities and dwellings underground in the hope that the bulk of their planet would help to protect them from the worst of the radiation that Sheol would one day rain upon the surface of Shaydan. Even so, they knew that the lethal radiation would be merely the first stage of Sheol’s death throes. Ultimately the star would explode and destroy their world along with itself.
Of all the patriarchs of Shaydan, only Set stood against the counsels of passivity and acceptance. He alone searched for a path to avert the doom that faced Shaydan. He alone determined to find a way to save himself, his people, his entire race. The other patriarchs thought him mad, at first, or supremely foolish to spend his remaining centuries trying to escape the inevitable. Set ignored them all.
Now, more than a century after he first started out to do it, he was exhibiting me to his fellow patriarchs as proof that they could migrate to Earth and begin life anew beneath the warmth of the stable life-giving yellow Sun.
I had no way of calculating how long we spent traveling from city to city. There was no way to count days, and there did not seem to be any noticeable seasons on Shaydan. Whenever I was permitted a glimpse into one of the reptilians’ minds and tried to ferret out such information, I could not understand how they reckoned time.
It occurred to me that the telepathic abilities of the Shaydanians must have a limited range. Otherwise why would Set go to the trouble and time of our planet-girdling travels? Why not remain comfortably in his own city and converse with the other patriarchs telepathically? Alternatively, if he found it necessary to exhibit me physically to each of the patriarchs, that meant that telepathic communication could not perform such a function. They had to see me in person.
Either way, it meant that there were limits even to Set’s formidable mental powers. I stored that hope away for future use; there was little other hope for me to cling to.
Now and then on our travels I thought I felt the ground tremble. More than once I heard a low rumbling reverberation like the growl of distant thunder. Neither Set nor his servants appeared to take any note of it, although our mounts seemed to hesitate and sniff the air worriedly.
In the middle of one of our audiences the ground did shake. The stone floor beneath me heaved, knocking me to my knees. A crack zigzagged in the wall behind the patriarch’s dais. He clutched the arms of his wide chair, hissing in a sibilant note I had never heard before. Even Set staggered slightly, and as I looked around I saw that the onlookers gathered on either side of the long chamber were clinging to one another and glancing around fearfully.
For the first time I heard the telepathic voices of many Shaydanians, clear and unshielded.
“The ground quakes again!”
“Our time grows short.”
“Sheol reaches out to seize us!”
Like a thunderbolt it struck me that the violent upheavals churning deep in the heart of the star Sheol were causing pulsations within the core of its planet Shaydan.
Our time grows short, one of the reptilians had gasped. But if Set and the patriarch felt that way, they gave no outward sign of it. Once the dust raised by the brief tremble had settled, Set unceremoniously yanked me to my feet and resumed his silent conversation with the olive-scaled patriarch seated before him.
Not before I finally learned what a truly horrible monster Set was. With so many minds open to me simultaneously, even if only for a few seconds, I learned that Set and his fellow patriarchs ruled their smaller fellows with a despicable iron despotism, a remorseless tyranny woven inextricably into the very genes of their people.
I realized in that horrifying flash of mental communication that almost everything Set had told me had been a distortion, a perversion of the truth. He was the prince of lies.
I had long wondered why not one of the people in any of the cities we had visited were anywhere near the size of Set and the other patriarchs. At first I had thought that this meant none of them were of patriarchal age. But why not? There should have been just as many reptilians hatched in his generation as these later ones. What had happened to Set’s generation? Were they all dead?
In that brief glimpse into the minds of so many Shaydanians inspired by the quake, I saw the sickening answer to my question. Set and his fellow patriarchs were the winners of a devastating war that had nearly destroyed all of Shaydan a thousand years before they learned that Sheol would explode. For Set himself had discovered the way to clone his cells, to make copies of himself, to do away with the need for breeding, for laying eggs, to do away with the female of his species completely.
Even worse, he had learned how to configure his cloned replicas to suit his own desires: how to limit their intelligence so that they would never challenge him, how to limit their life spans so they would never grow to his age and experience.
Swiftly, with cold ruthlessness, Set gathered about himself a merciless cadre of males his own age, offering them domination of their entire world for all the millennia of their lives. They led a remorseless war of extinction against their own kind, especially against their females, cloning warriors as they needed them, slaughtering all who opposed them. For two centuries the genocidal war raged across the face of Shaydan. When it ended, Set and the patriarchs ruled over a world of submissive clones. All males. Every mother and daughter had been methodically butchered. Every unhatched egg had been found and smashed.
It took centuries for them to repair the ecological damage they had done to their world. But time meant little to them. They knew that they would rule for millennia to come. And leave their power, when the time eventually came, to exact copies of themselves. With telepathy it might even be possible to transfer their personalities to cloned bodies and continue to exist forever.
Of course their society ran as efficiently as an ant colony. Of course warfare was now unknown to them. Set and his fellow patriarchs ruled a world of clones incapable of doing more than obeying. But Set wanted still more. He wanted to be adored.
Then, like a punishment for their sins, came the certain knowledge that Sheol would explode and destroy their entire world.
Cosmic justice. Or at least cosmic irony. It made me smile inwardly to know that Set, for all his moralistic cant about reptilian fitness and their care for their environment, was at heart a ruthless mass murderer. A genocidal slaughterer of his own kind who had chosen power and death over nature and life.
I should have known I could not have kept my new knowledge from him.
“You think I am hypocritical, hairless ape?” he asked one murky day as we rode through a stinging windstorm. He was up ahead of me, as usual, his broad back to me.
“I think you are mercilessly evil, at the very least,” I replied. It did not matter if he heard my words or not. He could sense the thoughts forming in my brain.
“I saved Shaydan from the kind of excesses that mammals would have created. Without firm control, the people would have eventually destroyed their environment.”
“So you destroyed the people.”
“They would have destroyed themselves and their whole environment, had I not intervened.”
“That’s nothing but a rationalization. You took total power for yourselves, you and your fellow patriarchs. You rule without love.”
“Love?” He seemed genuinely surprised. “You mean sex.”
“I mean love, caring for your own kind. Friendship so deep that you’d be willing to lay down your life to protect—” The words gagged in my throat. I thought of Anya and the memory of her betrayal burned inside me like bitter bile. I wanted to vomit.
Amused contempt radiated from his mind. “Loyalty and self-sacrifice. Mammalian concepts. Signs of your weakness. Just as your ideas of so-called love are. Love is an apish invention, to justify your obsession with breeding. Sex was never as important to my species as it is to yours, hot-blooded monkey.”
I found the strength to retort, “No, it’s power that’s your obsession, isn’t it?”
“I cleansed this world so that I could bring new life to it, a better form of life.”
“Artificially created. Maimed in mind and body so that your creatures have no choice but to obey you.”
In my mind I heard the hiss of his laughter. “Just as you are, Orion. An over-specialized monkey created by your superior beings, maimed in mind and body to serve them without choice.”
Hot anger flared within me. Because he was right.
“Naturally you hate me and what I have done.” Set’s cool amusement washed over me like glacier melt. “You realize that it is exactly what the Creators have done to you, and you hate them for it.”
Finally, after months or perhaps even years of travel, we returned to Set’s own city.
It was much like all the others. Above ground a group of ancient low stone buildings weathered by millennia of wind and rasping dust. Below ground a honeycomb of passageways and galleries, level after level, deeper and deeper.
All the Shaydanians here were scaled in tones of red. The entire population came out into the main thoroughfare leading into the city to welcome their master home in silent obedient reptilian fashion.
A trio of salmon pink guards led me deep underground to a hot, bare little cell, so dark that I had to grope along its nearly scalding walls to make out its dimensions. It was roughly square, so small that I could almost touch opposing walls by standing in its center and stretching out my arms. No windows, of course. No light at all. And insufferable heat, as if I were being slowly roasted by microwaves.
Wherever I touched the walls or floor, it scorched my skin. From some dim memory I recalled that on Earth bears had been trained to “dance” by forcing them onto a heated floor so that they rose to their hind legs and hopped around in a pitiful effort to avoid being burned. Likewise I tried to stay on my feet, on my toes, for as long as I could. But eventually exhaustion and that overburdening heavy gravity got the better of me and I collapsed to the hot stone floor.
For the first time since I had arrived on Shaydan I dreamed. I was with Anya once again in the forests of Paradise, living simply and happily, so much in love that wherever we walked, flowers sprang up from the ground. But when I put my arms out to embrace her, Anya changed, transformed herself. For a moment she was a shimmering sphere of silvery light, too bright for me to look at. I staggered back away from her, one arm thrown across my face to shield my eyes from her radiance.
From far, far away I heard the mocking voice of the Golden One, the godlike being who had created me.
“Orion, you reach too far. Can you expect a goddess to love a worm, a slug, a paramecium?”
All the so-called gods materialized before me: the dark-bearded, solemn-eyed one I thought of as Zeus; the lean-faced grinning Hermes; the cruelly beautiful Hera; broad-shouldered, redheaded Ares; dozens of others. All of them splendidly robed, magnificent in gleaming jewels and flawless, perfect features.
They laughed at me. I was naked and they pointed at my emaciated body, covered with raw sores and red welts from the pelting wind of Shaydan. They howled with laughter at me. Anya—Athena—was not among them, but I sensed her distant presence like cold sifting flakes of snow chilling my soul.
The gods and goddesses roared with amusement at me as I stood dumbfounded, unable to move, unable even to speak. The forests of Paradise wavered and bowed as snow fell, covering the trees, blanketing the ground. Even the laughter of the gods was smothered by the silent smooth white snow. They faded into nothingness and I was left alone in a world of glittering white.
The soft whiteness of the snow transformed into a glittering silvery metallic sheen. Then the silver light took on a ruddy glow. It became fiery red and seemed to pull in on itself, taking a shape once again. This time it was the massive looming form of Set who stood before me, hissing laughter at my pain and loss.
I realized that I had not dreamed during all the long months of our travels because he had not allowed me to dream. And now that our journey was finished, he was amusing himself by invading my dreams and perverting them to his own enjoyment.
I seethed with hate all the time I spent in that dark scorchingly hot cell. Set’s servants fed me only enough to keep me barely alive: a thin warm liquid that tasted rancid, pulpy rotting leaves, nothing more. I was out of that stinging, lashing wind, but the heat down in this deep underground chamber baked the strength out of me, blistered my skin, and seared my lungs.
Every night I dreamed of Anya and the other Creators, knowing that Set was watching, digging into memories I never knew I had. The dreams turned into nightmares as night after night I tried to warn Anya and the others while before my sleeping eyes I saw the Creators being sliced to bloody ribbons, bodies slashed open spurting blood, faces torn apart, limbs hacked from their torsos.
By me.
Horrified, I was their executioner. I burned them alive. I tore out their eyes. I drank their blood. Zeus’s. Hera’s. Even Anya’s.
Night after night the nightmares were the same. I would visit the Creators in their golden sanctuary. They would scorn me. Mock me. I would reach for Anya, begging her to help me, to understand the message of terror and death that I was carrying. But she would run away or transform herself into some form unobtainable.
Then the killing would start. I always began with the Golden One, tearing at him like a ferocious wolf, ripping the smirking smile from his face, rending his perfect body with claws of razor-sharp steel.
Night after night, the same dream. The same horror. And each night it became more real. I awoke bathed in sweat, shaking like a man possessed, hardly daring to look down at my trembling hands for fear that I would find them reeking with blood.
Behind each nightmare I sensed Set’s lurking, menacing presence. He was clawing ruthlessly through my mind, dredging into memories that the Golden One or whoever created me had long since sealed off from my conscious recall. I relived life after life, hurtling from the very origins of the human race to such distant futures that humankind itself had evolved into shapes and powers beyond recognition. Yet each dream inevitably, inexorably came down to the same horrifying scene.
I confronted the Creators. I tried to tell them what was going to happen, tried to warn them. They laughed at me. I begged them to listen to me, pleaded with them to save their own lives. They thought it was uproariously funny.
Then I killed them. Slashed them while they laughed, tore out their entrails while their faces still smirked and grinned at me. I killed them all. I tried to spare Anya. I screamed at her to run away, to transform herself so that I could not reach her. Sometimes she did. Sometimes she became that glowing silvery sphere that was forever beyond my touch. But when she did not, I killed her as mercilessly as I butchered all the others. I tore her throat out. I disemboweled her. I crushed her beautiful face in my clawed hands.
And woke up whimpering. I had not the strength for screaming. I awoke in that oven-hot lightless cell blind and terribly weak, my body wasting and my mind being pillaged.
The worst of it was that I knew what Set was doing. He was exploring my mind, using the memories that had been sealed away from me to learn everything he could about the Creators. Most of all he wanted to find out how he could send me back through spacetime to the Creators’ own domain, that golden paradise of theirs far in the future of this time.
I could feel his cold cruel presence in my mind, searching, rampaging through my memories like a conquering army looting a helpless village, looking for the key that would allow him to project me into the Creators’ realm.
He wanted to send me to a point in the continuum before the Creators had become aware of his own existence. He wanted to plant me among them when their defenses were down, when they were not expecting to be attacked, especially by their own creature.
Set would accompany me on this trip through spacetime. His mind and will would ride within my brain. He would see with my eyes. He would strike with my hands.
The hell of it was that there truly was hatred for the Creators inside me. He found that vein of anger, of bitter resentment, that seethed through me. He hissed with pleasure when he realized how I hated the Golden One, the very person who had created me. He saw how I had defied him and tried to kill him, how I hated the other Creators for shielding him from my wrath.
And he found the blistering-hot fury deep within me that etched my soul like acid eating steel whenever I thought of Anya. Love turned to hate. No, worse, for I still loved her yet hated her, too. She had chained me to a rack that was pulling me apart, worse torture than anything Set could inflict upon my body.
But the devil knew how to use the torment in my mind, how to employ that hatred for his own purposes.
“You are being very helpful to me, Orion,” I heard him in my mind as I writhed in that utterly black cell.
I knew it was true. I loathed myself for it, but I knew that there was enough rage and hatred within me to serve as a murderous weapon for Set’s malevolence.
The nightmares returned whenever I slept. No matter how hard I fought against it, inevitably my eyes would close and my starved, exhausted body would drift into slumber. And the nightmare would begin anew.
Each time more real. Each time I saw a little more detail, heard my own words and those of the Creators with better clarity, felt the solidity of their flesh in my ravening hands, smelled the hot sweetness of their blood as it spurted from the wounds I slashed into them.
There would come, inexorably, one final dream. I knew that one of these times the reality would be perfect, that I would actually be among my Creators, that I would kill them all for Set, my master. And then all dreams would cease. My pain and longing would be at an end. The crushing, forsaken sense of abandonment that filled my heart with despair would at last be wiped away.
All I had to do was surrender to the will of Set. I realized now that it was only my own foolish, stubborn resistance that stood in the way of final peace. A few moments of blood and anguish and everything would be finished. Forever.
I had to stop fighting against Set and admit to myself that he was my master. I had to allow him to send Orion the Hunter on this final stalk, and then he would allow me peace. I almost smiled to myself there in the blind darkness of that searingly hot cell. How ironic that Orion’s final hunt would be to track down his very Creators and kill them all.
“I am ready,” I called out. My voice was cracked, rasping. My throat and lungs parched.
In response I heard a vast hissing sigh that seemed to echo through all the underground chambers of Set’s magnificent palace of darkness.
It seemed like an eternity before anything happened. I lay on the stone floor of my cell in total darkness and absolute quiet except for my own ragged, labored breathing. Perhaps the floor became somewhat cooler. Perhaps the air became a little moister. Perhaps it was only my imagination.
I was too weak to stand, and I wondered how I might do my master’s bidding in such an exhausted condition.
“Have no fear, Orion,” Set’s voice echoed in my mind. “You will be strong enough when the moment comes. My strength will fill your body. I will be within you at every moment. You will not be alone.”
So his magnanimity in allowing the Creators to flee the Earth had been nothing more than a ruse. He intended to strike at them, to destroy them, at a time when they were completely unprepared to meet his attack. And I would be his weapon.
With the Creators permanently obliterated, all of the continuum was Set’s. He could colonize the Earth with his own species and destroy the human race at his leisure. Or enslave humankind, as he had been doing in the Neolithic.
There were depths here that I could not fathom. I remembered being told, more than once, that spacetime was not linear.
“Pathetic creature,” I heard the Golden One’s scornful voice in my memory, “you think of time as a river, flowing constantly from past to future. Time is an ocean, Orion, a great boundless sea on which I can sail in any direction I choose.”
“I don’t understand,” I had replied.
“How could you?” he had taunted. “I did not build such understanding into you. You are my hunter, not my equal. You exist to serve my purposes, not to discuss the universes with me.”
I am maimed in mind and body, I told myself. I was created that way. Set had spoken the truth.
And now I was going to be sent back to my Creators to end their existence. And my own.
Lying in the blind darkness of my cell, waiting for Set to send me on my mission of murder, it seemed as if the heated stones beneath me were slowly cooling. The very air I breathed seemed not as hot as it had been moments before, as if my physical torment was being eased in reward for my capitulating to Set’s will.
I did not feel him in ray mind, yet I knew he must be there, watching, waiting, ready to control my body.
I felt a hollow sinking sensation within my chest, my belly. The floor seemed to be descending, very slowly at first, then faster and faster. Like an elevator plunging out of control. I sensed myself falling through the inky blackness, the stones beneath me growing colder as I descended.
Then came that wrenching moment of absolute cold, of nothingness, when all the dimensions of time and space seem to disappear. I hung suspended in nowhere, without form or feeling, in a limbo where time itself did not exist. A billion years could have passed, or a billionth of a second.
Brilliant golden radiance lanced through me like spears of molten metal. I squeezed my eyes shut and threw my hands over my face. Tears spurted down my cheeks.
I still could not see; first I had been blind from lack of light, now I was blinded by too much of it. I lay curled in a fetal position, head tucked down, arms across my face. Nothing stirred. Not a breeze, not a bird or a cricket or a rustling leaf. I listened to my own heart pulsing feebly in my ears. I began counting. Fifty beats. A hundred. A hundred fifty…
“Orion? Can it be you?”
Weakly I raised my head. The golden light was still blindingly bright. Squinting against the overpowering radiance, I saw the lean form of a man standing over me.
“Help me,” I pleaded in a hoarse whisper. “Help me.”
He hunkered down on his haunches beside me. Either my eyes began to adjust to the light or it somehow dimmed. My eyes stopped tearing. The world began to come into unblurred focus for me.
“How did you get here? And in such condition!”
Danger, I wanted to say. Every instinct in me wanted to scream out an alarm that would alert him and the other Creators. But my voice froze in my throat.
“Help me,” was all I could croak.
The man crouching beside me was the one I thought of as Hermes. Greyhound lean in body and limbs, his face was a set of narrow V’s: pointed chin, slanting cheekbones, pointed hairline above a smooth forehead.
“Stay where you are,” he told me. “I’ll bring help.”
He vanished. As if he had been nothing more than an image on a screen, he simply disappeared from my sight.
Weakly I pushed myself up to a sitting position. I remembered this place from other existences. An expanse of unguessable extent, the ground covered with softly billowing mist, the sky above me a calm clear blue darkening at zenith enough to show a few scattered stars. Or were they stars? They did not twinkle at all in this silent, motionless world.
I had met the Golden One here many times. And Anya too. That is why Set had returned me to this spot. As I looked around now, it seemed artificial to me, like a stage setting or an elaborately constructed shrine meant to overawe ignorant visitors. A bogus representation of the Christian heaven, a bourgeois Valhalla. The kind of setting that the Assassins of old Persia would have used to convince their drug-dazed recruits that paradise awaited them—except that the old Assassins would have stocked the place with graceful dancing girls and beautiful houris.
I realized that I was seeing this place of the Creators through Set’s cynical mind. He was within me as truly as my own blood and brain. He had prevented me from crying out a warning to Hermes.
The air seemed to glow again, and I squeezed my eyes shut once more.
“Orion.”
Opening my eyes, I saw Hermes and two others with him: the grave, dark-bearded one I called Zeus, and a slender breathtakingly beautiful blonde woman of such sweetness and grace that she could only be Aphrodite. All three of the Creators were physically perfect, each in their own way. The men were in glittering metallic suits that fit their forms like second skins, from polished boot tops to high collars. Aphrodite wore a softly pleated robe of apricot pink, fastened at one shoulder by a golden clasp. Her arms and legs were bare, her skin flawless, glowing.
“Anya should be here,” she said.
“She is coming,” replied Zeus.
No! I wanted to shout. But I could not.
“The Golden One is on his way, also,” said Hermes.
Zeus nodded gravely.
“He’s in a bad way,” Aphrodite said. “Look at how emaciated he is! His skin seems burned, too.”
They stood solemnly inspecting me, their creature. They did not touch me. They did not try to help me to my feet or offer me food or even a cup of water.
A sphere of golden light appeared to one side of them, so bright that even the Creators stepped back slightly and shielded their eyes with upraised hands. The sphere hovered above the misty ground for a moment, shimmering, pulsating, then contracted and took on the form of a man.
The Golden One. I had served him as Ormazd, the god of light, in the long struggle against Ahriman and the Neanderthals. I had fought against him as Apollo, the champion of ancient Troy.
He was my creator. He had made me and, through me, the rest of the human race. And the human race, evolving through the millennia, had ultimately produced these godlike offspring who called themselves the Creators. They created us; we created them. The cycle was complete.
Except that now I was a weapon to be used against them. I would kill the Creators, and begin the destruction of the entire human race, through all spacetime, through all the universes, expunging my own kind from the continuum forever.
My creator stood before me, proud and imperious as ever. Golden radiance seemed to glow from within him. He was tall and wide of shoulder, dressed in a robe of dancing winking lights, as if clothed in fireflies. His unbearded face was broad and strong, eyes the tawny color of a lion, a rich mane of golden hair falling thickly to his shoulders.
I hated him. I adored him. I had served him through the ages. I had tried to kill him once.
“You were not summoned here, Orion.” His voice was the same rich tenor I remembered, a voice that could thrill a concert audience or a mob of fanatics, a voice tinged with taunting mockery.
“I… need help.”
“Obviously.” His tone was scornful, but I saw something more serious in his eyes.
“He seems to be injured,” said Aphrodite.
“How did he get here if you didn’t summon him?” asked Hermes.
Zeus’s eyes narrowed. “You did not give him the power to translate through the continuum at will, did you?”
“Of course not,” the Golden One answered, irritated. Turning back to me, he demanded, “How did you get here, Orion? Where have you come from?”
Instantly I wanted to obey him. With instincts he himself had built within me, I wanted nothing more than to tell him everything I knew. Set. The Cretaceous. I spoke the words within my mind, but my tongue refused to form them. Set’s command over me was too strong. I simply stared at the Creators like a stupid ox, like a dog begging its master to show some love even if it failed to follow his commands.
“Something is definitely wrong here,” Zeus said.
The Golden One nodded. “Come with me, Orion.”
I tried, but could not get to my feet. I floundered there on that ridiculous cloud-covered surface like a baby too weak to stand erect.
Aphrodite said, “Well, help him!” Without taking a step toward me.
The Golden One snorted disdainfully. “You are in a bad way, my Hunter. I thought I had built you better than this.”
He made a slight movement of one hand and I felt myself being buoyed up, lifted as if by invisible hands, and held in a half-reclining position in midair.
“Follow me,” said the Golden One, turning his back on me. The three other Creators winked out like candles snuffed by a sudden gust of wind.
I hung in midair, helpless as a child, with the Golden One’s swirling cloak of lights before me. He began walking, yet it seemed to me that we did not truly move—the view around us shifted and shimmered and changed. I felt no sense of motion at all. It was as if we were on a treadmill and the scenery on all sides was rolling past us.
We descended from the cloud-covered area as if we were going down a mountain slope. But still there was no real sense of motion. I simply sat on my invisible sedan chair and watched the world flow past me. Down a long trail we went and out onto the grassy floor of a broad valley. Tall spreading shade trees followed the meandering course of a river. The water gleamed in the light of the high sun, shining warmly yellow in the blissfully blue sky. A few chubby clumps of cumulus cloud floated serenely overhead, throwing dappled shadows across the tranquil green valley.
I searched that peaceful blue sky for a dark red point of light, the color of dried blood. Sheol. I could not find it. Did it exist in this time? Or was it merely below the horizon?
In the distance I saw a shimmering golden dome, and as we neared it I realized that it was gauzily transparent, like looking through a fine mesh screen of gold. Under its beautifully elegant curve there was a city, but a city such as I had never seen before. Tall slender spires stretching heavenward, magnificent colonnaded temples, steep ziggurats with stairs carved into their stone sides, wide plazas flanked by gracefully curved arcades, broad avenues decorated by statuary and triumphal arches.
My breath caught in my throat as I recognized one of the magnificent buildings: the Taj Mahal, set in its splendid garden. And a giant statue that had to be the Colossus of Rhodes. Facing it, the green-patinaed Liberty. Further on, the main temple of Angkor Wat gleaming in the sunlight as if newly built.
All empty. Unpopulated. As I rode my invisible chair of energy through the immaculate city with the Golden One striding unceremoniously ahead of me, I could not see a single person. Not a bird or cat or any sign of habitation whatever. Not a scrap of paper or even a leaf drifting across the streets on the gently wafting breeze.
At the farther end of the city stood towers of gleaming chrome and glass, straight-edged blocks and slabs that rose tall enough to look down on all the other buildings.
Into the tallest of these the Golden One led me, through a wide atrium of polished marble and onto a gleaming steel disk that began ascending slowly the instant he stepped onto it. Faster and faster it rose, whistling through the open atrium toward the glassed-in roof. The atrium was ringed with balconies whizzing past us at dizzying speed until all of a sudden we stopped, without a jerk or bump, without any feeling of deceleration at all.
The disk drifted to a semicircular niche in the balcony that girdled this level and nestled up to it. The Golden One stepped onto the balcony without a word, and I followed as if carried by invisible slaves.
He led me to a door, opened it, and stepped inside. As I followed him through the doorway a tingle of memory flickered through me. The room looked like a laboratory. It was crowded with vaguely familiar machines, bulky shapes of metal and plastic that I half remembered. In its center was a surgical table. The invisible hands that held me lifted me to its surface and laid me out upon it.
Whether I was too weak to move or held down by those invisible hands of energy, I could not tell.
“Sleep, Orion,” commanded the Golden One in an annoyed tone.
My eyes closed immediately. My breathing slowed to the deep regular rhythm of slumber. But I did not fall asleep. I resisted his command and remained alert, wondering if I was doing this of my own volition or if Set was controlling me.
It seemed like hours that I lay there unmoving, unseeing. I heard the faint hum of electrical equipment now and then, little more. No footsteps. No sounds of breathing except my own. Was the Golden One still in human guise, or had he reverted to his true form while his machines examined me?
I felt nothing during all that time except the solidity of the table beneath me. Whatever probes were being put to my body were not physical. The Golden One was scanning me, examining me remotely atom by atom, the way an orbiting spacecraft might examine the planet turning beneath it.
As far as I could tell he stayed out of my mind. I felt no mental probes. I remained awake and aware. My memories were not being stimulated. The Golden One was staying away from my brain.
Why?
“He is here!”
Anya’s voice! Concerned, angry almost.
“I can’t be disturbed now,” snapped the Golden One.
“He returned of his own volition and you tried to keep me from seeing him,” Anya said accusingly.
“Don’t you understand?” the Golden One retorted. “He is unable to return by himself. Someone has sent him here.”
“Let me see… oh! Look at him! He’s dying!”
Anya’s voice quivered with emotion. She cares about me! I exulted to myself. Immediately a voice answered, As she would care about a pet cat or a wounded deer.
“He’s weak,” the Golden One said. “But he won’t die.”
“What have you put him through?” she demanded.
At first he did not reply. Finally, though, he admitted, “I don’t know. I don’t know where he’s come from or how he got here.”
“You’ve questioned him?”
“Briefly. But he made no reply.”
“He’s been tortured. Look at what they’ve done to his poor body.”
“Never mind that! We have a serious problem here. When I tried to probe his mind, I got nothing but a blank.”
“His memories are completely erased?”
“I don’t think so. It was more like hitting a barrier. His mind has been shielded, somehow.”
“Shielded? By whom?”
Exasperated, the Golden One snapped, “I don’t know! And I can’t find out unless I can break through the shielding.”
“Do you think you can?”
I could sense him nodding. “With enough power I can do anything. The problem is that if I have to use too much power, it might destroy his mind totally.”
“You mustn’t do that!”
“I don’t want to. Whatever is stored inside his skull, I’ve got to recover it.”
“You don’t care about him,” Anya said. “He’s merely a tool that you use.”
“Exactly. But now he’s a tool that someone else might be using. I’ve got to find out who. And why.”
Deep within me, raging torrents of conflict were tearing at my guts. Anya wanted to protect me while the Golden One wanted only what was locked within my mind. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to love her and have her love me. Yet smothering those emotions, burying them in layers of molten iron, was Set’s unrelenting control over me. I saw a vision of my nightmare again. Horrified, I knew that I would kill them all.
“Let me have him,” Anya said.
A long pause, then the Golden One answered, “You are emotionally attached to this creature. It wouldn’t be wise to let you—”
“How can you let jealousy cloud your judgment at a time like this?”
“Jealousy!” The Golden One sounded astonished. “Is the eagle jealous of the butterfly? Is the sun jealous of its planets?”
Anya laughed, like the cool tinkling of a silver bell. “Let me take care of him, bring him back to his strength. Then perhaps he can tell us what has happened to him.”
“No. I have the equipment here—”
“To destroy his mind with your brute-force methods. I will bring him back to health. Then we can question him.”
“There isn’t time.”
Her tone became taunting. “Not time? For the Golden One, who claims he can travel across the continuum as if it were an ocean? No time for the one who tells us he understands the currents of the universes better than a mariner understands the sea?”
I heard him puff out a heavy sigh, almost a snort. “I will compromise with you. I can restore his physical health much more quickly with my methods than you can by spoon-feeding him. Once he is strong enough to walk and talk, you can begin his interrogation.”
“Agreed.”
“But if you don’t get him to tell us how he got here within a few days,” the Golden One warned, “then I will revert to my methods.”
More reluctantly Anya repeated, “Agreed.”
I heard her leave, then felt myself being lifted on cushions of energy again and carried off the surgical table. I tried to open my eyes a little, just to peep out at where I was being taken, but found I had no control over my eyelids. I could not move my fingers, either, or even wiggle my toes. Either the Golden One or Set was controlling my voluntary muscular system. Perhaps both of them, working inadvertently together for the moment.
I sensed my body being slid into a horizontal vat of some sort, a cylindrical tube that felt cool to my bare scorched skin. The hum of energy. The soft gurgling of liquids. I fell truly asleep, my mind drifting into a deep darkness, more relaxed than it had been in ages. It was like returning to the womb, and my last conscious thought was that perhaps this cylinder of metal and plastic had actually been my womb. I knew I had not been born of woman, any more than Set’s minions had been hatched from natural eggs.
I slept, unimaginably grateful that I did not dream.
The patient gentle cadence of surf washing up on a beach awakened me. I opened my eyes. I was sitting in a reclining chair, soft yet gently supportive, on a high balcony overlooking a wide turquoise sea that stretched out beyond the horizon. A formation of graceful white birds soared through the cloudless blue sky. The sleek gray forms of dolphins glided effortlessly through the waves far below me, their curved fins slicing the surface briefly and then disappearing, only to reappear moments later.
I took a deep breath of sweet clean air. The sunshine felt good, warm, while the breeze coming off the sea was refreshingly cool. I felt strong again. Looking down at myself, I saw that I was clothed in a sleeveless white knee-length robe and a pair of shorts.
For several moments I simply lay back in the recliner, rejoicing in my returned strength. My skin was healthily tanned, all the old scorches and sores had disappeared. My arms and legs had filled out once more.
I got to my feet slowly, found that my legs were firm, and stepped to the balcony’s railing. Peering far down, I scanned the wide expanse of golden sand below. No one. Not a soul. The curving beach was fringed with stately palm trees. The building I was in seemed to rise from the midst of the trees.
The surf drummed softly against the sand. The dolphins plied their way among the waves. One of the birds made a long, folded-wing dive into the water, splashed in, and bobbed up again, gulping a fish down its gullet.
“Hello.”
I whirled around. Anya was standing at the doorway that led inside from the balcony. Her robe was gleaming white silk woven with threads of silver that sparkled in the sunlight. Shining dark hair pulled back off her face. Classic features that inspired the sculptors of ancient Greece with the vision of ideal beauty. The goddess Athena come to warm, breathing life before me.
Instantly I felt Set’s iron-cruel control clamp itself on my emotions. Love and hate, fear and desire, all buried beneath his glacial grip.
“Anya,” was all I could say.
“How do you feel?” she asked, stepping toward me.
“Normal. Much better than… before.”
She gazed deeply into my eyes, and I could see that her own silver-gray eyes were troubled, searching.
“What time is it?” I asked.
With a slight smile she replied, “Morning.”
“No. I mean—what year? What era are we in?”
“This is the era in which you were created, Orion.”
“By the Golden One.”
“His true name is Aten.”
“That’s what the Egyptians call their sun god.”
She arched a brow. “He does not lack for ego, you know.”
“I was created,” I said slowly, “to hunt down Ahriman.”
“Yes. Originally. Aten found you useful for other tasks, too.”
“He’s insane, you know. The Golden One. Aten.”
Anya’s smile faded. “There is no such thing as insanity among us, Orion. We have evolved far beyond that.”
“You’re not really human, are you?”
“We are what humans have become. We are the descendants of humankind.”
“But this body you show me… it’s an illusion, isn’t it?”
She took the final step that closed the distance between us and reached up to touch my cheek with her hand. It felt vibrantly alive.
“This body is composed of atoms and molecules just as yours is, Orion. Blood courses through my veins. And hormones too. The same as any human female.”
“There are humans here? Actual men and women still exist in this time?”
“Yes, of course. There are even a few still living here on Earth.”
“Tell me!” I gasped with an urgency forced upon me by the will of Set, lurking within my own mind. With my voice, but his words, I begged, “I want to know everything there is to know about you.”
Over the next few weeks Anya told me.
We sailed across that wide sea in a bubble of energy that skimmed across the wave tops. I saw dolphins by the hundreds frolicking among the swells, and heard huge stately whales singing their eerily beautiful songs of the deeps. Through deep cool forests we rode like wraiths wafting along in the breeze. Deer stepped daintily through the woods, so tame that we could pet them. Across mountains and fertile grasslands we glided, wrapped in a sphere of energy that was invisible yet all-protective. When we were hungry, meals appeared out of thin air, steaming and delicious.
I saw small villages where the tiled rooftops glittered with solar panels and ordinary-looking human beings tended fields and flocks. There were no roads between them and no vehicles that I could see. Most of the world was uninhabited, green and flowering, the sky pristine blue.
There were even swamplands teeming with crocodiles and turtles and frogs. I saw the enormous terrifying bulk of a tyrannosaur loom up above the cypresses, but Anya calmed my instinctive fear.
“The entire area is fenced in by an energy screen. Not even a fly can get out.”
Once again I was living with the woman I had loved, night and day. But we never touched, never even kissed. We were not alone. I knew Set dwelled within me, and I got the feeling that she sensed it, too.
Yet Anya showed me the world as it existed in the time of the Creators. The planet Earth, more beautiful than I had ever thought it could be, an abode for all kinds of life, a haven of peace and plenty, a balanced ecology that maintained itself on the energy of the sun and the control of humankind’s descendants: the Creators. It was a perfect world, too perfect for me. Nothing was out of place. The weather was always mild and sunny. It rained only at night and even then our energy shell protected us. Not even insects bothered us. I got the feeling that we were riding through a vast park where all the plants were artificial and all the animals were machines under the control of the Creators.
“No, this is all real and natural,” Anya told me one night as we lay side by side looking up at the stars. Orion was in his rightful place up there; the Dipper and all the other constellations looked familiar. We were not so far in the future that they had become distorted beyond recognition.
Glowering ruddy Sheol was not in that sky, though. I felt Set’s unease and enjoyed it.
The turning point in human history, Anya explained to me, had come some fifty thousand years before this era. Human scientists learned how to control the genetic material buried deep within the cells of all living things. After billions of years of natural selection, humankind took purposeful control not only of its own genetic heritage, but of the genetic development of every plant and animal on Earth. And beyond.
Loud and bitter were the battles against such genetic engineering. There were mistakes, of course, and disasters. For almost a century the planet was racked by the Biowars.
“But the step had been taken, for good or ill,” Anya told me. “Once our ancestors learned how to control and alter genes, the knowledge could not be erased.”
Blind natural evolution gave way to deliberate, controlled evolution. Where nature took a million years to make a change, humans changed themselves in a generation.
Human life spans increased by quantum jumps. Two centuries. Five centuries. Thousands of years. Virtual immortality.
The human race exploded into space, first expanding throughout the inner solar system, then leapfrogging the outer gas-giant planets and riding out to the stars in giant habitats that housed whole communities, thousands of men, women, and children who would spend generations searching for new Earths.
“Some altered their forms so that they could live on worlds that would kill ordinary human beings,” Anya said. “Others decided to remain aboard their habitats and make them their permanent abodes.”
Yet no matter which path they chose, each group of star-seekers faced the same ultimate questions: Are we still human? Do we want to remain human? The hard radiation of deep space and the strange environments of alien worlds were sources of mutations beyond their control.
They needed a baseline, a “standard model” Earth-normal human genotype against which they could compare themselves and make their decisions. They needed a link with Earth.
On Earth, meanwhile, generation after generation of dogged researchers were probing deeply into the ultimate nature of life. Seeking nothing less than true immortality, they seized the reins of their own evolution and began a series of mutations that ultimately led to beings who could interchange matter and energy at will, transform their own bodies into globes of pure energy that lived on the radiation of sunlight.
“The Creators,” I said.
Anya nodded gravely but said, “Not yet Creators, Orion, for we had created nothing. We were merely the ultimate result of a quest that had begun, I suppose, when the earliest hominids first realized that they had no way to avoid death.”
They had not become truly immortal. They could be killed. I got the feeling that they had even committed murder among themselves, long ages past. Yet they were immortal enough. They could live indefinitely, as long as they had a source of energy. To such creatures time is meaningless. But to immortal creatures descended from curious apes, with all of eternity at their disposal, time is a challenge.
“We learned to manipulate time, to translate ourselves back and forth almost as easily as we walk across a meadow.”
And found, to their horror, that theirs is not the only universe in the continuum of spacetime.
“The universes seem infinite, constantly branching, constantly impinging on one another,” Anya said. “Aten—the Golden One—discovered that there was a universe in which the Neanderthals became the dominant species of Earth and our own type of human never came into being.”
“The Neanderthals were beautifully adapted to their environment,” I recalled. “They had no need to develop high technology or science.”
“That universe encroached on our own,” Anya said, her silver-gray eyes looking back to those days. “The overlap was so severe that Aten feared our universe would ultimately be engulfed and we would be doomed to nonexistence.”
For creatures who had only newly achieved immortality, this discovery raised panic and terror. What good to be immortal if your entire universe will be snuffed out in the cosmic workings of quantized spacetime?
“That is when we became Creators,” said Anya.
“The Golden One created me.”
“And five hundred others.”
“To exterminate the Neanderthals,” I remembered.
“To make this universe safe for our own kind,” Anya corrected gently.
The Golden One, puffed up by his (my) success over the Neanderthals, began to examine other nexuses in spacetime where he felt he could change the natural order of the continuum to the benefit of his own inflated ego. Using me as his tool, he began to tamper with the continuum, time and again.
He found, to his shock and the anger of the other Creators, that once you have tampered with the fabric of spacetime myriads of geodesic world lines begin unraveling. The more you try to knit everything up into a neat package, the more the continuum warps and alters. You have no choice but to continue to try to manipulate the continuum to your own purposes; you can never allow the fabric of spacetime to unfold along its natural lines again.
Yes, I heard Set hissing within me, the pompous ape rushes to and fro, scattering his energies, distracted as easily as a chattering monkey. I will end his dilemma. Forever.
I strained to tell Anya that there were others who could manipulate spacetime. But not even that much could get past Set’s control over me. I felt perspiration breaking out across my forehead, my upper lip beading, so hard was I trying. But Anya did not seem to notice.
“So now we live on this world,” she said as we sat in the energy bubble, speeding high above a deep blue ocean striated with long straight combers that were traveling from one side of the earth to the other in almost perfect uniformity.
“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.
“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 ail 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.”
Abruptly I was spinning, falling, flailing through empty space, stars whirling around me dizzyingly. The square, the city, the earth were gone. I was alone in the fierce cold of the void between worlds.
Not totally alone. I could feel Set’s furious hatred raging, even though he no longer controlled me from within.
I laughed soundlessly in the black vacuum. “You can punish my body,” I told Set mentally, “but you no longer control it. You can send me to your hell but you can’t make me do your work.”
I sensed him howling with wrath. The stars themselves seemed to shudder with the violence of his anger.
“Orion!” I heard Anya’s mind calling to me, like a silver bell in the wilderness, like a cool clear stream on a hot summer’s day.
I opened my mind to her. Everything that I had experienced, all my knowledge of Set and his plans, I transmitted to her in the flash of a microsecond. I felt her mind take in the new information, saw in my own inner eye the shocked expression on her face as she realized how narrowly she and the other Creators had escaped final death.
“You saved us!”
“Saved you,” I corrected. “I don’t care about the others.”
“Yet I… you thought that I had betrayed you.”
“You did betray me.”
“And still you saved me?”
“I love you,” I replied simply. It was the truth. I loved her completely and eternally. I knew now that it was my own heart’s choice, not some reflex built into me by the Golden One, not some control that Anya wielded over my mind. I was free of all of them and I knew that I loved her no matter what she had done.
“Orion, we’re trying to reach you, to bring you back.”
“Trying to save me?”
“Yes!”
I almost laughed there in the absolute cold of deep space. The stars were still pinwheeling around me, as if I were in the center of an immense kaleidoscope. But I saw now that one particular star was not spinning across the blackness of the void. It remained rock still, the exact center of my whirling universe. That blood red star called Sheol. It seethed and boiled and reached out for me.
Of course. Set’s hell. He was plunging me into the center of his dying star, destroying me so completely that not even the atoms of my body would remain intact.
Anya realized what he was doing as immediately as I did.
“We’re working to pull you back,” she told me, her voice frantic.
“No!” I commanded. “Send me straight into the star. Pour all the energy the Creators can command into me and let me plunge into Sheol’s rotting heart.”
In that awful endless moment, suspended in the infinite void between worlds while time itself hung suspended, I realized what I must do. I made my choice, freely, of my own will.
For my link with Anya was two-way. What she knew, I knew. I saw that she did love me as truly as a goddess can love a mortal. And more. I saw how I could destroy Set and his entire world, his very star, and end his threat to her and the other Creators. I didn’t care particularly about them, and I still loathed the self-styled Golden One. But I would end Set’s threat to Anya once and for all, no matter what it cost.
She saw what I wanted to do. “No! You’ll be destroyed! We won’t be able to recover you!”
“What difference does that make? Do it!”
Love and hate. The twin driving forces of our manic passionate hot-blooded species. I loved Anya. Despite her betrayal I loved her. I knew it was impossible, that despite the few snatches of happiness we had stolen there was no way that we could be together forever. Better to make an end of it, to give up this life of pain and suffering, to give her the gift of life with my final death.
And I hated Set. He had humiliated me, tortured my body and my mind, reduced me to a slavish automaton. As a man, as a human being, I hated him with all the roaring fury my kind is capable of. Through the eons, across the gulfs between our worlds and our species, for all of spacetime I hated him. My death would demolish his hopes forever, and in my blood-hot rage I knew that death was a small price to pay if it meant death to him and all his kind.
With an effort of my own free will I stopped my body’s spinning and arrowed straight toward simmering red Sheol. Not only will I die, I thought. Not only will Set and his loathsome kindred die. His world will die. His star will die as well. I will destroy all of them.
Too late Set realized he had lost control of my body. I felt his shocked surprise, his desperate panic.
“Everything you have told me has been a lie,” I said to him mentally. “Now I tell you one eternal truth. Your world ends. Now.”
All the energies that the Creators could generate from thousands of stars through all the ages of the continuum were being trained on me. My body became the focal point of such power as to tear worlds apart, annihilate whole stars, rip open the very fabric of spacetime itself.
I sped toward the seething mass of blood red Sheol, no longer a human body but a spear of blinding white-hot energy from across the continuum aiming at the decaying heart of the dying star. Tendrils of fiery plasma snaked up toward me. Arches of glowing ionized gas appeared and streamed above the star’s surface like bridges of living, burning souls. Disembodied, I still saw the churning surface of the star, bubbling and frothing like some immense witch’s caldron. Magnetic fields strong enough to twist solid steel into taffy ribbons clutched at me. Vicious flares heaved fountains of lethal radiation as if Sheol were trying to protect itself from me.
To no avail.
I plunged into that maelstrom of tortured plasma, seeking its dense core where atomic nuclei were fusing together to create the titanic energy that powered this star. With grim pleasure I realized that Sheol was truly dying already, its nuclear fires simmering, faltering, making the entire star shudder as it wavered between stability and explosion.
“I will help you to die,” I said to the star. “I will put an end to your agony.”
Through layer after layer of thickening plasma I dove, straight to Sheol’s heart, where the subatomic particles were packed more densely than any metal could ever be. Down and down into the depths of hell where not even atoms could exist and remain whole, deeper still I beat my way past wave after wave of pure gamma energy and pulses of neutrinos, down to the hardening core of the star where heavy nuclei were creating temperatures and pressures that they themselves could no longer withstand.
There I released all the energy that had been pent up in me, like driving a knife into the heart of an ancient, dreaded enemy. Like putting to rest a soul tormented by endless cancerous suffering.
Sheol exploded. And I died.
It was at that final moment of utter devastation, with the star exploding from the energy that I had directed into its heart, that I realized how much more the Creators knew than I did.
I died. In that maelstrom of unimaginable violence I was torn apart, the very atoms of what was once my body ripped asunder, their nuclei blasted into strange ephemeral particles that flared for the tiniest fraction of a second and then reverted ghostlike into pure energy.
Yet my consciousness remained. I felt all the pains of hell as Sheol exploded not merely once, but again and again.
Time collapsed around me. I hung in a spacetime stasis, bodiless yet aware, while the planets spun around the Sun with such dizzying speed they became blurs, streaks, near circles of colored lights, brilliant pinwheels whirling madly as they reflected the golden glory of the central sun.
I watched millions of years unfold before my godlike vision. Without a corporeal body, without eyes, the core of my being, the essential pattern of intelligence that is me inspected minutely the results of Sheol’s devastation.
With some surprise I realized that I had not completely destroyed the star. It was too small to explode into a supernova, the kind of titanic star-wrecking cataclysm that leaves nothing afterward except a tiny pulsar, a fifty-mile-wide sphere of neutrons. No, Sheol’s explosion had been the milder kind of disaster that Earthly astronomers would one day call a nova.
Disaster enough.
The first explosion blew off the outer layers of the star. Sheol flared with a sudden brilliance that could be seen a thousand light-years away. The star’s outer envelope of gas blew away into space, engulfing its single planet Shaydan in a hot embrace of death.
On that bleak and dusty world the sky turned so bright that it burned everything combustible on the surface of the planet. Trees, brush, grasses, animals all burst into fire. But the flames were quickly snuffed out as the entire atmosphere of Shaydan evaporated, blown off into space by the sudden intense heat. What little water there was on the planet’s surface was boiled away immediately.
The burning heat reached into the underground corridors that the Shaydanians had built beneath their cities. Millions of the reptilians died in agony, their lungs scorched and charred. Within seconds all the air was sucked away and those few who escaped the heat suffocated, lungs bursting, eyes exploding out of their heads. The oldest, biggest patriarchs died in hissing, screeching agony. As did the youngest, smallest of their clones.
Rocks melted on the surface of Shaydan. Mountains flowed into hot lava, then quickly cooled into vast seas of glass. The planet itself groaned and shuddered under the stresses of Shed’s eruption. All life was cleansed from its rocky, dusty surface. The underground cities of Shaydan held only charred corpses, perfectly preserved for the ages by the hard vacuum that had killed even the tiniest microbes on the planet.
And that was only the first explosion of Sheol.
Thousands of years passed in an eyeblink. Millions flew by in the span of a heartbeat. Not that I had physical eyes or heart, but the eons swept by like an incredibly rapid stop-motion film as I watched from my godlike perch in spacetime.
Sheol exploded again. And again. The Creators were not content to allow the star to remain. Bolts of energy streaked in from deep interstellar space to reach into the heart of Sheol and tear at it like a vulture eating at the innards of its chained victim.
Each explosion released a pulse of gravitational energy that cracked the planet Shaydan the way a sledgehammer cracks a rock. I saw quakes rack that dead airless world from pole to pole, gigantic fissures split its surface from one end to another.
Finally Shaydan broke apart. As Sheol exploded yet again the planet split asunder in the total silence of deep space—just as its reptilian inhabitants had always been silent, I thought.
Suddenly the solar system was filled with projectiles whizzing about like bullets. Some of them were the size of small planets, some the size of mountains. I watched, fascinated, horrified, as these fragments ran into one another, exploding, shattering, bouncing away only to smash together once more. And they crashed into the other planets as well, pounding red Mars and blue Earth and its pale battered moon.
One oblong mass of rock blasted through the thin crust of Mars, its titanic explosion liquefying the underlying mantle, churning up oceans of hot lava that streamed across that dead world’s face, igniting massive volcanoes that spewed dust and fire and smaller rocks that littered half the surface of the planet. Rivers of molten lava dug deep trenches across thousands of miles. Volcanic eruptions vomited lava and pumice higher than the thin Martian atmosphere.
I turned my attention to Earth.
The explosions of Sheol by themselves made little impact on the earth. With each nova pulse of the dying star the night skies of Earth glowed with auroras from pole to equator as subatomic particles from Sheol’s exploding plasma envelope hit the planet’s protective magnetic field and excited the ionosphere. The gravitational pulses that eventually wrecked Shaydan had no discernable effect on Earth; the nearly four hundred million miles’ distance between Sheol and Earth weakened the gravitational waves to negligible proportions.
But the fragments of Shaydan, the remains of that dead and shattered world, almost killed all life on Earth.
A million-year rain of fire sent thousands of stone and metal fragments from Shaydan plunging into Earth’s skies. Most were mere pebbles that burned up high in the atmosphere, brief meteors that eventually sifted down to Earth’s surface as invisible motes of dust. But time and again larger remnants of Shaydan would be caught by Earth’s gravity well and pulled down to the planet’s surface in fiery plunges that lit whole continents with their roaring, thundering passages.
Time and again pieces of rock and metal would punch through Earth’s tortured air, howling like all the fiends of hell, to pound the surface with tremendous explosions. Like billions of hydrogen bombs all exploding at once, each of these giant meteors blasted the planet hard enough to rock it on its axis.
Where they hit dry ground, they spewed up continent-sized clouds of dust that rose beyond the stratosphere and then spread darkness across half the world, blocking out sunlight for weeks.
Where they hit the sea, they rammed through the thin layer of crustal rocks underlying the oceans and broke into the molten-hot mantle beneath. Centuries-long geysers of steam rose from such impact sites, clouding over the sunlight even more than the dust clouds of the ground impacts.
Temperatures plummeted all around the world. At the once-temperate poles, salt water froze into ice. Sea levels dropped worldwide and large shallow inland seas dried up altogether. The shallow-water creatures who had lived in and around those seas perished; delicate algae and immense duckbills alike died away, deprived of their habitats.
More of Shaydan’s fragments pounded down on Earth, breaking through the crustal rocks, triggering massive earthquakes as fissures the length of the planet widened, chains of new volcanoes thundered, and whole continents split apart. I saw the birth of the Atlantic Ocean and watched it spread, shouldering Eurasia and Africa apart from the Americas.
Mountains rose from flatlands, continental blocks of land shifted and tilted, weather patterns were completely altered. High plateaus rose up to replace floodplains and swamps and more species of plants and animals were wiped out forever, totally destroyed by the incessant pounding the planet was suffering through.
The climate grew cooler still as new mountain chains blocked old airflows and dry land replaced swamps and inland seas. Ocean currents shifted as new tectonic plates were created out of the fissures that cracked half the planet and old plates were pulled back into the hot embrace of the planetary mantle with shuddering fitful earthquakes that shattered still more habitats of life.
If I had possessed eyes, I would have wept. Thousands upon thousands of species were dying, ruthlessly wiped out of existence because of me, because of what I had done. By destroying Sheol, by shattering Shaydan, I was killing creatures large and small, plant and animal, predator and prey, all across the face of the earth.
Whole families of microscopic plankton were annihilated from pole to pole, entire species of green plants driven into extinction. The graceful shelled ammonites, which had withstood Set’s deliberate devastation of Earth more than a hundred million years earlier, succumbed and disappeared from the rolls of life.
And the dinosaurs. Every last one of them. Gigantic fierce Tyrannosaurus and gentle duckbill, massive Triceratops and birdlike Stenonychosaurus—all gone, totally, forever gone.
I did not mean to kill them. Yet I felt a cosmic guilt. My rage against Set and his kind had resulted in all this suffering, all this death. My personal revenge had been won at the price of scrubbing the earth nearly clean of life.
I looked again at the new earth. Ice caps glittered at its poles. The rough outlines of the continents looked familiar now, although they were still not spaced across the globe in the way I remembered. The Atlantic was still widening, red-tipped volcanoes glowing down the length of the fissure that extended from Iceland to the Antarctic. North and South America were not yet connected, and the basin that would one day be the Mediterranean was a dry and grassy plain.
I saw a forest of leafy trees standing straight and tall against the morning sun. The sky was clear. The bombardment of Shaydan’s fragments had ended at last.
A gentle stream flowed through the woods. Grass grew on the ground right down to its banks. Flowers nodded brightly red and yellow and orange in the breeze while bees busily attended them. A turtle slid off a log and splashed into the stream, startling a nearby frog who hopped into a waterside thicket.
Birds soared by in fine feathery plumage. And up on a high branch sat a tiny furred ratlike animal, its beady black eyes glittering, its nose twitching worriedly.
This is all that’s left of life on Earth, I thought to myself. After the catastrophe that I caused, the planet has to make a new beginning.
I realized that just as Set had scoured the Earth to make room for his own kind of reptilian life, I had inadvertently put the planet through another holocaust that would eventually lead to my kind of life. That ratlike creature was a mammal, my ancestor, the ancestor of all humankind, the progenitor of the Creators themselves.
Once again I realized that I had been used by the Creators. I had given my body, my life, not merely to destroy Shaydan but to scrub the Earth clean and prepare it for the rise of the mammals and the human race.
“Just as I was going to do.”
It was Set’s voice speaking in my mind.
“I am not dead, Orion. I live here on Earth with my servants and slaves—thanks to you.”