by Ben Bova
We pounded through the forest without stop. Night fell but we barely slowed our pace. If the dragons had a need for sleep, they did not show it, and for all I knew, the masters riding them might have been sound asleep; I had no way of telling. Did they know that I can go without sleep for weeks at a time, if necessary? Or did they conclude that I could sleep without falling off the back of this gallumphing latter-day dinosaur?
I decided to find out.
I let myself slide off the dragon's back. Hitting the ground on the balls of my feet, I jumped out of the way of the beast pounding along behind me and dashed into the thick brush.
The dragons immediately stopped and reared up. I could hear their snuffling panting in the darkness of the night, like giant steam engines puffing. It was cloudy, threatening rain, so dark that I could not see them at all.
No sound came from the masters riding atop the giant beasts. But I heard the dragons crunching through the underbrush, sniffing like immense bloodhounds. I edged deeper into the bushes, scuttling like a beetle while trying to keep quiet. The forest had gone silent: not an insect chirped.
In the hushed darkness a picture formed itself in my mind. The village I had just left was being trampled by dozens of dragons. Men and women were being torn apart, crushed in the pitiless jaws of the beasts. I saw Chron ripped from throat to groin by a dragon's monstrous claws.
Someone was sending me a powerful message. Whether it was the masters whom I was trying to escape or Set himself in contact with me despite the distance separating us, the message was perfectly clear: either I surrender myself or Chron and all the villagers will be painfully, mercilessly slaughtered.
I rose to my feet. It was still utterly dark. Not even a breeze stirred the air. Within a few minutes, though, I heard the hissing breath and ponderous footfalls of one of the dragons. I stepped out into a slightly clearer space between the trees and saw the burning-red glittering eyes of a master staring down at me from his perch on the dragon's back.
"I fell asleep and slipped off," I lied.
It did not matter. The master watched, wordlessly, as his dragon crouched down enough for me to clamber up onto its back once again. And then we resumed our journey toward the north.
It began to rain at dawn and I hung on to the beast's back, angry, wet, frustrated, and—beneath it all—terrified of what Set was doing to Anya. We had failed, the two of us. Our few moments in Paradise had cost us our lives.
Then a new thought struck me. The masters had actually made a deal with Kraal's tribe. Despicable though it was on Kraal's part, it seemed to me to be a small sign of weakness on the part of Set. The masters had no need of collaborators before I had met Kraal. Our idea of welding all the human tribes into an alliance to resist the masters must have forced Set to make this new accommodation.
The masters were vulnerable. At least to a small degree. After all, we had killed some of their most fearsome dragons with the most primitive of weapons. We had been rousing the human tribes to fight back.
But a voice in my head kept asking, What is he doing to Anya?
Probably everything we had accomplished had been wiped away by Set's masterful use of terror. The old hostage maneuver: do as I say or I will kill those you love. Kraal had given in to it, with Reeva's urging. Set would never have stooped to bargaining with humans, even if the bargain was nothing more than threatening hostages, if he had not felt that we were starting to cause damage to him.
But what was he doing to Anya?
Set's hostage ploy has worked to perfection, my inner voice admitted. He has Anya in his grasp, and soon enough he will have you. And all you've accomplished with Kraal is to teach him how to round up fresh slaves for the diabolical masters.
And what is Set doing to Anya?
It was in this turmoil of conflicting fears and regrets that I rode on the back of the galloping dragon all that long, miserable, rainy day. Wet, cold, and dispirited, I lay my head on the beast's hide and tried to sleep. If the rain bothered the reptilians, they gave no indication of it. The water spattered off the scales of their hides; the chill dankness of the air seemed to have no effect on them at all.
I closed my eyes and willed my body to hang on to the dragon's wet, slippery back. I wanted to sleep, to be as rested as possible for the coming confrontation with Set. I also hoped, desperately, that in sleep the Creators might contact me as they had so often in other lives, other times.
My last waking thought was of Anya. Was she still alive? Was she suffering the tortures that Set told me he would inflict upon her?
I made myself sleep. Without dreams, without messages. Any other time I would have been happy for a few hours of restful oblivion. But when I awoke, I felt disappointed, abandoned, hopeless.
Blinking the sleep away, I saw that it was nearly nightfall again. We had broken clear of the forest and were riding now across the broad sea of grass toward the garden by the Nile. The moon was just rising above the flat horizon and with it that blood red star shone down on me, the same color as the baleful eyes of Set.
CHAPTER 11
The sun was high in a sky so blue it almost hurt my eyes to look at it. We were riding through the garden by the Nile now, the two dragons pacing less urgently down a long wide avenue of trees. The ground beneath us was grassless bare pebbles, raked smooth by unseen hands.
No slaves were in sight. No other dragons or masters. The garden seemed totally empty except for us.
Then up ahead I saw a structure, a building, or rather a high smooth curved wall. In the shadowless glare of the high sun it seemed the color of eggshell, almost white, and as smooth as the shell of an egg. It slanted inward, sloping a discernable few degrees toward the top. No battlements, no crenellations, no windows. Only a smoothly curving, sloping wall of featureless material that was neither stone nor wood. Our dragons slowed their pace even further as we approached the wall, then began to trot around its base. It was more than three stories high, I judged, and so wide in extent that it must have covered more ground than Troy and Jericho combined.
We rode around the wall's vast curving base for several minutes before I saw a section slide open to reveal a high, wide door. The dragons trotted through it.
Now the beasts slowed to a walk as we went down a long, broad tunnel. Their clawed feet crunched on bare pebbles. Their heads almost grazed the ceiling, which was made of the same smooth plastic material as the outer wall. Finally we stepped out into sunshine again.
We were in a huge circular courtyard, busy with reptilians of all descriptions and scampering, sweating half-naked human slaves. The inner wall towered above me, slanting inward, utterly smooth and impossible to climb.
There was a corral of sorts built on the far side of the courtyard, where the four-footed herbivorous dragons that served as slave guards were penned in. Some of them were eating, their long necks bent down to troughs piled high with greens. Others stood placidly, tails swinging slowly, eyes calmly surveying the courtyard, heads bobbing up and down. At their full height they reached more than halfway up the enclosing circular wall.
Exactly opposite the corral were sturdier pens where several of the fiercer meat-eating dragons paced nervously, hissing and snapping, their enormous teeth flashing like sabers in the sunlight.
A terrace jutted out from one section of the curving wall, more than fifteen feet above the ground. Dozens of pterosaurs squatted there as if sleeping, their big leathery wings folded, their long beaks hanging down, eyes closed. I saw no droppings on the beams that supported the terrace or the ground below. Either the flying lizards were well trained or the slaves cleaned up after them.
I counted eight of the humanoid masters in that wide courtyard, striding across the yard or sitting on benches or bent over some piece of work. None of them conversed with another. They remained far separated, aloof, as if they had no use for their own kind.
Human slaves scurried to fill the feeding troughs, toting big wicker baskets bulging with leafy vegetation. A quarte
t of slaves trudged out of a low doorway, leaning heavily into rope harnesses as they dragged a wooden pallet piled high with raw red meat for the carnosaurs. Others dashed here and there on tasks that were not apparent to me, but obviously important to someone from the way they were scampering. Two slaves ran up to us, standing with heads bowed as the masters slid off our mounts and beckoned me to do the same.
It was like a scene from a medieval castle or an oriental bazaar: the dragons in brilliant splashes of colors; the masters' scaly hides in pale coral red, almost pink; the looming walls; the outlandish pterosaurs; the scurrying slaves. Yet there were two things about it that seemed uncannily strange to me. There were no fires anywhere, no smoke, no cooking, no one warming themselves beside crackling flames. And there was virtually no noise.
All this was going on in almost total silence. Not a voice could be heard. Only the occasional hiss of a dragon or buzz of an insect broke the quiet. The slaves' unshod feet were inaudible on the dusty bare ground of the courtyard. The masters themselves made no sound, and their human slaves apparently dared not speak.
I slid to the ground and stared at the two slaves standing mutely before us. One was a young woman, bare to the waist like her male companion. Without a word they motioned to the dragons, which followed them to the pens on the opposite side of the courtyard from the herbivores' corral.
One of my captors touched my shoulder with a cold clawed hand and pointed in the direction of a narrow doorway set into the wall's curving face. I would have sworn the wall had been perfectly smooth a moment earlier.
With one master ahead of me and the second behind, I entered the cool shadows of a corridor that seemed to curve along the wall's inner circumference. We came to a ramp that led down and began a long, silent, spiraling descent. It was dark inside, especially after the brightness of the afternoon sun. The downward-ramped corridor had no lights at all; I could barely make out the back of the reptilian walking a few feet in front of me, his tail swinging slightly from side to side.
Finally we stopped at what seemed to be a blank wall. A portion of it slid aside. My escorts gestured me through.
I stepped into a dimly lit chamber and the door slid shut behind me. I knew I was not alone, however. I could sense the presence of another living entity.
Even though my eyes can adjust to very low light levels almost immediately, the chamber remained shrouded in gloomy shadows. Almost complete inky blackness. Then a beam of dark red light, like the angry glower of the blood star in the night, bathed the part of the chamber in front of me.
Set reclined on a low, wide backless couch. A throne of blackest ebony, raised three feet above the floor on which I stood. On either side of him stood several statues, some of wood, some of stone, one of them seemed to be carved from ivory. No two were the same size; they had been apparently carved by many different hands. Some were outright crude. The ivory statue was truly a beautiful masterwork.
They were all of the same subject: the hellish creature who was called Set.
His red slitted eyes radiated implacable hatred. His horned face, crimson-scaled body, long twitching tail were the devil incarnate. Thousands of generations of human beings would fear his image. His was the face of nightmares, of terror beyond reason, of an eternal enmity that knew no bounds, no restraints, no mercy.
I felt that burning hatred in my soul. My knees went weak with the seething dread and horror of standing face-to-face with the remorseless enemy of humankind.
"You are Orion." The words formed themselves in my mind.
Aloud I replied, "You are Set."
"Pitiful monkey. Are you the best your Creators could send against me?"
"Where is Anya?" I asked.
Set's mouth opened slightly. In a human face it might have been a cruel smile. Rows of pointed teeth, like a shark's, glittered in the sullen red light.
"The weakness of the mammal is that it is attached to other mammals. At first literally, physically. Then emotionally, all its life."
"Where is Anya?" I repeated.
He raised a clawed hand and part of the wall to his right became a window, a display screen. I saw dozens of humans packed into a dank airless chamber. Some were sitting, some were grubbing colorless globs of food from a bin with their bare hands and stuffing it into their mouths. A man and a woman were coupling off in a corner, ignoring the others and ignored by them.
"Monkeys," Set said in my mind.
I searched the scene but could not see Anya. Then I realized that this was the first example of real technology that I had seen from Set or any of the reptiles.
He raised one talon and I began to hear the hum and chatter of human speech, shouting, conversing, even laughing. A baby cried. An old man's cracked voice complained bitterly about someone who had called him a fool. A trio of women sat huddled together on the grimy floor, heads bent toward one another, whispering urgently among themselves.
"Chattering stupid monkeys," Set repeated. "Always talking. Always gibbering. What do they find to talk about?"
The human voices sounded warm and reassuring to me.
Set's words in my mind became sardonic. "Humans that see each other every hour of every day still make their mouth noises at each other constantly. This will be a better world when the last of them are eliminated."
"Eliminated?"
"Ah, that roused your simian curiosity, did it not?"
"You expect to wipe out the entire human race?"
"I will erase you, all of you, from the face of this world." Even though he projected the thought mentally, I seemed to hear a sibilant hissing in his words.
My mind was racing. He couldn't wipe out the entire human race. I knew that the Creators existed in the far future, which meant that humanity survived.
Then I heard Set's equivalent of laughter, an eerie blood-chilling high-pitched shrill, like the scrape of a claw against a chalkboard.
"The Creators will not exist once I have finished my task. I will bend the continuum to my will, Orion, and your pitiful band of self-styled gods will disappear like smoke from a candle that has been snuffed out."
The display on the wall went dark.
"Anya . . ."
"You wish to see the woman. Come with me." He got to his feet, looming over me like a fearsome dark shadow of death. "You will see her. And share her fate."
We went through another hidden door and into a corridor so dimly lit I could barely see his powerful form in front of me. He and his kind must be able to see far into the infrared, I reasoned. Does that mean they cannot see the higher-energy parts of the spectrum, the blues and violets? I mentally filed that conjecture for future consideration.
The corridor became a spiraling ramp that led down, down, deeper into the earth. The walls glowed a feeble dull red, barely enough for me to guide my steps. Still we descended. Set was nearly a foot taller than I, so tall that the scales of his head nearly scraped the tunnel's ceiling. He was powerfully built, yet his body did not bulge with muscle; it had a fluid grace to it, like the silent deadly litheness of a boa constrictor.
His skull was ridged, I saw, with two bony crests that ran down the back of his neck and merged with his spine. From the front those ridges looked like small horns just above his slitted snake's eyes. From the rear I saw that his spine was knobby with vestigial spikes, projections that may have been plates of bony armor in eons past. There was a small knob at the end of his tail, also, that might once have been a defensive club.
The tunnel was getting narrower, steeper. And hotter. I was perspiring. The floor was uncomfortably warm against my bare feet.
"How far down are we going?" I asked, my voice echoing off the smooth walls.
His voice answered in my mind, "Your Creators draw their energy from their sun, the golden light of the bigger star. I draw mine from the depths of the planet, from the ocean of molten iron that surges halfway between this world's outer crust and its absolute center."
"The earth's liquid core," I muttered.
"A sea of energy," Set continued, "heated by radioactivity and gravity, seething with electrical currents and magnetic fields, so hot that iron and all other metals are molten and flow like water."
He was describing hell. He drew his energy from hell.
Down and still further down we walked. I began to wonder why Set had not constructed an elevator. We walked on in silence, in the eerie dull red light, for what seemed like hours. It was like walking through an oven.
He's holding Anya down here, I told myself. What can he have down at this depth? Why so deep underground? Is he afraid of being seen? Does he have other enemies, in addition to the Creators? Perhaps some of his own kind are at odds with him?
My thoughts circled endlessly, but always came back to the same fearful question: What is he doing to Anya?
Gradually I became aware of a presence in my mind, another intelligence, probing so gently I could hardly feel it. At first I thought it might have been Anya. But this presence was alien, hostile. Then I realized why we were spending so much time walking toward Anya's prison. Set was probing my mind, interrogating me so subtly that I had not even realized it, searching my memories for—for what?
He sensed my awareness of his probe.
"You are just as stubborn as the woman. I shall have to use more forceful methods on you, just as I have had to do with her."
Hot fury driven by fear raged through me. I wanted to leap on his back and snap his neck. But I knew that he could overpower me. I could feel his evil amusement at my thoughts.
"She is in great pain, Orion. Her agony will become even greater before I allow her to die."
CHAPTER 12
The steep spiraling tunnel ended finally at another blank door. Set did nothing that I could see, but the door slid open to reveal what seemed, at first glance, to be an elaborate laboratory.
Anya was nowhere in sight. The chamber we stepped into hummed with electrical power. Row upon row of buzzing throbbing consoles stood along two of the four walls of the cramped little room. Behind us was a long table cluttered with strange objects and a backless chair, almost like an ornate bench, for a tailed two-legged creature to sit upon. The fourth wall was absolutely blank.