by Ben Bova
"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 spacetime 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."
CHAPTER 23
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 space-time 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 liquified, 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 descendan
ts 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 spacetime. 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.
CHAPTER 24
The ability to manipulate spacetime gives you control of 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.