Orion in the Dying Time

by Ben Bova

  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.

  CHAPTER 28

  He's catatonic," sneered the Golden One.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Sent, I would think," said Anya.

  "Yes, I agree. But why?"

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

  The Golden One looked sharply at me.

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

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

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

  "Why?" the Golden One demanded.

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

  He looked at me suspiciously.

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

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

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

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

  He nodded. "The main square then."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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