by Ben Bova
The world was spinning. The surf surging against my bloodied legs, knocking me over as more laser blasts lanced past my head. They were shooting to kill.
I crawled into the waves, letting the water surge over me, cool and stinging with salt. Like a crab I scrabbled along the sandy bottom as the water flowed over my head, covering me, protecting me from their merciless lasers. I tasted salt water in my mouth, felt it filling my nose. I was deep enough now to float up off the bottom and let the current carry me out farther from the land.
There was not much skin on me that was unburned, I knew. Despite my control of the pain signals, my body was telling me that it was almost gone. Legs useless, one arm burned to the bone, another searing wound in my chest.
I floated to the surface and gulped cool night air. I did not have the strength to swim. I was going to die again, and this time I knew that the Golden One had no intention of reviving me. I had failed in my mission. Failed him. Failed myself.
I would never see Anya again. Never look into her gray solemn eyes. Never feel her touch, hear her voice.
The Golden One had abandoned me to die here on this miserable planet. They had all abandoned me, all the Creators. Even Anya.
A bitter torrent of regret surged through me. Somewhere deep in my mind I could hear Aten’s scornful laughter telling me that he knew I would fail him. I was merely a creature, after all. How dare I presume to love one of the Creators? I was made to be their tool, not their equal.
Regret. Love for Anya. Hatred for the Golden One. All these emotions flooded through me as I bobbed in the swells of that unnamed ocean, dying.
And something else. Something that I had never realized existed within me came to the front of my consciousness. Me. Myself. The individual who is Orion. Not the slave of the Golden One. Not even the lover of the goddess Anya. Myself. It did not matter how I was created or by whom. It did not matter who I loved or who loved me. I exist. I live and breathe and love and hate. I will not tamely die, mourning my failures, bemoaning my fate.
I pulled what little strength was left in my battered body and concentrated every atom of my will. There are paths through space-time, I knew. The continuum is like an ocean, and there are currents in it that can carry you from one place-time to another.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I thought back to all the times I had been translated through the continuum of space-time. Could I move myself voluntarily? Could I reach that city of the Creators, the city I had saved from Set’s destruction, the city that they kept safe in its own protective bubble of energy?
With my eyes tight closed I could not see the stars in the night sky. My body grew cold, numb. I no longer felt the bobbing of the sea. Colder I grew, cryogenically cold for an endless moment.
And then I felt the warmth of sunlight on my naked skin. I opened my eyes and found myself lying in a meadow on a hillside. And below me lay the magnificent city of the Creators beneath its radiant sphere of energy, rising beside a calm blue sea.
A city of monuments and heroic statues, all dedicated to the Creators themselves. Pyramids and temples from every era, every culture of Earth. A city empty of people, except for the handful of Creators, the self-styled masters of the human race who had allowed themselves to be worshipped as gods. They had translated the monuments that adoring humans had built to them, accumulating them into this glowing city devoted to their own gratifications.
I rose to my feet. My body was whole and strong. The breeze from the sea was cool, the sun high overhead warming. I walked through wildflowers down the hill toward the city. Deer bounded in the woods farther off to my right. Rabbits hurried through the grass at my feet, stopping now and then to stare at me, noses twitching.
The city was empty. I knew that there were robots and mechanical conveniences waiting to be summoned by mere thought. But the Creators were not there, not one of them. I felt disappointed, yet not surprised. Aten had told me that they were scattered among the stars, struggling to resolve this ultimate crisis that they faced. Yet, to beings who can come and go through space-time at will, why were none of them here in their home base at this particular nexus in the continuum?
I wandered on, asking myself what I expected of this visit and getting nothing but a vague sense of uneasiness by way of an answer.
Past the Mayan Temple of the Sun I strolled, alone in the ageless city. Past the Parthenon and the great golden reclining Buddha that seemed to be grinning at me, knowingly. I walked through the city from one side to the other until I was at the base of the massive pyramid of Khufu, out beyond the Colossus of Rhodes.
I turned the corner of the great pyramid and there was the ocean, clean and glittering beneath the sun, waves washing up on the beach with curls of froth as they broke gently against the sand. The sea called to me and I walked into it, wading up to my hips before I slid in and began swimming slowly out toward the distant horizon.
“Welcome, friend Orion,” said a dolphin that popped up beside me. “We are happy to see you back among us.”
“Back among you?” I asked.
I saw that I was surrounded by the grinning sea mammals, gray and sleek and each as big as five men or more. It was no surprise to me that I understood their clicks and whistles. But I was surprised that they understood my tongue.
“It’s been a long time since we hunted the fast-darting tuna together,” said the nearest dolphin.
“Or went diving to the lair of the giant squid,” said another.
“Where are the Creators?” I asked. “Do you know?”
“The other two-legs? They have been gone for long ages, Orion.”
“They aren’t much fun. They argue among themselves most of the time.”
“They forget that we can hear them. Our sense of hearing is very acute.”
“I know,” I said, grinning back at them as I treaded water.
“Come!” said the nearest one. “There’s a whole school of tuna not more than five kilometers from here. Let’s feast on them!”
“Wait!” I begged. “I can’t swim that far.”
“No need for you to swim, friend Orion. Ride on my back the way you used to so many tides ago.”
“If you don’t mind carrying me…”
“Of course not! One hunter to another, we are all friends here in the sea.”
So I slid one leg across his smooth back and clutched his dorsal fin with both my hands and off we went on a wild splashing ride, the dolphin racing powerfully, smoothly through the ocean, dipping down below the surface to run as fast as possible, then sliding up to blow steamy stale air through his vent and pull in a gulp of fresh air with a wet sucking noise. I did the same each time he popped to the surface. If the individual dolphins had names I never learned them; they seemed to know each other without the need for such tags.
They said I had gone hunting with them before, that we were old friends. I had no memory of it whatsoever, but I did not let that interfere with my enjoyment of this wild splashing ride through the ocean. The water was clear as air down to a considerable depth, with the sun lighting it up. If it weren’t for the bubbles and the swarms of colorful fish darting all around us, I would not have thought we were underwater.
And then would come the splashing, frothing moment of breaking the surface, taking a fresh gulp of air. And then down below we would go again, sliding along smoothly on the powerful strokes of their tails.
Soon enough we came to the tuna school, big silver-gray sleek speedsters who turned and fled at the approach of the tribe of dolphins. Fast as the tuna were, though, the dolphins were faster. We split up into several smaller groups, circling around the school of tuna to set up a trap, much as the Mongols did on their great hunts each year. I slid free of my mount and hovered with a few of the older dolphins, treading water as I waited for the circlers to drive the prey toward us.
“Don’t let them get past you!” my friend clicked gleefully as he dashed off. Underwater, I could not reply to him.
The tuna panicked a
nd tried to evade the trap. The dolphins snapped them up in their grinning jaws by the dozens, by the hundred, gulping them down one after another. I grabbed one, more than enough for me to handle, bit through its spine to kill it and then let myself float to the surface with the big fish in my hands.
“Only one, friend Orion?” my friend teased. “This is the mighty hunter?”
I laughed as I tore at the clean fresh meat of the tuna. “How many deer can you chase down, legless one? How many rabbits can you outrun?”
I saw the dark fins of sharks circling in the distance, attracted by our slaughter of the tuna, but they kept away from the dolphins. As the sun began to slide toward the sea, we swam back to the beach by the Creators’ city, with me riding my friend’s back again.
Finally I was wading toward the beach. I stopped while still waist-deep in the water and shouted a farewell to the dolphins.
“Thanks for the hunt,” I called.
“The sea is good, friend Orion. Too bad you aren’t a dolphin, or at least a whale. You are a good companion, for a two-leg.”
“And you are good friends, all of you. Thanks for sharing your hunt with me.”
“The sea will always be your friend, Orion. It is good in the water.”
With that, they turned and headed out to the deeper waters, leaving me to stagger back up the beach and throw myself on the warm sand for the lowering sun to dry me.
The sea will always be my friend, they said. Yet there was a place in space-time where I was floating helpless in the sea, wounded and dying.
I returned to that place.
Chapter 11
I had hoped that I could somehow return with my body repaired, strong and healed of my wounds. But that, I could not do.
I opened my eyes and saw the starry dark night and felt pain, wave after wave of agony throbbing through every part of my body. Even as I consciously damped down the pain receptors in my brain I could feel it sullenly glowering beneath my deliberate self-control.
I was floating on my back in the deep, dark ocean, just as battered and helpless as I had been before my trip to the Creators’ realm. Had I really been there, cavorting with dolphins? Or was it all an illusion, a self-imposed dream, a feverish attempt at escapism?
My self-questioning quickly ended. I felt something brush against my badly burned leg. Just a touch, enough to make me twitch with alarm and get a mouthful of salt water in return. Then it was gone. But it would be back, I knew.
I remembered those tentacled horrors in the swamp, and wondered what predators this ocean harbored. Alone, half-dead, weaponless, I was going to be easy prey for some hungry hunter.
The sea will always be my friend, the dolphins had told me. I doubted it.
Another touch, making me flinch again. I remembered that sharks will often nudge their prey, bump it, almost play with it like a cat with a mouse before snapping it up in those horrendous tearing teeth.
Should I play dead or try to swim away? Would it make any difference?
It was no shark. This time I felt a tentacle delicately wrapping itself around the burned remains of my ankle. I shook my leg and it let go.
But not for long. The tentacle came back at precisely the same spot. This time it held fast. Quickly another slithered across my chest. I could feel its suckers attaching themselves to my burned flesh, delicately, almost tenderly.
I knew it was hopeless but I gulped down a big swallow of air as the tentacles pulled me below the surface. Bubbles gurgled in my ears. We sank down into the cold inky depths of the ocean.
Do not be afraid, friend Orion, I heard in my mind. We will not hurt you.
Now I’m hallucinating, I told myself. First I dream about dolphins and now I hallucinate that I can hear their voices in my mind. While I’m being pulled down to the bottom of the sea by some tentacled monster. If I don’t drown the pressure will cave in my ribs soon enough.
Have a little faith, friend Orion, the voice in my mind said. It felt almost amused.
I lost track of time as we sank deeper and deeper into the sea. There was no light to see by, no sensation at all except the rush of water swirling by me.
Listen to the music of our world, said the voice. Open your mind to it.
I could hear more than gurgling, I realized. There were crackling sounds all around me. Hoots and whistles and soft thrumming noises. And off in the distance a faint melodic crooning that rose and fell. None of the clicks and whistles of dolphins, though.
Now open your eyes, Orion.
I hadn’t realized I’d been keeping them shut. Involuntarily I gasped. I was surrounded by hundreds of soft glowing points of light, like being in the middle of a meadow full of fireflies or in the heart of a cluster of gleaming stars.
And when I gasped I had air to breathe.
“Can you hear me?” the voice asked. And I could. It was using sound rather than telepathy or whatever form of mind contact it had used before.
“Good,” it said, without my answering. “The air globe is stabilized and you should feel more comfortable. We will see what can be done about your wounds.” The voice was silky soft, warm and calm.
“Who are you?” I asked. “Where are we?”
The lights danced and twinkled around me, blue and red and green and yellow, but I could not make out any shapes.
“We are nearing the bottom of the sea, roughly a hundred kilometers from the shore where the Skorpis have made their base.”
“You know about them?”
I sensed a tolerant chuckle. “Yes, we know about them. And about you.” The voice grew darker, more severe. “And about the way you casually slaughter one another.”
“I wouldn’t call it casual,” I replied.
No response. The lights flickered around me, as if they were dancing in a sphere all around me, binding me in a web of blinking colorful flashes of energy.
“You haven’t told me who you are,” I said.
“You may call us the Old Ones.”
“What does that mean?”
Again that tolerant sense of amusement, like a grandfather watching a baby’s hesitant first steps.
“You will find out in due course,” the voice said. “For now, we must travel deeper into the sea.”
I got a sense of motion, acceleration, a tremendous rushing through the dark waters. The lights remained all around me. I could breathe. I seemed to be floating weightlessly, almost like an astronaut in orbit. In the dim flickering light I could see that my wounds were scabbing over. The bleeding had stopped completely and I felt a little stronger. All the while I was moving through the inky depths, speeding deeper and deeper, farther and farther from the shore.
At last I saw more lights approaching. They glowed and pulsated as if they were living, breathing creatures. Whole avenues of light opened up before my eyes, as if I were flying toward a vast city, swooping along a highway of lights that led to its magnificent heart.
“How do you feel?” the voice asked.
“Bewildered.”
“I mean physically. Your wounds.”
I flexed my arms, looked down at my legs. They were healing rapidly.
“Everything seems to be going along fine.”
“Good. We are pleased.”
“Tell me more about yourselves. What is this city of lights that we are approaching?”
“This is our home, Orion. The home of the Old Ones.”
“May I see you?” I asked, sensing that these lights were merely sparks of energy.
“You may be unpleasantly surprised,” the voice replied. “You may be repelled by our appearance.”
“Then tell me what to expect.”
“A reasonable approach to the problem.” The voice hesitated, as if checking with others before answering my request. Then:
“Orion, your Creators have told you that space-time is an ocean, have they not?”
“The one called Aten has taunted me more than once about my linear perception of space-time,” I answered.
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“Yes, we can see that. Yet your linear perception is not entirely in error, Orion.”
“There are currents in the ocean of space-time,” I said.
“And there is a flow, a very definite flow. Time’s arrow exists. Entropy exists. Even though we may move back and forth across the ocean of space-time, we still cannot hold back entropy. The continuum unravels a little whenever we move through space-time. The greater our move, the more disorder arises.”
“But what has this to do with the way you look?” I asked.
“Time’s arrow,” the voice replied. “There are earlier times and later times. There is a point in space-time when your planet Earth is barren and lifeless. There is a point where the human race begins—”
“Built by the Creators and sent to destroy the Neanderthals so that Earth can be inhabited by the Creators’ creatures.”
“Who in turn, over the millennia, evolve into the Creators themselves.”
“Yes. They created us and we created them.”
“There is a point in the evolution of our kind,” the voice said, “when we had not yet developed intelligence, when we were far simpler beings living in the seas of our original world.”
“Lunga is not your original world?”
“Oh, no. Not at all.”
“Then where did you originate?”
I sensed a hesitation. “Does it matter? Suffice to say that once we were far simpler beings than we are now.”
“Simpler beings,” I said, beginning to understand what he was hinting at, “with tentacles?”
“Yes.”
“And claws that can crack armor?”
“Do you think you are prepared to see us?”
I thought of those things in the swamp, with their clutching tentacles and snapping claws and dozens of beady eyes.
I took a breath and said shakily, “Yes, I’m ready.”
“Very well.”
The sea around me brightened and I saw that I was surrounded by dozens of writhing tentacled creatures. They were huge, immense, like gigantic pulsating jellyfish with long wriggling tentacles and lipless round mouths that opened and closed, opened and closed, coming nearer and nearer to me. My skin crawled and I felt panic rising inside me, surrounded by these enormous engulfing undulating horrors pressing closer and closer, tentacles reaching out for me, mouths pulsating…