by Ben Bova
“Why? What’s the reason for all this hatred and killing? Why the war? What’s this ultimate crisis?”
She almost laughed. “Orion, you’re like a little boy, asking so many questions. They’re not easily answered.”
I gestured toward a sunny glade where a swift stream burbled over rocks, hardly a few meters from where we stood. “Very well. Let’s go sit in the warmth of the sun and watch the deer come down to the stream and drink. And you can begin to explain it all to me.”
“I’m not sure that I can,” Anya said, but she walked along with me toward the grassy glade.
“Then tell me as much as my limited mind can understand,” I coaxed her.
“Your mind is not as limited as Aten thinks,” she told me. “He would be shocked to know that you can translate yourself across the continuum, and carry me along with you. And rejuvenate me, too.”
“If we go back to Prime and the era of the war, will you remain as youthful as you are now?”
“No,” she said ruefully. “I will be a dying old hag there, unless I exert almost all my failing strength to appear young for a few moments.”
“How did Aten do this to you?”
We had stepped out of the shade of the trees, into the welcoming sunlight. Walking to the edge of the stream, we sat oh the soft grass, our backs against a big sun-warmed boulder.
“This war between the Commonwealth and the Hegemony,” Anya said, “is really a continuation of the conflict we had over Troy.”
“But why—”
She hushed me with a finger on my lips. And began to explain as much as she could.
The human race had expanded through the solar system and out to the stars, not as a single unified species, but as a pack of squabbling, contending tribes. Humankind had not overcome its tribal animosities merely because we had achieved interstellar flight. The Creators had built that aggressive nature into us, and no amount of technology could remove it. Indeed, the more sophisticated our technology became, the more dangerous our weaponry. We could blast whole planets clean of all life. Now we were ready to shatter stars.
We had found other intelligent species among the stars. Some were far below us in technological and cultural development: cave dwellers or simple herders and pastoralists. By and large these were left alone by the expanding human species; they had nothing to offer us, neither trade nor knowledge nor competition. Scientists studied them, although now and again unscrupulous humans colonized their worlds and despoiled them.
We also found other species that were far beyond us and, like the Old Ones, wished to have nothing to do with humankind or its ilk. But there were several intelligent species among the stars, such as the Tsihn and the Skorpis, who were close to our own level of knowledge and power. With these we could trade. And fight.
Inevitably, the humans who colonized the stars polarized themselves into two competing groups: the Hegemony and the Commonwealth. Inevitably, they sought allies among the aliens of our own level. Inevitably, they went to war.
“Inevitably?” I asked Anya. “Aten told me that this war is actually a struggle to decide how the Creators will deal with the ultimate crisis.”
She bowed her head in acknowledgment. “I hadn’t realized he had revealed that much to you.”
“Have all of humankind’s wars been caused by the Creators?” I asked.
“No, not all of them. The human species is ferocious enough to start its own wars, without our instigation.”
“But what is this ultimate crisis?” I wanted to know. “Why do we have to kill billions of people and destroy whole planets? Why is the Commonwealth preparing to use a weapon that can blow away a star?”
Her eyes blazed. “They’re ready to use it? How do you know…?”
“The Old Ones.”
“Aten has made contact with the Old Ones?” Anya looked frightened.
“No, they refuse to speak with either the Commonwealth or the Hegemony.”
“Then how—”
“They spoke with me. They told me to warn both the Commonwealth and the Hegemony that they will not allow a star-destroying weapon to be used. They said they would eliminate all of us—all of humankind and all our allies—if we tried to destroy a star.”
Anya leaned back against the boulder. “They spoke to you?” She seemed unable to believe it.
I assured her that they did and gave her every detail of my contacts with the Old Ones. She probed into my mind and confirmed that it was all true.
“Then the Hegemony is lost,” she said at last. “And me with it. Aten will win. We were hoping to develop the star-destroyer ourselves. It was our last chance, a desperation weapon that we hoped would be so terrible it would force the Commonwealth to accept a truce.”
With a shake of my head, I repeated, “The Old Ones won’t permit it. They’ll wipe out all of us instead.”
Anya’s eyes looked old again, weary and defeated. “Then you’d better bring me back to Prime. I must tell the other Creators before they decide to go ahead with the weapon.”
“Tell me first how Aten is killing you. How is it possible?”
She shook her head again, utterly weary. “It’s a disease, Orion, a biological weapon that feeds on my metabolism. Aten developed it and planted it in all the Creators.”
“All of them?”
“Every one of us, long eons ago. The microbe lies dormant for ages, then slowly awakes and becomes active. Little by little, it saps your strength, slows your powers. Gradually its effects accelerate, until at last you wither and age and finally succumb.”
“But Zeus and Hera and the others—they didn’t show any signs of aging.”
A wan smile. “That’s because Aten is keeping them alive. As long as they stay with him, support his side of this war, he keeps them healthy.”
“And there’s nothing you can do? No cure? No way to restore yourself?”
“Don’t you think we’ve tried to find a cure? The organism mutates even as we study it; its basic genetic structure changes randomly. Aten spent millennia developing this disease. He experimented with hundreds of generations of humans to perfect it. Half the plagues in human history were his experiments.”
“Yet he can protect the Creators who accept his domination.”
“Apparently, although I wonder if he doesn’t plan to kill them, too, when he no longer needs them.”
“He always wanted to be the only god,” I muttered.
Anya seemed to grow weaker with the exertion of admitting her helplessness. Yet I could not believe that she and the other Creators could not overcome Aten’s treachery.
“If he can protect some of the Creators,” I wondered aloud, “why can’t you and the others find the protective agent for yourselves?”
“Because it is keyed to Aten himself,” she answered. “He reaches through space-time to alter the microbe whenever we attempt to counteract it. We develop a vaccine and he changes the microbe to be immune to it. We move through space-time to annihilate the microbe, and he moves through space-time to revive it. The game is endless and deadly.”
“And each time any of you translates across space-time it unravels the fabric of the continuum a little more,” I said, remembering what the Old Ones had told me.
“Yes,” Anya agreed grimly. “Already the continuum is so disturbed that we can no longer accurately trace the various space-time tracks. We can’t probe the cosmos anymore, Orion! We’re losing our ability to foresee the results of our actions. Chaos is crashing down upon us all. Absolute chaos!”
She was trembling with fear. I took her in my arms and held her while the warm sun of Paradise swung westward and began to set, turning the sky aflame with red and violet clouds. I watched the deer and smaller animals come to the stream for their evening drink while Anya remained huddled in my arms, as if asleep.
As the world grew dark, though, she lifted up her head and looked into my eyes.
“We must go back, Orion,” she said, tearfully. “I must tell the
others that we cannot develop the star-killer. I must get them to see that we have lost the war.”
“And Aten has won?”
“Yes.”
I shook my head. “Not while I live.”
Chapter 25
“There is one way to save you,” I told Anya.
“I know what you’re thinking, Orion, but it can’t be done. You can’t kill Aten.”
“He’s killing you.”
She touched my cheek with her fingertips, there in the gathering darkness of twilight, then kissed me lightly on the lips. “It can’t be done. He’s too powerful.”
I replied, “He’s constantly moving through space-time to adapt his bioweapon microbe against your attempts to destroy it. He’s turning the entire continuum into a shambles in his mad lust for dominance. He’s got to be stopped.”
“But if we other Creators, with all our powers, can’t stop him, how could you?”
“I almost killed him once, back in the time of Troy. Remember?”
“He was raving mad then.”
“And your fellow Creators pulled me off him. I could have snapped his neck, but the others stopped me.”
Despite her fears and her weakness, Anya smiled at me. “We may have made a mistake.”
“May have? You tried to cure his madness and now he’s killing you.”
“Orion,” Anya said, “I know how brave you are, and how much you love me. But to attempt to kill Aten is worse madness than he himself displays. He will destroy you with the flick of a finger. Destroy you utterly, and never revive you again.”
I shrugged. “So what? I don’t want to live if it means serving him forever, lifetime after lifetime. I don’t want to live if you die, if he kills you.”
“It’s hopeless, Orion. Useless.”
I got to my feet, extended my arms to her and helped her up. “It’s not hopeless, my darling. I have hope. That may be all I’ve got, but I won’t give up hope until the life is crushed out of me.”
Anya’s gaze shifted away from me. She took in the splashing stream, the trees swaying in the evening breeze, the first stars beginning to appear in the darkening sky.
“We’d better go back,” she said, with a sigh.
“Yes,” I said. “We have work to do.”
I closed my eyes and felt the abyssal cold of the interstices in the space-time continuum. It may have been only my imagination but it seemed to me that it took a longer span than usual to translate us back to that chamber beneath the surface of the planet Prime. Time is meaningless in between space-times, but I sensed that the old pathways were coming apart, unraveling like a frayed ball of twine, the ripples of causality churning into a chaotic froth.
Once again Anya sat at the head of the long, polished conference table. I stood beside her, a spotlight of energy still glowing around me in the otherwise shadowed chamber. She was old, weary, gray and dying.
The light around me dissolved and I was free to go to her, take her in my arms. She felt frail and dust-dry, as if she would crumble at my touch.
But her eyes were still luminous, still alive and alert.
“You’ll have to be my strength, Orion,” she said. “I can’t last much longer.”
Spheres of energy appeared along the table, glowing fitfully, feebly. They resolved themselves into a half-dozen of the Creators, all of them aged, withered, dying.
“The Old Ones have sent a message through Orion,” Anya told them. “They will not permit either of us to use the star-killer. They say they will eliminate us all if either the Commonwealth or the Hegemony attempts to do so.”
Like the Creators surrounding Aten, these Creators also scoffed at the Old Ones’ threat.
“How could they eliminate us? They don’t even have spacecraft. No technology at all.”
“None that you can recognize,” I said, still standing beside Anya’s chair. “But they can control the forces of the universe in their own way.”
“It’s a bluff,” sputtered one of the gray-bearded men. “They’re afraid that we’ll attack their stars and they’re trying to frighten us.”
“I don’t believe so,” said Anya. “They are far older than we. I suspect their powers are far greater than we can imagine.”
“If that’s the case, then we might as well surrender to Aten right here and now.”
“If the Old Ones have taken away our last trump card, then we’ve lost the war.”
“We’ll have to throw ourselves on Aten’s mercy.”
“He’ll stop the ravages of this disease of his if we simply agree to follow his leadership.”
They were old. They were tired. They had considered themselves immortal once, and now the prospect of painful death had them frightened and cowed.
“I agree,” Anya said to them, her voice utterly weary, infinitely said. “There is no further point to continuing this war. Despite the fact that we hold the military advantage at present, we have lost.”
“Ask Aten for a truce.”
“Call him now.”
Anya said, “We don’t even have the strength to reach him. The disease has weakened us too much. We’ll have to send an emissary to him, physically.”
I was about to tell them that I could reach Aten, but something made me hold my tongue. I glanced down at Anya, sitting hunched over beside me. She did not look at me, but I got the distinct impression that she had warned me not to speak.
“I will go to him,” Anya was telling the others. “Orion will convey me in his ship. You can return to your hibernation fields until I return.”
They nodded among themselves, then one by one became encased in those glowing spheres of energy that they used to move through space-time. The spheres shone weakly, though, as if they barely had enough power to cover the individual Creators. I knew that each of them had once been able to live in the emptiness of deep space in those spheres, drawing energy directly from the stars themselves. Now they looked as if they could barely make it to their separate chambers, deep beneath the Hegemony’s capitol, buried alive in hibernation crypts where they hoped they would be safe from the Commonwealth’s weaponry. They slept while their creatures fought and died for them.
“Come, Orion,” said Anya, “it’s time to put an end to this fighting. Take me to your ship.”
So all the fighting, all the strategy and battles came down simply to this: Threaten the Creators who had caused this war, and they were willing to surrender. Or at least ask for a truce. They thought nothing of sending millions of cloned warriors into battle, causing billions of deaths among the humans and other species. But threaten them, themselves, and they were ready to give up.
I could barely conceal my contempt for them all, even Anya.
And she knew it. She made a wan smile for me and said softly, “For what it’s worth, I never wanted this war.”
I had no intention of surrendering to Aten, but I had to obey Anya’s wishes. Or at least, appear to obey.
So I watched as Hegemony technicians slipped her inert form into a cryosleep capsule, an elaborately engraved metal sarcophagus, which we loaded aboard the Apollo. The technicians and other humans in the spaceport seemed to understand that their leaders had decided to surrender to the Commonwealth. Rumors of defeat hung heavy in the air. They were sullen, fearful, angry. But they did as they were told.
Anya’s last waking thoughts warned me, Don’t let the Skorpis know that we are going to surrender. They would blow your ship out of the galaxy if they knew.
I wondered if the humans of Prime would try to stop us, but they were obedient and allowed us to break orbit and head out of the Zeta system.
But not for long.
We were accelerating as fast as we could, trying to achieve the safety of superlight velocity before anyone could deter us. We passed the rings of defenses that orbited Prime, then flew through the belt of battle stations that surrounded the Zeta system like a globe of bristling hedgehog spines.
Someone back on the capital planet must have pas
sed on the rumors of our intention to surrender to the Skorpis, for as we were clearing the outermost battle stations in the belt, we were hailed by a dour-faced Skorpis admiral.
I took her message in my command chair on the bridge, wearing my best ship’s uniform.
“There is ugly talk,” said the admiral, her teeth showing in a barely suppressed snarl, “that you return to the Commonwealth to discuss surrender of the Hegemony.”
“This ship carries one of your leaders in cryosleep,” I answered. “We are transporting her to Loris, the capital of the Commonwealth, at her command.”
“To surrender?”
A diplomat would have found evasive words. A politician would have lied. I was simply a warrior. “To discuss an armistice, a truce, an end to the war,” I said.
“On Commonwealth terms,” the Skorpis admiral rumbled, like a lioness growling.
“On the best terms that can be obtained.”
“Surrender.”
“Not surrender,” I insisted. “An armistice. Peace.”
“Surrender,” she repeated. And I realized that she meant I should surrender my ship to her.
“This vessel is on a diplomatic mission. We are carrying one of the Hegemony’s highest leaders. You cannot order us—”
“Stop accelerating and prepare to be boarded by my warriors,” the Skorpis admiral insisted. “Otherwise we will destroy you, your ship, and the traitoress who wants to surrender.”
I knew that every moment I could keep her talking was a moment closer to the relative safety of superlight.
“On what authority do you make such an unreasonable demand?” I asked, as indignantly as I could.
Her image in my display screen disappeared, instantly replaced by a view of a dozen Skorpis battle cruisers powering toward us.
The Apollo rocked wildly.
“They’ve opened fire on us!” Emon yelled. He was practically at my elbow; his shout was more from sudden excitement than fear. At least, I hoped so.
“Evasive maneuvers,” I said.
You can’t evade laser beams, even at relativistic speed. With a dozen battle cruisers within range of us, they blazed away, catching us in a cone of fire that sizzled our defensive screen and sent all the meters on the bridge deep into the red.