by Ben Bova
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 13
The steep spiraling tunnel ended finally at another I 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.
Set clicked the talons of his right hand and that featureless wall slid up, revealing a much larger room, also packed with arcane equipment.
And Anya.
She was imprisoned in a glass cylinder standing atop a raised platform. Totally naked, she stood motionless, eyes closed, hands fiat at her sides. Blue flickers of electricity played up and down every inch of her body.
“She appears quite serene,” said Set’s hissing voice in my mind.
She seemed to be in frozen stasis. Or dead. On the four corners of the raised platform, outside the glass cylinder holding Anya, stood four rudely carved statues of Set. The largest was as high as my chest and made of wood.
“Look here,” he commanded.
I turned and followed his outstretched claw to see a row of display screens against the wall.
“They show her brain-wave patterns.”
Jagged spikes, red with agony, jittering up and down in rhythm to the sparks of electricity crawling over her body.
With a wave of Set’s hand the blue flickers intensified, became brighter, raced across Anya’s skin. Her naked body seemed to cringe, shudder. Her eyelids squeezed shut tighter. Tears crawled out from behind them. From the corner of my eye I saw the spikes of the display screens turn sharper, steeper, racing across the screens like tongues of flame burning themselves into my brain.
This monster was torturing Anya. Torturing her as heartlessly and efficiently as a swarm of army ants stripping the flesh from any living thing that stood in its path.
“Stop it!” I screamed. “Stop it!”
“Open your mind to me, Orion. Let me see what I want to see.”
“And then?”
“And then I will allow you both to die.”
I stared into his glittering reptilian eyes. There was no triumph there, no joy, not even sadistic pleasure. Nothing but pure hate. Hatred for the human race, hatred for the Creators, for Anya, for me. Set was remorselessly doing what he had to do to reach his goal.
I, too, burned with hatred. But, powerless, I let my shoulders slump and my head droop.
“Stop her pain and you can do what you want with me,” I said.
“I will ease her pain,” Set replied. “It will not stop until I have learned what I must know from you. Then you can both die.”
The blue flickers crawling across Anya’s skin turned paler, moved more slowly. The display screens showed her pain lessened.
And Set’s powerful, merciless mind drove into mine like a spike of red-hot iron, ruthlessly seeking the knowledge he wanted. I felt frozen, totally immobile, unable to twitch a finger as he ransacked my brain for its memory storage.
I saw, I heard, I felt things from my pasts. The insane Golden One sneering at me, telling me that he will destroy all the other Creators and be worshiped by the human race as its one true god. The barbaric splendor of Karakorum and Ogotai, the Mongols’ high khan, my friend, the man I assassinated. The piercing wet cold of Cornwall on that darkest day of the Dark Age, when Arthur’s knights slaughtered each other by the score.
Set was rampaging through my mind, touching on memories, thoughts, lifetimes that had been erased from my consciousness, seeking, seeking, greedily ripping across the eons I have lived to find what he sought.
Yet while he tore through my defenseless mind he exposed his own to me. The link between us, agonizing as it was, went in both directions. I could not see much of his thoughts, nor could I create an active probe to seek out his memory bank as he was doing to me. But Set could not ravage my mind without exposing at least some of his thoughts to me.
I was in the laboratory where the Golden One created me. I was on a becalmed sea beneath a brazen sky of hammered copper, dying of thirst. I was on a world that circled the star Sirius. I died with Anya in my arms as a great starship exploded.
At last I was standing in this alien fiendish torture chamber with Anya suffering within her glass prison and Set’s hateful red eyes glowering at me.
“Pah! This is pointless. You know less about it than I do.” For the first time his words, burning in my mind, seemed edged with frustration and anger.
My body came alive again. I felt it tingle as Set’s control over me relaxed.
He turned his reptilian gaze toward Anya once more. “She knows. I will have to tear it out of her.”
“No!” I bellowed as he raised his hand toward the instruments on the wall.
He turned to the wall of instruments once again, ignoring me for just a fraction of a second. Enough.
I grabbed the nearest of the four carved wooden statues and smashed him across his ridged back with it. Down he went, smashing into the dials and display screens lining the wall. Raising the carving over my head, I swung it with all my might at the tube of glass enclosing Anya. It shattered into a spray of fragments and the electrical flames that slithered over her naked flesh winked out.
I reached for her wrist and pulled her down off that pedestal of pain.
“Wh—what…?” Her eyes opened, bloodshot from pain.
“This way!” I snapped, pulling her along with me.
Set was on one knee, pulling himself to his feet. “Stop!” his voice roared in my head. And something within me wanted to obey him.
But something even stronger drove me on, overriding his mental command. I yanked Anya through the doorway and into the small outer chamber, then out into the corridor as Set barked out commands telepathically.
The corridor did not truly end where we had stopped.
That much I had seen in Set’s mind. A section of its wall slid away smoothly and Anya and I plunged into this new branch of the long spiraling tunnel.
Heading down.
“Orion—he captured you, too?”
“Reeva and Kraal made a deal with him: his price was both of us.”
We were pounding along the dim tunnel as it sloped sharply downward, our bare feet slapping against the smooth flooring. It felt hot. The feeble light emanating from the narrow walls cast no shadows.
“Are you all right?” I asked, her wrist still firmly in my grasp.
She gasped as we ran, “The pain… it was in my mind.”
“You’re all right?”
“Physically… but… I remember
… Orion, he’s a heartless fiend.”
“I’ll kill him.”
“Where are we heading? Why are we descending?”
“Energy,” I said. “His energy source is below, down deep in the earth.”
What I had seen in Set’s mind had been a confused tangle of impressions. He could manipulate spacetime as the Creators did, and the source of the titanic energies he needed for that was deeply buried beneath us.
“We can’t get away,” Anya said as we raced breathlessly down the tunnel, “by going down.”
“We can’t get away by heading up. Set’s cohorts are there. Dozens of dragons up at the surface, and I don’t know how many so-called masters he has with him.”
“They’ll be coming after us.”
I nodded grimly.
Set had been seeking in my mind a knowledge that the Creators apparently had and he did not. Something about a nexus in the spacetime continuum, a crisis that had occurred millions of years earlier that he was trying to change, undo, reverse.
Suddenly I saw his face in my mind, seething fury. “You cannot escape my wrath, pathetic ape. Excruciating pain and utter despair are all that you can look forward to.”
Anya saw him, too. Her eyes widened momentarily. Then she snapped, “He’s afraid, Orion. You’ve made him fear us.”
“FEAR ME!” Set’s voice boomed in our minds.
I said nothing and we plunged onward, down the spiraling dim tunnel, heading away from the sun and freedom. I knew that dozens of Set’s humanoid underlings were racing down the tunnel after us, cutting off any hope of returning to the surface and the world of warmth and light.
Not that it was cold in the tunnel as we sped down its steeply sloped spiral. The floor was now blistering hot, the walls glowed red. It was if we were heading for the entrance to hell.
I realized that I still grasped the statue of Set in my left hand, my fingers wrapped tightly around its neck. It was the only thing even close to a weapon that we possessed and I hung on to it, despite its hefty weight. It had served me well once and I was certain I would be wielding it again before long.
The tunnel finally widened into a broad circular chamber filled with more instruments and equipment of Set’s alien technology. This womb of rock was lit more brightly than the tunnel, though its ceiling was low, claustrophobic. In its center was a circular railing. We went to it and peered down a long featureless tube so deep that its end was lost from sight. Pulses of heat surged up through it, and I thought I could hear a rumbling low throbbing sound, like the slow pulsing of a gigantic heart at the core of an incalculably immense beast.
“A core tap,” Anya said, peering down that endless shaft.
“Core tap?”
“The energy source for Set’s attempt to warp the continuum. It must extend down to the molten core of the earth itself.”
I knew she was correct but the realization still made me blink with astonishment. Set was tapping the seething energies of the earth’s molten core. For the purpose of altering spacetime. But why? To what end? That I did not know.
This chamber was the end of the corridor. There was no exit except the way we had just come, and I sensed that dozens, scores of Set’s humanoid reptilians were racing down the corridor toward us.
Anya was totally absorbed in scanning the banks of instruments and display panels lining the chamber’s circular wall. We had only a few minutes before every reptilian master in Set’s domain came clawing at us, but she concentrated entirely on the hardware surrounding us. She was focused so completely on the machinery that the pain of Set’s torture was forgotten, her nudity ignored.
Not by me. She was the most beautiful woman in the world, slim and tall and lithe as a warrior goddess should be, lustrous black hair tumbling past her bare shoulders, luminous gray eyes intently studying the alien technology before her.
“The spacetime warp is building up at the bottom of the shaft, on the edge of the core. The energies down there are enough to distort the continuum completely, if focused properly.”
From the way she muttered the words it seemed that she was speaking more to herself than to me.
Then she turned. “Orion, we’ve got to destroy these instruments. Smash them! Quickly.”
“With pleasure,” I said, raising the wooden statue.
You are only increasing the agonies that I will inflict upon you, Set warned inside my head.
“Ignore him,” said Anya.
I swung the statue at the nearest bank of instruments. It crashed through the light plastic casing easily. Sparks showered, cold blue and white. A thin hiss of smoke seeped out of its battered face.
Methodically I went from one console to the next, smashing, breaking, destroying. I pictured Set’s face in place of the lifeless instruments. I enjoyed crushing it in.
I was only a quarter of the way around the wide circle when Anya warned, “They’re coming!”
I dashed to the circular chamber’s only entrance and heard the clatter of dozens of clawed feet scraping down the sloping ramp toward us.
“Hold them off for as long as you can,” Anya commanded.
I had only a brief instant to glance at her. She attacked the next set of consoles with her bare hands, ripping off the lightweight paneling and tearing at their innards, her fingers bloodied, the flash of electrical sparks throwing blue-white glare across the utterly determined features of her beautiful face.
Then the reptilians were on me. The doorway was not as narrow as I would have liked. More than one of the humanoid masters could confront me, sometimes as many as three at once. I used the statue of their lord and ruler as a weapon, striking at them with all the accumulated fury and hatred that had been building in me for these many months.
I killed them. By the pairs, by the threesomes, by the dozens and scores. I stood in that doorway and smashed and swung and clubbed with a might and bloodlust that I had never known before. The wooden statue became an instrument of death, crushing bones, smashing skulls, spurting the blood of these inhuman enemies until the doorway was clogged with their scaly bodies, the floor slick with gore.
They had no weapons except those that nature had given them. They slashed with their wicked claws, ripping my flesh again and again. My own blood flowed with theirs, but it did not matter to me. I was a killing machine, as mindless as a flame or an avalanche.
Then Anya was beside me, a long sharp strip of metal torn from the consoles in her hand, wielding it like a sword of vengeance. She shrieked a primal battle cry, I roared with rage born of desperation, the reptiles hissed and clawed at us both.
Slowly, inexorably, we were driven back from the doorway, back into the big circular chamber. They tried to get around us, surround us, swarm us under. We stood back-to-back, swinging, cutting, smashing at them with all the fury that human blood and sinew could generate.
Not enough. For every reptilian that fell another took its place. Two more. Ten more.
Without a word passing between us, Anya and I cut a swath through the monsters and made it to the railing around the core shaft. We used it to protect our backs as we fought on, all hope gone, just fought for the sake of killing as many of them as we could before they inevitably wore us down.
One of the humanoids clambered over the railing behind us, across the wide gap of the core shaft, and tried to leap across it to land on our backs. He could not span the width of the shaft and fell screeching wildly into its yawning abyss.
I had long since clamped down on the nerve impulses signaling pain and fatigue to my brain, but my arm felt heavier with each stroke, slower. A reptilian’s claws raked my chest, another tore at my face. It was the end.
Almost.
In the midst of the blood and battle I finally realized that they were not trying to kill us. They were dying by the dozens to obey Set’s implacable command. He wanted us alive. Quick death was not his plan for us.
I would not let him get his vicious hands on Anya again. With the last painful gasp of my
ebbing strength I grasped Anya around the waist and pushed the two of us over the top of the railing and into the yawning, gaping mouth of the red-hot pit that ended in the surging molten fury of the earth’s seething core.
Down and down we plummeted. Down toward the molten, surging heart of the earth.
And death.
BOOK II: PURGATORY
Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
Chapter 14
Down and down and down we plunged.
Lit by the sullen red glower from deep below us, Anya and I were weightless, in free-fall, like parachutists or astronauts in zero gravity. We seemed to be hanging in mid-air, floating eerily on nothingness, slowly roasting in the blistering heat welling up from below. A fiery wind like the blast from a bellowing rocket engine howled past us. We could not breathe, could not speak.
I willed my body to draw oxygen from the vacuoles within its cells: a temporary expedient, but it was better than drawing in a breath of burning air that would sear my lungs. I hoped Anya could do the same.
The brief glimpse into Set’s mind that I had obtained told me that this seemingly endless tube we were falling through reached down toward the earth’s core, where the raging heat powered a warping device that might fling us into another space time.
That was our only chance to escape Set and the slow death he had planned for us. That, or death itself in the searing embrace of molten iron that was rushing up toward us.
I gripped Anya tightly to me and she wrapped her arms around my neck. There were no words. Our embrace said everything we needed to say. I thought that Set and his reptilian minions could never know this kind of closeness, this sharing of body contact, flesh to flesh, that is uniquely mammalian.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I tried to recall the sensations of previous passages through spacetime warps. With all my strength I tried to make contact with the Creators, to will the two of us into the safety of their domain in the far future. But it was useless. We continued to plummet toward the earth’s core, clinging to each other in our free-fall weightlessness as the heat boiling up from below began to cook our flesh.