Orion in the Dying Time o-3

by Ben Bova

  He swatted me with a backhand slap as easily as I might swat a fly. I was knocked sideways, tumbled down the dais, landing flat on my back, stunned and almost unconscious.

  Chapter 22

  Through a blood red haze I saw Set still on his throne. He had barely moved to deal with me.

  “You think that I keep you paralyzed out of fear that you might attack me?” His voice in my buzzing brain was mocking. “Puny ape, I could crush your bones with ease. Fear me! For I am far mightier than you.”

  Forcing the pain away, pumping extra blood to my head to drive away the wooziness, I pulled myself up to a sitting position, then got slowly, warily to my feet.

  “You are not convinced?”

  Anya was still locked into immobility, but the look on her face was awful: a mixture of loathing and helpless terror. Juno’s dead body lay sprawled clumsily at the foot of the dais in a welling pool of blood.

  I could move. I took a step toward that throne and the monster sitting upon it.

  Set rose to his full height and stepped down to the floor. He towered over me, several heads taller, a shoulder-span wider, his red scales glittering in the torchlight, his eyes burning with an amused contempt that overlay eternal hatred.

  My senses went into hyperdrive and everything around me slowed. I saw the veins in Set’s skull pulsing, saw transparent eyelids flicking back and forth across the red slits of his pupils. I could see the muscles in Anya’s arms and legs tensing, straining to break free of Set’s mental control. In vain.

  I went into a defensive crouch, hands up in front of my face, backing away from Set. He advanced toward me in total confidence, arms by his sides, the talons of his feet clicking on the smooth bare floor like a metronome counting off time.

  I dove at his knees in a rolling block. Knock him down and his size advantage is lessened, I thought. But fast as I was, his reflexes were even faster. He caught me in the ribs with a kick that sent me sailing. I hit the floor painfully hard. With an effort I climbed to my feet. He was still advancing on me, hissing softly in his reptilian equivalent to laughter.

  I feinted left, then drove my right fist toward his groin with all the strength in me. He blocked the blow with one huge hand and grabbed me by the throat with the other. Lifting me off my feet, he raised my head to his own level. We were face-to-face, me with my feet dangling a yard or more off the floor, the breath slowly being squeezed out of me.

  Set’s face was in front of me, so close that I could smell the rancid hot breath hissing from his sharp-toothed mouth, see the glistening blood of Juno drying on his pointed chin. He was choking me to death and enjoying it.

  With the last of my strength I jabbed both my thumbs at his eyes. He blocked my right with his free hand but my left found its mark. Set screeched in unexpected pain and threw me against the wall like an angry child tossing away a toy that displeased him.

  I blacked out. My last conscious thought was a satisfied thrill that I had hurt the monster. Small consolation, but better than none at all.

  How long I was unconscious I have no way of reckoning. I lay in darkness, huddled on the floor of Set’s throne chamber. Dimly I felt the sensation of being lifted up and carried somewhere. But I could see nothing, hear nothing. Then I was dumped onto a hard floor again and left alone.

  From far, far away I heard a sound. A faint voice, calling. It was so distant, so indistinct, that I knew it had nothing to do with me.

  Yet it kept calling, time and again, as constant as waves rolling up onto a beach, as insistent as an automated beacon that will repeat itself endlessly until someone turns it off.

  Somehow its call began to sound familiar. From repetition, a part of my mind suggested dreamily. Hear the same noise long enough and it will become familiar to it. Pay no attention. Rest. Ignore the sound and it will fade away.

  Yet it did not fade. It got louder, clearer.

  “Orion,” it called.

  “Orion.”

  I don’t know how many times I heard it before I realized that it was calling my name, calling for me.

  “Orion.”

  I was still unconscious, I knew that. Yet my mind was alert and functioning even though my body was inert, insensate, comatose.

  “Who is calling me?” my mind asked.

  “We have met before,” answered the voice. “You called me Zeus.”

  I remembered. In another time, a different life. He was one of the Creators, like Anya, like the power-mad Golden One who let the ancient Greeks call him Apollo.

  Zeus. I remembered him among the Creators. Like all of them his physical appearance was flawless, godlike. Perfect physique, perfect skin, grave dark eyes, and darker hair. His beard was neatly trimmed, slightly flecked with touches of gray. I realized that all that was an illusion, an appearance put on for my sake. I knew that if I saw Zeus in his true form, he would be a radiant sphere of energy, like Anya, like all the other Creators.

  I thought of him as Zeus not because he was the leader of the Creators. They had no true leader, nor any of the common relationships that mortal humans experience. Yet to me he seemed wiser, more solemn, more circumspect in his views and his actions than the other Creators. Where they seemed swept by their private jealousies or passions for power, he seemed to be gravely striving to keep events under control, to protect the flow of the continuum, to prevent disasters that could erase all of humankind—and the Creators themselves. Of all the Creators, only he and Anya seemed to me to be worthy of my loyalty.

  “Orion, can you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Set has shielded himself against us quite effectively. We can’t get through to you and Anya.”

  “He is holding us prisoner…”

  “I know. Everything you have experienced, I know.”

  “We need help.”

  Silence.

  “We need help!” I repeated.

  “There is no way we can get help to you, Orion. Even this feeble communications link is draining more energy than we can afford.”

  “Set will kill her.”

  “There is nothing we can do. We’ll be fortunate to escape with our own lives.”

  I knew what he meant. I was expendable; there was no sense risking themselves for their creature. Anya was a regrettable loss. But she had brought it on herself, daring to assume human form to consort with a creature. She had always been an atavism, risking her own being instead of letting creatures such as Orion take the risks that they had been created to face.

  The other Creators—including this so-called Zeus—were ready to flee. In their true forms, they could scatter through the universe and live on the radiated energy of the stars for uncountable eons.

  “Yes,” Zeus admitted to me reluctantly, “that is our final option.”

  “You’ll let her die?” I knew that my life counted little to them. But Anya was one of them. Had they no loyalty? No courage?

  “You think in human terms, Orion. Survival is our goal, sacrifice is your lot. Anya is clever, perhaps she will surprise you and Set both.”

  I sensed the blind link between us fading. His voice grew fainter.

  “If there were something I could do to help you, Orion, truly I would do it.”

  “But not at the risk of your own survival,” I snapped.

  The thought surprised him, I could sense it. Risk the survival of a Creator over one of their creatures? Risk the survival of all the remaining Creators over the plight of one of their number? Never.

  They were not cowards. Godlike beings that they were, they were beyond cowardice. They were supreme realists. If they could not defeat Set, they would run from his wrath. What did it matter to them that the entire human race would be expunged from the continuum forever?

  “Orion,” called Zeus’s voice, even fainter. “We deal with forces beyond your understanding. Universes upon universes. We must face the ultimate crisis out there among the stars and whirling plasma clouds that pinwheel through the galaxy. Perhaps the human
race has played its part in evolving us, and now has no further role to play.”

  I snarled mentally, “Perhaps Set will seize such firm control of the continuum that he will track you down, each and every last one of you, no matter where you flee, no matter where you hide. Abandon the human race and you give Set the power to seek you through all of spacetime and destroy you utterly.”

  “No,” came Zeus’s reply, so weak it was nothing more than a ghostly whisper. “That cannot be. It cannot…”

  But there was doubt in his voice as it trailed off into nothingness. Doubt and fear.

  My eyes opened. I was in a bare little cell, hardly bigger than a coffin stood on end, huddled into it like a folded, crumpled sack of grain. My head was resting on my knees, my arms hung limply at my sides, pressing against the cool smooth back wall of the cell on one side and the cool smooth door on the other.

  The only light was from a dim dull red fluorescence emanating from the cell walls. The only sound was my own breathing.

  Abandoned. The Creators were going to abandon Anya and me to final destruction. They were going to abandon the entire human race and flee to the depths of interstellar space.

  And there was nothing I could do about it.

  I almost wept, hunched over in that cramped claustrophobic cubicle. Orion the mighty hunter, created by the gods to track down their enemies and destroy them, defender of the continuum. How laughable! Instead of crying, I howled with maniacal glee. Orion, tool of the Creators, locked helpless and alone in a dungeon deep within the ultimate enemy’s castle while the goddess I love is probably being tortured to death for the amusement of that fiend.

  I could hardly move, the cell was so narrow. Somehow I slithered to my feet. Almost. The cubicle was too low for me to stand erect. My head bowed, my shoulders, arms, back, and legs pressed against the cool smooth flat surfaces of the cell. It made my blood run cold. The walls and door felt, not slimy, but slick, like rubbery plastic. It made me shudder.

  I pushed as hard as I could against the door. It did not even creak. I strained every gram of strength in me, yet the door did not budge at all.

  Defeated, exhausted, I let myself slide back down to the floor, knees in my face, muscles aching from frustrated exertion.

  A mocking voice surged up from my memory. “You were created to act, Orion, not think. I will do the thinking. You carry out my orders.”

  The voice of the Golden One, the self-styled god who claimed to have created me.

  “The intelligence I built into you is adequate for hunting and killing,” I heard him saying to me, in his mocking deprecating way. “Never delude yourself into thinking that you have the brains to do more than that.”

  I had been furious with his sneering taunts. I had worked against him, challenged him, and finally driven him into a paroxysm of egomaniacal madness. The other Creators had to protect him against my anger and his own hysterical ravings.

  I can think, I told myself. If I can’t use my physical strength, then all that’s left to me is my mental power.

  “Set uses despair like a weapon.” I recalled Anya’s words.

  He had tried to manipulate me, control me, through my emotions. Tried and failed. What was he trying to do to me now, penning me in this soul-punishing cell?

  He comes from another world, the planet that circles the sun’s companion star, Sheol. Why has he come here? From what era did he originate? What is his grievance against the human race?

  He claims that he created the dinosaurs some two hundred millions years earlier than this era. He claims that he will extinguish the dinosaurs to make room on Earth for his own kind.

  A thrill of understanding raced through my blood as I recalled Set’s own words, heard again in my mind his sneering, hate-filled voice: You breed so furiously that you infest the world with your kind, ruining not merely the land but the seas and the very air you breathe as well. You are vermin, and the world is well rid of you.

  And again: We do not overbreed.

  Then why is he here on Earth? Why is he not content with his own world, Shaydan, where his kind live in harmony with their environment? I had seen the idyllic pictures of that world in the wall mosaics of this castle. Why leave that happy existence to seed the earth with reptilian life?

  I could think of three possibilities:

  First, Set had lied to me. The mosaics were idealizations. Shaydan was overcrowded and Set’s people needed more living room.

  Alternatively, Set had been driven off Shaydan, exiled from his native world, for reasons that I had no way of knowing.

  Or, even more harrowing, the planet Shaydan was threatened by some disaster so vast that it was imperative to transfer the population to a safer world.

  Which could it be? Possibly a combination of such reasons, or others that I had not an inkling of.

  How to find out? Probing Set’s mind was impossible, I knew. Even in the same room with him I could no more penetrate his formidable mental defenses than I could muscle my way out of this miserable dungeon.

  Could Anya probe his mind?

  I closed my eyes there in the dimness of my cell and reached mentally for Anya’s mind. I had no way of knowing where in the castle she was, or even if she was still in the castle at all. Or even if she still lived, I realized with a cold shudder.

  But I called to her, mentally.

  “Anya, my love. Can you hear me?”

  No response.

  I concentrated harder. I brought up a mental picture of Anya, her beautiful face, her expressive lips, her strong cheekbones and narrow straight nose, her midnight black hair, her large gray eyes shining and luminous, regarding me gravely with depths of love in them that no mortal had a right to hope for.

  “Anya, my beloved,” I projected mentally. “Hear me. Answer my plea.”

  I heard nothing, no reply whatever.

  Maybe she’s already dead, I thought bleakly. Maybe Set has raked her flesh with his vicious talons, torn her apart with his hideous teeth.

  Then I sensed the tiniest of flickers, a distant spark, a silver glint against the all-encompassing darkness of my soul. I focused every neuron of my mind on it, every synapse of my being.

  It was Anya, I knew. That infinitesimal spark of silver led me like a guiding star.

  I felt almost the way I had when I had entered Juno’s simple mind. But now I was projecting my consciousness into a mind infinitely more complex. It was like falling down an endlessly spiraling chute, like stepping from subterranean darkness into blinding sunlight, like entering an overpoweringly vast universe. I knew how Theseus felt in the palace of Knossus, trying to thread his way through a bewildering maze.

  Anya said nothing to me, gave no indication even that she knew I had entered her mind. I thought I understood why. If she gave any hint at all that she recognized my presence, Set would immediately know that I was awake and active—at least mentally. The only way to keep me hidden was not to make any response to me at all.

  Swiftly, wordlessly, I gave her the details of my contact with Zeus. No reaction from her, none at all. She was guarding her mind from Set with every defensive barrier she could maintain. I wondered if she really knew I was there, so completely did she ignore me.

  Set was still lounging on his throne, horned face staring at Anya, tail twitching unconsciously behind him. Poor Juno’s body had been removed and the bloodstains cleaned away. I wondered how long it had been since he had smashed me into senselessness. Perhaps only minutes had passed. Perhaps days.

  Anya was not in pain. Set was not torturing her or even threatening her. They were speaking together, almost as equals. Even the deadliest of foes have reasons to communicate peacefully, at times.

  “You are prepared, then, to leave this planet forever?” I heard Set’s voice in Anya’s mind.

  “If there is no alternative,” she replied, also without speaking.

  “What guarantee do I have that you will keep the agreement?”

  “Agreement?” I asked
Anya, but still there was no response from her. It was as if I did not exist, as far as she was concerned.

  “You have won. Your power is too great, too firmly entrenched here, for us to dislodge you. If you permit us to escape with our lives and agree not to pursue us further, the planet Earth is yours forever.”

  “Yes, but how do I know I can trust you? In a thousand years or a thousand million, how can I be certain that you will not return to battle against my descendants?”

  Anya shrugged mentally. “You will have destroyed the human race. We will have no means of fighting you then.”

  “You could create more humans, just as you created the one called Orion.”

  “No. That was an experiment that failed. Orion has been of no use to us against you.”

  I burned with shame at Anya’s words. They were true, and it hurt me to admit it.

  “Then you have no intention of trying to bring him with you when you leave the earth?”

  “How could he accompany us?” Anya replied. “He is nothing more than a human. He cannot change his form. He cannot exist in the depths of interstellar space, where we will make our new homes.”

  A shuddering horror filled me. Anya and all the Creators were indeed fleeing from Earth and abandoning the human race to extinction at Set’s hands. Abandoning the entire human race. Abandoning me.

  “Then you leave this creature Orion to me?” Set’s words were half request, half demand.

  “Of course,” Anya replied carelessly. “He is of no further value to us.”

  Deep in my underground cell I screamed a shriek of agony like a wild animal howling with pain and fright and the utter furious agony of betrayal.

  BOOK III: HELL

  I fled, and cri’d out Death;

  Hell trembl’d at the hideous Name, and sigh’d

  From all her Caves, and back resounded Death.

  Chapter 23

  I did not withdraw from Anya’s mind. I was driven out of it, repelled like an invading bacterium, thrown out like an unwanted guest.