Orion in the Dying Time o-3

by Ben Bova

  For hours I howled like a chained beast in my dark coffin of a cell, unable to move, to stand, unable even to pound the walls until my fists became bloody pulps. I huddled there in a fetal position, wailing and bellowing to a blindly uncaring universe. Betrayed. Abandoned by the only person in the continuum whom I could love, left to my fate as callously as if I were nothing more to her than the husk of a melon she had tasted and then thrown away.

  Anya and the other Creators were fleeing for their lives, reverting to their true physical forms, globes of pure energy that can live among the stars for all eternity. They were abandoning the human race, their own creations, to be methodically wiped out by Set and his reptilian brethren.

  What did it matter? I wept bitterly, thinking of how foolish I had been ever to believe that a goddess, one of the Creators, could love a man enough to risk her life for his sake. Anya had been all fire and courage and adventure when she had known that she could escape whatever danger we faced. Once she realized that Set had the power to truly end her existence, her game of playing human ended swiftly.

  She had chosen life for herself and her kind, and left me to die.

  I lost track of time, languishing and lamenting in my cell. I must have slept. I must have eaten. But my conscious mind had room for nothing but the enormity of Anya’s betrayal and the certainty of approaching death.

  Let it come, I told myself. The final release. The ultimate end of it all. I was ready to die. I had nothing to live for.

  I don’t consciously recall how or when it happened, but I found myself on my feet once more, standing in Set’s audience chamber again, facing him on his elevated throne.

  Blinking stupidly in the dull flickering ruddy light of the torches flanking his throne, I realized that I could move my arms and legs. I was not fettered by Set’s mental control.

  His enormous bulk loomed before me. “No, there are no chains of any kind holding you,” his words formed in my mind. “We have no need of them now. You understand that I can crush you whenever I choose to.”

  “I understand,” I replied woodenly.

  “For an ape you show promising intelligence,” his mocking voice echoed within me. “I see that you have pieced together the fact that I intend to bring my people to this world and make Earth our new home.”

  “Yes,” I said, while my mind wondered why.

  “Most of my kind are content to accept their fate upon Shaydan. They realize that Sheol is an unstable star and will soon explode. Soon, that is, in terms of the universe’s time scale. A few million years from now. Soon enough.”

  “You are not content to accept your fate upon a doomed planet,” I said to him.

  “Not at all,” Set replied. “I have spent most of my life shaping this planet Earth to my purposes, fashioning its life-forms into a fitting environment for my people.”

  “You travel through time, just like the Creators.”

  “Better than your puny Creators, little ape,” he answered. “Their pitiful powers were based on the tiny slice of energy that they could obtain from your yellow sun. They allowed most of the sun’s energy to waft off into space! Unused. Wasted. A foolish mistake. A fatal mistake.”

  He hissed with pleasure as he continued, “My own people have depended on the wavering energy from dying Sheol. I alone understood how much energy can be tapped from the molten core of a planet as large as Earth. Taken in its totality, a star’s energy output is millions of times stronger. But no one uses the total output of a star, only the miserable fraction that their planet intercepts.”

  “But a core tap…” I muttered.

  “Tapping the planet’s molten core gives me more energy, enormously concentrated energy, constant and powerful enough to leap across the eons of spaced me as easily as you can hop across a puddle. That is why I have won this planet for myself and your Creators are running for their lives, scattering out among the distant stars.”

  I said nothing. There was nothing for me to say. My only question was when Set would put me to death, and how long it would take.

  “I have no intention of killing you soon,” he said in my mind, knowing my thoughts without my speaking them. “You are my prize of victory over your Creators, my trophy. I will exhibit you all across Shaydan.”

  I looked up into his red snake’s eyes and realized what he had in mind. Most of his kind did not believe that they could be saved by migrating to Earth. Set intended to show me to them, to prove that he was master of the planet, that there would be no resistance to their relocation.

  “Good again, thinking ape! You perceive my motives and my intentions. I will be the savior of my kind! The conqueror of an entire world and the savior of my people! That is my accomplishment and my glory.”

  “A glorious accomplishment indeed,” I heard myself answer. “Exceeded only by your vanity.”

  “You grow bolder, knowing that I do not intend to kill you immediately.” I could sense anger in his words. “Be assured that you will die, in a manner and at a time that will not merely please me, but will convince all of Shaydan that I am to be obeyed by one and all. Obeyed and adored.”

  “Adored?” I felt shock at his words. “Like a god?”

  “Why not? Your bumbling Creators allowed themselves to be worshiped by their human spawn, did they not? Why should not my own people adore me for saving our race? I alone have conquered the Earth. I alone have opened the gates to Shaydan’s salvation.”

  “By killing off billions of Earth’s creatures.”

  Set shrugged his massive shoulders. “I created most of them, they are mine to do with as I please.”

  “You didn’t create humankind!”

  He hissed laughter. “No, I did not. Those who did are fleeing to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. The human race has lost its reason for existence, Orion. Why should they be allowed to last beyond their usefulness, any more than the dinosaurs or the trilobites or the ammonites?”

  I will not be allowed to outlive my usefulness, either, I thought. Once I ceased being useful to the Creators they abandoned me. Once I cease being useful to Set he will kill me.

  “Before you die, overgrown monkey,” Set went on tauntingly, “I will allow you to satisfy your apish curiosity and see the world of Shaydan. It will be the final satisfaction of your existence.”

  Chapter 24

  Set lumbered off his throne and led me down long dim corridors that sloped downward, always downward. The light was so deeply red, so dim to my eyes, that I might as well have been blind. The walls seemed blank, although I felt certain they were decorated with mosaics the way the upper corridors had been. I simply could not perceive them.

  Set’s massive form marched in front of me, the scales of his broad heavily muscled back glinting in the gloomy light, his tail swinging left and right in time to the strides of his clawed feet. Those talons clicked on the hard floor. Absurdly, his swinging tail and clicking claws made me think of a metronome. A metronome counting off the final moments of my life.

  We passed through laboratories and workrooms filled with strange equipment. And still we went on, downward, deeper. I tried to see these interminable corridors through Set’s eyes, but his mind was completely shielded from me. I could not penetrate it at all.

  He felt my attempt, though.

  “You find the light too dim?” he asked in my mind.

  “I am nearly blind,” I said aloud.

  “No matter. Follow me.”

  “Why must we walk?” I asked. “You have the ability to leap across spacetime, yet you walk from one end of your castle to another? No elevators, no moving belt-ways?”

  “Jabbering monkey, we of Shaydan use technology to help us do those things we could not do unaided. Unlike your kind, however, we do not have a simian fascination with toys. What we can accomplish with our unaided bodies we do for ourselves. In that way we help to maintain a balance with our environment.”

  “And waste hours of time and energy,” I grumbled.

  I se
nsed a genuine amusement from him. “What matter a few hours to one who can travel through spacetime at will? What matter a bit of exertion to one who is assured of feeding?”

  I realized that it had been too long since my last meal. My stomach felt empty.

  “One of your mammalian shortcomings,” Set told me, sensing my thought. “You have this absurd need to feed every few hours merely to maintain your body temperature. We are much more in harmony with our environment, two-footed monkey. Our need for food is modest compared to yours.”

  “Regardless of the environmental fitness of my kind,” I said, “I am hungry.”

  “You will eat on Shaydan,” Set answered in my mind. “We will both feast on Shaydan.”

  At last we entered a large circular chamber exactly like the one at the heart of his fortress in the Neolithic. Perhaps the same one, for all I could tell, although now it showed no signs of the battle Anya and I had put up there.

  At the thought of Anya, even the mere mention of her name, my entire body tensed and a flame of anger flared through me. More than anger. Pain. The bitter, racking anguish of love that had been scorned, of trust that had been shattered by deceit.

  I tried to put her out of my mind. I studied the chamber around me. Its circular walls were lined with row after row of dials and gauges and consoles, machines that controlled and monitored the titanic upwelling energy rising from the core tap. In the center of the chamber was a large circular hole, domed over with transparent shatterproof plastic, I saw, not merely the metal railing that had been there in the Neolithic fortress.

  The chamber pulsated with energy. Set’s entire castle was hot, far hotter than any human being would feel comfortable in. But this chamber was hotter still; some of the heat from the earth’s molten core leaked through all the machines and safety devices and shields to make this chamber the anteroom of hell.

  Set reveled in it. He strode to the plastic dome and peered down into the depths of the core tap, its molten energy throwing fiery red highlights across the horns and flaring cheekbones of his red-scaled face. Like a sunbather stretching out on a beach, Set spread his powerful arms around that scarlet-tinged dome in a sort of embrace, soaking up the heat that penetrated through it.

  I stood as far from it as I could. It was too hot for my comfort. Despite my efforts to control the temperature of my body, I still had to allow my sweat glands to do their work, and within seconds I was bathed in a sheen of perspiration from head to toe.

  After several moments Set whirled back toward me and pointed to a low platform on the other side of the circular chamber. Its square base was lined by a series of black tubular objects, rather like spotlights or the projectors used to cast pictures against screens. Above the platform the low ceiling was covered with similar devices.

  Wordlessly we stepped onto the platform. Set stood slightly behind me and to one side. He clamped a taloned hand on my shoulder; a clear sign of possession for any species that has hands. I gritted my teeth, knowing that I was no match for him either physically or mentally. Not by myself. A human being without tools is not a noble savage, I realized; he is a helpless naked ape, soon to be dead.

  Halfway across the room I could see our reflection in the plastic dome that topped the core tap. Distorted weirdly on its curving surface, my own grim face looked pale and weak with Set’s powerful shoulders and expressionless reptilian head rising above me. And his claws clamped on my shoulder.

  Suddenly we were falling, dropping in utter darkness as if the world had disappeared from beneath our feet. I felt a bitter cryogenic cold as I whirled in nothingness, disembodied yet freezing, falling, frightened.

  “Forgive me.”

  Anya’s voice reached my awareness. A faint, plaintive call, almost sobbing. Just once. Only those two words. From somewhere in the interstices between spacetimes, from deep in the quantized fabric of the continuum, she had reached out with that pitifully fleeting message for me.

  Or was it my imagination? My own self-pitying ego that refused to believe she could willingly abandon me? Forgive her? Those were not the words of a goddess, I reasoned. That was a message fashioned by my own emotions, my own unconscious mind trying to build a fortress around my pain and grief, trying to erect a castle to replace the desolation at the core of my soul.

  The instant of cold and darkness passed. My body took on dimensions and form once more. Once again I stood on solid ground, with Set’s claws pressing on my left shoulder.

  We were on the planet Shaydan.

  I was lost in murk. The sky was dark, covered with sick-looking low clouds the gray-brown color of death. A hot dry wind moaned, lashing my skin with fine particles of dust. Squinting against the blowing grit, I looked down at my feet. We were standing on a platform, but beyond its edge the ground was sandy and covered with small rocks and pebbles. A bit of scrawny bush trembled in the wind. A desiccated gray tangle of weeds rolled past.

  It was hot. Like an oven, like the baking dry heat of a pottery kiln. I could feel the heat soaking into me, sapping my strength, almost singeing the hairs on my bare arms and legs. I felt heavy, sluggish, as if loaded down with invisible chains. The gravity here is stronger than on Earth, I realized. No wonder Set’s muscles were so powerful; Earth must seem puny to him.

  I could not see more than a few feet in any direction. The very air was thick with a yellow-gray haze of windblown dust. It was difficult for me to breathe, like sucking the blistering sulfurous fumes of a fire pit into my lungs. I wondered how long I could survive in this atmosphere.

  “Long enough to accomplish my goal,” Set answered my thought.

  I tried to speak, but the gagging air caught in my throat and I coughed instead.

  “You find Shaydan less than beautiful, chattering monkey?” He radiated amused contempt. “Perhaps you would feel differently if you could see it through my eyes.”

  I blinked my tearing eyes and suddenly I was seeing this world through Set’s eyes. He allowed me into his mind. Allowed? He forced me, plucked my consciousness as easily as picking fruit from a tree. He kidnapped my awareness.

  And I saw Shaydan as he did.

  The mosaics I had seen in his castle immediately made sense to me. Through the eyes of this reptilian, born in this environment, I saw that we were standing in the middle of an idyllic scene.

  What had been haze and mist to me was perfectly transparent to Set. We were standing at the summit of a little knoll, looking out over a broad valley. A city stood off near the horizon, its buildings low and hugging the ground, colored as the ground itself was in shades of green and brown. A single road led from the city to the knoll where we stood. The road was lined with low trees, so small and wind-tangled that I wondered if they were truly trees or merely large bushes.

  What had seemed like a scorching, searing wind that drove stinging particles of dust now felt like a gentle caressing breeze. I knew that my own skin was being sandpapered by the flying dust, but to Set it was nothing more than the long-remembered embrace of his home world.

  I saw that we stood on a platform exactly like the one in Set’s castle back on Earth. Perhaps it was the very same one: it may have been translated through spacetime with us. The same black tubular projectors lined its four sides, except for the place where steps allowed one to mount or descend.

  Looking up, I saw other projectors overhead, mounted on tall slim poles spaced evenly around the platform.

  Beyond them was Sheol, so close that it covered more than a quarter of the sky, so huge that it seemed to be pressing down on me, hanging over me like some enormous massive doom that was squeezing the breath out of my parched lungs.

  The star was so close that I could see mottled swirls of hot gases bubbling on its surface, each of them larger than a whole world. Sickly dark blotches writhed here and there, tendrils of flame snaked across the surface of the star. Its color was so deeply red that it almost seemed to be projecting darkness rather than light. It seemed to be pulsating, to be breathing in and
out irregularly, gasping with an enormous shuddering vibration that racked its whole wide expanse.

  This was a dying star. And because it was dying, the planet Shaydan was doomed also.

  “Enough.”

  With that one word Set pushed me out of his mind. I stood half-blind, cringing at the stinging whips of the scorching, cutting wind, alone on the world of my enemies.

  But Set had not cut the mental link between us fast enough for me to be ejected from his mind empty-handed. While I had gazed upon the face of Sheol through his eyes, I had learned what he knew of the star and the other worlds that formed our solar system.

  The sun had been born with this companion, a double-star system. While the sun was a healthy bright yellow star with long eons of stable life ahead of it, its smaller companion was a sickly dull reddish dwarf, barely massive enough to keep its inner fusion fires going, unstable and doomed to extinction.

  Huddled close to the sun were four worlds of rock: the closest named after the messenger of the gods because it sped back and forth in the sky so swiftly; the next named for the goddess of love because of its beauty; the third was Earth itself, and the fourth, rust red in appearance, received the name of a war god.

  More than twice as far from the sun as the red planet lay the orbit of the feeble dwarf star that Set and his kind called Sheol. A single planet orbited around Sheol, Set’s world of Shaydan. Doomed world of a doomed star.

  Unwilling to accept the death of his kind, Set had spent millennia examining the other worlds of the solar system. Using the seething energy of his planet’s core, Set learned how to travel through spacetime, how to move himself through the vastness between the worlds, and through the even greater gulfs between the years.

  He found that beyond Sheol lay the giant worlds, planets of gas so cold they were liquefied, gelid, too far from the sun to be abodes for his kind.

  Of the four rocky worlds orbiting close to the warm yellow star, the first was nothing but barren rock pitilessly blasted by the heat and hard radiation of the nearby sun. The next was beautiful to gaze upon from afar, but below its dazzling clouds was a hellish world of choking poisonous gases and ground so hot it melted metal. The red planet was cold and bare, its air too thin to breathe, the life that had once flourished upon its surface long since died away. Worse yet, it was too small to have a molten core; there was no energy to tap on the red planet.