Orion in the Dying Time o-3

by Ben Bova

  It occurred to me that the telepathic abilities of the Shaydanians must have a limited range. Otherwise why would Set go to the trouble and time of our planet-girdling travels? Why not remain comfortably in his own city and converse with the other patriarchs telepathically? Alternatively, if he found it necessary to exhibit me physically to each of the patriarchs, that meant that telepathic communication could not perform such a function. They had to see me in person.

  Either way, it meant that there were limits even to Set’s formidable mental powers. I stored that hope away for future use; there was little other hope for me to cling to.

  Now and then on our travels I thought I felt the ground tremble. More than once I heard a low rumbling reverberation like the growl of distant thunder. Neither Set nor his servants appeared to take any note of it, although our mounts seemed to hesitate and sniff the air worriedly.

  In the middle of one of our audiences the ground did shake. The stone floor beneath me heaved, knocking me to my knees. A crack zigzagged in the wall behind the patriarch’s dais. He clutched the arms of his wide chair, hissing in a sibilant note I had never heard before. Even Set staggered slightly, and as I looked around I saw that the onlookers gathered on either side of the long chamber were clinging to one another and glancing around fearfully.

  For the first time I heard the telepathic voices of many Shaydanians, clear and unshielded.

  “The ground quakes again!”

  “Our time grows short.”

  “Sheol reaches out to seize us!”

  Like a thunderbolt it struck me that the violent upheavals churning deep in the heart of the star Sheol were causing pulsations within the core of its planet Shaydan.

  Our time grows short, one of the reptilians had gasped. But if Set and the patriarch felt that way, they gave no outward sign of it. Once the dust raised by the brief tremble had settled, Set unceremoniously yanked me to my feet and resumed his silent conversation with the olive-scaled patriarch seated before him.

  Not before I finally learned what a truly horrible monster Set was. With so many minds open to me simultaneously, even if only for a few seconds, I learned that Set and his fellow patriarchs ruled their smaller fellows with a despicable iron despotism, a remorseless tyranny woven inextricably into the very genes of their people.

  I realized in that horrifying flash of mental communication that almost everything Set had told me had been a distortion, a perversion of the truth. He was the prince of lies.

  I had long wondered why not one of the people in any of the cities we had visited were anywhere near the size of Set and the other patriarchs. At first I had thought that this meant none of them were of patriarchal age. But why not? There should have been just as many reptilians hatched in his generation as these later ones. What had happened to Set’s generation? Were they all dead?

  In that brief glimpse into the minds of so many Shaydanians inspired by the quake, I saw the sickening answer to my question. Set and his fellow patriarchs were the winners of a devastating war that had nearly destroyed all of Shaydan a thousand years before they learned that Sheol would explode. For Set himself had discovered the way to clone his cells, to make copies of himself, to do away with the need for breeding, for laying eggs, to do away with the female of his species completely.

  Even worse, he had learned how to configure his cloned replicas to suit his own desires: how to limit their intelligence so that they would never challenge him, how to limit their life spans so they would never grow to his age and experience.

  Swiftly, with cold ruthlessness, Set gathered about himself a merciless cadre of males his own age, offering them domination of their entire world for all the millennia of their lives. They led a remorseless war of extinction against their own kind, especially against their females, cloning warriors as they needed them, slaughtering all who opposed them. For two centuries the genocidal war raged across the face of Shaydan. When it ended, Set and the patriarchs ruled over a world of submissive clones. All males. Every mother and daughter had been methodically butchered. Every unhatched egg had been found and smashed.

  It took centuries for them to repair the ecological damage they had done to their world. But time meant little to them. They knew that they would rule for millennia to come. And leave their power, when the time eventually came, to exact copies of themselves. With telepathy it might even be possible to transfer their personalities to cloned bodies and continue to exist forever.

  Of course their society ran as efficiently as an ant colony. Of course warfare was now unknown to them. Set and his fellow patriarchs ruled a world of clones incapable of doing more than obeying. But Set wanted still more. He wanted to be adored.

  Then, like a punishment for their sins, came the certain knowledge that Sheol would explode and destroy their entire world.

  Cosmic justice. Or at least cosmic irony. It made me smile inwardly to know that Set, for all his moralistic cant about reptilian fitness and their care for their environment, was at heart a ruthless mass murderer. A genocidal slaughterer of his own kind who had chosen power and death over nature and life.

  I should have known I could not have kept my new knowledge from him.

  “You think I am hypocritical, hairless ape?” he asked one murky day as we rode through a stinging windstorm. He was up ahead of me, as usual, his broad back to me.

  “I think you are mercilessly evil, at the very least,” I replied. It did not matter if he heard my words or not. He could sense the thoughts forming in my brain.

  “I saved Shaydan from the kind of excesses that mammals would have created. Without firm control, the people would have eventually destroyed their environment.”

  “So you destroyed the people.”

  “They would have destroyed themselves and their whole environment, had I not intervened.”

  “That’s nothing but a rationalization. You took total power for yourselves, you and your fellow patriarchs. You rule without love.”

  “Love?” He seemed genuinely surprised. “You mean sex.”

  “I mean love, caring for your own kind. Friendship so deep that you’d be willing to lay down your life to protect—” The words gagged in my throat. I thought of Anya and the memory of her betrayal burned inside me like bitter bile. I wanted to vomit.

  Amused contempt radiated from his mind. “Loyalty and self-sacrifice. Mammalian concepts. Signs of your weakness. Just as your ideas of so-called love are. Love is an apish invention, to justify your obsession with breeding. Sex was never as important to my species as it is to yours, hot-blooded monkey.”

  I found the strength to retort, “No, it’s power that’s your obsession, isn’t it?”

  “I cleansed this world so that I could bring new life to it, a better form of life.”

  “Artificially created. Maimed in mind and body so that your creatures have no choice but to obey you.”

  In my mind I heard the hiss of his laughter. “Just as you are, Orion. An over-specialized monkey created by your superior beings, maimed in mind and body to serve them without choice.”

  Hot anger flared within me. Because he was right.

  “Naturally you hate me and what I have done.” Set’s cool amusement washed over me like glacier melt. “You realize that it is exactly what the Creators have done to you, and you hate them for it.”

  Chapter 26

  Finally, after months or perhaps even years of travel, we returned to Set’s own city.

  It was much like all the others. Above ground a group of ancient low stone buildings weathered by millennia of wind and rasping dust. Below ground a honeycomb of passageways and galleries, level after level, deeper and deeper.

  All the Shaydanians here were scaled in tones of red. The entire population came out into the main thoroughfare leading into the city to welcome their master home in silent obedient reptilian fashion.

  A trio of salmon pink guards led me deep underground to a hot, bare little cell, so dark that I had to grope along its nearly
scalding walls to make out its dimensions. It was roughly square, so small that I could almost touch opposing walls by standing in its center and stretching out my arms. No windows, of course. No light at all. And insufferable heat, as if I were being slowly roasted by microwaves.

  Wherever I touched the walls or floor, it scorched my skin. From some dim memory I recalled that on Earth bears had been trained to “dance” by forcing them onto a heated floor so that they rose to their hind legs and hopped around in a pitiful effort to avoid being burned. Likewise I tried to stay on my feet, on my toes, for as long as I could. But eventually exhaustion and that overburdening heavy gravity got the better of me and I collapsed to the hot stone floor.

  For the first time since I had arrived on Shaydan I dreamed. I was with Anya once again in the forests of Paradise, living simply and happily, so much in love that wherever we walked, flowers sprang up from the ground. But when I put my arms out to embrace her, Anya changed, transformed herself. For a moment she was a shimmering sphere of silvery light, too bright for me to look at. I staggered back away from her, one arm thrown across my face to shield my eyes from her radiance.

  From far, far away I heard the mocking voice of the Golden One, the godlike being who had created me.

  “Orion, you reach too far. Can you expect a goddess to love a worm, a slug, a paramecium?”

  All the so-called gods materialized before me: the dark-bearded, solemn-eyed one I thought of as Zeus; the lean-faced grinning Hermes; the cruelly beautiful Hera; broad-shouldered, redheaded Ares; dozens of others. All of them splendidly robed, magnificent in gleaming jewels and flawless, perfect features.

  They laughed at me. I was naked and they pointed at my emaciated body, covered with raw sores and red welts from the pelting wind of Shaydan. They howled with laughter at me. Anya—Athena—was not among them, but I sensed her distant presence like cold sifting flakes of snow chilling my soul.

  The gods and goddesses roared with amusement at me as I stood dumbfounded, unable to move, unable even to speak. The forests of Paradise wavered and bowed as snow fell, covering the trees, blanketing the ground. Even the laughter of the gods was smothered by the silent smooth white snow. They faded into nothingness and I was left alone in a world of glittering white.

  The soft whiteness of the snow transformed into a glittering silvery metallic sheen. Then the silver light took on a ruddy glow. It became fiery red and seemed to pull in on itself, taking a shape once again. This time it was the massive looming form of Set who stood before me, hissing laughter at my pain and loss.

  I realized that I had not dreamed during all the long months of our travels because he had not allowed me to dream. And now that our journey was finished, he was amusing himself by invading my dreams and perverting them to his own enjoyment.

  I seethed with hate all the time I spent in that dark scorchingly hot cell. Set’s servants fed me only enough to keep me barely alive: a thin warm liquid that tasted rancid, pulpy rotting leaves, nothing more. I was out of that stinging, lashing wind, but the heat down in this deep underground chamber baked the strength out of me, blistered my skin, and seared my lungs.

  Every night I dreamed of Anya and the other Creators, knowing that Set was watching, digging into memories I never knew I had. The dreams turned into nightmares as night after night I tried to warn Anya and the others while before my sleeping eyes I saw the Creators being sliced to bloody ribbons, bodies slashed open spurting blood, faces torn apart, limbs hacked from their torsos.

  By me.

  Horrified, I was their executioner. I burned them alive. I tore out their eyes. I drank their blood. Zeus’s. Hera’s. Even Anya’s.

  Night after night the nightmares were the same. I would visit the Creators in their golden sanctuary. They would scorn me. Mock me. I would reach for Anya, begging her to help me, to understand the message of terror and death that I was carrying. But she would run away or transform herself into some form unobtainable.

  Then the killing would start. I always began with the Golden One, tearing at him like a ferocious wolf, ripping the smirking smile from his face, rending his perfect body with claws of razor-sharp steel.

  Night after night, the same dream. The same horror. And each night it became more real. I awoke bathed in sweat, shaking like a man possessed, hardly daring to look down at my trembling hands for fear that I would find them reeking with blood.

  Behind each nightmare I sensed Set’s lurking, menacing presence. He was clawing ruthlessly through my mind, dredging into memories that the Golden One or whoever created me had long since sealed off from my conscious recall. I relived life after life, hurtling from the very origins of the human race to such distant futures that humankind itself had evolved into shapes and powers beyond recognition. Yet each dream inevitably, inexorably came down to the same horrifying scene.

  I confronted the Creators. I tried to tell them what was going to happen, tried to warn them. They laughed at me. I begged them to listen to me, pleaded with them to save their own lives. They thought it was uproariously funny.

  Then I killed them. Slashed them while they laughed, tore out their entrails while their faces still smirked and grinned at me. I killed them all. I tried to spare Anya. I screamed at her to run away, to transform herself so that I could not reach her. Sometimes she did. Sometimes she became that glowing silvery sphere that was forever beyond my touch. But when she did not, I killed her as mercilessly as I butchered all the others. I tore her throat out. I disemboweled her. I crushed her beautiful face in my clawed hands.

  And woke up whimpering. I had not the strength for screaming. I awoke in that oven-hot lightless cell blind and terribly weak, my body wasting and my mind being pillaged.

  The worst of it was that I knew what Set was doing. He was exploring my mind, using the memories that had been sealed away from me to learn everything he could about the Creators. Most of all he wanted to find out how he could send me back through spacetime to the Creators’ own domain, that golden paradise of theirs far in the future of this time.

  I could feel his cold cruel presence in my mind, searching, rampaging through my memories like a conquering army looting a helpless village, looking for the key that would allow him to project me into the Creators’ realm.

  He wanted to send me to a point in the continuum before the Creators had become aware of his own existence. He wanted to plant me among them when their defenses were down, when they were not expecting to be attacked, especially by their own creature.

  Set would accompany me on this trip through spacetime. His mind and will would ride within my brain. He would see with my eyes. He would strike with my hands.

  The hell of it was that there truly was hatred for the Creators inside me. He found that vein of anger, of bitter resentment, that seethed through me. He hissed with pleasure when he realized how I hated the Golden One, the very person who had created me. He saw how I had defied him and tried to kill him, how I hated the other Creators for shielding him from my wrath.

  And he found the blistering-hot fury deep within me that etched my soul like acid eating steel whenever I thought of Anya. Love turned to hate. No, worse, for I still loved her yet hated her, too. She had chained me to a rack that was pulling me apart, worse torture than anything Set could inflict upon my body.

  But the devil knew how to use the torment in my mind, how to employ that hatred for his own purposes.

  “You are being very helpful to me, Orion,” I heard him in my mind as I writhed in that utterly black cell.

  I knew it was true. I loathed myself for it, but I knew that there was enough rage and hatred within me to serve as a murderous weapon for Set’s malevolence.

  The nightmares returned whenever I slept. No matter how hard I fought against it, inevitably my eyes would close and my starved, exhausted body would drift into slumber. And the nightmare would begin anew.

  Each time more real. Each time I saw a little more detail, heard my own words and those of the Creators with
better clarity, felt the solidity of their flesh in my ravening hands, smelled the hot sweetness of their blood as it spurted from the wounds I slashed into them.

  There would come, inexorably, one final dream. I knew that one of these times the reality would be perfect, that I would actually be among my Creators, that I would kill them all for Set, my master. And then all dreams would cease. My pain and longing would be at an end. The crushing, forsaken sense of abandonment that filled my heart with despair would at last be wiped away.

  All I had to do was surrender to the will of Set. I realized now that it was only my own foolish, stubborn resistance that stood in the way of final peace. A few moments of blood and anguish and everything would be finished. Forever.

  I had to stop fighting against Set and admit to myself that he was my master. I had to allow him to send Orion the Hunter on this final stalk, and then he would allow me peace. I almost smiled to myself there in the blind darkness of that searingly hot cell. How ironic that Orion’s final hunt would be to track down his very Creators and kill them all.

  “I am ready,” I called out. My voice was cracked, rasping. My throat and lungs parched.

  In response I heard a vast hissing sigh that seemed to echo through all the underground chambers of Set’s magnificent palace of darkness.

  It seemed like an eternity before anything happened. I lay on the stone floor of my cell in total darkness and absolute quiet except for my own ragged, labored breathing. Perhaps the floor became somewhat cooler. Perhaps the air became a little moister. Perhaps it was only my imagination.

  I was too weak to stand, and I wondered how I might do my master’s bidding in such an exhausted condition.

  “Have no fear, Orion,” Set’s voice echoed in my mind. “You will be strong enough when the moment comes. My strength will fill your body. I will be within you at every moment. You will not be alone.”

  So his magnanimity in allowing the Creators to flee the Earth had been nothing more than a ruse. He intended to strike at them, to destroy them, at a time when they were completely unprepared to meet his attack. And I would be his weapon.