Orion in the Dying Time (15 page)

It rained off and on all the time we trekked back to the castle in the lake. We finally arrived on a steaming afternoon, wet, hungry and exhausted.

The castle stood glistening in the afternoon sun, its massive walls and high-flung towers wetly gleaming. High overhead, so bright it was easily visible in the washed-blue sky, the bloodred star glowered down at us.

CHAPTER 20

We were led up the long narrow ramp toward the 'single gate in the castle's wide high walls. The gate was barely wide enough for two of the slim humanoids to pass through side by side, but it was tall, at least twenty feet high. Sharp spikes ran all around its sides and arched top, like pointed teeth made of gleaming metal.

As we stepped out of the hot sunshine into the dimly, lit shadows of the castle I felt the subtle vibrating hum of powerful machinery. The air inside the castle was even warmer than the steaming afternoon outside, an intense heat that flowed over me like a stifling wave, squeezing perspiration from every pore, drenching us with soul-draining fatigue.

Our quintet of captors turned us over to four other humanoids, slightly larger but otherwise so identical to the others that I could not tell them apart. They might have been cloned from the same original cell, they looked so much alike. These new guards undid our bonds, and for the first time in days we could move our stiffened arms, flex our cramped fingers. Ordinary humans might have been permanently paralyzed, their arms atrophied, their hands gangrenous from lack of blood circulation. I had been able to force blood past the painfully tight ropes by consciously redirecting the flow to deeper arteries. Anya had done the same. Still, it would be a long time before the marks of our bonds left our flesh.

The first thing Anya did after flexing her numbed fingers was to pet little Juno, who hissed with pleasure at her attention. I almost felt jealous.

We were put in a cell the size of a dormitory room, all three of us. It was absolutely bare, not even a bit of straw to cover the hard seamless floor. The entire castle seemed to be made of some sort of plastic, just as Set's fortress in the Neolithic had been.

The walls looked absolutely seamless to me, yet a panel slid back abruptly to reveal a tray of food: meat steaming from the spit, cooked vegetables, flagons of water, and even a pile of greens for Juno.

We ate greedily, although I couldn't help thinking of the last meal a condemned man is given.

"What do we do now?" I asked Anya, wiping scraps of roasted meat from my chin with the back of my hand.

She glanced around at our bleak prison cell. "Can you feel that energy vibrating?"

I nodded. "Set must power everything here with the core tap."

"That's what we must reach," Anya said firmly. "And destroy."

"Easier said than done."

She regarded me with her grave, gray eyes. "It must be done, Orion. The existence of the human race, the whole continuum, depends on it being done."

"Then the first step," I said, with a sigh of resignation, "is to get out of this cell. Any ideas?"

As if in answer, the metal door slid back to reveal another pair of humanoid guards. Or perhaps two from the quartet that had ushered us into the cell in the first place, I could not tell.

They beckoned to us with taloned fingers and we went meekly out into the corridor, Juno clumping warily behind us.

The corridor was hot and dim, the overhead lights so deeply red that I felt certain most of their energy was emitted in the infrared, invisible to my eyes but apparently clear and bright to the reptiles. I closed my eyes and sought to make contact with Juno as we walked. Sure enough, through the duckbill's vision the corridor was brilliantly lit, and the temperature was wonderfully comfortable.

The corridor slanted downward. Not steeply, but a definite downward slope. As I walked along, seeing our surroundings through Juno's eyes, I realized that the walls were not blank at all. They were decorated with lively mosaics showing scenes of these graceful humanoid reptiles in beautiful glades and parks, in lovingly cultivated gardens, standing at the sea's frothing edge or atop rugged mountains.

I studied the artworks as we marched down the corridor. There was never more than one humanoid in any picture, although many of the scenes showed other reptiles, some bipedal but most of them four-legged. None of the humanoids wore any kind of clothing or carried anything resembling a tool or a weapon. Not even a belt or a pouch of any sort.

Then, with a sudden startling chill, I realized that every picture showed a sun in the sky that was deep red, not yellow, and so big that it often covered a quarter of the sky. There were even a few scenes in which a second sun appeared, small and yellow and distant.

These were pictures of a world that was not Earth. The red star they showed was the darkly crimson star that I had seen night after night, the evil-looking blood red star that was so bright I could see it in broad daylight, the star that was hovering above the castle even at this very moment.

I was about to tell Anya, but our guards stopped us at an ornately carved door, so huge that a dozen men could have marched through it at once. I reached out to touch it. It looked like dark wood, ebony perhaps, but it felt like cold lifeless plastic. Strange, I thought, that it can feel cold in such an overheated atmosphere.

The door split in two and swung open silently, smoothly. Without being told or prodded, Anya and I automatically stepped into an immense high-vaulted chamber. Juno trotted between us.

Using my own vision once more, I could barely see the top of the ribbed, steeply arched ceiling. The lighting was dim, the air oppressively hot, like standing in front of an open oven on a midsummer's afternoon.

Set reclined on a backless couch atop a platform raised three high steps above the floor. There were no statues of him here, no human slaves to worship him and try to placate him. Instead, rows of dully burning torches flanked Set's throne on either side, their flames licking slowly against the gloom, seeming to shed darkness rather than light.

We walked slowly toward that jet black throne and the devilish figure sitting upon it. Anya's face was grim, her lips pressed into a tight bloodless line, her fists clenched at her sides. The welts of the ropes that had bound her showed angry purple against her alabaster skin.

Once again I felt the fury and implacable hatred that cascaded from Set like molten lava pouring down the cone of an erupting volcano. And once again I felt the answering fury and hatred in my own soul, burning inside me, rising to a crescendo as we approached his throne. Here was evil incarnate, the eternal enemy, and my unalterable task was to strike him down and kill him.

And once again I felt Set take control of my body, force me to stop a half-dozen paces before his dais, paralyze my limbs so that I could not leap upon him and tear the heart from his chest.

Anya stood beside me as tensely as I. She felt Set's smothering mental embrace, too, and was struggling to break through it. Perhaps the two of us, working in unison, could overcome his fiendish power. Perhaps I could distract him in some way. Even if only momentarily, a moment might be enough.

"You are more resourceful than I had thought," his voice seethed in my mind.

"And more knowledgeable," I snapped.

His slitted red eyes glittered at me. "More knowledgeable? How so?"

"I know that you are not of this Earth. You come from the world that circles the red star, the planet that Kraal called the Punisher."

His pointed chin dropped a centimeter toward his massive scaled chest. It might have been a nod of acknowledgment, or merely an unconscious gesture as he thought over my words.

"The star is called Sheol," he replied mentally. "And my world is its only planet, Shaydan."

"In my original time," I said, "there is only one sun in the sky, and your star does not exist."

Now Set did nod. "I know, my apish enemy. But your original time, your entire continuum, will be destroyed soon enough. You and your kind will disappear. Sheol and Shaydan will be saved."

Anya spoke. "They have already been destroyed. What you hope to achieve is beyond hope. You have been defeated, you simply don't understand it yet."

Set's lipless mouth pulled back to reveal his pointed teeth. "Don't try to play your games with me, Creatress. I know full well that the continuums are not linear. There is a nexus here at this point in spacetime. I am here to see that you and your kind are swept away."

"Reptiles replacing human beings?" I challenged. "That can never be."

His amusement turned to acid. "So certain of your superiority, are you? Babbling mammal, the continuum in which you reign supreme on this planet is so weak that your Creators must constantly struggle to preserve it. Mammals are not strong enough to dominate spacetime for long, they are always swept away by truly superior creatures."

"Such as yourself?" I tried to say it with a sneer and only half succeeded.

"Such as myself," Set replied. "Frenetic mammals, running in circles, chattering and babbling always, your hot blood is your undoing. You must eat so much that you destroy the beasts and fields that feed you. 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 you are better?"

"We have no need to keep our blood heated. We do not need to slaughter whole species of beasts for our stomachs. We do not overbreed. And we do not constantly make those noises that you call intelligent communication! That is why we are better, stronger, more fit to survive than you over-specialized jabbering apes. That is why we will survive and you will not."

"You'll survive by killing the dinosaurs and planting your own seed here?" I asked.

I sensed amusement from him. "So . . ." he answered slowly, "the hairless ape is not so knowledgeable after all."

Sensing my confusion, Set went on: "The dinosaurs are mine to do with as I please. I created them. I brought my—seed, as you put it—to this planet nearly two hundred million of your years ago, when there was nothing on this land but a few toads and salamanders, fugitives from the seas."

Set's voice rose in my mind, took on a depth and power I had not experienced before. "I scrubbed this miserable planet clean to make room for my creations, the only kind of animal that could survive completely on dry land. I wiped out species by the thousands to prepare this world for my offspring."

"You created the dinosaurs?" I heard an astonished voice pipe weakly. My own.

"They are the consequences of my work from two hundred million years before this time. The fruits of my genius."

"But you went too far," Anya said. "The dinosaurs have been too successful."

He shifted his slitted gaze toward her. "They have done well. But now their time is at an end. This planet must be prepared for my true offspring."

"The humanoids," I said.

"The children of Shaydan. I have prepared this world for them."

"Killer!" Anya spat. "Destroyer! Blunderer!"

I could feel his contempt for her. And a cold amusement at her words. "I kill to prepare the way for my own kind. I destroy life on a planetwide scale to make room for my own life. I do not blunder."

"You do!" Anya accused. "You blundered two hundred million years ago. Now you must destroy your own creations because they have done too well. You blundered sixty-five million years from now, because the human race will rise up against you and your kind. You will be their symbol of unrelenting evil. They will be against you forever."

"They will cease to exist," Set replied calmly, "once my work here is finished. And you will cease to exist much sooner than that."

All through this conversation, with Anya and I speaking and Set answering in silent mental projections, I strained to break through his control of my body. I knew Anya was doing the same. But no matter how hard we tried, we could not move our limbs. Even Juno, cowering by Anya's feet, seemed unable to move.

"You'll never be able to wipe out the dinosaurs," I said. "We foiled your attempt to slaughter the duckbills and—"

He actually hissed at me. I sensed it was a form of laughter. "What did you accomplish, oversized monkey? On one particular day you helped a few hundred dinosaurs escape the death I had planned for them. They will meet that death on another day, perhaps next week, perhaps ten thousand years from now. I have all of time to work in, yammering ape. I created the dinosaurs and I will destroy them—at my leisure."

With that, he beckoned to Juno. Our little duckbill seemed reluctant to go toward him, yet helpless to resist. Grudgingly, as if being pulled by an invisible leash, Juno plodded to the dais and lumbered up its three steps to the clawed feet of Set.

Anya flared: "Don't!"

I strained with every atom of my being to break free of Set's mental bonds. As I struggled I watched with horrified eyes as Set picked up Juno like a weightless toy. The baby duckbill squirmed, frightened, but could no more escape Set's grasp than I could break free.

"Don't!" Anya screamed again.

Set lifted Juno's head up and sank his teeth into her soft unprotected throat. Blood gushed over him. The baby dinosaur gave a single piercing, whistling shriek that ended in a bubbling of blood. Its yellow eyes faded, its clumsy legs went limp.

I sensed Set's smirking, smug feeling of triumph and power. He let Juno's dead body, still twitching, fall to his feet and laughed mentally at Anya's anguish.

And dropped his guard just a fraction. Enough for me to burst loose and hurl myself up the dais, my fingers reaching for Set's red-scaled throat.

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 21

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 its 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.