Orion in the Dying Time (20 page)

"I don't want to. Whatever is stored inside his skull, I've got to recover it."

"You don't care about him," Anya said. "He's merely a tool that you use."

"Exactly. But now he's a tool that someone else might be using. I've got to find out who. And why."

Deep within me, raging torrents of conflict were tearing at my guts. Anya wanted to protect me while the Golden One wanted only what was locked within my mind. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to love her and have her love me. Yet smothering those emotions, burying them in layers of molten iron, was Set's unrelenting control over me. I saw a vision of my nightmare again. Horrified, I knew that I would kill them all.

CHAPTER 27

"Let me have him," Anya said.

A long pause, then the Golden One answered, "You are emotionally attached to this creature. It wouldn't be wise to let you—"

"How can you let jealousy cloud your judgment at a time like this?"

"Jealousy!" The Golden One sounded astonished. "Is the eagle jealous of the butterfly? Is the sun jealous of its planets?"

Anya laughed, like the cool tinkling of a silver bell. "Let me take care of him, bring him back to his strength. Then perhaps he can tell us what has happened to him."

"No. I have the equipment here—"

"To destroy his mind with your brute-force methods. I will bring him back to health. Then we can question him."

"There isn't time."

Her tone became taunting. "Not time? For the Golden One, who claims he can travel across the continuum as if it were an ocean? No time for the one who tells us he understands the currents of the universes better than a mariner understands the sea?"

I heard him puff out a heavy sigh, almost a snort. "I will compromise with you. I can restore his physical health much more quickly with my methods than you can by spoon-feeding him. Once he is strong enough to walk and talk, you can begin his interrogation."

"Agreed."

"But if you don't get him to tell us how he got here within a few days," the Golden One warned, "then I will revert to my methods."

More reluctantly Anya repeated, "Agreed."

I heard her leave, then felt myself being lifted on cushions of energy again and carried off the surgical table. I tried to open my eyes a little, just to peep out at where I was being taken, but found I had no control over my eyelids. I could not move my fingers, either, or even wiggle my toes. Either the Golden One or Set was controlling my voluntary muscular system. Perhaps both of them, working inadvertently together for the moment.

I sensed my body being slid into a horizontal vat of some sort, a cylindrical tube that felt cool to my bare scorched skin. The hum of energy. The soft gurgling of liquids. I fell truly asleep, my mind drifting into a deep darkness, more relaxed than it had been in ages. It was like returning to the womb, and my last conscious thought was that perhaps this cylinder of metal and plastic had actually been my womb. I knew I had not been born of woman, any more than Set's minions had been hatched from natural eggs.

I slept, unimaginably grateful that I did not dream.

The patient gentle cadence of surf washing up on a beach awakened me. I opened my eyes. I was sitting in a reclining chair, soft yet gently supportive, on a high balcony overlooking a wide turquoise sea that stretched out beyond the horizon. A formation of graceful white birds soared through the cloudless blue sky. The sleek gray forms of dolphins glided effortlessly through the waves far below me, their curved fins slicing the surface briefly and then disappearing, only to reappear moments later.

I took a deep breath of sweet clean air. The sunshine felt good, warm, while the breeze coming off the sea was refreshingly cool. I felt strong again. Looking down at myself, I saw that I was clothed in a sleeveless white knee-length robe and a pair of shorts.

For several moments I simply lay back in the recliner, rejoicing in my returned strength. My skin was healthily tanned, all the old scorches and sores had disappeared. My arms and legs had filled out once more.

I got to my feet slowly, found that my legs were firm, and stepped to the balcony's railing. Peering far down, I scanned the wide expanse of golden sand below. No one. Not a soul. The curving beach was fringed with stately palm trees. The building I was in seemed to rise from the midst of the trees.

The surf drummed softly against the sand. The dolphins plied their way among the waves. One of the birds made a long, folded-wing dive into the water, splashed in, and bobbed up again, gulping a fish down its gullet.

"Hello."

I whirled around. Anya was standing at the doorway that led inside from the balcony. Her robe was gleaming white silk woven with threads of silver that sparkled in the sunlight. Shining dark hair pulled back off her face. Classic features that inspired the sculptors of ancient Greece with the vision of ideal beauty. The goddess Athena come to warm, breathing life before me.

Instantly I felt Set's iron-cruel control clamp itself on my emotions. Love and hate, fear and desire, all buried beneath his glacial grip.

"Anya," was all I could say.

"How do you feel?" she asked, stepping toward me.

"Normal. Much better than . . . before."

She gazed deeply into my eyes, and I could see that her own silver-gray eyes were troubled, searching.

"What time is it?" I asked.

With a slight smile she replied, "Morning."

"No. I mean—what year? What era are we in?"

"This is the era in which you were created, Orion."

"By the Golden One."

"His true name is Aten."

"That's what the Egyptians call their sun god."

She arched a brow. "He does not lack for ego, you know."

"I was created," I said slowly, "to hunt down Ahriman."

"Yes. Originally. Aten found you useful for other tasks, too."

"He's insane, you know. The Golden One. Aten."

Anya's smile faded. "There is no such thing as insanity among us, Orion. We have evolved far beyond that."

"You're not really human, are you?"

"We are what humans have become. We are the descendants of humankind."

"But this body you show me . . . it's an illusion, isn't it?"

She took the final step that closed the distance between us and reached up to touch my cheek with her hand. It felt vibrantly alive.

"This body is composed of atoms and molecules just as yours is, Orion. Blood courses through my veins. And hormones too. The same as any human female."

"There are humans here? Actual men and women still exist in this time?"

"Yes, of course. There are even a few still living here on Earth."

"Tell me!" I gasped with an urgency forced upon me by the will of Set, lurking within my own mind. With my voice, but his words, I begged, "I want to know everything there is to know about you."

Over the next few weeks Anya told me.

We sailed across that wide sea in a bubble of energy that skimmed across the wave tops. I saw dolphins by the hundreds frolicking among the swells, and heard huge stately whales singing their eerily beautiful songs of the deeps. Through deep cool forests we rode like wraiths wafting along in the breeze. Deer stepped daintily through the woods, so tame that we could pet them. Across mountains and fertile grasslands we glided, wrapped in a sphere of energy that was invisible yet all-protective. When we were hungry, meals appeared out of thin air, steaming and delicious.

I saw small villages where the tiled rooftops glittered with solar panels and ordinary-looking human beings tended fields and flocks. There were no roads between them and no vehicles that I could see. Most of the world was uninhabited, green and flowering, the sky pristine blue.

There were even swamplands teeming with crocodiles and turtles and frogs. I saw the enormous terrifying bulk of a tyrannosaur loom up above the cypresses, but Anya calmed my instinctive fear.

"The entire area is fenced in by an energy screen. Not even a fly can get out."

Once again I was living with the woman I had loved, night and day. But we never touched, never even kissed. We were not alone. I knew Set dwelled within me, and I got the feeling that she sensed it, too.

Yet Anya showed me the world as it existed in the time of the Creators. The planet Earth, more beautiful than I had ever thought it could be, an abode for all kinds of life, a haven of peace and plenty, a balanced ecology that maintained itself on the energy of the sun and the control of humankind's descendants: the Creators. It was a perfect world, too perfect for me. Nothing was out of place. The weather was always mild and sunny. It rained only at night and even then our energy shell protected us. Not even insects bothered us. I got the feeling that we were riding through a vast park where all the plants were artificial and all the animals were machines under the control of the Creators.

"No, this is all real and natural," Anya told me one night as we lay side by side looking up at the stars. Orion was in his rightful place up there; the Dipper and all the other constellations looked familiar. We were not so far in the future that they had become distorted beyond recognition.

Glowering ruddy Sheol was not in that sky, though. I felt Set's unease and enjoyed it.

The turning point in human history, Anya explained to me, had come some fifty thousand years before this era. Human scientists learned how to control the genetic material buried deep within the cells of all living things. After billions of years of natural selection, humankind took purposeful control not only of its own genetic heritage, but of the genetic development of every plant and animal on Earth. And beyond.

Loud and bitter were the battles against such genetic engineering. There were mistakes, of course, and disasters. For almost a century the planet was racked by the Biowars.

"But the step had been taken, for good or ill," Anya told me. "Once our ancestors learned how to control and alter genes, the knowledge could not be erased."

Blind natural evolution gave way to deliberate, controlled evolution. Where nature took a million years to make a change, humans changed themselves in a generation.

Human life spans increased by quantum jumps. Two centuries. Five centuries. Thousands of years. Virtual immortality.

The human race exploded into space, first expanding throughout the inner solar system, then leapfrogging the outer gas-giant planets and riding out to the stars in giant habitats that housed whole communities, thousands of men, women, and children who would spend generations searching for new Earths.

"Some altered their forms so that they could live on worlds that would kill ordinary human beings," Anya said. "Others decided to remain aboard their habitats and make them their permanent abodes."

Yet no matter which path they chose, each group of star-seekers faced the same ultimate questions: Are we still human? Do we want to remain human? The hard radiation of deep space and the strange environments of alien worlds were sources of mutations beyond their control.

They needed a baseline, a "standard model" Earth-normal human genotype against which they could compare themselves and make their decisions. They needed a link with Earth.

On Earth, meanwhile, generation after generation of dogged researchers were probing deeply into the ultimate nature of life. Seeking nothing less than true immortality, they seized the reins of their own evolution and began a series of mutations that ultimately led to beings who could interchange matter and energy at will, transform their own bodies into globes of pure energy that lived on the radiation of sunlight.

"The Creators," I said.

Anya nodded gravely but said, "Not yet Creators, Orion, for we had created nothing. We were merely the ultimate result of a quest that had begun, I suppose, when the earliest hominids first realized that they had no way to avoid death."

They had not become truly immortal. They could be killed. I got the feeling that they had even committed murder among themselves, long ages past. Yet they were immortal enough. They could live indefinitely, as long as they had a source of energy. To such creatures time is meaningless. But to immortal creatures descended from curious apes, with all of eternity at their disposal, time is a challenge.

"We learned to manipulate time, to translate ourselves back and forth almost as easily as we walk across a meadow."

And found, to their horror, that theirs is not the only universe in the continuum of spacetime.

"The universes seem infinite, constantly branching, constantly impinging on one another," Anya said. "Aten—the Golden One—discovered that there was a universe in which the Neanderthals became the dominant species of Earth and our own type of human never came into being."

"The Neanderthals were beautifully adapted to their environment," I recalled. "They had no need to develop high technology or science."

"That universe encroached on our own," Anya said, her silver-gray eyes looking back to those days. "The overlap was so severe that Aten feared our universe would ultimately be engulfed and we would be doomed to nonexistence."

For creatures who had only newly achieved immortality, this discovery raised panic and terror. What good to be immortal if your entire universe will be snuffed out in the cosmic workings of quantized spacetime?

"That is when we became Creators," said Anya.

"The Golden One created me."

"And five hundred others."

"To exterminate the Neanderthals," I remembered.

"To make this universe safe for our own kind," Anya corrected gently.

The Golden One, puffed up by his (my) success over the Neanderthals, began to examine other nexuses in spacetime where he felt he could change the natural order of the continuum to the benefit of his own inflated ego. Using me as his tool, he began to tamper with the continuum, time and again.

He found, to his shock and the anger of the other Creators, that once you have tampered with the fabric of spacetime myriads of geodesic world lines begin unraveling. The more you try to knit everything up into a neat package, the more the continuum warps and alters. You have no choice but to continue to try to manipulate the continuum to your own purposes; you can never allow the fabric of spacetime to unfold along its natural lines again.

Yes, I heard Set hissing within me, the pompous ape rushes to and fro, scattering his energies, distracted as easily as a chattering monkey. I will end his dilemma. Forever.

I strained to tell Anya that there were others who could manipulate spacetime. But not even that much could get past Set's control over me. I felt perspiration breaking out across my forehead, my upper lip beading, so hard was I trying. But Anya did not seem to notice.

"So now we live on this world," she said as we sat in the energy bubble, speeding high above a deep blue ocean striated with long straight combers that were traveling from one side of the earth to the other in almost perfect uniformity.