Ben Bova - Orion in the Dying Time

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.”

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.