Ben Bova - Orion in the Dying Time

He made a slight movement of one hand and I felt myself being buoyed up, lifted as if by invisible hands, and held in a half-reclining position in midair.

“Follow me,” said the Golden One, turning his back on me. The three other Creators winked out like candles snuffed by a sudden gust of wind.

I hung in midair, helpless as a child, with the Golden One’s swirling cloak of lights before me. He began walking, yet it seemed to me that we did not truly move—the view around us shifted and shimmered and changed. I felt no sense of motion at all. It was as if we were on a treadmill and the scenery on all sides was rolling past us.

We descended from the cloud-covered area as if we were going down a mountain slope. But still there was no real sense of motion. I simply sat on my invisible sedan chair and watched the world flow past me. Down a long trail we went and out onto the grassy floor of a broad valley. Tall spreading shade trees followed the meandering course of a river. The water gleamed in the light of the high sun, shining warmly yellow in the blissfully blue sky. A few chubby clumps of cumulus cloud floated serenely overhead, throwing dappled shadows across the tranquil green valley.

I searched that peaceful blue sky for a dark red point of light, the color of dried blood. Sheol. I could not find it. Did it exist in this time? Or was it merely below the horizon?

In the distance I saw a shimmering golden dome, and as we neared it I realized that it was gauzily transparent, like looking through a fine mesh screen of gold. Under its beautifully elegant curve there was a city, but a city such as I had never seen before. Tall slender spires stretching heavenward, magnificent colonnaded temples, steep ziggurats with stairs carved into their stone sides, wide plazas flanked by gracefully curved arcades, broad avenues decorated by statuary and triumphal arches.

My breath caught in my throat as I recognized one of the magnificent buildings: the Taj Mahal, set in its splendid garden. And a giant statue that had to be the Colossus of Rhodes. Facing it, the green-patinaed Liberty. Further on, the main temple of Angkor Wat gleaming in the sunlight as if newly built.

All empty. Unpopulated. As I rode my invisible chair of energy through the immaculate city with the Golden One striding unceremoniously ahead of me, I could not see a single person. Not a bird or cat or any sign of habitation whatever. Not a scrap of paper or even a leaf drifting across the streets on the gently wafting breeze.

At the farther end of the city stood towers of gleaming chrome and glass, straight-edged blocks and slabs that rose tall enough to look down on all the other buildings.

Into the tallest of these the Golden One led me, through a wide atrium of polished marble and onto a gleaming steel disk that began ascending slowly the instant he stepped onto it. Faster and faster it rose, whistling through the open atrium toward the glassed-in roof. The atrium was ringed with balconies whizzing past us at dizzying speed until all of a sudden we stopped, without a jerk or bump, without any feeling of deceleration at all.

The disk drifted to a semicircular niche in the balcony that girdled this level and nestled up to it. The Golden One stepped onto the balcony without a word, and I followed as if carried by invisible slaves.

He led me to a door, opened it, and stepped inside. As I followed him through the doorway a tingle of memory flickered through me. The room looked like a laboratory. It was crowded with vaguely familiar machines, bulky shapes of metal and plastic that I half remembered. In its center was a surgical table. The invisible hands that held me lifted me to its surface and laid me out upon it.

Whether I was too weak to move or held down by those invisible hands of energy, I could not tell.

“Sleep, Orion,” commanded the Golden One in an annoyed tone.

My eyes closed immediately. My breathing slowed to the deep regular rhythm of slumber. But I did not fall asleep. I resisted his command and remained alert, wondering if I was doing this of my own volition or if Set was controlling me.

It seemed like hours that I lay there unmoving, unseeing. I heard the faint hum of electrical equipment now and then, little more. No footsteps. No sounds of breathing except my own. Was the Golden One still in human guise, or had he reverted to his true form while his machines examined me?

I felt nothing during all that time except the solidity of the table beneath me. Whatever probes were being put to my body were not physical. The Golden One was scanning me, examining me remotely atom by atom, the way an orbiting spacecraft might examine the planet turning beneath it.

As far as I could tell he stayed out of my mind. I felt no mental probes. I remained awake and aware. My memories were not being stimulated. The Golden One was staying away from my brain.

Why?

“He is here!”

Anya’s voice! Concerned, angry almost.

“I can’t be disturbed now,” snapped the Golden One.

“He returned of his own volition and you tried to keep me from seeing him,” Anya said accusingly.

“Don’t you understand?” the Golden One retorted. “He is unable to return by himself. Someone has sent him here.”

“Let me see… oh! Look at him! He’s dying!”

Anya’s voice quivered with emotion. She cares about me! I exulted to myself. Immediately a voice answered, As she would care about a pet cat or a wounded deer.

“He’s weak,” the Golden One said. “But he won’t die.”

“What have you put him through?” she demanded.

At first he did not reply. Finally, though, he admitted, “I don’t know. I don’t know where he’s come from or how he got here.”

“You’ve questioned him?”

“Briefly. But he made no reply.”

“He’s been tortured. Look at what they’ve done to his poor body.”

“Never mind that! We have a serious problem here. When I tried to probe his mind, I got nothing but a blank.”

“His memories are completely erased?”

“I don’t think so. It was more like hitting a barrier. His mind has been shielded, somehow.”

“Shielded? By whom?”

Exasperated, the Golden One snapped, “I don’t know! And I can’t find out unless I can break through the shielding.”

“Do you think you can?”

I could sense him nodding. “With enough power I can do anything. The problem is that if I have to use too much power, it might destroy his mind totally.”

“You mustn’t do that!”

“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.

“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.”