Ben Bova - Orion in the Dying Time

More than one sprawling city had been inundated by the rising seas. Our energy sphere carried us through watery avenues and broad plazas where fish and squid darted in the hazy sunlight that filtered down from the surface.

As our journey ended and we approached the only living city on Earth, the vast museum-cum-laboratory where the Golden One and the other Creators labored to hold their universe together, I tried to work up the courage to ask Anya the question that was most important to me.

“You… that is, we…” I stuttered.

She turned those lustrous gray eyes to me and smiled. “I know, Orion. We have loved each other.”

“Do you… love me now?”

“Of course I do. Didn’t you know?”

“Then why did you betray me?”

The words blurted out of my mouth before Set could stop them, before I even knew I was going to say them.

“What?” Anya looked shocked. “Betray you? When? How?”

My entire body spasmed with red-hot pain. It was as if every nerve in me was being roasted in flame. I could not speak, could not even move.

“Orion!” Anya gasped. “What’s happened to you?”

To all outward appearances I was in a catatonic state, rigid and mute as a granite statue. Inwardly I was in fiery agony, yet I could not scream, could not even weep.

Anya touched my cheek and flinched away, as if she could sense the fires burning within me. Then she slowly, deliberately, put her fingers to my face once again. Her hand felt cool and soothing, as if it were draining away all the agony within my body.

“I do love you, Orion,” she said, in a voice so low it was nearly a whisper. “I have taken human form to be with you because I love you. I love your strength and your courage and your endurance. You were created to be a hunter, a killer, yet you have risen beyond the limits that Aten placed on your mind.”

Set’s broiling anger seethed through me, but the pain was dying away, easing, as he spent his energies shielding his presence from Anya’s probing eyes.

“We have lived many lives together, my darling,” Anya said to me. “I have faced final destruction for your sake, just as you have suffered death for mine. I have never betrayed you and I never will.”

But you did! I screamed in silence. You will! Just as I will betray you and kill you all.

“He’s catatonic,” sneered the Golden One.

“He is under someone’s control,” Anya replied.

She had brought me not to the Golden One’s laboratory but to the tower-top apartment where I had been quartered before Anya and I had begun our trip around the world.

I could walk. I could stand. I suppose I could have eaten and drunk. I could not speak, however. My body felt wooden, numb, as I stood like an automaton in the middle of the spacious living room, arms at my sides, eyes staring straight into a mirrored wall that showed me my own blank face and rigid posture.

The Golden One was wearing a knee-length tunic of glowing fabric that clung to his finely muscled body. He planted his fists on his hips and snorted with disgust.

“You wanted to treat him with tender loving kindness and you bring him back to me catatonic.”

Anya had changed into a sleeveless chemise of pure white, cinched at the waist by a silver belt.

“His mind is being controlled by whoever had tortured his body,” she said, brittle tension in her tone.

“How did he get here?” the Golden One wondered, strutting around me like a man inspecting a prize animal. “Did he escape from his torturers or was he sent here?”

“Sent, I would think,” said Anya.

“Yes, I agree. But why?”

“Call the others,” I heard myself say. It was a strangled groan.

The Golden One looked sharply at me.

“Call the others.” My voice became clearer, stronger. Set’s voice, actually, not under my own control.

“The other Creators?” Anya asked. “All of them?”

I felt my head bob up and down once, twice. “Bring them here. All of them.” Then I added, “Please.”

“Why?” the Golden One demanded.

“What I have to tell you,” Set answered through me, “must be told to ail the Creators at once.”

He looked at me suspiciously.

“They must be in human form,” Set made me say. “I cannot speak to globes of energy. I must see human faces, human bodies.”

The Golden One’s tawny eyes narrowed. But Anya nodded to him. I remained silent, locked in Set’s powerful control, unable to move or to say more.

“It will be uncomfortable to have us all in here, jostling and perspiring,” he said, some of his old scornful tone returning.

“The main square,” Anya suggested. “Plenty of room for all of us there.”

He nodded. “The main square then,”

There were only twenty of them. Twenty majestic men and women who had taken on the burdens of manipulating spacetime to suit themselves. Twenty immortals who found themselves laboring forever to keep the continuum from caving in on them.

They were splendid. The human forms in which they presented themselves were truly godlike. The men were handsome, strong, some bearded but most clean shaven, eyes clear, limbs straight and smoothly muscled. The women were exquisite, graceful the way a panther or cheetah is, with coiled power just beneath the surface. Their skin was flawless, glowing, their hair lustrous, their eyes more beautiful than gemstones.

They wore a variety of costumes: glittering uniforms of metallic fibers, softly draped chitons, long swirling cloaks, even suits of filigreed armor. I felt shabby in a simple short-sleeved tunic and briefs.

The square on which we assembled was a harmonious oblong laid out in the Pythagorean dimension. Marble pillars and steles of imperishable gold rose at its corners. One of the square’s long sides was taken up by a Greek temple, so similar to the Parthenon in its original splendor that I wondered if the Creators had copied it or translated it through spacetime from the Acropolis to place it here. On the other side was a splendidly ornate Buddhist temple, with a gold seated Buddha staring serenely across the square at marble Athena standing with spear and shield. The two short ends of the square bore a steeply rising Sumerian ziggurat at one end and an equally precipitous Mayan pyramid at the other, so similar to each another that I knew they must both have originated in the mind of a single person.

Above the square the sky was a perfect blue, shimmering ever so slightly from the dome of energy that covered the entire city.

A sphinx carved from black basalt rested in the middle of the square’s smooth marble pavement, its shoulders slightly higher than my head, its female face hauntingly, disturbingly familiar. Yet I could not place it. It was not the face of any of the women among the twenty Creators who gathered around me.

I stood with my back to the sphinx, penned inside a cylinder of cool blue-flickering energy. The Golden One was taking no chances with me, he thought. He suspected that I had been sent here by an enemy. The energy screen was to keep me safely confined.

Set was amused by his precaution. “Foolish ape,” he said within me. “How he overestimates his own powers.”

The Creators were curious about why they had been summoned here, and not entirely pleased. They clustered in little groups of two and three, talking to each other in low tones, apparently waiting for others to appear. They are like monkeys, I realized. Chattering constantly, huddling together for emotional support. Even in their apotheosis they remained true to their simian origins.

Then a gleaming globe of pure white drifted over the roof of the Parthenon and settled slowly as the assembled Creators edged back to make room for it. When it touched the marble pavement of the square, it shimmered briefly and seemed to contract in on itself to produce the grave, dignified, bearded figure of the one I called Zeus.