Ben Bova - Orion in the Dying Time

“But when the red star began to flash and shake in the sky, Set became very angry. His demons started to slaughter whole villages and burn them to the ground. At last they surrounded our village with dragons and killed almost everyone. Then they burned the village and took us away with them into slavery.”

I nodded in the evening shadows. “And you tried to escape.”

“Reeva ran away from them and I followed her,” Kraal told me. “We ran as fast as we could but still one of the devils found us with his dragon. And then you appeared, like a god, to save us.”

Through all this Reeva said nothing, though I could feel her eyes on me.

“Set is evil,” I said to Kraal. “He intends to kill every one of us. Some he will use as slaves, but death is the final reward he has waiting for us all.”

“You intend to fight him?” Kraal asked.

“Yes.”

“Alone?” asked Reeva. The tone of her question made me realize that she feared I would force them to help me.

“Alone,” I replied.

“And the priestess? Anya? Where is she? Will she not help you?”

“No, she can’t help me,” I said. “I must face Set by myself.”

“Then he will kill you,” Reeva said, matter-of-factly. “He will kill us all.”

“Perhaps,” I admitted. “But not without a battle.”

In the morning I wished them well, told them to live as best as they could.

“Someday,” I said, “when young Kaan is big enough to walk and speak, when the new baby you are carrying is weaned, you will meet other people like yourselves and know that Set has been destroyed. Then you will at last be free.”

“What if Set kills you, instead?” Reeva asked.

“Then one day much sooner his demons and dragons will find you and kill you.”

I left them with that fearful thought and started off again toward the northeast.

Day after day I walked alone through the forest of Paradise toward my rendezvous with Set. I passed the hollowed rock cliff where I had invented the god who speaks. I passed two other villages, as burned and dead as Kraal’s. I saw no other human being anywhere in Paradise.

Set’s demons had visited all the villages, burning and killing, carrying off a few people to serve as slaves, slaughtering all the rest. He was wiping this world clean of humanity, except for a few slaves. He was making the Earth the home of his own reptilian kind.

I reached the edge of the forest at last and looked out from between the trees to the broad undulating plain of grass that stood between me and Set’s fortress.

Pterosaurs glided through the sunny sky high above. On the horizon I saw the lumpy dark shape of a sauropod. Set had his scouts out looking for me. He knew I was coming after him and he was waiting for me, alert and ready.

I sat myself on the ground, my back against the rough bark of a massive maple, thinking hard about my next move.

It was lunacy to try to reach Set’s fortress by myself, armed with nothing more than a wooden spear and a few stone implements. I had to have help. That meant that I had to return to the Creators.

For hours I resisted the idea. I had no desire to go back to them. I wanted to be free of them for all time. Or at the least, I wanted to meet them as an equal, a man who had defeated their most dangerous enemy with his own strength and wits, not a maimed toy that did not work correctly and was in constant need of help.

But there was no alternative. I could not face Set alone and unarmed. I needed their help.

Yet I knew that once I tried to make contact with the Creators, Set would home in on my mental beacon like a serpent gliding through the darkness is guided by its prey’s body heat. If I tried to make contact with the Creators and failed, Set’s demons would be upon me within hours.

That meant I could not merely seek out contact with the Creators and hope that they would bring me across spacetime to them. I had to make the leap myself, with my own power.

Night was falling. Crickets chirruped and winged insects whined through the shadows. I climbed up the maple’s trunk and flattened myself prone on one of its sturdy branches. Somehow I felt safer up in the tree than on the ground.

My monkey heritage, Set would have called it. Yet I truly did feel safer.

Closing my eyes, I tried to recall all the times I had been shifted through the continuum from one point in spacetime to another. I recalled the pain of death, repeated over and over. Concentrating, forcing myself to see through that pain, beyond it, I sought the memory of translating myself across the continuum.

I had done it before, although I was not certain that one of the Creators had not helped me without my being aware of it. Now I wanted to do it completely on my own. Could I?

The secret was to tap enough energy to create a warp in spacetime. Energy is subject to the control of a conscious mind just as matter is. And the universe teems with energy. Stars radiate their energy throughout spacetime, drenching the continuum with their bounty. Even as I lay sprawled on this tree branch in the dark of night, countless trillions of neutrinos and cosmic particles were flowing through my body, filling the night, swarming through the world around me.

I used that energy. Focusing it with my mind the way a lens focuses light, I bent that energy to my will. Once again I felt that moment of cryogenic cold, that instant of nothingness that marked the transition across the awful gulfs of the continuum.

I opened my eyes.

The city of the Creators stood all around me, magnificent temples and monuments from all the ages of humankind. Empty and silent, abandoned.

The energy dome shimmered above, tingeing the clear blue sky with a slight golden cast. Elsewhere on this tranquil Earth human beings very much like me lived their normal lives of joy and sorrow, work and love. But the Creators had fled.

For hours I walked through their city, their monument to themselves. Marble and bronze, gold and stainless steel, glass and glossy wood. To what avail? This world of theirs went along without them, but for how long? How long would the continuum maintain its stability with Set still alive and the Creators scattered among the stars? For how long could the human race exist with its implacable enemy still working to destroy all humanity?

I found myself in the main square once again, facing the Parthenon and its heroic statue of Athena. My Anya’s face looked down at me, a Greek battle helmet tilted back on her head, a great spear gripped in one slender hand.

I lifted my arms to the thirty-foot-tall statue rising before me.

“How can I win, all alone?” I asked the unfeeling marble. “What can I do, by myself?”

The statue stirred. Its marble seemed to glow from within and take on the tones of living flesh. Its painted eyes became live, grave gray eyes that looked down on me solemnly. Its lips moved and the melodious voice I knew so well spoke to me.

“You are not alone, my love.”

“Anya!”

“I am with you always, even if I cannot help you directly.”

The memory of her abandonment welled up in me. “You deserted me once.”

The living statue’s face almost seemed to cry. “I am ashamed of what I did, Orion.”

I heard myself reply, “You had no alternative. I know that. I understand it. My life was unimportant compared to the survival of the Creators. Still, it hurts worse than Set’s fires.”

Anya answered, “No such noble motives moved me. I was filled with the terror of death. Like any mortal human, I fled with my life and left the man I love most in all the universes to the mercies of the cruelest of the cruel.”

“I would have done the same,” I said.

She smiled sadly. “No, Orion. You would have died protecting me. You have given your life many times, but even faced with final extinction you would have tried to shield me with your own life.”