Ben Bova: Orion in the Dying Time

To Lester del Rey, mentor

“An intelligence knowing, at a given instance of time, all forces acting in nature, as well as the momentary position of all things of which the universe consists, would be able to comprehend the motions of the largest bodies of the world and those of the lightest atoms in one single formula, provided his intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to him nothing would be uncertain, both past and future would be present in his eyes.”

What if there were more than one such person?

With Anya beside me, I walked out of the ancient temple into the warming sunshine of a new day. All around us a lush green garden grew: flowering shrubs and bountiful fruit trees as far as the eye could see.

Slowly we walked along the bank of the river, the mighty Nile , flowing steadily through all the eons.

“Where in time are we?” I asked.

“The pyramids have not been started yet. The land that will someday be called the Sahara is still a wide grassland teeming with game. Bands of hunting people roam across it freely.”

“And this garden? It looks like Eden .”

She smiled at me. “Hardly that. It is the home of the creature whose statue stood on the altar.”

I glanced back at the little stone temple. It was a simple building, blocks of stone fitted atop one another, with a flat wooden slat roof.

“Someday the Egyptians will worship him as a powerful and dangerous god,” Anya told me. “They will call him Set.”

“He is one of the Creators?”

“No,” she said. “Not one of us. He is an enemy: one of those who seek to twist the continuum to their own purposes.”

“As the Golden One does,” I said.

She gave me a stern look. “The Golden One, power mad as he is, at least works for the human race.”

“He created the human race, he claims.”

“He had help,” she replied, allowing a small smile to dimple her cheeks.

“But this other creature… Set, the one with the lizard’s face?”

Her smile vanished. “He comes from a distant world, Orion, and he seeks to eliminate us from the continuum.”

“Then why are we here, in this time and place?”

“To find him and destroy him, my love,” said Anya. “You and I together, Hunter and Warrior, through all spacetime.”

I looked into her glowing eyes and realized that this was my destiny. I am Orion the Hunter. And with this huntress, that warrior goddess, beside me, all the universes were my hunting grounds.

Anya pulled off her glittering silvery robe and flung it to the grassy ground. Beneath it she wore a metallic suit of the kind I vaguely remembered from another time, long ages ago. It fit her skintight, from the tops of her silver boots to the high collar that circled her neck. She was a dazzling goddess with long dark hair that tumbled past her shoulders and fathomless gray eyes that held all of time in them.

I wore nothing but the leather kilt and vest from my previous existence in ancient Egypt. The wound that had killed me then had disappeared from my chest. Strapped to my right thigh, beneath the kilt, was the dagger that I had worn in that other time. A pair of rope sandals was my only other possession.

Anya said, “Come, Orion, we must hurry away from this place.”

I loved her as eternally and completely as any man has ever worshiped a woman. I had died many deaths for her sake, and she had defied her fellow Creators to be with me time and again, in every era to which they had sent me. Death could not part us. Nor time nor space.

I took her hand in mine and we headed off along a wide avenue between the heavily laden trees.

For what seemed like hours, Anya and I walked through the garden, away from the bank of the ageless Nile flowing patiently through this land that would one day be called Egypt. The sun rose high but the day remained deliciously cool, the air clean and crisp as a temperate springtime afternoon. Cottony clumps of cumulus clouds dotted the deeply blue sky. A refreshing breeze blew toward us from what would one day be the pitiless oven of the Sahara.

Despite her denying it, the garden did remind me of the legends I had heard of Eden. On both sides of us row upon row of trees marched as far as the eye could see, yet no two were the same. Fruits of all kinds hung heavy on their boughs: figs, olives, plums, pomegranates, even apples. High above them all swayed stately palms, heavy with coconuts. Shrubs were set out in carefully planned beds between the trees, each of them flowering so profusely that the entire park was ablaze with color.

Yet not another soul was in sight. Between the trees and shrubbery the grass was clipped to such a uniformly precise height that it almost seemed artificial. No insects buzzed. No birds flitted among the greenery.

“Where are we going?” I asked Anya.

“Away from here,” she replied, “as quickly as we can.”

I reached toward a bush that bore luscious-looking mangoes. Anya grabbed at my hand.

“No!”

“But I’m hungry.”

“It will be better to wait until we are clear of this park. Otherwise…” She glanced back over her shoulder.

“Otherwise an angel will appear with a flaming sword?” I teased.

Anya was totally serious. “Orion, this park is a botanical experimental station for the creature whose statue we saw in the temple.”

“The one called Set?”

She nodded. “We are not ready to meet him. We are completely unarmed, unprepared.”

“But what harm would it be to eat some of his fruit? We could still hurry along as we ate.”

Almost smiling, Anya said, “He is very sensitive about his plants. Somehow he knows when someone touches them.”

“And?”

“And he kills them.”

“He doesn’t drive them into the outer darkness, to earn their bread by the sweat of their brows?” I noticed that even though my tone was bantering, we were walking faster than before.

“No. He kills them. Finally and eternally.”

I had died many times, yet the Creators had always revived me to serve them again in another time, another place. Still I feared death, the agony of it, the separation and loss that it brought. And a new tendril of fear flickered along my nerves: Anya was afraid. One of the Creators, a veritable goddess who could move through eons of time as easily as I was walking along this garden path—she was obviously afraid of the reptilian entity whose statue had adorned the temple by the bank of the Nile.

I closed my eyes briefly to picture that statue more clearly. At first I had thought it was a representation of a man wearing a totem mask: the body was human, the face almost like a crocodile’s. But now as I scanned my memory of it I saw that this first impression had been overly simple.

The body was humanoid, true enough. It stood on two legs and had two arms. But the feet were claws with three toes ending in sharply hooked talons. The hands had two long scaly-looking fingers with an opposed thumb for the third digit, all of them clawed. The hips and shoulders connected in nonhuman ways.

And the face. It was the face of a reptile unlike anything I had seen before: a snout filled with serrated teeth for tearing flesh; eyes set forward in the skull for binocular vision; bony projections just above the eyes; a domed cranium that housed a brain large enough to be fully intelligent.