Ben Bova: Orion Among the Stars

“That’s not true, Orion,” said green-eyed Aphrodite. “We care for our creatures.”

I flung Aten to the ground. What was the point of killing him? They would simply make another.

But a murderous anger was surging through me. “Gods, you call yourselves? Liars! Imposters! Murderers! You’re nothing but a pack of ravening madmen.”

“You go too far,” Hera said. I remembered when she styled herself Olympias, the mother of Alexander the Great, the woman who engineered the assassination of her husband, Philip, king of Macedon.

Aten glared up at me with a fury in his eyes to match my own. “If you want to find your precious Anya,” he croaked, rubbing at his throat, “you will have to settle with us first.”

“What is there to settle?” I demanded. “The war is over—unless you godly murderers start it up again.”

“The war is over,” Hermes agreed, his gray eyes flicking to Zeus before he added, “We have settled our own differences; there’s no need for further fighting among the humans.”

I looked at Hermes, then at Zeus and Hera and all the others. My gaze finally returned to Aten, climbing back to his feet, glowering pure hatred at me.

“You must speak to the Old Ones for us,” he said, his voice already healing from my throttling.

“Must I?”

Zeus said, “It is important that we establish friendly relations with them. Vital.”

“Why?”

“The ultimate crisis, Orion!” said Hermes urgently. “It’s here! There’s no time to waste.”

“You can travel across time and yet you say you have no time to waste? I don’t understand.”

The Golden One almost put on his old smugly superior sneer, but Zeus spoke before he could. “We are facing a crisis that may be beyond our power to solve. No matter how we move across the continuum, all the time tracks, all the geodesies are being warped beyond control.”

I recalled the Old Ones telling me that every passage through the continuum creates disturbances, ripples in the fabric of space-time. Now, looking into the Creators’ minds as they stood before me, I saw what they feared. They had torn that fabric with their meddling in the continuum, their egomaniacal desire to alter space-time to suit their own desires. Now those ripples were cascading, threatening a turbulence that could rip apart the continuum itself and shatter the universe into mangled shards of chaos. All the timestreams would be torn apart by a tidal wave of discontinuity, causality would be wiped out as the quantum fluctuations of matter/energy dissolved time itself into an endless, meaningless nothingness.

“It is worse than you know, Orion,” raven-haired Istar said to me. “We are not the sole cause of the crisis.”

Before her words fully registered on my mind, Zeus said, “There are others who manipulate the continuum. Their exploitations of space-time have been even more severe than our own.”

“They must be stopped,” Hera said.

“Before the whole continuum breaks apart,” Hermes added.

I stared at them, trying to digest what they were telling me.

“It’s the truth, Orion,” said Aten, the Golden One, who had styled himself Apollo to the Greeks. “We are all in enormous danger; the entire universe is threatened.”

“That’s why you want the Old Ones,” I realized. “You need their help.”

Aten nodded. “Theirs, and the help of all the elder races in the galaxy.”

“And this war that you put humankind through for three generations? Where you destroyed whole planets? And you were ready to destroy the stars themselves—what was the real purpose of it?”

Aten’s golden eyes shifted away from mine momentarily, then he pulled himself to his full height and answered, “We disagreed about contacting the elder species, such as the Old Ones. I wanted to enlist their help; Anya and those of us who sided with her wanted to leave them alone.”

“And for that you put the human race through a century of war? And dragged in all those alien races, as well?”

Some of the old arrogance came back into his expression. “Anya can be very stubborn.”

“Where is she?”

“She refused to join us in this—” He hesitated, as if searching for a word. “—this peace conference.”

“She was dying.”

“I was trying to make her see things my way. It worked with the others.” He gestured carelessly toward Poseidon, Aphrodite, and several of the other Creators. “But, as I said, Anya is very stubborn.”

I suspected that there was more to it than he was telling me. “You say that she objected to contacting the Old Ones?”

“She thought we could face the ultimate crisis without their help.”

I turned to Aphrodite. “Is that true?”

“Yes,” she said. But as she spoke, her eyes were on the Golden One, not on me.

I looked at each of them in turn, finally resting my gaze on Zeus. “What’s the rest of it?” I asked him. “I know there must be more to this than I’ve been told so far.”

He stroked his neatly trimmed beard for a moment, almost smiled at me. “Accept what Aten has told you, Orion. Help us to gain the trust of the Old Ones.”

“How can I tell them to trust you when I myself can’t?”

Aten’s gold-flecked eyes blazed at me. “You’ll never be revived again, Orion. You’ve outlived your usefulness if you don’t help us get to the Old Ones.”

Staring into those angry eyes, I thought I finally understood what they had refused to tell me.

“You don’t want the Old Ones’ help. You want their power. You want to learn what they know so you can use it for your own ends. You talk about the ultimate crisis, but you still dream of dominating everyone and everything, you still aspire to mastering the entire continuum.”

Aten smiled coldly at me. “You’ve learned a lot since I first created you. Perhaps too much.”

“Stop this masquerade,” I demanded. “Show me the truth.”

His smile faded. The sky overhead darkened; clouds boiled up out of the sea and swept by. The other Creators aged and withered before my eyes: Aphrodite’s hair went dead white, her face wrinkled; Poseidon turned weak and trembling like a palsied old man; even Zeus and Hermes and Hera sank into decrepit gray-skinned wrecks.

Only Aten retained his youthful vigor. He even seemed stronger than before, glowing in the storm-clouded shadows like the sun.

And the Creators’ city itself crumbled before my eyes. The temples turned to dust, the columns cracked and toppled to the ground. The earth shook. Lightning split the sky.

“You think you have learned so much, Orion,” Aten sneered at me. “How little you know, creature!”

He waved one hand and the sky cleared as quickly as it had clouded. The other Creators had collapsed into heaps of rags and shriveling, decaying flesh in the midst of the ruined city.

And I recognized the ruins.

“Lunga!” I gasped. I could see past the rubble-strewn square, past the demolished stumps of towers and temples, out to the curving beach where the Skorpis base had been.

“Not Lunga,” said the Golden One. “That was a bit of a deception I played on you, Orion.”

I realized what he meant. “Earth. This is Earth. It never was Lunga, it was Earth all along.”

“Far in the future,” he said. “So far that the Moon has wandered away in its orbit until you can’t even recognize it unless I point it out to you.”

“Then the Old Ones are from Earth!”

“I doubt that. Perhaps from Neptune, originally, but not Earth. Some of them colonized Earth’s oceans, apparently, long eons ago.”

“Who destroyed your city?”

Smirking, “We did it ourselves. Another of our little family squabbles. No difference, we can build it up again when we’re ready.”