by Ben Bova
Two of them yanked me roughly to my feet. My head swam momentarily, but I swiftly adjusted the blood-pressure levels and the giddy feeling subsided. Another of the humanoids grabbed Anya by the hair and pulled her up from her knees. She screamed. I pulled away from the pair near me and karate-kicked the scaly demon under his pointed chin. His head snapped back so hard I heard vertebrae cracking. He fell over backward and lay still.
I turned to face the others, my hands tightly tied behind my back. Anya stood grim-faced, pale, with Juno trembling at her feet.
One of the humanoids went over to its felled companion, knelt over the body, and briefly examined it. Then it looked up at me. I had no way of reading what was going through the mind behind that expressionless lizard’s face. Its red eyes stared at me unblinking for a long moment, then it rose and pointed down the slope of the rocky ground in the general direction of the lake where the castle waited.
We began walking. Two of the humanoids took up the van, ahead of us; the other three followed behind. None of them touched either of us again.
“How do they communicate?” Anya wondered aloud.
“Some form of telepathy, obviously,” I replied. Then: “Do you think they can understand what we say?”
She tried to shrug despite her bonds. “I’m not certain that they can even hear us. I don’t think their senses are the same as ours.”
“They see deeper into the red end of the spectrum than we do,” I recalled from our time inside Set’s dimly lit fortress in the Neolithic.
“Some reptiles can’t hear anything at all.”
I glanced over my shoulder at the trio pacing along behind us. “I have the feeling that they understand us very well. They seemed to grasp the idea that I would fight to protect you from harm.”
“You made that quite clear!”
“Yes, I know, but the important thing is that they understood that I would not try to fight them if they did not hurt you.”
We marched along in silence for a while. Then I remembered to ask, “What happened in the valley after they knocked me out?”
“Most of the dinosaurs that were still alive got away,” Anya said, her lips sketching a bittersweet smile. “The humanoids had to give up their control of the tyrannosaurs to deal with you…”
I felt my face redden. “And I was easy prey for them, concentrating on the tyrannosaur I was controlling.”
“But all the other tyrannosaurs stopped attacking and started eating the instant they let up their controls.”
I thought about the overwhelming exhilaration I had felt while I controlled the tyrannosaur. I wasn’t merely directing the beast from afar, I was the tyrant lizard, powerful, terrifying, glorying in my strength and bloodlust. The seduction of the senses had been overpowering. If ever I had to take control of such a monster again, I would have to be on my guard: it was too easy to become the monster and forget everything else.
The humanoids marched us back the way we had come until night had fallen and the world was completely dark. Heavy clouds had been building up through the late afternoon and evening, and there were no stars to be seen. The dark wind was chill, and I could smell rain coming.
We stopped on the hummocky ground between two shallow ponds. The humanoids helped Anya and me to sitting positions, but did not loosen our bonds in the slightest. The five of them squatted in a semicircle facing us. Juno, who had been nibbling on just about anything green all day long, wormed her growing body between Anya and me and promptly went to sleep.
“We’re hungry,” I said to the blank-faced humanoids.
“And cold,” said Anya.
No reaction from them at all. They were not hungry, that was clear. No telling how long they could go without food. Either they never stopped to consider that we mammals needed meals more frequently, or—more likely—they didn’t care. Or—more likely still—they realized that hunger weakened us and reduced the chances of our trying to fight them or escape.
The rain held off until just after dawn. We slogged through ankle-deep mud, slipping and falling continuously, unable to stop our falls with our hands tied behind our backs. The humanoids always helped us to our feet, not gently, but not roughly either. Two of them always helped Anya while the other three stood between me and them.
It rained off and on all the time we trekked back to the castle in the lake. We finally arrived on a steaming afternoon, wet, hungry and exhausted.
The castle stood glistening in the afternoon sun, its massive walls and high-flung towers wetly gleaming. High overhead, so bright it was easily visible in the washed-blue sky, the bloodred star glowered down at us.
Chapter 21
We were led up the long narrow ramp toward the single gate in the castle’s wide high walls. The gate was barely wide enough for two of the slim humanoids to pass through side by side, but it was tall, at least twenty feet high. Sharp spikes ran all around its sides and arched top, like pointed teeth made of gleaming metal.
As we stepped out of the hot sunshine into the dimly lit shadows of the castle I felt the subtle vibrating hum of powerful machinery. The air inside the castle was even warmer than the steaming afternoon outside, an intense heat that flowed over me like a stifling wave, squeezing perspiration from every pore, drenching us with soul-draining fatigue.
Our quintet of captors turned us over to four other humanoids, slightly larger but otherwise so identical to the others that I could not tell them apart. They might have been cloned from the same original cell, they looked so much alike.
These new guards undid our bonds, and for the first time in days we could move our stiffened arms, flex our cramped fingers. Ordinary humans might have been permanently paralyzed, their arms atrophied, their hands gangrenous from lack of blood circulation. I had been able to force blood past the painfully tight ropes by consciously redirecting the flow to deeper arteries. Anya had done the same. Still, it would be a long time before the marks of our bonds left our flesh.
The first thing Anya did after flexing her numbed fingers was to pet little Juno, who hissed with pleasure at her attention. I almost felt jealous.
We were put in a cell the size of a dormitory room, all three of us. It was absolutely bare, not even a bit of straw to cover the hard seamless floor. The entire castle seemed to be made of some sort of plastic, just as Set’s fortress in the Neolithic had been.
The walls looked absolutely seamless to me, yet a panel slid back abruptly to reveal a tray of food: meat steaming from the spit, cooked vegetables, flagons of water, and even a pile of greens for Juno.
We ate greedily, although I couldn’t help thinking of the last meal a condemned man is given.
“What do we do now?” I asked Anya, wiping scraps of roasted meat from my chin with the back of my hand.
She glanced around at our bleak prison cell. “Can you feel that energy vibrating?”
I nodded. “Set must power everything here with the core tap.”
“That’s what we must reach,” Anya said firmly. “And destroy.”
“Easier said than done.”
She regarded me with her grave, gray eyes. “It must be done, Orion. The existence of the human race, the whole continuum, depends on it being done.”
“Then the first step,” I said, with a sigh of resignation, “is to get out of this cell. Any ideas?”
As if in answer, the metal door slid back to reveal another pair of humanoid guards. Or perhaps two from the quartet that had ushered us into the cell in the first place, I could not tell.
They beckoned to us with taloned fingers and we went meekly out into the corridor, Juno clumping warily behind us.
The corridor was hot and dim, the overhead lights so deeply red that I felt certain most of their energy was emitted in the infrared, invisible to my eyes but apparently clear and bright to the reptiles. I closed my eyes and sought to make contact with Juno as we walked. Sure enough, through the duckbill’s vision the corridor was brilliantly lit, and the temperature was wonderfull
y comfortable.
The corridor slanted downward. Not steeply, but a definite downward slope. As I walked along, seeing our surroundings through Juno’s eyes, I realized that the walls were not blank at all. They were decorated with lively mosaics showing scenes of these graceful humanoid reptiles in beautiful glades and parks, in lovingly cultivated gardens, standing at the sea’s frothing edge or atop rugged mountains.
I studied the artworks as we marched down the corridor. There was never more than one humanoid in any picture, although many of the scenes showed other reptiles, some bipedal but most of them four-legged. None of the humanoids wore any kind of clothing or carried anything resembling a tool or a weapon. Not even a belt or a pouch of any sort.
Then, with a sudden startling chill, I realized that every picture showed a sun in the sky that was deep red, not yellow, and so big that it often covered a quarter of the sky. There were even a few scenes in which a second sun appeared, small and yellow and distant.
These were pictures of a world that was not Earth. The red star they showed was the darkly crimson star that I had seen night after night, the evil-looking blood red star that was so bright I could see it in broad daylight, the star that was hovering above the castle even at this very moment.
I was about to tell Anya, but our guards stopped us at an ornately carved door, so huge that a dozen men could have marched through it at once. I reached out to touch it. It looked like dark wood, ebony perhaps, but it felt like cold lifeless plastic. Strange, I thought, that it can feel cold in such an overheated atmosphere.
The door split in two and swung open silently, smoothly. Without being told or prodded, Anya and I automatically stepped into an immense high-vaulted chamber. Juno trotted between us.
Using my own vision once more, I could barely see the top of the ribbed, steeply arched ceiling. The lighting was dim, the air oppressively hot, like standing in front of an open oven on a midsummer’s afternoon.
Set reclined on a backless couch atop a platform raised three high steps above the floor. There were no statues of him here, no human slaves to worship him and try to placate him. Instead, rows of dully burning torches flanked Set’s throne on either side, their flames licking slowly against the gloom, seeming to shed darkness rather than light.
We walked slowly toward that jet black throne and the devilish figure sitting upon it. Anya’s face was grim, her lips pressed into a tight bloodless line, her fists clenched at her sides. The welts of the ropes that had bound her showed angry purple against her alabaster skin.
Once again I felt the fury and implacable hatred that cascaded from Set like molten lava pouring down the cone of an erupting volcano. And once again I felt the answering fury and hatred in my own soul, burning inside me, rising to a crescendo as we approached his throne. Here was evil incarnate, the eternal enemy, and my unalterable task was to strike him down and kill him.
And once again I felt Set take control of my body, force me to stop a half-dozen paces before his dais, paralyze my limbs so that I could not leap upon him and tear the heart from his chest.
Anya stood beside me as tensely as I. She felt Set’s smothering mental embrace, too, and was struggling to break through it. Perhaps the two of us, working in unison, could overcome his fiendish power. Perhaps I could distract him in some way. Even if only momentarily, a moment might be enough.
“You are more resourceful than I had thought,” his voice seethed in my mind.
“And more knowledgeable,” I snapped.
His slitted red eyes glittered at me. “More knowledgeable? How so?”
“I know that you are not of this Earth. You come from the world that circles the red star, the planet that Kraal called the Punisher.”
His pointed chin dropped a centimeter toward his massive scaled chest. It might have been a nod of acknowledgment, or merely an unconscious gesture as he thought over my words.
“The star is called Sheol,” he replied mentally. “And my world is its only planet, Shaydan.”
“In my original time,” I said, “there is only one sun in the sky, and your star does not exist.”
Now Set did nod. “I know, my apish enemy. But your original time, your entire continuum, will be destroyed soon enough. You and your kind will disappear. Sheol and Shaydan will be saved.”
Anya spoke. “They have already been destroyed. What you hope to achieve is beyond hope. You have been defeated, you simply don’t understand it yet.”
Set’s lipless mouth pulled back to reveal his pointed teeth. “Don’t try to play your games with me, Creatress. I know full well that the continuums are not linear. There is a nexus here at this point in spacetime. I am here to see that you and your kind are swept away.”
“Reptiles replacing human beings?” I challenged. “That can never be.”
His amusement turned to acid. “So certain of your superiority, are you? Babbling mammal, the continuum in which you reign supreme on this planet is so weak that your Creators must constantly struggle to preserve it. Mammals are not strong enough to dominate spacetime for long, they are always swept away by truly superior creatures.”
“Such as yourself?” I tried to say it with a sneer and only half succeeded.
“Such as myself,” Set replied. “Frenetic mammals, running in circles, chattering and babbling always, your hot blood is your undoing. You must eat so much that you destroy the beasts and fields that feed you. You breed so furiously that you infest the world with your kind, ruining not merely the land but the seas and the very air you breathe as well. You are vermin, and the world is well rid of you.”
“And you are better?”
“We have no need to keep our blood heated. We do not need to slaughter whole species of beasts for our stomachs. We do not overbreed. And we do not constantly make those noises that you call intelligent communication! That is why we are better, stronger, more fit to survive than you over-specialized jabbering apes. That is why we will survive and you will not.”
“You’ll survive by killing the dinosaurs and planting your own seed here?” I asked.
I sensed amusement from him. “So…” he answered slowly, “the hairless ape is not so knowledgeable after all.”
Sensing my confusion, Set went on: “The dinosaurs are mine to do with as I please. I created them. I brought my—seed, as you put it—to this planet nearly two hundred million of your years ago, when there was nothing on this land but a few toads and salamanders, fugitives from the seas.”
Set’s voice rose in my mind, took on a depth and power I had not experienced before. “I scrubbed this miserable planet clean to make room for my creations, the only kind of animal that could survive completely on dry land. I wiped out species by the thousands to prepare this world for my offspring.”
“You created the dinosaurs?” I heard an astonished voice pipe weakly. My own.
“They are the consequences of my work from two hundred million years before this time. The fruits of my genius.”
“But you went too far,” Anya said. “The dinosaurs have been too successful.”
He shifted his slitted gaze toward her. “They have done well. But now their time is at an end. This planet must be prepared for my true offspring.”
“The humanoids,” I said.
“The children of Shaydan. I have prepared this world for them.”
“Killer!” Anya spat. “Destroyer! Blunderer!”
I could feel his contempt for her. And a cold amusement at her words. “I kill to prepare the way for my own kind. I destroy life on a planetwide scale to make room for my own life. I do not blunder.”
“You do!” Anya accused. “You blundered two hundred million years ago. Now you must destroy your own creations because they have done too well. You blundered sixty-five million years from now, because the human race will rise up against you and your kind. You will be their symbol of unrelenting evil. They will be against you forever.”
“They will cease to exist,” Set replied calmly, “once
my work here is finished. And you will cease to exist much sooner than that.”
All through this conversation, with Anya and I speaking and Set answering in silent mental projections, I strained to break through his control of my body. I knew Anya was doing the same. But no matter how hard we tried, we could not move our limbs. Even Juno, cowering by Anya’s feet, seemed unable to move.
“You’ll never be able to wipe out the dinosaurs,” I said. “We foiled your attempt to slaughter the duckbills and—”
He actually hissed at me. I sensed it was a form of laughter. “What did you accomplish, oversized monkey? On one particular day you helped a few hundred dinosaurs escape the death I had planned for them. They will meet that death on another day, perhaps next week, perhaps ten thousand years from now. I have all of time to work in, yammering ape. I created the dinosaurs and I will destroy them—at my leisure.”
With that, he beckoned to Juno. Our little duckbill seemed reluctant to go toward him, yet helpless to resist. Grudgingly, as if being pulled by an invisible leash, Juno plodded to the dais and lumbered up its three steps to the clawed feet of Set.
Anya flared: “Don’t!”
I strained with every atom of my being to break free of Set’s mental bonds. As I struggled I watched with horrified eyes as Set picked up Juno like a weightless toy. The baby duckbill squirmed, frightened, but could no more escape Set’s grasp than I could break free.
“Don’t!” Anya screamed again.
Set lifted Juno’s head up and sank his teeth into her soft unprotected throat. Blood gushed over him. The baby dinosaur gave a single piercing, whistling shriek that ended in a bubbling of blood. Its yellow eyes faded, its clumsy legs went limp.
I sensed Set’s smirking, smug feeling of triumph and power. He let Juno’s dead body, still twitching, fall to his feet and laughed mentally at Anya’s anguish.
And dropped his guard just a fraction. Enough for me to burst loose and hurl myself up the dais, my fingers reaching for Set’s red-scaled throat.
