by Ben Bova
“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.
The other Creators grouped themselves around him as he faced the Golden One and Anya. Clearly, Zeus was their spokesman, if not their leader.
“Why have you called us here, Aten?”
“And demanded that we assume human form?” red-haired Ares grumbled.
Aten, the Golden One, replied, “Most of you know my creature Orion. He has apparently been sent here by someone to deliver a message to all of us.”
Zeus turned to me. “What is your message, Orion?”
Every instinct in me screamed at me to warn them, to tell them to flee because I had been sent here to destroy them and all their works. Yet I wanted to break free of the force field that surrounded me and smash in their faces, tear their flesh, rend them limb from limb. Agonized, my mind filling with horror, I stood there mutely as the battle raged inside me between my inbuilt reflex to serve the Creators and the burning hatred for them that was as much my own as Set’s.
“Orion!” commanded the Golden One sharply. “Tell us what you have to say. Now!”
He himself had built the instinct to obey him into my mind, burned that obligatory response through my synapses, hard-wired my brain for obedience. Yet I felt Set’s overpowering presence counterbalancing that instinct, driving me toward murder. My body was a battlefield where they raged and fought for control, leaving me unable to choose between them, unable to move, unable even to speak.
Zeus made a sardonic smile. “Your toy is out of order, Aten. You’ve called us here for nothing.”
They all laughed. The sneering, self-important, callous, heartless, overbearing would-be gods and goddesses laughed, completely unaware that death was inches away from them, totally uncaring and insensitive to the agony I was going through. I was suffering the pains of hell. For what? For them!
Annoyed, the Golden One grumbled, “There’s always been something wrong with this one. I suppose I’ll have to dispose of it and make a better one.”
Anya looked dismayed but said nothing. The Creators began to turn their backs on me and walk away, many of them still laughing. I hated them all.
“I bring you a message,” I said, with Set’s powerful booming voice.
They stopped and turned back to stare at me.
“I bring you a message of death.”
The sky began to darken. No clouds; the open sky overhead swiftly changed from summer blue to deep violet and finally to impermeable black. I realized that Set had tapped into the generators that powered the dome shield over the city and perverted all the energy that fed it into turning the dome opaque. At a stroke he had trapped the Creators in their own city and cut them off from the energy they required to change their form from human back into glowing spheres of pure energy.
The square was bathed in an eerie red glow; the absolute blackness of the dome seemed to be tightening, drawing closer like the net of a snare or a hangman’s noose.
“You are trapped here,” Set’s voice bellowed from my lips. “Meet your death!”
The flickering blue force field around me winked off, the energy drawn into my own body. It felt like hot knives carving me for an instant, but then I was stronger than ever. And I was free—free to slaughter them all.
I stepped out from the spot where I had been imprisoned, stepped directly toward the Golden One, my hands twitching like the claws of a predatory reptile. He seemed totally unafraid of me, one brow cocked slightly in that smug, sneering manner of his.
“Stop, Orion. I command you to stop.”
As if I had been plunged into a smothering, suffocating pool of quicksand, my steps slowed, faltered. It was like trying to move through wet concrete. Then I felt a new surge of strength boil up within me like the hot wind of hell rising from the depths of the earth. I lunged through the invisible barrier grinning as I saw the Golden One’s face go from smug superiority to sudden astonished fright.
Everything slowed down around me as my senses shifted into hyperdrive. I saw beads of sweat breaking out on the broad smooth brow of the Golden One, saw Zeus’s eyes wide and round with unaccustomed fear, powerful Ares stumbling backward away from me, Aphrodite and Hera turning to run away from me, their beautiful robes billowing, the other Creators gaping, desperate, unable to change sh
ape and escape me.
My hands reached out, clawlike, for the Golden One’s throat.
“Orion, no!” Anya shouted. In the slow-motion world of my hyperdrive state her voice sounded like the long reverberating peal of a distant bell.
I turned toward her as the Golden One backed away from me.
“Please, Orion!” Anya begged. “Please!”
I stopped, staring at her lovely tormented face. In those fathomless silver-gray eyes I saw no fear of me at all. I knew I had to kill her, kill them all. I loved her still, yet the memory of her betrayal burned my soul like a branding iron. Had that love been built into me, too, like my other instincts? Was it her way to control me?
I stood in the middle of a triangle, pulled three different ways at once. The Golden One first; death to my creator, the one who made me to endure pain and sorrow that he would not face himself. My hands stretched again for his throat, even while he backpedaled in dreamlike slow motion. The other Creators were scattering, although the square was completely blocked now by the energy screen that Set had turned into a black impassable barrier.
Anya was reaching toward me, her simple words enough to freeze me in my tracks. Yet within me Set was urging me on with all the whips and scourges at his power.
Love. Hate. Obedience. Revenge. I was being torn apart by the forces that they wielded over me. Time hung suspended. The Golden One, his face a rictus of fury and fear, had focused his mind on me like a powerful laser beam, exerting every joule of energy he could command to bend me to his will The more his mighty power blazed at me, the more Set poured his ferocious energy into me, draining the generators that powered the city, driving me to overcome the Golden One’s conditioning, pushing me to grasp his throat in my hands and crush it.
Between them they were tearing me apart. It was like being riddled in a crossfire between two maddened armies, like being stretched into a bloody ribbon of flayed flesh on a sadistic torturer’s rack.
Anya stood to one side of me, her eyes pleading, her lips open in a cry that I could no longer hear.
Obey me! commanded the Golden One inside my head.
Obey me! Set thundered at me silently.
Each of them was pouring more and more of his energy into me, like a pair of enormous lasers focused on a helpless naked target.
“Use their energy!” Anya’s voice reached me. “Absorb their energy and use it for yourself!”
From the deepest recesses of my soul came an echoing response, a newly awakened voice, tortured, tormented, filled with anguish. What about me? it cried. What about Orion? Me, myself. Must I be a weapon of deliberate genocide? Must I forever be a toy, a puppet manipulated by my creator or by his ultimate enemy? When will Orion be free, be totally and completely human?
“NEVER!” I roared.
I could feel Set’s surprise and the Golden One’s shock. I could sense Anya breathlessly watching to see what I would do.
All that energy pouring into me. All that power: the overwhelming brilliance of the Golden One, the hell-hot fury of Set. All focused on me. While Anya watched, bright-eyed.
“Never!” I shouted again. “I will never obey either one of you again! I free myself of you both! Now!”
I spread my arms and felt as if binding chains had snapped and been thrown off.
“I’m free of you both!” I snarled at them: the Golden One standing stunned before me, Set raging within my own skull. “You can both go to hell!”
The Golden One’s mouth hung open. Anya’s expectant expression began to turn into a smile and she started to step toward me.
But Set’s furious voice within me seethed, “No, traitorous ape. Only you shall go to hell.”
Chapter 30
Abruptly I was spinning, falling, flailing through empty space, stars whirling around me dizzyingly. The square, the city, the earth were gone. I was alone in the fierce cold of the void between worlds.
Not totally alone. I could feel Set’s furious hatred raging, even though he no longer controlled me from within.
I laughed soundlessly in the black vacuum. “You can punish my body,” I told Set mentally, “but you no longer control it. You can send me to your hell but you can’t make me do your work.”
I sensed him howling with wrath. The stars themselves seemed to shudder with the violence of his anger.
“Orion!” I heard Anya’s mind calling to me, like a silver bell in the wilderness, like a cool clear stream on a hot summer’s day.
I opened my mind to her. Everything that I had experienced, all my knowledge of Set and his plans, I transmitted to her in the flash of a microsecond. I felt her mind take in the new information, saw in my own inner eye the shocked expression on her face as she realized how narrowly she and the other Creators had escaped final death.
“You saved us!”
“Saved you,” I corrected. “I don’t care about the others.”
“Yet I… you thought that I had betrayed you.”
“You did betray me.”
“And still you saved me?”
“I love you,” I replied simply. It was the truth. I loved her completely and eternally. I knew now that it was my own heart’s choice, not some reflex built into me by the Golden One, not some control that Anya wielded over my mind. I was free of all of them and I knew that I loved her no matter what she had done.
“Orion, we’re trying to reach you, to bring you back.”
“Trying to save me?”
“Yes!”
I almost laughed there in the absolute cold of deep space. The stars were still pinwheeling around me, as if I were in the center of an immense kaleidoscope. But I saw now that one particular star was not spinning across the blackness of the void. It remained rock still, the exact center of my whirling universe. That blood red star called Sheol. It seethed and boiled and reached out for me.
Of course. Set’s hell. He was plunging me into the center of his dying star, destroying me so completely that not even the atoms of my body would remain intact.
Anya realized what he was doing as immediately as I did.
“We’re working to pull you back,” she told me, her voice frantic.
“No!” I commanded. “Send me straight into the star. Pour all the energy the Creators can command into me and let me plunge into Sheol’s rotting heart.”
In that awful endless moment, suspended in the infinite void between worlds while time itself hung suspended, I realized what I must do. I made my choice, freely, of my own will.
For my link with Anya was two-way. What she knew, I knew. I saw that she did love me as truly as a goddess can love a mortal. And more. I saw how I could destroy Set and his entire world, his very star, and end his threat to her and the other Creators. I didn’t care particularly about them, and I still loathed the self-styled Golden One. But I would end Set’s threat to Anya once and for all, no matter what it cost.
She saw what I wanted to do. “No! You’ll be destroyed! We won’t be able to recover you!”
“What difference does that make? Do it!”
Love and hate. The twin driving forces of our manic passionate hot-blooded species. I loved Anya. Despite her betrayal I loved her. I knew it was impossible, that despite the few snatches of happiness we had stolen there was no way that we could be together forever. Better to make an end of it, to give up this life of pain and suffering, to give her the gift of life with my final death.
And I hated Set. He had humiliated me, tortured my body and my mind, reduced me to a slavish automaton. As a man, as a human being, I hated him with all the roaring fury my kind is capable of. Through the eons, across the gulfs between our worlds and our species, for all of spacetime I hated him. My death would demolish his hopes forever, and in my blood-hot rage I knew that death was a small price to pay if it meant death to him and all his kind.
With an effort of my own free will I stopped my body’s spinning and arrowed straight toward simmering red Sheol. Not only will I die, I thought. Not only will Set a
nd his loathsome kindred die. His world will die. His star will die as well. I will destroy all of them.
Too late Set realized he had lost control of my body. I felt his shocked surprise, his desperate panic.
“Everything you have told me has been a lie,” I said to him mentally. “Now I tell you one eternal truth. Your world ends. Now.”
All the energies that the Creators could generate from thousands of stars through all the ages of the continuum were being trained on me. My body became the focal point of such power as to tear worlds apart, annihilate whole stars, rip open the very fabric of spacetime itself.
I sped toward the seething mass of blood red Sheol, no longer a human body but a spear of blinding white-hot energy from across the continuum aiming at the decaying heart of the dying star. Tendrils of fiery plasma snaked up toward me. Arches of glowing ionized gas appeared and streamed above the star’s surface like bridges of living, burning souls. Disembodied, I still saw the churning surface of the star, bubbling and frothing like some immense witch’s caldron. Magnetic fields strong enough to twist solid steel into taffy ribbons clutched at me. Vicious flares heaved fountains of lethal radiation as if Sheol were trying to protect itself from me.
To no avail.
I plunged into that maelstrom of tortured plasma, seeking its dense core where atomic nuclei were fusing together to create the titanic energy that powered this star. With grim pleasure I realized that Sheol was truly dying already, its nuclear fires simmering, faltering, making the entire star shudder as it wavered between stability and explosion.
“I will help you to die,” I said to the star. “I will put an end to your agony.”
Through layer after layer of thickening plasma I dove, straight to Sheol’s heart, where the subatomic particles were packed more densely than any metal could ever be. Down and down into the depths of hell where not even atoms could exist and remain whole, deeper still I beat my way past wave after wave of pure gamma energy and pulses of neutrinos, down to the hardening core of the star where heavy nuclei were creating temperatures and pressures that they themselves could no longer withstand.
