Orion in the Dying Time o-3

by Ben Bova

  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.”

  I had no response to that.

  “I took on human form as a whim, at first,” Anya confessed. “I found it exciting to share a life with you, to feel the blood thundering through my body, to love and laugh and fight—even to bleed. But always I knew that I could escape if it became necessary. I never faced the ultimate test, true death. When Set held me in his power, when I knew that I would die forever, that I would cease to be, I felt real fear for the first time. I panicked and ran. I abandoned you to save myself.”

  “I thought I hated you for that,” I told her. “And yet I love you still.”

  “I am not worthy of your love, Orion.”

  Smiling, I replied, “Yet you have my love, Anya. Now and forever. Throughout all time, all space, all the universes of the continuum, I love you.”

  It was true. I loved her and forgave her completely. I did this of my own will; no one was manipulating me. This was not a response that the Golden One had built into my conditioning. I truly loved Anya, despite what she had done. Perhaps, in a strange way, I loved her in part because she had experienced the ultimate fear that all humans must face. None of the other Creators had shown the courage even to try.

  “And I love you, my darling,” she said, her voice growing faint.

  “But where are you?”

  “The Creators have fled. When they saw that Set could attack them here, in our own sanctuary, they abandoned the Earth altogether and fled for their lives.”

  “Will you return to me?” I asked.

  “The other Creators fear Set so much! They thought that destroying Sheol would put an end to him, but now they realize he is firmly entrenched on Earth. Only you can stop him, Orion. The Creators are depending entirely on you.”

  “But I can’t do it alone!” I called to her diminishing voice. I could feel her presence fading, dwindling, the statue losing its living warmth, returning to pure marble.

  “You must use your own resources, Orion,” Anya’s voice whispered to me. “The Creators are too afraid to face him themselves.”

  “Will you return to me?” I repeated.

  “I will try.” Fainter still.

  “I need you!”

  “When you need me most, I will be there for you, Orion.” Her voice was softer than the sighing of an owl’s wing. “When you need me most, my love.”

  Chapter 34

  I was alone in the empty main square again, staring at the cold marble statue of Athena.

  Alone. The Creators expected me to face Set and his minions without them, without even their help.

  Feeling drained, exhausted, I went to the marble steps of the Parthenon and sat down, my head sunk in my hands. From across the square the giant golden Buddha smiled placidly at me.

  For the first time in all my lives I was facing a situation where my strength by itself was of practically no value. I had to use my mind, the powers of thought, to find a way to defeat Set. He overpowered me physically, that I knew from painful experience. He had an army of Shaydanians at his clawed fingertips and legions of dinosaurs under his control.

  I had my body and my wits. Nothing more.

  The Buddha statue seemed to be watching me, its smile friendly and benign.

  “It’s all well and good for you to preach desirelessness,” I grumbled aloud to the gold-leafed wood. “But I have desires. I have needs. And what I need most is an army—”

  My voice stopped in midsentence.

  I knew where there was an army. A victorious army that had swept from the Gobi Desert to the banks of the Danube River. The army of Subotai, greatest of the Mongol generals who conquered most of the world for Genghis Khan.

  Rising to my feet, I mentally gathered the energy to project myself into the thirteenth century of the Christian era, to the time when the Mongol Empire stretched from the coast of China to the plain of Hungary. I had been there before. I had assassinated their high khan, Ogotai, the son of Genghis Khan. A man who had befriended me.

  The city of the Creators disappeared as I passed through the cryogenic cold of a transition through spacetime. For an instant I was bodiless in the utterly black void of the continuum. Then I was standing on a cold windswept prairie, heavy gray storm clouds thickening overhead. There was not a tree in sight, but in the distance I could make out the ragged silhouette of a walled city against the darkening clouds.

  I headed for the city. It began to rain, a cold driving rain mixed with wet sleet. I pulled my lion pelt around my torso and shut down the peripheral circulation in my capillaries as much as I dared to keep my body heat inside me. Head down, shoulders forward, I bulled my way through the icy rain as the ground beneath my feet turned to slick gooey mud.

  The city was not burning, which me
ant either that Subotai’s army was besieging it or had already captured it. I thought the latter because I saw no signs of a camp, no great horse corrals or mounted warriors on picket patrols.

  It was fully dark by the time I reached the city gate. The wall was nothing more than a rough palisade of pointed logs dug into what was fast becoming a sea of mud. The gate was a crude affair of planks with spaces between them for shooting arrows through.

  It was open. A good sign. No fighting was going on or expected.

  A half-dozen Mongol warriors stood in the shelter of the gate’s overhanging parapet, a small fire crackling fitfully beneath a makeshift board that only partially protected it from the pelting rain.

  The Mongols were wiry, battle-scarred veterans. Yet without their ponies they looked small, almost as small as children. Deadly children, though. Each of them wore a chain-mail vest and a conical steel helmet. They carried curved sabers and daggers at their belts. I saw their inevitable bows and quivers full of arrows resting against the planks of the half-open gate.

  One of them stepped out to challenge me.

  “Halt!” he commanded. “Who are you and what’s your business here?”

  “I am Orion, a friend of the lord Subotai. I have come from Karakorum with a message from the High Khan.”

  The tough warrior’s eyes narrowed. “The nobles have elected a new High Khan to replace Ogotai?”

  I shook my head. “Not yet. Kubilai and the others are gathering at Karakorum to make their choice. My message concerns other matters.”

  He eyed my dripping lion’s pelt and I realized he had never seen a saber-tooth before. But he showed no other sign of curiosity as he demanded, “What proof have you of your words?”

  I made myself smile. “Send a messenger to Subotai and tell him that Orion is here to see him. Describe me to him and he will be glad to see me.”

  He looked me up and down. Among the Mongols my size was little short of phenomenal. And Subotai knew of my abilities as a fighter. I hoped that no word had reached him from Karakorum that I had murdered the High Khan Ogotai.

  The warrior dispatched one of his men to carry my message to Subotai, then grudgingly allowed me to share the meager warmth of their fire, out of the cold rain.

  “That’s a fine pelt you are wearing,” said one of the other guards.

  “I killed the beast a long time ago,” I replied.

  They told me that this city was the capital of the Muscovites. I remembered that Subotai had been eager to learn all that I could tell him about the black-earth region of the Ukraine, and the steppes of Russia that led into the plains of Poland and, beyond the Carpathian mountains, into Hungary and the heartland of Europe.

  By the time the messenger returned, my back felt as if it were coated with ice even though my face and hands were reasonably warm. A pair of other warriors came with the messenger, decked in shining armor cuirasses and polished helmets, jewels in their sword hilts. With hardly a word they took me through the mud streets of the city of the Muscovites to the quarters of Subotai.

  He was not much different from the man I had met in an earlier lifetime. As small and wiry as any of his warriors, Subotai’s hair and beard were iron gray, his eyes jet black. Those eyes were lively, intelligent, curious about this great world that stretched so far in every direction.

  He had taken a church for his personal quarters, probably because the wooden structure was the largest building in the city and afforded the grandest room for audiences and nightly drinking bouts. I walked the length of the nave toward Subotai; the floor of the church had been cleared of pews, if any had ever been there. Stiffly pious pictures of Byzantine saints gazed down morosely at the pile of pillows where the altar had once been. Subotai reclined there with a few trusted companions and a dozen or so slim young local women who served food and wine.

  Behind him the church’s apse was rich with gold bas reliefs gleaming in the candlelight. Some of the gold had already been stripped from the wall; I knew the Mongols would soon melt down the rest. Set into the arch high above was a mosaic of mournful Christ, his wounded hands raised in blessing. It startled me to see that its face was almost an exact portrait of the Creator I called Zeus.

  Armed warriors lazed along the side walls of the converted church, drinking and talking among themselves. I was not fooled by their seeming indolence. In an instant they would cut off the head of any man who made the slightest threatening gesture. Or any woman. At a word from Subotai they would gleefully reward a liar or anyone else who displeased their general by pouring molten silver into his ears and eyes.

  Yet these Mongols knew the virtues of loyalty and honesty better than most so-called civilized peoples. And there was no question about their bravery. If ordered to, they would storm the strongest fortification in human-wave attacks that would either carry through to victory or leave every one of them dead.

  Subotai was drinking from a golden chalice encrusted with gemstones. The lieutenants reclining beside him held cups of silver and alabaster. It never ceased to amaze me: no matter how poor or rude a tribe might be, their priests always had gold and silver, their churches were always the best prizes for looters.

  “Orion!” Subotai shouted, leaping to his feet. “Man of the west!”

  He seemed genuinely glad to see me. Despite his gray hair he was as agile and eager as a youth.

  “My lord Subotai.” I stopped a few paces before him and made an appropriately low bow. I was glad to see him, too. When I had known him earlier, he had vibrated with a restless energy that had carried him and his armies to the ends of the earth. I was happy to see that such energy still animated him. He would need it if he agreed to do what I was going to ask of him.

  He extended his hand to me and I grasped his wrist as he grasped mine.

  “It is good to see you again, man of the west.”

  Looking down at him, I said solemnly, “I bring you a gift, my lord.”

  I took the soggy pelt of the saber-tooth from my shoulders and held it out to him. The head had been thrown back so that he could not see the lion’s gleaming fangs until that moment. He goggled at it.

  “Where did you find a beast such as this?”

  I could not help grinning. “I know of places where many strange and wonderful beasts exist.”

  He grinned back at me and led me to the piles of pillows where he had been reclining. “Tell me the news from Karakorum.”

  As he gestured for me to sit on the pillows at his right hand I inwardly breathed a sigh of relief. Subotai would have never clasped my arm if he intended to kill me. He was incapable of treachery against a friend. Neither he nor anyone else knew, apparently, that I had assassinated his High Khan, Ogotai, a man who had been my friend in a different life.

  While a beautiful young blonde handed me a cup of gold and an equally lovely girl poured spiced wine into it, I told him simply that Ogotai had died in his sleep and that I had seen him that very night.

  “He seemed content and pleased that the Mongol Empire ruled almost all the known world in peace. I think he was happy that no enemies stood against the Mongols.”

  Subotai nodded, but his face turned grave. “Soon, Orion, the unthinkable may happen. Mongol may turn against Mongol. The old tribal wars of the Gobi may erupt again, but this time huge armies will battle one another from one end of the world to the other.”

  “How can that be?” I asked, truly shocked. “The Yassa forbids such bloodletting among Mongols.”

  “I know,” replied Subotai sadly. “But not even the law of the Yassa can stop the strife that is to come, I fear.”

  As we reclined there on the silken pillows beneath the sorrowful eyes of Byzantine saints looking down upon us from their gilded unchanging heaven, Subotai explained to me what was happening among the Mongol generals.

  Simply put, they had virtually run out of lands to conquer. Genghis Khan, the leader they revered so highly that no Mongol would speak his name, had set the tribes of the Gobi on the path to
world conquest. With all of China, all of Asia to battle, the warriors of the Gobi stopped their incessant tribal conflicts and set out to conquer the world. Now that world had been conquered, except for dreary dank outlands such as Europe and the subcontinent of India where the heat killed men and horses alike.

  “The election of the new High Khan will bring divisions among the Mongols,” Subotai predicted gloomily. “It will be an excuse to go back to the old ways of fighting among ourselves.”

  I understood. The empire of Alexander the Great had broken up in the same manner, general battling general to hold the territory already possessed or to steal territory from a former comrade in arms.

  “What will you do, my lord Subotai?” I asked.

  He drained his chalice and put it down beside him. Immediately one of the slaves filled it to the brim.

  “I will not break the laws of the Yassa,” he said. “I will not spill the blood of other Mongols.”

  “Not willingly,” said one of the men sitting around us.

  Subotai nodded, his mouth set in a tight grim line. “I will lead my warriors westward, Orion, past the river they call Danube. It is a difficult land, cold and filled with dismal forests. But it is better than fighting amongst ourselves.”

  If Subotai intended to march into Europe, he would devastate the civilization there that was just beginning to throw off the shackles of ignorance and barbarism that had followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. In another few centuries the Renaissance would begin, with all that it would eventually mean for human knowledge and freedom. But not if the Mongols laid waste to all of Europe, from Muscovy to the English Channel.

  “My lord Subotai,” I said slowly, “once you asked me to tell you all I knew of this land where you now camp, and of the lands further west.”

  Some of his old vigor returned to his eyes. “Yes! And now that you have returned to me, I am more eager than ever to learn about the Germans and Franks and the other powers of the lands to the west.”

  “I will tell you all I know, but as you already understand, their lands are cold and heavily forested, not good territory for a Mongol warrior.”