Vengeance of Orion (33 page)

"Go," I told them. I meant it as a command. It came out as a whisper.

Helen took a step toward me.

"Go!" I made it stronger, but the effort sent waves of giddiness through me. "Leave me! Do as I say!"

Menalaos pulled her to him once more and they fled through the open doorway, into the night, toward the capital and a life together that I hoped would be bearable, perhaps even happy.

I sat heavily, all the strength gone from my body, leaning forward until the spear propped me from falling any farther, its butt wedged against Nekoptah's obese corpse.

The final death, I thought.

"If I can't be with you in life, Anya, then I will join you in death," I said aloud.

I toppled over onto my back as the black shadows of death swirled and gathered about me.

Chapter 46

I lay on my back, waiting for the final death, knowing that neither the Golden One nor any of the other Creators would revive me again. Nor would they revive Anya. They were glad to be rid of us both, I knew.

A wave of anger crested over the pain that throbbed through my body. I was accepting their victory over me, over
her
, their victory over us. They were tenderly nursing the Golden One back to sanity so that they could continue their mastery over the human race and its ultimate destiny.

Memories of other lives, other deaths, flooded through me. I began to understand what they had done to me and, more important, how they had done it.

With the last ebbing bit of strength in me, I slowly reached up and clasped the spear imbedded in my chest. Bathed in cold sweat, I closed off the receptor cells that shrieked with pain, willed my body to ignore the agony flaming through me. Then, weakly, slowly, I pulled the spear out of me. The bloody barbs of its point tore great gouges of flesh, but that no longer mattered. I pulled it free and let it fall clattering to the stone floor.

The world was swimming giddily about me now, the very walls of the temple shimmering, their carvings shifting and undulating almost like living creatures in an intricate, eerie dance.

I propped myself up on my elbows and watched the walls, saw my own image and that of Anya facing each other, wavering, moving, fading from my sight.

The secret of time is that it flows like an ocean, in vast enormous currents and tides. Humans see time as a river, like the Nile, always moving linearly from
here
to
there.
But time is a wide and beautiful sea that touches all shores. And in the many lives I had led, I had learned a little about navigating on that sea.

It takes energy to move across time. But the universe is filled with energy, drenched with the radiant bounty of uncounted stars. The Creators knew how to tap that energy, and my memories of their actions taught me how to tap it also.

The walls of Osiris's temple faded before my eyes, but did not disappear. The carvings melted away. The dancing, shimmering pictures slowly dissolved until the walls were blank and smooth, as if newly erected.

I rose to my feet. The wound in my chest was gone. That existed in another time, thousands of years away.

Through the open doorway I saw not the columned court of the main temple, but a lush garden where fruit trees bent their heavily laden branches to the grassy ground and flowers were opening their colorful petals to the first welcome rays of the morning sun.

The temple I was in was small, plain, virtually undecorated. A rough stone altar stood against one wall, with a single small statue atop it. It was the figure of a man with the head of a beast I could not recognize: a sharply curved beak, almost like a hawk's, but the rest of the face had no birdlike qualities to it.

No matter. I saw that there was another doorway in the opposite wall, and that it led into a smaller, inner shrine. It was dark in there, but I stepped through the doorway without hesitation.

Through the dim shadows I saw her lying on the altar, dressed in a long gown of silver. Her eyes were closed, her hands lay by her sides. She was not breathing, but I knew she was not dead. Merely waiting.

I looked up at the low ceiling, barely above my head. It was made of wooden beams covered with planks and sealed with pitch. I reached up and, sure enough, the section of roof just over the altar was hinged. I pushed it open and let the morning sun shine down on Anya's recumbent figure.

The silver of her robe gleamed like a thousand tiny stars. Color returned to her cheeks.

I stepped to the altar, leaned over her, and kissed her on the lips.

She felt warm and alive. Her arms twined around my neck and she sighed deeply and kissed me back. My eyes filled with tears and for many long minutes we said nothing at all, merely held each other so closely that neither time nor space could separate us.

"I knew you would find me," Anya said at last, her voice low and warm and filled with love.

"They said you couldn't be revived. They told me you were gone forever."

"I was here. Waiting for you."

Anya sat up slowly, and then I helped her to stand. Her eyes held the depths of the universes in them. She smiled at me, the same radiant smile I remembered from so many other existences.

But as I held her in my arms, rejoicing, the memory of our death together sent a chill shudder through me.

"What is it, my love?" she asked. "What's wrong?"

"The Golden One murdered you . . ."

Her face grew grave. "He is mad with jealousy of you, Orion."

"The other Creators have taken him. They're trying to cure his madness."

She looked at me with new respect. "And you helped to capture him, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"I thought so. They couldn't have done it without you, just as they couldn't have revived me without you."

"I don't understand," I said.

She touched my cheek with her soft, wonderful fingertips. "It will take time to teach you, my brave Orion, but you already know much more than you realize."

A new question rose in my mind. "Are you human now, or a . . . goddess?"

Anya laughed. "There are no gods or goddesses, Orion. You know that. We have much more knowledge than earlier human species. We have much more powerful capabilities."

Much more powerful than I, I thought.

As if she could read my mind, Anya said, "Your own powers are growing, Orion. You have learned much since the Golden One first sent you to the Ice Age to hunt down Ahriman. You are becoming one of us."

"Can you be killed?" I blurted.

She understood my fear. "Anyone can be killed, Orion. The entire continuum can be destroyed, and everything in it."

"Then there's no place for us to be at peace? No time when we can rest and live and love as ordinary human beings do?"

"No, my darling. Not even ordinary mortals have that luxury. The best we can hope for is to be together, to face the joys and dangers of each moment side by side, through all time, across all the universes."

I took her in my arms once more and felt not merely content, but supernally happy. "That will be good enough. To be with you, no matter what, is all I desire."

Epilogue

With Anya beside me, I walked out of the ancient temple into the warming sunshine of the 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 toward 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 piled atop one another, with a flat wooden slat roof.

"Someday the Egyptians will worship him as a powerful and dangerous god. They will call him Set."

"He is one of the Creators?"

"No," Anya 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 . . . the one with the lizard's face?"

The smile vanished. "He comes from a distant world, Orion, and he seeks to eliminate us all from the continuum."

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

"To find him and destroy him," said Anya. "You and I together. Hunter and warrior, through all space-time."

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

Author's Afterword

The distant past has always been just as exciting to me as the distant future, and seems an equally fascinating domain for science fiction.

The novel you have just read is science fiction, not an historical novel. Obviously this is so, for the novel deals with the gods and goddesses of the ancients, and attempts to portray them as advanced human beings from a far distant future who have the ability to travel through time at their whim.

Yet the historical parts of this novel are as accurate as careful research can make them—with some deliberate deviations from "known" history.

It is agreed among most students of ancient history that the siege of Troy celebrated in Homer's
Iliad
and the fall of Jericho described in the Old Testament's Book of Joshua both happened sometime around the middle of the twelfth century B.C. To the novelist, this presents the opportunity of placing the same characters at both events; both could have happened within the lifespan of a human being. Perhaps they happened within a few years, or even a few months, of each other.

Once I realized that this was so, the temptation to examine the fabled Trojan Horse and the true cause of the "tumbling down" of Jericho's walls simply overpowered me.

Thus the historical backbone of this novel—the Achaian siege of Troy, the Israelite invasion of Canaan, the collapse of the powerful Hittite empire, and the troubles of Egypt during the attacks of the Sea Peoples—are faithful to modern historical scholarship.

In classic Greek legend there is no certainty about Helen's fate after the Achaians sacked Troy. Some tales claim that she went to Egypt and spent the remainder of her days there. If she were the kind of woman I think she was, she would surely have preferred civilized, peaceful Egypt to the semi-barbaric rigors of Achaian Sparta.

I have taken a few liberties with the canons of history. Several scholars have pointed out that the Trojan Horse might have been a siege tower covered with horse hides. It could not have been built by the Achaians, however, who have left absolutely no evidence of such sophisticated military technology. But siege towers had been used in the Middle East for centuries before Troy. Certainly the Hittites knew of them, and thus I bring a Hittite contingent to the service of Odysseus and the House of Ithaca.

The cause of the collapse of Jericho's walls is more speculative, but I believe it is consistent with the archaeological evidence and the record from the Book of Joshua.

In this novel, I have it that while the Hebrews were slaves in Egypt, pharaoh commanded every
female
infant to be killed. This contradicts the Biblical telling of the murder of every male baby. Biblical scholars and historians agree that the Egyptians apparently carried out the slaughter as a means of controlling the Hebrews' population growth; the Jewish slaves were out-populating the native Egyptians. To my mind, the Egyptians were intelligent enough to realize that killing male children would not alter the Jewish birthrate; killing female children would. Thus the slaughter of the baby girls. I assume that later generations of Jewish scribes were so thoroughly male-oriented that they changed the story to agree with their concepts of male importance and dominance.

These speculations are perfectly in accord with the traditional science-fiction axiom that the author is free to invent
anything
, so long as no one can prove him wrong. The Egyptians slaughtered baby girls, and Troy and Jericho were both toppled by Hittite engineers.

The most fantastic elements in the novel are, of course, Orion himself and the pantheon of advanced human time-travelers who present themselves as gods and goddesses to the ancients.

Does this mean that the novel is fantasy, rather than science fiction? To be science fiction, a story must deal fairly with the known laws of science, and reasonable extrapolations thereof.

Time travel is clearly impossible, almost. Physicists have speculated that black holes representing collapsed stars or even collapsed galaxies must have gravitational fields about them that are so intense they warp space-time. Space and time are bent so drastically that modern physics cannot predict what happens under such circumstances. Such black holes may represent, then, natural time machines. What nature can do, the human mind can eventually duplicate or even improve upon. Time machines are clearly impossible today, but they may not always be so, especially if you allow plenty of millennia for them to be developed.

Thus the novel is, to my way of thinking, science fiction. Again, the axiom is that an author can use anything that cannot be
proven
to be wrong. Time travel is reasonable material for a science fiction novelist to use in his speculations. Even more fascinating are the consequences of time travel.

If one grants the possibility of time travel, then the need for a supernatural being, a god, as the cause of the universe—and of humankind—goes out the window. Consider a very advanced human civilization, thousands of years in our future. Their knowledge is so great that they discover the means to travel through time; past and future are like different currents in a vast ocean, to them. They could go back to an earlier eon on Earth and create the human race, their own ancestors. In fact,
they would have to.

To those earlier people the creators would seem like gods. It is clear that the ancient gods were not the beneficent moralists that we believe our modern gods to be. In fact, to any rational mind, the concept of a god who is perfectly just and perfectly merciful is not only illogical, it is decidedly out of tune with the observable facts of the world around us.

Now then—if the "gods" are as human as you and I but possess enormously greater powers than we do, and if power truly does, corrupt the human spirit, imagine how wildly malevolent an all-powerful god must be!

The result of such ratiocinations is the novel you have just finished reading, and its predecessor,
Orion.

There will be more.

Ben Bova

West Hartford, Connecticut