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Orion in the Dying Time (UC)

by Ben Bova

/////

To Lester del Rey, mentor

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this

book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely

coincidental.

ORION IN THE DYING TIME

thereof, in any form.

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc. 49 West 24th Street New York, NY

10010

Cover art by Boris Vallejo ISBN: 0-812-51429-7

First edition: August 1990

First mass market printing: August 1991

Printed in the United States of America 0987654321

"An intelligence knowing, at a given instance of time, all forces acting in

nature, as well as the momentary position of all things of which the universe

consists, would be able to comprehend the motions of the largest bodies of the

world and those of the lightest atoms in one single formula, provided his

intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to him

nothing would be uncertain, both past and future would be present in his

eyes."

—Pierre-Simon de Laplace

What if there were more than one such person?

Prologue

Jith Anya beside me, I walked out of the ancient temple into the warming

sunshine of a new day. Ml around usa lush green garden grew: flowering shrubs

and bountiful fruit trees as far as the eye could see. Slowly we walked along

the bank of 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 7 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 f creature whose statue stood on the altar." ?".' I

glanced back at the little stone temple. It was a p; simple building, blocks

of stone fitted atop one another, ; with a flat wooden slat roof.

2 "Someday the Egyptians will worship him as a power-Jfu\ and

dangerous god," Anya told me. "They will call him Set."

"He is one of the Creators?"

;\ "No," she said. "Not one of us. He is an enemy: one of ; those who seek to

twist the continuum to their own t purposes."

PROLOGUE

"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. . . Set, the one with the lizard's face?"

Her smile vanished. "He comes from a distant world, Orion, and he seeks to

eliminate us from the continuum."

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

"To find him and destroy him, my love," said Anya. "You and I together, Hunter

and Warrior, through all spacetime."

I looked into her glowing eyes and realized that this was my destiny. I am

Orion the Hunter. And with this huntress, that warrior goddess, beside me, all

the universes were my hunting grounds.

BOOK I

PARADISE

A book of verses underneath the bough A jug of wine, a loaf of bread—and thou

Beside me singing in the wilderness— Oh, wilderness were paradise enow!

Chapter 1

nya pulled off her glittering silvery robe and flung it the grassy ground.

Beneath it she wore a metallic suit of the kind I vaguely remembered from

another time, long ages ago. It fit her skintight, from the tops of her silver

boots to the high collar that circled her neck. She was a dazzling goddess

with long dark hair that tumbled past her shoulders and fathomless gray eyes

that held all of time in them.

I wore nothing but the leather kilt and vest from my previous existence in

ancient Egypt. The wound that had killed me then had disappeared from my

chest. Strapped to my right thigh, beneath the kilt, was the dagger that I had

worn in that other time. A pair of rope sandals was my only other possession.

Anya said, "Come, Orion, we must hurry away from this place."

I loved her as eternally and completely as any man has ever worshiped a woman.

I had died many deaths for her

4 BEN BOVA

sake, and she had defied her fellow Creators to be with me time and again, in

every era to which they had sent me. Death could not part us. Nor time nor

space.

I took her hand in mine and we headed off along a wide avenue between the

heavily laden trees.

For what seemed like hours, Anya and I walked through the garden, away from

the bank of the ageless Nile flowing patiently through this land that would

one day be called Egypt. The sun rose high but the day remained deliciously

cool, the air clean and crisp as a temperate springtime afternoon. Cottony

clumps of cumulus clouds dotted the deeply blue sky. A refreshing breeze blew

toward us from what would one day be the pitiless oven of the Sahara.

Despite her denying it, the garden did remind me of the legends I had heard of

Eden. On both sides of us row upon row of trees marched as far as the eye

could see, yet no two were the same. Fruits of all kinds hung heavy on their

boughs: figs, olives, plums, pomegranates, even apples. High above them all

swayed stately palms, heavy with coconuts. Shrubs were set out in carefully

planned beds between the trees, each of them flowering so profusely that the

entire park was ablaze with color.

Yet not another soul was in sight. Between the trees and shrubbery the grass

was clipped to such a uniformly precise height that it almost seemed

artificial. No insects buzzed. No birds flitted among the greenery.

"Where are we going?" I asked Anya.

"Away from here," she replied, "as quickly as we can."

I reached toward a bush that bore luscious-looking mangoes. Anya grabbed at my

hand.

"No!"

"But I'm hungry."

"It will be better to wait until we are clear of this park. Otherwise .. ."

She glanced back over her shoulder.

ORION IN THE DYING TIME 5

"Otherwise an angel will appear with a flaming sword?" I teased.

Anya was totally serious. "Orion, this park is a botanical experimental

station for the creature whose statue we saw in the temple."

"The one called Set?"

She nodded. "We are not ready to meet him. We are completely unarmed,

unprepared."

"But what harm would it be to eat some of his fruit? We could still hurry

along as we ate."

Almost smiling, Anya said, "He is very sensitive about his plants. Somehow he

knows when someone touches them."

"And?"

"And he kills them."

"He doesn't drive them into the outer darkness, to earn their bread by the

sweat of their brows?" I noticed that even though my tone was bantering, we

were walking faster than before.

"No. He kills them. Finally and eternally."

I had died many times, yet the Creators had always revived me to serve them

again in another time, another place. Still I feared death, the agony of it,

the separation and loss that it brought. And a new tendril of fear flickered

along my nerves: Anya was afraid. One of the Creators, a veritable goddess who

could move through eons of time as easily as I was walking along this garden

path—she was obviously afraid of the reptilian entity whose statue had adorned

the temple by the bank of the Nile.

I closed my eyes briefly to picture that statue more clearly. At first I had

thought it was a representation of a man wearing a totem mask: the body was

human, the face almost like a crocodile's. But now as I scanned my memory of

it I saw that this first impression had been overly simple.

The body was humanoid, true enough. It stood on two

6 BEN BOVA

legs and had two arms. But the feet were claws with three toes ending in

sharply hooked talons. The hands had two long scaly-looking fingers with an

opposed thumb for the third digit, all of them clawed. The hips and shoulders

connected in nonhuman ways.

And the face. It was the face of a reptile unlike anything I had seen before:

a snout filled with serrated teeth for tearing flesh; eyes set forward in the

skull for binocular vision; bony projections just above the eyes; a domed

cranium that housed a brain large enough to be fully intelligent.

"Now you begin to realize what we are up against," Anya said, reading my

thoughts.

"The Golden One sent us here to hunt down this thing called Set and destroy

him?" I asked. "Alone? Just the two of us? Without weapons?"

"Not the Golden One, Orion. The entire council of the Creators. The whole

assemblage of them."

The ones whom the ancient Greeks had called gods, who lived in their own

Olympian world in the distant future of this time.

"The entire assemblage," I repeated, "That means you agreed to the task."

"To be with you," Anya said. "They were going to send you alone, but I

insisted that I come with you."

"I am expendable," I said.

"Not to me." And I loved her all the more for it.

"You said this creature called Set—"

"He is not a creature of ours, Orion," Anya swiftly corrected. "The Creators

did not bring him into being, as we did the human race. He comes from another

world and he seeks to destroy the Creators."

"Destroy ... even you?"

She smiled at me, and it was if another sun had risen. "Even me, my love."

ORION IN THE DYING TIME 7

"You said he can cause final death, without hope of revival."

Anya's smile disappeared. "He and his kind have vast powers. If they can alter

the continuum deeply enough to destroy the Creators, then our deaths will be

final and irrevocable."

Many times over the eons I had thought that the release of death would be

preferable to the suffering toil of a life spent in pain and danger. But each

time the thought of Anya, of this goddess whom I loved and who loved me, made

me strive for life. Now we were together at last, but the threat of ultimate

oblivion hung over us like a cloud blotting out the sun.

We walked on until the lines of trees abruptly ended. Standing in the shade of

the last wide-branched chestnut, we looked out on a sea of grass. Wild uncut

grass as far as the limestone cliffs that jutted into the bright summer sky,

marking the edge of the Nile-cut valley. Windblown waves curled through the

waving fronds of grass like green surges of surf rushing toward us.

Silhouetted against the distant cliffs I saw a few dark specks moving slowly.

I pointed toward them and Anya followed my outstretched arm with her eyes.

"Humans," she muttered. "A crew of slaves."

"Slaves?"

"Yes. Look at what's guarding them."

Chapter 2

I focused my eyes intently on the distant figures. I have always been able to

control consciously all the functions of my body, direct my will along the

chain of neural synapses instantly to make any part of my body do exactly what

I wished it to do.

Now I concentrated on the line of human beings trudging across the grassy

landscape. They were being led by something not human.

At first it reminded me of a dinosaur, but I knew that the great reptilians

had become extinct millions of years before this time. Or had they? If the

Creators could twist time to their whim, and this alien called Set had

comparable powers, why not a dinosaur here in the Neolithic era?

It walked on four slim legs and had a long whiplike tail twitching behind it.

Its neck was long, too, so that its total length was nearly twenty feet, about

the size of a full-grown African bull elephant. But it was much less bulky,

slimmer,

ORION IN THE DYING TIME 9

more graceful. I got the impression that it could run faster than a man.

Its scales were brightly colored in bands of red, blue, yellow, and brown.

Horny projections of bone studded its back like rows of buttons. The head at

the end of that elongated neck was small, with a short stubby snout and eyes

set wide apart on either side of a rounded skull. Its eyes were slitted,

unblinking.

It strode up at the front of the little column of humans, and every few

moments turned its long neck back to look at the slaves it led.

And they were slaves, that was obvious. Fourteen men and women, wearing

nothing but tattered loincloths, emaciated ribs showing clearly even at the

distance from which we watched. They seemed exhausted, laboring for breath as

they struggled to keep up to the pace set by their reptilian guard. One of the

women carried a baby in a sling on her back. Two of the men looked like

teenagers to me. There was only one gray head among them. I got the impression

they rarely lived long enough to become gray.

Hiding behind the bole of the chestnut tree at the edge of the garden, we

watched the pitiful little parade for several silent moments.

Then I asked, "Why slaves?"

Anya whispered, "To tend this garden, of course. And the other desires of Set

and his minions."

The woman with the baby stumbled and fell to her knees. The giant reptile

instantly wheeled around and trotted up to her, looming over her. Even from

this distance I could hear the faint wailing of the baby.

The woman struggled to her feet, or tried to. Not fast enough for the guard.

Its slim tail whipped viciously across her back, striking the baby as well.

She screamed and the baby shrieked with pain and terror.

Again the tail flicked back and struck at her. She fell facedown on the grass.

BEN BOVA

I strained forward, but Anya grasped ray arm and held me back.

"No," she whispered urgently. "There's nothing you can do."

The huge lizard was standing over the prostrate mother, bending its neck to

sniff at her unmoving form. The baby still wailed. The other men and women

stood unmoving, mute as statues.

"Why don't they fight?" I seethed.

Anya replied, "With their bare hands against that monster?"

"They could at least run away while its attention is diverted. Scatter—"

"They know better, Orion. They would be hunted down like animals and killed

very slowly."

The lizard was squatting on its two rear legs and tail now, nudging the

woman's body with one of its clawed forepaws. She did not move.

Then the beast pulled the infant out of the sling and lifted it high, swinging

its head upward as it did so. I realized it was going to crunch the baby in

its jaws.

Nothing could hold me back now. I bolted out from the protection of the trees

and raced pell-mell toward the monster, bellowing loudly as I could while I

ran. All my bodily senses went into hyperdrive, as they always do when I face

danger. The world around me seemed to slow down, everything moved with an

almost dreamlike languor.

I saw the lizard holding the squalling baby aloft, saw its head turning toward

me on the end of that long snaky neck, saw its narrow slit eyes register on

me, its head bobbing back and forth as if it were saying no. In reality it was

merely trying to get a fix with both eyes on what was making the noise.

I saw the baby still clutched in the lizard's claws, its tiny legs churning in

the empty air, its blubbering face contorted and red with crying. And the

mother, her naked

ORION IN THE DYING TIME

back livid with the welts from the beast's tail, was pushing herself up on one

elbow in a futile effort to reach her baby.

The lizard dropped the baby and turned to face me, hissing. Its tongue darted

out of its tiny mouth as its head bobbed left and right. The tail flicked as

it dropped to all fours.

I had my dagger in my right hand. It seemed pitifully small against the talons

on the monster's paws, but it was the only weapon I possessed. As I closed the

distance between us I saw the other humans standing behind the lizard. My

brain registered that they were totally cowed, unmoving, not even trying to

get away or distract the beast in any manner. 1 would get no help from them.

The lizard took a few trotting steps toward me, then reared up on its hind

legs like an enraged bear. It towered over me, advancing on those monstrous

clawed hind legs while its neck bent down between its wide-spread forelegs,

hissing at me. Its teeth were small and flat, I saw. Not a flesh-eater. Just a

killing machine.

Suddenly bright yellow frills snapped open on both sides of its neck, making

its head appear twice as large; a trick for frightening enemies, but I knew it

for what it was.

I ran straight at the big lizard and saw its long tail whipping toward my

left. Like a slow-motion dream I watched its tip swinging toward me. I gauged

its speed and jumped over it as it snapped harmlessly beneath my feet. My

impetus carried me straight toward the lizard's scaled underside and I sank my

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