Short fiction complete, p.237
Short Fiction Complete, page 237
Aten’s eyes bulged up at me.
“Yes, I know your tricks. I know about matter transmission and the discontinuities you’ve created in the continuum. I know that you regard mortal humans as less than the dirt beneath your feet.”
“That’s not true, Orion,” said green-eyed Aphrodite. “We care for our creatures.”
I flung Aten to the ground. What was the point of killing him? They would simply make another.
But a murderous anger was surging through me. “Gods, you call yourselves? Liars! Imposters! Murderers! You’re nothing but a pack of ravening madmen.”
“You go too far,” Hera said. I remembered when she styled herself Olympias, the mother of Alexander the Great, the woman who engineered the assassination of her husband, Philip, king of Macedon.
Aten glared up at me with a fury in his eyes to match my own. “If you want to find your precious Anya,” he croaked, rubbing at his throat, “you will have to settle with us first.”
“What is there to settle?” I demanded. “The war is over—unless you godly murderers start it up again.”
“The war is over,” Hermes agreed, his gray eyes flicking to Zeus before he added, “We have settled our own differences; there’s no need for further fighting among the humans.”
I looked at Hermes, than at Zeus and Hera and all the others. My gaze finally returned to Aten, climbing back to his feet, glowering pure hatred at me.
“You must speak to the Old Ones for us,” he said, his voice already healing from my throttling.
“Must I?”
Zeus said, “It is important that we establish friendly relations with them. Vital.”
“Why?”
“The ultimate crisis, Orion!” said Hermes urgently. “It’s here! There’s no time to waste!”
“You can travel across time and yet you say you have no time to waste? I don’t understand.”
The Golden One almost put on his old smugly superior sneer, but Zeus spoke before he could. “We are facing a crisis that may be beyond our power to solve. No matter how we move across the continuum, all the time tracks, all the geodesics are being warped beyond control.”
I recalled the Old Ones telling me that every passage through the continuum creates disturbances, ripples in the fabric of spacetime. Now, looking into the Creators’s minds as they stood before me, I saw what they feared. They had tom that fabric with their meddling in the continuum, their egomaniacal desire to alter spacetime to suit their own desires. Now those ripples were cascading, threatening a turbulence that would rip apart the continuum itself and shatter the Universe into mangled shards of chaos. All the timestreams would be wiped out as the quantum fluctuations of matter/energy dissolved time itself into an endless, meaningless nothingness.
“It is worse than you know, Orion,” raven-haired Istar said to me. “We are not the sole cause of the crisis.”
Before her words fully registered on my mind, Zeus said, “There are others who manipulate the continuum. Their exploitations of spacetime have been even more severe than our own.”
“They must be stopped,” Hera said.
“Before the whole continuum breaks apart,” Hermes added.
I stared at them, trying to digest what they were telling me.
“It’s the truth, Orion,” said Aten, the Golden One, who had styled himself Apollo to the Greeks. “We are all in enormous danger; the entire Universe is threatened.”
“That’s why you want the Old Ones,” I realized. “You need their help.”
Aten nodded. “Theirs, and the help of all the elder races in the Galaxy.”
“And this war that you put humankind through for three generations? Where you destroyed whole planets? And you were ready to destroy the stars themselves—what was the real purpose of it?”
Aten’s golden eyes shifted away from mine momentarily, then he pulled himself to his full height and answered, “We disagreed about contacting the elder species, such as the Old Ones. I wanted to enlist their help; Anya and those of us who sided with her wanted to leave them alone.”
“And for that you put the human race through a century of war? And dragged in all those alien races, as well?”
Some of the old arrogance came back into his expression. “Anya can be very stubborn.”
“Where is she?”
“She refused to join us in this—” he hesitated, as if searching for a word, “—this peace conference.”
“She was dying.”
“I was trying to make her see things my way. It worked with the others,” he gestured carelessly toward Poseidon, Aphrodite, and several of the other Creators. “But, as I said, Anya is very stubborn.”
I suspected that there was more to it than he was telling me. “You say that she objected to contacting the Old Ones?”
“She thought we could face the ultimate crisis without their help.”
I turned to Aphrodite. “Is that true?”
“Yes,” she said. But as she spoke, her eyes were on the Golden One, not on me.
I looked at each of them in turn, finally resting my gaze on Zeus. “What’s the rest of it?” I asked him. “I know there must be more to this than I’ve been told so far.”
He stroked his neatly-trimmed beard for a moment, almost smiled at me. “Accept what Aten has told you, Orion. Help us to gain the trust of the Old Ones.”
“How can I tell them to trust you when I myself can’t?”
Aten’s gold-flecked eyes blazed at me. “You’ll never be revived again, Orion. You’ve outlived your usefulness if you don’t help us get to the Old Ones.”
Staring into those angry eyes, I thought I finally understood what they had refused to tell me.
“You don’t want the Old Ones’s help. You want their power. You want to learn what they know so you can use it for your own ends. You talk about the ultimate crisis, but you still dream of dominating everyone and everything, you still aspire to mastering the entire continuum.”
Aten smiled coldly at me. “You’ve learned a lot since I first created you. Perhaps too much.”
“Stop this masquerade,” I demanded. “Show me the truth.”
His smile faded. The sky overhead darkened; clouds boiled up out of the sea and swept by. The other Creators aged and withered before my eyes: Aphrodite’s hair went dead white, her face wrinkled; Poseidon turned weak and trembling like a palsied old man; even Zeus and Hermes and Hera sank into decrepit gray-skinned wrecks.
Only Aten retained his youthful vigor. He even seemed stronger than before, glowing in the storm-clouded shadows like the sun.
And the Creators’s city itself crumbled before my eyes. The temples turned to dust, the columns cracked and toppled to the ground. The Earth shook. Lightning split the sky.
“You think you have learned so much, Orion!” Aten sneered at me. “How little you know, creature!”
He waved one hand and the sky cleared as quickly as it had clouded. The other Creators had collapsed into heaps of rags and shriveling, decaying flesh in the midst of the ruined city.
And I recognized the ruins.
“Lunga!” I gasped. I could see past the rubble-strewn square, past the demolished stumps of towers and temples, out to the curving beach where the Skorpis base had been.
“Not Lunga,” said the Golden One. “That was a bit of a deception I played on you, Orion.”
I realized what he meant. “Earth. This is Earth. It never was Lunga, it was Earth all along.”
“Far in the future,” he said. “So far that the Moon has wandered away in its orbit until you can’t even recognize it unless I point it out to you.”
“Then the Old Ones are from Earth!”
“I doubt that. Perhaps from Neptune, originally, but not Earth. Some of them colonized Earth’s oceans, apparently, long eons ago.”
“Who destroyed your city?”
Smirking. “We did it ourselves. Another of our little family squabbles. No difference, we can built it up again when we’re ready.”
“And the other Creators? You’ve killed them all?”
“They’re not dead, Orion. I’m merely demonstrating to them—and to you—that I am the mightiest of all. They bend to my will or I take their lives from them.”
“That’s what you did to Anya.”
His face clouded. “She escaped me. Somehow, she got away. I suspect that you were responsible for that, Orion. In another era, another placetime, you rescued her.”
I felt a surge of joy at that, not merely because I saved her, but because it angered and frustrated him.
“But I’m canceling that occurrence,” the Golden One said. “I’m ending your existence, Orion. You’ve outlived your usefulness.”
“And the Old Ones?” I taunted.
He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Ah yes, the Old Ones.”
“You need them, don’t you?”
“Not as much as I need to be rid of you,” he said. “I created you to be my hunter, to do my bidding, but you’ve become more trouble than you’re worth.”
“You’d rather have the Universe shatter into ultimate chaos than have Anya challenge your supremacy,” I said.
His smile returned. “Better to reign in hell, Orion, than serve in heaven.”
Once I thought I had wanted to die, to be released from life, freed of the endless wheel of pain and disappointment. But now I wanted to live, to find Anya and revive her, to reach the Old Ones and ask their help in saving the continuum from utter collapse, to stand in the way of Aten and keep him from realizing his megalomaniacal dreams.
“Gotterdamerung,” I said.
“The twilight of the gods,” he replied. “The downfall of everything. I will be supreme at the end.”
“Never,” I said, and translated myself out of the ruins of the Creators’s city, away from Earth, far into the depths of interstellar space.
It felt like a death. Yet I knew I would live again to seek Anya, to fight against the Golden One, to find my place in the continuum.
EPILOGUE
It was a brown, arid world, but not without its beauty.
I stood on the crest of a dusty hill clawed by arroyos, looking out on a desert valley. Millions of years ago this had been sea bottom, but now the nearest body of open water was a thousand kilometers away. Yet there was life here: cactus and dry brown brush, poisonous lizards and tiny darting rodents with beady eyes and long hairless tails. Birds chattered from the few scrawny trees. Insects glinted in the harsh hot sunlight.
There was a patch of green down in that valley, with a village at its edge. A tiny knot of buildings made of sun-dried mud bricks, roofed with gnarled thin branches. Men and women were in the fields nearby, bent over their crops.
At first glance I did not notice any machinery, any sign that this human settlement was more advanced than the Stone Age. But then I caught the glint of sunlight on solar collectors atop the roof of a large building. I saw a geodesic dome, a small one, but large enough to house a communication antenna.
There were no roads in sight, only footpaths out to the fields where the crops were growing.
I had nothing with me but the tatters of an old uniform and an ancient dagger that I kept strapped to my thigh. With a smile of satisfaction, I started down the eroded bare dirt of the hillside, heading for the village.
I arrived as the Sun touched the western horizon and the workers were coming back from the fields.
They were startled to see a stranger.
“Who’re you?” asked the young woman in their lead. She looked to be still in her teens—sandy hair, sky-blue eyes, a scattering of freckles across her pert nose.
“My name is Orion.”
“Where’re you from? How’d you get here?”
I waved a hand vaguely toward the hills. “I’ve come a long way. I’m glad I found your village.”
She gave me a strange look, part suspicion, part curiosity.
“You said your name is Orion?”
“Does the name mean anything to you?” I asked.
She shook her head uncertainly. The others had gathered around us. I looked over their familiar faces. Clones of Frede, Magro, little Jerron. I saw that the oldest woman among them was pregnant.
“We don’t get many visitors out here,” Frede’s daughter said to me. “Just inspectors from the Commonwealth, once every other year or so.”
“What do you call this planet?” I asked them.
“It’s official name is Krakon IV,” said one of the teenaged boys.
“Yes, I know that. But what is your name for it?”
They glanced at each other. “We just call it Home.”
I smiled at them. Home. Their faces were streaked with sweat and they looked tired from their day’s work, but they seemed healthy and contented. Their clone parents had found a Home for themselves, far from the wars that they once knew.
“Well, come into the village,” Frede’s daughter said. “My mother and the elders will want to see you.”
Healthy, contented, and not afraid of strangers. The whole village came out to see the new arrival: gray-haired adults, scampering children, young women holding babies in their arms.
Frede’s eyes widened when she recognized me. She ran up and flung her arms around my neck.
“Orion!” she cried. “Orion!”
She could still embarrass me. Gently I untangled from her embrace, while the entire village watched, grinning.
“Why are you here?” she asked, suddenly wary. Her eyes were still bright and alert, although the hair had streaks of gray in it.
“I wanted to know how you’re doing, nothing more.”
She sighed with relief. They feasted me that night. I saw that the primitive look of the village was deliberate. They had decided to live with their environment as much as possible. Electricity from sunlight, engineered microbes to fix nitrogen for their crops and drive away insect pests, a self-contained nuclear pump to bring up water for irrigation.
“Maybe one day we’ll build ourselves an aircar or two,” Frede said as we sat at table in their main hall. “But for now, we can walk wherever we need to go.”
“You seem contented.”
She pointed to a young woman with a baby in her lap. “That infant’s my granddaughter, Orion. Our second generation can bear children naturally.”
Jerron had died, she told me, of a heart attack. “Magro’s our medic now. He’s got up-to-date equipment, but Jerron’s heart just quit. Nothing anyone could do. We buried him out in the fields. He was our first death.”
After dinner, Frede and I took a slow walk beneath the bright stars of their night sky.
“You mean you came all this way, to this lonely little frontier world, just to see us?”
“Why else?”
“I thought for a moment,” she confessed, “that you’d come to recruit us as soldiers again.”
“You’re getting a bit old for that,” I said.
“Our children aren’t.”
“There’s no need for soldiers. The peace between the Commonwealth and the Hegemony has held for almost twenty years now.”
“And you haven’t aged a bit.”
“I age much more slowly than you.” She was silent for a while as we walked out to the edge of their cultivated fields.
“You’re on your way to find her, aren’t you? The woman you love.”
I nodded in the moonless dark.
“Yes. I’ve got to find her, no matter how long it takes.”
“Do you need help? Is that why you’ve come?”
“No, no. You can’t help me. I’ve got to do this alone.”
“Can’t you stay here with us? With me?”
I looked down at her starlit face and saw that she was totally serious.
“I wish I could,” I said as tenderly as I could manage. “But I’ve got to find her. Wherever she is in time and space, I’ve got to go to her.”
Frede shook her head sadly. “You’ve done so much for us, Orion. Can’t we do anything for you?”
I smiled. “Live in peace, Frede.”
For me, I knew, there would be no peace. Anya was out there somewhere among the stars and I had to find her before all the timestreams of the Universe unraveled and collapsed into a chaos that would shatter the continuum forever.
I was no longer Aten’s creature, bound to do his bidding through all the ages of the continuum. I am my own man now, I told myself. But I am still Orion, the Hunter. And my hunt is just beginning.
Life as We Know It
Ben Bova’s most recent story for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, “Inspiration” (April, 1994), was a finalist for the Nebula. Since then, his newest novel, Death Dream, appeared on the stands.
“Life As We Know It” is a near-future science fiction story based on current day practices. Ben writes, “I’ve always been fascinated with the way the scientists at any of NASA’s fly-bys have felt almost compelled to invent instant theories to ‘explain’ what the TV monitors are showing. And then, after they’ve had a chance to actually digest the data, their ‘instant analyses’ are usually forgotten. Life is full of ironies, and we are going to find lots of surprises when we begin to explore other worlds in detail.”
THEY WERE ALL THERE, ALL the Grand Old Men of the field: McKay, Kliest, Taranto—even Sagan, little more than an ancient withered husk in his electric wheelchair. But the fire still burned in his deep, dark eyes.
All the egos and superegos who had given their lifetimes to the search for extraterrestrial life. Often they had been derided by the media, scorned by the politicians, even scoffed at by their fellow scientists; this was going to be their day. One way or the other.
Jupiter was going to reveal its secrets to them. Today. Life on another world at last. Make or break.
I could feel the tension in the room, like just before a thunderstorm, that electrical smell in the air that makes the hair on your arms stand on end. Careers would be made today, or broken. Mine included. That’s why everyone was here, waiting impatiently, chattering nervously, staring at the display screens that still showed nothing but crackling streaks of random noise.
