Yet it kept calling, time and again, as constant as waves rolling up onto a beach, as insistent as an automated beacon that will repeat itself endlessly until someone turns it off.
Somehow its call began to sound familiar. From repetition, a part of my mind suggested dreamily. Hear the same noise long enough and it will become familiar to it. Pay no attention. Rest. Ignore the sound and it will fade away.
Yet it did not fade. It got louder, clearer.
“Orion,” it called.
“Orion.”
I don’t know how many times I heard it before I realized that it was calling my name, calling for me.
“Orion.”
I was still unconscious, I knew that. Yet my mind was alert and functioning even though my body was inert, insensate, comatose.
“Who is calling me?” my mind asked.
“We have met before,” answered the voice. “You called me Zeus.”
I remembered. In another time, a different life. He was one of the Creators, like Anya, like the power-mad Golden One who let the ancient Greeks call him Apollo.
Zeus. I remembered him among the Creators. Like all of them his physical appearance was flawless, godlike. Perfect physique, perfect skin, grave dark eyes, and darker hair. His beard was neatly trimmed, slightly flecked with touches of gray. I realized that all that was an illusion, an appearance put on for my sake. I knew that if I saw Zeus in his true form, he would be a radiant sphere of energy, like Anya, like all the other Creators.
I thought of him as Zeus not because he was the leader of the Creators. They had no true leader, nor any of the common relationships that mortal humans experience. Yet to me he seemed wiser, more solemn, more circumspect in his views and his actions than the other Creators. Where they seemed swept by their private jealousies or passions for power, he seemed to be gravely striving to keep events under control, to protect the flow of the continuum, to prevent disasters that could erase all of humankind—and the Creators themselves. Of all the Creators, only he and Anya seemed to me to be worthy of my loyalty.
“Orion, can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Set has shielded himself against us quite effectively. We can’t get through to you and Anya.”
“He is holding us prisoner…”
“I know. Everything you have experienced, I know.”
“We need help.”
Silence.
“We need help!” I repeated.
“There is no way we can get help to you, Orion. Even this feeble communications link is draining more energy than we can afford.”
“Set will kill her.”
“There is nothing we can do. We’ll be fortunate to escape with our own lives.”
I knew what he meant. I was expendable; there was no sense risking themselves for their creature. Anya was a regrettable loss. But she had brought it on herself, daring to assume human form to consort with a creature. She had always been an atavism, risking her own being instead of letting creatures such as Orion take the risks that they had been created to face.
The other Creators—including this so-called Zeus—were ready to flee. In their true forms, they could scatter through the universe and live on the radiated energy of the stars for uncountable eons.
“Yes,” Zeus admitted to me reluctantly, “that is our final option.”
“You’ll let her die?” I knew that my life counted little to them. But Anya was one of them. Had they no loyalty? No courage?
“You think in human terms, Orion. Survival is our goal, sacrifice is your lot. Anya is clever, perhaps she will surprise you and Set both.”
I sensed the blind link between us fading. His voice grew fainter.
“If there were something I could do to help you, Orion, truly I would do it.”
“But not at the risk of your own survival,” I snapped.
The thought surprised him, I could sense it. Risk the survival of a Creator over one of their creatures? Risk the survival of all the remaining Creators over the plight of one of their number? Never.
They were not cowards. Godlike beings that they were, they were beyond cowardice. They were supreme realists. If they could not defeat Set, they would run from his wrath. What did it matter to them that the entire human race would be expunged from the continuum forever?
“Orion,” called Zeus’s voice, even fainter. “We deal with forces beyond your understanding. Universes upon universes. We must face the ultimate crisis out there among the stars and whirling plasma clouds that pinwheel through the galaxy. Perhaps the human race has played its part in evolving us, and now has no further role to play.”
I snarled mentally, “Perhaps Set will seize such firm control of the continuum that he will track you down, each and every last one of you, no matter where you flee, no matter where you hide. Abandon the human race and you give Set the power to seek you through all of spacetime and destroy you utterly.”
“No,” came Zeus’s reply, so weak it was nothing more than a ghostly whisper. “That cannot be. It cannot…”
But there was doubt in his voice as it trailed off into nothingness. Doubt and fear.
My eyes opened. I was in a bare little cell, hardly bigger than a coffin stood on end, huddled into it like a folded, crumpled sack of grain. My head was resting on my knees, my arms hung limply at my sides, pressing against the cool smooth back wall of the cell on one side and the cool smooth door on the other.
The only light was from a dim dull red fluorescence emanating from the cell walls. The only sound was my own breathing.
Abandoned. The Creators were going to abandon Anya and me to final destruction. They were going to abandon the entire human race and flee to the depths of interstellar space.
And there was nothing I could do about it.
I almost wept, hunched over in that cramped claustrophobic cubicle. Orion the mighty hunter, created by the gods to track down their enemies and destroy them, defender of the continuum. How laughable! Instead of crying, I howled with maniacal glee. Orion, tool of the Creators, locked helpless and alone in a dungeon deep within the ultimate enemy’s castle while the goddess I love is probably being tortured to death for the amusement of that fiend.
I could hardly move, the cell was so narrow. Somehow I slithered to my feet. Almost. The cubicle was too low for me to stand erect. My head bowed, my shoulders, arms, back, and legs pressed against the cool smooth flat surfaces of the cell. It made my blood run cold. The walls and door felt, not slimy, but slick, like rubbery plastic. It made me shudder.
I pushed as hard as I could against the door. It did not even creak. I strained every gram of strength in me, yet the door did not budge at all.
Defeated, exhausted, I let myself slide back down to the floor, knees in my face, muscles aching from frustrated exertion.
A mocking voice surged up from my memory. “You were created to act, Orion, not think. I will do the thinking. You carry out my orders.”
The voice of the Golden One, the self-styled god who claimed to have created me.
“The intelligence I built into you is adequate for hunting and killing,” I heard him saying to me, in his mocking deprecating way. “Never delude yourself into thinking that you have the brains to do more than that.”
I had been furious with his sneering taunts. I had worked against him, challenged him, and finally driven him into a paroxysm of egomaniacal madness. The other Creators had to protect him against my anger and his own hysterical ravings.
I can think, I told myself. If I can’t use my physical strength, then all that’s left to me is my mental power.
“Set uses despair like a weapon.” I recalled Anya’s words.