There were even swamplands teeming with crocodiles and turtles and frogs. I saw the enormous terrifying bulk of a tyrannosaur loom up above the cypresses, but Anya calmed my instinctive fear.
“The entire area is fenced in by an energy screen. Not even a fly can get out.”
Once again I was living with the woman I had loved, night and day. But we never touched, never even kissed. We were not alone. I knew Set dwelled within me, and I got the feeling that she sensed it, too.
Yet Anya showed me the world as it existed in the time of the Creators. The planet Earth, more beautiful than I had ever thought it could be, an abode for all kinds of life, a haven of peace and plenty, a balanced ecology that maintained itself on the energy of the sun and the control of humankind’s descendants: the Creators. It was a perfect world, too perfect for me. Nothing was out of place. The weather was always mild and sunny. It rained only at night and even then our energy shell protected us. Not even insects bothered us. I got the feeling that we were riding through a vast park where all the plants were artificial and all the animals were machines under the control of the Creators.
“No, this is all real and natural,” Anya told me one night as we lay side by side looking up at the stars. Orion was in his rightful place up there; the Dipper and all the other constellations looked familiar. We were not so far in the future that they had become distorted beyond recognition.
Glowering ruddy Sheol was not in that sky, though. I felt Set’s unease and enjoyed it.
The turning point in human history, Anya explained to me, had come some fifty thousand years before this era. Human scientists learned how to control the genetic material buried deep within the cells of all living things. After billions of years of natural selection, humankind took purposeful control not only of its own genetic heritage, but of the genetic development of every plant and animal on Earth. And beyond.
Loud and bitter were the battles against such genetic engineering. There were mistakes, of course, and disasters. For almost a century the planet was racked by the Biowars.
“But the step had been taken, for good or ill,” Anya told me. “Once our ancestors learned how to control and alter genes, the knowledge could not be erased.”
Blind natural evolution gave way to deliberate, controlled evolution. Where nature took a million years to make a change, humans changed themselves in a generation.
Human life spans increased by quantum jumps. Two centuries. Five centuries. Thousands of years. Virtual immortality.
The human race exploded into space, first expanding throughout the inner solar system, then leapfrogging the outer gas-giant planets and riding out to the stars in giant habitats that housed whole communities, thousands of men, women, and children who would spend generations searching for new Earths.
“Some altered their forms so that they could live on worlds that would kill ordinary human beings,” Anya said. “Others decided to remain aboard their habitats and make them their permanent abodes.”
Yet no matter which path they chose, each group of star-seekers faced the same ultimate questions: Are we still human? Do we want to remain human? The hard radiation of deep space and the strange environments of alien worlds were sources of mutations beyond their control.
They needed a baseline, a “standard model” Earth-normal human genotype against which they could compare themselves and make their decisions. They needed a link with Earth.
On Earth, meanwhile, generation after generation of dogged researchers were probing deeply into the ultimate nature of life. Seeking nothing less than true immortality, they seized the reins of their own evolution and began a series of mutations that ultimately led to beings who could interchange matter and energy at will, transform their own bodies into globes of pure energy that lived on the radiation of sunlight.
“The Creators,” I said.
Anya nodded gravely but said, “Not yet Creators, Orion, for we had created nothing. We were merely the ultimate result of a quest that had begun, I suppose, when the earliest hominids first realized that they had no way to avoid death.”
They had not become truly immortal. They could be killed. I got the feeling that they had even committed murder among themselves, long ages past. Yet they were immortal enough. They could live indefinitely, as long as they had a source of energy. To such creatures time is meaningless. But to immortal creatures descended from curious apes, with all of eternity at their disposal, time is a challenge.
“We learned to manipulate time, to translate ourselves back and forth almost as easily as we walk across a meadow.”
And found, to their horror, that theirs is not the only universe in the continuum of spacetime.
“The universes seem infinite, constantly branching, constantly impinging on one another,” Anya said. “Aten—the Golden One—discovered that there was a universe in which the Neanderthals became the dominant species of Earth and our own type of human never came into being.”
“The Neanderthals were beautifully adapted to their environment,” I recalled. “They had no need to develop high technology or science.”
“That universe encroached on our own,” Anya said, her silver-gray eyes looking back to those days. “The overlap was so severe that Aten feared our universe would ultimately be engulfed and we would be doomed to nonexistence.”
For creatures who had only newly achieved immortality, this discovery raised panic and terror. What good to be immortal if your entire universe will be snuffed out in the cosmic workings of quantized spacetime?
“That is when we became Creators,” said Anya.
“The Golden One created me.”
“And five hundred others.”
“To exterminate the Neanderthals,” I remembered.
“To make this universe safe for our own kind,” Anya corrected gently.
The Golden One, puffed up by his (my) success over the Neanderthals, began to examine other nexuses in spacetime where he felt he could change the natural order of the continuum to the benefit of his own inflated ego. Using me as his tool, he began to tamper with the continuum, time and again.
He found, to his shock and the anger of the other Creators, that once you have tampered with the fabric of spacetime myriads of geodesic world lines begin unraveling. The more you try to knit everything up into a neat package, the more the continuum warps and alters. You have no choice but to continue to try to manipulate the continuum to your own purposes; you can never allow the fabric of spacetime to unfold along its natural lines again.
Yes, I heard Set hissing within me, the pompous ape rushes to and fro, scattering his energies, distracted as easily as a chattering monkey. I will end his dilemma. Forever.
I strained to tell Anya that there were others who could manipulate spacetime. But not even that much could get past Set’s control over me. I felt perspiration breaking out across my forehead, my upper lip beading, so hard was I trying. But Anya did not seem to notice.
“So now we live on this world,” she said as we sat in the energy bubble, speeding high above a deep blue ocean striated with long straight combers that were traveling from one side of the earth to the other in almost perfect uniformity.
“And manipulate the continuum,” I commented.
“We’ve been forced to,” she admitted. “There’s no way we can stop without having the whole fabric of spacetime come crashing down on us.”
“And that would mean…?”
“Oblivion. Extinction. We’d be erased from existence, along with the whole human race.”
“But they’ve spread throughout interstellar space, you said.”
“Yes, but their origin is here. Their world line begins on Earth and then spreads throughout the galaxy. Still, it’s all the same. Expunge one part of that geodesic and it all unravels.”