Obey me! commanded the Golden One inside my head.
Obey me! Set thundered at me silently.
Each of them was pouring more and more of his energy into me, like a pair of enormous lasers focused on a helpless naked target.
“Use their energy!” Anya’s voice reached me. “Absorb their energy and use it for yourself!”
From the deepest recesses of my soul came an echoing response, a newly awakened voice, tortured, tormented, filled with anguish. What about me? it cried. What about Orion? Me, myself. Must I be a weapon of deliberate genocide? Must I forever be a toy, a puppet manipulated by my creator or by his ultimate enemy? When will Orion be free, be totally and completely human?
“NEVER!” I roared.
I could feel Set’s surprise and the Golden One’s shock. I could sense Anya breathlessly watching to see what I would do.
All that energy pouring into me. All that power: the overwhelming brilliance of the Golden One, the hell-hot fury of Set. All focused on me. While Anya watched, bright-eyed.
“Never!” I shouted again. “I will never obey either one of you again! I free myself of you both! Now!”
I spread my arms and felt as if binding chains had snapped and been thrown off.
“I’m free of you both!” I snarled at them: the Golden One standing stunned before me, Set raging within my own skull. “You can both go to hell!”
The Golden One’s mouth hung open. Anya’s expectant expression began to turn into a smile and she started to step toward me.
But Set’s furious voice within me seethed, “No, traitorous ape. Only you shall go to hell.”
Chapter 30
Abruptly I was spinning, falling, flailing through empty space, stars whirling around me dizzyingly. The square, the city, the earth were gone. I was alone in the fierce cold of the void between worlds.
Not totally alone. I could feel Set’s furious hatred raging, even though he no longer controlled me from within.
I laughed soundlessly in the black vacuum. “You can punish my body,” I told Set mentally, “but you no longer control it. You can send me to your hell but you can’t make me do your work.”
I sensed him howling with wrath. The stars themselves seemed to shudder with the violence of his anger.
“Orion!” I heard Anya’s mind calling to me, like a silver bell in the wilderness, like a cool clear stream on a hot summer’s day.
I opened my mind to her. Everything that I had experienced, all my knowledge of Set and his plans, I transmitted to her in the flash of a microsecond. I felt her mind take in the new information, saw in my own inner eye the shocked expression on her face as she realized how narrowly she and the other Creators had escaped final death.
“You saved us!”
“Saved you,” I corrected. “I don’t care about the others.”
“Yet I… you thought that I had betrayed you.”
“You did betray me.”
“And still you saved me?”
“I love you,” I replied simply. It was the truth. I loved her completely and eternally. I knew now that it was my own heart’s choice, not some reflex built into me by the Golden One, not some control that Anya wielded over my mind. I was free of all of them and I knew that I loved her no matter what she had done.
“Orion, we’re trying to reach you, to bring you back.”
“Trying to save me?”
“Yes!”
I almost laughed there in the absolute cold of deep space. The stars were still pinwheeling around me, as if I were in the center of an immense kaleidoscope. But I saw now that one particular star was not spinning across the blackness of the void. It remained rock still, the exact center of my whirling universe. That blood red star called Sheol. It seethed and boiled and reached out for me.
Of course. Set’s hell. He was plunging me into the center of his dying star, destroying me so completely that not even the atoms of my body would remain intact.
Anya realized what he was doing as immediately as I did.
“We’re working to pull you back,” she told me, her voice frantic.
“No!” I commanded. “Send me straight into the star. Pour all the energy the Creators can command into me and let me plunge into Sheol’s rotting heart.”
In that awful endless moment, suspended in the infinite void between worlds while time itself hung suspended, I realized what I must do. I made my choice, freely, of my own will.
For my link with Anya was two-way. What she knew, I knew. I saw that she did love me as truly as a goddess can love a mortal. And more. I saw how I could destroy Set and his entire world, his very star, and end his threat to her and the other Creators. I didn’t care particularly about them, and I still loathed the self-styled Golden One. But I would end Set’s threat to Anya once and for all, no matter what it cost.
She saw what I wanted to do. “No! You’ll be destroyed! We won’t be able to recover you!”
“What difference does that make? Do it!”
Love and hate. The twin driving forces of our manic passionate hot-blooded species. I loved Anya. Despite her betrayal I loved her. I knew it was impossible, that despite the few snatches of happiness we had stolen there was no way that we could be together forever. Better to make an end of it, to give up this life of pain and suffering, to give her the gift of life with my final death.
And I hated Set. He had humiliated me, tortured my body and my mind, reduced me to a slavish automaton. As a man, as a human being, I hated him with all the roaring fury my kind is capable of. Through the eons, across the gulfs between our worlds and our species, for all of spacetime I hated him. My death would demolish his hopes forever, and in my blood-hot rage I knew that death was a small price to pay if it meant death to him and all his kind.
With an effort of my own free will I stopped my body’s spinning and arrowed straight toward simmering red Sheol. Not only will I die, I thought. Not only will Set and his loathsome kindred die. His world will die. His star will die as well. I will destroy all of them.
Too late Set realized he had lost control of my body. I felt his shocked surprise, his desperate panic.
“Everything you have told me has been a lie,” I said to him mentally. “Now I tell you one eternal truth. Your world ends. Now.”
All the energies that the Creators could generate from thousands of stars through all the ages of the continuum were being trained on me. My body became the focal point of such power as to tear worlds apart, annihilate whole stars, rip open the very fabric of spacetime itself.
I sped toward the seething mass of blood red Sheol, no longer a human body but a spear of blinding white-hot energy from across the continuum aiming at the decaying heart of the dying star. Tendrils of fiery plasma snaked up toward me. Arches of glowing ionized gas appeared and streamed above the star’s surface like bridges of living, burning souls. Disembodied, I still saw the churning surface of the star, bubbling and frothing like some immense witch’s caldron. Magnetic fields strong enough to twist solid steel into taffy ribbons clutched at me. Vicious flares heaved fountains of lethal radiation as if Sheol were trying to protect itself from me.
To no avail.
I plunged into that maelstrom of tortured plasma, seeking its dense core where atomic nuclei were fusing together to create the titanic energy that powered this star. With grim pleasure I realized that Sheol was truly dying already, its nuclear fires simmering, faltering, making the entire star shudder as it wavered between stability and explosion.
“I will help you to die,” I said to the star. “I will put an end to your agony.”