Alarmed, I propped myself up on one elbow. “Then he could be released?”
Aten made a sneering smile. “None of us will release him! Would you, Orion?”
I shook my woozy head, muttering. “It would have been better to kill him.”
“Not so easily done, my love. Be satisfied that we have won.”
“Lots of the dinosaurs got loose,” I remembered.
“Good hunting for your Mongol friends,” said Aten. He pulled his cloak tighter about him. It began to shimmer.
“Wait!” I called.
The Creators looked down at me, their faces curious or annoyed.
“What about Subotai? He is here with only his personal guard, less than a thousand men.”
“Quite enough, I should think,” said Zeus.
“I promised him that I would bring his entire army here. That means all his people, their women, their flocks and herds, their yurts and all their belongings.”
“Why bother?” asked Aten scornfully. “The barbarian general accomplished nothing. He’s useless to us.”
Struggling up to a sitting position, I answered, “He is my friend. I promised him.”
“Ridiculous.” Aten sneered.
“That’s not for you to decide alone,” Anya snapped.
“I’m afraid I agree with Aten,” said Zeus. “It would serve no useful purpose.”
“It’s difficult enough trying to keep the continuum from unraveling,” said sharp-featured Hermes. “Why make a change that we don’t have to make?”
“I’ll do it myself,” I said.
They all stared at me.
“You?” Aten laughed. “A toy that I created, acting like a god?”
“Which of you brought Subotai and his thousand men to this time and place?” I demanded.
They glanced around at one another, finally focusing all their glances on Anya.
She shook her head, smiling. “Not I. I was hiding deep underground, waiting for the moment to strike at Set’s core tap. The rest of you were scattered among the stars.”
“You can’t mean that Orion did it himself!” Aten almost shouted.
Anya nodded. “He must have. None of us did.”
“I did it myself,” I said.
Zeus smiled without humor. “Orion, you are learning the powers of a god.”
“There are no gods,” I replied grimly. “Only beings such as yourselves—and Set.”
They stirred uneasily.
“If Orion wants to bring Subotai’s people here, I say he has earned that right,” Anya said firmly.
No one contradicted her.
I closed my eyes, grateful for her in so many ways that I could not even begin to count them. In that one fleeting instant I saw history unreeling before me like a spool of film spinning at blurring speed.
I saw Subotai’s people settling across this broad grassy savannah that stretched from the Red Sea to the Atlantic.
I saw Mongol warriors spitting carnosaurs on their lances, brown-skinned men in stained leathers and steel helmets, riding tough little Gobi ponies, who would give rise in later generations to splendid tales of knights in shining armor slaying fire-breathing dragons to save enchanted princesses.
I saw those Mongols learning agriculture from the natives of Paradise, intermarrying with them generation after generation as the glaciers retreated northward from Europe, taking the rains with them and turning the broad grasslands into the parched desert called Sahara.
I saw the great-great-grandchildren of Subotai’s army moving to the Nile valley, leaving the withering savannah, inventing irrigation and civilization. That made me smile: the so-called barbarian Mongols fathering the earliest civilization on Earth.
And I saw tortured Sheol breathe its final burst of flame and collapse at last into a gaudy ovoid of a planet, spinning madly, striped in brilliant colors, still heated from within by the energy of its final collapse, circled by dozens of fragments of the shattered Shaydan. I knew Zeus would be pleased to have the planet named after him.
And I saw, with a sinking heart, that all the slaughter I had done, the destruction of Sheol and the planet Shaydan, the time of great dying that I had rained upon the earth, the extinction of the dinosaurs and countless other forms of life—all this had been part of the Golden One’s plan.
I heard his haughty laughter as I watched once again the reign of death that I had inflicted upon the earth.
“I am evolution, Orion,” he boasted. “I am the force of nature.”
“All that killing,” I heard myself sob.
“It was necessary. My plans span eons, Orion. The dinosaurs were just as great an obstacle to me as they were to Set. They had to be removed, or else I could never have brought the human race into being. You wiped them out, Orion. For me! You think you are almost a god, but you are still my creature, Orion, my toy. Mine to use as I see fit.”
Epilogue
In the timeless city beneath the golden energy dome Anya healed me of my wounds, both physical and spiritual. The other Creators left us alone in that empty mausoleum of a city, alone among the temples and monuments that the Creators had built for themselves.
My burns healed quickly. The gulf between us caused by her seeming betrayal, less so. I realized that Anya had to make me think she had abandoned me, otherwise Set would have seen her trap when he probed my mind. Yet the pain was still there, the awful memory of feeling deserted. As the days quietly passed and the nights, the love we felt for each other slowly began to bridge even that gap.
Anya and I stood on the outskirts of the city before the massive bulk of the enormous pyramid of Khufu, its dazzling white coat of polished limestone gleaming gloriously in the morning light, the great Eye of Amon just starting to form as the sun moved across the sky toward the position that created the shadow sculpture.
I felt restless. Even though we had the entire empty city to ourselves, I could not overcome the uncomfortable feeling that we were not truly alone. The other Creators might be scattered across the universes, striving to maintain the spacetime continuum that they themselves had unwittingly unraveled, yet I had the prickly sensation in the back of my neck that told me we were being watched.
“You are not happy here,” Anya said as we walked unhurriedly around the base of the huge, massive pyramid.
I had to admit she was right. “It was better when we were back in the forest of Paradise.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “I liked it there, too, even though I didn’t appreciate it at the time.”
“We could go back there.”
She smiled at me. “Is that what you wish?”
Before I could answer, a shimmering sphere of glowing gold appeared before us, hovering a few inches above the polished stone slabs that made up the walkway around the pyramid’s base. The globe touched lightly on the paving, then contracted to form the human shape of Aten, dressed in a splendid military tunic of metallic gold with a high choker collar and epaulets bearing a sunburst insignia.
“Surely you’re not thinking of retiring, Orion,” he said, his tone just a shade less mocking than usual, his smile radiating more scorn than warmth.
Turning to Anya, he added, “And you, dearest companion, have responsibilities that cannot be avoided.”
Anya moved closer to me. “I am not your ‘dearest companion,’ Aten. And if Orion and I want to spend some time alone in a different era, what is that to you?”
“There is work to be done,” he said, the smile fading, his tone more serious.
He was jealous of me, I realized. Jealous of the love that Anya and I shared.
Then the old smug cynicism came back into his face. He cocked a golden eyebrow at me. “Jealous?” he read my thoughts. “How can a god be jealous of a creature? Don’t be ridiculous, Orion.”