“Don’t you think we’ve tried to find a cure? The organism mutates even as we study it; its basic genetic structure changes randomly. Aten spent millennia developing this disease. He experimented with hundreds of generations of humans to perfect it. Half the plagues in human history were his experiments.”
“Yet he can protect the Creators who accept his domination.”
“Apparently, although I wonder if he doesn’t plan to kill them, too, when he no longer needs them.”
“He always wanted to be the only god,” I muttered.
Anya seemed to grow weaker with the exertion of admitting her helplessness. Yet I could not believe that she and the other Creators could not overcome Aten’s treachery.
“If he can protect some of the Creators,” I wondered aloud, “why can’t you and the others find the protective agent for yourselves?”
“Because it is keyed to Aten himself,” she answered. “He reaches through space-time to alter the microbe whenever we attempt to counteract it. We develop a vaccine and he changes the microbe to be immune to it. We move through space-time to annihilate the microbe, and he moves through space-time to revive it. The game is endless and deadly.”
“And each time any of you translates across space-time it unravels the fabric of the continuum a little more,” I said, remembering what the Old Ones had told me.
“Yes,” Anya agreed grimly. “Already the continuum is so disturbed that we can no longer accurately trace the various space-time tracks. We can’t probe the cosmos anymore, Orion! We’re losing our ability to foresee the results of our actions. Chaos is crashing down upon us all. Absolute chaos!”
She was trembling with fear. I took her in my arms and held her while the warm sun of Paradise swung westward and began to set, turning the sky aflame with red and violet clouds. I watched the deer and smaller animals come to the stream for their evening drink while Anya remained huddled in my arms, as if asleep.
As the world grew dark, though, she lifted up her head and looked into my eyes.
“We must go back, Orion,” she said, tearfully. “I must tell the others that we cannot develop the star-killer. I must get them to see that we have lost the war.”
“And Aten has won?”
“Yes.”
I shook my head. “Not while I live.”
Chapter 25
“There is one way to save you,” I told Anya.
“I know what you’re thinking, Orion, but it can’t be done. You can’t kill Aten.”
“He’s killing you.”
She touched my cheek with her fingertips, there in the gathering darkness of twilight, then kissed me lightly on the lips. “It can’t be done. He’s too powerful.”
I replied, “He’s constantly moving through space-time to adapt his bioweapon microbe against your attempts to destroy it. He’s turning the entire continuum into a shambles in his mad lust for dominance. He’s got to be stopped.”
“But if we other Creators, with all our powers, can’t stop him, how could you?”
“I almost killed him once, back in the time of Troy. Remember?”
“He was raving mad then.”
“And your fellow Creators pulled me off him. I could have snapped his neck, but the others stopped me.”
Despite her fears and her weakness, Anya smiled at me. “We may have made a mistake.”
“May have? You tried to cure his madness and now he’s killing you.”
“Orion,” Anya said, “I know how brave you are, and how much you love me. But to attempt to kill Aten is worse madness than he himself displays. He will destroy you with the flick of a finger. Destroy you utterly, and never revive you again.”
I shrugged. “So what? I don’t want to live if it means serving him forever, lifetime after lifetime. I don’t want to live if you die, if he kills you.”
“It’s hopeless, Orion. Useless.”
I got to my feet, extended my arms to her and helped her up. “It’s not hopeless, my darling. I have hope. That may be all I’ve got, but I won’t give up hope until the life is crushed out of me.”
Anya’s gaze shifted away from me. She took in the splashing stream, the trees swaying in the evening breeze, the first stars beginning to appear in the darkening sky.
“We’d better go back,” she said, with a sigh.
“Yes,” I said. “We have work to do.”
I closed my eyes and felt the abyssal cold of the interstices in the space-time continuum. It may have been only my imagination but it seemed to me that it took a longer span than usual to translate us back to that chamber beneath the surface of the planet Prime. Time is meaningless in between space-times, but I sensed that the old pathways were coming apart, unraveling like a frayed ball of twine, the ripples of causality churning into a chaotic froth.
Once again Anya sat at the head of the long, polished conference table. I stood beside her, a spotlight of energy still glowing around me in the otherwise shadowed chamber. She was old, weary, gray and dying.
The light around me dissolved and I was free to go to her, take her in my arms. She felt frail and dust-dry, as if she would crumble at my touch.
But her eyes were still luminous, still alive and alert.
“You’ll have to be my strength, Orion,” she said. “I can’t last much longer.”
Spheres of energy appeared along the table, glowing fitfully, feebly. They resolved themselves into a half- dozen of the Creators, all of them aged, withered, dying.
“The Old Ones have sent a message through Orion,” Anya told them. “They will not permit either of us to use the star-killer. They say they will eliminate us all if either the Commonwealth or the Hegemony attempts to do so.”
Like the Creators surrounding Aten, these Creators also scoffed at the Old Ones’ threat.
“How could they eliminate us? They don’t even have spacecraft. No technology at all.”
“None that you can recognize,” I said, still standing beside Anya’s chair. “But they can control the forces of the universe in their own way.”
“It’s a bluff,” sputtered one of the gray-bearded men. “They’re afraid that we’ll attack their stars and they’re trying to frighten us.”
“I don’t believe so,” said Anya. “They are far older than we. I suspect their powers are far greater than we can imagine.”
“If that’s the case, then we might as well surrender to Aten right here and now.”
“If the Old Ones have taken away our last trump card, then we’ve lost the war.”
“We’ll have to throw ourselves on Aten’s mercy.”
“He’ll stop the ravages of this disease of his if we simply agree to follow his leadership.”
They were old. They were tired. They had considered themselves immortal once, and now the prospect of painful death had them frightened and cowed.
“I agree,” Anya said to them, her voice utterly weary, infinitely said. “There is no further point to continuing this war. Despite the fact that we hold the military advantage at present, we have lost.”
“Ask Aten for a truce.”
“Call him now.”
Anya said, “We don’t even have the strength to reach him. The disease has weakened us too much. We’ll have to send an emissary to him, physically.”
I was about to tell them that I could reach Aten, but something made me hold my tongue. I glanced down at Anya, sitting hunched over beside me. She did not look at me, but I got the distinct impression that she had warned me not to speak.
