BOOK III: HELL
I fled, and cri’d out Death;
Hell trembl’d at the hideous Name, and sigh’d
From all her Caves, and back resounded Death.
CHAPTER 23
I did not withdraw from Anya’s mind. I was driven out of it, repelled like an invading bacterium, thrown out like an unwanted guest.
For hours I howled like a chained beast in my dark coffin of a cell, unable to move, to stand, unable even to pound the walls until my fists became bloody pulps. I huddled there in a fetal position, wailing and bellowing to a blindly uncaring universe. Betrayed. Abandoned by the only person in the continuum whom I could love, left to my fate as callously as if I were nothing more to her than the husk of a melon she had tasted and then thrown away.
Anya and the other Creators were fleeing for their lives, reverting to their true physical forms, globes of pure energy that can live among the stars for all eternity. They were abandoning the human race, their own creations, to be methodically wiped out by Set and his reptilian brethren.
What did it matter? I wept bitterly, thinking of how foolish I had been ever to believe that a goddess, one of the Creators, could love a man enough to risk her life for his sake. Anya had been all fire and courage and adventure when she had known that she could escape whatever danger we faced. Once she realized that Set had the power to truly end her existence, her game of playing human ended swiftly.
She had chosen life for herself and her kind, and left me to die.
I lost track of time, languishing and lamenting in my cell. I must have slept. I must have eaten. But my conscious mind had room for nothing but the enormity of Anya’s betrayal and the certainty of approaching death.
Let it come, I told myself. The final release. The ultimate end of it all. I was ready to die. I had nothing to live for.
I don’t consciously recall how or when it happened, but I found myself on my feet once more, standing in Set’s audience chamber again, facing him on his elevated throne.
Blinking stupidly in the dull flickering ruddy light of the torches flanking his throne, I realized that I could move my arms and legs. I was not fettered by Set’s mental control.
His enormous bulk loomed before me. “No, there are no chains of any kind holding you,” his words formed in my mind. “We have no need of them now. You understand that I can crush you whenever I choose to.”
“I understand,” I replied woodenly.
“For an ape you show promising intelligence,” his mocking voice echoed within me. “I see that you have pieced together the fact that I intend to bring my people to this world and make Earth our new home.”
“Yes,” I said, while my mind wondered why.
“Most of my kind are content to accept their fate upon Shaydan. They realize that Sheol is an unstable star and will soon explode. Soon, that is, in terms of the universe’s time scale. A few million years from now. Soon enough.”
“You are not content to accept your fate upon a doomed planet,” I said to him.
“Not at all,” Set replied. “I have spent most of my life shaping this planet Earth to my purposes, fashioning its life-forms into a fitting environment for my people.”
“You travel through time, just like the Creators.”
“Better than your puny Creators, little ape,” he answered. “Their pitiful powers were based on the tiny slice of energy that they could obtain from your yellow sun. They allowed most of the sun’s energy to waft off into space! Unused. Wasted. A foolish mistake. A fatal mistake.”
He hissed with pleasure as he continued, “My own people have depended on the wavering energy from dying Sheol. I alone understood how much energy can be tapped from the molten core of a planet as large as Earth. Taken in its totality, a star’s energy output is millions of times stronger. But no one uses the total output of a star, only the miserable fraction that their planet intercepts.”