They shut up.
“You don’t have to believe a word I say,” I told them. “That doesn’t matter at all. What does matter is this: You are going to sit at this table until you have hammered out an agreement to end the war.”
They stirred at that.
“I don’t care if take days or years. No one leaves this time and place until you have agreed on peace. Once you do, you will be returned precisely to the times and places you were when I brought you here.”
“And what do you propose to do if we refuse to discuss peace?” asked the biggest Tsihn there, a real dragon with multihued scales encrusted with decorations.
“I will shoot you, one at a time, until you do begin meaningful discussions.”
Half of them leaped to their feet, shouting.
“How dare you?”
“You can’t-you wouldn’t!”
But they saw my troopers standing behind them, saw the guns at their waists, the grim smiles on their youthful-yet-aged faces.
“You will make peace or you will die,” I said sternly. “Just as you send your soldiers to be killed in battle, now you can face death yourselves.”
“You would kill unarmed civilians?”
“Who killed the people of Yellowflower?” I asked. “Who wiped out the Hegemony colonies? Who gave the orders?”
They sank back into their chairs.
“Listen to me,” I urged them. “If the war goes on, one side or the other will begin to use star-wrecking weapons. When you come to that point, the older species of the galaxy will annihilate all of you, without mercy and without remorse. You will all be exterminated like vermin.”
That started them arguing. I assured them of the Old Ones’ resolve. “Weapons powerful enough to destroy whole stars can set up chain reactions that can destroy much of the galaxy, perhaps the entire galaxy. That will not be permitted.”
“Who are you to make such threats?”
I smiled coldly. “In a sense, I am the ambassador from the Old Ones and the other ancient species of this galaxy. They have remained aloof from us because we are too young and too ignorant to be of interest to them. But now that we threaten the existence of the galaxy, they have no choice but to take notice of us-and take action.”
They did not want to believe me, but after long hours of debate and argument they began to accept what I told them. The sun sank behind the lofty trees and night came on. I kept them at the table, protected and warmed by a bubble of energy. I produced food and allowed them to leave the table briefly, knowing that there was no place in this continent-wide forest that they could escape to.
“No one returns to their own time and place until a peace agreement has been reached,” I said.
Days went by. They argued, they railed at each other, they hurled accusations and threats across the table. I reminded them that unless they began working toward peace I would begin shooting them. And I pointed to the loudest of the loudmouths.
“You’ll go first,” I said.
His eyes widened, but he stopped his insults and imprecations.
It was like a giant group-therapy session. It took time for them to air their true resentments, their real fears. They accused one another of all sorts of aggressions and atrocities, at first. But gradually, knowing that there was no alternative, knowing that they themselves were facing death, they began to get to the underlying causes of the war.
I knew that the real cause was the manipulations of the Creators. No matter what these humans and aliens agreed upon, the Creators could upset it in the blink of an eye. I realized that after I had finished with these politicians, I would have to face the Creators. Led by Aten, the Golden One.
I was surprised that he did not show himself here, even indirectly, disguised as one of the politicians. Probably he was content to let me work out a peace agreement, and then rip it to shreds before it could be implemented. He enjoyed playing with the human race that way, toying with us, tempting us and then degrading us when we reached for greatness. Like flies to wanton boys, I thought. Except that this fly has no intention of allowing any god to pull its wings off. Not now that I’ve learned how to use them.
Chapter 32
It took weeks. Seven weeks, plus two days. A hundred times or more I thought my imposed peace conference would see a murder across the conference table. A thousand times the politicians blustered at one another, hurled accusations, threats, turned to me and blistered the air with their rage, promising to flay me alive once they got back to their own worlds.
Each time I told them that no one would leave this time and place until they had agreed upon peace, with a treaty that they all endorsed, a treaty that bound them all to stop the war. And I warned them that if they could not end the war, they would become casualties themselves.
A dozen times they came close, only to have the agreement shattered on some objection, some grievance, some seemingly impossible demand.
But slowly, grudgingly, they inched toward the agreement that I demanded. I used no force, except the threat of execution. That was enough to keep them at their work. I fed them and allowed them to refresh themselves from time to time. I allowed them to sleep when they needed to, although that caused some complications because the Skorpis preferred to sleep in the daytime and the Tsihn and humans at night. The Arachnoids did not seem to sleep at all. But always I brought them back to that conference table, like dragging a puppy to the paper it is supposed to use when you are training it.
After fifty-one days they had the agreement on paper. They were exhausted, all of them, by the effort. But where they had started, fifty-one days earlier, as enemies and strangers across the table, now they knew each other, perhaps even respected each other. Even the incommunicative Arachnoids had used the translating machines I gave them to make certain that their needs and desires were addressed in the treaty.
They were about to sign the document when I made the final objection.
“There is one problem that the human members of this conference have not addressed,” I said from the head of the long table.
“What is that?” they demanded.
“Your armies. Your soldiers. What do you intend to do with them?”
The humans on both sides of the table glanced at one another. “Why, put them back in cryonic storage, of course. What else can we do with them?”
“Let them live,” I said.
“They don’t know how to live! They’ve been bred for soldiering and that’s all they know.”
“Find worlds that are not occupied and let them settle on them. You owe them that much.”
“They won’t know how to survive. The skills of farming and building and living peacefully have never been part of their training.”
“Then train them,” I said firmly. “Train them as you fly them out to these new worlds.”
“They would die off in a single generation,” a gruff-faced man pointed out. “They’re all sterile; bred that way, you know.”
“They can make children through cloning, the way you made them. And their children needn’t be sterile.”
“But if we sent the troops off to other planets, that would disarm us,” one of the women objected. “We would have no army to protect us in case of future need.”
“Let your own children train for soldiering,” I said. “Defend yourselves.”
“That’s a ghastly idea! My children, soldiers?”
I leaned on the table with both hands. “Only when your own children are soldiers will you understand that war is not something you play at. These men and women have fought for you and you’ve rewarded them with nothing. No rights, no privileges, nothing in all their lives to look forward to except more fighting.”
“But they were bred for that! They don’t know anything except the army.”
“They know that they want to live. They know that they want more than the prospect of pain and blood and killing. They are human beings, just as human as you are. You must accept them as such.”
“It’s impossible,” someone muttered.
“Do you have any idea of what it would cost to settle our soldiers on new worlds?”
“Ask our own children to join the military?”
I said, “That is my demand for this peace treaty. It is not negotiable. You will release your soldiers from their slavery and allow them to lead peaceful lives.”
“That is simply not possible. It can’t be done.”
I replied, “It will be done, or you’ll spend the rest of your lives at this table.”
“Now, really!”
“You will learn, in some small way, what it’s like to have nothing to look forward to. You will stay here until you realize that this form of slavery is no longer to be tolerated.”
One of the Skorpis said, “If you humans are worried that you will have no one to protect you, we can be hired to serve as your army.
“The Tsihn have a long tradition of honoring military prowess,” said the largest reptilian. “We could certainly make military arrangements with the Commonwealth.” It turned its slitted eyes across the table. “Or with the Hegemony, once we have agreed to end the present war.”
Several of the humans objected to hiring mercenaries or placing their safety in the hands of aliens on the strength of diplomatic agreements. Others shuddered at the thought of having their own children put on military uniforms.
“May I say a word or two?” Frede asked, from her station to one side of the table.
The politicians all turned to her, surprised to hear a military officer ask for permission to speak. Since the earliest days of this enforced conference, they had taken their guards for granted, as much a part of the background as the trees or energy bubble that protected us from the weather.
“I know that every soldier would be very grateful for the chance to start a new life, in peace. Maybe we don’t know anything except soldiering, but that includes a lot of survival skills, and we’d be happy for a chance to learn how to live normal lives. And-well, if you need us, we’d still be available.”
“You would leave your new homes and fight for the Commonwealth, if we called you?”
“If it’s necessary,” Frede said. “You’d have to tell us why it’s necessary.”
“The human armies of the Hegemony undoubtedly feel the same way,” I added.
It took further hours of debate. The humans asked to discuss the matter among themselves, and for the first time Commonwealth and Hegemony men and women walked off together, talking earnestly, trying to find a solution to a common problem.
The Tsihn reptilians seemed puzzled by my demand. “Why not freeze them if you don’t need them?” one of the lizards asked me.
“Because they are human beings,” I replied, “and entitled to all the rights that any other humans possess.”
A Skorpis commander shook her feline head. “Humans don’t understand the way of the warrior. They regard the warrior as an inferior person, a slave.”
“Regrettable,” said the Tsihn.
“That attitude is about to change,” I said.
“And we are all being held hostage here until it does,” the Skorpis commander replied.
“Regrettable,” the Tsihn repeated. I wondered if that was its idea of humor.
Neither the Commonwealth humans nor those of the Hegemony liked it, but at last they agreed to my demand: the existing human armies would remain alive and be resettled on unoccupied planets.
We had peace within our grasp. But only if I could make the Creators agree to it, I knew.
I returned the politicians to their homes, precisely to the times when I had kidnapped them. Frede and the other soldiers gaped when the whole group of them disappeared, together with their conference table and everything else.
“Matter transmission,” I told them.
They still shook their heads.
“I’m sending you back to Loris,” I told them. Before they could object, I added, “But not to your prison cells. You’ll be at the army base, in fairly luxurious quarters. If the politicians keep their word, the process of resettlement will begin soon.”
“And if it doesn’t?” Frede asked, with a veteran’s skepticism.
“I’ll come and get you,” I said.
She gazed into my eyes. “Who in the name of the seven levels of hell are you, Orion?”
“A soldier, just like you.”
“Dogshit you are.”
I grinned at her. “I’ve just been around longer. I know more tricks.”
“You’re not coming back to Loris with us?”
“No, I’ve got another problem to tackle,” I said.
She frowned slightly, then stepped up to me and, throwing her arms around my neck, gave me a very unmilitary kiss. “Thank you,” Frede said. “Thanks for our lives.”
I felt slightly flustered. The rest of the crew was grinning at us. I called them all to attention, then sent them back to Loris. They disappeared from the forest of Paradise as if they had never been there.
I took in a deep breath. The real test was facing me now. I translated myself to the city of the Creators.
This time I went right into the heart of the city, into its magnificent central square, bordered by temples from the highest human civilizations: a Sumerian ziggurat, a Mayan pyramid, the Parthenon in all of its original graceful beauty. The sun shone brightly through the shimmering golden energy dome that encased the Creators’ city; I could feel the breeze from the nearby sea wafting by.
They were all there, waiting for me, all of them in perfect glowing health. All of them in splendid robes, a pantheon of human physical perfection, the men handsome and grave, the women stunning and equally solemn. All except Anya.
“Where is she?”
The Golden One stepped forward, regarded me somberly.
“Where is she?” I repeated.
“All in due time, Orion. We have other matters to discuss first.”
My left hand snapped out and I seized him by the throat, pressing my thumb against his windpipe, forcing him to his knees.
“Where is Anya?” I thundered. “What have you done to her?”
The one I called Zeus snapped at me, “Release him at once!” I saw burly Ares and several of the others advancing upon me.
I tightened my grip on Aten’s throat. “Take another step and I’ll snap his neck.”
“What good would that do?” Zeus asked. “We will simply revive him.”
“You’ll copy him,” I said. “This one here will never know it. He’ll be dead.”
Aten’s eyes bulged up at me.
“Yes, I know your tricks. I know about matter transmission and the discontinuities you’ve created in the continuum. I know that you regard mortal humans as less than the dirt beneath your feet.”
“That’s not true, Orion,” said green-eyed Aphrodite. “We care for our creatures.”
I flung Aten to the ground. What was the point of killing him? They would simply make another.
But a murderous anger was surging through me. “Gods, you call yourselves? Liars! Imposters! Murderers! You’re nothing but a pack of ravening madmen.”
“You go too far,” Hera said. I remembered when she styled herself Olympias, the mother of Alexander the Great, the woman who engineered the assassination of her husband, Philip, king of Macedon.
Aten glared up at me with a fury in his eyes to match my own. “If you want to find your precious Anya,” he croaked, rubbing at his throat, “you will have to settle with us first.”
“What is there to settle?” I demanded. “The war is over-unless you godly murderers start it up again.”
“The war is over,” Hermes agreed, his gray eyes flicking to Zeus before he added, “We have settled our own differences; there’s no need for further fighting among the humans.”
I looked at Hermes, then at Zeus and Hera and all the others. My gaze finally returned to Aten, climbing back to his feet, glowering pure hatred at me.
“You must speak to the Old Ones for us,” he said, his voice already healing from my throttling.
“Must I?”
Zeus said, “It is important that we establish friendly relations with them. Vital.”
“Why?”
“The ultimate crisis, Orion!” said Hermes urgently. “It’s here! There’s no time to waste.”
“You can travel across time and yet you say you have no time to waste? I don’t understand.”
The Golden One almost put on his old smugly superior sneer, but Zeus spoke before he could. “We are facing a crisis that may be beyond our power to solve. No matter how we move across the continuum, all the time tracks, all the geodesies are being warped beyond control.”
I recalled the Old Ones telling me that every passage through the continuum creates disturbances, ripples in the fabric of space-time. Now, looking into the Creators’ minds as they stood before me, I saw what they feared. They had torn that fabric with their meddling in the continuum, their egomaniacal desire to alter space-time to suit their own desires. Now those ripples were cascading, threatening a turbulence that could rip apart the continuum itself and shatter the universe into mangled shards of chaos. All the timestreams would be torn apart by a tidal wave of discontinuity, causality would be wiped out as the quantum fluctuations of matter/energy dissolved time itself into an endless, meaningless nothingness.
“It is worse than you know, Orion,” raven-haired Istar said to me. “We are not the sole cause of the crisis.”
Before her words fully registered on my mind, Zeus said, “There are others who manipulate the continuum. Their exploitations of space-time have been even more severe than our own.”
“They must be stopped,” Hera said.
“Before the whole continuum breaks apart,” Hermes added.
I stared at them, trying to digest what they were telling me.
“It’s the truth, Orion,” said Aten, the Golden One, who had styled himself Apollo to the Greeks. “We are all in enormous danger; the entire universe is threatened.”
“That’s why you want the Old Ones,” I realized. “You need their help.”
Aten nodded. “Theirs, and the help of all the elder races in the galaxy.”
“And this war that you put humankind through for three generations? Where you destroyed whole planets? And you were ready to destroy the stars themselves-what was the real purpose of it?”
Aten’s golden eyes shifted away from mine momentarily, then he pulled himself to his full height and answered, “We disagreed about contacting the elder species, such as the Old Ones. I wanted to enlist their help; Anya and those of us who sided with her wanted to leave them alone.”
“And for that you put the human race through a century of war? And dragged in all those alien races, as well?”
Some of the old arrogance came back into his expression. “Anya can be very stubborn.”
“Where is she?”
“She refused to join us in this-” He hesitated, as if searching for a word. “-this peace conference.”
“She was dying.”
“I was trying to make her see things my way. It worked with the others.” He gestured carelessly toward Poseidon, Aphrodite, and several of the other Creators. “But, as I said, Anya is very stubborn.”
I suspected that there was more to it than he was telling me. “You say that she objected to contacting the Old Ones?”
“She thought we could face the ultimate crisis without their help.”
I turned to Aphrodite. “Is that true?”
“Yes,” she said. But as she spoke, her eyes were on the Golden One, not on me.
I looked at each of them in turn, finally resting my gaze on Zeus. “What’s the rest of it?” I asked him. “I know there must be more to this than I’ve been told so far.”
He stroked his neatly trimmed beard for a moment, almost smiled at me. “Accept what Aten has told you, Orion. Help us to gain the trust of the Old Ones.”
“How can I tell them to trust you when I myself can’t?”
Aten’s gold-flecked eyes blazed at me. “You’ll never be revived again, Orion. You’ve outlived your usefulness if you don’t help us get to the Old Ones.”
Staring into those angry eyes, I thought I finally understood what they had refused to tell me.
“You don’t want the Old Ones’ help. You want their power. You want to learn what they know so you can use it for your own ends. You talk about the ultimate crisis, but you still dream of dominating everyone and everything, you still aspire to mastering the entire continuum.”
Aten smiled coldly at me. “You’ve learned a lot since I first created you. Perhaps too much.”
“Stop this masquerade,” I demanded. “Show me the truth.”
His smile faded. The sky overhead darkened; clouds boiled up out of the sea and swept by. The other Creators aged and withered before my eyes: Aphrodite’s hair went dead white, her face wrinkled; Poseidon turned weak and trembling like a palsied old man; even Zeus and Hermes and Hera sank into decrepit gray-skinned wrecks.
Only Aten retained his youthful vigor. He even seemed stronger than before, glowing in the storm-clouded shadows like the sun.
And the Creators’ city itself crumbled before my eyes. The temples turned to dust, the columns cracked and toppled to the ground. The earth shook. Lightning split the sky.
“You think you have learned so much, Orion,” Aten sneered at me. “How little you know, creature!”
He waved one hand and the sky cleared as quickly as it had clouded. The other Creators had collapsed into heaps of rags and shriveling, decaying flesh in the midst of the ruined city.
And I recognized the ruins.
“Lunga!” I gasped. I could see past the rubble-strewn square, past the demolished stumps of towers and temples, out to the curving beach where the Skorpis base had been.
“Not Lunga,” said the Golden One. “That was a bit of a deception I played on you, Orion.”
I realized what he meant. “Earth. This is Earth. It never was Lunga, it was Earth all along.”
“Far in the future,” he said. “So far that the Moon has wandered away in its orbit until you can’t even recognize it unless I point it out to you.”
“Then the Old Ones are from Earth!”
“I doubt that. Perhaps from Neptune, originally, but not Earth. Some of them colonized Earth’s oceans, apparently, long eons ago.”
“Who destroyed your city?”
Smirking, “We did it ourselves. Another of our little family squabbles. No difference, we can build it up again when we’re ready.”
“And the other Creators? You’ve killed them all?”
“They’re not dead, Orion. I’m merely demonstrating to them-and to you-that I am the mightiest of all. They bend to my will or I take their lives from them.”
“That’s what you did to Anya.”
His face clouded. “She escaped me. Somehow, she got away. I suspect that you were responsible for that, Orion. In another era, another place-time, you rescued her.”
I felt a surge of joy at that, not merely because I saved her, but because it angered and frustrated him.
“But I’m canceling that occurrence,” the Golden One said. “I’m ending your existence, Orion. You’ve outlived your usefulness.”
“And the Old Ones?” I taunted.
He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Ah yes, the Old Ones.”
“You need them, don’t you?”
“Not as much as I need to be rid of you,” he said. “I created you to be my hunter, to do my bidding, but you’ve become more trouble than you’re worth.”
“You’d rather have the universe shatter into ultimate chaos than have Anya challenge your supremacy,” I said.
His smile returned. “Better to reign in hell, Orion, than serve in heaven.”
Once I thought I had wanted to die, to be released from life, freed of the endless wheel of pain and disappointment. But now I wanted to live, to find Anya and revive her, to reach the Old Ones and ask their help in saving the continuum from utter collapse, to stand in the way of Aten and keep him from realizing his megalomaniacal dreams.
“Götterdämmerung,” I said.
“The twilight of the gods,” he replied. “The downfall of everything. I will be supreme at the end.”
“Never,” I said, and translated myself out of the ruins of the Creators’ city, away from Earth, far into the depths of interstellar space.
It felt like a death. Yet I knew I would live again to seek Anya, to fight against the Golden One, to find my place in the continuum.
Epilogue
It was a brown, arid world, but not without its beauty.
I stood on the crest of a dusty hill clawed by arroyos, looking out on a desert valley. Millions of years ago this had been sea bottom, but now the nearest body of open water was a thousand kilometers away. Yet there was life here: cactus and dry brown brush, poisonous lizards and tiny darting rodents with beady eyes and long hairless tails. Birds chattered from the few scrawny trees. Insects glinted in the harsh hot sunlight.
There was a patch of green down in that valley, with a village at its edge. A tiny knot of buildings made of sun-dried mud bricks, roofed with gnarled thin branches. Men and women were in the fields nearby, bent over their crops.
At first glance I did not notice any machinery, any sign that this human settlement was more advanced than the Stone Age. But then I caught the glint of sunlight on solar collectors atop the roof of a larger building. I saw a geodesic dome, a small one, but large enough to house a communications antenna.
There were no roads in sight, only footpaths out to the fields where the crops were growing.
I had nothing with me but the tatters of an old uniform and an ancient dagger that I kept strapped to my thigh. With a smile of satisfaction, I started down the eroded bare dirt of the hillside, heading for the village.
I arrived as the sun touched the western horizon and the workers were coming back from the fields.
They were startled to see a stranger.