With a shake of my head, I repeated, “The Old Ones won’t permit it. They’ll wipe out all of us instead.”
Anya’s eyes looked old again, weary and defeated. “Then you’d better bring me back to Prime. I must tell the other Creators before they decide to go ahead with the weapon.”
“Tell me first how Aten is killing you. How is it possible?”
She shook her head again, utterly weary. “It’s a disease, Orion, a biological weapon that feeds on my metabolism. Aten developed it and planted it in all the Creators.”
“All of them?”
“Every one of us, long eons ago. The microbe lies dormant for ages, then slowly awakes and becomes active. Little by little, it saps your strength, slows your powers. Gradually its effects accelerate, until at last you wither and age and finally succumb.”
“But Zeus and Hera and the others—they didn’t show any signs of aging.”
A wan smile. “That’s because Aten is keeping them alive. As long as they stay with him, support his side of this war, he keeps them healthy.”
“And there’s nothing you can do? No cure? No way to restore yourself?”
“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.”