Even worse, he had learned how to configure his cloned replicas to suit his own desires: how to limit their intelligence so that they would never challenge him, how to limit their life spans so they would never grow to his age and experience.
Swiftly, with cold ruthlessness, Set gathered about himself a merciless cadre of males his own age, offering them domination of their entire world for all the millennia of their lives. They led a remorseless war of extinction against their own kind, especially against their females, cloning warriors as they needed them, slaughtering all who opposed them. For two centuries the genocidal war raged across the face of Shaydan. When it ended, Set and the patriarchs ruled over a world of submissive clones. All males. Every mother and daughter had been methodically butchered. Every unhatched egg had been found and smashed.
It took centuries for them to repair the ecological damage they had done to their world. But time meant little to them. They knew that they would rule for millennia to come. And leave their power, when the time eventually came, to exact copies of themselves. With telepathy it might even be possible to transfer their personalities to cloned bodies and continue to exist forever.
Of course their society ran as efficiently as an ant colony. Of course warfare was now unknown to them. Set and his fellow patriarchs ruled a world of clones incapable of doing more than obeying. But Set wanted still more. He wanted to be adored.
Then, like a punishment for their sins, came the certain knowledge that Sheol would explode and destroy their entire world.
Cosmic justice. Or at least cosmic irony. It made me smile inwardly to know that Set, for all his moralistic cant about reptilian fitness and their care for their environment, was at heart a ruthless mass murderer. A genocidal slaughterer of his own kind who had chosen power and death over nature and life.
I should have known I could not have kept my new knowledge from him.
“You think I am hypocritical, hairless ape?” he asked one murky day as we rode through a stinging windstorm. He was up ahead of me, as usual, his broad back to me.
“I think you are mercilessly evil, at the very least,” I replied. It did not matter if he heard my words or not. He could sense the thoughts forming in my brain.
“I saved Shaydan from the kind of excesses that mammals would have created. Without firm control, the people would have eventually destroyed their environment.”
“So you destroyed the people.”
“They would have destroyed themselves and their whole environment, had I not intervened.”
“That’s nothing but a rationalization. You took total power for yourselves, you and your fellow patriarchs. You rule without love.”
“Love?” He seemed genuinely surprised. “You mean sex.”
“I mean love, caring for your own kind. Friendship so deep that you’d be willing to lay down your life to protect—” The words gagged in my throat. I thought of Anya and the memory of her betrayal burned inside me like bitter bile. I wanted to vomit.
Amused contempt radiated from his mind. “Loyalty and self-sacrifice. Mammalian concepts. Signs of your weakness. Just as your ideas of so-called love are. Love is an apish invention, to justify your obsession with breeding. Sex was never as important to my species as it is to yours, hot-blooded monkey.”
I found the strength to retort, “No, it’s power that’s your obsession, isn’t it?”
“I cleansed this world so that I could bring new life to it, a better form of life.”
“Artificially created. Maimed in mind and body so that your creatures have no choice but to obey you.”
In my mind I heard the hiss of his laughter. “Just as you are, Orion. An over-specialized monkey created by your superior beings, maimed in mind and body to serve them without choice.”
Hot anger flared within me. Because he was right.
“Naturally you hate me and what I have done.” Set’s cool amusement washed over me like glacier melt. “You realize that it is exactly what the Creators have done to you, and you hate them for it.”