Reaching far back in time, to the point where life was just beginning to emerge from the waters and stake its claim on dry land, Set scrubbed the earth clean of almost every one of its life-forms and seeded the planet with reptilian stock. Long eons passed and those reptiles took command of the ground, the seas, and the air. They changed the planet’s entire ecosystem, even altered the composition of its atmosphere.
Now they were marked for destruction. The time had come for the descendants of Set’s seed, the dinosaurs, to give way to Set’s own people, the inhabitants of Shaydan. Set began the elimination of the dinosaurs and thousands of other species, cleansing the Earth once again to prepare it for his own kind.
A problem arose. From the distant future of the time where Set worked, the descendants of chattering inquisitive monkeys had evolved into powerful creatures who could also manipulate space time. Like monkeys, they busied themselves altering the continuum to suit themselves, even creating a breed of warriors to be sent to various points in spacetime to shape the continuum to their liking.
I realized that I was one of those warriors. The Creators had sent me to deal with Set, underestimating his abilities so tragically that now they were scattering out to the stars, abandoning the Earth and all its life to Set’s merciless hand.
Set had won a cosmic victory. The Earth was his. The human race was to be exterminated completely. I was to be exhibited around the planet Shaydan as proof of Set’s triumph and then ceremonially destroyed.
I knew that there was no way I could avoid my fate. With Anya gone, her back turned to me, I hardly had the will to keep on living.
I had died many times, but always the Creators had resurrected me to continue doing their bidding. I knew the pain that death brings, and the fear that comes with it every time, no matter how often. Is this the final destruction? Is the end of me? Will I be erased forever from the book of life?
Always in the past the Creators had restored me. But now they themselves were fleeing across the stars in fear of their lives.
I marveled that Set, as thorough and merciless as he was, would allow them to continue living.
CHAPTER 25
The ability to manipulate spacetime gives you control if the clock that counts out the hours, days, seasons, years. The ability to control time removes the frantic hurry from existence, teaches patience and prudence, allows the leisure to examine each step in life from every possible angle before proceeding further.
Set had traveled across millennia, across eons, to prepare his plans for the migration of his people to Earth. He felt no need for haste, no urge to speed.
Now he moved in a calm, deliberate manner to show me to his people even while Sheol seethed and writhed in the sky above.
Most of the time I was as good as blind in the murky atmosphere of Shaydan. The planet was slightly more massive than Earth; its more powerful gravity pulled on me, dragged my feet, made me feel tired and strained all the time. The merciless wind whipped at me and drove stinging particles of grit against my flesh. I was constantly exhausted, half-starved, my skin red and raw as if I were being lashed every hour of the day.
On rare occasions Set would allow me to see the world through the eyes of his people, and once again I saw a calm and beautiful desert world, severe but entrancing with its bold wind-sculpted rock mountains and bright yellow sky.
Set never allowed me into his own mind again. Did he realize that I had learned from him things that he would rather I did not know?
Slowly, as we traveled across the breadth of Shaydan, going from city to city in a seemingly endless round of visits and conferences, I began to understand the true nature of the people of Shaydan.
The fact that reptiles could evolve intelligence had puzzled me since I had first stepped out into the Neolithic garden along the Nile. Obviously Set and his kind had developed large complex brains, as mammals had done on Earth. Yet intelligence is more than a matter of brain size. If size were all that mattered, elephants and whales would be the intellectual equals of humankind, rather than the mental equals of dogs or pigs.