But you did! I screamed in silence. You will! Just as I will betray you and kill you all.
CHAPTER 29
“He’s catatonic,” sneered the Golden One.
“He is under someone’s control,” Anya replied.
She had brought me not to the Golden One’s laboratory but to the tower-top apartment where I had been quartered before Anya and I had begun our trip around the world.
I could walk. I could stand. I suppose I could have eaten and drunk. I could not speak, however. My body felt wooden, numb, as I stood like an automaton in the middle of the spacious living room, arms at my sides, eyes staring straight into a mirrored wall that showed me my own blank face and rigid posture.
The Golden One was wearing a knee-length tunic of glowing fabric that clung to his finely muscled body. He planted his fists on his hips and snorted with disgust.
“You wanted to treat him with tender loving kindness and you bring him back to me catatonic.”
Anya had changed into a sleeveless chemise of pure white, cinched at the waist by a silver belt.
“His mind is being controlled by whoever had tortured his body,” she said, brittle tension in her tone.
“How did he get here?” the Golden One wondered, strutting around me like a man inspecting a prize animal. “Did he escape from his torturers or was he sent here?”
“Sent, I would think,” said Anya.
“Yes, I agree. But why?”
“Call the others,” I heard myself say. It was a strangled groan.
The Golden One looked sharply at me.
“Call the others.” My voice became clearer, stronger. Set’s voice, actually, not under my own control.
“The other Creators?” Anya asked. “All of them?”
I felt my head bob up and down once, twice. “Bring them here. All of them.” Then I added, “Please.”
“Why?” the Golden One demanded.
“What I have to tell you,” Set answered through me, “must be told to ail the Creators at once.”
He looked at me suspiciously.
“They must be in human form,” Set made me say. “I cannot speak to globes of energy. I must see human faces, human bodies.”
The Golden One’s tawny eyes narrowed. But Anya nodded to him. I remained silent, locked in Set’s powerful control, unable to move or to say more.
“It will be uncomfortable to have us all in here, jostling and perspiring,” he said, some of his old scornful tone returning.
“The main square,” Anya suggested. “Plenty of room for all of us there.”
He nodded. “The main square then,”
There were only twenty of them. Twenty majestic men and women who had taken on the burdens of manipulating spacetime to suit themselves. Twenty immortals who found themselves laboring forever to keep the continuum from caving in on them.
They were splendid. The human forms in which they presented themselves were truly godlike. The men were handsome, strong, some bearded but most clean shaven, eyes clear, limbs straight and smoothly muscled. The women were exquisite, graceful the way a panther or cheetah is, with coiled power just beneath the surface. Their skin was flawless, glowing, their hair lustrous, their eyes more beautiful than gemstones.
They wore a variety of costumes: glittering uniforms of metallic fibers, softly draped chitons, long swirling cloaks, even suits of filigreed armor. I felt shabby in a simple short-sleeved tunic and briefs.
The square on which we assembled was a harmonious oblong laid out in the Pythagorean dimension. Marble pillars and steles of imperishable gold rose at its corners. One of the square’s long sides was taken up by a Greek temple, so similar to the Parthenon in its original splendor that I wondered if the Creators had copied it or translated it through spacetime from the Acropolis to place it here. On the other side was a splendidly ornate Buddhist temple, with a gold seated Buddha staring serenely across the square at marble Athena standing with spear and shield. The two short ends of the square bore a steeply rising Sumerian ziggurat at one end and an equally precipitous Mayan pyramid at the other, so similar to each another that I knew they must both have originated in the mind of a single person.