For hours I resisted the idea. I had no desire to go back to them. I wanted to be free of them for all time. Or at the least, I wanted to meet them as an equal, a man who had defeated their most dangerous enemy with his own strength and wits, not a maimed toy that did not work correctly and was in constant need of help.
But there was no alternative. I could not face Set alone and unarmed. I needed their help.
Yet I knew that once I tried to make contact with the Creators, Set would home in on my mental beacon like a serpent gliding through the darkness is guided by its prey’s body heat. If I tried to make contact with the Creators and failed, Set’s demons would be upon me within hours.
That meant I could not merely seek out contact with the Creators and hope that they would bring me across spacetime to them. I had to make the leap myself, with my own power.
Night was falling. Crickets chirruped and winged insects whined through the shadows. I climbed up the maple’s trunk and flattened myself prone on one of its sturdy branches. Somehow I felt safer up in the tree than on the ground.
My monkey heritage, Set would have called it. Yet I truly did feel safer.
Closing my eyes, I tried to recall all the times I had been shifted through the continuum from one point in spacetime to another. I recalled the pain of death, repeated over and over. Concentrating, forcing myself to see through that pain, beyond it, I sought the memory of translating myself across the continuum.
I had done it before, although I was not certain that one of the Creators had not helped me without my being aware of it. Now I wanted to do it completely on my own. Could I?
The secret was to tap enough energy to create a warp in spacetime. Energy is subject to the control of a conscious mind just as matter is. And the universe teems with energy. Stars radiate their energy throughout spacetime, drenching the continuum with their bounty. Even as I lay sprawled on this tree branch in the dark of night, countless trillions of neutrinos and cosmic particles were flowing through my body, filling the night, swarming through the world around me.
I used that energy. Focusing it with my mind the way a lens focuses light, I bent that energy to my will. Once again I felt that moment of cryogenic cold, that instant of nothingness that marked the transition across the awful gulfs of the continuum.
I opened my eyes.
The city of the Creators stood all around me, magnificent temples and monuments from all the ages of humankind. Empty and silent, abandoned.
The energy dome shimmered above, tingeing the clear blue sky with a slight golden cast. Elsewhere on this tranquil Earth human beings very much like me lived their normal lives of joy and sorrow, work and love. But the Creators had fled.
For hours I walked through their city, their monument to themselves. Marble and bronze, gold and stainless steel, glass and glossy wood. To what avail? This world of theirs went along without them, but for how long? How long would the continuum maintain its stability with Set still alive and the Creators scattered among the stars? For how long could the human race exist with its implacable enemy still working to destroy all humanity?
I found myself in the main square once again, facing the Parthenon and its heroic statue of Athena. My Anya’s face looked down at me, a Greek battle helmet tilted back on her head, a great spear gripped in one slender hand.
I lifted my arms to the thirty-foot-tall statue rising before me.
“How can I win, all alone?” I asked the unfeeling marble. “What can I do, by myself?”
The statue stirred. Its marble seemed to glow from within and take on the tones of living flesh. Its painted eyes became live, grave gray eyes that looked down on me solemnly. Its lips moved and the melodious voice I knew so well spoke to me.