Part 22 (1/2)

I took a deep breath of sweet clean air. The suns.h.i.+ne felt good, warm, while the breeze coming off the sea was refres.h.i.+ngly cool. I felt strong again. Looking down at myself, I saw that I was clothed in a sleeveless white knee-length robe and a pair of shorts.

For several moments I simply lay back in the recliner, rejoicing in my returned strength. My skin was healthily tanned, all the old scorches and sores had disappeared. My arms and legs had filled out once more.

I got to my feet slowly, found that my legs were firm, and stepped to the balcony's railing. Peering far down, I scanned the wide expanse of golden sand below. No one. Not a soul. The curving beach was fringed with stately palm trees. The building I was in seemed to rise from the midst of the trees.

The surf drummed softly against the sand. The dolphins plied their way among the waves. One of the birds made a long, folded-wing dive into the water, splashed in, and bobbed up again, gulping a fish down its gullet.

”h.e.l.lo.”

I whirled around. Anya was standing at the doorway that led inside from the balcony. Her robe was gleaming white silk woven with threads of silver that sparkled in the sunlight. s.h.i.+ning dark hair pulled back off her face. Cla.s.sic features that inspired the sculptors of ancient Greece with the vision of ideal beauty. The G.o.ddess Athena come to warm, breathing life before me.

Instantly I felt Set's iron-cruel control clamp itself on my emotions. Love and hate, fear and desire, all buried beneath his glacial grip.

”Anya,” was all I could say.

”How do you feel?” she asked, stepping toward me.

”Normal. Much better than... before.”

She gazed deeply into my eyes, and I could see that her own silver-gray eyes were troubled, searching.

”What time is it?” I asked.

With a slight smile she replied, ”Morning.”

”No. I mean-what year? What era are we in?”

”This is the era in which you were created, Orion.”

”By the Golden One.”

”His true name is Aten.”

”That's what the Egyptians call their sun G.o.d.”

She arched a brow. ”He does not lack for ego, you know.”

”I was created,” I said slowly, ”to hunt down Ahriman.”

”Yes. Originally. Aten found you useful for other tasks, too.”

”He's insane, you know. The Golden One. Aten.”

Anya's smile faded. ”There is no such thing as insanity among us, Orion. We have evolved far beyond that.”

”You're not really human, are you?”

”We are what humans have become. We are the descendants of humankind.”

”But this body you show me... it's an illusion, isn't it?”

She took the final step that closed the distance between us and reached up to touch my cheek with her hand. It felt vibrantly alive.

”This body is composed of atoms and molecules just as yours is, Orion. Blood courses through my veins. And hormones too. The same as any human female.”

”There are humans here? Actual men and women still exist in this time?”

”Yes, of course. There are even a few still living here on Earth.”

”Tell me!” I gasped with an urgency forced upon me by the will of Set, lurking within my own mind. With my voice, but his words, I begged, ”I want to know everything there is to know about you.”

Over the next few weeks Anya told me.

We sailed across that wide sea in a bubble of energy that skimmed across the wave tops. I saw dolphins by the hundreds frolicking among the swells, and heard huge stately whales singing their eerily beautiful songs of the deeps. Through deep cool forests we rode like wraiths wafting along in the breeze. Deer stepped daintily through the woods, so tame that we could pet them. Across mountains and fertile gra.s.slands we glided, wrapped in a sphere of energy that was invisible yet all-protective. When we were hungry, meals appeared out of thin air, steaming and delicious.

I saw small villages where the tiled rooftops glittered with solar panels and ordinary-looking human beings tended fields and flocks. There were no roads between them and no vehicles that I could see. Most of the world was uninhabited, green and flowering, the sky pristine blue.

There were even swamplands teeming with crocodiles and turtles and frogs. I saw the enormous terrifying bulk of a tyrannosaur loom up above the cypresses, but Anya calmed my instinctive fear.

”The entire area is fenced in by an energy screen. Not even a fly can get out.”

Once again I was living with the woman I had loved, night and day. But we never touched, never even kissed. We were not alone. I knew Set dwelled within me, and I got the feeling that she sensed it, too.

Yet Anya showed me the world as it existed in the time of the Creators. The planet Earth, more beautiful than I had ever thought it could be, an abode for all kinds of life, a haven of peace and plenty, a balanced ecology that maintained itself on the energy of the sun and the control of humankind's descendants: the Creators. It was a perfect world, too perfect for me. Nothing was out of place. The weather was always mild and sunny. It rained only at night and even then our energy sh.e.l.l protected us. Not even insects bothered us. I got the feeling that we were riding through a vast park where all the plants were artificial and all the animals were machines under the control of the Creators.

”No, this is all real and natural,” Anya told me one night as we lay side by side looking up at the stars. Orion was in his rightful place up there; the Dipper and all the other constellations looked familiar. We were not so far in the future that they had become distorted beyond recognition.

Glowering ruddy Sheol was not in that sky, though. I felt Set's unease and enjoyed it.

The turning point in human history, Anya explained to me, had come some fifty thousand years before this era. Human scientists learned how to control the genetic material buried deep within the cells of all living things. After billions of years of natural selection, humankind took purposeful control not only of its own genetic heritage, but of the genetic development of every plant and animal on Earth. And beyond.

Loud and bitter were the battles against such genetic engineering. There were mistakes, of course, and disasters. For almost a century the planet was racked by the Biowars.

”But the step had been taken, for good or ill,” Anya told me. ”Once our ancestors learned how to control and alter genes, the knowledge could not be erased.”

Blind natural evolution gave way to deliberate, controlled evolution. Where nature took a million years to make a change, humans changed themselves in a generation.

Human life spans increased by quantum jumps. Two centuries. Five centuries. Thousands of years. Virtual immortality.

The human race exploded into s.p.a.ce, first expanding throughout the inner solar system, then leapfrogging the outer gas-giant planets and riding out to the stars in giant habitats that housed whole communities, thousands of men, women, and children who would spend generations searching for new Earths.

”Some altered their forms so that they could live on worlds that would kill ordinary human beings,” Anya said. ”Others decided to remain aboard their habitats and make them their permanent abodes.”

Yet no matter which path they chose, each group of star-seekers faced the same ultimate questions: Are we still human? Do we want to remain human? The hard radiation of deep s.p.a.ce and the strange environments of alien worlds were sources of mutations beyond their control.

They needed a baseline, a ”standard model” Earth-normal human genotype against which they could compare themselves and make their decisions. They needed a link with Earth.

On Earth, meanwhile, generation after generation of dogged researchers were probing deeply into the ultimate nature of life. Seeking nothing less than true immortality, they seized the reins of their own evolution and began a series of mutations that ultimately led to beings who could interchange matter and energy at will, transform their own bodies into globes of pure energy that lived on the radiation of sunlight.