Orion in the Dying Time
by Ben Bova
To Lester del Rey, mentor
“An intelligence knowing, at a given instance of time, all forces acting in nature, as well as the momentary position of all things of which the universe consists, would be able to comprehend the motions of the largest bodies of the world and those of the lightest atoms in one single formula, provided his intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to him nothing would be uncertain, both past and future would be present in his eyes.”
What if there were more than one such person?
Prologue
With Anya beside me, I walked out of the ancient temple into the warming sunshine of a new day. All around us a lush green garden grew: flowering shrubs and bountiful fruit trees as far as the eye could see.
Slowly we walked along the bank of the river, the mighty Nile , flowing steadily through all the eons.
“Where in time are we?” I asked.
“The pyramids have not been started yet. The land that will someday be called the Sahara is still a wide grassland teeming with game. Bands of hunting people roam across it freely.”
“And this garden? It looks like Eden .”
She smiled at me. “Hardly that. It is the home of the creature whose statue stood on the altar.”
I glanced back at the little stone temple. It was a simple building, blocks of stone fitted atop one another, with a flat wooden slat roof.
“Someday the Egyptians will worship him as a powerful and dangerous god,” Anya told me. “They will call him Set.”
“He is one of the Creators?”
“No,” she said. “Not one of us. He is an enemy: one of those who seek to twist the continuum to their own purposes.”