"Bova, Ben - Orion 03 - Orion in the Dying Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bova Ben)

Ben Bova
Orion 3:
Orion in the Dying Time
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."
ЧPierre-Simon de Laplace
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."
"As the Golden One does," I said.
She gave me a stern look. "The Golden One, power mad as he is, at least works for the human race."
"He created the human race, he claims."
"He had help," she replied, allowing a small smile to dimple her cheeks.
"But this other creature... Set, the one with the lizard's face?"
Her smile vanished. "He comes from a distant world, Orion, and he seeks to eliminate us from the continuum."
"Then why are we here, in this time and place?"
"To find him and destroy him, my love," said Anya. "You and I together, Hunter and Warrior, through all spacetime."
I looked into her glowing eyes and realized that this was my destiny. I am Orion the Hunter. And with this huntress, that warrior goddess, beside me, all the universes were my hunting grounds.

BOOK I: PARADISE
A book of verses underneath the bough
A jug of wine, a loaf of breadЧand thou
Beside me singing in the wildernessЧ
Oh, wilderness were paradise enow!
Chapter 1
Anya pulled off her glittering silvery robe and flung it to the grassy ground. Beneath it she wore a metallic suit of the kind I vaguely remembered from another time, long ages ago. It fit her skintight, from the tops of her silver boots to the high collar that circled her neck. She was a dazzling goddess with long dark hair that tumbled past her shoulders and fathomless gray eyes that held all of time in them.
I wore nothing but the leather kilt and vest from my previous existence in ancient Egypt. The wound that had killed me then had disappeared from my chest. Strapped to my right thigh, beneath the kilt, was the dagger that I had worn in that other time. A pair of rope sandals was my only other possession.
Anya said, "Come, Orion, we must hurry away from this place."
I loved her as eternally and completely as any man has ever worshiped a woman. I had died many deaths for her sake, and she had defied her fellow Creators to be with me time and again, in every era to which they had sent me. Death could not part us. Nor time nor space.
I took her hand in mine and we headed off along a wide avenue between the heavily laden trees.
For what seemed like hours, Anya and I walked through the garden, away from the bank of the ageless Nile flowing patiently through this land that would one day be called Egypt. The sun rose high but the day remained deliciously cool, the air clean and crisp as a temperate springtime afternoon. Cottony clumps of cumulus clouds dotted the deeply blue sky. A refreshing breeze blew toward us from what would one day be the pitiless oven of the Sahara.
Despite her denying it, the garden did remind me of the legends I had heard of Eden. On both sides of us row upon row of trees marched as far as the eye could see, yet no two were the same. Fruits of all kinds hung heavy on their boughs: figs, olives, plums, pomegranates, even apples. High above them all swayed stately palms, heavy with coconuts. Shrubs were set out in carefully planned beds between the trees, each of them flowering so profusely that the entire park was ablaze with color.
Yet not another soul was in sight. Between the trees and shrubbery the grass was clipped to such a uniformly precise height that it almost seemed artificial. No insects buzzed. No birds flitted among the greenery.
"Where are we going?" I asked Anya.
"Away from here," she replied, "as quickly as we can."
I reached toward a bush that bore luscious-looking mangoes. Anya grabbed at my hand.
"No!"
"But I'm hungry."