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

"It will be better to wait until we are clear of this park. Otherwise..." She glanced back over her shoulder.
"Otherwise an angel will appear with a flaming sword?" I teased.
Anya was totally serious. "Orion, this park is a botanical experimental station for the creature whose statue we saw in the temple."
"The one called Set?"
She nodded. "We are not ready to meet him. We are completely unarmed, unprepared."
"But what harm would it be to eat some of his fruit? We could still hurry along as we ate."
Almost smiling, Anya said, "He is very sensitive about his plants. Somehow he knows when someone touches them."
"And?"
"And he kills them."
"He doesn't drive them into the outer darkness, to earn their bread by the sweat of their brows?" I noticed that even though my tone was bantering, we were walking faster than before.
"No. He kills them. Finally and eternally."
I had died many times, yet the Creators had always revived me to serve them again in another time, another place. Still I feared death, the agony of it, the separation and loss that it brought. And a new tendril of fear flickered along my nerves: Anya was afraid. One of the Creators, a veritable goddess who could move through eons of time as easily as I was walking along this garden pathЧshe was obviously afraid of the reptilian entity whose statue had adorned the temple by the bank of the Nile.
I closed my eyes briefly to picture that statue more clearly. At first I had thought it was a representation of a man wearing a totem mask: the body was human, the face almost like a crocodile's. But now as I scanned my memory of it I saw that this first impression had been overly simple.
The body was humanoid, true enough. It stood on two legs and had two arms. But the feet were claws with three toes ending in sharply hooked talons. The hands had two long scaly-looking fingers with an opposed thumb for the third digit, all of them clawed. The hips and shoulders connected in nonhuman ways.
And the face. It was the face of a reptile unlike anything I had seen before: a snout filled with serrated teeth for tearing flesh; eyes set forward in the skull for binocular vision; bony projections just above the eyes; a domed cranium that housed a brain large enough to be fully intelligent.
"Now you begin to realize what we are up against," Anya said, reading my thoughts.
"The Golden One sent us here to hunt down this thing called Set and destroy him?" I asked. "Alone? Just the two of us? Without weapons?"
"Not the Golden One, Orion. The entire council of the Creators. The whole assemblage of them."
The ones whom the ancient Greeks had called gods, who lived in their own Olympian world in the distant future of this time.
"The entire assemblage," I repeated, "That means you agreed to the task."
"To be with you," Anya said. "They were going to send you alone, but I insisted that I come with you."
"I am expendable," I said.
"Not to me." And I loved her all the more for it.
"You said this creature called SetЧ"
"He is not a creature of ours, Orion," Anya swiftly corrected. "The Creators did not bring him into being, as we did the human race. He comes from another world and he seeks to destroy the Creators."
"Destroy... even you?"
She smiled at me, and it was if another sun had risen. "Even me, my love."
"You said he can cause final death, without hope of revival."
Anya's smile disappeared. "He and his kind have vast powers. If they can alter the continuum deeply enough to destroy the Creators, then our deaths will be final and irrevocable."
Many times over the eons I had thought that the release of death would be preferable to the suffering toil of a life spent in pain and danger. But each time the thought of Anya, of this goddess whom I loved and who loved me, made me strive for life. Now we were together at last, but the threat of ultimate oblivion hung over us like a cloud blotting out the sun.
We walked on until the lines of trees abruptly ended. Standing in the shade of the last wide-branched chestnut, we looked out on a sea of grass. Wild uncut grass as far as the limestone cliffs that jutted into the bright summer sky, marking the edge of the Nile-cut valley. Windblown waves curled through the waving fronds of grass like green surges of surf rushing toward us.
Silhouetted against the distant cliffs I saw a few dark specks moving slowly. I pointed toward them and Anya followed my outstretched arm with her eyes.
"Humans," she muttered. "A crew of slaves."
"Slaves?"
"Yes. Look at what's guarding them."

Chapter 2
I focused my eyes intently on the distant figures. I have always been able to control consciously all the functions of my body, direct my will along the chain of neural synapses instantly to make any part of my body do exactly what I wished it to do.
Now I concentrated on the line of human beings trudging across the grassy landscape. They were being led by something not human.
At first it reminded me of a dinosaur, but I knew that the great reptilians had become extinct millions of years before this time. Or had they? If the Creators could twist time to their whim, and this alien called Set had comparable powers, why not a dinosaur here in the Neolithic era?
It walked on four slim legs and had a long whiplike tail twitching behind it. Its neck was long, too, so that its total length was nearly twenty feet, about the size of a full-grown African bull elephant. But it was much less bulky, slimmer, more graceful. I got the impression that it could run faster than a man.
Its scales were brightly colored in bands of red, blue, yellow, and brown. Horny projections of bone studded its back like rows of buttons. The head at the end of that elongated neck was small, with a short stubby snout and eyes set wide apart on either side of a rounded skull. Its eyes were slitted, unblinking.
It strode up at the front of the little column of humans, and every few moments turned its long neck back to look at the slaves it led.
And they were slaves, that was obvious. Fourteen men and women, wearing nothing but tattered loincloths, emaciated ribs showing clearly even at the distance from which we watched. They seemed exhausted, laboring for breath as they struggled to keep up to the pace set by their reptilian guard. One of the women carried a baby in a sling on her back. Two of the men looked like teenagers to me. There was only one gray head among them. I got the impression they rarely lived long enough to become gray.
Hiding behind the bole of the chestnut tree at the edge of the garden, we watched the pitiful little parade for several silent moments.
Then I asked, "Why slaves?"
Anya whispered, "To tend this garden, of course. And the other desires of Set and his minions."
The woman with the baby stumbled and fell to her knees. The giant reptile instantly wheeled around and trotted up to her, looming over her. Even from this distance I could hear the faint wailing of the baby.
The woman struggled to her feet, or tried to. Not fast enough for the guard. Its slim tail whipped viciously across her back, striking the baby as well. She screamed and the baby shrieked with pain and terror.
Again the tail flicked back and struck at her. She fell facedown on the grass.