Ben Bova - Orion 2 - Vengeance of Orion

VIP免费
2024-12-07 0 0 505.32KB 245 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
Ben Bova
Vengeance of Orion
To the kindly, courteous, cheerful, and always-helpful staff of the West
Hartford Library, with my thanks.
CONTENTS
PART ONE
continued
PART TWO
PART THREE
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Epilogue
Afterward
The great invasions which destroyed late Bronze Age civilization came from two
directions. From the northwest a variety of tribes, called by the Egyptians
the "sea peoples," began raiding the eastern coasts of the Mediterranean...
[by] 1200 B.C. the Hittite empire was destroyed.... While these invasions from
the northwest swept over Greece, Asia Minor, and the Mediterranean coasts,
other hordes of invaders came from the southeast, from the fringes of the
Arabian desert... The movement began early: the Israelites were already in
Palestine before 1220 B.C
-The Columbia History of the World, 1972
Prologue
I am not superhuman. I do have abilities that are far beyond those of any
normal man's, but I am just as human and mortal as anyone of Earth.
Yet I am a solitary man. My life has been spent alone, my mind clouded with
strange dreams and, when I am awake, half memories of other lives, other
existences that are so fantastic that they can only be the compensations of a
lonely, withdrawn subconscious mind.
As I did almost every day, I took my lunch hour late in the afternoon and made
my way from my office to the same small restaurant in which I always ate.
Alone. I sat at my usual table, toying with my food and thinking about how
much of my life is spent in solitude.
I happened to look up toward the front entrance of the restaurant when she
came in-stunningly beautiful, tall and graceful, hair the color of midnight
and lustrous gray eyes that held all of eternity in them.
"Anya," I breathed to myself, even though I had no idea who she was. Yet
something within me leaped with joy, as if I had known her from ages ago.
She seemed to know me as well. Smiling, she made her way directly to my table.
I got up from my chair, feeling elated and confused at the same time.
"Orion." She extended her hand.
I took it in mine and bent to kiss it. Then I held a chair for her to sit. The
waiter came over and she asked for a glass of red wine. It trundled off to the
bar.
"I feel as if I've known you all my life," I said to her.
"For many lifetimes," she said, her voice soft and melodious as a warm summer
breeze. "Don't you remember?"
I closed my eyes in concentration and a swirl of memories rushed in on me so
rapidly that it took my breath away. I saw a great shining globe of golden
light and the dark brooding figure of a fiercely malevolent man, a forest of
giant trees and a barren windswept desert and a world of unending ice and
snow. And her, this woman, clad in silver armor that gleamed against the dark-
ness of infinity.
"I... remember... death," I heard myself stammer. "The whole world, the entire
universe... all of space-time collapsed in on itself."
She nodded gravely. "And rebounded in a new cycle of expansion. That was
something that neither Ormazd nor Ahriman foresaw. The continuum does not end;
it begins anew."
"Ormazd," I muttered. "Ahriman." The names touched a chord in my mind. I felt
anger welling up inside me, anger tinged with fear and resentment. But I could
not recall who they were and why they stirred such strong emotions within me.
"They are still out there," she said, "still grappling with each other. But
they know, thanks to you, Orion, that the continuum cannot be destroyed so
easily. It perseveres."
"Those other lives I remember-you were in them."
"Yes, as I will be in this one."
"I loved you, then."
Her smile lit the world. "Do you love me now?"
"Yes." And I knew it was so. I meant it with every atom of my being.
"And I love you, too, Orion. I always have and I always will. Through death
and infinity, my darling, I will always love you."
"But I'm leaving soon."
"I know."
Past her shoulder I could see through the restaurant's window the gaudy
crescent of Saturn hanging low on the horizon, the thin line of its rings
slicing through its bulging middle. Closer to the horizon the sky of Titan was
its usual smoggy orange overcast.
The starship was parked in orbit up there, waiting for us to finish our final
preparations and board it.
"We'll be gone for twenty years," I said.
"To the Sirius system. I know."
"It's a long voyage."
"Not as long as some we've already made, Orion," she said, "or others we will
make someday."
"What do you mean?"
"I'll explain it during the voyage." She smiled again. "We'll have plenty of
time to remember everything then."
My heart leaped in my chest. "You're going too?"
"Of course." She laughed. "We've endured the collapse and rebirth of the
universe, Orion. We have shared many lives and many deaths. I'm not going to
be separated from you now."
"But I haven't seen you at any of the crew briefings. You're not on the
list..."
"I am now. We will journey out to the stars together, my beloved. We have a
long and full lifetime ahead of us. And perhaps even more than that."
I leaned across the table and kissed her lips. My loneliness was ended, at
last. I could face anything in the world now. I was ready to challenge the
universe.
BOOK I: TROY
Chapter 1
THE slash of a whip across my bare back brought me to full awareness. "Pull,
you big ox! Stop your daydreaming or you'll think Zeus's thunderbolts are
landing on your shoulders!"
I was sitting on a rough wooden bench along the gunwale of a long, wallowing
boat, a heavy oar in my hands. No, not an oar. A paddle. We were rowing hard,
under a hot high sun. I could see the sweat streaming down the emaciated ribs
and spine of the man in front of me. There were welts across his nut-brown
skin.
"Pull!" the man with the whip roared. "Stay with the beat."
I wore nothing but a stained leather loincloth. Sweat stung my eyes. My back
and arms ached. My hands were callused and dirty.
The boat was like a Hawaiian war canoe. The prow rose high into a grotesquely
carved figurehead; some fierce demonic spirit, I guessed, to protect the boat
and its crew. I glanced swiftly around as I dug my paddle into the heaving
dark sea and counted forty rowers. Amidships there were bales of goods,
tethered sheep and pigs that squealed with every roll of the deck.
The sun blazed overhead. The wind was fitful and light. The boat's only sail
was furled against its mast. I could smell the stench of the animals'
droppings. Toward the stern a brawny bald man was beating a single large
mallet on a well-worn drum, as steady as a metronome. We drove our paddles
into the water in time with his beat-or took a sting from the rowing master's
whip.
Other men were gathered down by the stern, standing, shading their eyes with
one hand and pointing with the other as they spoke with one another. They wore
clean knee-length linen tunics and cloaks of red or blue that went down to
midcalf. Small daggers at their belts, more for ornamentation than combat, I
judged. Silver inlaid hilts. Gold clasps on their cloaks. They were young men,
lean, their beards light. But their faces were grave, not jaunty. They were
looking toward something that sobered their youthful spirits. I followed their
gaze and saw a headland not far off, a low treeless rocky rise at the end of a
sandy stretch of beach. Obviously our destination was beyond that promontory.
Where was I? How did I get here? Frantically I ransacked my mind. The last
firm memory I could find was of a beautiful, tall, gray-eyed woman who loved
me and whom I loved. We were... a shudder of blackest grief surged through me.
She was dead.
My mind went spinning, as if a whirlpool had opened in the dark sea and
dragged me down into it. Dead. Yes. There was a ship, a very different ship.
One that traveled not through the water but through the vast emptiness between
stars. I had been on that ship with her. And it exploded. She died. She was
killed. We were both killed.
Yet I lived, sweaty, dirty, my back stinging with welts, on this strangely
primitive oversized canoe heading for an unknown land under a brazen cloudless
sky.
Who am I? With a sudden shock of fright I realized that I could remember
nothing about myself except my name. I am Orion, I told myself. But more than
that I could not recall. My memory was a blank, as if it had been wiped clean,
like a classroom chalkboard being prepared for a new lesson.
I squeezed my eyes shut and forced myself to think about that woman I had
loved and that fantastic star-leaping ship. I could not even remember her
name. I saw flames, heard screams. I held her in my arms as the heat blistered
our skins and made the metal walls around us glow hell-red.
"He's beaten us, Orion," she said to me. "We'll die together. That's the only
consolation we will have, my love."
I remembered pain. Not merely the agony of flesh searing and splitting open,
steaming and cooking even as our eyes were burned away, but the torture of
being torn apart forever from the one woman in all the universes whom I loved.
The whip cracked against my bare back again.
"Harder! Pull harder, you whoreson, or by the gods I'll sacrifice you instead
of a bullock once we make landfall!"
He leaned over me, his scarred face red with anger, and slashed at me again
with the whip. The pain of the lash was nothing. I closed it off without
another thought. I always could control my body completely. Had I wanted to, I
could have snapped this hefty paddle in two and driven the ragged end of it
through the whipmaster's thick skull. But what was the sting of his whip
compared to the agony of death, the hopelessness of loss?
We rowed around the rocky headland and saw a calm sheltered inlet. Spread
along the curving beach were dozens of ships like our own, pulled far up on
the sand. Huts and tents huddled among their black hulls like shreds of paper
littering a city street after a parade. Thin gray smoke issued from cook fires
here and there. A pall of thicker, blacker smoke billowed off in the distance.
A mile or so inland, up on a bluff that commanded the beach, stood a city or
citadel of some sort. High stone walls with square towers rising above the
battlements. Far in the distance, dark wooded hills rose and gradually gave
way to mountains that floated shimmering in the blue heat haze.
The young men at the stern seemed to get tenser at the sight of the walled
city. Their voices were low, but I heard them easily enough.
"There is it," one of them said to his companions. His voice was grim.
The youth next to him nodded and spoke a single word.
"Troy."
Chapter 2
WE landed, literally, driving the boat up onto the beach until its bottom
grated against the sand and we could go no farther. Then the whipmaster
bellowed at us as we piled over the gunwales, took up ropes, and-straining,
cursing, wrenching the tendons in our arms and shoulders-we hauled the pitch-
blackened hull up onto the beach until only its stern and rudder paddle
touched the water.
Hardly any tide to speak of, I knew. When they finally sail past the Pillars
of Herakles and out into the Atlantic, that's when they'll encounter real
tides.
Then I wondered how I knew that.
I did not have time to wonder for long. The whipmaster allowed us a scant few
moments to get our breath back, then he started us unloading the boat. He
roared and threatened, shaking his many-thonged whip at us, his cinnamon-red
beard ragged and tangled, the scar on his left cheek standing out white
against his florid frog's-eyed face. I carried bales and bleating sheep and
squirming, foul-smelling pigs while the gentlemen in their cloaks and linen
tunics and their fine sandals walked down a gangplank, each followed by two or
more slaves who carried their goods, mostly arms and armor, from what I could
see.
"Fresh blood for the war," grunted the man next to me, with a nod toward the
young noblemen. He looked as grimy as I felt, a stringy old fellow with skin
as tanned and creased as weather-beaten leather. His hair was sparse, gray,
matted with perspiration; his beard, mangy and unkempt. Like me, he wore
nothing but a loincloth; his skinny legs and knobby knees barely seemed strong
enough to tote the burdens he carried.
There were plenty of other men, just as ragged and filthy as we, to take the
bales and livestock from us. They seemed delighted to do so. As I went back
and forth from the boat I saw that this stretch of beach was protected by an
earthenwork rampart studded here and there with sharpened stakes.
We finished our task at last, unloading a hundred or so massive double-handled
jugs of wine, as the sun touched the headland we had rounded earlier in the
day. Aching, exhausted, we sprawled around a cook fire and accepted steaming
wooden bowls of boiled lentils and greens.
A cold wind blew in from the north as the sun slipped below the horizon,
sending sparks from our little fire glittering toward the darkening sky.
"I never thought I'd be here on the plain of Ilios," said the old man who had
worked next to me. He put the bowl to his lips and gobbled the stew hungrily.
"Where are you from?" I asked him.
"Argos. My name is Poletes. And you?"
"Orion."
"Ah! Named after the Hunter."
I nodded, a faint echo of memory tingling the hairs at the back of my neck.
The Hunter. Yes, I was a hunter. Once. Long ago. Or-was it a long time from
now? Future and past were all mixed together in my mind. I remembered...
"And where are you from, Orion?" asked Poletes, shattering the fragile images
half-forming in my mind.
"Oh," I gestured vaguely, "west of Argos. Far west."
"Farther than Ithaca?"
"Beyond the sea," I answered, not knowing why, but feeling instinctively that
it was as honest a reply as I could give.
"And how came you here?"
I shrugged. "I'm a wanderer. And you?"
Edging closer to me, Poletes wrinkled his brow and scratched at his thinning
pate. "No wanderer I. I'm a storyteller, and happy was I to spend my days in
the agora, spinning tales and watching the faces of the people as I talked.
Especially the children, with their big eyes. But this war put an end to my
storytelling."
"How so?"
He wiped at his mouth with the back of his grimy hand. "My lord Agamemnon may
need more warriors, but his faithless wife wants thetes."
"Slaves?"
"Hah! Worse off than a slave. Far worse," Poletes grumbled. He gestured to the
exhausted men sprawled around the dying fire. "Look at us! Homeless and
hopeless. At least a slave has a master to depend on. A slave belongs to
someone; he is a member of a household. A thes belongs to no one and nothing;
he is landless, homeless, cut off from everything except sorrow and hunger."
"But you were a member of a household in Argos, weren't you?"
He bowed his head and squeezed his eyes shut, as if to block out a painful
memory.
"A household, yes," he said, his voice low. "Until Queen Clytemnestra's men
booted me out of the city for repeating what every stray dog and alley cat in
Argos was saying-that the queen has taken a lover while her royal husband is
here fighting at Troy's walls."
I took a sip of the rapidly cooling stew, trying to think of something to say.
"At least they didn't kill you," was all I could come up with.
"Better if they had!" Poletes replied bitterly. "I would be dead and in Hades
and that would be the end of it. Instead, I'm here, toiling like a jackass,
working for wages."
"That's something, anyway," I said.
His eyes snapped at me. "You are eating your wages, Orion."
"This... this is our payment?"
"For the day's work. Exactly. Show me a thes with coin in his purse and I'll
show you a sneak thief."
I took a deep breath.
"Lower than slaves, that's what we are, Orion," said Poletes, in a whisper
that was heavy with overdue sleep. "Vermin under their feet. Dogs. That's how
they treat us. They'll work us to death and let our bones rot where we fall."
With a heavy sigh Poletes put his empty bowl down and stretched out on the
sandy ground. It was getting so dark that I could barely see his face. The
pitiful little fire had gone down to nothing but embers. The wind blowing in
from the water was cold and sharp. I automatically adjusted my blood flow to
keep as warm as possible. There were no blankets or even canvas tarpaulins
among the sprawled bodies of the exhausted thetes. They slept in their
loincloths and nothing else.
I lay down beside the old man, then found myself wondering how old he could
truly be. Forty, perhaps. I doubted that anyone lived much past fifty in this
primitive time. A pair of mangy dogs snarled at each other over some bones by
the fire, then settled down side by side, better protected against the night
than we were.
Just before I closed my eyes to sleep, I caught sight of the beetling towers
of Troy bulking dark against the deepening violet sky.
Agamemnon. Troy. How did I get here? How long could I survive as something
lower than a slave?
Falling asleep was like entering another world. My dream was as real as life.
I thought perhaps it was life, a different life on a different plane of
existence.
I stood in a place that had neither time nor dimension. No land, no sea, no
sky. Not even a horizon. A great golden glow surrounded me, stretching away to
infinity on every side, warm and so bright that it dazzled my eyes. I could
see nothing except its radiance.
Without knowing why, I began to walk. Slowly at first, but soon my pace
quickened, as if I knew where I was heading and why. Time was meaningless
here, but I walked endlessly, my bare feet striking something firm beneath me,
though when I looked down all I could see was the gleaming golden light.
And then, far, far off, I saw a brilliance that outshone everything else. A
speck, a spot, a source of radiance that blazed pure gold and drew me forward
like a magnet draws a sliver of iron, like the fiery sun draws a falling
comet.
I ran, I flew toward that burning golden glow. Breathlessly I raced to it, my
eyes painfully dazzled, my heart thundering wildly, the breath rasping in my
throat.
I stopped. As if an invisible wall had risen before me. As if my body had
suddenly become paralyzed.
I stopped and slumped to my knees.
A human form sat before me, elevated above my level, resting on nothing more
substantial than golden light. He was the source of all the radiance. He shone
so beautifully that it hurt my eyes to look upon him. Yet I could not look
away.
He was splendid. Thick mane of golden hair, gold-flecked eyes. Skin that
glowed with life-giving radiance. Utterly handsome face, masculine yet
beautiful, calm and self-assured, the hint of a smile curling his lips. Broad
shoulders and wide hairless chest. Bare to the waist, where draperies of
gleaming gold enfolded him.
"My poor Orion." His smile turned almost mocking. "You are certainly in a
sorry state."
I did not know what to reply. I could not reply. My voice froze in my throat.
"Do you remember your Creator?" he asked, tauntingly.
I nodded dumbly.
"Of course you do. That memory is built so deeply into you that nothing but
final destruction can erase it."
I knelt before my Creator, my mind whirling with faint half memories,
struggling to find my voice, to speak, to ask him...
"Do you remember my name?" he asked.
Almost, I did.
"No matter. For the present you may call me Apollo. Your companions on the
plain of Ilios refer to me by that name."
Apollo. The Greek god of light and beauty. Of course. The god of music and
medicine-or is it biotechnology, I wondered. But I seemed to recall that he
had another name, another time. And there were other gods, as well. And a
goddess, the one whom I loved.
"I am being harsh with you, Orion, because you disobeyed me in the matter of
摘要：

BenBovaVengeanceofOrionTothekindly,courteous,cheerful,andalways-helpfulstaffoftheWestHartfordLibrary,withmythanks.CONTENTSPARTONEcontinuedPARTTWOPARTTHREEPrologueChapter1Chapter2Chapter3Chapter4Chapter5Chapter6Chapter7Chapter8Chapter9Chapter10Chapter11Chapter12Chapter13Chapter14Chapter15Chapter16Cha...

展开>> 收起<<
Ben Bova - Orion 2 - Vengeance of Orion.pdf

共245页,预览10页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：245 页 大小：505.32KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-07

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 动力学连接体 力的合成 配电装置 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 245
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注