Ross Rocklynne - People of the Darkness

To hold these rigid attitudes was indeed a task. One must be active, most active, so that doubt of oneself rippled behind and never quite caught up. Sun Destroyer ripped and slid and skidded across the unbounded domain of countless billions of stars; she danced in dervish pattern. No matter that her fellow energy creatures stared and trembled at her approach; no matter that they hated and feared her — she would feed on their hate and their fear, and grow large and strong in her happiness.

The creatures of the skies knew no rest from Sun Destroyer, and she would give them no rest. They found their playland infested with this green-light who sought them at first to play, ostensibly, but whose ultimate purpose was their discomfort. In their harrowing ordeal, they even dared the terrors of the unknown bands of hyperspace. One of these unknown bands was the nineteenth. In this band, so the story went, strange dimensional tortures abounded. Furthermore, life, should it venture within, would find itself divided witlessly into many parts. Nobody seemed really sure of what actually went on in the nineteenth, although Swift insisted he had discovered its laws.

“You go in and you find yourself divided into seventeen equal parts,” said Swift.

“Fourteen,” challenged the young green-light Sky Mist. “So it was told me by some of the older ones of our race when they dared to enter the nineteenth. But it was a terrible experience, and they emerged instantly.”

“I have entered,” said Swift, “and entered alone. It was frightening, yes, but I didn’t know about that beforehand, and I took a chance and stayed — long enough to count seventeen parts of me, no less.”

“It was seventeen,” another purple-light agreed. “However, the single time I was there I noted that the real effect of the nineteenth band is to reduce one to one-seventeenth of his true size; coincidentally, he sees sixteen reflections of himself in a kind of hypnotic mental outpouring in which he attempts to compensate for his lost bulk.”

“An ingenious but impractical theory,” said Swift offhandedly. “Enough of these speculations, however. I myself am off to the nineteenth band for a practical demonstration, if only to myself. Perhaps there are those brave enough to enter with me.”

Sky Mist began to gather his courage, but still hung back. The others, charmed and at once repelled by the monstrous idea, fluttered uncertainly so that foamy iridescences frothed about their rims. They looked off to the rim of the galaxy which enclosed them, as if seeking other diversion. It was then that the outermost one of the gathering saw Sun Destroyer.

“Sun Destroyer comes!”

The heavens seemed to chill and darken.

“We must go before she sees us!”

Sun Destroyer was the living impulse of their migration into the nineteenth band. As one, the gathering shared the common thought of escape, escape, no matter where; the nineteenth band of hyperspace opened to receive them. Sun Destroyer plunged across space and hung motionless in the swarming sparkles that were left behind when her quarry vanished. She whirled a furious splatter of vision rays out upon the skies; perhaps each creature was hiding somewhere behind the shield of some great star!

Sun Destroyer searched first in true space. She ranged through the light-years, at first taking some pleasure in the chase; of the youthful energy creatures she saw no sign. She hung then before the portals of the hyperspaces, and thought with demon humor, They fear the bands of space less than they fear me! She ascended the spaces, skipping, however, from one to another. Some of these bands contained horrors and mysteries unmentionable; others could be worked with if their laws were understood; most were less preferable than the band of true space at any time.

A million years of searching passed. Fury and astonishment goaded Sun Destroyer. How silent the universe with her fellow youths gone! How loud the painful thoughts within her memory swirls! She must find them; she would again hum with the universal music of her contentment. But where had those fleeing youths immured themselves? The answer came at last: in the nineteenth band! Or, perhaps, the dreaded twentieth band, or the twenty-eighth — but most likely the nineteenth. These were the three bands that Sun Destroyer herself knew nothing of. But she would not let fear even begin in her — she was in the nineteenth band before she ever knew it.

Sun Destroyer felt the blinding, divisive pain of her entrance into the nineteenth band; but pain she had known before. Her astonishment was greater than her pain, and then came her great mirth. For this was indeed the space into which the youths had fled. They lay scattered upon the sky in myriads, pared down to smaller sizes. At a single glance, Sun Destroyer recognized thirteen different and smaller copies of Sun Mist. Swift himself was distributed everywhere. And Sun Destroyer herself! She saw herself in multiplicate form, in spinning glowing beauty that shamed the lesser ones to ugliness. For a moment this unequaled sight charmed her, but then the myriad of her fellows cried in orchestrated voice, “She has found us!” “We must undo the plan!” “She is here, and the crystal will shatter!”

Sun Destroyer’s multiplicate gaze was an admiring one, but was rigidly curious, for she divined a strangeness here. The youths moved not in their many pared-down forms. It was as if each had been assigned a position which he was reluctant to change. But Sun Destroyer could change position, and in a wicked experiment she did so; she permeated with multiplicate dance the motionless concourse. A cry of protest breathed across the silent and starless sky. “She moves; the equation will be destroyed!”

“What do you do?” Sun Destroyer’s voice came from the many forms of her. Slyly casual her voice was, as she searched for some clue to the game that was being played. Then she began to see the crystalline pattern of ultimate beauty that the youths presented to themselves. The prime number seventeen was the control factor; thought itself was the moving force that formed the living crystal; and the object was the lessening of pain.

The seventeen scattered forms of Sun Destroyer shivered and whirled and cascaded their golden gleams within her; her ecstasy was real.

“Let me play with you,” she whispered. “I will not disturb your peace this time.”

“Go! Sun Destroyer, you must go!”

“I must stay.” Her multiplicate forms danced involuntarily. Again protest whirred from the living crystal. “I promise you! You play a game I must be part of. See! I am able to divine the nature of your game. I can place myself as well as any of you.” Her searing thought formed within her and her copies. Rigidly, her seventeen selves assumed a pattern like a template that placed itself three-dimensionally within the complex latticework of the myriad others. The living crystal then was forced to change into a new pattern. Space sang and seemed to snap as the concourse of multiplied energy creatures crystallized anew; but with that new crystallization came such pulsing discordances within Sun Destroyer that even she shuddered with the horror of what she had done. In her eagerness, the equation failed; pain came in corrosive beats. The wail of anger and suffering ate into her thought swirls, so that in spasm and fright she sought to undo her error. But upon the strange heavens of the nineteenth band grew only a crystal of impossible structure and revolting ugliness and unbearable pain.

A moment that structure held. Then Swift in his many forms broke free of the crystal and it at once broke free of its structure to become a formless and even uglier mass of contorting energy creatures.

“She has found us,” said Swift. “Even here she would find us. So now we must go, before she leads us into more painful structures. Her thinking is ugly; she could not lead us into beauty.”