Ross Rocklynne - People of the Darkness

The words were almost impossible for Sun Destroyer to hear. She rejected them almost as soon as they reached her, but not soon enough. The portent of what was happening dazed her; her bewilderment changed to horror.

“You must not go,” she cried, surging amongst them as if she would block their many exits. “I erred — I did not know. I saw beauty in your form; I only wished to create more perfect beauty. I divined that as you moved toward beauty, you moved from pain. I only wished—”

Space was empty. Sun Destroyer was alone in the nineteenth band. They would never return, they would not believe that she would wish to seek beauty with them, that she sought painlessness and the surcease that ultimate beauty gave. She looked about on her seventeen separate and small selves, on the gleaming sphericity of the many Sun Destroyers, and she saw her own golden gleams turn ugly and dark within her. She could not bear the sight, and turned from herself toward the blank part of her inner mind.

But even there was torture.

Where was not torture?

The forty-ninth band. But even this thought, dull and old and full of horror, must be turned back again and again before she could face it and again examine it. And in order to face it, she must leave the nineteenth band and its ruined joy; she must depart forever from her seventeen selves, and somehow regain the hope of her single self.

In the fifteenth band, where resided no light whatsoever, Sun Destroyer restored herself to something of what she had been, and yet knew she could never be the same. Scorn of herself and of her supplicative abasement burned in her mind. She had begged the children of the skies for help; they, in their rightful suspicion, had denied her. Now no one could help her, save as she helped herself. Dread seized her, dread of herself and the need that was plain within her. Now there was but one answer to her life; she had known the answer; she had tried to blot it out, Her mind reeled at the enormity of the thing she must do…

Several light-years distant, the green-and purple-lights dispiritedly awaited the emergence of Sun Destroyer into the true band of space. They had no doubt she would emerge with taunts that would shame them for what they had attempted in the nineteenth band. They knew she would hover amongst them, challenging them to games only so that she could distribute annoyances. But when Sun Destroyer did emerge and flash toward them it was only to flash on by as if they never existed. Luminiscent stared after her, not so much in relief as in shock. “That is strange,” she whispered. “Strange! There must be something wrong with Sun Destroyer—”

Sun Destroyer hung before her mother.

The visions of Sun Dust locked with those of the younger green-light; puzzlement mixed with dread was in her gaze.

“What is it, my daughter?” she queried doubtfully. “You have not thus voluntarily come to me in many millions of years.”

Languidly Sun Destroyer rotated on a gradually changing axis. “You have two other children now who show you the respect you demand, mother,” she said casually.

Sun Dust’s inner green light seemed to darken; already three of her green-lights were gone. One remained to her, and when that one went also she would die.

Sun Dust was sad, not because of her coming end, but because her child should remind her of it, in subtle taunt.

“You have something you wish to know of me, my child.”

“A little thing,” said Sun Destroyer. “There is a little thing I would know of Darkness, he who sired me. It is not so very important, however, so that if you wished not to tell me—” Astounded, the words choked off; she could not control the eagerness within her. Shame rendered her further speechless, for Sun Dust could not help but note her lie.

Sun Dust said slowly, almost as if in relief, “It is something that is very important. Yet, in what way could Darkness be of import?” She mused on the question, made as if to search Sun Destroyer’s thought swirls; but Sun Destroyer thrust her off in unhidden recoil.

“Very well,” she said stiffly. “It is important. Darkness and his whole life and what he did with his life is important to me, for I am the product of that life! Darkness sought for answers to life — in me reside those answers, and the means of implementing them! Do you understand?”

Sun Dust could only gaze mutely.

“However, it is not only of Darkness I wish to know,” Sun Destroyer continued. “I seem to remember, from fragments of the story you told me, of another being, a being named—” She stopped, hardly able to say the name; she had thought it and dreamed of it so often.

Her mother said, “You speak of Oldster?”

“Yes!” Her eagerness was open to the skies now, consuming her, to be seen by any who looked. “Oldster, he who resides in the universe from which Darkness came. Mother, tell me of him! Was he wise?”

“He was very wise, my child.”

“And it was he who gave Darkness the secret that enabled him to cross the great gap of nothing that separates — our universe from his?”

“It was Oldster who gave Darkness access to the sphere of Great Energy which enabled him to cross. Ah, yes,” Sun Dust whispered, “Oldster was wise, so wise that he must live even today; for he escaped his doom. But he wishes to die.”

“To die?” The thought scoured Sun Destroyer with its newness. She swelled so that arrows of pale energy impaled the spaces about her. “Oldster, the wise, would wish to die? He could not then be so wise.” For a thousand years she brooded on that enigma. Finally, “Perhaps even the wise are sometimes foolish. Perhaps,” she added slowly, “one can become so wise that it becomes wise to wish for death. Therefore, though it is a foolish desire, I have no quarrel with it. Now mother, tell me of another thing, of the sphere of Great Energy. Does — does it still exist?”

“It is indestructible,” said Sun Dust simply. “Surely you must know this. It still exists, for Darkness carried it out into the darkness with him as he strove to reach his native universe. Darkness died, but the sphere is still out there, moving slowly toward that other universe.”

“It is still out there,” repeated Sun Destroyer. “Then, mother, who is to say that I may not follow it — catch up with it — and use it!”

“Who is to say, indeed?” murmured Sun Dust sorrowfully, and asked her question, though she sensed its answer. “But why?”

“Why? Why! ” The thoughts of Sun Destroyer streamed; violences stormed within her; she strained against bonds as if testing that point at which they could be broken. “You ask me why; and yet you must know why — for why else do I live except to discover those things I must know, and to learn the answer to questions none before me has asked? Mother, I too must cross the darkness, as Darkness did before me!”

“And then?”

“And then — then I shall seek out Oldster, and wrest from him the answer to the secret that plagues me, so that I may at last know my happiness. And who, indeed, more earnestly seeks happiness than I? Who is more deserving of happiness, of all the creatures of the skies, than I? Therefore, I shall leave you, leave this universe, and eventually even leave Oldster, after I have found him. For what need then shall I have of anyone?”

Her voice dreamed. The universe hummed about her. Her future lured her with its promise. For a long time the moment held, and then she must bring herself back to hear the horror in the voice of Sun Dust, and to feel the probing quest of Sun Dust’s thoughts in her own thought swirls.

“To seek out Oldster,” Sun Dust’s thoughts came, “you will endure such agonies as you cannot dream. Do you not understand, my child? Oh, Sun Destroyer, you must not! You seek happiness, but there is no happiness in the darkness. For a hundred million years, you will know agony such as a younger green-light never could know. Had you chosen to cross the darkness when you were younger — when there was still time—”