Ross Rocklynne - People of the Darkness

His thoughts swung back to the darkness.

For five million years he bathed himself in the rays that permeate space. He grew. He was ten million miles in diameter.

His mother came; he saw her hurtling toward him from a far distance. She stopped close.

“You are much larger, Darkness. You grow faster than the other newly-born.” He detected pride in her transmitted thoughts.

“I have been lying here, thinking,” he said. “I have been wondering, and I have come to guess at many things. There are others, like you and myself.”

“There are thousands of others, I am going to take you to them. Have you tried propellants?”

“I have not tried, but I shall.” There was a silence. “I have discovered the propellants,” said Darkness, puzzled, “but they will not move me.”

She seemed amused. “That is one thing you do not know, Darkness. You are inhabiting the seventeenth band of hyperspace; propellants will not work there. See if you can expand.”

All these were new things, but instinctively he felt himself expand to twice his original size.

“Good. I am going to snap you into the first band — there. Try your propellants.”

He tried them and, to his intense delight, the flaring lights that were the stars fled past. So great was his exhilaration that he worked up a speed that placed him several light-years from his mother.

She drew up beside him. “For one so young, you have speed. I shall be proud of you. I feel, Darkness,” and there was wistfulness in her tone, “that you will be different from the others.”

She searched his memory swirls. “But try not to be too different.”

Puzzled at this, he gazed at her, but she turned away. “Come.”

He followed her down the aisles formed by the stars, as she accommodated her pace to his.

They stopped at the sixth galaxy from the abyss of lightlessness. He discerned thousands of shapes that were his kind moving swiftly past and around him. These, then, were his people.

She pointed them out to him. “You will know them by their vibrations and the varying shades of the colored globes of light at their centers.”

She ran off a great list of names, which he had no trouble in impressing on his memory swirls.

“Radiant, Vibrant, Swift, Milky, Incandescent, Great Power, Sun-eater, Light-year—”

“Come, I am going to present you to Oldster.”

They whirled off to a space seven light-years distant. They stopped, just outside the galaxy. There was a peculiar snap in his consciousness.

“Oldster has isolated himself in the sixth band of hyperspace,” said his mother.

Where before he had seen nothing save inky space, dotted with masses of flaming, tortured matter, he now saw an energy creature whose aura fairly radiated old age. And the immense purple globe which hung at his core lacked a certain vital luster which Darkness had instinctively linked with his own youth and boundless energy.

His mother caught the old being’s attention, and Darkness felt his thought rays contact them.

“Oh, it’s you, Sparkle,” the old being’s kindly thoughts said. “And who is it with you?”

Darkness saw his mother, Sparkle, shoot off streams of crystalline light.

“This is my first son.”

The newly-born felt Oldster’s thought rays going through his memory swirls.

“And you have named him Darkness,” said Oldster slowly. “Because he has wondered about it.” His visions withdrew, half-absently. “He is so young, and yet he is a thinker; already he thinks about life.”

For a long time Oldster bent a penetrating gaze upon him. Abruptly, his vision rays swung away and centered on a tiny, isolated group of stars. There was a heavy, dragging silence.

“Darkness,” Oldster said finally, “your thoughts are useless.” The thoughts now seemed to come from an immeasurable distance, or an infinitely tired mind. “You are young, Darkness. Do not think so much; so much that the happiness of life is destroyed in the overestimation of it. When you wish, you may come to see me. I shall be in the sixth band for many millions of years.”

Abruptly, Oldster vanished. He had snapped both mother and son back in the first band.

She fixed her vision on him. “Darkness, what he says is true — every word. Play for awhile — there are innumerable things to do. And once in great intervals, if you wish, go to see Oldster; but for a long time do not bother him with your questions.”

“I will try,” answered Darkness, in sudden decision.

Darkness played. He played for many million years.

With playmates of his own age, he roamed through the endless numbers of galaxies that composed the universe. From one end to another he dashed in a reckless obedience to Oldster’s command.

He explored the surfaces of stars, often disrupting them into fragments, sending scalding geysers of belching flame millions of miles into space. He followed his companions into the swirling depths of the green-hued nebulae that hung in intergalactic space. But to disturb these mighty creations of nature was impossible. Majestically they rolled around and around, or coiled into spirals, or at times condensed into matter that formed beautiful hot suns.

Energy to feed on was rampant here, but so densely and widely was it distributed that he and his comrades could not even dream of absorbing more than a trillionth part of it in all their lives.

He learned the mysteries of the forty-seven bands of hyperspace. He learned to snap into them or out again into the first or true band at will. He knew the delights of blackness impenetrable in the fifteenth band, of a queerly illusory multiple existence in the twenty-third, and an equally strange sensation of speeding away from himself in an opposite direction in the thirty-first, and of the forty-seventh, where all space turned into a nightmarish concoction of cubistic suns and galaxies.

Incomprehensible were those forty-seven bands. They were coexistent in space, yet they were separated from each other by a means, which no one had ever discovered. In each band were unmistakable signs that it was the same universe. Darkness only knew that each band was one of forty-seven subtly differing faces, which the universe possessed, and the powers of his mind experienced no difficulty in allowing him to cross the unseen bridges, which spanned the gulfs between them.

And he made no attempts toward finding the solution — he was determined to cease thinking, for the time being at least. He was content to play, and to draw as much pleasure and excitement as he could from every new possibility of amusement.

But the end of all that came, as he had suspected it would. He played, and loved all this, until…

He had come to his fifty-millionth year, still a youth. The purple globe at his core could have swallowed a sun a million miles in diameter, and his whole body could have displaced fifty suns of that size. For a period of a hundred thousand years he lay asleep in the seventh band, where a soft, colorless light pervaded the universe.

He awoke, and was about to transfer himself to the first band and rejoin the children of Radiant, Light-year, Great Power and all those others.

He stopped, almost dumbfounded, for a sudden, overwhelming antipathy for companionship had come over him. He discovered, indeed, that he never wanted to join his friends again. While he had slept, a metamorphosis had come about, and he was as alienated from his playmates as if he had never known them.

What had caused it? Something. Perhaps, long before his years, he had passed into the adult stage of mind. Now he was rebelling against the friendships, which meant nothing more than futile play.

Play! Bouncing huge suns around like rubber balls, and then tearing them up into solar systems; chasing one another up the scale through the forty-seven bands, and back again; darting about in the immense spaces between galaxies, rendering themselves invisible by expanding to ten times normal size.