Ross Rocklynne - People of the Darkness

The gravitational drag of the star was beyond belief. Plucked at with their thousand spears of insult, he fought with his falling sun as if his life depended on it, and he swung it free, in a vast arc, only to have it spin away in a mighty spiraling orbit. It disappeared beyond the titan’s farther rim, whirled swiftly, and came into view on the opposite rim just as it struck that heaving surface: The youths gasped concertedly, and suddenly they scattered back and away.

Yellow Light, for a moment of unbelief, held his visions on that terrible prelude to catastrophe. Then he too urged himself back a light-year, stunned.

The gargantua’s surface rippled with planet-size tidal waves and bulged for an infinitesimal second at its equator. The outraged matter at its core, pressed beyond endurance by the sudden application of a force and mass it could not compensate for, swelled up against its constructing confines and gave up all its supernal heat and energy in one huge upsurge of liberation. Million-mile cracks appeared on the crazily agitated surface of the star, deepened into vast gorges from which puffs of matter and light were emitted with frightful velocity. Pounded at insensately from within itself, the whole star broke apart with one vast detonation which bathed the heavens in demon light. It threw its fragments with unequaled savagery upon the sky, destroying in their course the tattered remnants of the two galaxies which had fed it. The inferno reached for fifteen light-years across space, and Yellow Light, visions blacked out by the ravening brilliance, was hurled back on the wavefront of the explosion.

Dazed, he finally thrust out with his parapropellants and stopped. From his vantage point, he saw the remainder of the conflagration. The brilliance died. Chaos was on the universe. New suns flared into life; freed matter settled into the stability of solitary, sedately coiling nebulae; flaming gases fled in great mist clouds across the gaps’ between four newly formed galaxies. Of the giant sun there was nothing. It had died and its convulsions had remade a tiny corner of the universe.

He hung there, shivering, knowing that there was something he must do. He must get away! He was too late, for from a hundred different directions the youths converged on him until once more he was encircled with their outraged cries.

“He destroyed our sun!” The purple-light who thus spoke reached out with a pressor ray. Yellow Light was ignominiously jarred a half-million miles to one side.

“Yellow Light, Yellow Light!” the voices cried. Another pressor ray flung him in an opposite direction. Feebly he tried to resist.

“I did not destroy it,” he panted, with an upsurge of rage. “I would have added to it successfully if there hadn’t been interference! It wasn’t my fault!”

A half-dozen rays, tractors and pressors both, stopped his protests, tore at him, pushed him, whirled him, until great foaming puffs of brilliance erupted from his oversize body. In a fury he lashed out with his own rays, but they were clumsily, ineffectively guided.

The youths cried out their devil’s song: “Yellow Light! Clumsy one! Yellow Light!”

“ Stop it! ”

A new voice burst through the mocking clamor. As if by magic, Yellow Light’s torturers ceased their battering, and he whirled, finally focusing his visions on the newcomer. Star Glory! A great starved eagerness leaped up in him at sight of her flawless milk-white sphericity with the round, clear green light as her core.

“Stop it, I say!” said Star Glory coldly. The youths stared at her. One of them burst out in excited voice, “Stop it? Why should we stop it? He is a clumsy fool. He destroyed our star with his clumsiness. Look at him! Yellow Light!”

“Yellow Light, Yellow Light,” the attendant throng muttered half-heartedly.

“Stop it!” cried Star Glory. She bent on Yellow Light a look of tenderness. She said slowly, “It is not right that you should treat him this way. I was with him in the seventeenth band. He had no mother. He was in the seventeenth band too long. My own mother, Crescent Moon, says that he was in the seventeenth band too long. She rescued him. If he is clumsy or has yellow lights at his core, you must blame it on his long stay in the seventeenth band, not on him. Something happened to him.”

The encircling youths were quiet and involuntarily drew back from him.

Yellow Light felt the hot flood of a terrible shame as the meaning of her words flowed into him. He trembled, caught halfway between an emotion of blind anger and futile despair. He held himself rigid, aware of the pity in which the uneasy youths held him.

Horror mounted within him.

“Say no more, Star Glory,” he whispered imploringly.

“I was in the seventeenth band with him, myself,” said Star Glory eagerly. “It was I who told him his mother had died. And then it was I who begged my mother to rescue him.” She rotated languidly, as she repeated her tale again and again.

Yellow Light writhed in the agony of the indictment all unwittingly hurled at him, as she thus bathed at the center of attention.

“I can stand it no more!” he cried in a terrible voice.

Star Glory whirled in surprise, apparently remembering him again. She turned then to the throng as a sudden thought struck her. “I know where there is a sun perhaps larger than the one Yellow Light so clumsily destroyed. We will go there!”

The youths, already forgetting the object of their late mockery, burst out with eager assent, milling about her.

“And Yellow Light may go with us!” said Star Glory magnanimously. “Come, Yellow Light!”

With a final delighted glance at him, she activated her propellants and shot away, the whole concourse of youths streaming after her, a chain of lights sweeping across the newly created galaxies. With blurred visions, Yellow Light stared after them. Then, a lost thought spurring him on, he frantically followed them.

It was in vain. His flight was cumbersome, pitiful in its fumbling attempt at a great velocity. He stopped finally, the youths gone, shuddering in a horror that was directed at himself.

I am alone, he thought starkly. I have failed. I am lost! Then, for the second time, came a flashing memory.

There was something he must find! There was something he must look for! There was something that was for him, and him alone! He thrust out wildly with his visions, hoping that he might see, or sense, the nameless reality of that which must be his. There was flaming matter — that was all.

But in his mind the flame of his desire burned fiercer and hotter, consuming him in terrible, bright clearness.

“I will find it!” he vowed passionately to the poised assemblage of stars. “I will find it — and I will know peace!”

He was young, in the life scale of energy creatures, but thirty million years had passed since his birth. Already there was in him an unyielding black bitterness, tinged with white from afar with the unseen bright beacon of his hope. In search of the fulfillment of an unnamable desire he went, and the millions of years passed.

He was a specter of the stellar legions, weaving through their impersonal ranks, searching deeply beneath their scalded faces, reeling with the suffocation of his continued failure, as he found no clue. The bands of hyperspace knew him, as he thrust himself into them with laborious mental effort, from first to forty-seventh, where all space was filled with cubistically distorted stars and galaxies. And he knew nothing of the forty-eighth, the chilling band of life. He was a purple-light and did not have the instinctively guarded, natural wisdom of the green.

He was forty million years in age, and he met Star Glory. He saw her flashing toward him from the far distance, bright with her perfection, searing him with the memory of the awful thing she had revealed to him. He froze, choked with an emotion he could not label.