Ross Rocklynne - People of the Darkness

“Yellow Light!” She thrust out her parapropellants, halting before him in sharp curiosity. “Where have you been?”

His great loneliness ebbed from him in a swift tide as he was washed in the cruel tenderness of her gaze.

He blurted out thickly, “Everywhere, Star Glory! I have sought. I have searched the universe over—” He halted.

“You have searched?” she demanded. “For what? Oh, Yellow Light, for what have you searched? Is not everything you desire around you?”

“No,” he whispered, “no!”

She came closer. “For what do you search?” She was eager with tremulous curiosity, striving to reach into his memory swirls with her thought bands, to reach in and draw out his innermost thoughts. He closed his memory swirls against her, overcome with shame.

“I do not know for what I search,” he gasped. Then, in bitter frenzy, he cried out, “I do not know! There is in me a terrible yearning! There is something I must find. It is here, Star Glory, and yet it is not here! I have not found it!”

For long she stared at him, and he was again aware of the wisdom that was hers, a wisdom he could never accumulate, and which she would never divulge. Suddenly she filled him with nameless horror.

“Leave me, Star Glory!” he whispered. “Leave me!”

She rotated with slow, piercing thought. “Perhaps,” she said presently, “you are on a fool’s quest, Yellow Light. But I will leave.” She did, though he would have had her back the moment she was gone. He turned and blundered in slow, zigzag fashion in the opposite direction, a vast sickness growing in him — fool’s quest! So Star Glory had said. But she could not be right! Else why this thunderous longing that beat in his mind?

His meeting with Star Glory had a strange result. Thousands of years later, a group of youths came flashing toward him, circling him in dazzling brilliance as they taunted his clumsiness with their own grace.

“Yellow Light!” their devil’s song blasted out. “Yellow Light! He searches and does not know for what he searches!”

“Star Glory would not have told you!” he cried in his mortification, but at the same time he knew that her vanity had betrayed him.

“Yellow Light!” the dervishes called mockingly. “How can he find what he does not know?”

“I will find it,” he cried, goaded to consuming rage.

“He will find it. Yellow Light, the clumsy one, the yellow one, will find it! As well could he solve the mystery of the third band—” And they whirled away, their knife-thoughts still in his brain.

He quivered, his thoughts rioting uncontrollably under their mockery, his body expanding and contracting under the dreadful indictment. They were not like him! They did not have to search for a chimera! Poor Yellow Light, the deluded. And then came thought of the third band.

Slowly the thought unfolded, like a flower that has been in the darkness too long. Then, by some alchemy of the mind, he knew, as he had always known, that he and he alone could solve that mystery. He halted on the threshold of soaring emotions, exploring the astounding discovery.

It must be what I seek, he thought in awe. The third band! The third band! It is mine!” By laborious mental command he clicked into it.

Before him stretched the thin, patterned plane of white brilliance that was the three-dimensional universe projected onto a two-dimensional plane. The third band! And beyond the depraved ugliness of compressed galaxies stretched the tight, ebony skin of nothingness, reaching without end into diminishing distances.

“It is mine,” he whispered with a terrible bright clearness of purpose, and without doubt he hurled himself at that dark curtain behind which mystery, darkly ominous, lay entombed.

It parted and closed behind him.

He hung poised, hardly daring to think on the incredible occurrence. But he was here! He was choked with the pride of his feat, a feat no other energy creature had ever accomplished. He was the only living being able to penetrate that dark wall! And though around him was the sheerest darkness, the thought was intoxicating to his senses.

Darkness! Nothingness! He waited, trembling with the revelation of his mightiness. He sent out his vision rays for what must have been long light-years. There was nothing. A chilling doubt began to arise.

“No,” he cried at long last. “No! There is something! There is at least a galaxy, a far galaxy, a new universe!”

And far away, a mote of egg-shaped light, he saw it — a galaxy! Energy formed and foamed away from him as his body contracted to half its size under the emotions of thanksgiving and pulsing wonder. Involuntarily, he lashed out with his propellants and surged into glorious, parsec-eating flight. Through him flowed such strength and power as he had never known. His speed mounted, for the galaxy grew apace, nor did it seem to weave from side to side. He was flying, straight and true, with all the grace of Star Glory herself!

And still faster! His mind numbed with the utter enigma of that which was happening. He, Yellow Light, the malformed, the ill-born, was great. He was the eater-of-space, the faster-than-light, owner of the inner band! He hungrily drank in the celestial beauty of a million stars as the galaxy subdivided within itself, and now lay spread across the endless darkness with spiral arms outstretched to receive him. And into it he plunged, drenching himself in the radiant energy which throbbed through space, in mad excitement hurling himself in graceful loops and arcs around flaming hulks of matter. From one end of the majestic galaxy to the other he plummeted with incomparable ease and strength, slicing dead red cinders into dozens of separate pieces, hurling them with skill unsurpassed around other stars to form complete, complex solar systems. He devoured stars whole, converted them into energy, then contracted his body until energy coalesced, flowed together and formed new lumps of matter. He flung it from him at light speed, in wanton abandon. Stars exploded as his titanic bullets struck them, and he reformed them with ironic mercy. “I am master!” he exulted, and halted on the edge of the galaxy to see the dead emptiness that stretched away forever. He threw himself into it, and with delight watched the galaxy shrink. It was gone. Again he cast about him with his visions, and a nimbus seemed to settle about his mind.

“This is the birthplace of matter,” he whispered, and why he thought it he did not know. Yet, it was truth. Untold years, numbering in the tens of millions, seemed to pass through the dark fabric of space, and there was a manifold rustling of energy growing from nothing. He saw the motes of light glowing in prismatic beauty, swirling in eldritch dances as they pirouetted about each other, melted together, and assumed the guise of matter. Matter which darkened and swelled and seethed. Matter which churned against itself, colliding, flaring in molten beauty, gaining mass from a magical source, and thundering upward to sun size.

All around him space was ruptured and cast out of being, as the illustrious miracle took place. Suns of fiery magnificence swarmed through the infinite extents of a newborn universe. They erupted and clawed at each other with gravitational drags; and planets, steaming hot, shot out from their writhing interiors.

He moved with the pomp of a conqueror through the flaming legions.

“This is mine,” he cried, and there was no voice to deny him.

No voice! No life! The thought was a clanging discord.

“There must be life!” he cried violently.

Thus he saw life, and its energy beat strongly at him. Space swarmed with life. He saw groups of energy creatures, far away on the ragged shores of the numberless galactic accretions. They had no knowledge of him, Yellow Light, for they moved and played on, intent on themselves and their own pursuits. In Yellow Light grew a vast cunning. He moved with insolent, powerful grace toward a nearby sun, a lost memory tugging at him.