Ross Rocklynne - People of the Darkness

He hovered over the star and proceeded to reach out to a nearby galaxy with jabbing tractor rays, bringing back smaller stars. He dropped them, thus adding to the star’s bulk until it became a ravening furnace of indigo violence. It grew, swelled, became a dangerous celestial bomb. And now, with infinite skill and precision, Yellow Light lowered suns delicately, in constant stream, apparently absorbed with lofty fascination in his game, apparently unaware of the energy creatures who, one by one, left their own games as they noted Yellow Light’s tremendously careless skill. They came darting from all directions, tens and hundreds of them. They watched in silent awe as Yellow Light fed the madly undulating rind of the ripening star with a flawless technique which soon had the monster a billion miles through.

And then they came by the thousands! Yellow Light felt such joy as he had never known. If only Star Glory, if only those other taunting youths, could see him now.

They pressed closer about him and his bulging star, voiceless. They knew that he did not see them, and if he did see them, would not deign to notice them. He felt a great pity for their smallness, their inferior strength. He cast a side vision at them, sweepingly, carelessly, then returned to his effortless task.

They appreciated his recognition of them, and finally they could contain themselves no longer. A chant grew, swelling with voluminous roar against his thought swirls.

“He is great! The greatest of the great! See the star he has built! Oh, there can be none greater than this stranger in our midst. We are the luckless ones, and we writhe in our shame!”

They whirled about him, in their thousands, crying out their praise, their worship, their intense admiration. His thought swirls rioted uncontrollably as their litany drew him to the pinnacle of his happiness. He saw now that there was truly no limit to his magnificence, and no limit of size to which he could take this star.

He played his visions over them, as they whirled in awkward adoration, and a hideous, mind-destroying doubt crawled through him. He froze in horror, stricken dumb. It seemed as if his very life-force were draining away.

“He is great,” said the weaving throng doubtfully.

The truth burst in him with white-hot intensity. Something crumbled in his mind, and with a wild, mad thought blasting at the hovering expectant thousands, he spurred back and away.

“Go! Vanish!”

Space was still and the energy creatures were gone. And, as if they also expected his command, the stars commenced to pale. They faded to redness, to darkness, to non-being, and darkness wrapped itself around him. He shook in a series of trapped convulsions and drew his visions in about him like a shroud. He hung there, unable to still his dreadful thoughts. Then, involuntarily, there was a click in his consciousness. When he again looked, the familiar ranks of galaxies and stars, unchanged, surrounded him.

He was back in the first band of true space, and he knew he was mad.

The inner third band — a dream dimension — and each creature had been but a replica of himself…

For long thousands of years, he was afraid to move, for he knew what he would find. He was filled with a dull, dead weariness in which thoughts trickled slowly. And yet one thought stood out with burning clarity. He had not found that for which he sought.

“I will never find it,” he whispered in agony. Never? The thought was unbearable.

Then came whispering to him the name that flowed like a great unseen river through space. Crescent Moon, the mother of Star Glory, had twice mentioned him. Oldster — the wise.

“He must not die!” he cried violently. “He must not sleep! I will find him!”

Abruptly, his horror was washed away in the great fear that Oldster would die before he, Yellow Light, could speak to him. That must not happen! Oldster would know, and Oldster would answer. He trembled with his longing, and entered the fifteenth band of lightlessness, engulfed in its funereal obscurity.

“Oldster!” He cried the name out, but in all this infinity he did not feel the beat of a life-force. Oldster was far, far away. Nonetheless, he began his search. He blundered for untold thousands of years that swelled to millions, seeking for the merest wisp of thought that might emanate from the somnolent hulk of the terrifying creature. The invisible light-years fled away as he weaved out from a center. And finally, so faint as to be almost without being, came a single mental vibration, wordless, meaningless.

He drove toward it, a terrible fright seizing at his mind. The strength of the thought hardly increased, and yet he felt now the faint, pulsing beat of a fading life-force. Oldster it surely must be!

“Awake! Awake! I am Yellow Light. Do you know of me? I was without a mother. She died. Oldster!” Over and over again, without end, a single goading thought that impinged with monotonous insistency on the dying creature’s brain.

The pulse of life fluttered, then increased in strength with spasmodic, dreadful surges. Yellow Light leaped into the breach, hammering at it with his thoughts.

Then came a muttering, a mumble, a restless jumble of agonized thought, a great wave of delirious horror. Spellbound with the futilely lashing thoughts of the creature, Yellow Light was held frozen.

The formless thought ceased abruptly. A hollow, stricken voice, as if borne on leaden wings from a distance infinitely far, said, “Go away! Away! There is nothing for you here. I am tortured again!”

“I did not mean to bring you pain,” said Yellow Light violently.

“But you have brought me pain, a pain I thought to escape,” the old creature burst out rackingly. “Who are you? Why do you torture me? Ah, I will soon know.”

Yellow Light’s thought swirls were seized with tight bands of energy which relentlessly, cruelly explored through the accumulated memory of his life. The probing bands withdrew, and the thousands of years, pregnant with foreboding silence, trooped away.

Then came Oldster’s dull whisper, “Yellow Light is his name — Vanguard! And I had thought myself done with Sun Destroyer! Oh, Yellow Light, whose true name is Vanguard, there is an evil heritage on you, and I see no end, no end!”

The fluttering fingers of horror touched at Yellow Light’s brain.

“My true name is Vanguard,” he whispered, but before he could complete the thought, Oldster reached into him, and one by one tore away the veils drawn over his identity. Acutely revealed was the story of that creature from an age long-gone; of Darkness, the dreamer, who had plunged across the sea of lightlessness, in search of a purpose, and had found it only in death; of Sun Destroyer, his daughter, who had returned along his path only to die in the mad fantasies of her disordered mind, after bringing into being her child, Vanguard.

“Vanguard!” Yellow Light said starkly. “That is my true name! But — but Oldster! Death — birth! I understand none of these.”

“Nor shall you.” It seemed as if Oldster’s memory were fleeing backward along a trail which took him to the day when he was young. He muttered restlessly, “What might I not have spared myself had I not sought the answer to those problems. Oh, Yellow Light — Vanguard — leave me. Leave me! I cannot help you. I am lost; we are all lost, and there is no answer!”

Yellow Light surged forward in violent denial.

He charged passionately, “There is an answer, Oldster. And you know that answer. I have searched. I do not know how long I have searched! What is it? What is it that haunts me, Oldster, so that it drips on me like an acid, eating at me until I am mad with the desire to find it? I am lost if you do not tell me!”