Ross Rocklynne - People of the Darkness

“There is no real answer to your dream,” Oldster said dully. “My son, return to the inner third band!”

“The inner third band?” The scalding memory of the dream dimension returned. “I cannot! There is nothing for me there, Oldster. I will not live in dreams!”

“You have lived in nothing else,” said Oldster sadly. His thoughts left Yellow Light momentarily, then came back.

He whispered, so that his voice was barely audible, “If you really wish to find that which you seek — there is Star Glory!”

“Star Glory!” and suddenly he was shaking, his mind seared unaccountably with the thought.

“But — but—” he whispered. But Oldster had drawn his thought bands in around him and would say no more.

Yellow Light hung in darkness unutterable, palsied with an unknown horror. Star Glory! He must seek her out, and his search would at last be rewarded. But why? Why?

He dropped to the first band of true space, and, with erratic, strangely eager propellants, lashed himself across the boundless star fields. He found her, in the course of a thousand years.

He intercepted her course, and for long moments, quivering with his mad exultation, he held her visions with his own.

She, in turn, returned his stare, and he sensed a peculiar change coming over her.

She spoke at last, faintly:

“You are strange. Yellow Light, strange. Why is it that you are here?”

He was caught in the grip of an emotion he could not name. “I do not know, Star Glory! I have been sent by Oldster — I do not know why I have been sent!”

For a long time she bent on him the growing glance of cruelty and paradoxical tenderness.

She whispered at last. “Then I think that I know. Yellow Light, follow me!”

He poised, trembling with unexplainable dread. He watched Star Glory as she receded, and then it seemed to be the last he knew. A nimbus settled over his thought swirls, and he remembered only that under the terrible spell of her receding green light, he had cast out his own yellow-specked purple light. Two globes — green and purple — collided in midspace, merged, and became a pulsing ball of luminescence.

He stared, gripped with a sense of loss.

Star Glory he saw. She hovered over the white, pulsing ball, and he knew with poignant certainty that it was life — life that he and Star Glory had created. And she, though her green light had merged with his purple, had magically acquired another light, while his was gone, gone!

“Gone!” he cried in agony, and did not know why he was agonized. Suddenly he saw Star Glory and the energy child disappear.

He went after her in a frenzy, and found her again in the seventeenth band of hyperspace. She was hovering in strange benediction over her child. Yellow Light moved toward her in leaden motion.

“Star Glory,” he whispered.

She turned toward him, and read his unspoken question. Her thoughts were cold.

“You will die,” she said heartlessly.

“No!” he cried.

“Yes. Thus it is, thus it must be.” She was impersonal, uncaring. “Oldster wishes to die. You knew that. It is not strange that he should point out the path of death to you. Perhaps,” she added, with demon humor, “it is what you were searching for!”

“I did not search for that,” he said dully. He stared at the energy child, hanging pendant in the seventeenth band, where propellants were useless. A memory, a longing that was old, tugged at the roots of his brain. But he could not place it. A great, deathly weariness was working grimly in his body.

“My purple light,” he said helplessly. “It is gone. But yours has returned!”

“And will return three times more,” she uttered, and there was the shadow of her own eventual doom hanging over her words. She rotated restlessly. “Go, Yellow Light! There is a law which governs us — and I can do nothing about it. Had you been like Oldster, if in your wisdom you had known the secret of the purple and green lights… ah, Oldster brought his own torture on himself. He will never die!”

She turned from him, and so he left her, the talons of his dissipation into the energy from which he had been formed clawing at his propellants, rendering them almost entirely useless.

He drifted without purpose the length of a galaxy, striving to drink into him as much of the beauty around him as he could before he was negated. It was useless. His brooding thoughts returned to Oldster and the great treachery that Oldster had practiced on him. Bitter fury goaded him to a flaming, zigzag flight. He remembered suddenly the soaring grace of his flight in the inner third band. And so came the great thought!

The inner third band! His memory swirls throbbed with excitement. He could go there!

“Oldster, Oldster,” he whispered, the wild fire of hope burning in him. “Had I listened! But it cannot be too late!”

It could not be too late. It must not be! He threw himself into the third band with his waning strength, tremulous with thought of the dream-life that awaited him. He flung himself at the impalpable dark skin behind which lay the dream dimension.

It was as if he had flung himself against a solid wall.

“I am lost,” he said starkly, “and my search is finished—”

“I have been waiting for you,” said Oldster.

“You betrayed me!” said Yellow Light, trembling with dread. “I have come before you to die, Oldster! You will know that I am dying; you will know that it is you who have caused it, and you will never forget. You will live in horror of the memory, but it will return, and your sleep will be broken and you will never be at peace again!”

The aged creature’s thought rays rested on his rioting memory swirls with singularly gentle touch.

“Peace, my son,” he whispered, his words aching. “I have given you more than you could have given yourself, Yellow Light! You stayed in the seventeenth band too long and emerged to find yourself lacking in the great grace and power of motion which other energy creatures possessed. Such is the penalty — such was the heritage of Sun Destroyer, your mother. But there was another heritage which she gave you, all unwittingly. It was fitting that she called you Vanguard, for you are the vanguard of a new race, of which the yellow light is the symbol!”

The dying creature drew back a slow light-year.

“You mean—” He groped with the blinding thought.

“Yes, yes!” Oldster’s thoughts reached out with swelling strength and glory. “You are a step upward along the path of evolution, and you have given birth to a new race. Another mystery of space has been shattered. And there are more, Yellow Light, more! Long, winding and bitter is the path, but it ascends to a land of promise I cannot guess at.

“I see a glimmering — for a moment I understand the enormous purpose behind the cycle of life and death. The years have fled, and I have thrust all the bitterness of my life behind me, but now and anon, in my death-striving dreams, I see a tremendous purpose. Whither? I do not know. But you are a touchstone on the path, as was that first creature whose mutation allowed him ascent into the hyperspatial universe, as were a million, a billion others. From them stemmed the new races. The Star Glories, the others, the unnumbered billions of others, were shadows with no meaning. My son,” Oldster whispered, and it seemed that he himself felt the rare brilliance of ultimate meaning, “you are great!”

Yellow Light hung exhausted, no longer fighting, bathed in the blinding significance of the word. Great! He dreamed a dream that lay billions of years in the future.

“Yellow lights,” he muttered. “I see them — and they are no longer different. And from me they stem!”