Ross Rocklynne - People of the Darkness

For a clairvoyant second in his time scale the raging thoughts of Devil star swelled. “I am cursed!” And subsided. Then he did move faster, but only to hurl himself across Moon Flame’s path.

“You must listen,” he said tensely. “We must stop, we purple-lights, we must learn, think, beware. For all of us will die.”

Moon Flame clove the sky toward Devil Star without lessening his speed. “Die,” he said. “Another word.”

“But you do not understand, Moon Flame! None of us can. Death is our destiny. It was destined before we were born.”

“Then if this strange event is destined, why fight it? No one could win.”

“No one?” Devil Star said, as Moon Flame loomed toward him refusing to lessen his speed. Devil Star swerved into a different trajectory, brushing the surface of a violet super-sun. He said, “I shall win, Moon Flame. I shall fight death, the death green-lights mete out to purple-lights. I shall interrupt destiny; I shall master destiny.”

But Moon Flame did not understand. He could not. The importance of this information escaped him, even the words themselves hazed away in his mind. He brushed Devil Star aside with an impatient pressor beam, scornful of him for having dropped out of the race. He shot away, leaving a swirl of incandescent globules in his wake. Devil Star’s visions followed after him, but all he saw was the immortal blaze of his life’s years. He would not die!

He moved again after a moment, a yearning sadness in him. He still had time to live, and to live without thought. That time might never, come again. He went after Moon Flame and the others, letting his joy of life swell within him. He was not ready, either to fight his urges or to be harmed by those who could harm him. He was not yet the rebel, though the time for that would come.

Devil Star was to have five million more years of peace. Then the time came.

He was alone, and cradling his loneliness, atop a galaxy shaped like a masterfully blown, brimming wine glass, with the bubbles of stars blowing about its rim. The moment of his curse had come, and he knew it well, for he saw the vast cunning that had grown in him, and he was powerless to stop it .

He would lie here, shielded by a great star, and he would wait.

The waiting was not long. Came the beat of a life-force curving around the bright colossus that shadowed him. He trembled. Deep inside the voices of his being whispered that he should forget, turn back; play-skim along the surface of life as Moon Flame and the others. Accept destiny, Devil Star!

Destiny. The cunning shift and quiver of subparticles that began when the universe began.

He would not.

The life-force pressed in on him, strengthened. And now with a thread of his vision rays he thrust around his shielding star, to see an energy creature whose green central light danced with undersurface forms and cast out a hypnotic radiance. She swam lazily into view, but beneath the languid appearance of her he sensed a frightening intensity.

Devil Star moved closer to his star and off to the side, for now he sensed the swirl and pulse of another life. With a thinned ray of sight, he beheld the purple-light ripping through space toward the deadly source of the vibration that drew him.

For one chaotic moment, Devil Star’s purpose was as nothing. His fear of being discovered vanished, for he knew this energy creature.

“Solar Cloud!”

The cry of warning blasted through space. He came into full view of green-and purple-light, ready to disrupt, if he could, this first scene in a chilling drama. Neither heard his cry. The beings hung pendant in space, the huge green-light languidly, composedly rotating, the slightly smaller purple-light staring in hard, bright wonder. They could not — would not — see or hear him. They were caught on that barbed law from which mere interference could not set them free. And Devil Star knew that they were speaking, but speaking along such tightened bands of energy he could not hear what they said.

“Solar Cloud,” he whispered, “stop!”

Then came reaction. The full knowledge of his ultimate triumph came to him. He would succeed in his purpose, and having succeeded, would succeed in other things as well. Giddily he caressed his luscious dream. He was young, not nearly so old as the matured purple-light Solar Cloud. But he would live to be older: old beyond death. At once, he was transformed from his pity and back to his cunning. He would watch.

The green-light disappeared into a hyperspace. The purple-light was bewildered. Then he too disappeared, and Devil Star, bitterly frightened that already he had lost them, felt the click in his thought swirls that transported him into the second band of the universe’s forty-eight layers. For a moment he was one with solid matter that threatened to make him part of it. He shook himself out of the second band and into the third, where all the universe was pressed into flatness. He endured the fourth band and its snakes of living light. He entered the fifth, searching for trace of green-and purple-light, but there was only cosmos in wild motion, the burning matters and energies of the universe seething against walls of utmost black, splattering, smashing, raining back into original shapes to repeat the causeless motion. Spasms of pain ripped through Devil Star as eating vibrations impinged on him. For a flickering moment he allow to himself to wonder at the reason behind that display of a universe amok. Causeless?

Nothing without cause.

Or was there?

He flicked into the next band, and the next, vainly searching for green-and purple-light. In a wild gamble, he shot all the way to the thirty-sixth and, starkly limned against that sick yellow background, he saw their brightening colors. Thereafter, making no attempt to hide, he followed, until around him were those cubed celestial bodies of the forty-seventh band.

The green-light vanished.

The purple-light remained behind, frantically darting across those strange heavens. A wild, trembling excitement shook Devil Star. He must get closer! Solar Cloud knew nothing of a forty-eighth band, but surely the green-light somehow would draw him into it. And Devil Star inadvertently would be drawn with him; for he would be near Solar Cloud, near the sundered skin of the forty-eighth band, and he would be able to follow.

And, subtly, he knew why he must follow. There was the memory, the damning memory of his birth, and he must know if it were memory, or phantasm without meaning.

He did indeed move closer to Solar Cloud… and instantly was swept along in a tide that lifted and bore him. He had his moment of surprise before his consciousness blurred. He was rocking, laved in spangling energies. He was washing back and forth, in some mighty and primeval ocean of force. Then, sharply, he was aware.

His visions darted out, then withdrew. The full knowledge of where he was smote him. Crystalline tongues of fire quivered from his contracting body. The impossible had happened.

The laws of the universe had made no provision for this lawless event.

He, unmatured, was in the forty-eighth band.

Time passing, the great vital pulses of time, flowing like an unseen river through that band where life energies burned. And coldly, almost thoughtlessly, like a being detached from his own body, he watched.

He saw that mating of green-and purple-light as their central cores met in annihilating fusion.

And saw and felt the grayness of coming death settle over Solar Cloud.

Then he drifted in torpor, saw the pulsing white globe which heralded life, and saw nothing else. The moment was relived. The memory had been there.

Then, almost like pain, all that was gone. Against his will, he had been moved to the first band of true space.