Ross Rocklynne - People of the Darkness

Still his thoughts did not function. He hung in a box of emptiness between two stars, unable to plumb the depths of that staggering event.

Solar Cloud was dead, or dying.

As he, Devil Star, was destined to die.

Now the thoughts did start. An incredible thing had happened. Where had it begun? Ten thousand billion years ago? Or a mere fragment of time since Devil Star had been born?

His thoughts took their upward surge, and as full awareness returned he felt a shock of knowledge: he was being watched, and it was the green-light, she who had conceived a life, and heartlessly destroyed one, who was watching him. A sudden cunning hatred of her took hold of him. He held her stare and flung it back arrogantly. And she watched him with coldness from the eminence of her greater size.

The moment of silence drew out to become a vibrating deadly thing stretched between them. Around them stars hotly burned, cooled, collided in collisions that turned them into destroying novae; cooled and grew again in that mad rushing race toward the universe’s entropic doom. And still Devil Star fought for dominance.

The moment could hold no longer. He felt his arrogance dissolving, though he hotly cried out against it. And this the green-light felt.

She said chillingly, “I saw you there. And it was not meant to be. Will you forget?”

“Forget?” The cry was choked from Devil Star. Then the nature of that insidious invitation struck him: this green light, and others of her kind, must be vulnerable to him and his astounding knowledge. “You are… begging me to forget, Comet Glow?”

And as he mockingly uttered her name, she drew back, a darkness creeping into the brilliant depths of her. “If that is the word you wish to use — yes.”

He surged closer to her. “It is the word, mother of four children. Then let me forget also the arts of existence — the eating of energy, the dispelling of it, the use of my parapropellants. I would as soon forget them. And let me also forget the dread moment of my birth!”

And he knew what effect that had on her, for he had told none but Moon Flame. Involuntarily she expanded in her dawning horror.

“Remember… that?” The words were torn from her.

“I remember it. Is there another purple-light who remembers it? Is there another such as I?” He rotated in mock preening. “I will not forget,” he said. He was gone from her sight, into another band of hyperspace. But she followed, reaching out with tight bands of energy, holding him fast, yet at a distance.

“Devil Star!” The words came faintly. “What is it you search for?”

She was debasing herself before him, she, a green-light, millions of years older than he. And he knew his moment of gloating should be put to one side. He was young. There was much knowledge he did not have.

“I am searching for—” He stopped. For what? His rim was ablaze with the sparkling excrescences which betrayed his uncertainty. He began again: “Comet Glow, perhaps I am seeking to be master of my own fate.”

For a long time her somber gaze rested on him. “Devil Star, it is not possible.”

Instantly he tore from her restraining bonds of energy. “You say that,” he cried, “who saw me, an unmatured purple-light, in the band of life — who knows I have a memory which carries me to the moment of my own birth.”

And he stopped, chilled by her odd, pitying silence. He was pressed to dismaying silence himself, and wondered if, somewhere in the undercaverns of his thought swirls, he knew the dread answer she was trying to give him. Another thought rose clamoring. Green-lights are… different. They have a cruel, natural wisdom purple-lights cannot hope to possess.

And, mockingly, that ruinous afterthought: They?

He was sinking into his dreadful abyss.

“Devil Star.” The gentle thought of Comet Glow came. “You are young. You are life. Live as life must live. Yes, as it must .”

She pressed closer, laving him with her anxiety. “Do you seek to change the natal matrix of the vast universe? Ten thousand billion years ago — and longer, Devil Star, perhaps longer — the pattern of all that is was foreordained — and all that will be! No electron that moved along its path but what moved in response to a prior event.

“There has been no thought, and shall be none, that was not caused by prior thought or birthed from event. No result without cause, and no event without result!”

His words came out of the tortured depths of him. “I was in the band of life. And it was against the pattern. There was no reason for it, no reason!”

“Yes,” she whispered sadly. “There was a reason. And if you persist in searching for that reason, or in making use of your knowledge, you will but have further proof of the shackles destiny binds us with.”

Alone in the quivering brightness hung Devil Star. Not make use of knowledge? No result without cause? The thoughts tugged and tore. Into his mind came the drugging answer to all problems. He slept. And in his sleep, an insidious process began working, a selection and burying of the hated answers.

These, O Golden Lights, are the memories of Devil Star; and there are more.

He came back; he came back to the energy children of his own group, and he played as they played. Coldly secret was his knowledge, secret not only from others, but from penetration by his outer mind. And yet he knew his knowledge was there and would harden and polish until its facets would shine brilliantly throughout him. For he was different from them.

Different, exterior to the pattern — he, the rebel from causation.

Somewhere in the passing millions of years, the senseless, joyous years of youth, Devil Star’s mother vanished and was never seen again. He took small note of it. Comet Glow, too: sometimes he saw her studying him, in somber thought, from a faraway depth of space, and then she too faded into a forgotten darkness. Other names passed from the scene. And in from the wings, in response to a cue none heard or looked for or questioned, came other, younger energy creatures, eager for life, excited and delirious as they merged with the splendors about them. On this entropic stage, Devil Star cunningly acted out his part, and called it play.

And there was a green-light, one of the twin siblings of Comet Glow, who played along with him.

Her name was Dark Fire, and sometimes, peering with her into the black whirling cauldron of a sunspot, he saw in her his own primeval excitement with movement. The universe was movement. There was no stillness; if there were stillness there was death, and therefore that which moved was life, and the more wildly it moved the more it lived. Dark Fire lived. Out of a nebula’s green heart she would come racing, trailing wasteful streams of excess energy, circling him, adance in her fiery outpourings.

“Devil Star,” she would cry. “I’ve discovered something; you must come. A monster star, rolling across the sky so fast it is a disk, not a globe. And its own weight should split it up! But it doesn’t split up. Why?”

“Some concentration of core energy,” amusedly, tentatively from Devil Star.

“We’ll go there, Devil Star, now. Out on the whirling edge of the universe, out where matter ends and the darkness begins—”

He felt a wonderful sense of companionship with that green-light. He felt a tenderness for her, a longing to be of her and with her, because of her wildness and her talent for doing the unexpected. The pattern of play in this surging universe concerned the helter-skelter rearrangement of galaxies themselves; one became boldly ambitious to put more than a nick into the dusty perimeters of the terrible huge green nebulae. But Dark Fire explored more lusciously novel avenues of play.