Ross Rocklynne - People of the Darkness

“Come, Devil Star, look what I have done!”

He saw the planet she had made, and marveled. A planet whose surface crawled with beings made of solid matter. Tiny motes of things, of many different patterns, powered by thin streams of energy, dependent on gravitation and a compound chemical which flowed. An incredible kind of actual life whose base was silicon — or perhaps carbon, he did not trouble to find out.

“It dies so swiftly,” he said.

“But its time scale is different. I shall tend this planet,” she dreamed. “The life-forms will improve on themselves. Someday they may come out into space.” Excitement was in her. “And they will never know that she who created them watches their brave venture.”

For a long time Devil Star brooded over that planet and its alien life. So strange, he thought, so impossible. In the subswirls of his mind a remembrance shook him.

“Something troubles you, Devil Star?”

“Yes,” he said faintly. “You have done something which has never been done. The creation of that planet, and its life-forms. It is… against the pattern!”

She sensed the problem. Far from meeting his own mood of questioning, however, her gaze held secret mockery. “Against it? Devil Star, there is nothing against the pattern; and no one who can go against it.”

“No!” he cried out in denial. “Dark Fire, you had choice — to create or not to create. You chose to create. You were master of yourself in your choice.”

“No. I did that which I would do. I had no choice.” She rotated along a precessing axis, probing him, mocking him. “Let us explore this thought of yours. I have choice, so you would say, of destroying this life that I have created, or of allowing it to exist. But I have no choice.”

“You have choice!”

“No.”

Again, mockery. Suddenly she drew back, lashing out with a destroying heat ray that in a cosmic instant seared the planet. Molten waves heaved across its surface. Fuming yellow blazes boiled away the life of its beings. Devil Star looked on in horror, and a clamoring thought arose: As she would destroy me!

That shocked moment held. Then, mockingly:

“I made no choice, Devil Star; I could not have acted but as I did. For am I not the child of my mother, of all who went before her? Am I not the product of all the events of space-time that have impinged upon me to make me as I am? Am I not moved and swayed by cosmic tides that began long before I began? And you, Devil Star; you yourself are but a wave-curl in the tide… another event… pressing in on me, forcing me to make my so-called choice. Choice? There was none. There was an inevitable act.”

His aura was fuming with the tremor of his denial. “Then,” he cried bitterly, “we might as well drift. It would all come out the same anyway.”

Amusement was in her thoughts. “Do you drift?” she asked.

The complete logic of that reply escaped him.

“I do not drift.” Anger made him add, “Nor am I drifted, by you, Dark Fire, or anyone. I would not have destroyed the planet.” Then a thought shook him. He looked at her askance. “Dark Fire, until now we have been friends, sharing life together. We can no longer be friends. For a time will come, and soon, when I must make a choice between two events. Do you understand?”

Her visions caught his, puzzled. “I do not understand,” she said slowly. “We must always be friends.”

A fuzzy-headed comet slashed across the dark heavens between them.

Devil Star said in mirthless mockery, “Friends! Can green-and purple-lights ever be friends?”

For a long time she held that thought. Then, as if in reaction against the horror that rose from the instinctive matrix of her, she surged back across the heavens. From that far distance, her amplifying fear and shock drove against him, wave upon wave.

“You speak and do not know whereof you speak, Devil Star! You cannot mean—”

He followed in triumph, but it was a cold and bitter triumph faulted by her betrayal. Dark Fire dwindled away more swiftly than he followed, as though to flee from him must dull her turmoil. But drifting back came her voice, cold and thinned by distance:

“Devil Star, there will be no choice!”

The friendship of Dark Fire and Devil Star was finished. Often, in the millions of years that were to elapse, they would be members of the same playing group, but a barrier would exist. Devil Star thrilled to the impenetrable hostility that lay so subtly between, them, for he recognized himself to be in deadly combat with life’s most inimical force; Dark Fire was but the symbol of that force.

In the midst of his violent, star-disrupting play was immured the cold thought: I am destined to die, and to die in a certain manner. I shall therefore turn destiny aside; I shall not die!

When Dark Fire came, he would be ready for her.

When Dark Fire came, however, he was not.

He was in his forty-millionth year, still a youth in his vast time scale, when he began drifting away from his other friends as well. He was huge, his purple light a vast globe of force flickering with deep indigo wells of flame, his outer body strong with tremendous, interacting fields of force. And the games of his youth palled.

For already he felt the hunger in him, and mistook the first deep pangs for the need to acquire knowledge.

His search for knowledge took him not into the macro-but into the microcosms. Surely the larger universe was near the end result while the smaller was near the beginning. Somewhere in that complex welter of whirling subparticles he would be able to find result without cause!

His tools were crude. It was nothing to pluck a star from the heavens with a reaching tractor ray, to split it, explode it. But to shear a molecule from a parent mass, to hold it inviolate from its fellows, was indeed nearly impossible. He raged at the task for a million years, forgetting all the names linked to his life — forgetting the menace of Dark Fire.

Dark Fire, Comet Glow, Moon Flame — these indeed belonged to another universe. On the rim of an outer galaxy, Devil Star conducted his dark probe. For ten thousand years at a time he held himself motionless, shredding cold matter, slicing it, training himself to split his broad arms of leaping energy into threads of power, thinning his vision rays down to that consistency which would give him sight into small worlds.

When success came, as it did, it lasted for one thrilling moment. In a vacuum of its own, untouched by outside forces, that microcosm hung pendant. Devil Star saw it fuzzily, by the reflecting thread of electrons he sent against it. And was to see it no more. For in the moment of triumph, when his defenses were discarded, came the icy cold certainty that he was being watched.

That captured micro-universe was gone from his delicate grasp as if it had never been. With a violence beyond imagining, he expanded to half again his girth. Lingering along the rims of his senses was the single, quivering pulse of life-energy. From a distance it had come, beamed upon him as if by intent. From a dozen portions of his body his visions leapt out. And he saw Dark Fire.

He was gripped by the splendor of her, as she moved slowly down an aisle of stars toward him… her visions already touching his, holding them with hard, bright purpose. Against the darker background of space, her central green light was lustrous, and alive with dancing greener forms under its translucent swirling rim. For a moment, his thoughts convulsed. Wildly he searched for a memory that would take him back to his natal moment; for another memory, when he was not much older, when he hovered behind a shielding star, cunning with his knowledge, strong; and for another!