Ross Rocklynne - People of the Darkness

“I am dying!” The hideous accusation blasted stridently out.

“As you would have had me die!”

“No, no! Devil Star! You have done a terrible thing! You… do not know… how terrible… for you.”

“I had choice!” he cried bitterly.

Silence. Then, from a distance, muttering:

“Choice. No. There could have been no… choice. It began… how long ago? Before you were born, Devil Star. Before… back to the… beginning. No motion but was caused by motion. No cause without result, or result… without cause. Thought from thought, thought from… motion. How else… could it be?

“Devil Star!” That muttering, distant voice held blind despair. “Your only immortality… truly, your only happiness… lay in that child… you and I would have created.”

Her voice muttered away into nothing. In repelled fascination, Devil Star watched expansive grayness sweep across and engulf her. Deathly puffs of blackening light filled the heavens as the friend of his youth died. Then he left that band, the eleventh band where insanity lived.

In the first band of true space, he thrust out with his parapropellants and hurled himself into light speed. Then he went still faster; fled through a galaxy and burst from its outer rim. He traversed the black gulf that separated it from its neighbor. The universe careened, the splendor about him went unnoticed.

For a million years Devil Star sought his opiate in blind motion. Finally, deep into the bottomless darkness that cupped this lenticular universe, he stopped. His horror was not dulled. The memory was not sheared off. He could not outrun himself. He was cursed.

Devil Star was cursed; but he was alive, unlike Dark Fire whose deathly urge had been turned back upon her. The thought trudged in with dead reluctance; it had no wings to make him soar. For, in spite of all, Dark Fire, the beloved friend of his youth, truly was dead. No matter that all of nature had conspired against him, a purple-light; no matter that Dark Fire, from some blind instinct, had sought with all her being to fulfill a supposedly incorruptible law of the universe. She was dead, and he had killed her.

He hung quivering and lost in the lightless emptiness. His triumph, for the moment, was without savor.

I should not have fought, he thought numbly. It was not meant that I should fight. Better to play, not to think.

Not meant? His thoughts took their whirling plunge into that maelstrom which flung him in endless circles of illogic. He had fought destiny, and won; but had there been some chain of causes and results, some implacable series of microcosmic events, that made his triumph only an inevitable act, part of the pattern after all?

Then he had not escaped. He shrank into himself, pulling his visions in about him so that even the mother universe and its searching brilliance seemed not to exist. Now he was as alone as mortality could be. He was feeding on his own inner resources, a circuitous being independent of the flux and strain of conflicting energies. He was master of himself; for this naked, two-dimensional instant of time he was the master!

But no: his convictions could not hold up, for there was the past, whipping his every thought and action into submission with infinitely reaching arms of cause and result. He had not escaped; and with this realization a new fury entered the life of Devil Star. It came like the roar of a monster full-born in the sub swirls of his mind: a monster clawing and rearing, fighting for emergence into the searching light of his awareness. He was shaken to the depths by the beast housed below his consciousness — that depthless, unuttered longing to which he could not give a name. Frantically, his thoughts moved back along the years of his life, searching for some explanation of a ruinous emotion. Entombed in his self-imposed darkness, removed from the entropic swing and surge of the universe, he felt that longing engulf him.

“It is something I want,” he gasped. “Some thing I must have, must!”

Then, slipping unbidden from another corner of his mind, as if in cue to his desperation, came a sense of solution. The new thought held him rigid.

“I was in another universe,” he whispered. “In that moment before she would have had me fling out my central purple core and die, I was transported to another band of space, a band I never saw before. And when I returned to the band of life, my will to mate with her, and to die, was gone.”

He hung laxly, surfeited with his emotions. It was that he longed for, that other hidden band; it could be nothing else. For if it were not that… he thrust the clangorous thought away, for it was as pain-filled as that red beam a maddened Dark Fire had sent against him.

Now he pushed aside the darkness enclosing him, as if it were a cocoon, and he a new life. And he beheld the resplendent lens of the universe a hundred light-years away.

And as he beheld it, the prime conviction of his life returned to become a drumming force inside him. Surely that universe and its myriad avenues was not mirrored into being by the counterplay of energies at the beginning of time. Destiny could be turned aside. Had he not so turned it? And the answer to its turning lay in that hidden band of space.

Somehow he would find that band; he would put his life into it — and find the answer to all of being!

The universe knew Devil Star again. He drifted back into it at medium speed, captivated with the wonder of his upward-spiraling thoughts. Dimly, he knew that the cleaving memory of Dark Fire’s destruction was turning fuzzy. He wanted it so. Neither ecstasy nor hurt could endure in full measure much longer than the present moment. For, it seemed, the mind was a turbulent structure, as frantic in its upheavals and overthrows as the interior fury of a white dwarf star. Somewhere in his thought swirls, caged for this moment, were the sharpest agonies of his life. In their place had risen hope, and it was a thrilling hope indeed, the hope that the hidden band held out for him.

He would find that hidden band, though he had to roam the universe a hundred times over.

He knew it existed, and existed approximately as he visualized it with his strange, bodiless sight. He could see the glory of it now, those geometric galaxies, and their calculated exchange and counterexchange of glowing suns. The gigantic thought of its being made him tremble, for here was mystery indeed. Yet as long as there was mystery, life could thrill to the full fury of existence.

He stepped up his velocity, thrusting out his visions in growing rapture as he hurled through the light-spattered outermost fringes of the dazzling universe. Here was splendor, conflict, movement! And he was part of it again.

Then, the worse for its suddenness, a chill spread through him.

For, from afar, flickering in crazy paths across the heaving black patchwork of a dark nebular cloud, he saw a group of energy creatures. He started back and away, filled only with the need to escape their sight. But they saw him. Instantly, their parapropellants flashed, and they came thundering toward him, the babble of their excited thoughts rushing in.

“Devil Star! Where have you been?”

“It’s been a million—”

“No, ten million—”

“—years!”

They ringed him, circling, and in stark horror at this intrusion of his carefully erected sanity he wanted only to fling himself into some other band. He could not look at them without thinking of Dark Fire.

He resisted the impulse to flee , knowing they would follow. Now he was caught again in the full current of the life-force. In this careening group were many that he knew, many that he did not. And there were the missing names!