Ross Rocklynne - People of the Darkness

“I have been—” he choked, and stopped. Terror, first for himself, and then for them, engulfed him. He would tell them where he had been and what he had seen. They would be forewarned. He would tell them, green-light and purple, of the self-destruction they imposed on themselves.

And then, as he hung in strangled half-speech, awareness of the truth pierced him. These energy creatures were no more concerned with the answers to their questions than if they had never been uttered. Had they inquired of Dark Fire? Had they ever questioned an appearance into their midst or a disappearance from it?

They crowded, jostling. If Devil Star had spoken they could not have heard him in their excitement. “Come, Devil Star—” A nudging pressor beam caught him unaware, jarring him sideways half a planet’s orbit. A half-dozen flung out, dancing him, whirling him ahead of them in their thoughtless joy. “We’ve found a new game—”

He let himself be impelled, numbed, in the direction they chose. He thrust out his own propellants, half-heartedly keeping up with them, his thoughts a tempest. After a while he would leave them; he would disappear to some more quiet corner of the cosmos. But now, for some reason, he must stay…

“Yes, Devil Star, where have you been?”

Unerringly he faced about in his flight, picking out the green-light who uttered the question. She rode the bright heavens alongside him, keeping pace, her visions intent on him rather than on her hilariously cavorting playmates. And he knew instantly that though she played along with them, she had reached that point in her life where she was not really of them.

As he was not of them.

She repeated the question, naively unaware of its importance as she stared in bland curiosity. He returned her gaze blankly, wondering at that tremendous secret she instinctively hid from purple-lights.

He whispered, “Green-light, you do not know where I have been?”

She laughed. “Should I know?”

“No. No! You could not know… and could not believe. I have been—”

And he stopped, faint with his knowledge of what she was and what she must be thinking. He must be cunning, strong, and treacherous, too. He had bared his thoughts to Comet Glow and to Dark Fire. This green-light would not know him. He quivered with the effort of self-denial, and laughed, too, in the strange way that was possible for him.

“I have been,” he chided, “ten billion light-years away. I discovered ten million comets and tied their beards together.”

She studied him, piqued. “You must have been to a very interesting place,” she decided. Tentatively: “Shall we go there together, Devil Star? I am tired of these silly creatures I am forced to be with.”

Said Devil Star, “We shall go together! Now or later?”

“Now!”

Devil Star frowned. “We’d better not,” he said cautiously. “They’d see us and follow. We’ll sneak off later, shall we?”

She was reluctant at this proposal, but she agreed. “All right. But don’t forget — later.” She watched him suspiciously, not knowing whether to believe him. Then she and Devil Star were caught up in the flickering motion of the crowd that surrounded them, and they were in the midst of the new game.

With part of his mind, with the light-hearted, deceitful part whose use he had discovered, he played. He was more avid than they, with ironic humor dumping lavish scoops of stellar matter onto a red star, and then taking his turn with pressor beam to hold the frantic matter in place. Even when the star grew to a size beyond endurance, it was Devil Star who insisted it could be made more massive, to increase the fury of its explosion. Following his directions, the greater part of the group shot the full force of their pressor beams onto the straining surface of that outraged colossus. The remaining half-dozen went to work denuding a small galaxy nearby and lowering its components into the star. Then the pressor beams instantly were withdrawn.

The star exploded in one racking puff of atomic dissolution. The excited crowd of energy creatures hung inert in space as the fury of the explosion engulfed them. Their identities were lost in that mad glare of force. They became one with the ravening skies. They were shot tumbling and whirling, their thoughts burned away in wave upon wave of exploding surf. They were expunged, but mobile and alive, will-less and relaxed in the deliciousness of uncontrolled motion.

Devil Star was caught up too. He let himself tumble, blown on the white wind of destruction. With this difference: he kept on going.

And somewhere behind him, reproachful, was the green-light — World Rim was her name.

He would see her again.

He had no room for emotion now. There was purpose only. He thundered through the empty spaces, veering away from galaxies that vibrated with the noxious beat of the life-force. And found a galaxy where peace was.

Now he must think.

He, Devil Star, had cheated death. Truly, that had been the prime search of his life. Having cheated it, he had uncovered the way to knowledge unending. His was the right to probe beneath the devious faces of the turning universe. He would discover the hidden band.

Something had happened in that band which enabled him to triumph over life’s first law. Had it given him choice? He was convinced that it had.

In the tens of thousands, in the millions of years that now passed, Devil Star came to think of that band as the band of decision. He had been in that band. He had interrupted its faultless rightness, and thereby interrupted destiny. And it was somewhere.

The bands of space, frightening though they were to him and to all energy creatures, nonetheless knew him. He entered them one by one, forcing himself through their complexities, studying them with a coldly disciplined leisure. He had time… he had fought death and won… he was immortal, the rebel from causation.

His purpose held unblemished. With the cold analytical tool of his mind, he probed for the reasons behind these strange layers of space. Gazing on the obscene ugliness of the third band, he wondered at what lay behind the dark skin of nothingness that clove it. He tried to break through and failed; he knew he could never enter. With equal certainty, he knew the answer did not lie there. For… he could not enter.

The fourth band and its snakes of living light. The fifth, where the cosmos shook and seemed to scream and where no order prevailed. On up. The eighth, where all of space was geared to such a time scale that the blazing components of the universe were serpentines of solid matter. He speeded his own time rate, thinking to catch up with some moment that this universe called the present. In the fastest time scale he could create, he saw no change.

The ninth band, inhabited by the brittle cinders of suns, gaunt prognosticators of the universe’s ultimate decadence. He probed beneath those suns. They were not burnt-out matter; they were matter held in some timeless moment of atomic convulsion, as if the fury of light and heat had been sheared away. What reason? Was there here a result without cause?

But he knew in the innermost heart of him that there was reason. The universe was warped and curled, fighting its own irresistible stresses and strains, stretching itself out of shape and out of logic, then discarding its own topological impossibilities into hidden pockets of space. A straight line was no less straight if warped by a gravitational field, for who or what in that field could determine any other straightness?

He ascended the bands, moving with a leisure he did not think of as being unnatural. His purpose held white and pure. He had no thought for others of his kind, for the lost names of his youth. Unendingly, the secrets of space channeled into his mind. He was bursting with the wonder of it.