Ross Rocklynne - People of the Darkness

You are young, Devil Star.

I am young, came the unbidden thought, and still able — No!

He curbed that astounding flurry of inner wildness, and then rearranged the thought. He was young, yes — and deathless. Eternity was his, to seek knowledge in. He was anointed with a great destiny. Destiny? No, Devil Star, you shall arrange your destiny.

—young.

The fifteenth, the twentieth, the thirtieth bands. He searched them all, unhurrying, dawdling, experiencing no sense of failure. He was content.

You are young, Devil Star! You are still young! The crazed subthought was screaming at him.

He hardly heard it.

He did not hurry.

He came to the thirty-fifth band, where unattached colors of violent hue did their spastic dances through matterless space.

—youth. There is still time, not for this, but for that other!

The forty-first. The forty-sixth. He made his leisurely transit into the forty-seventh. And there was chaos. A jumble, a mumble of agony that split from the innermost core of him; thoughts that burned him like whitest heat, and turned him into something he could not recognize. Devil Star was chaos.

Recognition again. Wave upon wave of horror rolled over him. Flares of condensing energy rained from his outer to his inner body. For he knew what he had tried to do — tried, again and again, and, time after time, had failed to do: to enter the forty-eighth band.

In his chaos, he had hurled himself at that unseen wall, and time after time it had hurled him back.

Thought returned slowly. He was numbed with the attack of the monster inside him. Fleetingly, knowledge came. But it was gone before he could snatch it. Then he blundered like a blinded creature down the bands.

He knew what he must do, what he could not deny.

Slowly, he left that galaxy, plunged across the winding arteries where dark flowed, was in the galaxy of his birth. And at last, alone in space, he faced her.

“It is you,” she said wonderingly. “Devil Star.”

His returning thoughts were heavy with fatigue. “It is I, World Rim. And I have come back — to keep my promise.”

“Your promise… yes. To take me to the place you found.”

She was searching him, whirling nearer in her green-cored glory, intent with her visions. And he saw with shock that she was changed. Larger, matured — but changed also in some inscrutable way that he would not put into words.

“We will go now,” he said heavily.

Still she searched him, and the interminable years passed while she searched. Uneasily she rotated against her starred background.

“There is something wrong,” she said.

“There is nothing wrong!” The denial burst out.

She brooded. “Very well,” she said with chilling reluctance. “We shall go together to this place. Where is it?”

World Rim was older than in that brief moment he had known her so long ago. At last he admitted to himself that she must have had children. Yet, there was about her a naivete that made him impatient.

“ I s hall follow you, ” he said.

A subtle change came over her. She stared. He saw the dancing green masses in her flawless body. And her thought came. “Very well, Devil Star! Follow me!”

In growing delight he followed her up the bands, as obedient to his ruinous emotions as any unsuspecting purple-light who had followed that path before him. He was like a creature apart, however, who views himself — for encased deeply in his thought swirls, deeper still and stronger than the clamorous outside longing, was another purpose, unemotional and anarchistic.

The spaces of the universe dropped behind. He burst through into the tenth band. World Rim was there, inert in space, watching, not him, but a small faceted black star. Suddenly he was chilled by the immensity of her abstraction.

“Green-light!” he whispered.

At first she seemed not to hear him. Then she touched him briefly with a vision ray.

“Devil Star,” she murmured. “No, it’s no use. There is something wrong. Go away.”

The utter calamity of that order held him rigid.

“There is nothing wrong,” he insisted. “I am here. We are obedient to the laws of life. I shall go with you.”

Her ray of vision wavered away, as if there were some difficulty in keeping her attention upon him.

“No, there is something wrong,” she repeated stubbornly. “Why should I take you anywhere?” Then, craftily: “Where is there to take you?”

He burst into the full flood of her withdrawn visions. He was trembling, trying to reject what he heard, and not succeeding. Welling from his depths came knowledge of the ultimate horror he was facing. Here — now — he must defeat the horror, or he was lost to it and would live with it forever.

“I shall go with you,” he whispered in bitter frenzy. “You will take me with you — to the forty-eighth band!”

As soon as the words were out, he knew he should not have uttered them. First stillness claimed her. Then came her faint thought.

“It is,” she said wonderingly, “the place you had been when we spoke so many years ago. But no. It is impossible, Devil Star. Perhaps you are deceiving me again.”

Though her rim was heaving and fluttering, and though she seemed to be drifting away, he surged in upon her, reckless, uncaring. “Deceived you! It is you who deceived me, deceived me and all purple-lights. But I was not deceived, green-light!”

And it flooded out of him, half in bitter scorn, half in pride, the whole story of his anarchistic fight against the universe: the story of his victory over destiny, and of his victory over death.

“I fought you, World Rim,” he lashed out. “You and all other green-lights — and I fought the universe itself.” Stay it though he would, the caverns of his resolve were engulfing him. In fright, he strove to heave himself out of dark chaos. But he spoke on, alternately frightened and astounded at what he was saying.

And from World Rim silence.

“Speak!” he said wildly. “You will help me. There is a need in me, a longing. I do not know what it is!”

World Rim seemed to shrink, until she was small, her central light wavering, dimming and flaming.

“Then I know,” she whispered. “Devil Star, you wish to die.”

“No!”

“And you wish to create.”

He stared, shaken with the thought.

“To create,” he whispered.

“But—” She faltered. Then her voice gained strength; she was firm with conviction. “I see it all, Devil Star. You wish to die, and in dying to create. All energy creatures, even green-lights after their fourth giving of birth, must die, or they will be very unhappy. It is very clear.

“But also you wish to find that impossible so-called band of decision you talk about.”

His mind was whirled, drugged, tortured while she spoke. And yet, as if the barless cage in his thought swirls had opened, he knew that from her deeply buried instincts the true answer to his longing had come. To create, yes. That she had also mentioned death, and the search for a chimera called the band of decision, he for the moment glazed over.

“Then I must create,” he said hollowly. “And I can create only in the forty-eighth band. World Rim, you must take me there.”

“No.” The word shattered against him. “No, Devil Star,” she said sadly. “For when we got there, you would find — or think you would find — this band of decision. And then it would be same as with… Dark Fire.”

There was a humming in his mind swirls, a growing noisy reverberation that was the beginning of madness. Again he hurled himself after the drifting form of her, until she loomed and occluded all the universe save herself. From him rained the fiery excrescences of his terrible fear. “We must go,” he cried, “and we will go, World Rim, you and I, to the forty-eighth band.”