Ross Rocklynne - People of the Darkness

From the core of her the red beams of her anger were beginning to form. Along her rim, flame sparkled. “No,” she said stubbornly. “I do not want to go, and there is nothing to be done about it. Somehow you must have changed, Devil Star.”

She laughed suddenly, peering at him. “It is very funny! You wish to die, and in dying to create. But now you will be unable to do either. Nor can you reach the band of decision, for it presumably lies within the forty-eighth band. Yes, you’ve changed — changed!”

Paralyzed, he hung in the burned space of the tenth band, the splendorous black suns seeming to fling her words back in brassy echoes.

She drifted faster away, her thoughts roaring in, tripled in volume by his own noisy madness, and strident with their connotations. “Only green-lights remember the moment of their birth, Devil Star! Else how could they know their way back to the forty-eighth band when the time came?” Came her dwindling laughter, across the rushing spaces, into the maddened thought swirls of Devil Star. Horror piled on horror. He could endure no more.

These are the memories of Devil Star, O Golden Lights. And in them is the memory of the half-hundred green-lights who followed after, and the memory of the other things, of the drumbeat of longing, of the search through matter’s fabric, and of the hundred million years that passed.

They would see him from afar, streaming across the star fields, not pausing, hurrying only, hurrying to some place that had no location. And they would see him again, spinning along the axle of some galactic wheel. And still again, rigid in abstraction, grasping at space and its dust in a timeless query none of them would ever understand. He was there when they were born and there when they died. And his name was never known.

The universe writhed. The parts of it assumed new configurations. Matter changed in its inevitable way, dropping toward that bottom level where time must end. Devil Star lived on.

The mother green-light, dropping down the bands of space from the seventeenth band where her youngest lay in mindless contentment, paused in the sixth band of hyperspace. For, scarcely a light-year away, the giant body of the legendary creature hung sleeping. Full of tenderness for her child and for all life, she looked upon that aged purple-light with the awe of reverence. Out of what unexplained past had he come? Who was he? She drifted nearer, for a long time searching him with her visions. And he stirred, awoke and saw her. Restlessly, he turned away.

“Green-light, leave me.” His thoughts came from what seemed an infinite distance of weariness.

She scarcely dared to think; but she would not leave. Presently she spoke, whispering:

“We have seen you from afar, often. And you have never spoken. And you must be lonely.”

“Lonely!” The word came back at her in a racking burst. “I am not lonely. I do not wish to be disturbed. Now go.”

She moved away, reluctantly, but she was filled with compassion. “Yes, I shall go. But I know you are sad — and indeed you are lonely. I shall come again. And the others will know of you, and will revere you, and perhaps those who seek knowledge will come to you. We shall not try to guess at the secret of your life. And you will have a name.”

Tenderly, remembering the naming of her youngest, she renamed her oldest.

“To us, you will be known as Oldster.”

“You must have learned many things,” the young purple-light said timidly. He was called Burning Planet.

Oldster muttered, “There are some who are different, such as you, Burning Planet. But what is it to be different? As you, I have searched and found nothing — nothing! And I am sad. I wish only for extinction. And it will not come.”

“To be extinguished is—” Burning Planet was anxious to comprehend.

“Yes.” Bitter amusement was in Oldster’s thoughts. “To be no more. To burn no more. I thought to master destiny; but destiny masters me, as you. I cannot exclude the universe which continues to give me life.”

“But there is joy in learning! Is that not reason to live?”

“Joy!” The word was uttered in such a frenzy of grief that the young purple-light timorously drew back in readiness for flight. Oldster’s immense body, seventy million miles across, quivered with lakes of blinding energy. “Can there be joy when I long for something that can never be? Oh, my son, leave, leave me in my sadness!”

Burning Planet was overwhelmed, and could not make himself leave.

Presently, as if from an infinitely deep space, came the suffering thoughts of Oldster.

“There is space, and there are stars, and of the things to know about them I have little to seek out. I have traveled the star lanes for eons, filled with my longing, and the search for knowledge has been only the disguised search for my life’s completion.

“Yet I have learned; but what I have failed to learn, my son, is the spark that keeps my hope and my life alive.”

“There is a great secret that eludes you?” Burning Planet spoke breathlessly.

The old being of the universe sighed as he absently studied a nearby group of meteoroids parading in silent cold line across the bright sky.

“Do we have choice,” he whispered. “Did I have choice? For there was the band of decision — but you would not understand that, my son. Oh, the years have passed, and there is no answer. Space-time began; it fumed into being at some point unthinkably remote. Where? How? Why? We conceive no beginning, for beginning is time itself; and yet, from nothingness sprang matter. Result without cause. I have searched — searched downward into miniscule universes, striving to find that beginning which came into being without a first motion.

“I have trapped matter’s smallest part, stripped space of all influences around it. And having trapped it, no longer sensed it. For observation is influence.

“In that vacuous cage, did that particle move in paths of its own choosing? If it did, without cause—”

Oldster’s thoughts broke off. Then, drudging, they came again: “But no. The universe decays, and draws life into decadence with it. There is no hope!”

Silence endured. Timorously Burning Planet spoke, but there was no response. Reluctantly he withdrew from the aged creature’s presence, for there was more he would have known. He returned to space’s first level, pondering.

I shall seek knowledge, he decided. I shall not be like the others, mastered by their own whims… by destiny? But I do not understand. I am not mastered … And from afar he felt it, the wax and wane of the life impulse. From the spiraling arms of a nebula, out of its green heart as if she had been hiding therein, a green-light drifted toward him. But Burning Planet’s time had not come. He continued on his way.

There was Darkness.

And the daughter of Darkness, Sun Destroyer.

And her son, Vanguard, to be known for a long time as Yellow Light.

And there were the millions, the tens and hundreds of millions of years that passed.

With drudging energy, Oldster heaved his vast body into a ragged motion that took him for the last time across the light-streaming rivers of the sky, into the first deeps of the darkness that Darkness had crossed. There, beyond sight of that meager pinpoint arrangement of matter that was this universe, he drew his visions in about him, and drew in his thoughts as well, striving to cancel them out.

Millennia would pass, though, and still he would be trying to blot out the memories of his life. Still he would fight his agonizing need. His was failure, for he had not created.

As for the band of decision — with his fading consciousness he searched back through time. He had imagined it. It had never existed!