Ross Rocklynne - People of the Darkness

“You created us.”

Deep in the fabric of him he was at last torn. In those insidious words was a horror he dared not recognize. “No,” came his agonized muttering. “You are giving me hope. And I have lived too long with torture to endure hope.

“Leave me.”

“We shall not leave, Oldster, until your great life has reached its completion.” The sublime voice vibrated sweetly on the emptiness. “You created us — as surely as if you had sired Darkness himself. For did you not guide Darkness to his life’s completion? Was it not the thought of you that brought Sun Destroyer back along Darkness’s path? And was it not you who guided Vanguard, you who, in your greatness, saw us in him? Yes, Oldster, you are our creator — you are the creator of life!

“And it is life that will endure, and has ultimate meaning.”

Oldster hung laxly in that sphere of golden blaze, his exhausted mind devoid of will for battle.

“Then I have created,” he whispered. Peace flowed, scouring at the bitter longings of his life. Deep within was a warning voice, but now he would not heed it. Not to fight, not to rebel — ah, how sweet to accept it!

He was theirs. Let it be so. Let them lead him to his life’s completion. They in their all-knowingness could not be questioned. He had created. The thought held white and pure before him. Let the thought be so.

“Life that shall endure,” he muttered.

“Oldster!” The sublime voice rang. “Life does endure! For is not life the rebel from dead matter? Matter is death, for it grows old, powdering and graying toward its entropic destiny. But life is the rebel. Life builds and grows and evolves toward its high destiny which we know, but which you cannot know. But this you shall know. Life masters itself. Life is outside destiny — and has choice!”

Laxly he hung, accepting those dazzling meanings. Now it was over. He would not fight. And then, from somewhere, from a thousand directions, he felt their thoughts grasping at his thought swirls, filling him with that drugged peace he knew with Dark Fire, that companion of his lost years, when he faced her in the band of life.

“Oldster.” Inward hummed that lordly, loving voice. “Now you will know you have not failed. For are you not life, and the greatest rebel of all life?”

“And life has within it the dark rebel!”

After this, there shall be no more years, no more of memory or wonder or battle. There will be no more of Darkness, of Sun Destroyer, of Vanguard who was called Yellow Light, or of golden-lights. And this will be as Oldster wills it.

For now within him, in this moment before the universe must cease to exist, comes knowledge. The moment is the same as when he hung pendant in the forty-eighth band about to release his central globe, obedient to the relentless urge of destiny. He has been transported to that unlocated cosmos which lies beyond time and space dimensions. He is in the band of decision.

Again he looks upon those swinging suns with the rapt wonder of youth. It is the same band for which he looked so long!

“Look upon this, Oldster, for the time of glory comes. In its last moments, your life can know no higher joy.”

Distant yet near, the sweet voice drifted in.

“Now you inhabit that place you searched for. And it is a place that belongs to life alone.”

“My last moments.” The thought was examined wonderingly. From far down came feeble denial. “No, golden-lights. For I have tried to die. I cannot. I am trapped to life by the destiny that created me.”

He drifted in untrammeled vacuum, his motion a dimensionless sensation. He drank in the beauty of this faultless universe, its rounded, glowing suns, its logical plan, the purposeful paths of motion as units of seeming matter moved quietly from one galaxy to another. At least they looked like galaxies — but were not?

As those suns were not suns!

Into this bodiless entity that was himself came the whisper of doubt. Not suns! Blindly his reaching thoughts swept out.

“Then I searched everywhere for the band of decision — except within myself!”

“Yes, Oldster!”

The seeming galaxies blurred and shimmered as if in answering accord.

“And now,” cried Oldster, “my thoughts return to that moment when I trapped the universe’s smallest particle in emptied space, and vainly wondered if it could determine its own destiny. It could not.”

Silence. He drifted. His formless self moved, in some strange way, through these logically constructed islands of space toward some goal whose meaning hummed within him. Then, echoing through and through this universe came the ringing voice that hovered outside himself.

“And now you see, Oldster, and you know what it is you see. For life is the rebel, and dead matter knows no path but that given it. Oldster! Does not the mind, and that essence of self which is beyond the mind — do not even these need structure?”

Light as the touch of space, those thoughts lingered. Then Oldster felt their withdrawal. The fluttering of countless minds against his began to quiet. Without pain, he knew they were leaving him.

“Oldster” — the thought held no sadness, only an immeasurable love — “you know you have choice, and you know why you have it. Now farewell. Your time of glory comes.”

They were gone, those golden-lights, and in their near-perfection they carried with them those ultimate answers Darkness himself sought. And yet it did not matter, for he, Oldster, was within his fabled band of decision. And life could ask no more.

In mounting ecstasy, he hurled himself through vast spaces that were yet small beyond calculation; he went rushing with deadly accuracy toward his yet unseen goal. Those “galaxies,” those structures of which the golden-lights spoke, slanted out behind him, and new ones rushed into his sightless vision.

What old and new thoughts did those swinging suns evoke, what memories and dreams, in the slumbering outer mind of that being who was called Oldster? Which configuration of “stars” and “planets,” and what shuttling motion in and between them, called forth the haunting remembrances of Moon Flame, of Comet Glow and her child Dark Fire; of World Rim and the countless lost names of his unmeasured past? Ah, even the essence of being has structure; it must be so. And he inhabited, moved through, that band of decision.

And soon he would meet… his dark rebel!

His ecstasy soared as he burst across those dimensionless distances and unerringly swung into a blaze of pressing light created by a sphere of galaxies. And he halted, feeling the throb of his certain knowledge as he fixed his strange vision on the writhing heart of the farthest concourse of stars.

Instantly a lone star heaved from it and moved across dark space. Oldster was in its path as instantly.

Even in the midst of his blinding pain, his ecstasy endured. He knew there was no hurt, that it was not a star which flamed through him, but some other formless quality of his inner being. He knew that he did not see, for there was no light. And he knew that he was not here.

Yet what did it matter what symbols he chose, symbols that he understood, but which were not real. For that dark rebel, whatever form it possessed, was within him. And the essence of being has choice!

He watched that sun falter in midspace, watched it reverse direction and fall back, with its message, to the untroubled galaxy that had urged it forth. His joy was a mighty song as that particle of itself jousted with the destiny that bade it continue along a straight-angle path — fought and won.

That rebel particle was rushing, rushing back to the heart of the deeply buried mechanism that ejected it. Soon it would strike. And he knew that when it struck its blow there would be… explosion!