Ross Rocklynne - People of the Darkness

“Green-light, I have journeyed a distance the length of which I cannot think to you, seeking the riddle of the darkness. But perhaps there was something else I was seeking, something to fill a vacant part of me. I know now what it was; A mate, green-light, a thinker. And you are that thinker, that friend with whom I can journey, voyaging from universe to universe, finding the secrets of all that is. Look! The Great Energy which alone made it possible for me to cross the darkness has been barely tapped!”

Imperceptibly she drew away. There was an unexplainable wariness that seemed half sorrow in her thoughts.

“You are a thinker,” he exclaimed. “Will you come with me?”

She stared at him, and he felt she possessed a natural wisdom he could never hope to accumulate. There was a strange shrinkage of his spirits. What was that she was saying?

“Darkness,” she said gently, “you would do well to turn and leave me, a green-light, forever. You are a purple-light, I a green. Green-light and purple-light — is that all you have thought about the two types of life? Then you must know that beyond the difference in color, there is another: the greens have a knowledge not vouchsafed the purples, until it is… too late. For your own sake, then, I ask you to leave me forever.”

He looked at her puzzled. Then, slowly, “That is an impossible request, now that I have found you. You are what I need,” he insisted.

“But don’t you understand?” she cried. “I know something you have not even guessed at! Darkness — leave me!”

He became bewildered. What was she driving at? What was it she knew that he could not know? For a moment he hesitated. Far down in him a voice was bidding him to do as she asked, and quickly. But another voice, that of a growing emotion he could not name, bid him stay; for she was the complement of himself, the half of him that would make him complete. And the second voice was stronger.

“I am not going,” he said firmly, and the force of his thoughts left no doubt as to the unshakable quality of his decision.

She spoke faintly, as if some outside will had overcome her. “No, Darkness, now you are not going; it is too late! Learn the secret of the purple globe!”

Abruptly, she wrenched herself into a hyperspace, and all his doubts and fears were erased as she disappeared, He followed her delightedly up the scale, catching sight of her in one band just as she vanished into the next.

And so they came to the forty-seventh, where all matter, its largest and smallest components, assumed the shapes of unchangeable cubes; even he and the green-light appeared as cubes, gigantic cubes millions of miles in extent, a geometric figure they could never hope to distort.

Darkness watched her expectantly. Perhaps she would now start a game of chopping chunks off these cubed suns and swing them around as planets. Well, he would be willing to do that for a while, in her curious mood of playfulness, but after that they must settle down to discovering possible galactic systems beyond this one.

As he looked at her she vanished. “Hmm, probably gone down the scale,” thought Darkness, and he dropped through the lower bands. He found her in none.

“Darkness… try the… forty-eighth…” Her thought came faintly.

“The forty-eighth!” he cried in astonishment. At the same time, there was a seething of his memory swirls as if the knowledge of his life were being arranged to fit some new fact, a strange alchemy of the mind by which he came to know that there was a forty-eighth.

Now he knew, as he had always known, that there was a forty-eighth. He snapped himself into it.

Energy became rampant in a ceaseless shifting about him. A strange energy, reminding him of nothing so much as the beating flow of an energy creature approaching him from a near distance. His vision sought out the green-light.

She was facing him somberly, yet with a queerly detached arrogance. His mind was suddenly choked with the freezing sensation that he was face to face with horror.

“I have never been here before,” he whispered faintly. He thought he detected pity in her, but it was overwhelmed by the feeling that she was under the influence of an outside will that could not know pity.

Yet she said, “I am sadder than ever before. But too late. You are my mate, and this is the band of… life!”

Abruptly while he stared, she receded, and he could not follow, save with his visions. Presently, as if a hypnotist had clamped his mind, she herself disappeared, all that he saw of her being the green globe of light she carried. He saw nothing else, knew nothing else. It became his whole universe, his whole life. A peacefulness, complete and uncorroded by vain striving, settled on him like stardust.

The green globe of light dimmed and became smaller, until it was less than a pinpoint, surrounded by an infinity of colorless energy.

Then, so abruptly it was in the nature of a shock, he came from his torpor and was conscious. Far off he still saw the green globe of light, but it was growing in size, approaching — approaching a purple globe of light that in turn raced toward it at high velocity.

“It is my own light,” he thought, startled. “I must have unwittingly hurled it forth when she settled that hypnotic influence over me. No matter. It will come back.”

But would it come back? The green globe of light was expanding in apparent size, approaching the purple globe which, in turn, dwindled toward it at increasing speed.

“At that rate,” he thought in panic, “they will collide. Then how will my light come back to me?”

He watched intently, a poignantly cold feeling clutching at him. Closer… closer. He quivered. Green globe and purple globe had crashed.

They met in a blinding crescendo of light that brightened space for light-years around. A huge mistiness of light formed into a sphere, in the center of which hung a brilliant ball. The misty light slowly subsided until it had been absorbed into the brighter light, that remained as motionless as Darkness himself. Then it commenced pulsating with a strange, rhythmic regularity.

Something about that pulsing stirred ancient memories, something that said, “You, too, were once no more than that pulsing ball.”

Thoughts immense in scope, to him, tumbled in his mind.

“That globe is life,” he thought starkly. “The green-light and I have created life. That was her meaning, when she said this was the band of life. Its activating energy flows rampant here.

“That is the secret of the purple globe; with the green globe it creates life. And I had never known the forty-eighth band until she made it known to me!

“The purpose of life — to create life.” The thought of that took fire in his brain. For one brief, intoxicating moment he thought that he had solved the last and most baffling of his mighty problems.

As with all other moments of exaltation he had known, disillusionment followed swiftly after. To what end was that? The process continued on and on, and what came of it? Was creation of life the only use of life? A meaningless circle! He recalled Oldster’s words of the past, and horror claimed him.

“Life, my life,” he whispered dully. “A dead sun and life — one of equal importance with the other. That is unbelievable!” he burst out.

He was aware of the green-light hovering near; yes, she possessed a central light, while his was gone!

She looked at him sorrowfully. “Darkness, if only you had listened to me!”

Blankly, he returned her gaze. “Why is it that you have a light, while I have none?”

“A provision of whatever it was that created us endows the green-lights with the ability to replace their lights three times. Each merging of a purple and green-light may result in the creation of one or several newly-born. Thus the number born overbalances the number of deaths. When my fourth light has gone, as it will some day, I know, I too will die.”