Ross Rocklynne - People of the Darkness

“You mean, I will… die?”

“Soon.”

Darkness shuddered, caught halfway between an emotion of blind anger and mental agony. “There is death everywhere,” he whispered, “and everything is futile!”

“Perhaps,” she said softly, her grief carrying poignantly to him. “Darkness, do not be sad. Darkness, death does indeed come to all, but that does not say that life is of no significance.

“Far past in the gone ages of our race, we were pitiful, tiny blobs of energy which crept along at less than light speed. An energy creature of that time knew nothing of any but the first and forty-eighth band of hyperspace. The rest he could not conceive of as being existent. He was ignorant, possessing elementary means of absorbing energy for life. For countless billions of years he never knew there was an edge to the universe. He could not conceive an edge.

“He was weak, but he gained in strength. Slowly, he evolved, and intelligence entered his mind.

“Always, he discovered things he had been formerly unable to conceive in his mind, and even now there are things that lay beyond the mind; one of them is the end of all space. And the greatest is, why life exists. Both are something we cannot conceive, but in time evolution of mental powers will allow us to conceive them, even as we conceived the existence of hyperspace and those other things. Dimly, so dimly, even now I can see some reason, but it slips the mind. But Darkness! All of matter is destined to break down to an unchanging state of maximum entropy; it is life, and life alone, that builds in an upward direction. So… faith!”

She was gone. She had sown what comfort she could. Her words shot Darkness full of the wild fire of hope. That was the answer! Vague and promissory it was, but no one could arrive nearer to the solution than that. For a moment he was suffused with the blissful thought that the last of his problems was disposed of.

Then, in one awful space of time, the green-light’s philosophy was gone from his memory as if it had never been uttered. He felt the pangs of an unassailable weariness, as if life energies were seeping away.

Haggardly, he put into effect one driving thought. With lagging power, he shot from the fatal band of life… and death… down the scale. Something unnamable, perhaps some natal memory, made him pause for the merest second in the seventeenth band. Afar off, he saw the green-light and her newly-born. They had left the highest band and come to the band where propellants became useless. So it had been at his own birth.

He paused no more and dropped to the true band, pursuing a slow course across the star beds of this universe, until he at last emerged on its ragged shore. He went on into the darkness, until hundred hundreds of light-years separated him from the universe his people had never known existed.

He stopped and looked back at the lens of misty radiance. “I have not even discovered the edge of the darkness,” he thought. “It stretches out and around. That galactic system and my own are just pinpoints of light, sticking up, vast distances apart, through an unlimited ebony cloth. They are so small in the darkness they barely have the one dimension of existence!”

He went on his way, slowly, wearily, as if the power to activate his propellants were diminishing. There came a time, in his slow, desperate striving after the great velocity he had known in crossing the lightless section, when that universe, that pinpoint sticking up, became as a pinpoint to his sight.

He stopped, took one longing look at it, and accelerated until it was lost to view.

“I am alone again,” he thought vaguely. “I am more alone than Oldster ever was. How did he escape death from the green-lights? Perhaps he discovered their terrible secret, and fled before they could wreak their havoc on him. He was a lover of wisdom, and he did not want to die. Now he is living, and he is alone, marooning himself in the lightness band, striving not to think. He could make himself die, but he is afraid to, even though he is so tired of life, and of thinking his endless thoughts.

“I will die. But no…! Ah, yes, I will.”

He grew bewildered. He thought, or tried to think, of what came after death. Why, there would be nothing!

He would not be there, and without him nothing else could exist!

“I would not be there, and therefore there would be nothing,” he thought starkly. “Oh, that is inconceivable. Death! Why, forever after I died, I would be… dead!”

He strove to alleviate the awfulness of the eternal unconsciousness. “I was nothing once, that is true; why cannot that time come again? But it is unthinkable. I feel as if I am the center of everything, the cause, the focal point, and even the foundation.”

For some time this thought gave him a kind of gloating satisfaction. Death was indeed not so bad, when one could thus drag to oblivion the very things which had sponsored his life. But at length, reason supplanted dreams. He sighed. “And that is vanity!”

Again he felt the ineffably horrible sensation of an incapacity to activate his propellants the full measure, and an inability to keep himself down to normal size. His memory swirls were pulsating and striving, sometimes, to obliterate themselves.

Everything seemed meaningless. His very drop into the darkness, at slow acceleration, was without purpose.

“I could not reach either universe now,” he commented to himself, “because I am dying. Poor mother! Poor Oldster! They will not even know I crossed. That seems the greatest sorrow — to do a great thing, and not be able to tell of it. Why did they not tell me of the central lights? With Oldster, it was fear that I should come to the same deathless end as he. With mother — she obeyed an instinct as deeply rooted as space. There must be perpetuation of life.

“Why? Was the green-light right? Is there some tangible purpose to life which we are unable to perceive? But where is my gain, if I have to die to bring to ultimate fruition that purpose? I suppose Oldster knew the truth. Life just is, had an accidental birth, and exists haphazardly, like a star, or an electron.

“But, knowing these things, why do I not immediately give way to the expanding forces within me? Ah, I do not know!”

Convulsively he applied his mind to the continuance of life within his insistently expanding body. For awhile he gloried in the small increase of his fading vigor.

“Making solar systems!” his mind took up the thread of a lost thought. “Happy sons of Radiant, Incandescent, Great Power, and all the others!”

He concentrated on the sudden thought that struck him. He was dying, of that he was well aware, but he was dying without doing anything. What had he actually done, in this life of his?

“But what can I do? I am alone,” he thought vaguely. Then, “I could make a planet, and I could put the life germ on it. Oldster taught me that.”

Suddenly he was afraid he would die before he created this planet. He set his mind to it, and began to strip from the sphere of tight matter vast quantities of energy, then condensed it to form matter more attenuated. With lagging power, he formed mass after mass of matter, ranging all through the ninety-eight elements that he knew.

Fifty-thousand years saw the planet’s first stage of completion. It had become a tiny sphere some fifteen-thousand miles in diameter. With a heat ray he then boiled it, and with another ray cooled its crust at the same time forming oceans and continents on its surface. Both water and land, he knew, were necessary to life which was bound by nature of its construction to the surface of a planet.

Then came the final, completing touch. No other being had ever deliberately done what Darkness did then. Carefully, he created an infinitesimal splash of life-perpetuating protoplasm; he dropped it aimlessly into a tiny wrinkle of the planet’s surface.