Ross Rocklynne - People of the Darkness

He looked at the finished work, the most perfect planet he or his playmates had ever created, with satisfaction, notwithstanding the dull pain of weariness that throbbed through the complex energy fields of his body.

Then he took the planet up in a tractor ray, and swung it around and around, as he now so vividly recalled doing in his childhood. He gave it a swift angular velocity, and then shot it off at a tangent, in a direction along the line of which he was reasonably sure lay his own universe. He watched it with dulling visions. It receded into the darkness that would surround it for ages, and then it was a pinpoint, and then nothing.

“It is gone,” he said, somehow wretchedly lonely because of that, “but it will reach the universe; perhaps for millions of years it will traverse the galaxies unmolested. Then a sun will reach out and claim it. There will be life upon it, life that will grow until it is intelligent, and will say it has a soul, and purpose in existing.”

Nor did the ironic humor of the ultimate swift and speedy death of even that type of life, once it had begun existence, escape him. Perhaps for one or ten million years it would flourish, and then even it would be gone — once upon a time nothing and then nothing again.

He felt a sensation that brought blankness nearer, a sensation of expansion, but now he made no further attempts to prolong a life which was, in effect, already dead. There was a heave within him, as if some subconscious force were deliberately attempting to tear him apart.

He told himself that he was no longer afraid. I am simply going into another darkness — but it will be a much longer journey than the other.

Like a protecting cloak, he drew in his vision rays about him, away from the ebony emptiness. He drifted, expanding through the vast, inter-universal space.

The last expansion came, the expansion that dissipated his memory swirls. A vast, compact sphere of living drew itself out until Darkness was only free energy distributed over light-years of space.

And death, in that last moment, seemed suddenly to be a far greater and more astounding occurrence than birth had ever seemed.

Deep within the fifteenth band of lightlessness reposed he who had lived so long that he had forgotten the unutterable span of years which stretched back from this moment to the moment of his birth.

He thought, and wished to forget thought. To forget thought — that was death! Ah, let death come. If it would but creep up on him without his knowledge. If it would not let him know of its restful presence until it had done its work. If it would not give him warning, so that, unwilling, he fought against it with all the subterranean forces of his seventy-million-mile body.

To fight against death, and to wish it at the same time: this was a battle that could know no winner. Better to wish for nothing, to throttle thought until it subsided to a level where recognition of one’s identity was a difficult thing.

Completely enclosed, first by the fifteenth band of lightlessness, second by his self-imposed guard against thoughts concerning the outer universe, still there was the trickle of thought that gave him awareness. Outside was the universe, in all its glowing splendor. Outside, too, were other energy creatures, beings such as he himself had been before his eternal quest for knowledge had led him to escape his normal fate — the fate he would now welcome.

They knew of him who strove not to think, and they respected his desire. For he had become a legend, beloved, yet held in awe.

Why did he wish to die, and yet could not die? Those young energy creatures could not know; but they did know that to disturb him would be to bring to him an unendurable agony. One ray of light, one single outside thought, would be as a stiletto piercing him with shocking awareness of external things. He had sought a hundred million years for the self-administered anesthetic that would ease him to coma and a blessed semblance of mindless apathy. To disturb him now would be cruelty.

This was Oldster, this incredibly aged creature, who, some said, was here even before the galaxies, or perhaps before the nebulae, or — who knows? — even before time itself. This was the Old One of the race, he who no longer wished to think, or, if he must think, wished to think of extinction and its blessed relief.

The breadth of this universe would not be comprehended with the naked mind. It was so great in girth that at the utmost, frightful velocity an energy creature could attain, he could never hope to travel from rim to rim in anything less than seven million years.

Yet this universe was small. Small, and with little significance in the vastness of all. It was but a pinpoint of light breaking the dead monotony of a darkness vast past description. Dark space, dark emptiness. A frightening gulf, in truth, a bottomless pit, an ocean of lightlessness, and utterly without a particle of any kind to give it warmth or character.

It stretched away…

But there were other universes, other feeble pinpoints which, in their own right, were huge.

The youths were gathered in numbers of some hundreds around the giant white star, amongst them an air of interest and excitement as they watched the planet-swinger.

“The system will crumble,” murmured the green-light, Luminescent. “How could it do otherwise? The gravitational stresses! The crisscrossing orbits!”

“Yet if Swift succeeds in making this new planet settle to a stable orbit, it will form the largest and most complex solar system we have created,” mused her companion, the purple-light Star Eater.

“Swift will do it,” insisted the nearby green-light Darting Green Ray. “If you remember, he placed the fifty-seventh when we all thought it impossible. By my count, thirty others have been thrown in since then. We could go on up to a hundred or more, no doubt of it.

“If only Sun Destroyer doesn’t come along now!”

“If only she doesn’t!”

Nervous sparkling streams formed about Luminescent’s thirty million miles of coruscant energy.

If only Sun Destroyer would stay away.

They turned their full attention on Swift, as if to blot out the darkened thoughts of that roving Sun Destroyer.

Swift was swinging his planet; he was planet-swinger of the moment, upon whose intuition rested the stability of a new and somewhat top-heavy solar system. Yes, it was an incredibly intricate solar system these energy creatures had built. Millions of years before they had, in their endless search for diversified pleasures, selected this monster star to weave about with a family of planets. Their success, so far, was phenomenal. No less than eighty-seven planets shuttled in stable orbits. There was no attempt to place the orbits in one plane; haphazardly, they lay in every conceivable plane. But as the number of planets had grown, so had their difficulties. Eccentric anomalies were so great that some planets swung in orbits whose major axes might be billions of miles, while the minor axes were but two or three million. These orbits reached in all directions. Now, how to insert another planet directly into the midst of that mad tangle? Such was Swift’s problem.

He nonetheless solved it, and he solved it adroitly; within the cogent swirls of patterned energy that formed his mind, cunning equations shortened or lengthened, at proper intervals, the tractor beam on the end of which poised his swinging new world, so that its velocity, when finally it was snapped into place, was pared to a nicety. Gracefully, even if somewhat dangerously, it missed direct collision with half a dozen of its fellows; then it whipped about in a complete and marvelously accurate ellipse, and serenely assumed its position in the monstrous complexity of orbits.