Gone? He knew a sudden stab of fright. He was seized in the relentless talons of horror.
“Come back,” he cried. “Come back!”
But would she come back? Had Star Glory, the small one of the green light, forgotten him and her promise? It could not be so. He was not doomed to lie here, shrinking from the terror of his awful abnormality. He was without a mother!
Slowly wheeled the stars in their vast orbits. Slowly coiled the powerful grim nebulae. Swiftly darted bearded comets across the age-old bright universe. The thousands of years were slipping away into the dusty past, and his own soul was shriveling within him. He was alone, the abandoned, the forgotten, the ill-born.
The mother of Star Glory came back.
He saw her with his all-encompassing visions, driving toward him on the invisible thrust of her propellants. Slowly she came, the flawless green-light, and her coming presaged a dull, thudding agony within him. His swollen body contracted under the impulse of his dreadful thoughts. She hung now in the first band of true space, drenching him in the slow, reluctant sadness of her unuttered thoughts, and he could not bring himself to speak.
“Star Glory told me of you,” she said into the throbbing silence.
“I have no mother of my own,” he whispered. “Star Glory says she is dead.”
The green-light held his visions with her own. There was in her a shudder of pain, but tenderness and love also.
“Yes,” she said gently. “She is dead. How she died, why she died, I do not think that even Oldster would know; and though he did, it would be wrong, cruel, to disturb him.”
She paused, bending on him a look of gentle pity. “Now you are ready for your freedom. Your name shall be Yellow Light.”
There was a constriction of shame in his memory swirls. “Yellow Light,” he whispered faintly. “That is my name?”
He felt the soothing touch of her thoughts, binding him strongly in her outflowing gentleness. There was a bitter sadness in her voice when she spoke.
“Yes, that is to be your name. You must try to be proud of it.For they will call you that anyway! Yellow Light, you are in the first band of true space!”
There was a click in his consciousness which told him that such indeed was the case. He was free. He hung poised in throbbing uncertainty, surrounded by all the bright beauty of the far-flung galaxies, drinking into him the radiant energy which swept in plenitude through the rich burning fabric of space.
The green-light hung a distance away, clouding out the xanthic blaze of a diadem of clustered stars.
“Your propellants,” the thought whispered gently to him. “Try them.”
He remembered the soaring flight of Star Glory, the vast distances which had eroded away to nothing under the great velocity that was hers. He was trembling in his eagerness as he explored the complex mechanism of his swollen body. His propellants thrust out. He felt the first surge of motion, but like a great clumsy animal he fumbled in unequal spurts. There was no sense of direction in him. He traced a slow tortuous path through the hub of a restlessly churned galaxy. He weaved from side to side, and yet thrilled to the motion that he gave himself. But it was hard, hard. Why did he not move with the ease and grace and swiftness of Star Glory?
He drew his propellants in at last and halted, turning his proud glance on the green-light.
“I moved,” he cried excitedly.
She hung a distance away, quivering, and he had the feeling that she was shrouded in horror. Vast emptinesses yawned in him. He was shaken with her voiceless compassion. For what? For whom? He did not dare to think the true thought.
“I moved,” he whispered, and the complex energy fields contracted toward the yellow-specked purple core of his body, He was faint, burning in the fire of her chaotic, broken thoughts,
At length she answered, “You moved, Yellow Light. Yes, you moved. Come with me.” She went slowly, accommodating her pace to his as they followed the resplendent aisles formed by the gyrating stars.
Chapter II
You Must Fight!
Thousands of light-years inward toward the center of the universe she went with him, pointing out from afar darting groups of the creatures who lived between the stars. “Dark Nebula, Comet, Bright Star-Cloud, Incandescent, Star-Hot, Blue Sun, Mighty, Sparkle, Valiant—” So she reeled off great lists of names which he had no trouble impressing on his memory swirls.
She told him of the forty-seven bands of hyperspace, and bade him follow her. It was hard. He struggled with the strange mechanism of his mind which permitted ascension or descension into the strange facets of the universe. She waited for him anxiously in the second, the third, and halted him there. Here, some strange hyperlaw had flattened all the mighty, proud, three-dimensional suns and swarming galaxies into a two-dimensional projection of themselves, and there was no depth and no beauty. He shuddered at the ugliness of a depraved universe and was caught up in horror by the tight black skin of nothingness which somehow seemed to be removed a step from, and parallel to, the compressed plane of meaningless brilliance.
“What is beyond there?” he whispered.
She answered, “No one knows, and no one shall know. Energy creatures have tried to break that invisible barrier; we are not so equipped. It is the mystery of the third band.”
Patiently, then, she went on ahead of him and waited until his incredible clumsiness allowed him to ascend into the fourth band. He hung there and saw his great young body repeated and repeated in long ranks that stretched away until his visions could no longer see them. The dark, dead images frightened him. They passed through the seventh band, where a soft, mellow, languid radiance washed through a starless cosmos. And through the tenth.
His progress was slow, wearisome. The green-light abruptly grasped at his thought swirls and clicked him back with her to the first band of true space. He faced her, dreading her next words, somehow understanding what was in her mind.
“I am alone now,” he said, with a sinking sensation.
She trembled. “Yellow Light, Yellow Light,” she cried softly, and there was a deep, foreboding grief in her. “Why is it? Why must this be? But I cannot stop it. It is done. I do not know why it was done, or who did it. It may be the enormous meaning that transcends time and space and has its answer somewhere, far above us. Oldster could tell you! Oldster! But Oldster dies, alone, in the fifteenth band of lightlessness, and he wishes to die and be no more! Yellow Light, I am sad!”
He said dully, for he was beginning to see something of himself, “Now what is there for me?”
Involuntarily she moved back from him a half-million miles, as if he had lashed her. She was shaken, her thoughts contorted with her sadness for him. Chaotic bubbles of liquescent light fled from her contracting body.
“Play!” she burst out violently. “There!” She pointed into the far distance and he saw, as his visions caught the scene, a swarming group of green and purple-lights in abandoned fantasy of motion about a violent sun. “You will play with them. No more can I tell you!”
“What is my purpose in life?” he asked quietly.
“Play, Yellow Light! Play! Purpose? It will be revealed to you.”
She turned. He spurred after her in mounting fright, terrified of her leaving him. But when he faced her again his thoughts were paralyzed, and he could find no word to say. So she went, leaving him in his flaming loneliness.
He hung there, quiescent before the stars, searching in his mind for something that he surely should have, and yet aware that somehow, subtly, he had lost memory of it. He searched into the far, far distances and saw only the gaunt mystery of tortured matter. He was entombed in a mausoleum of light-surfeited space. His horror was real.
What was he to do? Play? So had the green-light instructed. He looked toward the playing youths and there was in him a constriction of fright. He moved off unsteadily, weaving uncertainly in his great clumsy stride, his approach a painful, slow process of indirection, of formless motion. Angrily, he sought
for the full power and strength that must be his. His propellants did not respond to his agonized efforts.
He stopped millions of miles from the swarming youths. He knew he had no courage to face them. He was engulfed in fear, and he was not of them. He spurred back along the direction he had come, and with craven heart immersed himself in the dead lightlessness of a dark nebula. He hung there, trembling with his self-loathing, living over again the dreadful pity that Crescent Moon had bestowed on him. Why? Why was there pity for him? Who was his mother? What had happened to her? Why was it he had been allowed to remain in the seventeenth band too long and what had it done to him?
Who was Oldster?
Oldster! The name awoke in him a terrible fascination. He knew a strange reverence for the mysterious creature, a strange kinship. Oldster wished to die! Yellow Light brooded on the ghastly thought, revolted and at the same time charmed by his revulsion. He must visit Oldster! He would know!
He thought awhile, for the passing thousands of years, on the horror of those things that Oldster, the all-wise, could tell him about himself. Then came pain, and the pangs of a new fear. He trembled. Oldster would tell him… what?
Ah, no,he thought starkly. I am afraid! I cannot go before him — yet.
A blank, unnamed desire to go, anywhere, surged unrestrained through him. He activated his propellants with an abrupt awkward surge and emerged slowly from the deep night of the nebula, casting about with his visions like a creature that emerges affrightedly from its lair. He saw no energy creatures, and thus brought himself again into the splendid brilliance of the stars.
He looked then into the far distances, and he thought he saw his destiny beckoning to him. Out there, beyond the circle of life, he must go! Why? He did not yet know the answer, and yet he must go.
So he went, pursuing his erratic course across the quiescent jewels that lay scattered on the limitless ebony cloth of the universe; and so for fifteen million years, life other than his did not know him. At last, saddened, his own mental involutions revealed to him, he returned, knowing that he had fled, not from life, as he had thought; not with a desire to await some change in his body that would make him like other energy creatures; he had attempted to flee that from which all the soaring grace of Star Glory’s flight could not take him — himself.
I have gained nothing,he thought sadly, as he hung on the ragged shores of his own galaxy.The years are wasted, and I have grown. I have been alone, and I have never escaped. I am the same. I am Yellow Light, and I have not been proud of my name! What matters the discoloration of my purple light? What matter the pitiful deficiencies that encumber me? I have not fought. Yellow Light, Yellow Light, he cried softly,you must fight!
Toward this end, holding his courage erect, he sought out life and found it, his visions resting at last on a titanic violet sun around which swarmed a horde of energy creatures, purples and greens. He was imbued with the sacred hope of a new fulfillment, and yet the pangs of dread ate at his thought swirls. If he failed, where would he turn?
It was a thought that had no answer, but he felt that then he would know true horror. He would have to escape! Where? Where lay escape from the cruel taunts of life, escape from himself? He was suddenly trembling with a nostalgic yearning for an invisible, intangible something that he could not name, that came trembling out of the reservoir of his clouded memory. Shaken by the thought, he drove slowly toward the blazing violet sun.
On the outskirts of the milling crowd of green and purple lights, he stopped. He watched with a rigid fear of discovery that slowly turned to a tremulously eager excitement.
This was a game the youths were playing, a staggering game of cosmic proportions. Below, coloring the heavens virulently in its baleful violet glow, a huge sun was growing. Vicious whirls of tortured gas fled across its face. Geysers of torn, disrupted matter arced upward like a hot tongue to lick toward nearby stars. The sun was in visible pain from its colossal weight pressing inward on itself.
Beneath the comparatively calm exterior, a furnace of titanic heat explosions raged. Now and again a planet-size fragment belched upward to fall in a futile frenzy of frustration as its parent dragged it back with inexorable gravitational fingers. The gargantua was three million miles in diameter, and the excited youths were skillfully adding to its mass by stripping a nearby galaxy of stars.
Yellow Light watched eagerly, charmed by the consummate skill with which a young purple-light delicately lowered a hundred-thousand-mile star into the ravening maw of the monster. He understood, too, the mechanics which demanded such precision. The skymonster was a cosmic powder-dump, primed to respond instantly and with suicidal force to an untoward exterior intervention. It sought release, even as it fought to maintain stability.
All this Yellow Light saw, and saw too the clamoring youths as they fought for their turns. One by one, stars were selected, swung on tractor beams, discarded as their masses proved their danger. One by one, while the breathless youths watched, solar masses were lowered through the immense gravitational field, until the oceans of gas that tripped across the monster’s face licked at the proffered morsels and swallowed them in a greedy burst of inchoate flame.
Yellow Light’s swollen body rippled visibly with his desire to enter the delighting game. He turned now, still undiscovered, and stealthily reached out toward the denuded galaxy, with a tractor ray drawing back toward himself a flaming mass which he thought would answer the purpose. His thought swirls throbbed in anticipation.
Slowly the sky monster grew, racked with its incredible stresses of heat and weight. Yellow Light hung back, lacking the courage to claim his turn, trembling with an inner frustration and dread. Finally he could stand it no longer. A green-light, the center of attention of a hundred energy creatures, completed her task with swift, complacent proficiency. Yellow Light activated his propellants and moved into the breach, at the same time thrusting his ripe young sun out on the tip of his tractor ray.
“Stand back!” he cried tremulously. “Stand back! It’s my turn!” He began to swing the lump of flaming matter in vast clumsy arcs.
The youths churned back in a great scattering cloud, back and away from the untoward length of his ray.
They were staring at him, Yellow Light knew. He felt a convulsion of panic. The sun almost slipped from his awkward grasp. Determinedly, he continued to swing it, aping the motions of those who had preceded him. Then suddenly, like an angry hive, the horde of youths swarmed in and closed about him in a sphere, nimbly dodging his tractor ray.
“Who is he?” — “An adult!” — “What is he doing here?” — “It is not his turn!”
A hundred outraged cries rang in his thought swirls. A single purple-light detached himself from the throng and cried with vast scorn, “Who are you, Yellow Light? What do you do here? Go away, large one!”
Yellow Light was sick with fright. “It is my turn,” he whispered.
They sensed his great clumsiness, his fear.
“Yellow Light!” a half-hundred of them cried in mockery. “Yellow Light! Yellow Light!”
The sun slipped from his grasp and started to fall toward the writhing violet sun. Paralyzed, he stared after it. He emitted a great wild cry and plunged with his awkward stride after it. He caught it again on the tip of his tractor ray, and the pack of youths roared in high fury, “He is destroying our sun. Stop him! Stop Yellow Light!”
The gravitational drag of the star was beyond belief. Plucked at with their thousand spears of insult, he fought with his falling sun as if his life depended on it, and he swung it free, in a vast arc, only to have it spin away in a mighty spiraling orbit. It disappeared beyond the titan’s farther rim, whirled swiftly, and came into view on the opposite rim just as it struck that heaving surface: The youths gasped concertedly, and suddenly they scattered back and away.
Yellow Light, for a moment of unbelief, held his visions on that terrible prelude to catastrophe. Then he too urged himself back a light-year, stunned.
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nbsp; The gargantua’s surface rippled with planet-size tidal waves and bulged for an infinitesimal second at its equator. The outraged matter at its core, pressed beyond endurance by the sudden application of a force and mass it could not compensate for, swelled up against its constructing confines and gave up all its supernal heat and energy in one huge upsurge of liberation. Million-mile cracks appeared on the crazily agitated surface of the star, deepened into vast gorges from which puffs of matter and light were emitted with frightful velocity. Pounded at insensately from within itself, the whole star broke apart with one vast detonation which bathed the heavens in demon light. It threw its fragments with unequaled savagery upon the sky, destroying in their course the tattered remnants of the two galaxies which had fed it. The inferno reached for fifteen light-years across space, and Yellow Light, visions blacked out by the ravening brilliance, was hurled back on the wavefront of the explosion.
Dazed, he finally thrust out with his parapropellants and stopped. From his vantage point, he saw the remainder of the conflagration. The brilliance died. Chaos was on the universe. New suns flared into life; freed matter settled into the stability of solitary, sedately coiling nebulae; flaming gases fled in great mist clouds across the gaps’ between four newly formed galaxies. Of the giant sun there was nothing. It had died and its convulsions had remade a tiny corner of the universe.
He hung there, shivering, knowing that there was something he must do. He must get away! He was too late, for from a hundred different directions the youths converged on him until once more he was encircled with their outraged cries.
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