People of the Darkness

by Ross Rocklynne

  Amusement was in her thoughts. “Do you drift?” she asked.

  The complete logic of that reply escaped him.

  “I do not drift.” Anger made him add, “Nor am I drifted, by you, Dark Fire, or anyone. I would not have destroyed the planet.” Then a thought shook him. He looked at her askance. “Dark Fire, until now we have been friends, sharing life together. We can no longer be friends. For a time will come, and soon, when I must make a choice between two events. Do you understand?”

  Her visions caught his, puzzled. “I do not understand,” she said slowly. “We must always be friends.”

  A fuzzy-headed comet slashed across the dark heavens between them.

  Devil Star said in mirthless mockery, “Friends! Can green-and purple-lights ever be friends?”

  For a long time she held that thought. Then, as if in reaction against the horror that rose from the instinctive matrix of her, she surged back across the heavens. From that far distance, her amplifying fear and shock drove against him, wave upon wave.

  “You speak and do not know whereof you speak, Devil Star! You cannot mean—”

  He followed in triumph, but it was a cold and bitter triumph faulted by her betrayal. Dark Fire dwindled away more swiftly than he followed, as though to flee from him must dull her turmoil. But drifting back came her voice, cold and thinned by distance:

  “Devil Star, there will be no choice!”

  Chapter III

  The Band of Decision

  The friendship of Dark Fire and Devil Star was finished. Often, in the millions of years that were to elapse, they would be members of the same playing group, but a barrier would exist. Devil Star thrilled to the impenetrable hostility that lay so subtly between, them, for he recognized himself to be in deadly combat with life’s most inimical force; Dark Fire was but the symbol of that force.

  In the midst of his violent, star-disrupting play was immured the cold thought: I am destined to die, and to die in a certain manner. I shall therefore turn destiny aside; I shall not die!

  When Dark Fire came, he would be ready for her.

  When Dark Fire came, however, he was not.

  He was in his forty-millionth year, still a youth in his vast time scale, when he began drifting away from his other friends as well. He was huge, his purple light a vast globe of force flickering with deep indigo wells of flame, his outer body strong with tremendous, interacting fields of force. And the games of his youth palled.

  For already he felt the hunger in him, and mistook the first deep pangs for the need to acquire knowledge.

  His search for knowledge took him not into the macro-but into the microcosms. Surely the larger universe was near the end result while the smaller was near the beginning. Somewhere in that complex welter of whirling subparticles he would be able to find result without cause!

  His tools were crude. It was nothing to pluck a star from the heavens with a reaching tractor ray, to split it, explode it. But to shear a molecule from a parent mass, to hold it inviolate from its fellows, was indeed nearly impossible. He raged at the task for a million years, forgetting all the names linked to his life — forgetting the menace of Dark Fire.

  Dark Fire, Comet Glow, Moon Flame — these indeed belonged to another universe. On the rim of an outer galaxy, Devil Star conducted his dark probe. For ten thousand years at a time he held himself motionless, shredding cold matter, slicing it, training himself to split his broad arms of leaping energy into threads of power, thinning his vision rays down to that consistency which would give him sight into small worlds.

  When success came, as it did, it lasted for one thrilling moment. In a vacuum of its own, untouched by outside forces, that microcosm hung pendant. Devil Star saw it fuzzily, by the reflecting thread of electrons he sent against it. And was to see it no more. For in the moment of triumph, when his defenses were discarded, came the icy cold certainty that he was being watched.

  That captured micro-universe was gone from his delicate grasp as if it had never been. With a violence beyond imagining, he expanded to half again his girth. Lingering along the rims of his senses was the single, quivering pulse of life-energy. From a distance it had come, beamed upon him as if by intent. From a dozen portions of his body his visions leapt out. And he saw Dark Fire.

  He was gripped by the splendor of her, as she moved slowly down an aisle of stars toward him… her visions already touching his, holding them with hard, bright purpose. Against the darker background of space, her central green light was lustrous, and alive with dancing greener forms under its translucent swirling rim. For a moment, his thoughts convulsed. Wildly he searched for a memory that would take him back to his natal moment; for another memory, when he was not much older, when he hovered behind a shielding star, cunning with his knowledge, strong; and for another!

  “Devil Star, there will be no choice!”

  The clangor of that voice from the past had no meaning for him, though frantically he tried to examine it. But meanings, reasons, coherent thinking, were lost to him. As Dark Fire drifted nearer, he was enclosed in vast peace. He knew at once that his searching, even his finding, was a patchwork substitute for this great longing that had been built into the very fabric of him.

  Now came the voice of Dark Fire, humming, insidious. “Devil Star, our moment has come, as we knew it would. Devil Star, follow me!”

  * * *

  And now he hangs in the vibrant band of life, drawn there half by her will, half by his. He trembles with the half-memory of death, and yet is bathed by the hypnotic vibrations flooding from the central light of her, so that he knows peace and understands the answers to all questions.

  She is dwindling. He knows what he must do.

  As she would destroy me!

  The thought rages, but he prepares.

  Then hiatus:the gulf of timelessness between two instants of time. He is there, by a mechanism he does not understand. There has been a click deep in the lower caverns of his thought swirls — as if he has transported himself to another band of hyperspace.

  But is this another hyperspace? It cannot be. In that ladder of universes, and he has climbed it from lower to topmost rung, there is nothing similar.

  He views this strange space with childish wonder,knowing that he is here, and yet is without a body, without a purple central light. He knows, too, that actually he must be in the forty-eighth band of hyperspace, about to die, and at peace.

  He is there — and here. Fantasy or reality? It does not matter. It comes to him, in wonder gentle as light scattering, that here is an importance he might never comprehend.

  A queer, geometric, somehow logical universe. Yes, the idea of logic presses insistently in. And yet what he views does not seem outwardly logical. For these clean-cut star systems, though surely vast distances stretch between them, seem equally large to his sight. They lie, he reasons, on a four-dimensional skin, stretched out and pasted upon it. There is distance… but no perspective.

  Between those star systems are no dust motes, no hurrying comets, no uncollected suns, no irregularity. There is dark vacuum, pure, logical vacuum.

  But suns, sometimes whole groups of suns, whirl sparkling across that vacuous space from one spinning galaxy to another. That galaxy, in turn, urges another unit from its turning heart or its majestically rounded rim. The quiet orderly exchange-exchange is magnificent to watch. The new suns, or solar systems, quietly fall into new orbits that seem prepared for them. There is a shiver and dance of movement as the other members of the receiving system move obligingly about to make room.

  He moves quietly through this charmed universe — the bodiless entity of him — wondering about it, speculating. How quiet, how at peace, how right. And then, as he hangs motionless again in dark vacuum, he sees a single, glowing sun detach itself from the rounding rim of the nearest galaxy. It speeds toward him — and is closer. Yet he will not move. The distance lessens. It is upon him and passing through him.

  For a burning moment he is locked
in its fiery heart, and all of being blazes with hurt.

  Surging against his pain, he fights his way out, and speeds away rotating and looking back, bewildered. The speeding sun has faltered in its flight and is hanging motionless. The entire universe quivers and blurs, as if in response to some discord. Then the sun reverses direction, reluctantly falling back into its parent star system.

  And the system explodes!

  Frozen with stark horror, Devil Star sees that sudden, senseless explosion. He watches a hundred suns shoot like streaming bullets in a dozen directions. Those suns plow through nearby galaxies. They drive relentlessly to new positions in other galactic accretions. The universe surges and bubbles and seethes with irregularity. There are more explosions and more frantic exchanges. The heavens are alight with flaming tongues of corrupted matter. There is an urgent hustle and bustle.

  Then the exchanged suns begin to find their niches without commotion. The number of explosions lessens. The firmament ceases its horrifying agitation. Order is restored. The orderly suns, sometimes with attendant planets, march quietly across the dark sky.

  * * *

  Now the configuration of this strange sky is different.

  Numbly, Devil Star hardly dares to move. Then a clamor rises in him. There is something he must do. He is repelled by his need, and does not know why he is repelled. From that strange, dimensionless distance he sees a sun moving toward him. He rushes to meet it. Again that prolonged, fiery moment of agony.

  And that universe, that industrious universe with its lawless logic, that universe is gone.

  Devil Star is back in the forty-eighth band, watching Dark Fire.

  The moment of watching was drawn out.

  “Devil Star!” The cry blasted across space, imperative, but in the substrata of that cry was unspeakable horror.

  Faintly Devil Star answered: “No.”

  The brightening green flames of Dark Fire’s central light wavered, dimmed, brightened again. He felt the wave upon wave of hypnotic compulsion washing over him. But he only felt an answering deadness in the depths of his thought swirls.

  She came across the spaces, looming, rushing, trailing chaotic streams of energy along her weaving path. She was upon him before he understood what was happening. Her speechless rage and hate preceded her. Astounded, he felt a searing burst of pain deep in the energy fields of his complex body, and saw that a flaming red beam of force had leaped from her. Vainly he tried to beat it off with screening forces. The beam seared through. She was pouring the energy of her vast body into that beam, intent on eating through to the heart of him.

  “You must die, Devil Star!” The mindless cacophony screamed, ripping, filling the universe with its throbbing hate.

  “You must die! You are in the band of life! And you must die!”

  Numbed beyond thought, he only spurred back, intent on outdistancing her. She, a demon bent on destroying him, followed. Desperately he clicked himself from the band of life and into the forty-seventh band. And she burst into that space after him — and into the next and the next.

  As he fled, working only on instinct and the dazed horror that fed him, a chilling, mountainous certainty rose. The laws of life as he knew them had been violated. No matter that he had triumphed, in some obscure, staggering way that he could not yet comprehend. To Dark Fire it made no difference. Her wisdom, her destroying hate, as with all green-lights, must have its source in blind instinct. There had been outrage. He must die!

  A cruel incisiveness claimed him as he frantically dropped down the terraced spaces of the universe. Here and there as he fled, he plucked small suns from the heavens, swept scattered debris into his body, and converted it all to primal energy. When she burst through after him into the eleventh band, he was ready for her. All the quivering excess energy his swollen body held was channeled into a concentrated bolt of destruction that smote her point-blank.

  Shaken even beyond horror, he saw those clouds of fuming light that exploded from the core of her.

  She hung without motion, lax, her visions down, a sickly pale radiance creeping in shadowy waves through her. Across her central green light fitful waves of yellow surged. And then the force fields that made her body a coherent unit lost their function. Involuntary expansion started.

  “I am dying!” The hideous accusation blasted stridently out.

  “As you would have had me die!”

  “No, no! Devil Star! You have done a terrible thing! You… do not know… how terrible… for you.”

  “I had choice!” he cried bitterly.

  Silence. Then, from a distance, muttering:

  “Choice. No. There could have been no… choice. It began… how long ago? Before you were born, Devil Star. Before… back to the… beginning. No motion but was caused by motion. No cause without result, or result… without cause. Thought from thought, thought from… motion. How else… could it be?

  “Devil Star!” That muttering, distant voice held blind despair. “Your only immortality… truly, your only happiness… lay in that child… you and I would have created.”

  Her voice muttered away into nothing. In repelled fascination, Devil Star watched expansive grayness sweep across and engulf her. Deathly puffs of blackening light filled the heavens as the friend of his youth died. Then he left that band, the eleventh band where insanity lived.

  In the first band of true space, he thrust out with his parapropellants and hurled himself into light speed. Then he went still faster; fled through a galaxy and burst from its outer rim. He traversed the black gulf that separated it from its neighbor. The universe careened, the splendor about him went unnoticed.

  For a million years Devil Star sought his opiate in blind motion. Finally, deep into the bottomless darkness that cupped this lenticular universe, he stopped. His horror was not dulled. The memory was not sheared off. He could not outrun himself. He was cursed.

  * * *

  Devil Star was cursed; but he was alive, unlike Dark Fire whose deathly urge had been turned back upon her. The thought trudged in with dead reluctance; it had no wings to make him soar. For, in spite of all, Dark Fire, the beloved friend of his youth, truly was dead. No matter that all of nature had conspired against him, a purple-light; no matter that Dark Fire, from some blind instinct, had sought with all her being to fulfill a supposedly incorruptible law of the universe. She was dead, and he had killed her.

  He hung quivering and lost in the lightless emptiness. His triumph, for the moment, was without savor.

  I should not have fought, he thought numbly. It was not meant that I should fight. Better to play, not to think.

  Not meant? His thoughts took their whirling plunge into that maelstrom which flung him in endless circles of illogic. He had fought destiny, and won; but had there been some chain of causes and results, some implacable series of microcosmic events, that made his triumph only an inevitable act, part of the pattern after all?

  Then he had not escaped. He shrank into himself, pulling his visions in about him so that even the mother universe and its searching brilliance seemed not to exist. Now he was as alone as mortality could be. He was feeding on his own inner resources, a circuitous being independent of the flux and strain of conflicting energies. He was master of himself; for this naked, two-dimensional instant of time he was the master!

  But no: his convictions could not hold up, for there was the past, whipping his every thought and action into submission with infinitely reaching arms of cause and result. He had not escaped; and with this realization a new fury entered the life of Devil Star. It came like the roar of a monster full-born in the sub swirls of his mind: a monster clawing and rearing, fighting for emergence into the searching light of his awareness. He was shaken to the depths by the beast housed below his consciousness — that depthless, unuttered longing to which he could not give a name. Frantically, his thoughts moved back along the years of his life, searching for some explanation of a ruinous emotion. Entombed in his self-imposed darkness, removed
from the entropic swing and surge of the universe, he felt that longing engulf him.

  “It is something I want,” he gasped. “Some thing I must have, must!”

  Then, slipping unbidden from another corner of his mind, as if in cue to his desperation, came a sense of solution. The new thought held him rigid.

  “I was in another universe,” he whispered. “In that moment before she would have had me fling out my central purple core and die, I was transported to another band of space, a band I never saw before. And when I returned to the band of life, my will to mate with her, and to die, was gone.”

  He hung laxly, surfeited with his emotions. It was that he longed for, that other hidden band; it could be nothing else. For if it were not that… he thrust the clangorous thought away, for it was as pain-filled as that red beam a maddened Dark Fire had sent against him.

  Now he pushed aside the darkness enclosing him, as if it were a cocoon, and he a new life. And he beheld the resplendent lens of the universe a hundred light-years away.

  And as he beheld it, the prime conviction of his life returned to become a drumming force inside him. Surely that universe and its myriad avenues was not mirrored into being by the counterplay of energies at the beginning of time. Destiny could be turned aside. Had he not so turned it? And the answer to its turning lay in that hidden band of space.

  Somehow he would find that band; he would put his life into it — and find the answer to all of being!

  Chapter IV

  World Rim

  The universe knew Devil Star again. He drifted back into it at medium speed, captivated with the wonder of his upward-spiraling thoughts. Dimly, he knew that the cleaving memory of Dark Fire’s destruction was turning fuzzy. He wanted it so. Neither ecstasy nor hurt could endure in full measure much longer than the present moment. For, it seemed, the mind was a turbulent structure, as frantic in its upheavals and overthrows as the interior fury of a white dwarf star. Somewhere in his thought swirls, caged for this moment, were the sharpest agonies of his life. In their place had risen hope, and it was a thrilling hope indeed, the hope that the hidden band held out for him.