People of the Darkness

by Ross Rocklynne

  He would find that hidden band, though he had to roam the universe a hundred times over.

  He knew it existed, and existed approximately as he visualized it with his strange, bodiless sight. He could see the glory of it now, those geometric galaxies, and their calculated exchange and counterexchange of glowing suns. The gigantic thought of its being made him tremble, for here was mystery indeed. Yet as long as there was mystery, life could thrill to the full fury of existence.

  He stepped up his velocity, thrusting out his visions in growing rapture as he hurled through the light-spattered outermost fringes of the dazzling universe. Here was splendor, conflict, movement! And he was part of it again.

  Then, the worse for its suddenness, a chill spread through him.

  For, from afar, flickering in crazy paths across the heaving black patchwork of a dark nebular cloud, he saw a group of energy creatures. He started back and away, filled only with the need to escape their sight. But they saw him. Instantly, their parapropellants flashed, and they came thundering toward him, the babble of their excited thoughts rushing in.

  “Devil Star! Where have you been?”

  “It’s been a million—”

  “No, ten million—”

  “—years!”

  They ringed him, circling, and in stark horror at this intrusion of his carefully erected sanity he wanted only to fling himself into some other band. He could not look at them without thinking of Dark Fire.

  He resisted the impulse to flee,knowing they would follow. Now he was caught again in the full current of the life-force. In this careening group were many that he knew, many that he did not. And there were the missing names!

  “I have been—” he choked, and stopped. Terror, first for himself, and then for them, engulfed him. He would tell them where he had been and what he had seen. They would be forewarned. He would tell them, green-light and purple, of the self-destruction they imposed on themselves.

  And then, as he hung in strangled half-speech, awareness of the truth pierced him. These energy creatures were no more concerned with the answers to their questions than if they had never been uttered. Had they inquired of Dark Fire? Had they ever questioned an appearance into their midst or a disappearance from it?

  They crowded, jostling. If Devil Star had spoken they could not have heard him in their excitement. “Come, Devil Star—” A nudging pressor beam caught him unaware, jarring him sideways half a planet’s orbit. A half-dozen flung out, dancing him, whirling him ahead of them in their thoughtless joy. “We’ve found a new game—”

  He let himself be impelled, numbed, in the direction they chose. He thrust out his own propellants, half-heartedly keeping up with them, his thoughts a tempest. After a while he would leave them; he would disappear to some more quiet corner of the cosmos. But now, for some reason, he must stay…

  “Yes, Devil Star, where have you been?”

  Unerringly he faced about in his flight, picking out the green-light who uttered the question. She rode the bright heavens alongside him, keeping pace, her visions intent on him rather than on her hilariously cavorting playmates. And he knew instantly that though she played along with them, she had reached that point in her life where she was not really of them.

  As he was not of them.

  She repeated the question, naively unaware of its importance as she stared in bland curiosity. He returned her gaze blankly, wondering at that tremendous secret she instinctively hid from purple-lights.

  He whispered, “Green-light, you do not know where I have been?”

  She laughed. “Should I know?”

  “No. No! You could not know… and could not believe. I have been—”

  And he stopped, faint with his knowledge of what she was and what she must be thinking. He must be cunning, strong, and treacherous, too. He had bared his thoughts to Comet Glow and to Dark Fire. This green-light would not know him. He quivered with the effort of self-denial, and laughed, too, in the strange way that was possible for him.

  “I have been,” he chided, “ten billion light-years away. I discovered ten million comets and tied their beards together.”

  She studied him, piqued. “You must have been to a very interesting place,” she decided. Tentatively: “Shall we go there together, Devil Star? I am tired of these silly creatures I am forced to be with.”

  Said Devil Star, “We shall go together! Now or later?”

  “Now!”

  Devil Star frowned. “We’d better not,” he said cautiously. “They’d see us and follow. We’ll sneak off later, shall we?”

  She was reluctant at this proposal, but she agreed. “All right. But don’t forget — later.” She watched him suspiciously, not knowing whether to believe him. Then she and Devil Star were caught up in the flickering motion of the crowd that surrounded them, and they were in the midst of the new game.

  With part of his mind, with the light-hearted, deceitful part whose use he had discovered, he played. He was more avid than they, with ironic humor dumping lavish scoops of stellar matter onto a red star, and then taking his turn with pressor beam to hold the frantic matter in place. Even when the star grew to a size beyond endurance, it was Devil Star who insisted it could be made more massive, to increase the fury of its explosion. Following his directions, the greater part of the group shot the full force of their pressor beams onto the straining surface of that outraged colossus. The remaining half-dozen went to work denuding a small galaxy nearby and lowering its components into the star. Then the pressor beams instantly were withdrawn.

  The star exploded in one racking puff of atomic dissolution. The excited crowd of energy creatures hung inert in space as the fury of the explosion engulfed them. Their identities were lost in that mad glare of force. They became one with the ravening skies. They were shot tumbling and whirling, their thoughts burned away in wave upon wave of exploding surf. They were expunged, but mobile and alive, will-less and relaxed in the deliciousness of uncontrolled motion.

  Devil Star was caught up too. He let himself tumble, blown on the white wind of destruction. With this difference: he kept on going.

  And somewhere behind him, reproachful, was the green-light — World Rim was her name.

  He would see her again.

  He had no room for emotion now. There was purpose only. He thundered through the empty spaces, veering away from galaxies that vibrated with the noxious beat of the life-force. And found a galaxy where peace was.

  Now he must think.

  He, Devil Star, had cheated death. Truly, that had been the prime search of his life. Having cheated it, he had uncovered the way to knowledge unending. His was the right to probe beneath the devious faces of the turning universe. He would discover the hidden band.

  Something had happened in that band which enabled him to triumph over life’s first law. Had it given him choice? He was convinced that it had.

  In the tens of thousands, in the millions of years that now passed, Devil Star came to think of that band as the band of decision. He had been in that band. He had interrupted its faultless rightness, and thereby interrupted destiny. And it was somewhere.

  The bands of space, frightening though they were to him and to all energy creatures, nonetheless knew him. He entered them one by one, forcing himself through their complexities, studying them with a coldly disciplined leisure. He had time… he had fought death and won… he was immortal, the rebel from causation.

  His purpose held unblemished. With the cold analytical tool of his mind, he probed for the reasons behind these strange layers of space. Gazing on the obscene ugliness of the third band, he wondered at what lay behind the dark skin of nothingness that clove it. He tried to break through and failed; he knew he could never enter. With equal certainty, he knew the answer did not lie there. For… he could not enter.

  The fourth band and its snakes of living light. The fifth, where the cosmos shook and seemed to scream and where no order prevailed. On up. The eighth, where all of space was geared
to such a time scale that the blazing components of the universe were serpentines of solid matter. He speeded his own time rate, thinking to catch up with some moment that this universe called the present. In the fastest time scale he could create, he saw no change.

  The ninth band, inhabited by the brittle cinders of suns, gaunt prognosticators of the universe’s ultimate decadence. He probed beneath those suns. They were not burnt-out matter; they were matter held in some timeless moment of atomic convulsion, as if the fury of light and heat had been sheared away. What reason? Was there here a result without cause?

  But he knew in the innermost heart of him that there was reason. The universe was warped and curled, fighting its own irresistible stresses and strains, stretching itself out of shape and out of logic, then discarding its own topological impossibilities into hidden pockets of space. A straight line was no less straight if warped by a gravitational field, for who or what in that field could determine any other straightness?

  He ascended the bands, moving with a leisure he did not think of as being unnatural. His purpose held white and pure. He had no thought for others of his kind, for the lost names of his youth. Unendingly, the secrets of space channeled into his mind. He was bursting with the wonder of it.

  You are young, Devil Star.

  I am young,came the unbidden thought,and still able — No!

  He curbed that astounding flurry of inner wildness, and then rearranged the thought. He was young, yes — and deathless. Eternity was his, to seek knowledge in. He was anointed with a great destiny. Destiny? No, Devil Star, you shall arrange your destiny.

  —young.

  The fifteenth, the twentieth, the thirtieth bands. He searched them all, unhurrying, dawdling, experiencing no sense of failure. He was content.

  You are young, Devil Star! You are still young! The crazed subthought was screaming at him.

  He hardly heard it.

  He did not hurry.

  He came to the thirty-fifth band, where unattached colors of violent hue did their spastic dances through matterless space.

  —youth. There is still time, not for this, but for that other!

  The forty-first. The forty-sixth. He made his leisurely transit into the forty-seventh. And there was chaos. A jumble, a mumble of agony that split from the innermost core of him; thoughts that burned him like whitest heat, and turned him into something he could not recognize. Devil Star was chaos.

  Recognition again. Wave upon wave of horror rolled over him. Flares of condensing energy rained from his outer to his inner body. For he knew what he had tried to do — tried, again and again, and, time after time, had failed to do: to enter the forty-eighth band.

  In his chaos, he had hurled himself at that unseen wall, and time after time it had hurled him back.

  Thought returned slowly. He was numbed with the attack of the monster inside him. Fleetingly, knowledge came. But it was gone before he could snatch it. Then he blundered like a blinded creature down the bands.

  He knew what he must do, what he could not deny.

  Slowly, he left that galaxy, plunged across the winding arteries where dark flowed, was in the galaxy of his birth. And at last, alone in space, he faced her.

  “It is you,” she said wonderingly. “Devil Star.”

  His returning thoughts were heavy with fatigue. “It is I, World Rim. And I have come back — to keep my promise.”

  “Your promise… yes. To take me to the place you found.”

  She was searching him, whirling nearer in her green-cored glory, intent with her visions. And he saw with shock that she was changed. Larger, matured — but changed also in some inscrutable way that he would not put into words.

  “We will go now,” he said heavily.

  Still she searched him, and the interminable years passed while she searched. Uneasily she rotated against her starred background.

  “There is something wrong,” she said.

  “There is nothing wrong!” The denial burst out.

  She brooded. “Very well,” she said with chilling reluctance. “We shall go together to this place. Where is it?”

  World Rim was older than in that brief moment he had known her so long ago. At last he admitted to himself that she must have had children. Yet, there was about her a naivete that made him impatient.

  “Is hall follow you, ” he said.

  A subtle change came over her. She stared. He saw the dancing green masses in her flawless body. And her thought came. “Very well, Devil Star! Follow me!”

  In growing delight he followed her up the bands, as obedient to his ruinous emotions as any unsuspecting purple-light who had followed that path before him. He was like a creature apart, however, who views himself — for encased deeply in his thought swirls, deeper still and stronger than the clamorous outside longing, was another purpose, unemotional and anarchistic.

  The spaces of the universe dropped behind. He burst through into the tenth band. World Rim was there, inert in space, watching, not him, but a small faceted black star. Suddenly he was chilled by the immensity of her abstraction.

  “Green-light!” he whispered.

  At first she seemed not to hear him. Then she touched him briefly with a vision ray.

  “Devil Star,” she murmured. “No, it’s no use. There is something wrong. Go away.”

  The utter calamity of that order held him rigid.

  “There is nothing wrong,” he insisted. “I am here. We are obedient to the laws of life. I shall go with you.”

  Her ray of vision wavered away, as if there were some difficulty in keeping her attention upon him.

  “No, there is something wrong,” she repeated stubbornly. “Why should I take you anywhere?” Then, craftily: “Where is there to take you?”

  He burst into the full flood of her withdrawn visions. He was trembling, trying to reject what he heard, and not succeeding. Welling from his depths came knowledge of the ultimate horror he was facing. Here — now — he must defeat the horror, or he was lost to it and would live with it forever.

  “I shall go with you,” he whispered in bitter frenzy. “You will take me with you — to the forty-eighth band!”

  As soon as the words were out, he knew he should not have uttered them. First stillness claimed her. Then came her faint thought.

  “It is,” she said wonderingly, “the place you had been when we spoke so many years ago. But no. It is impossible, Devil Star. Perhaps you are deceiving me again.”

  Though her rim was heaving and fluttering, and though she seemed to be drifting away, he surged in upon her, reckless, uncaring. “Deceived you! It is you who deceived me, deceived me and all purple-lights. But I was not deceived, green-light!”

  And it flooded out of him, half in bitter scorn, half in pride, the whole story of his anarchistic fight against the universe: the story of his victory over destiny, and of his victory over death.

  “I fought you, World Rim,” he lashed out. “You and all other green-lights — and I fought the universe itself.” Stay it though he would, the caverns of his resolve were engulfing him. In fright, he strove to heave himself out of dark chaos. But he spoke on, alternately frightened and astounded at what he was saying.

  And from World Rim silence.

  “Speak!” he said wildly. “You will help me. There is a need in me, a longing. I do not know what it is!”

  World Rim seemed to shrink, until she was small, her central light wavering, dimming and flaming.

  “Then I know,” she whispered. “Devil Star, you wish to die.”

  “No!”

  “And you wish to create.”

  He stared, shaken with the thought.

  “To create,” he whispered.

  “But—” She faltered. Then her voice gained strength; she was firm with conviction. “I see it all, Devil Star. You wish to die, and in dying to create. All energy creatures, even green-lights after their fourth giving of birth, must die, or they will be very unhappy. It is very clear.

&nbs
p; “But also you wish to find that impossible so-called band of decision you talk about.”

  His mind was whirled, drugged, tortured while she spoke. And yet, as if the barless cage in his thought swirls had opened, he knew that from her deeply buried instincts the true answer to his longing had come. To create, yes. That she had also mentioned death, and the search for a chimera called the band of decision, he for the moment glazed over.

  “Then I must create,” he said hollowly. “And I can create only in the forty-eighth band. World Rim, you must take me there.”

  “No.” The word shattered against him. “No, Devil Star,” she said sadly. “For when we got there, you would find — or think you would find — this band of decision. And then it would be same as with… Dark Fire.”

  There was a humming in his mind swirls, a growing noisy reverberation that was the beginning of madness. Again he hurled himself after the drifting form of her, until she loomed and occluded all the universe save herself. From him rained the fiery excrescences of his terrible fear. “We must go,” he cried, “and we will go, World Rim, you and I, to the forty-eighth band.”

  From the core of her the red beams of her anger were beginning to form. Along her rim, flame sparkled. “No,” she said stubbornly. “I do not want to go, and there is nothing to be done about it. Somehow you must have changed, Devil Star.”

  She laughed suddenly, peering at him. “It is very funny! You wish to die, and in dying to create. But now you will be unable to do either. Nor can you reach the band of decision, for it presumably lies within the forty-eighth band. Yes, you’ve changed — changed!”

  Paralyzed, he hung in the burned space of the tenth band, the splendorous black suns seeming to fling her words back in brassy echoes.

  She drifted faster away, her thoughts roaring in, tripled in volume by his own noisy madness, and strident with their connotations. “Only green-lights remember the moment of their birth, Devil Star! Else how could they know their way back to the forty-eighth band when the time came?” Came her dwindling laughter, across the rushing spaces, into the maddened thought swirls of Devil Star. Horror piled on horror. He could endure no more.