People of the Darkness

Prologue

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.

Chapter I Sun Destroyer

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.

Flames of excitement added new light to the burning heavens. Swift accepted congratulations with becoming modesty. He retired into the crowd, giving the creation and placement of the next planet into the care of a huge young green-light who was on the verge of her maturity, though neither she nor her companions were aware of it. Bursting with excess energies as she was, she confidently made her planet, rolling it out upon the sky, flipping it and dancing it on the end of a tractor beam. She began a trial swing; A thousand years later, the planet sped true.

The thousands of years wore on. Swift placed the hundredth planet.

If only Sun Destroyer stayed away!

“If only Sun Destroyer stays away!” whispered Luminescent.

“If only she does,” muttered Star Eater.

“But maybe she won’t,” mourned Darting Green Ray.

“She must!”

“Perhaps she will.”

“We’ll hope that she does.”

The painstaking, infinitely pleasurable task went on. The delicate computations which were now required by that solar mechanism of interweaving bodies were past belief. But these children of the universal spaces were inspired. This was not only a toy with moving parts; it had become an artistic creation. Space was being mastered, matter made to humble itself, the laws of motion forced to bend. The hundred and tenth planet went in.

White Galaxy started the next planet. He was busy assembling the raw materials when he felt that which he did not wish to feel. The purple luminosity at his core seemed to contract; then racing spangles of purple light flung against his outer rim, where they quivered and powdered into effulgent dust. In fearful spasm, White Galaxy’s visions speared the heavens, looking for the source of his fear.

He was not alone. The others felt what he felt: the hated and hateful beat of a life-force, the life-force of a green-light, a vibrancy they knew too well. It impinged upon them from afar, and rushed upward in intensity as their questing vision rays lanced the skies.

A single thought grew from the gathering; of itself it seemed to wound the burning spaces.

“Sun Destroyer!”

As one, the gathering of purples and greens swung in a single direction; their visions reached far, through the constellations to find Sun Destroyer’s point of radiation. For it was she! They saw her, millions and hundreds of millions of miles away, yes, light-years away, yet devouring the paltry distances with demon stride. On she came, implacable in her discovery of them; on she came, emerging with rush and fuming commotion from between two distant galaxies, a train of ruptured, flattened, shattered, collided, churning, mashed and powdered suns in her wake. This was Sun Destroyer, destroying.

“Sun Destroyer!”

The fearful cry went up again, this time with a note of protest.

She flashed toward them, thrusting suns to right and left in chaotic abandon, thirsty in her power, satiate with energy. Young as she was, with an excellence and beauty of form and coruscation not seen in these skies; gold cascades of living energy poured within her outer confining rim; circling spangled brilliancies moved in lazy dance about her green central core, as if not moved by the violent power replete within the rest of her. Spheroidal she was, but with smoothnesses and liquidly mirror surfaces that none of these purple and green-lights saw in each other. In her shining beauty she hung at last before them, ceasing motion with one thrust of her parapropellants, while the heavens turned to fire in the throwing-off of her wasteful excess of burning energy.

“What do you do?” she asked. Mirth was in her tones. Her visions swept the frozen group, centering a moment on White Galaxy. White Galaxy, not beautiful as was Sun Destroyer, shrank back; but White Galaxy was growing. Soon he would mature, but not yet; his fear of Sun Destroyer was fear of her beauty, contrasted with his lack of beauty, or so he thought. He could not know the truth that lay behind her glance; yet it was only a glance as her visions slid away, to rest upon his half-made planet.

“We do nothing,” said Swift, taking the initiative in a bold move to scorn her. “Sun Destroyer, go back where you came from. We do not wish you here.”

“What do you do?”

She scoured the gathering with her visions, and then pierced through them to that area of sky they almost hid. Swift comprehension was in Sun Destroyer’s thoughts, for now she saw the planet-woven sun.

“A new solar system.” Admiration lingered in her thoughts. “A very complex one, too.” Amazement was hers. “It must have taken you a very long time, an exceedingly long time, to fabricate it.”

“An exceedingly long time,” agreed Swift in rising anger. “Sun Destroyer! Go away! You shall not make one move toward our solar system.”

Sun Destroyer seemed hardly to hear him. Languidly upon an axis she rotated as she studied the marvelous toy. “Never fear, Swift,” she said at last. “I have no intention of destroying your system. On the contrary, I shall assist you; together we shall add to its excellence! Of course, it is now my turn.”

She contracted to half her size. Pure energy pressed in upon itself with a blinding display of light and heat. Out upon the skies, twirling on the tip of a tractor beam went Sun Destroyer’s fifteen-thousand-mile planet.

“Back now, White Galaxy,” admonished Sun Destroyer. “You were a little slow, you know; naturally, you have lost your turn.” White Galaxy, still held by his fear of her beauty and of something else within her he could never name, did indeed move back, shrinking away from her. The other energy creatures fluttered on the sky in a restless wave.

“Stop her! She will destroy the sun as she destroys all suns!”

Sun Destroyer swung her lump of matter in ever-widened circles. Vainly in his anger, Swift swelled to twice his size, as if to block her from the sun. But there was no stopping Sun Destroyer. There seemed barely enough time for her to make an accurate set of equations before she loosed the twirling world. It rolled across the field of the sky at moderate speed while the dozens of youths watched abjectly.

“The planet is too massive,” murmured Luminescent.

“And moving far too slowly,” cried Sun Flame.

“The balance will be destroyed, and the system; our beautiful system, will cave in on itself!” said Darting Green Ray.

The planet went looping in. In the outermost level of orbits it seemed to falter badly. It fell to the next level, and conditions there turned out to be marvelously suited to its presence. Sun Destroyer’s planet sped true; it was gyrating around the massive sun in an almost perfect circle.

Immediately, Sun Destroyer contracted again, and produced still another planet without going through the formality of declaring this to be her turn also. The second planet hurtled true. Sun Destroyer placed a third, and yet a fourth; both went in without error. One hundred fourteen planets; the youths were awed; the poetic rhythms of those gleaming planets shuttling about the proud fierce sun stunned them. But Sun Destroyer would destroy it, destroy it!

“Stop her! Sun Destroyer, go back!”

Swift, caught between rage and fascination, uncertainly faced the mirth of Sun Destroyer. Within him, he felt the same shrinkage of spirits that afflicted White Galaxy. But he would not permit himself to back off; beautiful she was, and different, and for those reasons if no others she must be stood up to.

“It was hardly skill,” said Swift. “A matter of luck.”

“Luck?” Her green central core seemed to heave. The golden cascades within her darkened.

“Luck,” insisted Swift. His glance raked her with scorn. Within him grew an excitement. He had touched her monstrous vanity. Her mirth was gone. Her arrogant composure was dissolving. Where beauty had been grew ugliness. Forward Swift surged to taunt her, completely forgetful of what had been his objective, somehow to chase Sun Destroyer away. “Luck,” he repeated. “Luck! No computations were made. You apparently do not have the necessary intelligence to make them — or even to know they should be made.”

She hung before him, unspinning, rigid in space, staring at him astounded. “I?” she cried. “I?”

“You,” insisted Swift. “you ride the skies like a thing that owns the universe. But even your beauty burns out of you when you are crossed. Obviously, you do not own even yourself, much less the universe. You fancy yourself to be so much better a breed than we, but are you? We have observed that your reasoning power is undeveloped; your bright prettiness is seen to be only glitter and turns black when someone brave enough to speak his mind to you — like myself—”

“Like yourself?”

The thought ripped into Swift. He started to speak again, but no words would come. An inner trembling had stopped him. His excitement controlled him, and then fear. What had he said? Sun Destroyer was not leaving; she was, on the contrary, spinning in the heavens. Her golden internal lights again spangled within her. Far from chasing her away, he had rekindled her purpose. Mirth darted across the open spaces from Sun Destroyer and impinged again on Swift.

“You are not brave, Swift,” said Sun Destroyer; her laughter tore at him. “You are frightened. As all of you are frightened — not of what I might do to your intricate toy over which you have labored so long, no. You are frightened of my perfection!” Languidly upon the skies, indulgently observing them, she rotated. The throng hung silent; then they fluttered into motion as Sun Destroyer again turned upon the monster sun and its many planets.

Sun Destroyer’s thoughts came musingly. “Swift says it was luck. But was it? In my perfection, need I make elaborate computations for such simple work as placing a planet? We shall see. Perhaps I shall show you that it was skill, born out of the fabric of me!”

Even before she finished speaking, energy coalesced within her. A spheroidal lump of hot matter formed. It was a planet. As it cooled down and cleared itself of raging fumes, Sun Destroyer flung it out on the tip of a tractor beam.

“It is a small planet,” said Sun Destroyer offhandedly. “Back now, Swift!” and away the planet went in a shallow loop as solar attraction bent the angle of its path. Swift had indeed moved back. He was numbed to new fear. Small the planet was, but…

Suddenly the gathering of youths surged on the sky. A hundred outraged cries rang as that tiny, seemingly inoffensive planet became a plundering demon. It glided across the orbit of the outermost world, which in turn faltered and collided with its fellow in the next orbit. A racking commotion now ensued; a full dozen planets were caught in a holocaust of cross motion. The thrown planet in the meantime skipped through a dozen other orbits in a planetary dance that ended in chaos. Several planets dropped into their primary. The monster sun shuddered rackingly. Solar prominences burned the sky, incinerating all the inner planets. Sun Destroyer’s planet looped around the other side of the system and with what seemed calculated precision reduced all the middle orbits to ruin. Suddenly there was no order at all. Planets collided, exploded, fell into the sun. Finally the sun itself exploded.

Where the beautiful, complex toy had reposed was ravening space, heaven’s inferno. The energy creatures rode out the storm, rode the waves of heat and demon light. When it was over, they fluttered back together, whirling and expanding and darting off into side spaces looking for the object of their hate. But Sun Destroyer had not gone. She hung precisely where she had been, discarding excess luminescence from the monster flare.

“She destroyed our sun, as she destroys all suns!”

“It was a bad calculation, very bad,” said Sun Destroyer mournfully. “I suppose I am not so skillful after all. Perhaps Swift was right.”

Of all that gathering, only Swift and White Galaxy knew the truth. And Swift was therefore mute. He abjectly wished her to go, her and her cascading yellow gleams, and her promise of a further threat that he could not name.

Sun Destroyer did go, with a final flaunting glance at the angered and grieving crowd. Out went her propellants, and she rushed away across the galaxies, weaving between the stars, touching them not.

Chapter II Sun Dust

Sun Destroyer, flinging herself through star cluster after star cluster, suddenly felt a thrill of fright.

She stopped her headlong motion, thrusting her visions into the backward distance. The fright grew as she saw the being who came in her wake. It was a green-light twice as large as herself.

“Stop, Sun Destroyer!”

The thought came clearly and firmly. Sun Destroyer’s unease persisted. Saying no word, she waited for the green-light to catch up with her.

They hung in space facing each other. Quiverings of exuded radiance sparkled along the rim of the older green-light’s body.

“My daughter,” said Sun Dust sadly. “Why must you cause others unhappiness?”

Some of Sun Destroyer’s unease disappeared. It was replaced by defiance.

“I seek only my own happiness,” she retorted.

“By destroying that of others?”

“Did I destroy that of others?” asked Sun Destroyer, as if in surprise.

“There are many strange tales of you,” Sun Dust said gently. “The other youths are fearful when you come. You take their peace.”

“I do not mean to, mother. I only know that I seek my own happiness. I care not about other things. It seems right and proper that I do as I do.” She added, pointedly, sharply: “I doubt if any thing will change me.”

The Mother hung motionless. Sun Destroyer began to rotate upon the heavens, to rotate and expand, while the running streams of yellow gleams agitated within her. The pain of her younger years was returning to her, carried, it seemed, in the sorrowfulness of this being. And she did not wish it to return — did not wish it to!

The mother said, “Sun Destroyer — my daughter.” Distress was in her voice. “Could you not find other means to satisfy your desires? Surely there are more worthwhile things than destruction, are there not?”

“Ah, yes,” said Sun Destroyer mockingly. She almost could not believe that these words were being said. “You echo the credo of Darkness, mother — of him who sired me. Darkness, dreaming that he would solve the secrets of all that is. He solved nothing. Darkness! He should have listened to Oldster, who knew the truth, that not too high a value must be placed on one’s life — nor any life. Darkness, the fool.”

Dark grew the golden gleams within her, for her thoughts were dark and running with pain.

Darkness himself awakened her pain. She quivered deep within, as if to force from her being the monstrous blight. Sharply she said to this being who also awakened her pain:

“I have been very happy. I have been happy because I do not consider myself — or others — as sacred appendages of the universe. Why would you take that happiness from me?”

For a long time the older green-light held visions on her youngest child. She was remembering that day long ago when Darkness burst through from another universe, searching for the significance of life, and finding it only in death. Fright was in Sun Dust, fright of Sun Destroyer, and fear for Sun Destroyer. On that day many years ago when Sun Destroyer lay in her cradle in the seventeenth band of hyperspace, Darkness passed by on his way to death and gazed upon his child. What was in his gaze, and what did his presence mean?

Sun Dust felt her knowledge, a hidden knowledge, that somehow was evoked by memory of that which Darkness carried: the sphere of Great Energy.

Energies unknown spearing through the cradling space where this one of the golden effulgences had grown. Sun Destroyer she was, a destroyer indeed, and not only of suns. Mindless and wanton destruction was her credo, and utter and complete satisfaction of personal desires. Sun Dust knew the truth as she would never know it again. She had bred a child who was as different as horror was different from peace.

She said faintly, “No, there was nothing of you in Darkness, my child.”

The pain was gone. Sun Destroyer felt new energies within her and brightening thoughts. Deliberately, as if to give her growing elation its expression, she reached out with pressor beam and tractor ray and tore a nearby sun into flaming ruin, scattering the fragments the length and depth of a galaxy.

Her mother could only look at her.

But Sun Destroyer was pleased again, and uncaring. Soft, languid lights took shape in her body. How quickly her thoughts ran, how brightly she saw herself! “Darkness,” she mused. “Ah, Darkness! He sought the end and the meaning of all life — but who are we to say that he failed? Mother, look upon me! Am I not flawless?” Quickly she spun in smooth sphericity, mirror-like and gleaming. “Am I not the meaning that Darkness sought? Do I not personify that for which life has sought ever since life first came to be? Yes, I am that meaning!

“Life seeks happiness.That is its meaning. But life fails to find happiness. The reasons, I am sure, are obvious; for from the beginning we have imbued ourselves with a sacred love of ourselves. We have become so inflated with the idea of being alive that we consider the universe made for us. Then, out of our respect for ourselves, we manufacture respect for others, and how wrong it is to do so. You must see the meaning, mother.”

“I hear only words,” came the thoughts of Sun Dust. But Sun Destroyer dreamed on. “Life blunders,” she whispered. “Each of us sacrifices some of himself to maintain the happiness of others. When we seek happiness for others a part of us dies. Therefore, I — I, Sun Destroyer, and only I — am the meaning that Darkness was seeking, the meaning that he created, all unknowingly. For see! I am happy. My desires are sated. I do as I will, without thought for the happiness of others.”

A foam of red sparks leaped unbidden from the complex energy fields of her body.

“But I breed unhappiness by trying to do as you wish me to do, mother,” she said darkly. “I shape myself with your desires — and I die!”

“No,” said Sun Dust.

“I die!” said Sun Destroyer, and charged bitterly, “You have not listened.”

“I listened, I heard. My child, I heard only words.”

Sun Destroyer stared at her, at this great quiet creature who hung athwart space and who was moved only to sorrow and love. No, Sun Dust would never understand; how could she understand one who was the end product of all her race? How could she or any like her ever know what lay in the thought swirls of Sun Destroyer? But she must understand! At least she must know of Sun Destroyer’s secret yearning, and she must know something of the answers to its fulfillment.

And if she did not,who would?

A gulf as wide as that spanning two universes yawned in horror before her.

“Mother.” The word trembled out of her. “There is something I must know. A little while ago, a great knowledge came to me. I knew — and know not how I knew — that there is a band of space beyond the forty-eighth.”

“Beyond the forty-eighth? Beyond? No, my child.”

“Yes! I ascended the bands. Up through to the topmost — and I sought to break through — into the forty-ninth. There is a forty-ninth band. Yes, I sought to fling myself past the band of life into a forty-ninth, and I failed. Failed!”

The quiet sphere of Sun Dust was no longer quiet. The cry of this strange being who was her daughter was a pain within her. “I am glad you failed,” whispered Sun Dust. “For if there is a forty-ninth band, the knowledge bodes you no good. I know nothing of this forty-ninth band. Nor has anyone spoken of it. Therefore how could it be? If others know nothing of it, how can you?”

“I do know,” said Sun Destroyer sharply. “As for how I know, it is for the reasons I gave you.” Abruptly, she was luxuriating in the rightness of that which she knew. The mystery of her greatness lured her. “Why, it must be, mother, that I am the only energy creature ever to sense the existence of the forty-ninth band! After all, I must be the very reason for the existence of all life. In me is centered the driving force of all our race. Therefore, I shall go into the forty-ninth band!”

“My child!” Sun Dust’s distress was tinged with a growing horror. “You do not know what you say.”

“I know,” the dreaming thoughts of Sun Destroyer came. “Pain was mine when first I knew of the forty-ninth; but then the pain was gone. The forty-ninth band cannot bode ill for me — not if pain goes!

“Somehow there is a way to shatter the wall between the band of life and the forty-ninth. I shall shatter that wall.”

Abruptly, she disappeared into a hyperspace.

Sun Dust did not try to follow. The forty-ninth band! There was, there could be, no such thing. And yet…

She pursued a slow, spiritless trail across her jeweled amphitheater, and knew a sadness that she should have been instrumental in bringing Sun Destroyer into being.

Chapter III Into the Darkness

For the fourth time, Sun Destroyer impelled herself into the forty-eighth band, where the universe seemed entirely to lose its true character in an infinity of colorless, rampant life energy. There was in her, though she did not realize it, a growing fright. Thrice she had sought, by sheer momentum, to break through into the forty-ninth band, of whose existence she was as certain as of life itself. Thrice she had failed. Thrice she was forced to forget her failure, and dropped back through the scale of bands, now and then reaching out to split one blazing sun after another. Each time the memory of failure persisted, leading her into an unbearable morass of discontent. For the fourth time she returned.

“It is naught but a foolish impulse,” she told herself smolderingly. “I shall try again, and then, if I fail, I shall fail forever.”

Subsequently, there was the clicking in her consciousness which told her that she should indeed have entered the forty-ninth band; but around her was nothing but the life energy of the forty-eighth.

Momentarily, fury exploded; she stilled it, and with monumental effort thrust the problem from her. She dropped to the first band, that of true space, heartlessly ruptured a magnificent quadruple system of stars, and sped savagely away across the universe, a plundering, destroying creature, in search of creatures her own age.

“I shall play and destroy and torment my fellow creatures from now on,” she told herself firmly. “Thus I shall seek the happiness which I, as the end product of all life, am deserving of. Ah, the forty-ninth band is but a chimera, which I would follow but to reap my own eternal discontent!”

The tens of thousands, the millions of years fled. Sun Destroyer truly played, if the viciousness with which she acted could be called play. Idleness could not be tolerated; monotony was to be avoided. Sun Destroyer must destroy. There was a sheer magnificence to be experienced when one sent two stars across a galaxy to crash upon each other with supernal bursts of energy. To dash amongst her own kind, and completely without regard for their desires, to disrupt their carefully wrought toys, to scatter them, to disappear into a hyperspace with a taunting word — such was the rightful action of him who would be eternally without discontent!

Yes, one must play, and in playing give no thought either to the future or the past. Also, one must be without a goal, and must plan nothing. Goals somehow disappeared or their value diminished as one approached them; plans in turn never held true to themselves, but were forever distorting themselves or even turning full-circle to become the opposite of what they were intended to become. The forty-ninth band? Even if such existed, it could no longer exert its dread fascination upon her. With these rigid attitudes, reasoned Sun Destroyer, she would extract from existence the unending pleasure which, surely, was the rightful heritage of life.

To hold these rigid attitudes was indeed a task. One must be active, most active, so that doubt of oneself rippled behind and never quite caught up. Sun Destroyer ripped and slid and skidded across the unbounded domain of countless billions of stars; she danced in dervish pattern. No matter that her fellow energy creatures stared and trembled at her approach; no matter that they hated and feared her — she would feed on their hate and their fear, and grow large and strong in her happiness.

The creatures of the skies knew no rest from Sun Destroyer, and she would give them no rest. They found their playland infested with this green-light who sought them at first to play, ostensibly, but whose ultimate purpose was their discomfort. In their harrowing ordeal, they even dared the terrors of the unknown bands of hyperspace. One of these unknown bands was the nineteenth. In this band, so the story went, strange dimensional tortures abounded. Furthermore, life, should it venture within, would find itself divided witlessly into many parts. Nobody seemed really sure of what actually went on in the nineteenth, although Swift insisted he had discovered its laws.

“You go in and you find yourself divided into seventeen equal parts,” said Swift.

“Fourteen,” challenged the young green-light Sky Mist. “So it was told me by some of the older ones of our race when they dared to enter the nineteenth. But it was a terrible experience, and they emerged instantly.”

“I have entered,” said Swift, “and entered alone. It was frightening, yes, but I didn’t know about that beforehand, and I took a chance and stayed — long enough to count seventeen parts of me, no less.”

“It was seventeen,” another purple-light agreed. “However, the single time I was there I noted that the real effect of the nineteenth band is to reduce one to one-seventeenth of his true size; coincidentally, he sees sixteen reflections of himself in a kind of hypnotic mental outpouring in which he attempts to compensate for his lost bulk.”

“An ingenious but impractical theory,” said Swift offhandedly. “Enough of these speculations, however. I myself am off to the nineteenth band for a practical demonstration, if only to myself. Perhaps there are those brave enough to enter with me.”

Sky Mist began to gather his courage, but still hung back. The others, charmed and at once repelled by the monstrous idea, fluttered uncertainly so that foamy iridescences frothed about their rims. They looked off to the rim of the galaxy which enclosed them, as if seeking other diversion. It was then that the outermost one of the gathering saw Sun Destroyer.

“Sun Destroyer comes!”

The heavens seemed to chill and darken.

“We must go before she sees us!”

Sun Destroyer was the living impulse of their migration into the nineteenth band. As one, the gathering shared the common thought of escape, escape, no matter where; the nineteenth band of hyperspace opened to receive them. Sun Destroyer plunged across space and hung motionless in the swarming sparkles that were left behind when her quarry vanished. She whirled a furious splatter of vision rays out upon the skies; perhaps each creature was hiding somewhere behind the shield of some great star!

Sun Destroyer searched first in true space. She ranged through the light-years, at first taking some pleasure in the chase; of the youthful energy creatures she saw no sign. She hung then before the portals of the hyperspaces, and thought with demon humor,They fear the bands of space less than they fear me! She ascended the spaces, skipping, however, from one to another. Some of these bands contained horrors and mysteries unmentionable; others could be worked with if their laws were understood; most were less preferable than the band of true space at any time.

A million years of searching passed. Fury and astonishment goaded Sun Destroyer. How silent the universe with her fellow youths gone! How loud the painful thoughts within her memory swirls! She must find them; she would again hum with the universal music of her contentment. But where had those fleeing youths immured themselves? The answer came at last: in the nineteenth band! Or, perhaps, the dreaded twentieth band, or the twenty-eighth — but most likely the nineteenth. These were the three bands that Sun Destroyer herself knew nothing of. But she would not let fear even begin in her — she was in the nineteenth band before she ever knew it.

Sun Destroyer felt the blinding, divisive pain of her entrance into the nineteenth band; but pain she had known before. Her astonishment was greater than her pain, and then came her great mirth. For this was indeed the space into which the youths had fled. They lay scattered upon the sky in myriads, pared down to smaller sizes. At a single glance, Sun Destroyer recognized thirteen different and smaller copies of Sun Mist. Swift himself was distributed everywhere. And Sun Destroyer herself! She saw herself in multiplicate form, in spinning glowing beauty that shamed the lesser ones to ugliness. For a moment this unequaled sight charmed her, but then the myriad of her fellows cried in orchestrated voice, “She has found us!” “We must undo the plan!” “She is here, and the crystal will shatter!”

Sun Destroyer’s multiplicate gaze was an admiring one, but was rigidly curious, for she divined a strangeness here. The youths moved not in their many pared-down forms. It was as if each had been assigned a position which he was reluctant to change. But Sun Destroyer could change position, and in a wicked experiment she did so; she permeated with multiplicate dance the motionless concourse. A cry of protest breathed across the silent and starless sky. “She moves; the equation will be destroyed!”

“What do you do?” Sun Destroyer’s voice came from the many forms of her. Slyly casual her voice was, as she searched for some clue to the game that was being played. Then she began to see the crystalline pattern of ultimate beauty that the youths presented to themselves. The prime number seventeen was the control factor; thought itself was the moving force that formed the living crystal; and the object was the lessening of pain.

The seventeen scattered forms of Sun Destroyer shivered and whirled and cascaded their golden gleams within her; her ecstasy was real.

“Let me play with you,” she whispered. “I will not disturb your peace this time.”

“Go! Sun Destroyer, you must go!”

“I must stay.” Her multiplicate forms danced involuntarily. Again protest whirred from the living crystal. “I promise you! You play a game I must be part of. See! I am able to divine the nature of your game. I can place myself as well as any of you.” Her searing thought formed within her and her copies. Rigidly, her seventeen selves assumed a pattern like a template that placed itself three-dimensionally within the complex latticework of the myriad others. The living crystal then was forced to change into a new pattern. Space sang and seemed to snap as the concourse of multiplied energy creatures crystallized anew; but with that new crystallization came such pulsing discordances within Sun Destroyer that even she shuddered with the horror of what she had done. In her eagerness, the equation failed; pain came in corrosive beats. The wail of anger and suffering ate into her thought swirls, so that in spasm and fright she sought to undo her error. But upon the strange heavens of the nineteenth band grew only a crystal of impossible structure and revolting ugliness and unbearable pain.

A moment that structure held. Then Swift in his many forms broke free of the crystal and it at once broke free of its structure to become a formless and even uglier mass of contorting energy creatures.

“She has found us,” said Swift. “Even here she would find us. So now we must go, before she leads us into more painful structures. Her thinking is ugly; she could not lead us into beauty.”

The words were almost impossible for Sun Destroyer to hear. She rejected them almost as soon as they reached her, but not soon enough. The portent of what was happening dazed her; her bewilderment changed to horror.

“You must not go,” she cried, surging amongst them as if she would block their many exits. “I erred — I did not know. I saw beauty in your form; I only wished to create more perfect beauty. I divined that as you moved toward beauty, you moved from pain. I only wished—”

Space was empty. Sun Destroyer was alone in the nineteenth band. They would never return, they would not believe that she would wish to seek beauty with them, that she sought painlessness and the surcease that ultimate beauty gave. She looked about on her seventeen separate and small selves, on the gleaming sphericity of the many Sun Destroyers, and she saw her own golden gleams turn ugly and dark within her. She could not bear the sight, and turned from herself toward the blank part of her inner mind.

But even there was torture.

Where was not torture?

The forty-ninth band. But even this thought, dull and old and full of horror, must be turned back again and again before she could face it and again examine it. And in order to face it, she must leave the nineteenth band and its ruined joy; she must depart forever from her seventeen selves, and somehow regain the hope of her single self.

In the fifteenth band, where resided no light whatsoever, Sun Destroyer restored herself to something of what she had been, and yet knew she could never be the same. Scorn of herself and of her supplicative abasement burned in her mind. She had begged the children of the skies for help; they, in their rightful suspicion, had denied her. Now no one could help her, save as she helped herself. Dread seized her, dread of herself and the need that was plain within her. Now there was but one answer to her life; she had known the answer; she had tried to blot it out, Her mind reeled at the enormity of the thing she must do…

Several light-years distant, the green-and purple-lights dispiritedly awaited the emergence of Sun Destroyer into the true band of space. They had no doubt she would emerge with taunts that would shame them for what they had attempted in the nineteenth band. They knew she would hover amongst them, challenging them to games only so that she could distribute annoyances. But when Sun Destroyer did emerge and flash toward them it was only to flash on by as if they never existed. Luminiscent stared after her, not so much in relief as in shock. “That is strange,” she whispered. “Strange! There must be something wrong with Sun Destroyer—”

Sun Destroyer hung before her mother.

The visions of Sun Dust locked with those of the younger green-light; puzzlement mixed with dread was in her gaze.

“What is it, my daughter?” she queried doubtfully. “You have not thus voluntarily come to me in many millions of years.”

Languidly Sun Destroyer rotated on a gradually changing axis. “You have two other children now who show you the respect you demand, mother,” she said casually.

Sun Dust’s inner green light seemed to darken; already three of her green-lights were gone. One remained to her, and when that one went also she would die.

Sun Dust was sad, not because of her coming end, but because her child should remind her of it, in subtle taunt.

“You have something you wish to know of me, my child.”

“A little thing,” said Sun Destroyer. “There is a little thing I would know of Darkness, he who sired me. It is not so very important, however, so that if you wished not to tell me—” Astounded, the words choked off; she could not control the eagerness within her. Shame rendered her further speechless, for Sun Dust could not help but note her lie.

Sun Dust said slowly, almost as if in relief, “It is something that is very important. Yet, in what way could Darkness be of import?” She mused on the question, made as if to search Sun Destroyer’s thought swirls; but Sun Destroyer thrust her off in unhidden recoil.

“Very well,” she said stiffly. “It is important. Darkness and his whole life and what he did with his life is important to me, for I am the product of that life! Darkness sought for answers to life — in me reside those answers, and the means of implementing them! Do you understand?”

Sun Dust could only gaze mutely.

“However, it is not only of Darkness I wish to know,” Sun Destroyer continued. “I seem to remember, from fragments of the story you told me, of another being, a being named—” She stopped, hardly able to say the name; she had thought it and dreamed of it so often.

Her mother said, “You speak of Oldster?”

“Yes!” Her eagerness was open to the skies now, consuming her, to be seen by any who looked. “Oldster, he who resides in the universe from which Darkness came. Mother, tell me of him! Was he wise?”

“He was very wise, my child.”

“And it was he who gave Darkness the secret that enabled him to cross the great gap of nothing that separates — our universe from his?”

“It was Oldster who gave Darkness access to the sphere of Great Energy which enabled him to cross. Ah, yes,” Sun Dust whispered, “Oldster was wise, so wise that he must live even today; for he escaped his doom. But he wishes to die.”

“To die?” The thought scoured Sun Destroyer with its newness. She swelled so that arrows of pale energy impaled the spaces about her. “Oldster, the wise, would wish to die? He could not then be so wise.” For a thousand years she brooded on that enigma. Finally, “Perhaps even the wise are sometimes foolish. Perhaps,” she added slowly, “one can become so wise that it becomes wise to wish for death. Therefore, though it is a foolish desire, I have no quarrel with it. Now mother, tell me of another thing, of the sphere of Great Energy. Does — does it still exist?”

“It is indestructible,” said Sun Dust simply. “Surely you must know this. It still exists, for Darkness carried it out into the darkness with him as he strove to reach his native universe. Darkness died, but the sphere is still out there, moving slowly toward that other universe.”

“It is still out there,” repeated Sun Destroyer. “Then, mother, who is to say that I may not follow it — catch up with it — and use it!”

“Who is to say, indeed?” murmured Sun Dust sorrowfully, and asked her question, though she sensed its answer. “But why?”

“Why?Why! ” The thoughts of Sun Destroyer streamed; violences stormed within her; she strained against bonds as if testing that point at which they could be broken. “You ask me why; and yet you must know why — for why else do I live except to discover those things I must know, and to learn the answer to questions none before me has asked? Mother, I too must cross the darkness, as Darkness did before me!”

“And then?”

“And then — then I shall seek out Oldster, and wrest from him the answer to the secret that plagues me, so that I may at last know my happiness. And who, indeed, more earnestly seeks happiness than I? Who is more deserving of happiness, of all the creatures of the skies, than I? Therefore, I shall leave you, leave this universe, and eventually even leave Oldster, after I have found him. For what need then shall I have of anyone?”

Her voice dreamed. The universe hummed about her. Her future lured her with its promise. For a long time the moment held, and then she must bring herself back to hear the horror in the voice of Sun Dust, and to feel the probing quest of Sun Dust’s thoughts in her own thought swirls.

“To seek out Oldster,” Sun Dust’s thoughts came, “you will endure such agonies as you cannot dream. Do you not understand, my child? Oh, Sun Destroyer, you must not! You seek happiness, but there is no happiness in the darkness. For a hundred million years, you will know agony such as a younger green-light never could know. Had you chosen to cross the darkness when you were younger — when there was still time—”

The chill enveloped Sun Destroyer. For a frightening moment, she understood Sun Dust’s meaning; but then she must discard that understanding. For in that understanding lay fuller knowledge of the nature of her bonds, the very bonds that tied her cruelly to life in this universe — if she would let it!

Out of her being, therefore, was wrenched the cry, “I follow my desires!”

She moved back another light-year as if distance strengthened her. Sun Dust gauged that mounting physical barrier, but in her sadness she did not attempt to follow or lessen the other distances that were growing between her and her first-born.

“You follow your desires,” she said sadly, “if you but could. But I know you must go, my child, for the forces that move you are too great. Since I shall not — shall never see you again, I must tell you one more thing.” Her voice now was heavy with warning. “Sun Destroyer, though you must cross the darkness, though you must seek out Oldster, do not attempt to follow in his path.”

Sun Dust disappeared into a hyperspace, gone from Sun Destroyer forever; and Sun Destroyer felt the intoxication of her freedom. She twirled in space, charmed with the newness of her release. Now she answered to no one; indeed, she was mistress of two universes, and even Oldster would bow before her!

Sun Destroyer grew taut. In her mind she bent herself like a great bow that would hurl her straight and true to an unimaginable target. Her great moment came, and then she was gone. She flung in unerring motion across the powdered star-streams of heaven, and only once in her long journey to that entrance point where Darkness had appeared in this universe so many millions of years ago did she pause — ruthlessly destroying the ringed star which her playmates thought free of her depredations.

Then, with mounting acceleration and a seething of excitement unmatched even by the bursting cores of the novae about her, she speared the great spaces. Whole galaxies sped by and were lost. Nebulae enclosed her and dropped behind. Finally, after seven million years, the whole vast sweep of the starred heavens before her was gripped in a great, tight semicircle by a darkness that stretched endlessly away.

On the edge of this darkness, with the dazzling, radiant beauty of the egg-shaped universe behind her, she hovered. Her visions witlessly speared the mystery of that supremely vast ocean of lightlessness; then she was into it, and, forever, left her own universe behind.

Chapter IV The Son of Sun Destroyer

Only after the last trace of universal matter, light and lightless energy were swallowed by the darkness and she moved through unthinkable black, did Sun Destroyer detect the first sign of the sphere of Great Energy. It came as a single pulse, impinging unmistakably upon her. She swelled as if she would hasten her flight by enclosing all about her. Again the pulse came, and again, until radiation from the thing she sought poured through her in a steady stream, providing a beam she was able to follow.

Ahead of her still was darkness, but she felt the presence of the perfectly invisible sphere of tight matter which Darkness wrested from a billion-mile star millions of years ago — yes, easily one hundred fifty million years ago! And it was near! She rushed upon it as upon a quarry that would turn on her were she not to take it first. And then it was hers, she was wrapped about it, and all in a moment was intoxicated with the inexhaustible powers that flooded through her. For a moment, she was Darkness, not as he was in death, but as he was in full life, plunging into the unknown. She knew the fright of Darkness, but also she felt that she must know his unrivaled sense of victory.

Nothing could withstand him who owned the sphere of Great Energy. Great had been Darkness, but greater still was Sun Destroyer, the daughter of Darkness! Suddenly the darkness knew no horrors for her, but presented her, in processions of ebony pageantry, the happiness that was hers. Here was no fright; the darkness was happiness; at its end was Oldster, who in turn would add to her happiness and complete it with his endless wisdom. For Oldster would know of the forty-ninth band! And so would go pain.

A marvelous rustling now seemed to fill space. The voices of great beings who lived elsewhere seemed to call to her. She listened to them, knowing at once that they did not exist, and yet charmed by the imageries she conjured. Lilting were the voices. They were the voices of no one she knew — except perhaps that of Darkness? Faint grew the voices as she expunged them. She thought vaguely, perhaps they came from the forty-ninth band?

Her fantasies endured for that moment, and then were gone. In full force, she saw again the darkness she would cross. She must go. She ate at the sphere of Great Energy with concentrated knots of force — she moved under that unimaginable power with a starting velocity she had never known before.

The first light-years passed.

Then forty million years were gone.

Sun Dust.

The words of Sun Dust came back.

Sun Destroyer knew torture.

The desire was nameless. It stabbed her; it was with her all her waking moments. What was this need, greater than any desire she had known before? How long would it last? Shudders ran through the complex energy fields of her grown body, and subsisted with seeming interminableness for long periods of time, feeding on an instinct that had grown to unmanageable proportions. Yes, her body had grown, as had her green light. That was the answer! She had matured. Now she was experiencing the same agonies Darkness must have endured on his long journey, except that his had been worse, for he had not known their source.

Sun Destroyer, cleaving the untold distances within the darkness, was slave to her buffeting emotions. Monotony was one of her demons. She wished to slash suns, she wished to heap scorn on the ugly ones of her race so that they would flee her and leave their complex toy galaxies for her to heap into smoking ruin. Then she would live again! For she was dead here, entrapped, trapped by her own desire for happiness which had instead become an agony of unsatisfied longing.

Sun Destroyer drifted in self-imposed coma. She heard again the singing and the lilting, the beautiful and the wonderful voices of the great ones who lived in the forty-ninth band. Yes, she would believe they existed. Surely they must, for she heard them, orchestrated out of the fabric of a darkness that was living and not dead, dead like that which enclosed her and pressed in upon her and would not let her live. Oh, the voices! The voices! The voices died; she awoke, the depravity of her hurtling and endless existence smothered her.

When would it end?

Much as had Darkness eons before, when she finally sighted the universe toward which the sphere of Great Energy had led her, she involuntarily contracted and then expanded with the joy of that which she saw. The lightless spaces about her were ablaze with spangling streams of her excess energy; her emotions danced on the black sky. And then, as the new universe moved in upon her with startling jumps in size, and it rose to its full lenticular radiance, silhouetted in aching beauty against the blackest of darknesses, she abruptly lost consciousness. When she awoke, she knew she must have dreamed — but no! She was surrounded by an infinitude of galaxies stretching farther than her visions could plumb.

Now she drifted, making no effort to guide herself, even when she brushed the flames of some mammoth star. She drifted across these new fields of the endless sky, grasping the sphere of Great Energy near her green core, drinking in the celestial beauties about her as if they would revivify her. Her thoughts drifted, too; she dreamed; she wished now to drift through her life without effort, without longings, without needs, without even the desire to destroy or to exert mastery over the lesser forms of matter or of life.

Then that peaceful moment in Sun Destroyer’s life was gone.

She felt the beat of a life-force.

Her drifting thoughts tautened and came to full halt. Involuntarily, her visions lanced out in sudden, eager motion; she sent them stabbing between two near galaxies. She caught sight of the purple-light who approached. He was coming swiftly, and, if he continued on, would pass her. She moved slowly to intercept him.

He stopped when he saw her, rotating upon the skies as he studied her. There was in his attitude an uncertainty, at first; surely he must have sensed her strangeness. But he was a languid and indulgent purple-light, who knew that all matter ended where the darkness began, if he thought about it at all. He therefore approached, coming so close that reflected starlight from the liquescent mirror surfaces of Sun Destroyer seemed to bobble in swift-changing pattern across him.

Within Sun Destroyer, a strange alchemy was taking place. She was becoming hard, cold, infused with merciless purpose.

She whispered, “What is your name, purple-light?”

The purple-light eyed her doubtfully. “I am called, as she who created me named me, Great Red Sun.”

“And I am known as Sun Destroyer, Great Red Sun.”

The purple-light laughed. “But you will not destroy me, Sun Destroyer.”

Sun Destroyer laughed with him, and moved a step nearer. “I do not want to.” She held his visions; she transfixed him; she would not let him go. “Tell me,” she said slowly, “what you know of a creature named Oldster!”

Great Red Sun moved back, to view her as an object among the stars, for he was plainly curious. But Sun Destroyer, her purpose fermenting whether she willed it or not, again closed up the distance, so that everything but a rim of sky was blotted out of his sight except her, her green light, and the shining magnificence of her surfaces and the gleaming cascades of gold within her. Great Red Sun saw what was happening, and in his indulgence of her stayed where he was.

He said curiously, “You do not know of Oldster, he who thinks and wishes to die because he thinks? Surely you must know of Oldster, for everyone does. Ah, he is aged, and he will live forever! Such is the legend handed down. But I am sure you know the legend as well as I.”

Sun Destroyer said nothing. The silence weighted upon Great Red Sun; with Sun Destroyer looming over him, he must speak. “You know the legend,” he insisted. “You know he must not be disturbed; this you surely know!”

“And why not?” whispered Sun Destroyer. “Why is it you must not disturb him?”

“It is what we have been told, green-light — you as well as the others — unless,” he added in piqued humor, “you have just this moment burst into being out of the fabric of space! We all know that it would be cruel to waken him, for he seeks forgetfulness, and has sought it these past two hundred million years. He sleeps, and sleeps, and, I think, grows ever nearer to death.”

Sun Destroyer started. “To death?” she cried. “But he must not die — he must not! Tell me where he sleeps, purple-light. I must know. His wisdom is great, and he must not die!”

Great Red Sun rotated languidly. “Yet I am sure he will.”

Sun Destroyer surged in on him even closer. “Tell me,” she whispered. “Great Red Sun, Oldster knows something I must know. I have come distances you cannot begin to comprehend, merely to see him and to speak with him. Do you understand? Tell me where this ancient being sleeps — then I shall go away and leave you!”

“Go away and leave me?” Great Red Sun mused on the words. “I do not see why that would be of any great value, Sun Destroyer. Could I not leave you, anytime I wish? Therefore, you speak in riddles.”

Sun Destroyer’s body throbbed. She said fiercely, “Tell me where Oldster sleeps!”

Great Red Sun began to move away. “I will not tell you.” He turned his visions from her in cold disdain. “You would disturb him, you would waken him, and you would even torture him if he would let you. I sense it. Therefore, I shall not tell you!

“Go away, green-light. There is evil in you, and I do not like it.”

He moved away faster and faster. Sun Destroyer energized herself with the sphere of Great Energy and looped in front of him. She caught his thought swirls and held them in tight bands of living force.

“Come with me, Great Red Sun.”

“Come with — you?”

Great Red Sun stared. Suddenly he began to tremble. All the universe changed for Great Red Sun. Where before had been the starry vistas of his unending land was now only this huge and looming green-light, with the dancing green forms at her central core.

“Go where with you, green-light? I will come!”

Sun Destroyer murmured with merciless intonation, “To the forty-eighth band!”

And she snapped herself into a hyperspace, ascended the scale, and paused in the cubed forty-seventh band until the purple-light caught up with her and stared in dazed wonder.

Sun Destroyer again approached, looming over him and occluding the burning cubed galaxies.

“Tell me, ” she whispered, “where Oldster resides!”

Great Red Sun’s thoughts were listless. “It does not matter, green-light; I will tell you that which everyone knows anyway. He resides a mere galaxy’s length from here, in the darkness of the fifteenth band. It would be cruel beyond words to disturb him, though.”

“Now — follow me!” said Sun Destroyer, and in moments the beating flow of the life energy surrounded her, and the purple-light as well. Sun Destroyer, obeying laws as old as life itself, hovered in those sunless skies, the green forms dancing in silent whirl on her green core. She waited for the moment.

The moment came. If Great Red Sun was lost in hypnotic lure, Sun Destroyer was doubly lost, for all the evil in her and all the striving and all need were gone. She was in motion, receding a vast distance from the purple-light, and she knew no thought. Somewhere out on the skies a change had occurred. Great Red Sun’s purple core was growing toward her; but intercepting its path was her own green globe.

She watched, lost to everything except the imminence of that silent and inevitable meeting.

Green and purple-light crashed blindingly, throbbed, settled — and now they were but one sphere of mistily pulsing light.

The sight of it closed around Sun Destroyer’s senses. Now there was no pain, there was only soft fulfillment. The past was lost. She was what must be and should be. “It is my child — my child!” she murmured, even as, unknown to her, another green-light formed magically within her. She had no further thought for Great Red Sun, the neuter dying purple-light, who hung in devitalized shock beyond the rim of her visions. She would not see him again, nor would he see her, for Great Red Sun soon would die; he would not know his child, he would know nothing.

Sun Destroyer moved upon the pulsing ball, enclosed it, and dropped with it to the seventeenth band.

Sun Destroyer hovered near it, watching it in its galactic cradle, and a great sense of relief and peace and completion flooded through her. The agony of loneliness and frustration that had grown to such terrible proportions was gone now. She seemed content to hang here, to watch with strange sensations of pride her newly-born, the first of four who would be allowed her.

“It is my child,” she dreamed. “And I have done a wonderful thing. Lie there, my son, and grow. And your name shall be Vanguard!”

The vanguard of those who would know the anarchic contentment and happiness which others of their race, in their ignorance and fear, helplessly discarded.

The vanguard of those who would be empowered to reach that pinnacle of power beyond the band of life.

Her thoughts flowed peacefully, enclosing her in their anesthetic charm. Then, slowly, remembrance of things external returned. She had crossed — the universal spaces, dared the darkness and conquered; a wonderful, a joyful deed had been accomplished. Almost it seemed enough to ensure her as the ultimate of her race. It was not, of course, enough. There was Oldster, and then the forty-ninth band!

She must leave her child; yes, leave him, to grow by himself until the distant time of her return. She circled him, she laved him with soft energies as if to still the impact of terror that would come in the first moment of awareness, and then she dropped from the seventeenth band to the first.

Here in the true band, enclosed by the unfamiliar configurations of an ancient sky, she hovered spiritlessly. She was as sluggish in her sense of goal as she was in her feelings. What had happened to her? In the universe of her birth, her desire to penetrate to the forty-ninth band had been a flaming, a racking thing. Now it was assuming unimportance. From her dulled emotions came a thrill of burgeoning anger. Of course it was unimportant, as all things were unimportant! Then why should she desire it to assume importance? Terror of the paradox grew out of anger, and following terror came the memory of her pain, and the memory of her younger years. Memory bred fantasy, and in convulsing spasms of streaming thought that spewed broken arrows of light on the skies she saw herself to be her own child, the infant Vanguard. But no! It was she herself, as she was, so it seemed, when she too was a babe held powerless in the seventeenth band, an echo of Vanguard, backward in time to the moment of her own birth!

Sun Destroyer writhed in her unbidden memories. She must go. She must leave her memories and her fantasies, and she must leave the sphere of Great Energy.

She did not know why, but the sphere of Great Energy must be cleft from her, forever. She hurled it out, straight and true, using its own vast energies to put it beyond the reach or staying power of any mortal creature. She hurled it as a thing loathed, and watched it as it fumed away invisibly toward the limits of the universe where darkness received it.

It was gone.

Why? What blind impulse made her cut the lifeline to her own universe? “Because,” the still voice came, so still it could not claim real substance, “with the sphere goes your pain, daughter of Darkness.” For, yes, pain was gone, at least for now. And now she too must go — faster, sweeping pell-mell across the littered seas of the sky, and faster, to outrun thought.

She could not outrun thought, but neither could she outrun the self-rebuilding processes within her. After a dozen light-years a measure of her old self returned, and came the thought of Oldster. Oldster! Ah, now she knew of his secret lair, and she would go there.

She paused, a struggling thought like a burning pain within her. “I must see my child again, for perhaps I may never—”

The thought burned and flamed and died, as she irately swept its implications of horror away, No, she would return. Vanguard would know her, he would know Sun Destroyer; he would know the real Sun Destroyer, destroyer of suns and recipient of endless joy; and Vanguard would learn from her. In vicious delight, she swept out with a tractor beam and lumped a dozen hot young stars into a galaxy-destroying supernova. Avidly she fed on the sight of the inferno, the useless havoc, the careless destruction she had wrought — and snapped herself into the fifteenth band of lightlessness.

Chapter V Oldster Awakens

Lightlessness came. No matter; she would find Oldster by the very pulsation of his slowing thoughts.

She impelled herself through hyperspace without benefit of light, toward the near rim of the universe where the ancient one resided.

Abruptly, energy surged against her thought swirls — and the energy was that of thought, so feeble, so incredibly faint, that it could have emanated from none other than him she sought! She hovered, as if pushed back by the wavefront of enfeebled thoughts. She trembled unaccountably, filled with a dread she could not analyze. Those thoughts! There was in them a harrowing timbre of suffering, and they dwelt part in death and part in life. Were these idealess thoughts those of Oldster, and had he lived with them the uncounted millions or billions of years? Then he must be mad, mad! In revulsion she fled back, and again hovered, bitter with rage toward herself, fighting the horror she had shared.

“Oldster!”

She whispered the name.

“Oldster!”

She cried it out, and felt it flung back stridently as if in a chamber; but it was the reverberating chamber of her own mind. Nonetheless, in sheer reflex she moved nearer the source of those stripped thoughts — and nearer, throwing the name out clearly but softly at first, then putting the full power of her thought voice behind it. Her fear, as she planned, was destroyed. She hurled herself full at the foci of the feeble thought waves, and cried into lightlessness.

“OLDSTER!”

Silence.

And still silence.

Then the complex energy fields of her body constricted. Horror again claimed her, but this time she would not give way to its impulses. The monstrous creature was awakening; she felt the racking spasms if its thought as if a vast, a torpid body were pulling itself in torture from an immeasurable deep.

“Oldster,” she whispered tremulously. “Awaken! Awaken! It is I, the daughter of Darkness, who calls to you!”

Motion, of a great quivering form,of a mind that had scarcely known motion for ages. It struck at her from the dark with repellent force. She could scarcely endure the reality of this immured creature, dead to himself and to others, and yet heaving and twisting and expanding back to life. If only she could see him, surely her dread would vanish. Then he would be but another energy creature, ancient but conceivable. In this palling dark, though, she could not even dream his realness!

Yet he who had been dead for so long now was rising to the dreadful pain of life, for abruptly space about her was thick with the torment of unformed thoughts: Out of his sludge of forgetfulness he was coming. She had goaded him, she, Sun Destroyer, who had destroyed his sleep, as was her unequaled right.

“Awaken!” she cried.

“I awake.”

The voice was faint, as if from a far distance. But it was a voice, approachable and solid. Sun Destroyer surged in uncontrollable bodily expansion toward it, making the voice large in her mind, and forming an image of Oldster to go with it. Yes, he was real; he was only real, and not mere image.

Her fright was gone.

“I have come across the darkness, Oldster,” she said. “And I am the daughter of Darkness, whom you knew in long ages past!”

The thought waves of the being grew in volume, racking space in their spasm of untold despair, so that Sun Destroyer found herself again shrinking from dread.

“Who calls?” the ancient one suddenly cried; the bitter protest smote Sun Destroyer. “Who calls him who sought above all things not to be disturbed? Then it is in vain, and my agony must begin again. Go away, daughter of Darkness, if such you are! Ah, I care not for Darkness nor the emptiness he crossed. It is peace alone I seek, and the dark emptiness of nonexistence. I am sad, and the wakefulness you have brought me back to is an agony I cannot bear. Go away, I implore you, daughter of Darkness, and leave me once again to seek the peace you destroy. Go. Go!”

“I cannot go. Even as you gave Darkness the secret of Great Energy, so now must you give an answer that I seek. Listen to me, Oldster.”

“I listen to nothing save my own despair,” the creature said dully. “You have brought me back to a pain I had thought never to endure again. Leave me, leave me!”

“I shall not leave you, Oldster, for I too know the meaning of pain.”

She spoke arrogantly. The furies were rising in her. Oldster, no less than myriad others, was to bow before her; already he was hers, brought back to torment at her bidding.

“I shall not leave you, Oldster,” she repeated in disdain. “I have dared to awaken you; shall I then dare to let you sleep again? No, Oldster, you shall remain awake until I have of you all that I wish. You shall not lie in decrepit uselessness and seek to hide your knowledge from me, who is the ultimate of my race; who possesses within her, save for a link I cannot supply, the ability to penetrate beyond the forty-eighth band of life and into the forty-ninth!”

Silence, heavy with portent, rushed in on her. Her own words seemed to fill the vacuous silence. The dark of the fifteenth band pressed against her, so that she found herself searching for a single ray of light to leaven the unknown menace of Oldster. For he was wise; perhaps he was powerful also! Perhaps he was using the silence to crush her. She started forward half in fear. “Oldster—”

“Quiet, my child.”

Then, as if he were throttling a pain that stabbed through and again through him, Oldster’s mutter came:

“She speaks in words that mean nothing; she, daughter of Darkness — Sun Destroyer! Ah, now I know of you!” And indeed, Sun Destroyed felt the impact of Oldster’s thoughts probing in one lightning thrust through her memory swirls, before she was able to close them in one resentful effort.

“You have no right!” she cried.

Oldster said heavily, “There is no right and there is no wrong, my child, as you yourself contend. Oh, Sun Destroyer, Sun Destroyer, I sorrow for you, as I sorrow for others who, someday, may be like you.”

Sun Destroyer drew back uncertainly. “I know not why you should sorrow for me.” Now she spoke again with arrogance, so that Oldster would understand. “I sorrow for no one, Oldster. I am completion within myself, and expect nothing from anyone outside myself.”

“Then that is but another chimera you follow.” His voice dragged, heavy with a foreboding that Sun Destroyer could not comprehend. “If you indeed are able to penetrate the forty-ninth band, daughter of Darkness, then do I sorrow for you all the more. Oh, Sun Destroyer,” he burst out, “return where you came from, and take your child with you. Your child, Sun Destroyer! What will happen to your child?”

“I shall return to him,” she said.

“You do not know!” Oldster’s voice came in racking beat. “You think you are mistress of your universes, but your course is the course of self-destruction. Sun Destroyer, I who know it is best tell you this. Return to your child, return to your universe if you can, but help your child — for he will need your help!

“And you must forget the forty-ninth band.”

“Forget the forty-ninth band?” All else was swept away, thoughts of her child, of the great enveloping chill that was settling over her. Yes, she would return to her child, for what could stop her; but forget the forty-ninth band? “No,” she cried. She felt herself surging against the bonds this creature would throw about her. “Oldster, you are old, and your thoughts are old. You dwell in a hermitage, and there is no joy for you. Perhaps you also hope to destroy my joy, after having destroyed your own.”

“No, my child, ” came Oldster’s mutter.

Sun Destroyer would not stop. “You are wise, Oldster, but sometimes youth is wiser.” Her voice raged. “Have I not found that which all my race has sought through all of time? For I have struck away my bonds. Now see! I have even no pity of you and your wakeful state. Nor shall I have pity, even when that which I wish is given to me. Perhaps,” she added in demon humor, “I shall keep you awake, for all the years of my life, even after I find the forty-ninth band.”

Oldster moved in his space; she felt the restless beat of his thoughts.

“Her dreams are too great,” he muttered. “Even her dreams of torturing me shall not come to pass. But because she dreams, she dreams of a forty-ninth band, and there can be none — not a true one. Daughter of Darkness, hear me: there can be no true forty-ninth band!”

She said coldly, “There could not be any forty-ninth band other than a true one. You speak meaninglessly, or you lie.”

“I do not lie; the forty-ninth band is not real.”

“You lie, or so you are not as wise as I thought, for I know of a forty-ninth! I first knew of it when I was very young, and all your vaunted wisdom cannot stay me in my course. Now I need but the knowledge you have gained through the millions of years. Surely, in that knowledge, lies the clue.”

“My knowledge is of no use to such as you,” replied Oldster. His voice was dull, his thoughts feeble and embittered. “My knowledge will only harm you, for of what use can you put it — except to find a forty-ninth band which does not truly exist. Oh, Sun Destroyer, Sun Destroyer, go away, while there is yet time. Believe me, I know things of you that you do not know of yourself! Ah, I will not give you this knowledge you desire!” and Sun Destroyer felt his thoughts withdraw, as if he were again preparing to wrap himself in his mindless dark.

She surged forward with a sharp cry, coming so close to the great unseen hulk that she felt the radiation of his aura.

“You shall never rest, Oldster,” she whispered into the looming hulk, “if such is your decision. If you do not give me this knowledge, I shall never give you peace. Never to rest again, never to sleep, never a hope of that extinction you long for! To think you are safe, to sink toward slumber — only to awaken as I burst into your retreat! That shall be your fate, Oldster, wherever you are, for all the years of my life, and all the years of my son’s life!

“I speak truly. Now do you think to refuse me?”

“No.”

The single word came in drumming beat. Sun Destroyer heard it, and could not believe. But her ecstasy began.

“I am to be told how to reach the forty-ninth band?”

“You are to be given that knowledge which I have, Sun Destroyer, and with it you will find your forty-ninth band. I give you your wish, daughter of Darkness, not from fear of you and your witless threats—” Oldster paused as if to underscore his meaning, and an inner trembling seized her, for she saw in his words the same kind of remorseless taunt she had meted out to him. Again she surged toward him, crying out, knowing she must not allow herself to be turned back by her own weapons being used against her; but Oldster’s drumming thoughts blanketed about her.

“Peace, my child,” he muttered. “I wish no ill for you; but I know I must give you what you wish. For now there is only the single path you may follow.

“But later on, you will beseech me.”

“Beseech you!” The cry was torn from her. Then, in wonder, “Beseech you, when I, the highest of my race, have attained that which will complete my whole life?”

“You will plead with me, Sun Destroyer, plead with me to bring you back.” Oldster was shuddering, racked with a despair that vibrated across the spaces between them, but Sun Destroyer felt only a puzzled wonder that he should despair, when eternal happiness lay before her. For Oldster’s battle with her was lost, and in the lightlessness of the fifteenth band, she permitted herself to rotate in gloating victory, awaiting his command.

And it came.

“Sun Destroyer, receive the knowledge I am about to give you!”

Sun Destroyer’s ecstasy reached its peak as she erased awareness, as Oldster’s probing mind grasped her memory swirls in tight bands of energy, as the knowledge he chose for her flooded in resistless tide…

Chapter VI The Forty-Ninth Band

The thousands of years passed, and Oldster felt her go, slipping in ecstasy through the layers of space that held the fifteenth band in untrammeled dark. He felt her go, away from him, away from all that is, and he listened long to the silences of hyperspace. At last he felt the whispered drumbeat of her voice.

“It is there, Oldster, the knowledge I sought. Oldster, you have guided me well. Now let me prove that I am the ultimate of all life. Oldster, farewell!”

Again there was silence for Oldster, and the bare beginning of peace. But would there or could there be peace from now on, with Sun Destroyer dispersed upon the universe, when any moment she might recur to him like a memory more frightful than any of those in all his long life? Yes, she would infest him, not because of her threat, but because she could not will otherwise.

But for now she was gone, leaving with him double reason not to think, not to feel, not to hope. Time would pass, the ache would dull, and perhaps again his thoughts would stop. Thoughts! How they brought him pain and depthless despair! Better to fight them again, to begin the old battle, to slough them off, even with the threat of Sun Destroyer hanging over him. Convulsively, he drew his thoughts in about him, quieting them, soothing them, erasing remembrance of all the glowing universe.

Perhaps she would not come…

Oldster drowsed, and drowsed deeper still. Tens of thousands, a million years passed. Outside the fifteenth band of lightlessness life had its being, and the nebulae and galaxies and stars and the lesser things of the heavens spun unceasingly, in brilliant internal or borrowed splendor. Inside reposed he who desired not to think. Toward blessed coma Oldster drifted.

“Oldster!”

Without substance the name pierced him. He knew not how much time had elapsed. However long or short, it had not been long enough. But now all was silence again; he had dreamed. It had been an outlaw thought, and his name had not been cried out after all.

“Oldster!”

The name was real, and the cry was real. Oldster listened dully to its unwelcome echoes within him. The agony of wakefulness shot through him, and yet he knew that he must awake — for Sun Destroyer called.

“I awake,” he muttered. “You call me again, my daughter, when I seek peace. But I awake.”

“I call for your aid, Oldster!”

The voice of Sun Destroyer was shot through with horror.

“I need your help!”

“And have you indeed reached the forty-ninth band, Sun Destroyer?” Oldster questioned wearily.

“I have reached it, Oldster — it is about me!”

“Then,” Oldster muttered, “there is a new sorrow that I must learn to blot out in thoughtlessness. Sun Destroyer, had you but listened! Had you but returned to your universe! Had you but taken your child with you!”

There was blank silence. And Sun Destroyer’s voice came, penetrating down through the bands of hyperspace that separated her from Oldster.

She spoke, in tremulous wax and wane, “My child! Vanguard! He whom I created. How long has he been alone? How long!” Her voice washed away, as if her thoughts too were swept up to pinnacles unseen. Thinly came her thoughts again. “I do not understand of what you speak, Oldster. What have I to do with things of other bands, or even the true band? For see! I am truly set apart from my race. I am in the forty-ninth band!”

“Yes, my daughter,” whispered Oldster bitterly. “You are in the forty-ninth band. Then why was it you again broke my slumber?”

“I wish to return,” said Sun Destroyer. “For a moment! Oldster, I wish to return and again see my child.”

Oldster whispered, “But tell me what it is you see. What is the nature of the forty-ninth band? Does it hold happiness, eternal without end?”

“Oh, it does, Oldster, it does! And yet — Oldster!” Her thoughts came in drumbeat, rhythmic, ominous, dulling. “I see dead stars — and black gulfs surrounded by stars which are not matter. They move, in patterns strange to the sight — circling, with no recourse to the laws of motion. They split, and the lumps of nothing split — and from them are born whole galaxies! Blazing, spinning galaxies. Creation is about me, I am drowning in its beauty, and I would be happy, Oldster, I would be happy if—”

“Yes, my child. You would be happy except for—”

“Except for the shadows,” Sun Destroyer cried. “The shadows, with their pointed tips, creeping in from everywhere; the ugly shadows, quietly drawing away all of the matrix from which creation spins… it is so black! Black as your fifteenth band, Oldster! How will I return? I knew a strange peace when I looked upon my child, and it seemed that all things had been explained to me!”

“Tell me more of what you see,” said Oldster dully.

“Now the universe is again bright.”

“Tell me more.”

“All is beauty. I am happy. I spin through the brightness, taking it into me as the shadows took it before, but — suddenly there is a cavity in the center of the brightness. A single star grows in the cavity and dims and dies — and I am moving without will into the cavity and it has enclosed me. All space has closed about, folding me tight, and is pressing me, Oldster, pressing me without pity. I am smaller, and smaller.” Upward in fright rose the thoughts of Sun Destroyer. “And I have tried to escape, to fling myself down into the forty-eighth band. I am powerless! I am being crushed. Is there no one to pity me, to draw me back, to free me? Oldster, you must hear! Draw me back, back to your universe, for if I do not escape, do not escape—”

“It is your child you think of,” muttered Oldster.

“He must not be left there too long,” came the violent cry of Sun Destroyer. “I must return. Vanguard must know me, he must not lie there alone, with no one to come.”

In racking beat her thoughts came, strident and raging as if she would shackle him to her by sheer force of need. Oldster; face to face with the horrors of a universe he wanted nothing of, shuddered throughout the complex coiling fields of his ancient body. I sought death, he thought starkly, but I am face to face with life — and it will not let me go! Stay, daughter of Darkness, look for that happiness which is about you. What of your happiness?

“But you are happy, Sun Destroyer! What of the happiness you searched for and found?” She heard the insistent cry, for her raging thoughts abruptly ceased. For a long time only silence was in the spaces; then came Sun Destroyer’s musing mutter, as of one who knows no single thought.

“I think of my child,” she muttered. “And yet I am also happy, for I am at the pinnacle of being. Am I not set apart from my race?”

Oldster whispered, “Yes, Sun Destroyer, you are indeed set apart. Yes! You have sought happiness. Now you have found it.” His voice turned soothing, persuasive, insidious. “Tell me more of what you see!”

“I am moving through the galaxies and there is nothing that moves me. It is, then, the galaxies which move past me, by a will of their own. They are speeding, speeding away, and the sight is beautiful beyond imagination. They disappear, and more arrive, growing toward me and then contracting as they speed past and away — but no! They do not contract, it is I who expand. I am large. Larger than all the universe. Now — energy creatures! Creatures of my own kind, Oldster. They surround me, and they see in me a wonderful perfection.”

Her voice cut off; then, thin and remote, came the disjointed cry: “Oldster, if I am unable to return, what will become of Vanguard, my son?”

“He will remain in the seventeenth band,” Oldster made slow reply.

“But he will be helpless,” came that thin and remote voice, as if from a separate being. Waves of horror beat against Oldster’s thoughts. “You must release me, Oldster! Take away the knowledge you gave me. I do not desire it. It is of no value. I am trapped in fantasy, trapped here in the forty-ninth band!”

“I cannot release you,” said Oldster sorrowfully. “There is nothing that can release you. Now you are set apart from others, as you wished.” He said, his voice penetrating and insidious, “Now you know complete happiness.”

“I know complete happiness,” whispered the daughter of Darkness hollowly. “Truly, I am sad that others have not followed me in my way of life. I am expanding, Oldster.”

“Continue to expand, then. But if you expand too much, will not death take you?”

“Oh, Oldster. I cannot die. Happiness has no place for death, truly, it has not. Therefore I cannot die!”

“Then continue to expand, and tell me what you see as you expand.”

“The universe darkens.”

“And what of the creatures who surrounded you?”

“They were all creatures who had died before. Now they are gone, out into the darkness that hovers on the rim of everything. Oldster. I followed them. I lost sight of them, but I followed them nonetheless, into a darkness which is much like the one I, and Darkness before me crossed. Oldster!” Her thoughts seethed with excitement. “I thought I saw Vanguard. It could not be — but could it? He is there, much larger than he should be. He comes close and speaks — no! He is the purple-light who died in the creation of Vanguard!

“Oldster, I do not want your knowledge!”

Her thoughts vanished. Oldster waited for a recurrence of that ebbing voice.

It came, in spasms of ebb and flow.“I do not want it,” Sun Destroyer whispered. “In my childhood the terrible pain came, and with it came the thought of the forty-ninth band. Then when your knowledge came to me, the terrible pain came again! It was the same pain — and then I was in the forty-ninth band!

“I expand.”

“Continue to expand,” admonished Oldster. “Truly, daughter of Darkness, in that direction lies a happiness I would seek for myself, had I but the courage. Now, Sun Destroyer,” and his thoughts were compassionately insistent, “you see your child!”

“I see my child, yes!”

“And the thought comes to me that you also see Darkness, himself, emerging out of the emptiness, full with the flush of life, wrapped in his great dreams.”

“Yes, Oldster. It is Darkness himself, and he comes close. Oldster!”

The voice rose. It became a strident rasp that seemed to sunder all of space. From all around Oldster the tearing thoughts of Sun Destroyer came, formless, splotched throughout the bands of space, echoing and reechoing within the tortured chamber of Oldster’s mind.

“Oldster, it is he!” came the bursting thoughts of Sun Destroyer. “It is Darkness, none other, riding the heavens beyond where I lie, and from him come the piercing dead shadows that I saw before.

“But he has no inner light!”

Sun Destroyer threshed in her space. Oldster was buffeted and torn by her stormy horror. Her voice washed away to nothing and then returned in a discordance that ruptured all the peace Oldster ever had known.

“I am being destroyed!” cried Sun Destroyer in tones of protest. “I have just begun to live, and the sphere of Great Energy is destroying me! See the shafts of pointed darkness that hurl from it, the unseeable shadows of hate that pierce me!

“Oh, Darkness, go, go from here and die! Your time is over; mine has begun. Why do you stay?”

Thinly that rasp of thought ran out. The shaken universe was silent. Oldster strained; he heard nothing.

“Daughter of Darkness!” he cried. “Hear me!”

“I hear!” said Sun Destroyer. Her voice tore through space, convulsive, sobbing, raging.

“I hear, Oldster, but I am near death, and all your wisdom cannot save me. For see, I did not know for what I searched; I searched for Darkness himself, and called it something else.”

“No, no,” cried Oldster; “you inhabit that band of which you dream!”

The thoughts that reached him were heavy with her dying, but in them was arrogance.

“You can fool me no longer, Old One. I inhabit myself, I am closed within myself, and everything I searched for was within myself; the forty-ninth band lives in me, born of the dread memory of that which made me what I am.

“And so I expand; but I shall not die.” Her voice dreamed. Fitfully it came, as if from remote spaces. Again Oldster strained to hear, and as he strove he felt a liquid peace settle over him, as if the horror of Sun Destroyer and the pity of her had canceled some of the horrors of his own past.

“I shall not die, of course,” dreamed the voice of Sun Destroyer in the mind of Oldster. “For how can perfection die? I shall simply dream the dreams that I wish. And they are peaceful dreams, of life and of beauty; and of Vanguard my child… and the other children who will be given to me. They will not be the terrible striving dreams that pitilessly forced me to know my own beginnings.”

The voice grew thinner, so that at the last expansion of Sun Destroyer, Oldster could not distinguish the silence of space from her last whisper.

Then the silence was everything, and he was wrapped around by it, and the first blanketing slumber began.

Oldster drowsed, then slept, fitful at first with his disturbing thoughts, and then with no awareness at all. Blessed peace was achieved. Long millions of years would pass before Oldster awakened again.