People of the Darkness

Chapter I Devil Star

The story of Darkness has been told. Darkness, the dreamer who crossed the immeasurable gulf of lightless emptiness between two universes. He, an energy creature tens of millions of miles in girth, sought the answer to life. Perhaps he found that answer in death, when he mated in the thus-far inaccessible band of life.

Also, the story of Darkness’ daughter Sun Destroyer has been told. She plunged back along Darkness’s trail to seek out that aged, sorrowing being whose name was Oldster. For Oldster was wise. He had counseled Darkness. Surely Oldster could lead Sun Destroyer to her life’s completion in the forty-ninth band of hyperspace. But there was no forty-ninth band, unless it lay in Sun Destroyer’s wild fantasies of impossible happiness. She too died, yearning for her son Vanguard, the infant purple-light who lay helpless in the seventeenth band of hyperspace.

The story of Vanguard has been told. He was renamed Yellow Light by his taunting playmates, because of imperfections in his central core. Disabled by his long stay in the seventeenth band, he was never to know contentment. Oldster, in his compassion and wisdom, led Vanguard to mate — to create and thus to die — for he knew Vanguard’s true greatness, that he was destined to father a new race which would supplant the old.

There is, however, another story to be told, the last story of the darkness, the story of the purple-light named Devil Star. Out of the infinities he comes, pressing headlong through the scattered concourses of the stars. Cursed beyond hope, Devil Star, even from the moment of his birth, seeks a nameless thing, a secret held inviolate in the depths of his thought swirls. Moving at speeds far beyond that of light itself, he does not know he flees a horror he cannot outdistance.

Millions of years have passed since this Devil Star’s crashing birth. Stars have swung in their elongated orbits. The universe in that instant of time has blurred into a slightly different pattern. Novae have flickered in their feebly dying explosions, puffing out upon space the excreta of their deaths. Planets have been born, lush with life, and that life has died. Decay and crushing retrogression is the story being enacted on this entropic stage, and yet he who flees in his torment does not see the ultimate hope this holds out for him.

Around him, above, and below to a depth beyond imagination stretch untold millions of light-years, and this Devil Star has traversed them all. He has peered with searing tentacles of energy into the bursting hearts of atoms. With touch that is gentle and loving he has reached for the darting wave-trains of electrons, striving to control his horror so that he might comprehend that shattering law which came into being at a time unthinkably remote. Not succeeding, he has turned into a wild creature, loosing his grief and longing into attack on this teeming universe and the forty-eight bands of hyperspace which compose it.

The forty-eighth band.

Comes the drugging memory that darts within its cage, seeking a door never made for its escape. And Devil Star thunders through space pursued by the horror of his memory.

Now there are dreams, dying sometimes to mere awareness. There is around him the tympanic thrumming of hyperspace’s thirteenth band, and he seeks to attune himself to that harmonic, to become a sympathetic instrument on which it might play. He dreams awhile, dreams the great staggering dream that he is controlling this moment, this naked, two-dimensioned instant of time-dreams that in this thin-sliced layer of eternity he is master.

“For one stripped moment,” dreams Devil Star, “let me control. Then I shall have the answer!” To what?

The raging of thought, the denial of universal communion, the sinking again into that battle with the unimaginable webwork of motion that began ten thousand billion years ago.

But there is the grief of longing, and the desire; and then memory, speeding wraithlike from the far distances of time, striking him, rebounding, returning to strike again. There are the green-lights, the half-hundred of them scattered through the millions of his years of his life. And there is that other green-light, the mother green-light, she who created him and nurtured him and taught him. He does not want to think of her.

There was a time when Devil Star was young. He does not want to think of it. Yet he was young, once. Must he think of it? Yes, he must, in dread nostalgic pain which in being felt again somehow lost a part of its edge.

Therefore he must think again of his youth, of the years of play — of youth and that great yard of galaxies surrounded by the high fence of the darkness. Youth and the joys of living. Youth — and the deep-fluttering memory of his birth.

Into his ten-millionth year, this Devil Star never spoke of that memory. He kept it cold and dying in an unplumbed chamber of his thought swirls. Then the memory, having grown too large, must press upward in its wild escape. And these are the memories of Devil Star:

“Moon Flame!”

The memory of Moon Flame is so strong.

“You spoke?” Devil Star’s companion in the joyous race across that galaxy touched him briefly with his visions.

“Yes, I spoke. Moon Flame, listen to me. I must know something. Whether you — if the others — if they remember.”

The purple-light Moon Flame rotated lazily in his hurtling flight. “Remember what?”

“The moment of birth,” said Devil Star. “Remember the mother, the dying father, the band of life.” He felt his sickness come upon him as he uttered the words. He strove to control the fluttering of his aura, without success, for there was concerned alarm in the gaze of Moon Flame.

“I remember nothing of this,” said Moon Flame slowly. “Birth, death, father. The words are meaningless; you speak in riddles. And while we talk we lose the race. I see the others in the galaxy beyond. Shall we forget these riddles and move on faster?”

For a clairvoyant second in his time scale the raging thoughts of Devil star swelled. “I am cursed!” And subsided. Then he did move faster, but only to hurl himself across Moon Flame’s path.

“You must listen,” he said tensely. “We must stop, we purple-lights, we must learn, think, beware. For all of us will die.”

Moon Flame clove the sky toward Devil Star without lessening his speed. “Die,” he said. “Another word.”

“But you do not understand, Moon Flame! None of us can. Death is our destiny. It was destined before we were born.”

“Then if this strange event is destined, why fight it? No one could win.”

“No one?” Devil Star said, as Moon Flame loomed toward him refusing to lessen his speed. Devil Star swerved into a different trajectory, brushing the surface of a violet super-sun. He said, “I shall win, Moon Flame. I shall fight death, the death green-lights mete out to purple-lights. I shall interrupt destiny; I shall master destiny.”

But Moon Flame did not understand. He could not. The importance of this information escaped him, even the words themselves hazed away in his mind. He brushed Devil Star aside with an impatient pressor beam, scornful of him for having dropped out of the race. He shot away, leaving a swirl of incandescent globules in his wake. Devil Star’s visions followed after him, but all he saw was the immortal blaze of his life’s years. He would not die!

He moved again after a moment, a yearning sadness in him. He still had time to live, and to live without thought. That time might never, come again. He went after Moon Flame and the others, letting his joy of life swell within him. He was not ready, either to fight his urges or to be harmed by those who could harm him. He was not yet the rebel, though the time for that would come.

Devil Star was to have five million more years of peace. Then the time came.

He was alone, and cradling his loneliness, atop a galaxy shaped like a masterfully blown, brimming wine glass, with the bubbles of stars blowing about its rim. The moment of his curse had come, and he knew it well, for he saw the vast cunning that had grown in him, and he was powerless to stop it.

He would lie here, shielded by a great star, and he would wait.

The waiting was not long. Came the beat of a life-force curving around the bright colossus that shadowed him. He trembled. Deep inside the voices of his being whispered that he should forget, turn back; play-skim along the surface of life as Moon Flame and the others. Accept destiny, Devil Star!

Destiny. The cunning shift and quiver of subparticles that began when the universe began.

He would not.

The life-force pressed in on him, strengthened. And now with a thread of his vision rays he thrust around his shielding star, to see an energy creature whose green central light danced with undersurface forms and cast out a hypnotic radiance. She swam lazily into view, but beneath the languid appearance of her he sensed a frightening intensity.

Devil Star moved closer to his star and off to the side, for now he sensed the swirl and pulse of another life. With a thinned ray of sight, he beheld the purple-light ripping through space toward the deadly source of the vibration that drew him.

For one chaotic moment, Devil Star’s purpose was as nothing. His fear of being discovered vanished, for he knew this energy creature.

“Solar Cloud!”

The cry of warning blasted through space. He came into full view of green-and purple-light, ready to disrupt, if he could, this first scene in a chilling drama. Neither heard his cry. The beings hung pendant in space, the huge green-light languidly, composedly rotating, the slightly smaller purple-light staring in hard, bright wonder. They could not — would not — see or hear him. They were caught on that barbed law from which mere interference could not set them free. And Devil Star knew that they were speaking, but speaking along such tightened bands of energy he could not hear what they said.

“Solar Cloud,” he whispered, “stop!”

Then came reaction. The full knowledge of his ultimate triumph came to him. He would succeed in his purpose, and having succeeded, would succeed in other things as well. Giddily he caressed his luscious dream. He was young, not nearly so old as the matured purple-light Solar Cloud. But he would live to be older: old beyond death. At once, he was transformed from his pity and back to his cunning. He would watch.

The green-light disappeared into a hyperspace. The purple-light was bewildered. Then he too disappeared, and Devil Star, bitterly frightened that already he had lost them, felt the click in his thought swirls that transported him into the second band of the universe’s forty-eight layers. For a moment he was one with solid matter that threatened to make him part of it. He shook himself out of the second band and into the third, where all the universe was pressed into flatness. He endured the fourth band and its snakes of living light. He entered the fifth, searching for trace of green-and purple-light, but there was only cosmos in wild motion, the burning matters and energies of the universe seething against walls of utmost black, splattering, smashing, raining back into original shapes to repeat the causeless motion. Spasms of pain ripped through Devil Star as eating vibrations impinged on him. For a flickering moment he allow to himself to wonder at the reason behind that display of a universe amok. Causeless?

Nothing without cause.

Or was there?

He flicked into the next band, and the next, vainly searching for green-and purple-light. In a wild gamble, he shot all the way to the thirty-sixth and, starkly limned against that sick yellow background, he saw their brightening colors. Thereafter, making no attempt to hide, he followed, until around him were those cubed celestial bodies of the forty-seventh band.

The green-light vanished.

The purple-light remained behind, frantically darting across those strange heavens. A wild, trembling excitement shook Devil Star. He must get closer! Solar Cloud knew nothing of a forty-eighth band, but surely the green-light somehow would draw him into it. And Devil Star inadvertently would be drawn with him; for he would be near Solar Cloud, near the sundered skin of the forty-eighth band, and he would be able to follow.

And, subtly, he knew why he must follow. There was the memory, the damning memory of his birth, and he must know if it were memory, or phantasm without meaning.

He did indeed move closer to Solar Cloud… and instantly was swept along in a tide that lifted and bore him. He had his moment of surprise before his consciousness blurred. He was rocking, laved in spangling energies. He was washing back and forth, in some mighty and primeval ocean of force. Then, sharply, he was aware.

His visions darted out, then withdrew. The full knowledge of where he was smote him. Crystalline tongues of fire quivered from his contracting body. The impossible had happened.

The laws of the universe had made no provision for this lawless event.

He, unmatured, was in the forty-eighth band.

Chapter II Dark Fire

Time passing, the great vital pulses of time, flowing like an unseen river through that band where life energies burned. And coldly, almost thoughtlessly, like a being detached from his own body, he watched.

He saw that mating of green-and purple-light as their central cores met in annihilating fusion.

And saw and felt the grayness of coming death settle over Solar Cloud.

Then he drifted in torpor, saw the pulsing white globe which heralded life, and saw nothing else. The moment was relived. The memory had been there.

Then, almost like pain, all that was gone. Against his will, he had been moved to the first band of true space.

Still his thoughts did not function. He hung in a box of emptiness between two stars, unable to plumb the depths of that staggering event.

Solar Cloud was dead, or dying.

As he, Devil Star, was destined to die.

Now the thoughts did start. An incredible thing had happened. Where had it begun? Ten thousand billion years ago? Or a mere fragment of time since Devil Star had been born?

His thoughts took their upward surge, and as full awareness returned he felt a shock of knowledge: he was being watched, and it was the green-light, she who had conceived a life, and heartlessly destroyed one, who was watching him. A sudden cunning hatred of her took hold of him. He held her stare and flung it back arrogantly. And she watched him with coldness from the eminence of her greater size.

The moment of silence drew out to become a vibrating deadly thing stretched between them. Around them stars hotly burned, cooled, collided in collisions that turned them into destroying novae; cooled and grew again in that mad rushing race toward the universe’s entropic doom. And still Devil Star fought for dominance.

The moment could hold no longer. He felt his arrogance dissolving, though he hotly cried out against it. And this the green-light felt.

She said chillingly, “I saw you there. And it was not meant to be. Will you forget?”

“Forget?” The cry was choked from Devil Star. Then the nature of that insidious invitation struck him: this green light, and others of her kind, must be vulnerable to him and his astounding knowledge. “You are… begging me to forget, Comet Glow?”

And as he mockingly uttered her name, she drew back, a darkness creeping into the brilliant depths of her. “If that is the word you wish to use — yes.”

He surged closer to her. “It is the word, mother of four children. Then let me forget also the arts of existence — the eating of energy, the dispelling of it, the use of my parapropellants. I would as soon forget them. And let me also forget the dread moment of my birth!”

And he knew what effect that had on her, for he had told none but Moon Flame. Involuntarily she expanded in her dawning horror.

“Remember… that?” The words were torn from her.

“I remember it. Is there another purple-light who remembers it? Is there another such as I?” He rotated in mock preening. “I will not forget,” he said. He was gone from her sight, into another band of hyperspace. But she followed, reaching out with tight bands of energy, holding him fast, yet at a distance.

“Devil Star!” The words came faintly. “What is it you search for?”

She was debasing herself before him, she, a green-light, millions of years older than he. And he knew his moment of gloating should be put to one side. He was young. There was much knowledge he did not have.

“I am searching for—” He stopped. For what? His rim was ablaze with the sparkling excrescences which betrayed his uncertainty. He began again: “Comet Glow, perhaps I am seeking to be master of my own fate.”

For a long time her somber gaze rested on him. “Devil Star, it is not possible.”

Instantly he tore from her restraining bonds of energy. “You say that,” he cried, “who saw me, an unmatured purple-light, in the band of life — who knows I have a memory which carries me to the moment of my own birth.”

And he stopped, chilled by her odd, pitying silence. He was pressed to dismaying silence himself, and wondered if, somewhere in the undercaverns of his thought swirls, he knew the dread answer she was trying to give him. Another thought rose clamoring. Green-lights are… different. They have a cruel, natural wisdom purple-lights cannot hope to possess.

And, mockingly, that ruinous afterthought:They?

He was sinking into his dreadful abyss.

“Devil Star.” The gentle thought of Comet Glow came. “You are young. You are life. Live as life must live. Yes, as it must.”

She pressed closer, laving him with her anxiety. “Do you seek to change the natal matrix of the vast universe? Ten thousand billion years ago — and longer, Devil Star, perhaps longer — the pattern of all that is was foreordained — and all that will be! No electron that moved along its path but what moved in response to a prior event.

“There has been no thought, and shall be none, that was not caused by prior thought or birthed from event. No result without cause, and no event without result!”

His words came out of the tortured depths of him. “I was in the band of life. And it was against the pattern. There was no reason for it, no reason!”

“Yes,” she whispered sadly. “There was a reason. And if you persist in searching for that reason, or in making use of your knowledge, you will but have further proof of the shackles destiny binds us with.”

Alone in the quivering brightness hung Devil Star. Not make use of knowledge? No result without cause? The thoughts tugged and tore. Into his mind came the drugging answer to all problems. He slept. And in his sleep, an insidious process began working, a selection and burying of the hated answers.

These, O Golden Lights, are the memories of Devil Star; and there are more.

He came back; he came back to the energy children of his own group, and he played as they played. Coldly secret was his knowledge, secret not only from others, but from penetration by his outer mind. And yet he knew his knowledge was there and would harden and polish until its facets would shine brilliantly throughout him. For he was different from them.

Different, exterior to the pattern — he, the rebel from causation.

Somewhere in the passing millions of years, the senseless, joyous years of youth, Devil Star’s mother vanished and was never seen again. He took small note of it. Comet Glow, too: sometimes he saw her studying him, in somber thought, from a faraway depth of space, and then she too faded into a forgotten darkness. Other names passed from the scene. And in from the wings, in response to a cue none heard or looked for or questioned, came other, younger energy creatures, eager for life, excited and delirious as they merged with the splendors about them. On this entropic stage, Devil Star cunningly acted out his part, and called it play.

And there was a green-light, one of the twin siblings of Comet Glow, who played along with him.

Her name was Dark Fire, and sometimes, peering with her into the black whirling cauldron of a sunspot, he saw in her his own primeval excitement with movement. The universe was movement. There was no stillness; if there were stillness there was death, and therefore that which moved was life, and the more wildly it moved the more it lived. Dark Fire lived. Out of a nebula’s green heart she would come racing, trailing wasteful streams of excess energy, circling him, adance in her fiery outpourings.

“Devil Star,” she would cry. “I’ve discovered something; you must come. A monster star, rolling across the sky so fast it is a disk, not a globe. And its own weight should split it up! But it doesn’t split up. Why?”

“Some concentration of core energy,” amusedly, tentatively from Devil Star.

“We’ll go there, Devil Star, now. Out on the whirling edge of the universe, out where matter ends and the darkness begins—”

He felt a wonderful sense of companionship with that green-light. He felt a tenderness for her, a longing to be of her and with her, because of her wildness and her talent for doing the unexpected. The pattern of play in this surging universe concerned the helter-skelter rearrangement of galaxies themselves; one became boldly ambitious to put more than a nick into the dusty perimeters of the terrible huge green nebulae. But Dark Fire explored more lusciously novel avenues of play.

“Come, Devil Star, look what I have done!”

He saw the planet she had made, and marveled. A planet whose surface crawled with beings made of solid matter. Tiny motes of things, of many different patterns, powered by thin streams of energy, dependent on gravitation and a compound chemical which flowed. An incredible kind of actual life whose base was silicon — or perhaps carbon, he did not trouble to find out.

“It dies so swiftly,” he said.

“But its time scale is different. I shall tend this planet,” she dreamed. “The life-forms will improve on themselves. Someday they may come out into space.” Excitement was in her. “And they will never know that she who created them watches their brave venture.”

For a long time Devil Star brooded over that planet and its alien life. So strange, he thought, so impossible. In the subswirls of his mind a remembrance shook him.

“Something troubles you, Devil Star?”

“Yes,” he said faintly. “You have done something which has never been done. The creation of that planet, and its life-forms. It is… against the pattern!”

She sensed the problem. Far from meeting his own mood of questioning, however, her gaze held secret mockery. “Against it? Devil Star, there is nothing against the pattern; and no one who can go against it.”

“No!” he cried out in denial. “Dark Fire, you had choice — to create or not to create. You chose to create. You were master of yourself in your choice.”

“No. I did that which I would do. I had no choice.” She rotated along a precessing axis, probing him, mocking him. “Let us explore this thought of yours. I have choice, so you would say, of destroying this life that I have created, or of allowing it to exist. But I have no choice.”

“You have choice!”

“No.”

Again, mockery. Suddenly she drew back, lashing out with a destroying heat ray that in a cosmic instant seared the planet. Molten waves heaved across its surface. Fuming yellow blazes boiled away the life of its beings. Devil Star looked on in horror, and a clamoring thought arose: As she would destroy me!

That shocked moment held. Then, mockingly:

“I made no choice, Devil Star; I could not have acted but as I did. For am I not the child of my mother, of all who went before her? Am I not the product of all the events of space-time that have impinged upon me to make me as I am? Am I not moved and swayed by cosmic tides that began long before I began? And you, Devil Star; you yourself are but a wave-curl in the tide… another event… pressing in on me, forcing me to make my so-called choice. Choice? There was none. There was an inevitable act.”

His aura was fuming with the tremor of his denial. “Then,” he cried bitterly, “we might as well drift. It would all come out the same anyway.”

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

The complete logic of that reply escaped him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Devil Star, there will be no choice!”

Chapter III The Band of Decision

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

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

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

When Dark Fire came, however, he was not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Devil Star, there will be no choice!”

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

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

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

She is dwindling. He knows what he must do.

As she would destroy me!

The thought rages, but he prepares.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the system explodes!

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

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

Now the configuration of this strange sky is different.

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

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

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

The moment of watching was drawn out.

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

Faintly Devil Star answered: “No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“As you would have had me die!”

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

“I had choice!” he cried bitterly.

Silence. Then, from a distance, muttering:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter IV World Rim

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

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.

“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.

These are the memories of Devil Star, O Golden Lights. And in them is the memory of the half-hundred green-lights who followed after, and the memory of the other things, of the drumbeat of longing, of the search through matter’s fabric, and of the hundred million years that passed.

Chapter V The Golden-Lights

They would see him from afar, streaming across the star fields, not pausing, hurrying only, hurrying to some place that had no location. And they would see him again, spinning along the axle of some galactic wheel. And still again, rigid in abstraction, grasping at space and its dust in a timeless query none of them would ever understand. He was there when they were born and there when they died. And his name was never known.

The universe writhed. The parts of it assumed new configurations. Matter changed in its inevitable way, dropping toward that bottom level where time must end. Devil Star lived on.

The mother green-light, dropping down the bands of space from the seventeenth band where her youngest lay in mindless contentment, paused in the sixth band of hyperspace. For, scarcely a light-year away, the giant body of the legendary creature hung sleeping. Full of tenderness for her child and for all life, she looked upon that aged purple-light with the awe of reverence. Out of what unexplained past had he come? Who was he? She drifted nearer, for a long time searching him with her visions. And he stirred, awoke and saw her. Restlessly, he turned away.

“Green-light, leave me.” His thoughts came from what seemed an infinite distance of weariness.

She scarcely dared to think; but she would not leave. Presently she spoke, whispering:

“We have seen you from afar, often. And you have never spoken. And you must be lonely.”

“Lonely!” The word came back at her in a racking burst. “I am not lonely. I do not wish to be disturbed. Now go.”

She moved away, reluctantly, but she was filled with compassion. “Yes, I shall go. But I know you are sad — and indeed you are lonely. I shall come again. And the others will know of you, and will revere you, and perhaps those who seek knowledge will come to you. We shall not try to guess at the secret of your life. And you will have a name.”

Tenderly, remembering the naming of her youngest, she renamed her oldest.

“To us, you will be known as Oldster.”

“You must have learned many things,” the young purple-light said timidly. He was called Burning Planet.

Oldster muttered, “There are some who are different, such as you, Burning Planet. But what is it to be different? As you, I have searched and found nothing — nothing! And I am sad. I wish only for extinction. And it will not come.”

“To be extinguished is—” Burning Planet was anxious to comprehend.

“Yes.” Bitter amusement was in Oldster’s thoughts. “To be no more. To burn no more. I thought to master destiny; but destiny masters me, as you. I cannot exclude the universe which continues to give me life.”

“But there is joy in learning! Is that not reason to live?”

“Joy!” The word was uttered in such a frenzy of grief that the young purple-light timorously drew back in readiness for flight. Oldster’s immense body, seventy million miles across, quivered with lakes of blinding energy. “Can there be joy when I long for something that can never be? Oh, my son, leave, leave me in my sadness!”

Burning Planet was overwhelmed, and could not make himself leave.

Presently, as if from an infinitely deep space, came the suffering thoughts of Oldster.

“There is space, and there are stars, and of the things to know about them I have little to seek out. I have traveled the star lanes for eons, filled with my longing, and the search for knowledge has been only the disguised search for my life’s completion.

“Yet I have learned; but what I have failed to learn, my son, is the spark that keeps my hope and my life alive.”

“There is a great secret that eludes you?” Burning Planet spoke breathlessly.

The old being of the universe sighed as he absently studied a nearby group of meteoroids parading in silent cold line across the bright sky.

“Do we have choice,” he whispered. “Did I have choice? For there was the band of decision — but you would not understand that, my son. Oh, the years have passed, and there is no answer. Space-time began; it fumed into being at some point unthinkably remote. Where? How? Why? We conceive no beginning, for beginning is time itself; and yet, from nothingness sprang matter. Result without cause. I have searched — searched downward into miniscule universes, striving to find that beginning which came into being without a first motion.

“I have trapped matter’s smallest part, stripped space of all influences around it. And having trapped it, no longer sensed it. For observation is influence.

“In that vacuous cage, did that particle move in paths of its own choosing? If it did, without cause—”

Oldster’s thoughts broke off. Then, drudging, they came again: “But no. The universe decays, and draws life into decadence with it. There is no hope!”

Silence endured. Timorously Burning Planet spoke, but there was no response. Reluctantly he withdrew from the aged creature’s presence, for there was more he would have known. He returned to space’s first level, pondering.

I shall seek knowledge,he decided.I shall not be like the others, mastered by their own whims… by destiny? But I do not understand. I am not mastered… And from afar he felt it, the wax and wane of the life impulse. From the spiraling arms of a nebula, out of its green heart as if she had been hiding therein, a green-light drifted toward him. But Burning Planet’s time had not come. He continued on his way.

There was Darkness.

And the daughter of Darkness, Sun Destroyer.

And her son, Vanguard, to be known for a long time as Yellow Light.

And there were the millions, the tens and hundreds of millions of years that passed.

With drudging energy, Oldster heaved his vast body into a ragged motion that took him for the last time across the light-streaming rivers of the sky, into the first deeps of the darkness that Darkness had crossed. There, beyond sight of that meager pinpoint arrangement of matter that was this universe, he drew his visions in about him, and drew in his thoughts as well, striving to cancel them out.

Millennia would pass, though, and still he would be trying to blot out the memories of his life. Still he would fight his agonizing need. His was failure, for he had not created.

As for the band of decision — with his fading consciousness he searched back through time. He had imagined it. It had never existed!

He would sleep now. He would decay downward to that moment when the centripetal urge for life would grow too feeble. The last hounds of his defense would wander off. For now he could not be disturbed.

“Awake, Oldster.”

The serene yet lordly voice echoed through and through that immeasurably deep cavern of thoughtlessness where Oldster resided.

“Awake, and awake to the high moment of your long life.”

The field upon field of overlapping energies that was Oldster quivered with the beginning beat of the old torture. Forces that had all but nullified themselves trembled out of balance. The vast body heaved and turned and its portions writhed. Then it held rigid.

Awareness had come to Oldster: awareness, strong and lashing. He beheld the fact of his return to life with an icy horror he had never expected to endure again. His thoughts lashed about like those of a being in a trap of pain. For one moment of illusory freedom he felt his pain depart, as he plunged back along time’s trail to the gone days of his youth.

“Awake.”

The sweet years of youth, when he had no thought but for play. Let them come again! But no. He felt memory swept away, and he was returned to his future. And from outside the packet of canceling forces that was himself had come a… voice.

“No!” The word shouted within him. It filled the closed universe that he had fashioned for his awaited death. And he knew the muted denial was bursting in violence to him who so cruelly shattered his dream of night. “No, whoever you are, whatever, leave me! Leave me alone, not to think, not to live. Ah, you have made me live again, as Sun Destroyer and Vanguard, when I would have none of them.”

His thoughts spiraled away, thrown out in convulsive denial. The awful agonies of returning sensation spread crazily to the limits of his being. A vision trembled involuntarily…

“And it is of Vanguard that we would speak.” The thought vibrated in serene, lordly compassion against his thought swirls. “Now, you who were born as Devil Star, look upon us!”

Wave upon wave of horror engulfed Oldster as that command drove in. He would not! He was master of himself, of his environs. The rebel thought endured, however, only long enough to be swept away by the shattering failure of his life. His central resolve dissipated. Not to fight, not to reach — ah, there would have lain happiness!

Thinly at first his visions moved from him; then they fumed out in thick beams designed to bring full revelation of that energy creature whose unafraid thoughts pried into his.

And as he saw he lay silent in that emptiness, quiet in his congealed wonder.

Momentarily, his thoughts dwelt in that long-gone moment when Dark Fire moved in splendor toward him, with her destiny of creation and death. For here was splendor beyond imagination, with the promise of something wondrous, and something tormenting; but here also was destiny, in these ranks upon endless ranks of beings, hanging in somber immobility against that lightless sky.

He saw those thousands upon thousands of golden-lighted energy beings gazing down upon him in serene sublimity. Their formless thoughts flowed around and through him, without discord, with peace.

“Golden-lights,” he whispered, and as he spoke the words he was moved beyond thought.

How long?

How long!

And from that concourse came answer, from one of them, from all of them — he would never know.

“For longer than you can dream, Oldster. For longer than the life of a star. You have slept, slept ages beyond calculation. Yet here, in this pulseless emptiness, we have found you. And the time has come.”

“The time,” whispered Oldster.

“The time of glory.”

There was a rustling of thoughts flowing, thoughts unfettered by fear, nor chained to hope. And the golden central cores shone in beauty.

“The time of glory that comes to you, Oldster. For you are the last of your people. And we are of Vanguard, and those who came after Vanguard.”

Now that unlocated voice swelled, filling the darkness with its lordly sweetness.

“For see, Oldster! We are all that you dreamed of — and more. We stem from Vanguard! And Vanguard gave life more than he dreamed. Clearly and purely we see the answers to those ultimate questions Darkness himself asked. Sun Destroyer herself, in her ancient past, never dreamed that her vain quest would be reached in us — through her!”

The giant words drummed against Oldster; he strove to break through to their meanings, but shadows obtruded themselves. Fear came unbidden and uncontrolled. He quivered, searching amongst those serenely watching beings with their crystal-sparkling, golden-drenched bodies for some sign that would make meaning burst upon him. For a while, he reveled in the belief that soon he would understand. He waited, letting his visions rove from one to another of those untroubled golden ones. The answers did not come. In depraved ugliness came doubt, shouting at him.

“No,” he cried bitterly. “You speak of impossible things. There are no answers. You are mockeries. What is it to me who you are? I, Oldster, want none of you — I do not want hope! Now leave me, leave me alone in my sadness.”

He lashed out at them, feeling his old agonies, and knowing that they, in their serene perfection, could not understand that they had but doubled and redoubled his tortures. For they and their kind must die and vanish in the stampeding downgrade forces which led to universal quiet. They too were but atoms trampling over each other in that mad rush toward the bottom level of inertness. Even perfection must die, ruled by destiny.

He started to withdraw his visions, when they, far from retreating, whirled nearer, their bright golden centers glowing in upon him until he was trapped in a blaze of fire. The inbred contentment of their thoughts pulsed through him. He fought against that dominance. He quivered with the dread that in spite of himself they would fill him full of that anesthetic hope he had no use for.

Then, thundering through his thought swirls, came that lordly measured voice, sublime in the surety of its owner’s purpose:

“Oldster! You have not failed!”

“Not failed!”

Convulsively Oldster flung back the words, like a missile to be hurled.

“Not failed? You are mockeries, you golden-lights, and now you must go, and go forever, and leave me alone in this lightless emptiness. Not failed!” The words seemed to echo in their frenzied dreariness. He felt the outermost limits of his being expanding, and quivering with miniscule outflarings of yellow energy, as if he could drive them away by the pressure of his physical being. Failing that, he would drive them away with the whip of his contempt.

“I, Oldster, who used to be Devil Star, have failed in ways your blind minds would never perceive.”

His thoughts drummed, violent in their unthrottled hate. They did not retreat, but continued to surround him and smother him with that sense of peace which he must battle if he were to keep his sanity.

“You do not understand failure, you golden-lights, you who stemmed from Vanguard. Could you ever feel the tortures of Vanguard himself, or of those who went before him — of Sun Destroyer, of Darkness? Ah, I can see it. You have reached a perfection beyond such burrowings! And I shall not let you give me peace.

“For I have failed, and I will continue to be tortured with my failures. You would not understand.”

“We understand.”

That voice, in its merciless love of him, drove in.

“We understand, and we say you have not failed. For see! You have created, and has not that driving urge to create been the great pain of your life?”

His thoughts swept out in blind denial. “Leave me, golden-lights, leave me! I have not created.”

“You created us.”

Deep in the fabric of him he was at last torn. In those insidious words was a horror he dared not recognize. “No,” came his agonized muttering. “You are giving me hope. And I have lived too long with torture to endure hope.

“Leave me.”

“We shall not leave, Oldster, until your great life has reached its completion.” The sublime voice vibrated sweetly on the emptiness. “You created us — as surely as if you had sired Darkness himself. For did you not guide Darkness to his life’s completion? Was it not the thought of you that brought Sun Destroyer back along Darkness’s path? And was it not you who guided Vanguard, you who, in your greatness, saw us in him? Yes, Oldster, you are our creator — you are the creator of life!

“And it is life that will endure, and has ultimate meaning.”

Oldster hung laxly in that sphere of golden blaze, his exhausted mind devoid of will for battle.

“Then I have created,” he whispered. Peace flowed, scouring at the bitter longings of his life. Deep within was a warning voice, but now he would not heed it. Not to fight, not to rebel — ah, how sweet to accept it!

He was theirs. Let it be so. Let them lead him to his life’s completion. They in their all-knowingness could not be questioned. He had created. The thought held white and pure before him. Let the thought be so.

“Life that shall endure,” he muttered.

“Oldster!” The sublime voice rang. “Life does endure! For is not life the rebel from dead matter? Matter is death, for it grows old, powdering and graying toward its entropic destiny. But life is the rebel. Life builds and grows and evolves toward its high destiny which we know, but which you cannot know. But this you shall know. Life masters itself. Life is outside destiny — and has choice!”

Laxly he hung, accepting those dazzling meanings. Now it was over. He would not fight. And then, from somewhere, from a thousand directions, he felt their thoughts grasping at his thought swirls, filling him with that drugged peace he knew with Dark Fire, that companion of his lost years, when he faced her in the band of life.

“Oldster.” Inward hummed that lordly, loving voice. “Now you will know you have not failed. For are you not life, and the greatest rebel of all life?”

“And life has within it the dark rebel!”

Chapter VI A Time of Glory

After this, there shall be no more years, no more of memory or wonder or battle. There will be no more of Darkness, of Sun Destroyer, of Vanguard who was called Yellow Light, or of golden-lights. And this will be as Oldster wills it.

For now within him, in this moment before the universe must cease to exist, comes knowledge. The moment is the same as when he hung pendant in the forty-eighth band about to release his central globe, obedient to the relentless urge of destiny. He has been transported to that unlocated cosmos which lies beyond time and space dimensions. He is in the band of decision.

Again he looks upon those swinging suns with the rapt wonder of youth. It is the same band for which he looked so long!

“Look upon this, Oldster, for the time of glory comes. In its last moments, your life can know no higher joy.”

Distant yet near, the sweet voice drifted in.

“Now you inhabit that place you searched for. And it is a place that belongs to life alone.”

“My last moments.” The thought was examined wonderingly. From far down came feeble denial. “No, golden-lights. For I have tried to die. I cannot. I am trapped to life by the destiny that created me.”

He drifted in untrammeled vacuum, his motion a dimensionless sensation. He drank in the beauty of this faultless universe, its rounded, glowing suns, its logical plan, the purposeful paths of motion as units of seeming matter moved quietly from one galaxy to another. At least they looked like galaxies — but were not?

As those suns were not suns!

Into this bodiless entity that was himself came the whisper of doubt. Not suns! Blindly his reaching thoughts swept out.

“Then I searched everywhere for the band of decision — except within myself!”

“Yes, Oldster!”

The seeming galaxies blurred and shimmered as if in answering accord.

“And now,” cried Oldster, “my thoughts return to that moment when I trapped the universe’s smallest particle in emptied space, and vainly wondered if it could determine its own destiny. It could not.”

Silence. He drifted. His formless self moved, in some strange way, through these logically constructed islands of space toward some goal whose meaning hummed within him. Then, echoing through and through this universe came the ringing voice that hovered outside himself.

“And now you see, Oldster, and you know what it is you see. For life is the rebel, and dead matter knows no path but that given it. Oldster! Does not the mind, and that essence of self which is beyond the mind — do not even these need structure?”

Light as the touch of space, those thoughts lingered. Then Oldster felt their withdrawal. The fluttering of countless minds against his began to quiet. Without pain, he knew they were leaving him.

“Oldster” — the thought held no sadness, only an immeasurable love — “you know you have choice, and you know why you have it. Now farewell. Your time of glory comes.”

They were gone, those golden-lights, and in their near-perfection they carried with them those ultimate answers Darkness himself sought. And yet it did not matter, for he, Oldster, was within his fabled band of decision. And life could ask no more.

In mounting ecstasy, he hurled himself through vast spaces that were yet small beyond calculation; he went rushing with deadly accuracy toward his yet unseen goal. Those “galaxies,” those structures of which the golden-lights spoke, slanted out behind him, and new ones rushed into his sightless vision.

What old and new thoughts did those swinging suns evoke, what memories and dreams, in the slumbering outer mind of that being who was called Oldster? Which configuration of “stars” and “planets,” and what shuttling motion in and between them, called forth the haunting remembrances of Moon Flame, of Comet Glow and her child Dark Fire; of World Rim and the countless lost names of his unmeasured past? Ah, even the essence of being has structure; it must be so. And he inhabited, moved through, that band of decision.

And soon he would meet… his dark rebel!

His ecstasy soared as he burst across those dimensionless distances and unerringly swung into a blaze of pressing light created by a sphere of galaxies. And he halted, feeling the throb of his certain knowledge as he fixed his strange vision on the writhing heart of the farthest concourse of stars.

Instantly a lone star heaved from it and moved across dark space. Oldster was in its path as instantly.

Even in the midst of his blinding pain, his ecstasy endured. He knew there was no hurt, that it was not a star which flamed through him, but some other formless quality of his inner being. He knew that he did not see, for there was no light. And he knew that he was not here.

Yet what did it matter what symbols he chose, symbols that he understood, but which were not real. For that dark rebel, whatever form it possessed, was within him. And the essence of being has choice!

He watched that sun falter in midspace, watched it reverse direction and fall back,with its message, to the untroubled galaxy that had urged it forth. His joy was a mighty song as that particle of itself jousted with the destiny that bade it continue along a straight-angle path — fought and won.

That rebel particle was rushing, rushing back to the heart of the deeply buried mechanism that ejected it. Soon it would strike. And he knew that when it struck its blow there would be… explosion!

And for him, now, was the time of glory.

For that particle, that sun, was himself, as all these turning, studious galaxies were himself, the mind and the soul of him. What need to cleave space, to endure torture, to question himself now? Why question the manner in which he, Devil Star, had been given access to this glory that lay under his supposedly conscious self? The golden-lights knew. The minds of the golden-lights, though, were wrapped in a spiritual blaze beyond his comprehension for eternity. Let it be so.

His thoughts rolled on, growing rich within him as that portentous falling sun hurled itself along its returning path.

“Darkness — Sun Destroyer — Vanguard,” he whispered. “Rebels all. And Devil Star! Where are those who followed the worn paths? But you, Darkness, you, Sun Destroyer, you, Vanguard” — almost he could see the shadowy pained shapes of them beckoning to him from a past beyond recall — “have we not created as no other energy creature created? For there are the golden-lights.”

His thoughts dreamed on; the strangely visible constructions of his inner mind seemed to glitter their accord.

“The golden-lights know what you never knew,” he dreamed. “The answer to life itself. But even I, in these last moments, see a portion of that distant answer. Yes, Darkness! Life the rebel — the mighty force that combats the entropic gradient of the universe. Let the universe slope down, but life eternally moves upward, building on its own discarded forms. And life will rebuild all that is.

“Were we ourselves not changelings, mutants with strange powers? And it was the dark rebel within us that made us so! The dark rebel, that moves as it will.”

Piercing through to him from some outer circle of being came shrill warning. He ignored it. Let the surface awareness of him thrash about, in terror of that which was to happen. He would not return to it. He was here, his bodiless entity, watching life function in dauntless disobedience to the laws lifeless destiny laid down.

That glowing particle, that was himself as well, was far down into its parent system, moving swiftly along the path it had chosen for itself. Now, because of this choice, would come the rearrangement of this vast webwork around him. New thoughts, different outlooks, and volition that thwarted destiny. For destiny ruled that a purple-light must die in one certain manner.

Destiny could not rule life’s dark rebel.

Again the warning, the clamorous scream to return, to fight. He would have none of it. He felt a tender pity for that being whose mere awareness was obedient to what the stresses and strains of his vast body demanded. He would not return.

The dark rebel struck.

In the timeless moment of its striking all space seemed to still. And the clamoring thoughts of Oldster, that aged being, stilled as well. His animal struggles ceased. Alone in his mausoleum of darkness, he was filled with a pulsing wonder. He felt the forcefields girding his great body together losing their prime binding energy.

And then expansion.

The chill of horror returned to him. “I am dying,” he whispered. And that horror was abruptly gone. He looked about him, peering into the darkness that would show him nothing. Then he remembered that which he had seen in his inner being. The dark rebel falling, aimed true and striking. The cataclysm that followed, the white puffing rings of concentric explosion, the pell-mell exchange of suns.

The rearrangement of desire.

And in full measure the meaning of that astounding event came. The thought hummed and swelled, until he was flinging it out beyond him in mocking wave upon wave, into the face of that universe which had mocked him with its dead answers. In this last moment of expansion, the pain and formless searching of his years vanished in the ultimate triumph. He had had choice between two events, that of being and that of not-being. Without intervention he had chosen. He was content. It was the time of glory.