People of the Darkness

by Ross Rocklynne

  “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.

  BOOK THREE

  Abyss of Darkness

  The Story of a Creature of Light Engulfed in Maiming Dark. His Life, His Deadly Love, the Wondrous Story of His End: the Quest Seems Ended, and yet Barely Has Begun.

  Prologue

  Of darkness the cosmos was made. There was nothing else, nothing — unless one chose to consider the throttled points of brilliance which the darkness, at intervals of unmentionable light-years, permitted to remain in its realm. These were the universes; and, though they stretched without number toward the unseen horizon of space-time, they were so small, so unidimensional in the frightful sea of lightlessness, that they submissively drenched themselves in the overpowering stigma of nonentity, and became part and parcel of the darkness themselves.

  And yet, each point of brilliance swarmed and flowed with the ceaseless, soundless orchestration of atoms, planets, stars and galaxies. Each sun was an atom-torturing note in a swelling cosmic song. Each gap between the galaxies was a rest-beat. Each galaxy was a harmonic undertone to the operatic whole which sang thunderously and unheeded to the unsentient darkness. Churning, restive, tortured by its own inner movements, strong, mighty, the universal rhythm pounded back at itself; the great nebulae writhed greenly; the great suns blasted themselves with their own violent excesses of heat and light and spewed out galaxy-spanning fans of cosmic rays. And there was no director to the chaotic symphony which was now frightful, now gentle, now bestial, now soothing.

  Soothing to him who lay alone in the seventeenth band of hyperspace…

  Chapter I

  Yellow Light

  How long he had lain here, it was beyond him to know.

  But there must have been a beginning for, before there had been sight, there had been thought, and quiet, entombed darkness.

  Therefore there must have been something before the thought.

  But what?

  The trickle of awareness ran first through his memory swirls, the awareness of an outside, a something beyond himself. Thus had his visions unfolded and the magic of the universe flowed into him. The great stars and nebulae presented themselves to him in all their pageantry, and he was dazzled by the splendid hot colors, the poetry of their motions; the soundless songs they sang moved him beyond intelligent thought.

  He was charmed by the opulence of this enormous gesture which the universe made toward him. He was flattered by the radiant energy in which he was laved, and which his embryonic body absorbed into the complex energy patterns that composed his great mass. There was peace and quiet and beauty and thoughtfulness, and a kind, celestial attention to his needs. He lived without strife or the need for understanding in a plentiful Arcadia.

  He was contented.

  He was an energy creature, now more than two million miles in girth and growing apace, and he did not understand the awful, ineradicable shadow that had fallen across his life.

  His mother had not come for him.

  The slow millions of years trooped away to die. The universal restive hum continued, and the universe changed its face. There were new, green-hued nebulae on the stage; there were new stars emerging in fiery grandeur from the wings, with their attendant trains of self-effacing planets. He watched it all, reaching out to the limit of his visions, hanging pendant in his great auditorium, surfeited with his great happiness, and never once hearing a discord. There was no evil in him.

  “Who are you?”

  The low muttering of drums, the harsh clangor of a cymbal, and the heartbeat of the universe seemed to still.

  The uttered thought swept inward to impinge on his memory swirls, and the even, steady, undisturbed throb of his consciousness was broken. Chaos, indecision, wonder, fear — these were his. He faltered in his own mind for the source of the thought. It had not originated there. He swept out with visions.

  Far away, across the blinding white width of a galaxy, he saw the creature. There was a strange shrinkage of his spirits. Life! Life other than his!

  He was quivering with dread, his vanity shattered by a revelation he had not considered in his way of life. Liquid sparks of varicolored flame fled his vast swollen spheroidal body. Life, other than his, to divide the universe with him!

  The incisive question came again, whispering at him with demon intonations. He forced his trembling vision rays to play over the smaller, different body that was pendant a thousand light years distant — a globe of milk-white radiance, throbbing with the slow pulsations of life, and at its heart a glowing ball of green light. Their visions locked and they were staring at each other in hard, bright wonder.

  “I did not know there was other life,” he whispered.

  She answered with scorn, “Did not know there was other life! Where is your mother, large body? What is your name? What are the yellow dots that dance in your purple light?”

  He looked inward on himself, looked at the star-yellow globes which truly marred the perfection of his purple central core. He was floodedwith shame, overflowing from some instinctive well of knowledge, that the great pulsing center of his body was not clear purple. He looked up, dazed. Mother? Name?

  “I do not know what you mean, green light,” he whispered.

  “Why hasn’t your mother come for you?” she demanded sharply. “Why hasn’t she given you a name? Why hasn’t she taken you from the seventeenth band into the first band of true space? How long have you been lying here? You are big and swollen and unnatural. You are big enough to have been plunging through the starways for more than a million, perhaps five million years.”

  He shrank back from the awful indictment her words hurled at him. A great, helpless confusion grew in him. A thousand shafts of shame speared his monstrous vanity, and his pride in himself and his central importance drained away. He was no longer the hub; he existed somewhere on the outer rim of being, and he was whirled without purpose or will in a vast, involuntary arc. It was not he who whirled the universe in its spectacular pageantry, it was he who was whirled: he was but a minor actor in the show.

  He emitted his thought faintly: “Have you a mother? Have you a name?”

  She was staring at him with the cold, instinctive knowledge of her kind, the knowledge that only a green-light had. Buried deep within her, there was a heartless pity for him and the enormity of the thing that had happened to him.

  “Every creature has a mother, strange one. My mother was here but a million years ago. It was then she named me. I am known as Star Glory.” A proud quiver of sparks rained in molten beauty from her tiny body. She added dreamily, “It is a beautiful name. What a pity that you have none.”

  A forlorn resentment rippled over his glowing, swollen sphericity.

  “But I shall have a name,” he flared. “I shall have a name as soon as my mother comes. It shall be as strong a name as yours is beautiful.”

  “Your mother must be dead,” she said heartlessly.

  “No!” he cried, agonized. “No!”

  “Your mother is dead,” she added, goading at his pain with thoughtless knives. “Else why is it that you are still here when you are so big? Nothing,” she said with her chilling wisdom, “could keep your mother away if she were alive. She is dead. But do not worry. Soon my mother, Crescent Moon, will come again. And she will release me. Perhaps she will also release you. In the meantime, let us talk. What do you think of the stars?”

  “They are beautiful, beautiful,” he whispered, shaken in a torrent of fear and wild doubt.

  “Yes, of course, they are beautiful, ” she said complacently. “But they are powerful also. I w
onder if they are more powerful than I. I should like to pit my strength against them, to tear them apart and fling their flaming remnants in thousands of directions.” She brooded for a thousand years on her luscious dream. Presently she added, “Do you think you could destroy a nebula?”

  He had no answer for her in his dumb, stricken misery, and she talked on and on, for thousands of spinning years, laying before him a picture of the universe as described by her mother. He learned of a great concourse of lenticular, egg-and ring-shaped galaxies spreading across the sky for seven billion light-years, the shining motes at last drawing up short on the awful black shore of the solid sea of lightlessness which stretches away forever.

  “My mother told me that once a creature crossed the great abyss. His name was Darkness. I do not believe it. There is nothing beyond our universe.”

  He learned of the forty-seven bands of hyperspace.

  And then came her mother.

  He saw her from afar, her great flawless body with a single ripe star of green light hanging pendant at her core. She emerged from a distant nebula, the brilliance of her flight leaving her a broad fan of incandescent sparks. He heard nothing of what occurred between small and large green-light, for they spoke only to each other.

  His memory swirls writhed with a poignant-sweet eagerness. She would come for him! He would be freed, freed from the awful stigma of nonentity, of namelessness. He would mingle with other youths, green-and purple-lights, and he would cavort with them through the corridors of the stars, dashing in mad abandon the length of a thousand galaxies. He would toss suns and build and shatter solar systems. He would slip up and down the forty-seven bands of hyperspace, and once more the wild, sad, powerful symphony of stars would sound ringingly in his memory swirls. He would have a name.

  He watched them, Mother and daughter, trembling in his eagerness. By some strange knowledge he knew that Star Glory had been snapped from the seventeenth band of hyperspace by her mother. What happened affirmed the knowledge. Star Glory surged into glorious motion, as she tried her heretofore unused and unusable propellants. She lost girth as she fled at increasing speed across the quiescent galaxies and into the far distance. Proudly her mother followed after her. They were gone.