People of the Darkness

by Ross Rocklynne

“He destroyed our sun!” The purple-light who thus spoke reached out with a pressor ray. Yellow Light was ignominiously jarred a half-million miles to one side.

  “Yellow Light, Yellow Light!” the voices cried. Another pressor ray flung him in an opposite direction. Feebly he tried to resist.

  “I did not destroy it,” he panted, with an upsurge of rage. “I would have added to it successfully if there hadn’t been interference! It wasn’t my fault!”

  A half-dozen rays, tractors and pressors both, stopped his protests, tore at him, pushed him, whirled him, until great foaming puffs of brilliance erupted from his oversize body. In a fury he lashed out with his own rays, but they were clumsily, ineffectively guided.

  The youths cried out their devil’s song: “Yellow Light! Clumsy one! Yellow Light!”

  “Stop it!”

  A new voice burst through the mocking clamor. As if by magic, Yellow Light’s torturers ceased their battering, and he whirled, finally focusing his visions on the newcomer. Star Glory! A great starved eagerness leaped up in him at sight of her flawless milk-white sphericity with the round, clear green light as her core.

  “Stop it, I say!” said Star Glory coldly. The youths stared at her. One of them burst out in excited voice, “Stop it? Why should we stop it? He is a clumsy fool. He destroyed our star with his clumsiness. Look at him! Yellow Light!”

  “Yellow Light, Yellow Light,” the attendant throng muttered half-heartedly.

  “Stop it!” cried Star Glory. She bent on Yellow Light a look of tenderness. She said slowly, “It is not right that you should treat him this way. I was with him in the seventeenth band. He had no mother. He was in the seventeenth band too long. My own mother, Crescent Moon, says that he was in the seventeenth band too long. She rescued him. If he is clumsy or has yellow lights at his core, you must blame it on his long stay in the seventeenth band, not on him. Something happened to him.”

  The encircling youths were quiet and involuntarily drew back from him.

  Yellow Light felt the hot flood of a terrible shame as the meaning of her words flowed into him. He trembled, caught halfway between an emotion of blind anger and futile despair. He held himself rigid, aware of the pity in which the uneasy youths held him.

  Horror mounted within him.

  “Say no more, Star Glory,” he whispered imploringly.

  “I was in the seventeenth band with him, myself,” said Star Glory eagerly. “It was I who told him his mother had died. And then it was I who begged my mother to rescue him.” She rotated languidly, as she repeated her tale again and again.

  Yellow Light writhed in the agony of the indictment all unwittingly hurled at him, as she thus bathed at the center of attention.

  “I can stand it no more!” he cried in a terrible voice.

  Star Glory whirled in surprise, apparently remembering him again. She turned then to the throng as a sudden thought struck her. “I know where there is a sun perhaps larger than the one Yellow Light so clumsily destroyed. We will go there!”

  The youths, already forgetting the object of their late mockery, burst out with eager assent, milling about her.

  “And Yellow Light may go with us!” said Star Glory magnanimously. “Come, Yellow Light!”

  With a final delighted glance at him, she activated her propellants and shot away, the whole concourse of youths streaming after her, a chain of lights sweeping across the newly created galaxies. With blurred visions, Yellow Light stared after them. Then, a lost thought spurring him on, he frantically followed them.

  It was in vain. His flight was cumbersome, pitiful in its fumbling attempt at a great velocity. He stopped finally, the youths gone, shuddering in a horror that was directed at himself.

  I am alone, he thought starkly. I have failed. I am lost! Then, for the second time, came a flashing memory.

  There was something he must find! There was something he must look for! There was something that was for him, and him alone! He thrust out wildly with his visions, hoping that he might see, or sense, the nameless reality of that which must be his. There was flaming matter — that was all.

  But in his mind the flame of his desire burned fiercer and hotter, consuming him in terrible, bright clearness.

  “I will find it!” he vowed passionately to the poised assemblage of stars. “I will find it — and I will know peace!”

  Chapter III

  The Inner Band

  He was young, in the life scale of energy creatures, but thirty million years had passed since his birth. Already there was in him an unyielding black bitterness, tinged with white from afar with the unseen bright beacon of his hope. In search of the fulfillment of an unnamable desire he went, and the millions of years passed.

  He was a specter of the stellar legions, weaving through their impersonal ranks, searching deeply beneath their scalded faces, reeling with the suffocation of his continued failure, as he found no clue. The bands of hyperspace knew him, as he thrust himself into them with laborious mental effort, from first to forty-seventh, where all space was filled with cubistically distorted stars and galaxies. And he knew nothing of the forty-eighth, the chilling band of life. He was a purple-light and did not have the instinctively guarded, natural wisdom of the green.

  He was forty million years in age, and he met Star Glory. He saw her flashing toward him from the far distance, bright with her perfection, searing him with the memory of the awful thing she had revealed to him. He froze, choked with an emotion he could not label.

  “Yellow Light!” She thrust out her parapropellants, halting before him in sharp curiosity. “Where have you been?”

  His great loneliness ebbed from him in a swift tide as he was washed in the cruel tenderness of her gaze.

  He blurted out thickly, “Everywhere, Star Glory! I have sought. I have searched the universe over—” He halted.

  “You have searched?” she demanded. “For what? Oh, Yellow Light, for what have you searched? Is not everything you desire around you?”

  “No,” he whispered, “no!”

  She came closer. “For what do you search?” She was eager with tremulous curiosity, striving to reach into his memory swirls with her thought bands, to reach in and draw out his innermost thoughts. He closed his memory swirls against her, overcome with shame.

  “I do not know for what I search,” he gasped. Then, in bitter frenzy, he cried out, “I do not know! There is in me a terrible yearning! There is something I must find. It is here, Star Glory, and yet it is not here! I have not found it!”

  For long she stared at him, and he was again aware of the wisdom that was hers, a wisdom he could never accumulate, and which she would never divulge. Suddenly she filled him with nameless horror.

  “Leave me, Star Glory!” he whispered. “Leave me!”

  She rotated with slow, piercing thought. “Perhaps,” she said presently, “you are on a fool’s quest, Yellow Light. But I will leave.” She did, though he would have had her back the moment she was gone. He turned and blundered in slow, zigzag fashion in the opposite direction, a vast sickness growing in him — fool’s quest! So Star Glory had said. But she could not be right! Else why this thunderous longing that beat in his mind?

  His meeting with Star Glory had a strange result. Thousands of years later, a group of youths came flashing toward him, circling him in dazzling brilliance as they taunted his clumsiness with their own grace.

  “Yellow Light!” their devil’s song blasted out. “Yellow Light! He searches and does not know for what he searches!”

  “Star Glory would not have told you!” he cried in his mortification, but at the same time he knew that her vanity had betrayed him.

  “Yellow Light!” the dervishes called mockingly. “How can he find what he does not know?”

  “I will find it,” he cried, goaded to consuming rage.

  “He will find it. Yellow Light, the clumsy one, the yellow one, will find it! As well could he solve the mystery of the third band—” And they whirled
away, their knife-thoughts still in his brain.

  He quivered, his thoughts rioting uncontrollably under their mockery, his body expanding and contracting under the dreadful indictment. They were not like him! They did not have to search for a chimera! Poor Yellow Light, the deluded. And then came thought of the third band.

  Slowly the thought unfolded, like a flower that has been in the darkness too long. Then, by some alchemy of the mind, he knew, as he had always known, that he and he alone could solve that mystery. He halted on the threshold of soaring emotions, exploring the astounding discovery.

  It must be what I seek,he thought in awe.The third band! The third band! It is mine!” By laborious mental command he clicked into it.

  Before him stretched the thin, patterned plane of white brilliance that was the three-dimensional universe projected onto a two-dimensional plane. The third band! And beyond the depraved ugliness of compressed galaxies stretched the tight, ebony skin of nothingness, reaching without end into diminishing distances.

  “It is mine,” he whispered with a terrible bright clearness of purpose, and without doubt he hurled himself at that dark curtain behind which mystery, darkly ominous, lay entombed.

  It parted and closed behind him.

  He hung poised, hardly daring to think on the incredible occurrence. But he was here! He was choked with the pride of his feat, a feat no other energy creature had ever accomplished. He was the only living being able to penetrate that dark wall! And though around him was the sheerest darkness, the thought was intoxicating to his senses.

  Darkness! Nothingness! He waited, trembling with the revelation of his mightiness. He sent out his vision rays for what must have been long light-years. There was nothing. A chilling doubt began to arise.

  “No,” he cried at long last. “No! There is something! There is at least a galaxy, a far galaxy, a new universe!”

  And far away, a mote of egg-shaped light, he saw it — a galaxy! Energy formed and foamed away from him as his body contracted to half its size under the emotions of thanksgiving and pulsing wonder. Involuntarily, he lashed out with his propellants and surged into glorious, parsec-eating flight. Through him flowed such strength and power as he had never known. His speed mounted, for the galaxy grew apace, nor did it seem to weave from side to side. He was flying, straight and true, with all the grace of Star Glory herself!

  And still faster! His mind numbed with the utter enigma of that which was happening. He, Yellow Light, the malformed, the ill-born, was great. He was the eater-of-space, the faster-than-light, owner of the inner band! He hungrily drank in the celestial beauty of a million stars as the galaxy subdivided within itself, and now lay spread across the endless darkness with spiral arms outstretched to receive him. And into it he plunged, drenching himself in the radiant energy which throbbed through space, in mad excitement hurling himself in graceful loops and arcs around flaming hulks of matter. From one end of the majestic galaxy to the other he plummeted with incomparable ease and strength, slicing dead red cinders into dozens of separate pieces, hurling them with skill unsurpassed around other stars to form complete, complex solar systems. He devoured stars whole, converted them into energy, then contracted his body until energy coalesced, flowed together and formed new lumps of matter. He flung it from him at light speed, in wanton abandon. Stars exploded as his titanic bullets struck them, and he reformed them with ironic mercy. “I am master!” he exulted, and halted on the edge of the galaxy to see the dead emptiness that stretched away forever. He threw himself into it, and with delight watched the galaxy shrink. It was gone. Again he cast about him with his visions, and a nimbus seemed to settle about his mind.

  “This is the birthplace of matter,” he whispered, and why he thought it he did not know. Yet, it was truth. Untold years, numbering in the tens of millions, seemed to pass through the dark fabric of space, and there was a manifold rustling of energy growing from nothing. He saw the motes of light glowing in prismatic beauty, swirling in eldritch dances as they pirouetted about each other, melted together, and assumed the guise of matter. Matter which darkened and swelled and seethed. Matter which churned against itself, colliding, flaring in molten beauty, gaining mass from a magical source, and thundering upward to sun size.

  All around him space was ruptured and cast out of being, as the illustrious miracle took place. Suns of fiery magnificence swarmed through the infinite extents of a newborn universe. They erupted and clawed at each other with gravitational drags; and planets, steaming hot, shot out from their writhing interiors.

  He moved with the pomp of a conqueror through the flaming legions.

  “This is mine,” he cried, and there was no voice to deny him.

  No voice! No life! The thought was a clanging discord.

  “There must be life!” he cried violently.

  Thus he saw life, and its energy beat strongly at him. Space swarmed with life. He saw groups of energy creatures, far away on the ragged shores of the numberless galactic accretions. They had no knowledge of him, Yellow Light, for they moved and played on, intent on themselves and their own pursuits. In Yellow Light grew a vast cunning. He moved with insolent, powerful grace toward a nearby sun, a lost memory tugging at him.

  He hovered over the star and proceeded to reach out to a nearby galaxy with jabbing tractor rays, bringing back smaller stars. He dropped them, thus adding to the star’s bulk until it became a ravening furnace of indigo violence. It grew, swelled, became a dangerous celestial bomb. And now, with infinite skill and precision, Yellow Light lowered suns delicately, in constant stream, apparently absorbed with lofty fascination in his game, apparently unaware of the energy creatures who, one by one, left their own games as they noted Yellow Light’s tremendously careless skill. They came darting from all directions, tens and hundreds of them. They watched in silent awe as Yellow Light fed the madly undulating rind of the ripening star with a flawless technique which soon had the monster a billion miles through.

  And then they came by the thousands! Yellow Light felt such joy as he had never known. If only Star Glory, if only those other taunting youths, could see him now.

  They pressed closer about him and his bulging star, voiceless. They knew that he did not see them, and if he did see them, would not deign to notice them. He felt a great pity for their smallness, their inferior strength. He cast a side vision at them, sweepingly, carelessly, then returned to his effortless task.

  They appreciated his recognition of them, and finally they could contain themselves no longer. A chant grew, swelling with voluminous roar against his thought swirls.

  “He is great! The greatest of the great! See the star he has built! Oh, there can be none greater than this stranger in our midst. We are the luckless ones, and we writhe in our shame!”

  They whirled about him, in their thousands, crying out their praise, their worship, their intense admiration. His thought swirls rioted uncontrollably as their litany drew him to the pinnacle of his happiness. He saw now that there was truly no limit to his magnificence, and no limit of size to which he could take this star.

  He played his visions over them, as they whirled in awkward adoration, and a hideous, mind-destroying doubt crawled through him. He froze in horror, stricken dumb. It seemed as if his very life-force were draining away.

  “He is great,” said the weaving throng doubtfully.

  The truth burst in him with white-hot intensity. Something crumbled in his mind, and with a wild, mad thought blasting at the hovering expectant thousands, he spurred back and away.

  “Go! Vanish!”

  Space was still and the energy creatures were gone. And, as if they also expected his command, the stars commenced to pale. They faded to redness, to darkness, to non-being, and darkness wrapped itself around him. He shook in a series of trapped convulsions and drew his visions in about him like a shroud. He hung there, unable to still his dreadful thoughts. Then, involuntarily, there was a click in his consciousness. When he again looked, the familiar rank
s of galaxies and stars, unchanged, surrounded him.

  He was back in the first band of true space, and he knew he was mad.

  The inner third band — a dream dimension — and each creature had been but a replica of himself…

  Chapter IV

  The Betrayal

  For long thousands of years, he was afraid to move, for he knew what he would find. He was filled with a dull, dead weariness in which thoughts trickled slowly. And yet one thought stood out with burning clarity. He had not found that for which he sought.

  “I will never find it,” he whispered in agony. Never? The thought was unbearable.

  Then came whispering to him the name that flowed like a great unseen river through space. Crescent Moon, the mother of Star Glory, had twice mentioned him. Oldster — the wise.

  “He must not die!” he cried violently. “He must not sleep! I will find him!”

  Abruptly, his horror was washed away in the great fear that Oldster would die before he, Yellow Light, could speak to him. That must not happen! Oldster would know, and Oldster would answer. He trembled with his longing, and entered the fifteenth band of lightlessness, engulfed in its funereal obscurity.

  “Oldster!” He cried the name out, but in all this infinity he did not feel the beat of a life-force. Oldster was far, far away. Nonetheless, he began his search. He blundered for untold thousands of years that swelled to millions, seeking for the merest wisp of thought that might emanate from the somnolent hulk of the terrifying creature. The invisible light-years fled away as he weaved out from a center. And finally, so faint as to be almost without being, came a single mental vibration, wordless, meaningless.

  He drove toward it, a terrible fright seizing at his mind. The strength of the thought hardly increased, and yet he felt now the faint, pulsing beat of a fading life-force. Oldster it surely must be!

  “Awake! Awake! I am Yellow Light. Do you know of me? I was without a mother. She died. Oldster!” Over and over again, without end, a single goading thought that impinged with monotonous insistency on the dying creature’s brain.