The pulse of life fluttered, then increased in strength with spasmodic, dreadful surges. Yellow Light leaped into the breach, hammering at it with his thoughts.
Then came a muttering, a mumble, a restless jumble of agonized thought, a great wave of delirious horror. Spellbound with the futilely lashing thoughts of the creature, Yellow Light was held frozen.
The formless thought ceased abruptly. A hollow, stricken voice, as if borne on leaden wings from a distance infinitely far, said, “Go away! Away! There is nothing for you here. I am tortured again!”
“I did not mean to bring you pain,” said Yellow Light violently.
“But you have brought me pain, a pain I thought to escape,” the old creature burst out rackingly. “Who are you? Why do you torture me? Ah, I will soon know.”
Yellow Light’s thought swirls were seized with tight bands of energy which relentlessly, cruelly explored through the accumulated memory of his life. The probing bands withdrew, and the thousands of years, pregnant with foreboding silence, trooped away.
Then came Oldster’s dull whisper, “Yellow Light is his name — Vanguard! And I had thought myself done with Sun Destroyer! Oh, Yellow Light, whose true name is Vanguard, there is an evil heritage on you, and I see no end, no end!”
The fluttering fingers of horror touched at Yellow Light’s brain.
“My true name is Vanguard,” he whispered, but before he could complete the thought, Oldster reached into him, and one by one tore away the veils drawn over his identity. Acutely revealed was the story of that creature from an age long-gone; of Darkness, the dreamer, who had plunged across the sea of lightlessness, in search of a purpose, and had found it only in death; of Sun Destroyer, his daughter, who had returned along his path only to die in the mad fantasies of her disordered mind, after bringing into being her child, Vanguard.
“Vanguard!” Yellow Light said starkly. “That is my true name! But — but Oldster! Death — birth! I understand none of these.”
“Nor shall you.” It seemed as if Oldster’s memory were fleeing backward along a trail which took him to the day when he was young. He muttered restlessly, “What might I not have spared myself had I not sought the answer to those problems. Oh, Yellow Light — Vanguard — leave me. Leave me! I cannot help you. I am lost; we are all lost, and there is no answer!”
Yellow Light surged forward in violent denial.
He charged passionately, “There is an answer, Oldster. And you know that answer. I have searched. I do not know how long I have searched! What is it? What is it that haunts me, Oldster, so that it drips on me like an acid, eating at me until I am mad with the desire to find it? I am lost if you do not tell me!”
“There is no real answer to your dream,” Oldster said dully. “My son, return to the inner third band!”
“The inner third band?” The scalding memory of the dream dimension returned. “I cannot! There is nothing for me there, Oldster. I will not live in dreams!”
“You have lived in nothing else,” said Oldster sadly. His thoughts left Yellow Light momentarily, then came back.
He whispered, so that his voice was barely audible, “If you really wish to find that which you seek — there is Star Glory!”
“Star Glory!” and suddenly he was shaking, his mind seared unaccountably with the thought.
“But — but—” he whispered. But Oldster had drawn his thought bands in around him and would say no more.
Yellow Light hung in darkness unutterable, palsied with an unknown horror. Star Glory! He must seek her out, and his search would at last be rewarded. But why? Why?
He dropped to the first band of true space, and, with erratic, strangely eager propellants, lashed himself across the boundless star fields. He found her, in the course of a thousand years.
He intercepted her course, and for long moments, quivering with his mad exultation, he held her visions with his own.
She, in turn, returned his stare, and he sensed a peculiar change coming over her.
She spoke at last, faintly:
“You are strange. Yellow Light, strange. Why is it that you are here?”
He was caught in the grip of an emotion he could not name. “I do not know, Star Glory! I have been sent by Oldster — I do not know why I have been sent!”
For a long time she bent on him the growing glance of cruelty and paradoxical tenderness.
She whispered at last. “Then I think that I know. Yellow Light, follow me!”
He poised, trembling with unexplainable dread. He watched Star Glory as she receded, and then it seemed to be the last he knew. A nimbus settled over his thought swirls, and he remembered only that under the terrible spell of her receding green light, he had cast out his own yellow-specked purple light. Two globes — green and purple — collided in midspace, merged, and became a pulsing ball of luminescence.
He stared, gripped with a sense of loss.
Star Glory he saw. She hovered over the white, pulsing ball, and he knew with poignant certainty that it was life — life that he and Star Glory had created. And she, though her green light had merged with his purple, had magically acquired another light, while his was gone, gone!
“Gone!” he cried in agony, and did not know why he was agonized. Suddenly he saw Star Glory and the energy child disappear.
He went after her in a frenzy, and found her again in the seventeenth band of hyperspace. She was hovering in strange benediction over her child. Yellow Light moved toward her in leaden motion.
“Star Glory,” he whispered.
She turned toward him, and read his unspoken question. Her thoughts were cold.
“You will die,” she said heartlessly.
“No!” he cried.
“Yes. Thus it is, thus it must be.” She was impersonal, uncaring. “Oldster wishes to die. You knew that. It is not strange that he should point out the path of death to you. Perhaps,” she added, with demon humor, “it is what you were searching for!”
“I did not search for that,” he said dully. He stared at the energy child, hanging pendant in the seventeenth band, where propellants were useless. A memory, a longing that was old, tugged at the roots of his brain. But he could not place it. A great, deathly weariness was working grimly in his body.
“My purple light,” he said helplessly. “It is gone. But yours has returned!”
“And will return three times more,” she uttered, and there was the shadow of her own eventual doom hanging over her words. She rotated restlessly. “Go, Yellow Light! There is a law which governs us — and I can do nothing about it. Had you been like Oldster, if in your wisdom you had known the secret of the purple and green lights… ah, Oldster brought his own torture on himself. He will never die!”
She turned from him, and so he left her, the talons of his dissipation into the energy from which he had been formed clawing at his propellants, rendering them almost entirely useless.
He drifted without purpose the length of a galaxy, striving to drink into him as much of the beauty around him as he could before he was negated. It was useless. His brooding thoughts returned to Oldster and the great treachery that Oldster had practiced on him. Bitter fury goaded him to a flaming, zigzag flight. He remembered suddenly the soaring grace of his flight in the inner third band. And so came the great thought!
The inner third band! His memory swirls throbbed with excitement. He could go there!
“Oldster, Oldster,” he whispered, the wild fire of hope burning in him. “Had I listened! But it cannot be too late!”
It could not be too late. It must not be! He threw himself into the third band with his waning strength, tremulous with thought of the dream-life that awaited him. He flung himself at the impalpable dark skin behind which lay the dream dimension.
It was as if he had flung himself against a solid wall.
“I am lost,” he said starkly, “and my search is finished—”
Chapter V
A Race is Born
“I have been
waiting for you,” said Oldster.
“You betrayed me!” said Yellow Light, trembling with dread. “I have come before you to die, Oldster! You will know that I am dying; you will know that it is you who have caused it, and you will never forget. You will live in horror of the memory, but it will return, and your sleep will be broken and you will never be at peace again!”
The aged creature’s thought rays rested on his rioting memory swirls with singularly gentle touch.
“Peace, my son,” he whispered, his words aching. “I have given you more than you could have given yourself, Yellow Light! You stayed in the seventeenth band too long and emerged to find yourself lacking in the great grace and power of motion which other energy creatures possessed. Such is the penalty — such was the heritage of Sun Destroyer, your mother. But there was another heritage which she gave you, all unwittingly. It was fitting that she called you Vanguard, for you are the vanguard of a new race, of which the yellow light is the symbol!”
The dying creature drew back a slow light-year.
“You mean—” He groped with the blinding thought.
“Yes, yes!” Oldster’s thoughts reached out with swelling strength and glory. “You are a step upward along the path of evolution, and you have given birth to a new race. Another mystery of space has been shattered. And there are more, Yellow Light, more! Long, winding and bitter is the path, but it ascends to a land of promise I cannot guess at.
“I see a glimmering — for a moment I understand the enormous purpose behind the cycle of life and death. The years have fled, and I have thrust all the bitterness of my life behind me, but now and anon, in my death-striving dreams, I see a tremendous purpose. Whither? I do not know. But you are a touchstone on the path, as was that first creature whose mutation allowed him ascent into the hyperspatial universe, as were a million, a billion others. From them stemmed the new races. The Star Glories, the others, the unnumbered billions of others, were shadows with no meaning. My son,” Oldster whispered, and it seemed that he himself felt the rare brilliance of ultimate meaning, “you are great!”
Yellow Light hung exhausted, no longer fighting, bathed in the blinding significance of the word. Great! He dreamed a dream that lay billions of years in the future.
“Yellow lights,” he muttered. “I see them — and they are no longer different. And from me they stem!”
He fondled the thought with languid, luscious introspection, hardly aware that every passing moment brought him nearer extinction. He passed in thought over the mad, mad years of his life, as he blundered through the heavenly corridors, seeking and not finding, stretched on the agonizing rack of his own thoughts, tortured with dreams. Now it seemed as if all memory of his pain were softened.
“Yellow Light,” he thought sadly. “I should have been proud of my name.”
He could no longer focus thoughts. He knew he was dying. And yet, dying before the wise old creature, a lost remembrance plagued him.
He fought with himself. “I must know,” he thought in stark horror, knowing that he could no longer form the words. “I must. Oldster! Let me die then — but first let me know! For what did I search?”
Soothingly, faintly, gently came the answering whisper. “For the seventeenth band. But it was beyond recall — the seventeenth band, backward in time the length of your life when you were but a child; when you knew nothing of life, even your own; when the universe seemed to sing a great song of peace. You remember, Yellow Light! Now you know that your search was in vain, save in death!”
Oldster’s voice was gone, and Yellow Light sank into an abyss from which even he knew there would be no return. “Save in death,” he repeated, as the darkness yawned; it was truth.
He thought he heard the pounding, soundless rhythm of a swelling song as the universe singled him out and made him the center of being, the hub of the great wheel, the master, the supreme audience. It was good. He imagined himself to be very young again.
BOOK FOUR
Rebel of the Darkness
The Quest Begins. Devil Star Roams the Galaxies. Pursues His Demons of Light and of Dark Who in the End Pursue Him. His Life, His Lovelessness, His End: the Quest Is Now Most Wondrously Concluded.
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 memor
y, 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?”
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