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?<
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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.”
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