People of the Darkness
Page 17
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.
; OTHER PAGETURNER SCIENCE FICTION
The Star Kings — Edmond Hamilton
Metropolis — Thea von Harbou
Rat in the Skull & Other Off-Trail Science Fiction — Rog Philllips
The Involuntary Immortals — Rog Phillips
The House on the Borderland — William Hope Hodgson
The Interplanetary Huntress — Arthur K. Barnes
The Interplanetary Huntress Returns — Arthur K. Barnes
Future Eves: Classic Science Fiction About Women by Women — (ed) Jean Marie Stine
A Martian Odyssey — Stanley G. Weinbaum
Women of Wood & Other Stories — A. Merritt
This Island Earth — Raymond F. Jones
Ki-Gor, Lord of the Jungle — John Peter Drummond
Scout — Otavio Ramos, Jr.
Tarzan of the Apes — Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Return of Tarzan — Edgar Rice Burroughs
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
Copyright 1973 by Ross L. Rocklin
Reprinted by permission of the Ackerman Agency.
“Into the Darkness,” Astonishing Stories , June, 1940; Copyright 1940 by Fictioneers, Inc.; Copyright 1968 by Ross L. Rocklin.
“Abyss of Darkness,” Astonishing Stories , December. 1942; Copyright 1942 by Fictioneers, Inc.; Copyright 1970 by Ross L. Rocklin.
“Daughter of Darkness,” Astonishing Stories , November, 1941; Copyright 1941 by Fictioneers, Inc.; Copyright 1969 by Ross L. Rocklin.
“Rebel of the Darkness,” (as “Revolt of the Devil Star”) Imagination , February, 1951; Copyright 1950 by Greenleaf Publishing Co.
Copyright
A Renaissance E Books publication
ISBN 1-58873-162-6
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Copyright © 2003 by Renaissance E Books
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PageTurner Editions
A Futures Past Classic — Selected and introduced by Jean Marie Stine
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