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  People of the Darkness

  Ross Rocklynne

  NEBULA NOMINEE’S “FANTASY MASTERPIECE”

  Nebula nominee Ross Rocklynne’s awe inspiring cosmic masterpiece, People of the Darkness is a science fiction classic of “vast, nebula-like beings and follows their life courses through billions from galaxy to galaxy.” (The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction)

  Into the Darkness (1940)

  Daughter of Darkness (1941)

  Abyss of Darkness (1942)

  Revolt of the Devil Star (Variant Title: Rebel of the Darkness) (1951)

  Ross Rocklynne

  PEOPLE OF THE DARKNESS

  A Generational Saga of Living Nebula

  To my sister Olive

  and my brother Clyde,

  and all the words and games.

  INTRODUCTION

  Nebula nominee Ross Rocklynne’s awe inspiring cosmic masterpiece, People of the Darkness is a science fiction classic of “vast, nebula-like beings and follows their life courses through billions from galaxy to galaxy.” (The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction) Rocklynne was nominated for the Nebula in 1972 for his novelette, “Ching Witch!,” and People of the Darkness showcases his talents at their height. SF historian/critic Sam Moskowitz lauds Rocklynne as “a successful exponent of telling the story from the viewpoint of the alien,” and hails People of the Darkness as a “fantasy masterpiece of intelligent spiral nebula.”

  In this book you will encounter one of the most amazing casts of characters in all of science fiction — and not a single one is a human! You will meet Darkness, who rebelled against the ancient teachings of his people and set off on an impossible quest in search of other realms and other life. Sun Destroyer, whose delight was to demolish the solar systems other of her kind built the same way a kid kicks over someone else’s sandcastle — until she met Darkness. Yellow Light, offspring of Darkness and Sun Destroyer, who renewed his parents’ quest for other realms and beings, but whose destiny was to found a new, vital race to replace the dying People of the Darkness. And, finally, Devil Star, whose act of defiance would paradoxically make him his people’s guardian — and the one to finally solved the secrets of life and death. Plus a host of other characters, Darting Green Ray, Swift, Star Dust, Great Red Sun, Dark Fire — and the Oldster.

  It’s no wonder the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says that Rocklynne, “who specialized in space opera constructed around ingenious scientific problems,” possessed “one of the most interesting… florid imaginations of his time,” and the SF Source Book cautions “his work should not be judged by the standards of his pulp contemporaries.” While Ray Bradbury hailed Rocklynne’s writing as “Unusual and unexpected!” and says, “I liked People of the Darkness!”

  Here is how Ross Rocklynne described himself in a wartime issue of Planet Stories (May 1943), at about the time he was writing the People of the Darkness saga:

  “I was born February 21, 1913, in Cincinnati, Ohio. But before I explain anything else, let me account for the way the twig was bent: My earliest memories concern my father’s workshop, wherein he invented perpetual-motion machines. None of these machines ever worked, by the way. But I always waited in wide-eyed interest. It was only many years later, when, as a result of my admiration of these gadgets, I began to read science-fiction, that I was able to point out to my father the fallacies of his ambition. However, he was a die-hard (as his father was before him). And he never gave up. A peculiar commentary on this is that not so long before my father’s death, I was enthusiastically at work, collaborating with him on a perpetual-motion machine myself. I had mathematically proved that the theory was sound. We stayed in this happy state of mind for a long time, while the machine slowly grew. But long before its completion, I doubted my own arithmetic (which never had been my strong point) and busied myself drawing diagrams no one but I understood. Alas, these diagrams conclusively disproved what my mathematics had proved, and humanity was out a cheap source of power.

  “To get back to a chronological order, at various times in my life I have washed windows, scrubbed floors, tended guinea pigs and furnaces; worked in department stores as flunky, stock boy, supply clerk, assistant purchasing Agent; spent some interesting and instructive years at the Evening School of the University of Cincinnati, held the position of assistant editor on an Evening paper.

  “I have been happily married somewhat over a year, and the girl is a writer herself; which makes it about perfect, doesn’t it? Since before the war, we have been to the West Coast, back East again, and have returned to California. To bring this up to date, at present we stand alone in the swollen city of Los Angeles, with virtually no permanent address, watching defense workers rush in from every direction. There is a stir in the air, a controlled excitement: Uncle Sam is rolling up his sleeves; and the date of the knock-out punch, we feel, is the only uncertainty.”

  Rocklynne modestly concludes: “Unhappily (like a lot of other writers who find themselves writing an autobiographical sketch at the behest of a hopeful editor) my existence has been almost placid, certainly disappointing from an adventurous standpoint. In a way, though, I am happy about this. I write stories and have my adventures that way. I can only hope that the readers are happy about the situation, too.”

  We are sure that when you have finished People of the Darkness, you will be happy about the situation, too. (And look for Ching Witch! & Other Science Fiction Stories, the first ever collection of Ross Rocklynne’s shorter work, coming soon from Renaissance E Books.)

  Jean Marie Stine

  02/7/2003

  BOOK ONE

  Into the Darkness

  The Story of a Creature of Light and of Dark. His Flight Across Lightlessness. His Life, His Love, His End. The Beginning, though not the Real Beginning, of the quest.

  Chapter I

  Birth of “Darkness”

  Out in space, on the lip of the farthest galaxy and between the two star clusters, there came into being a luminiferous globe that radiated for light-years around. A life had been born!

  It became aware of light; one of its visions had become activated. First it saw the innumerable suns and nebulae whose radiated energy now fed it. Beyond that it saw a dense, impenetrable darkness.

  The darkness intrigued it. It could understand the stars, but the darkness it could not. The babe probed outward several light-years and met only lightlessness. It probed further, and further, but there was no light. Only after its visions could not delve deeper did it give up, but a strange seed had been sown; that there was light on the far edge of the darkness became its innate conviction.

  Wonders never seemed to cease parading themselves before this newly-born. It became aware of another personality hovering near, an energy creature thirty million miles across. At its core hung a globe of subtly glowing green light one million miles in diameter.

  He explored this being with his vision, and it remained still during his inspection. He felt strange forces plucking at him, forces that filled him to overflowing with peacefulness. At once, he discovered a system of energy waves having marvelous possibilities.

  “Who are you?” these waves were able to inquire of that other life.

  Softly soothing, he received answer.

  “I am your mother.”

  “You mean…?”

  “You are my son — my creation. I shall call you… Darkness. Lie here and grow, Darkness, and when you are many times larger. I will come again.”

  She had vanished, swallowed untraceably by a vast spiral nebula, a cloud of swiftly twisting stardust.

  He lay motionless, strange thoughts flowing. Mostly he wondered about the sea of lightlessness lapping the shore of this galaxy in which he had been born. Sometime later
he wondered about life — what life was, and its purpose.

  “Whenshe comes again, I shall ask her,” he mused. “Darkness, she called me — Darkness!”

  His thoughts swung back to the darkness.

  For five million years he bathed himself in the rays that permeate space. He grew. He was ten million miles in diameter.

  His mother came; he saw her hurtling toward him from a far distance. She stopped close.

  “You are much larger, Darkness. You grow faster than the other newly-born.” He detected pride in her transmitted thoughts.

  “I have been lying here, thinking,” he said. “I have been wondering, and I have come to guess at many things. There are others, like you and myself.”

  “There are thousands of others, I am going to take you to them. Have you tried propellants?”

  “I have not tried, but I shall.” There was a silence. “I have discovered the propellants,” said Darkness, puzzled, “but they will not move me.”

  She seemed amused. “That is one thing you do not know, Darkness. You are inhabiting the seventeenth band of hyperspace; propellants will not work there. See if you can expand.”

  All these were new things, but instinctively he felt himself expand to twice his original size.

  “Good. I am going to snap you into the first band — there. Try your propellants.”

  He tried them and, to his intense delight, the flaring lights that were the stars fled past. So great was his exhilaration that he worked up a speed that placed him several light-years from his mother.

  She drew up beside him. “For one so young, you have speed. I shall be proud of you. I feel, Darkness,” and there was wistfulness in her tone, “that you will be different from the others.”

  She searched his memory swirls. “But try not to be too different.”

  Puzzled at this, he gazed at her, but she turned away. “Come.”

  He followed her down the aisles formed by the stars, as she accommodated her pace to his.

  They stopped at the sixth galaxy from the abyss of lightlessness. He discerned thousands of shapes that were his kind moving swiftly past and around him. These, then, were his people.

  She pointed them out to him. “You will know them by their vibrations and the varying shades of the colored globes of light at their centers.”

  She ran off a great list of names, which he had no trouble in impressing on his memory swirls.

  “Radiant, Vibrant, Swift, Milky, Incandescent, Great Power, Sun-eater, Light-year—”

  “Come, I am going to present you to Oldster.”

  They whirled off to a space seven light-years distant. They stopped, just outside the galaxy. There was a peculiar snap in his consciousness.

  “Oldster has isolated himself in the sixth band of hyperspace,” said his mother.

  Where before he had seen nothing save inky space, dotted with masses of flaming, tortured matter, he now saw an energy creature whose aura fairly radiated old age. And the immense purple globe which hung at his core lacked a certain vital luster which Darkness had instinctively linked with his own youth and boundless energy.

  His mother caught the old being’s attention, and Darkness felt his thought rays contact them.

  “Oh, it’s you, Sparkle,” the old being’s kindly thoughts said. “And who is it with you?”

  Darkness saw his mother, Sparkle, shoot off streams of crystalline light.

  “This is my first son.”

  The newly-born felt Oldster’s thought rays going through his memory swirls.

  “And you have named him Darkness,” said Oldster slowly. “Because he has wondered about it.” His visions withdrew, half-absently. “He is so young, and yet he is a thinker; already he thinks about life.”

  For a long time Oldster bent a penetrating gaze upon him. Abruptly, his vision rays swung away and centered on a tiny, isolated group of stars. There was a heavy, dragging silence.

  “Darkness,” Oldster said finally, “your thoughts are useless.” The thoughts now seemed to come from an immeasurable distance, or an infinitely tired mind. “You are young, Darkness. Do not think so much; so much that the happiness of life is destroyed in the overestimation of it. When you wish, you may come to see me. I shall be in the sixth band for many millions of years.”

  Abruptly, Oldster vanished. He had snapped both mother and son back in the first band.

  She fixed her vision on him. “Darkness, what he says is true — every word. Play for awhile — there are innumerable things to do. And once in great intervals, if you wish, go to see Oldster; but for a long time do not bother him with your questions.”

  “I will try,” answered Darkness, in sudden decision.

  Chapter II

  Cosmic Children

  Darkness played. He played for many million years.

  With playmates of his own age, he roamed through the endless numbers of galaxies that composed the universe. From one end to another he dashed in a reckless obedience to Oldster’s command.

  He explored the surfaces of stars, often disrupting them into fragments, sending scalding geysers of belching flame millions of miles into space. He followed his companions into the swirling depths of the green-hued nebulae that hung in intergalactic space. But to disturb these mighty creations of nature was impossible. Majestically they rolled around and around, or coiled into spirals, or at times condensed into matter that formed beautiful hot suns.

  Energy to feed on was rampant here, but so densely and widely was it distributed that he and his comrades could not even dream of absorbing more than a trillionth part of it in all their lives.

  He learned the mysteries of the forty-seven bands of hyperspace. He learned to snap into them or out again into the first or true band at will. He knew the delights of blackness impenetrable in the fifteenth band, of a queerly illusory multiple existence in the twenty-third, and an equally strange sensation of speeding away from himself in an opposite direction in the thirty-first, and of the forty-seventh, where all space turned into a nightmarish concoction of cubistic suns and galaxies.

  Incomprehensible were those forty-seven bands. They were coexistent in space, yet they were separated from each other by a means, which no one had ever discovered. In each band were unmistakable signs that it was the same universe. Darkness only knew that each band was one of forty-seven subtly differing faces, which the universe possessed, and the powers of his mind experienced no difficulty in allowing him to cross the unseen bridges, which spanned the gulfs between them.

  And he made no attempts toward finding the solution — he was determined to cease thinking, for the time being at least. He was content to play, and to draw as much pleasure and excitement as he could from every new possibility of amusement.

  But the end of all that came, as he had suspected it would. He played, and loved all this, until…

  He had come to his fifty-millionth year, still a youth. The purple globe at his core could have swallowed a sun a million miles in diameter, and his whole body could have displaced fifty suns of that size. For a period of a hundred thousand years he lay asleep in the seventh band, where a soft, colorless light pervaded the universe.

  He awoke, and was about to transfer himself to the first band and rejoin the children of Radiant, Light-year, Great Power and all those others.

  He stopped, almost dumbfounded, for a sudden, overwhelming antipathy for companionship had come over him. He discovered, indeed, that he never wanted to join his friends again. While he had slept, a metamorphosis had come about, and he was as alienated from his playmates as if he had never known them.

  What had caused it? Something. Perhaps, long before his years, he had passed into the adult stage of mind. Now he was rebelling against the friendships, which meant nothing more than futile play.

  Play! Bouncing huge suns around like rubber balls, and then tearing them up into solar systems; chasing one another up the scale through the forty-seven bands, and back again; darting about in the immense spaces betwee
n galaxies, rendering themselves invisible by expanding to ten times normal size.

  He did not want to play, and he never wanted to see his friends again. He did not hate them, but he was intolerant of the characteristics, which bade them to disport amongst the stars for eternity.

  He was not mature in size, but he felt he had become an adult, while they were still children — tossing suns the length of a galaxy, and then hurling small bits of materialized energy around them to form planets; then just as likely to hurl huger masses to disrupt the planetary systems they so painstakingly made.

  He had felt it all along, this superiority. He had manifested it by besting them in every form of play they conceived. They generally bungled everything, more apt to explode a star into small fragments than to whirl it until centrifugal force threw off planets.

  I have become an adult in mind, if not in body; I am at the point where I must accumulate wisdom, and perhaps sorrow,he thought whimsically. I will see Oldster, and ask him my questions — the questions I have thus far kept in the background of my thoughts. But, he added thoughtfully, I have a feeling that even his wisdom will fail to enlighten me. Nevertheless, there must be answers. What is life? Why is it? And there must be another universe beyond the darkness that hems this one in.

  Darkness reluctantly turned and made a slow trail across that galaxy and into the next, where he discovered those young energy creatures with whom it would be impossible to enjoy himself again.

  He drew up, and absently translated his time standard to one corresponding with theirs, a rate of consciousness at which they could observe the six planets whirling around a small, white-hot sun as separate bodies and not mere rings of light.

  They were gathered in numbers of some hundreds around this sun; and Darkness hovered on the outskirts of the crowd, watching them moodily.