People of the Darkness Read online

  Darkness activated his propellants and dropped into the awful cavity, until he was far beneath its rim and had approached the center of the star where lay that mass of matter which was the source of the Great Energy. To his sight it was invisible, save as a blank area of nothingness, since light rays of no wavelength whatsoever could leave it.

  Darkness wrapped himself around the sphere, and at the same time the two halves of the giant star fell together, imprisoning him at its core.

  This possibility he had not overlooked. With concentrated knots of force, he ate away the merest portion of the surface of the sphere, and absorbed it in him. He was amazed at the metamorphosis. He became aware of a vigor so infinite that he felt nothing could withstand him.

  Slowly, he began to expand. He was inexorable. The star could not stop him; it gave. It cracked, great gaping cracks which parted with displays of blinding light and pure heat. He continued to grow, pushing outward.

  With the sphere of Great Energy, which was no more than ten million miles across, in his grasp, he continued inflation. A terrific blast of malignant energy ripped at him; cracks millions of miles in length appeared, cosmic displays of pure energy flared. After that, the gargantua gave way before Darkness so readily that he had split it up into separate parts before he ever knew it.

  He then became aware that he was in the center of thousands of large and small pieces of the star that were shooting away from him in all directions, forming new suns that would chart individual orbits for themselves.

  He had conquered. He hung motionless, grasping the sphere of Great Energy at his center, along with the mystic globe of purple light.

  He swung his vision on the darkness, and looked at it in fascination for a long time. Then, without a last look at the universe of his birth, he activated his propellants with the nameless Great Energy and plunged into that dark well.

  All light, save that he created, vanished. He was hemmed in on all sides by the vastness of empty space. Exaltation, coupled with an awareness of the infinite power in his grasp, took hold of his thoughts and made them soar. His acceleration was minimum rather than maximum, yet in a brief space of his time standard he traversed uncountable billions of light-years.

  Darkness ahead, and darkness behind, and darkness all around — that had been his dream. It had been his dream all through his life, even during those formless years in which he had played, in obedience to Oldster’s admonishment. Always there had been the thought: what lies at the other end of the darkness? Now he was in the darkness, and a joy such as he had never known claimed him. He was on the way! Would he find another universe, a universe which had bred the same kind of life as he had known? He could not think otherwise.

  His acceleration was incredible! Yet he knew that he was using a minimum of power. He began to step it up, swiftly increasing even the vast velocity which he had attained. Where lay that other universe? He could not know, and he had chosen no single direction in which to leave his own universe. There had been no choice of direction. Any line stretching into the vault of the darkness might have ended in that alien universe…

  Not until a million years had elapsed did his emotions subside. Then there were other thoughts. He began to feel a dreadful fright, a fright that grew on him as he left his universe farther behind. He was hurtling into the darkness that none before him had crossed, and few had dared to try crossing, at a velocity which he finally realized he could attain, but not comprehend. Mind could not think it, thoughts could not say it!

  And — he was alone!Alone! An icy hand clutched at him. He had never known the true meaning of that word. There were none of his friends near, nor his mother, nor great-brained Oldster — there was no living thing within innumerable light-centuries.He was the only life in the void!

  * * *

  Thus, for almost exactly ninety million years he wondered and thought, first about life, then the edge of the darkness, and lastly the mysterious energy field eternally at his core. He found the answer to two, and perhaps, in the end, the other.

  Ever, each infinitesimal second that elapsed, his visions were probing hundreds of light-years ahead, seeking the first sign of that universe he believed in; but no, all was darkness so dense it seemed to possess mass.

  The monotony became agony. A colossal loneliness began to tear at him. He wanted to do anything, even play, or slice huge stars up into planets. But there was only one escape from the phantasmal horror of the unending ebony path. Now and then he seized the globe of light with a tractor ray and hurled into the curtain of darkness behind him at terrific velocity.

  It sped away under the momentum imparted to it until sight of it was lost. But always, though millions of years might elapse, it returned, attached to him by invisible strings of energy. It was part of him, it defied penetration of its secret, and it would never leave him, until, perhaps, of itself it revealed its true purpose.

  Infinite numbers of light-years, so infinite that if written, a sheet as broad as the universe would have been required, reeled behind.

  Eighty million years passed. Darkness had not been as old as that when he had gone into the void for which he had been named. Fear that he had been wrong took a stronger foothold in his thoughts. But now he knew that he would never go back.

  Long before the eighty-nine-millionth year came, he had exhausted all sources of amusement. Sometimes he expanded or contracted to incredible sizes. Sometimes he automatically went through the motions of traversing the forty-seven bands. He felt the click in his consciousness which told him that if there had been hyperspace in the darkness, he would have been transported into it. But how could there be different kinds of darkness? He strongly doubted the existence of hyperspace here, for only matter could occasion the dimensional disturbances which obtained in his universe.

  But with the eighty-nine-millionth year came the end of his pilgrimage. It came abruptly. For one tiny space of time, his visions contacted a stream of light, light that was left as the outward trail of a celestial body. Darkness’ body, fifty million miles in girth, involuntarily contracted to half its size. Energy streamed together and formed molten blobs of flaring matter that sped from him in the chaotic emotions of the moment.

  A wave of shuddering thankfulness shook him, and his thoughts rioted sobbingly in his memory swirls.

  “Oldster, Oldster, if only your great brain could know this—”

  Uncontrollably inflating and deflating, he tore onward, shearing vast quantities of energy from the tight matter at his core, converting it into propellant power that drove him at a velocity that was more than unthinkable, toward the universe from whence had come that light-giving body.

  Chapter V

  The Colored Globes

  In the ninety-millionth year a dim spot of light rushed at him, and, as he hurtled onward, the spot of light grew, and expanded, and broke up into tinier lights, tinier lights that in turn broke up into their components — until the darkness was blotted out, giving way to the dazzling, beautiful radiance of an egg-shaped universe.

  He was out of the darkness; he had discovered its edge. Instinctively, he lessened his velocity to a fraction of its former self, and then, as if some mightier will than his had overcome him, he lost consciousness and sped unknowingly, at steady speed, through the outlying fringe of the outer galaxy, through it, through its brothers, until, unconscious, he was in the midst of that alien galactic system.

  When he regained consciousness, at first he made a rigid tour of inspection, flying about from star to star, tearing them wantonly apart, as if each and every atom belonged solely to him. The galaxies, the suns, the very elements of construction, all were the same as he knew them. All nature, he decided, was probably alike, in this universe, or in that one.

  But was there life?

  An abrupt wave of restlessness, of unease, passed over him. He felt unhappy and unsated. He looked about on the stars, great giants, dwarfs fiercely burning, other hulks of matter cooled to black, forbidding cinders, interga
lactic nebulae wreathing unpurposefully about, assuming weird and beautiful formations over periods of thousands of years. He, Darkness, had come to them, he had crossed the great gap of nothing, but they were unaffected by this unbelievable feat and went swinging on their courses, knowing nothing of him. He felt small, without meaning. Such thoughts seemed the very apostasy of sense, but there they were; he could not shake them off. It was with a growing feeling of disillusionment that he drifted through the countless galaxies and nebulae that unrolled before him, in search of life.

  And his quest was rewarded. From afar, the beating flow of the life energy came. He drove toward its source, thirty or forty light-years, and hung in its presence.

  The being was a green-light, that one of the two classes in which Darkness had divided the life he knew. He himself was a purple-light, containing at his core a globe of pure light, the purpose of which had been one of the major problems of his existence.

  The green-light, when she saw him, came to a stop. They stared at each other.

  Finally she spoke, and there was wonder and doubt in her thoughts.

  “Who are you? You seem… alien.”

  “You will hardly believe me,” Darkness replied, now trembling with a sensation which, inexplicably, could not be defined by the fact that he was conversing with a being of another universe. “But I am alien. I do not belong to this universe.”

  “But that seems quite impossible. Perhaps you are from another space, beyond the forty-seventh. But that is more impossible!” She eyed him with growing puzzlement and awe.

  “I am from no other space,” said Darkness somberly. “I am from another universe beyond the darkness.”

  “From beyond the darkness?” she said faintly, and then she involuntarily contracted. Abruptly she turned her visions on the darkness. For a long, long time she stared at it, and then she returned her vision rays to Darkness.

  “So you have crossed the darkness,” she whispered. “They used to tell me that that was the most impossible thing it was possible to dream of– to cross that terrible section of lightlessness. No one could cross, they said, because there was nothing on the other side. But I never believed, purple-light, I never believed them. And there have been times when I have desperately wanted to traverse it myself. But there were tales of beings who had gone into it, and never returned. And you have crossed it!”

  A shower of crystalline sparks fled from her. So evident was the sudden hero worship carried on her thought waves that Darkness felt a wild rise in spirits. And suddenly he was able to define the never-before experienced emotions which had enwrapped him when first this green-light spoke.

  “Green-light, I have journeyed a distance the length of which I cannot think to you, seeking the riddle of the darkness. But perhaps there was something else I was seeking, something to fill a vacant part of me. I know now what it was; A mate, green-light, a thinker. And you are that thinker, that friend with whom I can journey, voyaging from universe to universe, finding the secrets of all that is. Look! The Great Energy which alone made it possible for me to cross the darkness has been barely tapped!”

  Imperceptibly she drew away. There was an unexplainable wariness that seemed half sorrow in her thoughts.

  “You are a thinker,” he exclaimed. “Will you come with me?”

  She stared at him, and he felt she possessed a natural wisdom he could never hope to accumulate. There was a strange shrinkage of his spirits. What was that she was saying?

  “Darkness,” she said gently, “you would do well to turn and leave me, a green-light, forever. You are a purple-light, I a green. Green-light and purple-light — is that all you have thought about the two types of life? Then you must know that beyond the difference in color, there is another: the greens have a knowledge not vouchsafed the purples, until it is… too late. For your own sake, then, I ask you to leave me forever.”

  He looked at her puzzled. Then, slowly, “That is an impossible request, now that I have found you. You are what I need,” he insisted.

  “But don’t you understand?” she cried. “I know something you have not even guessed at! Darkness — leave me!”

  He became bewildered. What was she driving at? What was it she knew that he could not know? For a moment he hesitated. Far down in him a voice was bidding him to do as she asked, and quickly. But another voice, that of a growing emotion he could not name, bid him stay; for she was the complement of himself, the half of him that would make him complete. And the second voice was stronger.

  “I am not going,” he said firmly, and the force of his thoughts left no doubt as to the unshakable quality of his decision.

  She spoke faintly, as if some outside will had overcome her. “No, Darkness, now you are not going; it is too late! Learn the secret of the purple globe!”

  Abruptly, she wrenched herself into a hyperspace, and all his doubts and fears were erased as she disappeared, He followed her delightedly up the scale, catching sight of her in one band just as she vanished into the next.

  And so they came to the forty-seventh, where all matter, its largest and smallest components, assumed the shapes of unchangeable cubes; even he and the green-light appeared as cubes, gigantic cubes millions of miles in extent, a geometric figure they could never hope to distort.

  Darkness watched her expectantly. Perhaps she would now start a game of chopping chunks off these cubed suns and swing them around as planets. Well, he would be willing to do that for a while, in her curious mood of playfulness, but after that they must settle down to discovering possible galactic systems beyond this one.

  As he looked at her she vanished. “Hmm, probably gone down the scale,” thought Darkness, and he dropped through the lower bands. He found her in none.

  “Darkness… try the… forty-eighth…” Her thought came faintly.

  “The forty-eighth!” he cried in astonishment. At the same time, there was a seething of his memory swirls as if the knowledge of his life were being arranged to fit some new fact, a strange alchemy of the mind by which he came to know that there was a forty-eighth.

  Now he knew, as he had always known, that there was a forty-eighth. He snapped himself into it.

  Energy became rampant in a ceaseless shifting about him. A strange energy, reminding him of nothing so much as the beating flow of an energy creature approaching him from a near distance. His vision sought out the green-light.

  She was facing him somberly, yet with a queerly detached arrogance. His mind was suddenly choked with the freezing sensation that he was face to face with horror.

  “I have never been here before,” he whispered faintly. He thought he detected pity in her, but it was overwhelmed by the feeling that she was under the influence of an outside will that could not know pity.

  Yet she said, “I am sadder than ever before. But too late. You are my mate, and this is the band of… life!”

  Abruptly while he stared, she receded, and he could not follow, save with his visions. Presently, as if a hypnotist had clamped his mind, she herself disappeared, all that he saw of her being the green globe of light she carried. He saw nothing else, knew nothing else. It became his whole universe, his whole life. A peacefulness, complete and uncorroded by vain striving, settled on him like stardust.

  The green globe of light dimmed and became smaller, until it was less than a pinpoint, surrounded by an infinity of colorless energy.

  Then, so abruptly it was in the nature of a shock, he came from his torpor and was conscious. Far off he still saw the green globe of light, but it was growing in size, approaching — approaching a purple globe of light that in turn raced toward it at high velocity.

  “It is my own light,” he thought, startled. “I must have unwittingly hurled it forth when she settled that hypnotic influence over me. No matter. It will come back.”

  But would it come back? The green globe of light was expanding in apparent size, approaching the purple globe which, in turn, dwindled toward it at increasing speed.

 
“At that rate,” he thought in panic, “they will collide. Then how will my light come back to me?”

  He watched intently, a poignantly cold feeling clutching at him. Closer… closer. He quivered. Green globe and purple globe had crashed.

  They met in a blinding crescendo of light that brightened space for light-years around. A huge mistiness of light formed into a sphere, in the center of which hung a brilliant ball. The misty light slowly subsided until it had been absorbed into the brighter light, that remained as motionless as Darkness himself. Then it commenced pulsating with a strange, rhythmic regularity.

  Something about that pulsing stirred ancient memories, something that said, “You, too, were once no more than that pulsing ball.”

  Thoughts immense in scope, to him, tumbled in his mind.

  “That globe is life,” he thought starkly. “The green-light and I have created life. That was her meaning, when she said this was the band of life. Its activating energy flows rampant here.

  “That is the secret of the purple globe; with the green globe it creates life. And I had never known the forty-eighth band until she made it known to me!

  “The purpose of life — to create life.” The thought of that took fire in his brain. For one brief, intoxicating moment he thought that he had solved the last and most baffling of his mighty problems.

  As with all other moments of exaltation he had known, disillusionment followed swiftly after. To what end was that? The process continued on and on, and what came of it? Was creation of life the only use of life? A meaningless circle! He recalled Oldster’s words of the past, and horror claimed him.

  “Life, my life,” he whispered dully. “A dead sun and life — one of equal importance with the other. That is unbelievable!” he burst out.