People of the Darkness Read online

  He was aware of the green-light hovering near; yes, she possessed a central light, while his was gone!

  She looked at him sorrowfully. “Darkness, if only you had listened to me!”

  Blankly, he returned her gaze. “Why is it that you have a light, while I have none?”

  “A provision of whatever it was that created us endows the green-lights with the ability to replace their lights three times. Each merging of a purple and green-light may result in the creation of one or several newly-born. Thus the number born overbalances the number of deaths. When my fourth light has gone, as it will some day, I know, I too will die.”

  “You mean, I will… die?”

  “Soon.”

  Darkness shuddered, caught halfway between an emotion of blind anger and mental agony. “There is death everywhere,” he whispered, “and everything is futile!”

  “Perhaps,” she said softly, her grief carrying poignantly to him. “Darkness, do not be sad. Darkness, death does indeed come to all, but that does not say that life is of no significance.

  “Far past in the gone ages of our race, we were pitiful, tiny blobs of energy which crept along at less than light speed. An energy creature of that time knew nothing of any but the first and forty-eighth band of hyperspace. The rest he could not conceive of as being existent. He was ignorant, possessing elementary means of absorbing energy for life. For countless billions of years he never knew there was an edge to the universe. He could not conceive an edge.

  “He was weak, but he gained in strength. Slowly, he evolved, and intelligence entered his mind.

  “Always, he discovered things he had been formerly unable to conceive in his mind, and even now there are things that lay beyond the mind; one of them is the end of all space. And the greatest is, why life exists. Both are something we cannot conceive, but in time evolution of mental powers will allow us to conceive them, even as we conceived the existence of hyperspace and those other things. Dimly, so dimly, even now I can see some reason, but it slips the mind. But Darkness! All of matter is destined to break down to an unchanging state of maximum entropy; it is life, and life alone, that builds in an upward direction. So… faith!”

  She was gone. She had sown what comfort she could. Her words shot Darkness full of the wild fire of hope. That was the answer! Vague and promissory it was, but no one could arrive nearer to the solution than that. For a moment he was suffused with the blissful thought that the last of his problems was disposed of.

  Then, in one awful space of time, the green-light’s philosophy was gone from his memory as if it had never been uttered. He felt the pangs of an unassailable weariness, as if life energies were seeping away.

  Haggardly, he put into effect one driving thought. With lagging power, he shot from the fatal band of life… and death… down the scale. Something unnamable, perhaps some natal memory, made him pause for the merest second in the seventeenth band. Afar off, he saw the green-light and her newly-born. They had left the highest band and come to the band where propellants became useless. So it had been at his own birth.

  He paused no more and dropped to the true band, pursuing a slow course across the star beds of this universe, until he at last emerged on its ragged shore. He went on into the darkness, until hundred hundreds of light-years separated him from the universe his people had never known existed.

  Chapter VI

  Dissipation

  He stopped and looked back at the lens of misty radiance. “I have not even discovered the edge of the darkness,” he thought. “It stretches out and around. That galactic system and my own are just pinpoints of light, sticking up, vast distances apart, through an unlimited ebony cloth. They are so small in the darkness they barely have the one dimension of existence!”

  He went on his way, slowly, wearily, as if the power to activate his propellants were diminishing. There came a time, in his slow, desperate striving after the great velocity he had known in crossing the lightless section, when that universe, that pinpoint sticking up, became as a pinpoint to his sight.

  He stopped, took one longing look at it, and accelerated until it was lost to view.

  “I am alone again,” he thought vaguely. “I am more alone than Oldster ever was. How did he escape death from the green-lights? Perhaps he discovered their terrible secret, and fled before they could wreak their havoc on him. He was a lover of wisdom, and he did not want to die. Now he is living, and he is alone, marooning himself in the lightness band, striving not to think. He could make himself die, but he is afraid to, even though he is so tired of life, and of thinking his endless thoughts.

  “I will die. But no…! Ah, yes, I will.”

  He grew bewildered. He thought, or tried to think, of what came after death. Why, there would be nothing!

  He would not be there, and without him nothing else could exist!

  “I would not be there, and therefore there would be nothing,” he thought starkly. “Oh, that is inconceivable. Death! Why, forever after I died, I would be… dead!”

  He strove to alleviate the awfulness of the eternal unconsciousness. “I was nothing once, that is true; why cannot that time come again? But it is unthinkable. I feel as if I am the center of everything, the cause, the focal point, and even the foundation.”

  For some time this thought gave him a kind of gloating satisfaction. Death was indeed not so bad, when one could thus drag to oblivion the very things which had sponsored his life. But at length, reason supplanted dreams. He sighed. “And that is vanity!”

  Again he felt the ineffably horrible sensation of an incapacity to activate his propellants the full measure, and an inability to keep himself down to normal size. His memory swirls were pulsating and striving, sometimes, to obliterate themselves.

  Everything seemed meaningless. His very drop into the darkness, at slow acceleration, was without purpose.

  “I could not reach either universe now,” he commented to himself, “because I am dying. Poor mother! Poor Oldster! They will not even know I crossed. That seems the greatest sorrow — to do a great thing, and not be able to tell of it. Why did they not tell me of the central lights? With Oldster, it was fear that I should come to the same deathless end as he. With mother — she obeyed an instinct as deeply rooted as space. There must be perpetuation of life.

  “Why? Was the green-light right? Is there some tangible purpose to life which we are unable to perceive? But where is my gain, if I have to die to bring to ultimate fruition that purpose? I suppose Oldster knew the truth. Life just is, had an accidental birth, and exists haphazardly, like a star, or an electron.

  “But, knowing these things, why do I not immediately give way to the expanding forces within me? Ah, I do not know!”

  Convulsively he applied his mind to the continuance of life within his insistently expanding body. For awhile he gloried in the small increase of his fading vigor.

  “Making solar systems!” his mind took up the thread of a lost thought. “Happy sons of Radiant, Incandescent, Great Power, and all the others!”

  He concentrated on the sudden thought that struck him. He was dying, of that he was well aware, but he was dying without doing anything. What had he actually done, in this life of his?

  “But what can I do? I am alone,” he thought vaguely. Then, “I could make a planet, and I could put the life germ on it. Oldster taught me that.”

  Suddenly he was afraid he would die before he created this planet. He set his mind to it, and began to strip from the sphere of tight matter vast quantities of energy, then condensed it to form matter more attenuated. With lagging power, he formed mass after mass of matter, ranging all through the ninety-eight elements that he knew.

  Fifty-thousand years saw the planet’s first stage of completion. It had become a tiny sphere some fifteen-thousand miles in diameter. With a heat ray he then boiled it, and with another ray cooled its crust at the same time forming oceans and continents on its surface. Both water and land, he knew, were necessary to life which was
bound by nature of its construction to the surface of a planet.

  Then came the final, completing touch. No other being had ever deliberately done what Darkness did then. Carefully, he created an infinitesimal splash of life-perpetuating protoplasm; he dropped it aimlessly into a tiny wrinkle of the planet’s surface.

  He looked at the finished work, the most perfect planet he or his playmates had ever created, with satisfaction, notwithstanding the dull pain of weariness that throbbed through the complex energy fields of his body.

  Then he took the planet up in a tractor ray, and swung it around and around, as he now so vividly recalled doing in his childhood. He gave it a swift angular velocity, and then shot it off at a tangent, in a direction along the line of which he was reasonably sure lay his own universe. He watched it with dulling visions. It receded into the darkness that would surround it for ages, and then it was a pinpoint, and then nothing.

  “It is gone,” he said, somehow wretchedly lonely because of that, “but it will reach the universe; perhaps for millions of years it will traverse the galaxies unmolested. Then a sun will reach out and claim it. There will be life upon it, life that will grow until it is intelligent, and will say it has a soul, and purpose in existing.”

  Nor did the ironic humor of the ultimate swift and speedy death of even that type of life, once it had begun existence, escape him. Perhaps for one or ten million years it would flourish, and then even it would be gone — once upon a time nothing and then nothing again.

  He felt a sensation that brought blankness nearer, a sensation of expansion, but now he made no further attempts to prolong a life which was, in effect, already dead. There was a heave within him, as if some subconscious force were deliberately attempting to tear him apart.

  He told himself that he was no longer afraid. I am simply going into another darkness — but it will be a much longer journey than the other.

  Like a protecting cloak, he drew in his vision rays about him, away from the ebony emptiness. He drifted, expanding through the vast, inter-universal space.

  The last expansion came, the expansion that dissipated his memory swirls. A vast, compact sphere of living drew itself out until Darkness was only free energy distributed over light-years of space.

  And death, in that last moment, seemed suddenly to be a far greater and more astounding occurrence than birth had ever seemed.

  BOOK TWO

  Daughter of Darkness

  The Story of a Dark Destroyer. Her Return Flight Across the Great Emptiness. Her Life, Her Lightless Love, Her End: the Seed of the Quest Is Planted Again.

  Prologue

  Deep within the fifteenth band of lightlessness reposed he who had lived so long that he had forgotten the unutterable span of years which stretched back from this moment to the moment of his birth.

  He thought, and wished to forget thought. To forget thought — that was death! Ah, let death come. If it would but creep up on him without his knowledge. If it would not let him know of its restful presence until it had done its work. If it would not give him warning, so that, unwilling, he fought against it with all the subterranean forces of his seventy-million-mile body.

  To fight against death, and to wish it at the same time: this was a battle that could know no winner. Better to wish for nothing, to throttle thought until it subsided to a level where recognition of one’s identity was a difficult thing.

  Completely enclosed, first by the fifteenth band of lightlessness, second by his self-imposed guard against thoughts concerning the outer universe, still there was the trickle of thought that gave him awareness. Outside was the universe, in all its glowing splendor. Outside, too, were other energy creatures, beings such as he himself had been before his eternal quest for knowledge had led him to escape his normal fate — the fate he would now welcome.

  They knew of him who strove not to think, and they respected his desire. For he had become a legend, beloved, yet held in awe.

  Why did he wish to die, and yet could not die? Those young energy creatures could not know; but they did know that to disturb him would be to bring to him an unendurable agony. One ray of light, one single outside thought, would be as a stiletto piercing him with shocking awareness of external things. He had sought a hundred million years for the self-administered anesthetic that would ease him to coma and a blessed semblance of mindless apathy. To disturb him now would be cruelty.

  This was Oldster, this incredibly aged creature, who, some said, was here even before the galaxies, or perhaps before the nebulae, or — who knows? — even before time itself. This was the Old One of the race, he who no longer wished to think, or, if he must think, wished to think of extinction and its blessed relief.

  Chapter I

  Sun Destroyer

  The breadth of this universe would not be comprehended with the naked mind. It was so great in girth that at the utmost, frightful velocity an energy creature could attain, he could never hope to travel from rim to rim in anything less than seven million years.

  Yet this universe was small. Small, and with little significance in the vastness of all. It was but a pinpoint of light breaking the dead monotony of a darkness vast past description. Dark space, dark emptiness. A frightening gulf, in truth, a bottomless pit, an ocean of lightlessness, and utterly without a particle of any kind to give it warmth or character.

  It stretched away…

  But there were other universes, other feeble pinpoints which, in their own right, were huge.

  * * *

  The youths were gathered in numbers of some hundreds around the giant white star, amongst them an air of interest and excitement as they watched the planet-swinger.

  “The system will crumble,” murmured the green-light, Luminescent. “How could it do otherwise? The gravitational stresses! The crisscrossing orbits!”

  “Yet if Swift succeeds in making this new planet settle to a stable orbit, it will form the largest and most complex solar system we have created,” mused her companion, the purple-light Star Eater.

  “Swift will do it,” insisted the nearby green-light Darting Green Ray. “If you remember, he placed the fifty-seventh when we all thought it impossible. By my count, thirty others have been thrown in since then. We could go on up to a hundred or more, no doubt of it.

  “If only Sun Destroyer doesn’t come along now!”

  “If only she doesn’t!”

  Nervous sparkling streams formed about Luminescent’s thirty million miles of coruscant energy.

  If only Sun Destroyer would stay away.

  They turned their full attention on Swift, as if to blot out the darkened thoughts of that roving Sun Destroyer.

  Swift was swinging his planet; he was planet-swinger of the moment, upon whose intuition rested the stability of a new and somewhat top-heavy solar system. Yes, it was an incredibly intricate solar system these energy creatures had built. Millions of years before they had, in their endless search for diversified pleasures, selected this monster star to weave about with a family of planets. Their success, so far, was phenomenal. No less than eighty-seven planets shuttled in stable orbits. There was no attempt to place the orbits in one plane; haphazardly, they lay in every conceivable plane. But as the number of planets had grown, so had their difficulties. Eccentric anomalies were so great that some planets swung in orbits whose major axes might be billions of miles, while the minor axes were but two or three million. These orbits reached in all directions. Now, how to insert another planet directly into the midst of that mad tangle? Such was Swift’s problem.

  He nonetheless solved it, and he solved it adroitly; within the cogent swirls of patterned energy that formed his mind, cunning equations shortened or lengthened, at proper intervals, the tractor beam on the end of which poised his swinging new world, so that its velocity, when finally it was snapped into place, was pared to a nicety. Gracefully, even if somewhat dangerously, it missed direct collision with half a dozen of its fellows; then it whipped about in a complete and marvelously acc
urate ellipse, and serenely assumed its position in the monstrous complexity of orbits.

  Flames of excitement added new light to the burning heavens. Swift accepted congratulations with becoming modesty. He retired into the crowd, giving the creation and placement of the next planet into the care of a huge young green-light who was on the verge of her maturity, though neither she nor her companions were aware of it. Bursting with excess energies as she was, she confidently made her planet, rolling it out upon the sky, flipping it and dancing it on the end of a tractor beam. She began a trial swing; A thousand years later, the planet sped true.

  The thousands of years wore on. Swift placed the hundredth planet.

  If only Sun Destroyer stayed away!

  “If only Sun Destroyer stays away!” whispered Luminescent.

  “If only she does,” muttered Star Eater.

  “But maybe she won’t,” mourned Darting Green Ray.

  “She must!”

  “Perhaps she will.”

  “We’ll hope that she does.”

  The painstaking, infinitely pleasurable task went on. The delicate computations which were now required by that solar mechanism of interweaving bodies were past belief. But these children of the universal spaces were inspired. This was not only a toy with moving parts; it had become an artistic creation. Space was being mastered, matter made to humble itself, the laws of motion forced to bend. The hundred and tenth planet went in.

  White Galaxy started the next planet. He was busy assembling the raw materials when he felt that which he did not wish to feel. The purple luminosity at his core seemed to contract; then racing spangles of purple light flung against his outer rim, where they quivered and powdered into effulgent dust. In fearful spasm, White Galaxy’s visions speared the heavens, looking for the source of his fear.