People of the Darkness Page 6

  “My child!” Sun Dust’s distress was tinged with a growing horror. “You do not know what you say.”

  “I know,” the dreaming thoughts of Sun Destroyer came. “Pain was mine when first I knew of the forty-ninth; but then the pain was gone. The forty-ninth band cannot bode ill for me — not if pain goes!

  “Somehow there is a way to shatter the wall between the band of life and the forty-ninth. I shall shatter that wall.”

  Abruptly, she disappeared into a hyperspace.

  Sun Dust did not try to follow. The forty-ninth band! There was, there could be, no such thing. And yet…

  She pursued a slow, spiritless trail across her jeweled amphitheater, and knew a sadness that she should have been instrumental in bringing Sun Destroyer into being.

  Chapter III

  Into the Darkness

  For the fourth time, Sun Destroyer impelled herself into the forty-eighth band, where the universe seemed entirely to lose its true character in an infinity of colorless, rampant life energy. There was in her, though she did not realize it, a growing fright. Thrice she had sought, by sheer momentum, to break through into the forty-ninth band, of whose existence she was as certain as of life itself. Thrice she had failed. Thrice she was forced to forget her failure, and dropped back through the scale of bands, now and then reaching out to split one blazing sun after another. Each time the memory of failure persisted, leading her into an unbearable morass of discontent. For the fourth time she returned.

  “It is naught but a foolish impulse,” she told herself smolderingly. “I shall try again, and then, if I fail, I shall fail forever.”

  Subsequently, there was the clicking in her consciousness which told her that she should indeed have entered the forty-ninth band; but around her was nothing but the life energy of the forty-eighth.

  Momentarily, fury exploded; she stilled it, and with monumental effort thrust the problem from her. She dropped to the first band, that of true space, heartlessly ruptured a magnificent quadruple system of stars, and sped savagely away across the universe, a plundering, destroying creature, in search of creatures her own age.

  “I shall play and destroy and torment my fellow creatures from now on,” she told herself firmly. “Thus I shall seek the happiness which I, as the end product of all life, am deserving of. Ah, the forty-ninth band is but a chimera, which I would follow but to reap my own eternal discontent!”

  The tens of thousands, the millions of years fled. Sun Destroyer truly played, if the viciousness with which she acted could be called play. Idleness could not be tolerated; monotony was to be avoided. Sun Destroyer must destroy. There was a sheer magnificence to be experienced when one sent two stars across a galaxy to crash upon each other with supernal bursts of energy. To dash amongst her own kind, and completely without regard for their desires, to disrupt their carefully wrought toys, to scatter them, to disappear into a hyperspace with a taunting word — such was the rightful action of him who would be eternally without discontent!

  Yes, one must play, and in playing give no thought either to the future or the past. Also, one must be without a goal, and must plan nothing. Goals somehow disappeared or their value diminished as one approached them; plans in turn never held true to themselves, but were forever distorting themselves or even turning full-circle to become the opposite of what they were intended to become. The forty-ninth band? Even if such existed, it could no longer exert its dread fascination upon her. With these rigid attitudes, reasoned Sun Destroyer, she would extract from existence the unending pleasure which, surely, was the rightful heritage of life.

  To hold these rigid attitudes was indeed a task. One must be active, most active, so that doubt of oneself rippled behind and never quite caught up. Sun Destroyer ripped and slid and skidded across the unbounded domain of countless billions of stars; she danced in dervish pattern. No matter that her fellow energy creatures stared and trembled at her approach; no matter that they hated and feared her — she would feed on their hate and their fear, and grow large and strong in her happiness.

  The creatures of the skies knew no rest from Sun Destroyer, and she would give them no rest. They found their playland infested with this green-light who sought them at first to play, ostensibly, but whose ultimate purpose was their discomfort. In their harrowing ordeal, they even dared the terrors of the unknown bands of hyperspace. One of these unknown bands was the nineteenth. In this band, so the story went, strange dimensional tortures abounded. Furthermore, life, should it venture within, would find itself divided witlessly into many parts. Nobody seemed really sure of what actually went on in the nineteenth, although Swift insisted he had discovered its laws.

  “You go in and you find yourself divided into seventeen equal parts,” said Swift.

  “Fourteen,” challenged the young green-light Sky Mist. “So it was told me by some of the older ones of our race when they dared to enter the nineteenth. But it was a terrible experience, and they emerged instantly.”

  “I have entered,” said Swift, “and entered alone. It was frightening, yes, but I didn’t know about that beforehand, and I took a chance and stayed — long enough to count seventeen parts of me, no less.”

  “It was seventeen,” another purple-light agreed. “However, the single time I was there I noted that the real effect of the nineteenth band is to reduce one to one-seventeenth of his true size; coincidentally, he sees sixteen reflections of himself in a kind of hypnotic mental outpouring in which he attempts to compensate for his lost bulk.”

  “An ingenious but impractical theory,” said Swift offhandedly. “Enough of these speculations, however. I myself am off to the nineteenth band for a practical demonstration, if only to myself. Perhaps there are those brave enough to enter with me.”

  Sky Mist began to gather his courage, but still hung back. The others, charmed and at once repelled by the monstrous idea, fluttered uncertainly so that foamy iridescences frothed about their rims. They looked off to the rim of the galaxy which enclosed them, as if seeking other diversion. It was then that the outermost one of the gathering saw Sun Destroyer.

  “Sun Destroyer comes!”

  The heavens seemed to chill and darken.

  “We must go before she sees us!”

  Sun Destroyer was the living impulse of their migration into the nineteenth band. As one, the gathering shared the common thought of escape, escape, no matter where; the nineteenth band of hyperspace opened to receive them. Sun Destroyer plunged across space and hung motionless in the swarming sparkles that were left behind when her quarry vanished. She whirled a furious splatter of vision rays out upon the skies; perhaps each creature was hiding somewhere behind the shield of some great star!

  Sun Destroyer searched first in true space. She ranged through the light-years, at first taking some pleasure in the chase; of the youthful energy creatures she saw no sign. She hung then before the portals of the hyperspaces, and thought with demon humor,They fear the bands of space less than they fear me! She ascended the spaces, skipping, however, from one to another. Some of these bands contained horrors and mysteries unmentionable; others could be worked with if their laws were understood; most were less preferable than the band of true space at any time.

  A million years of searching passed. Fury and astonishment goaded Sun Destroyer. How silent the universe with her fellow youths gone! How loud the painful thoughts within her memory swirls! She must find them; she would again hum with the universal music of her contentment. But where had those fleeing youths immured themselves? The answer came at last: in the nineteenth band! Or, perhaps, the dreaded twentieth band, or the twenty-eighth — but most likely the nineteenth. These were the three bands that Sun Destroyer herself knew nothing of. But she would not let fear even begin in her — she was in the nineteenth band before she ever knew it.

  Sun Destroyer felt the blinding, divisive pain of her entrance into the nineteenth band; but pain she had known before. Her astonishment was greater than her pain, and then came h
er great mirth. For this was indeed the space into which the youths had fled. They lay scattered upon the sky in myriads, pared down to smaller sizes. At a single glance, Sun Destroyer recognized thirteen different and smaller copies of Sun Mist. Swift himself was distributed everywhere. And Sun Destroyer herself! She saw herself in multiplicate form, in spinning glowing beauty that shamed the lesser ones to ugliness. For a moment this unequaled sight charmed her, but then the myriad of her fellows cried in orchestrated voice, “She has found us!” “We must undo the plan!” “She is here, and the crystal will shatter!”

  Sun Destroyer’s multiplicate gaze was an admiring one, but was rigidly curious, for she divined a strangeness here. The youths moved not in their many pared-down forms. It was as if each had been assigned a position which he was reluctant to change. But Sun Destroyer could change position, and in a wicked experiment she did so; she permeated with multiplicate dance the motionless concourse. A cry of protest breathed across the silent and starless sky. “She moves; the equation will be destroyed!”

  “What do you do?” Sun Destroyer’s voice came from the many forms of her. Slyly casual her voice was, as she searched for some clue to the game that was being played. Then she began to see the crystalline pattern of ultimate beauty that the youths presented to themselves. The prime number seventeen was the control factor; thought itself was the moving force that formed the living crystal; and the object was the lessening of pain.

  The seventeen scattered forms of Sun Destroyer shivered and whirled and cascaded their golden gleams within her; her ecstasy was real.

  “Let me play with you,” she whispered. “I will not disturb your peace this time.”

  “Go! Sun Destroyer, you must go!”

  “I must stay.” Her multiplicate forms danced involuntarily. Again protest whirred from the living crystal. “I promise you! You play a game I must be part of. See! I am able to divine the nature of your game. I can place myself as well as any of you.” Her searing thought formed within her and her copies. Rigidly, her seventeen selves assumed a pattern like a template that placed itself three-dimensionally within the complex latticework of the myriad others. The living crystal then was forced to change into a new pattern. Space sang and seemed to snap as the concourse of multiplied energy creatures crystallized anew; but with that new crystallization came such pulsing discordances within Sun Destroyer that even she shuddered with the horror of what she had done. In her eagerness, the equation failed; pain came in corrosive beats. The wail of anger and suffering ate into her thought swirls, so that in spasm and fright she sought to undo her error. But upon the strange heavens of the nineteenth band grew only a crystal of impossible structure and revolting ugliness and unbearable pain.

  A moment that structure held. Then Swift in his many forms broke free of the crystal and it at once broke free of its structure to become a formless and even uglier mass of contorting energy creatures.

  “She has found us,” said Swift. “Even here she would find us. So now we must go, before she leads us into more painful structures. Her thinking is ugly; she could not lead us into beauty.”

  The words were almost impossible for Sun Destroyer to hear. She rejected them almost as soon as they reached her, but not soon enough. The portent of what was happening dazed her; her bewilderment changed to horror.

  “You must not go,” she cried, surging amongst them as if she would block their many exits. “I erred — I did not know. I saw beauty in your form; I only wished to create more perfect beauty. I divined that as you moved toward beauty, you moved from pain. I only wished—”

  Space was empty. Sun Destroyer was alone in the nineteenth band. They would never return, they would not believe that she would wish to seek beauty with them, that she sought painlessness and the surcease that ultimate beauty gave. She looked about on her seventeen separate and small selves, on the gleaming sphericity of the many Sun Destroyers, and she saw her own golden gleams turn ugly and dark within her. She could not bear the sight, and turned from herself toward the blank part of her inner mind.

  But even there was torture.

  Where was not torture?

  The forty-ninth band. But even this thought, dull and old and full of horror, must be turned back again and again before she could face it and again examine it. And in order to face it, she must leave the nineteenth band and its ruined joy; she must depart forever from her seventeen selves, and somehow regain the hope of her single self.

  In the fifteenth band, where resided no light whatsoever, Sun Destroyer restored herself to something of what she had been, and yet knew she could never be the same. Scorn of herself and of her supplicative abasement burned in her mind. She had begged the children of the skies for help; they, in their rightful suspicion, had denied her. Now no one could help her, save as she helped herself. Dread seized her, dread of herself and the need that was plain within her. Now there was but one answer to her life; she had known the answer; she had tried to blot it out, Her mind reeled at the enormity of the thing she must do…

  Several light-years distant, the green-and purple-lights dispiritedly awaited the emergence of Sun Destroyer into the true band of space. They had no doubt she would emerge with taunts that would shame them for what they had attempted in the nineteenth band. They knew she would hover amongst them, challenging them to games only so that she could distribute annoyances. But when Sun Destroyer did emerge and flash toward them it was only to flash on by as if they never existed. Luminiscent stared after her, not so much in relief as in shock. “That is strange,” she whispered. “Strange! There must be something wrong with Sun Destroyer—”

  Sun Destroyer hung before her mother.

  The visions of Sun Dust locked with those of the younger green-light; puzzlement mixed with dread was in her gaze.

  “What is it, my daughter?” she queried doubtfully. “You have not thus voluntarily come to me in many millions of years.”

  Languidly Sun Destroyer rotated on a gradually changing axis. “You have two other children now who show you the respect you demand, mother,” she said casually.

  Sun Dust’s inner green light seemed to darken; already three of her green-lights were gone. One remained to her, and when that one went also she would die.

  Sun Dust was sad, not because of her coming end, but because her child should remind her of it, in subtle taunt.

  “You have something you wish to know of me, my child.”

  “A little thing,” said Sun Destroyer. “There is a little thing I would know of Darkness, he who sired me. It is not so very important, however, so that if you wished not to tell me—” Astounded, the words choked off; she could not control the eagerness within her. Shame rendered her further speechless, for Sun Dust could not help but note her lie.

  Sun Dust said slowly, almost as if in relief, “It is something that is very important. Yet, in what way could Darkness be of import?” She mused on the question, made as if to search Sun Destroyer’s thought swirls; but Sun Destroyer thrust her off in unhidden recoil.

  “Very well,” she said stiffly. “It is important. Darkness and his whole life and what he did with his life is important to me, for I am the product of that life! Darkness sought for answers to life — in me reside those answers, and the means of implementing them! Do you understand?”

  Sun Dust could only gaze mutely.

  “However, it is not only of Darkness I wish to know,” Sun Destroyer continued. “I seem to remember, from fragments of the story you told me, of another being, a being named—” She stopped, hardly able to say the name; she had thought it and dreamed of it so often.

  Her mother said, “You speak of Oldster?”

  “Yes!” Her eagerness was open to the skies now, consuming her, to be seen by any who looked. “Oldster, he who resides in the universe from which Darkness came. Mother, tell me of him! Was he wise?”

  “He was very wise, my child.”

  “And it was he who gave Darkness the secret that enabled him to cross th
e great gap of nothing that separates — our universe from his?”

  “It was Oldster who gave Darkness access to the sphere of Great Energy which enabled him to cross. Ah, yes,” Sun Dust whispered, “Oldster was wise, so wise that he must live even today; for he escaped his doom. But he wishes to die.”

  “To die?” The thought scoured Sun Destroyer with its newness. She swelled so that arrows of pale energy impaled the spaces about her. “Oldster, the wise, would wish to die? He could not then be so wise.” For a thousand years she brooded on that enigma. Finally, “Perhaps even the wise are sometimes foolish. Perhaps,” she added slowly, “one can become so wise that it becomes wise to wish for death. Therefore, though it is a foolish desire, I have no quarrel with it. Now mother, tell me of another thing, of the sphere of Great Energy. Does — does it still exist?”

  “It is indestructible,” said Sun Dust simply. “Surely you must know this. It still exists, for Darkness carried it out into the darkness with him as he strove to reach his native universe. Darkness died, but the sphere is still out there, moving slowly toward that other universe.”

  “It is still out there,” repeated Sun Destroyer. “Then, mother, who is to say that I may not follow it — catch up with it — and use it!”

  “Who is to say, indeed?” murmured Sun Dust sorrowfully, and asked her question, though she sensed its answer. “But why?”

  “Why?Why! ” The thoughts of Sun Destroyer streamed; violences stormed within her; she strained against bonds as if testing that point at which they could be broken. “You ask me why; and yet you must know why — for why else do I live except to discover those things I must know, and to learn the answer to questions none before me has asked? Mother, I too must cross the darkness, as Darkness did before me!”

  “And then?”

  “And then — then I shall seek out Oldster, and wrest from him the answer to the secret that plagues me, so that I may at last know my happiness. And who, indeed, more earnestly seeks happiness than I? Who is more deserving of happiness, of all the creatures of the skies, than I? Therefore, I shall leave you, leave this universe, and eventually even leave Oldster, after I have found him. For what need then shall I have of anyone?”