People of the Darkness Read online

  Her voice dreamed. The universe hummed about her. Her future lured her with its promise. For a long time the moment held, and then she must bring herself back to hear the horror in the voice of Sun Dust, and to feel the probing quest of Sun Dust’s thoughts in her own thought swirls.

  “To seek out Oldster,” Sun Dust’s thoughts came, “you will endure such agonies as you cannot dream. Do you not understand, my child? Oh, Sun Destroyer, you must not! You seek happiness, but there is no happiness in the darkness. For a hundred million years, you will know agony such as a younger green-light never could know. Had you chosen to cross the darkness when you were younger — when there was still time—”

  The chill enveloped Sun Destroyer. For a frightening moment, she understood Sun Dust’s meaning; but then she must discard that understanding. For in that understanding lay fuller knowledge of the nature of her bonds, the very bonds that tied her cruelly to life in this universe — if she would let it!

  Out of her being, therefore, was wrenched the cry, “I follow my desires!”

  She moved back another light-year as if distance strengthened her. Sun Dust gauged that mounting physical barrier, but in her sadness she did not attempt to follow or lessen the other distances that were growing between her and her first-born.

  “You follow your desires,” she said sadly, “if you but could. But I know you must go, my child, for the forces that move you are too great. Since I shall not — shall never see you again, I must tell you one more thing.” Her voice now was heavy with warning. “Sun Destroyer, though you must cross the darkness, though you must seek out Oldster, do not attempt to follow in his path.”

  Sun Dust disappeared into a hyperspace, gone from Sun Destroyer forever; and Sun Destroyer felt the intoxication of her freedom. She twirled in space, charmed with the newness of her release. Now she answered to no one; indeed, she was mistress of two universes, and even Oldster would bow before her!

  Sun Destroyer grew taut. In her mind she bent herself like a great bow that would hurl her straight and true to an unimaginable target. Her great moment came, and then she was gone. She flung in unerring motion across the powdered star-streams of heaven, and only once in her long journey to that entrance point where Darkness had appeared in this universe so many millions of years ago did she pause — ruthlessly destroying the ringed star which her playmates thought free of her depredations.

  Then, with mounting acceleration and a seething of excitement unmatched even by the bursting cores of the novae about her, she speared the great spaces. Whole galaxies sped by and were lost. Nebulae enclosed her and dropped behind. Finally, after seven million years, the whole vast sweep of the starred heavens before her was gripped in a great, tight semicircle by a darkness that stretched endlessly away.

  On the edge of this darkness, with the dazzling, radiant beauty of the egg-shaped universe behind her, she hovered. Her visions witlessly speared the mystery of that supremely vast ocean of lightlessness; then she was into it, and, forever, left her own universe behind.

  Chapter IV

  The Son of Sun Destroyer

  Only after the last trace of universal matter, light and lightless energy were swallowed by the darkness and she moved through unthinkable black, did Sun Destroyer detect the first sign of the sphere of Great Energy. It came as a single pulse, impinging unmistakably upon her. She swelled as if she would hasten her flight by enclosing all about her. Again the pulse came, and again, until radiation from the thing she sought poured through her in a steady stream, providing a beam she was able to follow.

  Ahead of her still was darkness, but she felt the presence of the perfectly invisible sphere of tight matter which Darkness wrested from a billion-mile star millions of years ago — yes, easily one hundred fifty million years ago! And it was near! She rushed upon it as upon a quarry that would turn on her were she not to take it first. And then it was hers, she was wrapped about it, and all in a moment was intoxicated with the inexhaustible powers that flooded through her. For a moment, she was Darkness, not as he was in death, but as he was in full life, plunging into the unknown. She knew the fright of Darkness, but also she felt that she must know his unrivaled sense of victory.

  Nothing could withstand him who owned the sphere of Great Energy. Great had been Darkness, but greater still was Sun Destroyer, the daughter of Darkness! Suddenly the darkness knew no horrors for her, but presented her, in processions of ebony pageantry, the happiness that was hers. Here was no fright; the darkness was happiness; at its end was Oldster, who in turn would add to her happiness and complete it with his endless wisdom. For Oldster would know of the forty-ninth band! And so would go pain.

  A marvelous rustling now seemed to fill space. The voices of great beings who lived elsewhere seemed to call to her. She listened to them, knowing at once that they did not exist, and yet charmed by the imageries she conjured. Lilting were the voices. They were the voices of no one she knew — except perhaps that of Darkness? Faint grew the voices as she expunged them. She thought vaguely, perhaps they came from the forty-ninth band?

  Her fantasies endured for that moment, and then were gone. In full force, she saw again the darkness she would cross. She must go. She ate at the sphere of Great Energy with concentrated knots of force — she moved under that unimaginable power with a starting velocity she had never known before.

  The first light-years passed.

  Then forty million years were gone.

  Sun Dust.

  The words of Sun Dust came back.

  Sun Destroyer knew torture.

  The desire was nameless. It stabbed her; it was with her all her waking moments. What was this need, greater than any desire she had known before? How long would it last? Shudders ran through the complex energy fields of her grown body, and subsisted with seeming interminableness for long periods of time, feeding on an instinct that had grown to unmanageable proportions. Yes, her body had grown, as had her green light. That was the answer! She had matured. Now she was experiencing the same agonies Darkness must have endured on his long journey, except that his had been worse, for he had not known their source.

  Sun Destroyer, cleaving the untold distances within the darkness, was slave to her buffeting emotions. Monotony was one of her demons. She wished to slash suns, she wished to heap scorn on the ugly ones of her race so that they would flee her and leave their complex toy galaxies for her to heap into smoking ruin. Then she would live again! For she was dead here, entrapped, trapped by her own desire for happiness which had instead become an agony of unsatisfied longing.

  Sun Destroyer drifted in self-imposed coma. She heard again the singing and the lilting, the beautiful and the wonderful voices of the great ones who lived in the forty-ninth band. Yes, she would believe they existed. Surely they must, for she heard them, orchestrated out of the fabric of a darkness that was living and not dead, dead like that which enclosed her and pressed in upon her and would not let her live. Oh, the voices! The voices! The voices died; she awoke, the depravity of her hurtling and endless existence smothered her.

  When would it end?

  Much as had Darkness eons before, when she finally sighted the universe toward which the sphere of Great Energy had led her, she involuntarily contracted and then expanded with the joy of that which she saw. The lightless spaces about her were ablaze with spangling streams of her excess energy; her emotions danced on the black sky. And then, as the new universe moved in upon her with startling jumps in size, and it rose to its full lenticular radiance, silhouetted in aching beauty against the blackest of darknesses, she abruptly lost consciousness. When she awoke, she knew she must have dreamed — but no! She was surrounded by an infinitude of galaxies stretching farther than her visions could plumb.

  Now she drifted, making no effort to guide herself, even when she brushed the flames of some mammoth star. She drifted across these new fields of the endless sky, grasping the sphere of Great Energy near her green core, drinking in the celestial beauties about her as if
they would revivify her. Her thoughts drifted, too; she dreamed; she wished now to drift through her life without effort, without longings, without needs, without even the desire to destroy or to exert mastery over the lesser forms of matter or of life.

  Then that peaceful moment in Sun Destroyer’s life was gone.

  She felt the beat of a life-force.

  Her drifting thoughts tautened and came to full halt. Involuntarily, her visions lanced out in sudden, eager motion; she sent them stabbing between two near galaxies. She caught sight of the purple-light who approached. He was coming swiftly, and, if he continued on, would pass her. She moved slowly to intercept him.

  He stopped when he saw her, rotating upon the skies as he studied her. There was in his attitude an uncertainty, at first; surely he must have sensed her strangeness. But he was a languid and indulgent purple-light, who knew that all matter ended where the darkness began, if he thought about it at all. He therefore approached, coming so close that reflected starlight from the liquescent mirror surfaces of Sun Destroyer seemed to bobble in swift-changing pattern across him.

  Within Sun Destroyer, a strange alchemy was taking place. She was becoming hard, cold, infused with merciless purpose.

  She whispered, “What is your name, purple-light?”

  The purple-light eyed her doubtfully. “I am called, as she who created me named me, Great Red Sun.”

  “And I am known as Sun Destroyer, Great Red Sun.”

  The purple-light laughed. “But you will not destroy me, Sun Destroyer.”

  Sun Destroyer laughed with him, and moved a step nearer. “I do not want to.” She held his visions; she transfixed him; she would not let him go. “Tell me,” she said slowly, “what you know of a creature named Oldster!”

  Great Red Sun moved back, to view her as an object among the stars, for he was plainly curious. But Sun Destroyer, her purpose fermenting whether she willed it or not, again closed up the distance, so that everything but a rim of sky was blotted out of his sight except her, her green light, and the shining magnificence of her surfaces and the gleaming cascades of gold within her. Great Red Sun saw what was happening, and in his indulgence of her stayed where he was.

  He said curiously, “You do not know of Oldster, he who thinks and wishes to die because he thinks? Surely you must know of Oldster, for everyone does. Ah, he is aged, and he will live forever! Such is the legend handed down. But I am sure you know the legend as well as I.”

  Sun Destroyer said nothing. The silence weighted upon Great Red Sun; with Sun Destroyer looming over him, he must speak. “You know the legend,” he insisted. “You know he must not be disturbed; this you surely know!”

  “And why not?” whispered Sun Destroyer. “Why is it you must not disturb him?”

  “It is what we have been told, green-light — you as well as the others — unless,” he added in piqued humor, “you have just this moment burst into being out of the fabric of space! We all know that it would be cruel to waken him, for he seeks forgetfulness, and has sought it these past two hundred million years. He sleeps, and sleeps, and, I think, grows ever nearer to death.”

  Sun Destroyer started. “To death?” she cried. “But he must not die — he must not! Tell me where he sleeps, purple-light. I must know. His wisdom is great, and he must not die!”

  Great Red Sun rotated languidly. “Yet I am sure he will.”

  Sun Destroyer surged in on him even closer. “Tell me,” she whispered. “Great Red Sun, Oldster knows something I must know. I have come distances you cannot begin to comprehend, merely to see him and to speak with him. Do you understand? Tell me where this ancient being sleeps — then I shall go away and leave you!”

  “Go away and leave me?” Great Red Sun mused on the words. “I do not see why that would be of any great value, Sun Destroyer. Could I not leave you, anytime I wish? Therefore, you speak in riddles.”

  Sun Destroyer’s body throbbed. She said fiercely, “Tell me where Oldster sleeps!”

  Great Red Sun began to move away. “I will not tell you.” He turned his visions from her in cold disdain. “You would disturb him, you would waken him, and you would even torture him if he would let you. I sense it. Therefore, I shall not tell you!

  “Go away, green-light. There is evil in you, and I do not like it.”

  He moved away faster and faster. Sun Destroyer energized herself with the sphere of Great Energy and looped in front of him. She caught his thought swirls and held them in tight bands of living force.

  “Come with me, Great Red Sun.”

  “Come with — you?”

  Great Red Sun stared. Suddenly he began to tremble. All the universe changed for Great Red Sun. Where before had been the starry vistas of his unending land was now only this huge and looming green-light, with the dancing green forms at her central core.

  “Go where with you, green-light? I will come!”

  Sun Destroyer murmured with merciless intonation, “To the forty-eighth band!”

  And she snapped herself into a hyperspace, ascended the scale, and paused in the cubed forty-seventh band until the purple-light caught up with her and stared in dazed wonder.

  Sun Destroyer again approached, looming over him and occluding the burning cubed galaxies.

  “Tell me, ” she whispered, “where Oldster resides!”

  Great Red Sun’s thoughts were listless. “It does not matter, green-light; I will tell you that which everyone knows anyway. He resides a mere galaxy’s length from here, in the darkness of the fifteenth band. It would be cruel beyond words to disturb him, though.”

  “Now — follow me!” said Sun Destroyer, and in moments the beating flow of the life energy surrounded her, and the purple-light as well. Sun Destroyer, obeying laws as old as life itself, hovered in those sunless skies, the green forms dancing in silent whirl on her green core. She waited for the moment.

  The moment came. If Great Red Sun was lost in hypnotic lure, Sun Destroyer was doubly lost, for all the evil in her and all the striving and all need were gone. She was in motion, receding a vast distance from the purple-light, and she knew no thought. Somewhere out on the skies a change had occurred. Great Red Sun’s purple core was growing toward her; but intercepting its path was her own green globe.

  She watched, lost to everything except the imminence of that silent and inevitable meeting.

  Green and purple-light crashed blindingly, throbbed, settled — and now they were but one sphere of mistily pulsing light.

  The sight of it closed around Sun Destroyer’s senses. Now there was no pain, there was only soft fulfillment. The past was lost. She was what must be and should be. “It is my child — my child!” she murmured, even as, unknown to her, another green-light formed magically within her. She had no further thought for Great Red Sun, the neuter dying purple-light, who hung in devitalized shock beyond the rim of her visions. She would not see him again, nor would he see her, for Great Red Sun soon would die; he would not know his child, he would know nothing.

  Sun Destroyer moved upon the pulsing ball, enclosed it, and dropped with it to the seventeenth band.

  Sun Destroyer hovered near it, watching it in its galactic cradle, and a great sense of relief and peace and completion flooded through her. The agony of loneliness and frustration that had grown to such terrible proportions was gone now. She seemed content to hang here, to watch with strange sensations of pride her newly-born, the first of four who would be allowed her.

  “It is my child,” she dreamed. “And I have done a wonderful thing. Lie there, my son, and grow. And your name shall be Vanguard!”

  The vanguard of those who would know the anarchic contentment and happiness which others of their race, in their ignorance and fear, helplessly discarded.

  The vanguard of those who would be empowered to reach that pinnacle of power beyond the band of life.

  Her thoughts flowed peacefully, enclosing her in their anesthetic charm. Then, slowly, remembrance of things external returned. She had
crossed — the universal spaces, dared the darkness and conquered; a wonderful, a joyful deed had been accomplished. Almost it seemed enough to ensure her as the ultimate of her race. It was not, of course, enough. There was Oldster, and then the forty-ninth band!

  She must leave her child; yes, leave him, to grow by himself until the distant time of her return. She circled him, she laved him with soft energies as if to still the impact of terror that would come in the first moment of awareness, and then she dropped from the seventeenth band to the first.

  Here in the true band, enclosed by the unfamiliar configurations of an ancient sky, she hovered spiritlessly. She was as sluggish in her sense of goal as she was in her feelings. What had happened to her? In the universe of her birth, her desire to penetrate to the forty-ninth band had been a flaming, a racking thing. Now it was assuming unimportance. From her dulled emotions came a thrill of burgeoning anger. Of course it was unimportant, as all things were unimportant! Then why should she desire it to assume importance? Terror of the paradox grew out of anger, and following terror came the memory of her pain, and the memory of her younger years. Memory bred fantasy, and in convulsing spasms of streaming thought that spewed broken arrows of light on the skies she saw herself to be her own child, the infant Vanguard. But no! It was she herself, as she was, so it seemed, when she too was a babe held powerless in the seventeenth band, an echo of Vanguard, backward in time to the moment of her own birth!

  Sun Destroyer writhed in her unbidden memories. She must go. She must leave her memories and her fantasies, and she must leave the sphere of Great Energy.

  She did not know why, but the sphere of Great Energy must be cleft from her, forever. She hurled it out, straight and true, using its own vast energies to put it beyond the reach or staying power of any mortal creature. She hurled it as a thing loathed, and watched it as it fumed away invisibly toward the limits of the universe where darkness received it.