He was sinking into his dreadful abyss.
"Devil Star." The sorrowing thoughts of Comet Glow came. "You are
young. Live as life <i>must</i> live."
She pressed closer, laving him with her anxiety. "Do you seek to change
the natal matrix of the vast universe? Ten thousand billion years
ago--and perhaps even longer, Devil Star! The pattern of all that is
was foreordained--and all that will be! No electron that moved along
its path but what moved in response to a prior event.
"There has been no thought--and shall be none--that was not caused by a
prior thought.
"No result without cause. And no event without result!"
His words came out of the tortured depths of him. "I was in the band of
life. And it was against the pattern. There was no reason for it--no
reason!"
"Yes," she whispered sadly. "There was a reason. And if you persist in
searching for that reason, you will surely have further proof of the
shackles destiny binds us with."
Alone in the quivering brightness hung Devil Star. Not make use of
knowledge? No result without cause? The thoughts tugged and tore. Into
his mind came the drugging answer to all problems. He slept. And in his
sleep, an insidious process began working, a selection and burying of
the hated answers.
And when he awoke he knew, coldly secret within him, that he was
exterior to the pattern--the rebel, the one who would revolt against
destiny.
<tb>
Somewhere in the passing millions of years, the senseless, joyous years
of youth, his Mother vanished forever. He took small note of it. Comet
Glow, too, faded into a forgotten darkness. Other names passed from the
scene. And in from the wings, for reasons none questioned, came other,
younger energy creatures....
... He played. And there was a green light, one of the twin siblings of
Comet Glow, who played along with him.
Her name was Dark Fire, and sometimes, looking down into the black
whirling cauldron of a sun-spot, he could see the same primeval
excitement with movement that marked her.
He felt a wonderful sense of companionship with that green light, a
tenderness, perhaps because he too had her taste for the unexpected.
The pattern of play in this surging universe concerned the
helter-skelter rearrangement of galaxies themselves. But Dark Fire
often explored more novel avenues of play. Out of a nebula's heart she
would come racing, trailing hot streams of excess energy--would circle
him--dance--afire with some tremendous importance.
But that friendship was to end.
"Come, Devil Star, look what I've done!"
He saw the planet she had made, and marvelled. A planet whose surface
crawled with beings made of solid matter. An incredible kind of actual
life whose base was silicon--or carbon; he did not try to find out.
"It dies so swiftly," he said.
"But its time-scale is different. I shall tend this planet," she
dreamed. "The life-forms will improve on themselves. Maybe someday they
will come on out into space." Excitement was in her. "And they will
never know that she who created them watches their brave venture."
For long and long Devil Star brooded over that planet. In the
sub-swirls of his mind a remembrance shook him.
"Something troubles you, Devil Star?"
"Yes," he said faintly. "The creation of that planet. It is ... against
the pattern!"
She sensed the problem, but there was only cunning mockery in her gaze.
"Against it? Devil Star, there is nothing against the pattern--and no
one who can fight it."
"No!" he cried in denial. "Dark Fire, you had your choice--to create
or not to create. You selected--you were master of yourself in that
selection."
"No. I did that which I <i>would</i> do. I had no choice." She rotated along
an axis, probing him, mocking him. "We shall explore this thought of
yours. I have choice, so you would say, of destroying this life I have
created, or of allowing it to exist. But I have no choice."
"You have choice!"
"No."
Again that mockery. And suddenly she drew back, lashing out with a
destroying heat-ray that in a cosmic instant turned her planet into a
molten, endless sea. Devil Star looked at it in horror, and a clamoring
thought rose in him: <i>As she would destroy me!</i>
That shocked moment held. Then, mockingly,
"I made no choice, Devil Star. I could not have acted but as I did. For
am I not the product of my Mother? Of all who went before her? Of all
the events that have impinged on me to make me as I am? Am I not moved
and swayed by cosmic tides that began long before I began? And you,
Devil Star, are but a wave-curl in the tide ... an event in space-time,
forcing me to make my so-called 'choice.' Choice? There was none.
There was an inevitable act."
He stared at her askance. Then a thought shook him to the innermost
part of his being.
"Dark Fire," he whispered, "until now we have been friends. We can
no longer be friends. For soon a time will come when I must--when I
<i>shall</i>--make a choice between two events. Do you understand?"
Puzzlement was in her gaze. "I do not understand," she said slowly. "We
must always be friends."
A fuzzy-headed comet slashed its path across the dark heavens between
them.
Devil Star said, in mirthless mockery, "Friends! Can green and purple
lights ever be friends?"
For long and long she held that thought. Then, as if in involuntary
reaction against the horror that rose from the instinctive matrix
of her, she surged back across the heavens. From that distance, her
amplifying fear and shock drove against him.
"You speak, and do not know whereof you speak!"
He followed in triumph, but Dark Fire dwindled more swiftly, as if
knowing that to flee from him would dull her turmoil. But drifting back
came her voice, cold and faint.
"Devil Star, there will be no choice!"
<tb>
The friendship of Dark Fire and Devil Star was truly done. For even
when they were members of the same playing group, there was this cold
thought: I am destined to die, and to die in a certain manner. I shall
therefore turn destiny aside. I shall not die!
When Dark Fire came for him, he would be ready for her.
When the time came, ironically, he was not ready....
He was in his forty-millionth year, still a youth in his vast
time-scale, when he began drifting away from his other friends as
well. For already he felt the hunger in him, the first deep pangs, and
mistook it for his need to acquire knowledge.
His search for knowledge took him not into the macro, but into the
microcosms. Surely the larger universe was near the end result while
the smaller was near the beginning. Somewhere in that complexity of
sub-particles he would find a result without cause!
His tools were crude. It was nothing to pluck a star from the heavens
with a reaching tractor ray--to split it--explode it. But to shear a
molecule from a parent mass, to hold it inviolate from its fellows,
seemed impossible. He raged at the task for a million years, forgetting
all the names linked to his life--forgetting the menace of Dark Fire.
And he succeeded.
His success lasted for one thrilling moment. In a vacuum of its own,
untouched by outside force, that microcosm hung pendant. Devil Star
saw it fuzzily, by the reflecting thread of electrons that he sent
against it. And was to see it no more. For in that moment of triumph
came the icy cold certainty that he was being watched.
That captured micro-universe was gone from his delicate grasp as if it
had never been. With a violence beyond imagining, he expanded to half
again his diameter. From a dozen portions of his body, his visions
leaped out. And he saw Dark Fire.
He was gripped by the splendor of her, as she moved slowly down an
aisle of stars toward him ... her visions already touching his, holding
them with hard bright purpose. Against the dark background of space,
her central green light was lustrous.
"<i>Devil Star, there will be no choice!</i>"
The sudden clangor of that voice from the past had no meaning to Devil
Star, though he frantically tried to examine it. But meanings, reasons,
coherent thinking were lost to him. As Dark Fire drifted nearer, he was
enclosed in a vast peace. He knew at once that his searching, even his
finding, was a patchwork substitute for this great longing that had
been built into the very fabric of him.
Now came the voice of Dark Fire, humming, insidious.
"Devil Star, our moment has come--as we knew it would. Devil Star,
follow me!"
<tb>
And now he hung in the vibrant band of life, drawn there half by her
will, half by his. And he trembled with the half-memory of death,
and yet bathed by the hypnotic vibrations flooding from the central
light of her, so that he knew peace and understood the answers to all
questions.
She was dwindling. He knew what he must do.
<i>As she would destroy me!</i>
The thought raged, but he prepared.
Then hiatus ... the gulf of timelessness between two instants of
time. There was a click deep in the subterranean caverns of his
thought swirls. It was as if he had been transported to another band of
hyper-space.
But was this another hyper-space? It could not be. In that depthless
ladder of universes, and he had traversed them all, there was nothing
similar.
He viewed this strange space with childish wonder, knowing that he was
here, yet without a body, without a purple central light.
And he knew, too, that actually he was in the forty-eighth band of
hyper-space, about to die, and at peace.
He was there--and here. Fantasy or reality? It did not matter. It came
to him, in wonder as gentle as light scattering, that here there was a
mystery he might never comprehend.
A queer, geometric, somehow logical universe. Yes, the idea of logic
pressed insistently in on him. And yet, what happened did not seem
logical. For all of these clean-cut star-systems, though vast distances
stretched between them, seemed equally large to his sight. There was a
feeling of distance--without perspective.
Between those star-systems were no dust-motes, no hurrying comets, no
uncollected suns, no irregularity. There was dark, logical vacuum.
But suns, sometimes whole groups of suns, whirled sparkling across that
vacuum from one spinning galaxy to another. That galaxy, in turn, urged
another unit from its turning heart, or majestically rounded rim. The
quiet, orderly exchange was magnificent to watch. The exchanged suns,
or solar systems, quietly fell into new orbits that seemed prepared for
them.
He moved quietly through this charmed universe, wondering about it. How
quiet, how at peace, how <i>right</i>. And then, as he hung motionless again
in dark vacuum, pondering, he saw a single glowing sun detach itself
from the rounding rim of the nearby galaxy. It sped toward him, closer.
And yet he would not move. The distance lessened. It was upon him,
passing through him.
For a burning moment, he was locked in its fiery heart, and all of
being blazed with hurt.
Surging, he fought his way out, sped away, looked back, bewildered. The
speeding sun faltered in flight, was motionless. The entire universe
seemed to quiver at that discord. Then the sun reversed direction,
reluctantly falling back into its parent star system.
And the system exploded!
Frozen with horror, Devil Star--the bodiless entity of him--saw that
sudden, senseless explosion, watched a hundred suns shot like vast
bullets in a hundred flaming paths. Those suns plowed through nearby
galaxies, drove relentlessly to new positions in other galactic
accretions. The universe bubbled and seethed with irregularity. There
were more explosions, more frantic exchanges. The universe was alight
with flaming cores of brilliance. There was an urgent hustle and bustle.
Then the exchanged suns began to find their places without commotion.
The explosions grew less in number. The heavens ceased their horrifying
agitation. Order was restored. The orderly suns, sometimes with
attendant planets, marched quietly across the dark sky.
Numbed, Devil Star did not dare to move. Then a clamoring need rose in
him. There was something he must do. From the strange, dimensionless
distances he saw a sun moving toward him. He rushed to meet it. Again
that prolonged, fiery moment of agony.
And that universe, that industrious universe with its lawless
logic--that universe was gone.
Devil Star was back in the forty-eighth band, watching Dark Fire.
<tb>
The moment of watching drew out.
"Devil Star!" The cry blasted across space, imperative; but in the
sub-strata of that cry was unspeakable horror.