She came across the spaces, trailing chaotic streams of energy. Her
speechless rage preceded her like a curling tidal wave. Astounded, he
felt a searing burst of pain in the energy fields of his complex body,
and saw that a flaming red beam of force had leaped from her. He tried
to beat it off with instantly erected screens. The beam seared through.
She was pouring the energy of her body into that beam, intent on eating
through to the heart of him.
"You must die, Devil Star!" The mindless cacophony screamed at him.
"You must die! You are in the band of life! And you must die!"
He spurred frantically back, but she followed. Desperately he felt
that click in his mind which told him he was out of the forty-eighth
band and into the forty-seventh. But she burst into that space after
him--and the next and the next.
As he fled, a chilling certainty rose in Devil Star. The laws of life
had been violated. No matter that he had triumphed in some obscure,
staggering way that he could not yet comprehend. To Dark Fire, it made
no difference. Her wisdom, her destroying hate, as with all green
lights, must have its source in blind instinct. There had been outrage.
He must die.
A cruel incisiveness claimed him as he dropped down the terraced
spaces of the universe. Here and there, he plucked small suns from the
heavens, converted them to seething energy. When she burst through
after him into the second band of space, he was ready for her. All the
quivering excess energy his swollen body held was channeled into a
concentrated sword of destruction that smote her point-blank.
Shaken even beyond horror, he saw those clouds of fuming light that
exploded from the core of her.
She hung without motion, lax, visions down, a sickly pale radiance
creeping in waves through her. Across her central green light fitful
waves of yellow surged. And then the force fields of her body lost
their hold. Visibly she began to expand.
"I am dying!"
The hideous accusation blasted out at him.
"As you would have had me die!"
"No, no! Devil Star, you have done a terrible thing. You--do not yet
know--how terrible. Terrible--for you."
"I had choice!" he cried bitterly.
Silence. Then, from a distance, muttering: "Choice. No. There could
have been no--choice. It began--how long ago? Before you were born,
Devil Star. Back to--the beginning. No thought but caused a thought. No
motion but caused a motion. How--else could it be?
"Devil Star!" That muttering, distant voice held blind despair. "Your
only immortality--truly, your only happiness--lay in that child you and
I--would have created...."
Her voice stopped. In hideous fascination, Devil Star watched that
expansive greyness sweeping across her. Then, convulsively, he thrust
out his para-propellents, sped across the galaxies, not stopping,
frantically seeking forgetfulness.
For a million years Devil Star continued that senseless pace. Finally,
deep into the bottomless darkness that cupped the lenticular universe,
he stopped. And there was ultimate horror in him. The memory was not
sheared off. He could not outrun himself. He was cursed.
<tb>
Cursed--but alive. The thought did not have wings to make him soar.
For Dark Fire, the friend of his youth, was dead. No matter that all
of nature had conspired against him, a purple light; no matter that
Dark Fire, from some blind instinct, had sought with all her being to
fulfill a supposedly incorruptible law of the universe. She was dead,
and he had killed her.
He hung quivering and lost in that lightless emptiness. His triumph,
for the moment, was tasteless. For was it triumph? Had that succession
of events which resulted in Dark Fire's death been inevitable--part of
the pattern after all?
Then he had not escaped!
He shrank into himself so that even the mother universe and its
searching brilliance seemed not to exist. Now he was as alone as
mortality could be, feeding on his inner resources, a circuitous being
independent of the flux and strain of conflicting energies. He was
master of himself for this naked, two dimensional instant of time!
... No. There was the past, whipping his every thought and action into
submission with infinitely reaching arms of cause and result. He had
not escaped....
In that moment of realization, a new fury entered the life of Devil
Star. It came like the roar of a monster full-born in the sub-swirls of
his mind ... a monster clawing, rearing, fighting for emergence into
the searching light of his conscious mind--and unable to emerge!
He was shaken to the depths by that beast--that depthless, unuttered
longing which he could not give a name. Entombed in his self-imposed
darkness, away from the entropic surge and sway of the universe, he
felt that longing engulf him.
"It is something I want," he gasped. "Something I must have. Must!"
... Then, slipping unbidden from another corner of his mind, came the
feeling of solution. And that new thought held him rigid. He did not
dare to believe that the monster was out of his prison. And yet, what
else could it be? Hope surged through him.
"I was in another universe," his thoughts rioted. "In that moment
before <i>she</i> would have had me fling out my central purple core and
die, I was transported to another band of space, a band I never saw
before. And when I returned to the band of life, my will to die was
gone."
He hung laxly, surfeited with emotion. It was that he longed for. And
if it were not--he thrust the clangorous thought away.
Like a cocoon unfolding, he pushed aside the darkness enclosing him.
And as he beheld the resplendent lens of the vast universe, the prime
conviction of his life returned. Surely that universe and its myriad
avenues was not mirrored into being by the counterplay of energies at
the beginning of time. Destiny could be turned aside. Had he not so
turned it? And the answer to its turning lay in that hidden band of
space.
He would find that band, would put his life into it. And would find the
answer to all of being!
<tb>
Devil Star drifted back into the universe again, captivated with the
wonder of his upward spiraling thoughts. For, it seemed, the mind was a
turbulent structure, as frantic in its upheavals and overthrows as the
interior fury of a white dwarf star. Somewhere in his thought swirls,
caged for this moment, were the sharpest agonies of his life. In their
place had risen hope, and it was a thrilling hope indeed. The hidden
band!
He would find that hidden band, though he had to roam the vast universe
a hundred times over. And would still this thunderous longing.
He stepped up his velocity, thrusting out his visions in growing
rapture as he hurled through the light-spattered outermost fringes
of the dazzling universe. Here was splendor, conflict, movement!
And he was part of it again. Then, the worse for its suddenness, a
chill spread through him. He felt the unmistakable pulse of a nearby
life force.
His one thought was to flee--to disappear again to some quiet corner of
the cosmos--but no, for some reason he must stay....
"<i>Devil Star, where have you been?</i>"
Unerringly, without will to stop himself, he faced about in his flight,
with deadly accuracy placing his visions on the green light who had
uttered that question. She rode the bright heavens less than ten
millions of miles away, and he was caught here, knowing her name and
knowing her innermost purpose in life.
She repeated the question, naively unaware of its importance, staring
at him with a bland curiosity. He gazed back blankly, wondering at that
tremendous secret which she instinctively hid from purple lights.