"Now!"
Devil Star frowned. "We'd better not," he said cautiously. "Not right
away. Better make sure none of the others are around to see us. Come,
World Rim!" And he shot into instant motion, gaining two light years on
her before she knew what was happening. She surged into frantic motion
after him, bewildered, panicky with incomprehension of his actions or
thoughts.
Coldly, cruelly, he let himself be occluded from her in the heaving
patchwork of a dark nebular cloud. World Rim was left behind,
reproachful. He would see her again.
He had no room for emotion now, only purpose. He thundered through the
empty spaces, veered away from galaxies that vibrated with the noxious
beat of the life force, and found a galaxy where peace was.
He hung there, thinking. He had cheated death! Truly, that had been the
prime search of his life. And, having cheated it, he would discover the
way to knowledge unending. He would discover the hidden band.
Something had happened in that band which enabled him to triumph over
life's first law. What?
Had it given him choice? He was convinced that it had.
<tb>
In the millions of years that now elapsed, Devil Star came to think
of that band as the band of decision. He had been in that band. He had
interrupted its faultless rightness. He had interrupted destiny! And it
was somewhere!
The bands of space, in all their complexity, knew him. He went up
them one by one, studying them with a coldly disciplined leisure.
With the cold analytical tool of his mind, he probed for the reasons
behind those strange layers of hyper-space. He gazed on the obscene
ugliness of the third band, wondering what lay behind the dark skin of
nothingness that clove it. But the answer did not lie there. For he
could not enter.
The fourth band, where he was mirrored endlessly to the vanishing point.
The fifth band, where all of space was geared to such a time-scale that
the blazing components of the universe were serpentines of solid matter.
The sixth, seventh, eighth. The ninth, inhabited by the brittle cinders
of suns, gaunt reminders of the universe's ultimate decadence. Those
suns, however, were not burned-out matter, they were matter held in
some timeless moment of atomic convulsion, as if the fury of heat and
light had been sheared away. What reason? Was there here a result
without cause?
But he knew there <i>was</i> reason. The universe was warped, curled,
fighting its own irresistible stress and strain, stretching itself out
of shape, discarding its own topological impossibilities into hidden
pockets of space. A straight line was no less straight if warped by a
gravitational field. For who or what, in that field, could determine
any other straightness.
He ascended the bands, moving with a leisure he did not think was
unnatural. His purpose held white and pure. He had no thought for
others of his kind. Unendingly, the secrets of space channeled into his
mind. He was bursting with the wonder of it.
<i>You are young, Devil Star!</i>
"I am young," came the unbidden thought, "and still able--" <i>No!</i>
He rearranged that astounding thought. He was young, deathless. He was
annointed with a great destiny. Destiny? No, Devil Star, you shall
arrange your destiny.
... <i>Youth.</i>
The fifteenth, the twentieth, the thirtieth bands. He searched them
all, unhurrying, dawdling, experiencing no sense of failure. He was
content.
<i>You are young, Devil Star! You are still young!</i>
The sub-thought was screaming at him.
He did not hurry.
<tb>
He came to the thirty-fifth band, where unattached colors of violent
hue did their spasmic dances through matterless space.
... <i>Youth. There is still time, not for this, but for that other!</i>
The forty-first. The forty-sixth. He made his leisurely transit into
the forty-seventh. And then there was chaos. A jumble, a mumble of
burning thoughts that turned him into something he had no mind to
recognize. He was chaos.
Recognition again. Wave upon wave of horror rolled over him. Condensing
energy rained from his outer to his inner body. For he knew what he had
tried to do--tried, again and again, and, time after time, had failed
to do: to enter the forty-eighth band.
In his chaos, he had hurled himself at that unseen wall, and time after
time, it had hurled him back. He could not enter.
Thought came slowly. He was numbed with the attack of the monster
inside him. Fleetingly, knowledge came. But it was gone before he could
snatch it. Then he blundered like a blinded creature down the bands.
He knew what he must do, what he could not deny.
He left that galaxy, plunged across the winding arteries where dark
flowed, was in the galaxy of his birth. And at last, alone in space, he
faced her.
"It is you," she said wonderingly. "Devil Star."
His returning thoughts were heavy. "Yes, World Rim. And I have come to
keep my promise. To go with you to the place I found."
She was searching him, whirling nearer, intent with her visions. And he
saw with shock that she was changed in some way he could not put into
words.
"We will go now," he said.
Still she searched him. Uneasily she rotated against her starred
background.
She brooded. Then, with chilling reluctance, she said, "Very well, we
shall go to this place. Where is it?"
World Rim was older than when he last saw her; he knew, coldly, that
she had had children. And yet she seemed still naive. He was impatient.
"<i>I</i> shall follow <i>you</i>," he said.
A subtle change came over her. She stared. And her thought came. "Very
well, Devil Star! Follow me!"
In growing delight, he followed her up the bands, as obedient to his
ruinous emotions as any unsuspecting purple light who had followed that
path before him. Finally he burst through into the tenth band. World
Rim was there, inert in space, watching a tiny, faceted star. Suddenly
he was chilled by the immensity of her abstraction.
"Green light!" he whispered.
At first she seemed not to hear him. Then she touched him briefly with
a vision ray.
"Devil Star," she murmured. "No. It's no use. There is something wrong.
Go away."
The utter calamitousness of that order held him rigid.
"There is nothing wrong," he whispered. "I am here. I shall go with
you."
Her visions wavered away. "No, there is something wrong," she repeated
stubbornly. "Why should I take you anywhere?" Then, craftily, "Where is
there to take you?"
<tb>
He burst into the full flood of her visions. He was trembling, trying
to reject what he heard, and not succeeding. Welling up from the
depths of him came knowledge of the ultimate horror he was facing.
Here--now--he must defeat the horror, or he was lost to it and would
live with it forever.
"I shall go with you," he said in bitter frenzy. "You shall take me
with you--to the forty-eighth band!"
And as soon as the words were out, he knew he should not have spoken
them. Her faint thoughts came:
"It is," she said wonderingly, "the place you had been when I last saw
you so many years ago. But no. It is impossible, Devil Star! Perhaps
you are deceiving me again."
He surged closer, reckless, uncaring. "Deceived you! It is you who
deceived me, deceived me and all purple lights. But I was not fooled
green light!"
And it flooded out of him, half in pride, half in scorn, the whole
story of his anarchistic fight against destiny.
"I fought you, World Rim," he lashed out, "and I fought all other green
lights--and the universe itself!" Stay it though he would, a yawning
cavern was engulfing him. He trembled, striving to bring himself up
out of that utter chaos of dark. But he spoke on, raging, alternately
frightened and astounded at what he was speaking.
And from World Rim came silence.
"Speak!" he said wildly. "There is a need in me, a longing. I do not
know what it is!"
She seemed to shrink, until she was small, her central light wavering.
"Then I know," she whispered. "Devil Star, you wish to die."
"No!"
"And you wish to create. To create and die."
He stared, his thought swirls shaken with those words.
"To create," he whispered.
Now her voice lifted, firm with conviction. "I see it all now, Devil
Star. You wish to die, and in dying to create. All energy creatures,
even green lights after their fourth giving-of-birth, must do that, or
they will be very unhappy. It is very clear. But also you want to find
that impossible band of decision you talk about."
His thoughts were tortured. Yet he knew that from her deeply buried
instincts, the true answer to his longing had come.
"Then I must create," he said hollowly. "And you must take me there--to
the forty-eighth band!"
"No." The word shattered against him. "For when we got there, it might
be the same as with--Dark Fire."
There was a humming within him, a growing madness. "We must go!" he
said violently.
Sparkles of flame shot from the core of her.
"No," she repeated stubbornly. "I do not want to, and there is nothing
to do about it. Somehow you must have changed, Devil Star."
She laughed suddenly, peering at him.
"It is very funny! You wish to create, to die. But now you will
be unable to do either. Nor can you reach the band of decision,
for you believe it lies within the forty-eighth band. Yes, you've
changed--changed!"
Paralyzed, he hung in space, the resplendent mindless giants of the
universe seeming to fling her words back in brassy echoes.
She began drifting away, her thoughts roaring into his thought swirls,
tripled in volume and strident with their connotations. "Only green
lights remember the moments of their birth, Devil Star! Else how could
they know their way back to the forty-eighth band when the time came?"
Came her dwindling laughter, across the rushing spaces, into the
maddened thought swirls of Devil Star.
Horror had been piled on horror. He could endure no more.
<tb>
They would see him from afar, streaming across the star fields, not
pausing, hurrying only, hurrying to some place that had no location.
And they would see him plunging up the starry axle of some galactic
wheel.... And still again, rigid in abstraction, grasping at space and
its dust in a timeless query none of them would ever understand.
He was there when they were born, there when they died. And his name
was never known.
Matter changed, dropped slowly toward that bottom level where time must
end. Devil Star lived on.
The mother green light paused in the sixth band of hyper-space. For,
scarcely a light year away, the giant body of the legendary creature
hung sleeping.
Full of tenderness for her newborn child and for all life, she was
filled with reverence. Out of what unexplained past had that aged
purple light come? As she drifted nearer, he stirred, awoke, saw her.
She scarcely dared to think. But she would not leave. She spoke,
whispered.
"We have seen you from afar, often. And you have never spoken. And you
must be lonely."
"Lonely!" The word came in a racking burst. "I am not lonely. I do not
wish to be disturbed. Now go."
She was filled with compassion. "I shall go. But I shall come again.
And the others will know of you, and revere you, and perhaps those who
seek knowledge will come to you. And you shall have a name."
Tenderly, remembering the naming of her youngest, she renamed her
oldest. "To us, you shall be known as Oldster."
She left him with his thoughts....
<tb>
--<i>I thought to master destiny. But destiny masters me. I cannot
exclude the universe which continues to give me life.</i>
--<i>There is space, and there are stars, and of the things to know about
them I have little to seek out. I have traveled the star-lanes for
eons, filled with my longing, and the search for knowledge has only
been the disguised search for my life's completion.</i>
--<i>Yet I have learned. But what I have failed to learn is that which
keeps my life burning.</i>
--<i>Do we have choice. Did I have choice. For there was the band of
decision. Oh, the years have passed, and there is no answer. Space-time
began--where?--how? Result without cause! I have searched--searched
downward into minuscule universes--striving to find that which came
into being without a first motion. I have trapped matter's smallest
part, stripped space of all influences around it. And having trapped
it, could not observe it! For observation is influence.</i>
--<i>In that vacuous cage, did that particle move in paths of its own
choosing? If it did--without cause</i>--
--<i>But no. The universe decays, and draws life into decadence with it.
There is no hope....</i>
<tb>
There was Darkness.
And Sun Destroyer.
And Vanguard.
And the millions, the tens of millions of years that passed.
With drudging energy, Oldster heaved his vast body into a ragged motion
that took him for the last time across the flowing rivers of the sky,
into the first deeps of the black gulf Darkness crossed. There, beyond
sight of the universe, he drew his visions in about him.
He would sleep now. He would decay down to that moment when the
centripetal urge for life would grow too feeble. The last hounds of his
defense would wander off. For now he could not be disturbed.
"Awake, Oldster."
The serene, yet lordly voice echoed through and through that
immeasurably deep cavern of thoughtlessness where Oldster resided.
"Awake, and awake to the high moment of your long life."
Awareness came to Oldster, awareness strong and lashing. His vast body
heaved and writhed as he beheld the icy horror of his return to life.
For from outside this packet of cancelling forces that was himself had
come a voice.
"No!" The word shouted within him: yet he knew its violence had reached
him who had so cruelly shattered his dream of night. "No! Whoever
you are, whatever, leave me! Ah, you have made me live again--as Sun
Destroyer--and Vanguard--"
"And it is of Vanguard we would speak." The thought vibrated in serene,
lordly compassion against his thought swirls. "Now, you who were known
as Devil Star, look upon us!"
Wave upon wave of horror engulfed him as that command drove in. He
would not! The rebel thought endured only long enough to be swept away
by the shattering failures of his life. He was not master. Not to
fight, not to reach--ah, there would have lain happiness!
Thinly at first his visions moved from him--then in thick beams that
would bring full revelation of his tormentor.
And as he saw, he lay silent in emptiness, quiet in his congealed
wonder. For here was splendor, these rank upon endless rank of beings,
hanging in somber immovableness against that lightless sky. And here
also was destiny.
Their formless thoughts flowed around him, without discord, with peace.
"Golden lights," he whispered.
How long?
<i>How long!</i>
And from that concourse of golden-lighted energy creatures came
answer--from one or all, he would never know.
"For longer than you can dream, Oldster. For longer than the life of a
star. You have slept, slept ages beyond calculation. Yet here, in this
pulseless emptiness, we have found you. And the time of glory has come."
There was a rustling of thoughts, unfettered with fear, not chained to
hope. And the golden central cores shone in beauty.
"The time of glory comes to you, Oldster."
Now that unlocated voice swelled, filling the darkness with its lordly
sweetness.
"For see, Oldster! We are all you dreamed of--and more. We stem from
Vanguard! And Vanguard gave life more than he dreamed. Clearly and
purely we see the answers to those ultimate questions of life and death
Darkness himself asked. Sun Destroyer, in her ancient past, never
dreamed that her vain quest would be reached in us--through her!"
<tb>
The giant words drummed against Oldster. He quivered with sudden
fear, searched among those serenely watching beings with their
crystal-sparkling, golden-lighted bodies for some thought that would
make meaning burst on him. The answers did not come. And, in depraved
ugliness, came doubt.
"No," he cried softly. "You speak of impossibilities! There are no
answers. You are mockeries, and I want nothing of you--I do not want
hope. Now leave me, leave me in my sadness!"
He lashed out at them, feeling his old agonies return, for they too
were but atoms trampling over each other in that mad rush toward the
bottom level of inertness. Even perfection must die, ruled by destiny.
He started to withdraw his vision when they, far from retreating,
whirled nearer, their bright golden centers glowing in upon him until
he was trapped in a blaze of fire. He stared, quivering with the dread
that in spite of himself they would fill him with hope.
Then, thundering through his thought swirls, came that lordly measured
voice, a voice sublime in the surety of its owner's purpose.
"Oldster! You have not failed!"
Involuntarily Oldster flung the words back.
"Not failed? You are mockeries, you golden lights. Not failed!" The
words echoed in their frenzied dreariness. He felt the outer limits
of his being expanding, quivering with miniscule flarings of yellow
energy.
"I, Oldster, have failed in ways your blind minds could never perceive.
You do not understand failure, you who stemmed from Vanguard. Could
you ever feel the tortures of Vanguard himself--or of Sun Destroyer or
Darkness? Ah, you have reached a perfection beyond such burrowings!
And I shall not let you give me peace! For I have failed, and I shall
continue to be tortured with my failures. You would not understand."'
"We understand."
That voice, with its merciless love of him, drove in.
"We understand, and we say you have not failed. For see! You have
created, and has not that driving urge to create been the great pain of
your life?"