"You created us."
The sublime voice vibrated sweetly on the emptiness. And deep in the
fabric of Oldster was chaos.
"You created us, Oldster, as surely as if you had sired Darkness
himself. For did you not guide Darkness to his life's completion?
Was it not the thought of you that brought Sun Destroyer back along
Darkness' path? And was it not you who guided Vanguard, you who, in
your greatness, saw us in him? Yes, Oldster, you are our creator--you
are the creator of life!
"And it is life that shall endure, and has ultimate meaning."
Oldster hung laxly in that sphere of golden blaze. Deep within was a
warning voice. But now he would not heed it. Not to rebel--ah, how
sweet to accept!
He was theirs. Let it be so. Let them lead him to his life's
completion. They, in their all-knowingness, could not be questioned.
He had created. The thought held white and pure before him. Let the
thought be so.
"Life that shall endure," he muttered.
"Life does endure!" The sublime voice rang. "Is not life the rebel from
dead matter? Matter is death, Oldster, for it grows old and powders
toward its entropic destiny. But life is the rebel. It builds, evolves
toward its high destiny which we know, but which you cannot know. But
this you shall know. Life masters itself. Life is outside destiny--and
has choice!"
From somewhere, from a thousand different directions, Oldster felt the
golden lights grasping at his thought swirls, filling him with that
anesthetic peace he had known with Dark Fire, when he faced her in the
band of life.
"Oldster." Inward hummed that lordly, loving voice. "Now you shall know
you have not failed. For are you not life, and the greatest rebel of
all life?
"And life has within it the dark rebel!"
<tb>
He was transported to an unknown cosmos beyond time and space
dimension. He was in the band of decision.
Again he looked upon those swinging suns. It was the same band, for
which he had looked so long!
He drifted in that untrammeled vacuum, drank in the beauty of this
faultless universe, its rounded glowing suns, and followed their quiet
paths from one galaxy to another. Or were they not galaxies after all?
As those suns were not suns!
Not suns! Blindly his thoughts swept out.
"Then I have searched everywhere for my answers--except within myself!"
"Yes, Oldster." Distant, yet near, the sweet voice drifted in. "Now you
inhabit that place you searched for. And it is a place that belongs to
life alone."
The seeming-galaxies seemed to shimmer in answering accord.
"And now," cried Oldster, "my thoughts return to that moment when I
trapped the universe's smallest particle in utter vacuum--and wondered
if it could determine its own destiny. It could not!"
He drifted, his formless self somehow moving through these logically
constructed "galaxies" toward some goal whose meaning hummed within him.
Then, echoing through and through this universe came the ringing voice
that hovered outside himself.
"Now you see, Oldster, and know what it is you see. For life is the
rebel, but dead matter knows no path but that given it.
"Oldster! Does not life have memory, emotion, volition? Do not even
those functions need mechanism? Oldster--" the thought held no sadness,
only an immeasurable love "--you know you have choice, and why you have
choice. Now farewell! Your time of glory has come."
The fluttering of countless minds against his began to quiet. Without
pain, he knew they were leaving--were gone--leaving the memory of their
near-perfection, carrying with them the ultimate answers of life. And
yet it did not matter. Did not matter!
He was within his fabled band of decision.
In mounting ecstasy, he hurled through those vast spaces that were yet
small beyond calculation, went rushing toward his unseen goal. Those
"galaxies," those mechanisms of which the golden lights spoke, slanted
out behind him, and new ones rushed in to his sightless vision.
What old and new thoughts did those swinging "suns" evoke, what
memories and dreams, in the slumbering conscious mind of that being
who was called Oldster? Which configuration of "stars" and "galaxies"
and what motion in and between them, called forth the haunting
remembrances of Moon Flame, of Comet Glow and her twin child Dark
Fire--of World Rim and the countless lost names of his unmeasured past?
Mind had mechanism. It could not be otherwise. And he inhabited, moved
through, that band of decision.
And soon he would meet--his dark rebel!
<tb>
His ecstasy soared as he burst across those dimensionless distances,
unerringly swung into a blaze of light created by a seeming-sphere of
galaxies. And he halted, feeling the throb of his certain knowledge
as he fixed his strange vision on the writhing heart of the farthest
concourse of stars.
Instantly a lone sun heaved from it, moved across darkness. Oldster was
in its path as instantly.
Even in the midst of that blinding hurt his ecstasy endured. He knew
there was no pain, that he did not see, that he was not here.
Yet, what did it matter what symbols he chose, symbols that he
understood, but which were not real?
The dark rebel was within him in this mechanism of mind. And mind has
choice!
He watched that sun falter in mid-space, watched it reverse direction,
and fall back, <i>with its message</i>, to the untroubled galaxy that had
urged it forth. His joy was a mighty song as that particle, of itself,
jousted with the destiny that bade it continue along its straight-angle
course--fought and won!
That rebel particle was rushing, rushing, back to the heart of the
deep-buried mechanism that ejected it. Soon it would strike. And there
would be--explosion!
And for him, now, was the time of glory.
For that particle, that sun, was himself, as all these turning,
studious galaxies were himself--the mind of him. What need to question
himself now? Why question the manner in which he was given access to
this glory under his conscious mind? The golden lights knew. But the
minds of those golden lights--the descendants of Vanguard--were wrapped
in a spiritual blaze beyond his comprehension.
His thoughts rolled on, growing rich within him as that falling sun
hurled itself along its returning path.
"Darkness--Sun Destroyer--Vanguard--and Devil Star! Rebels all. Where
are those who followed the worn paths? Gone, of no consequence. But you
Darkness, you Sun Destroyer, you Vanguard--" almost he could see the
shadowy pained shapes of them beckoning to him out of a past beyond
recall "--have we not created as no other energy creature has created?
For there are the golden lights."
His thoughts dreamed on, and the strangely visible "galaxies" of his
inner mind seemed to glitter their accord.
"The golden lights knew what you never knew, Darkness," he dreamed.
"The answer to life itself. But even I, in these last moments, see some
portion of that distant answer. Yes, Darkness! Life the rebel--the
mighty force that combats the entropic gradient of the universe. Let
the universe slope down, but life eternal moves upward, building on its
own discarded forms. And life will rebuild all that is.
"Were we ourselves not changelings, mutations with strange powers? And
it was the dark rebel within us that made us so! The dark rebel, that
moves as it will...."
<tb>
Into him, from some outer circle of being, came shrill warning. He
ignored it. Let the conscious mind of him thrash about, in terror
of what was to happen. He would not return to it. He was here, his
bodiless entity, watching mind function in dauntless disobedience to
the laws lifeless destiny laid down.
He watched the fall of that glowing particle in rigid fascination.
Now would come the rearrangement of this vast webwork about him. New
thoughts, different emotions--and volition that thwarted destiny. For
destiny's only death for a purple light came from a green.
But destiny could not rule life's dark rebel.
Again the warning, the clamorous scream to return, to fight. But he
would have none of it. He felt a tender pity for that being whose
conscious mind was obedient to what the stresses and strains of his
vast body demanded. He would not return.
The dark rebel struck.
In the timeless moment of its striking, all space seemed to still. And
the conscious mind of Oldster, that aged being, stilled as well. His
animal struggles ceased. Alone in his mausoleum of darkness, he was
filled with a pulsing wonder. He felt the force fields girding him
together lose their prime energy.
And then expansion.
"I am dying," he whispered.
He looked about him, peering into the darkness that would show him
nothing. And suddenly he remembered that which he had seen in his inner
being. The dark rebel, falling, falling, striking. The cataclysm that
followed, the white light of explosion, the pell-mell exchange of
suns. The rearrangement of desire.
And in full measure the meaning of that astounding event came. The
thought hummed, swelled, until he was flinging it out beyond him in
mocking wave after wave, into the face of that universe that had mocked
him with its dead answers. In this last moment of expansion the pain
and formless searching of his years vanished in the ultimate triumph.
He had had choice between two events, being and not-being.
And as all thoughts that had ever been and were a part of him raced
through his mind in that final moment, he caught one infinitesimal
thought, one he had spawned in a long gone eternity. "<i>To be or not to
be--that is the question....</i>"
And he knew the answer. The age-old answer he had long sought. It was a
matter of choice.
And he was content to die now, having chosen....