People of the Darkness

Prologue

Of darkness the cosmos was made. There was nothing else, nothing — unless one chose to consider the throttled points of brilliance which the darkness, at intervals of unmentionable light-years, permitted to remain in its realm. These were the universes; and, though they stretched without number toward the unseen horizon of space-time, they were so small, so unidimensional in the frightful sea of lightlessness, that they submissively drenched themselves in the overpowering stigma of nonentity, and became part and parcel of the darkness themselves.

And yet, each point of brilliance swarmed and flowed with the ceaseless, soundless orchestration of atoms, planets, stars and galaxies. Each sun was an atom-torturing note in a swelling cosmic song. Each gap between the galaxies was a rest-beat. Each galaxy was a harmonic undertone to the operatic whole which sang thunderously and unheeded to the unsentient darkness. Churning, restive, tortured by its own inner movements, strong, mighty, the universal rhythm pounded back at itself; the great nebulae writhed greenly; the great suns blasted themselves with their own violent excesses of heat and light and spewed out galaxy-spanning fans of cosmic rays. And there was no director to the chaotic symphony which was now frightful, now gentle, now bestial, now soothing.

Soothing to him who lay alone in the seventeenth band of hyperspace…

Chapter I Yellow Light

How long he had lain here, it was beyond him to know.

But there must have been a beginning for, before there had been sight, there had been thought, and quiet, entombed darkness.

Therefore there must have been something before the thought.

But what?

The trickle of awareness ran first through his memory swirls, the awareness of an outside, a something beyond himself. Thus had his visions unfolded and the magic of the universe flowed into him. The great stars and nebulae presented themselves to him in all their pageantry, and he was dazzled by the splendid hot colors, the poetry of their motions; the soundless songs they sang moved him beyond intelligent thought.

He was charmed by the opulence of this enormous gesture which the universe made toward him. He was flattered by the radiant energy in which he was laved, and which his embryonic body absorbed into the complex energy patterns that composed his great mass. There was peace and quiet and beauty and thoughtfulness, and a kind, celestial attention to his needs. He lived without strife or the need for understanding in a plentiful Arcadia.

He was contented.

He was an energy creature, now more than two million miles in girth and growing apace, and he did not understand the awful, ineradicable shadow that had fallen across his life.

His mother had not come for him.

The slow millions of years trooped away to die. The universal restive hum continued, and the universe changed its face. There were new, green-hued nebulae on the stage; there were new stars emerging in fiery grandeur from the wings, with their attendant trains of self-effacing planets. He watched it all, reaching out to the limit of his visions, hanging pendant in his great auditorium, surfeited with his great happiness, and never once hearing a discord. There was no evil in him.

“Who are you?”

The low muttering of drums, the harsh clangor of a cymbal, and the heartbeat of the universe seemed to still.

The uttered thought swept inward to impinge on his memory swirls, and the even, steady, undisturbed throb of his consciousness was broken. Chaos, indecision, wonder, fear — these were his. He faltered in his own mind for the source of the thought. It had not originated there. He swept out with visions.

Far away, across the blinding white width of a galaxy, he saw the creature. There was a strange shrinkage of his spirits. Life! Life other than his!

He was quivering with dread, his vanity shattered by a revelation he had not considered in his way of life. Liquid sparks of varicolored flame fled his vast swollen spheroidal body. Life, other than his, to divide the universe with him!

The incisive question came again, whispering at him with demon intonations. He forced his trembling vision rays to play over the smaller, different body that was pendant a thousand light years distant — a globe of milk-white radiance, throbbing with the slow pulsations of life, and at its heart a glowing ball of green light. Their visions locked and they were staring at each other in hard, bright wonder.

“I did not know there was other life,” he whispered.

She answered with scorn, “Did not know there was other life! Where is your mother, large body? What is your name? What are the yellow dots that dance in your purple light?”

He looked inward on himself, looked at the star-yellow globes which truly marred the perfection of his purple central core. He was floodedwith shame, overflowing from some instinctive well of knowledge, that the great pulsing center of his body was not clear purple. He looked up, dazed. Mother? Name?

“I do not know what you mean, green light,” he whispered.

“Why hasn’t your mother come for you?” she demanded sharply. “Why hasn’t she given you a name? Why hasn’t she taken you from the seventeenth band into the first band of true space? How long have you been lying here? You are big and swollen and unnatural. You are big enough to have been plunging through the starways for more than a million, perhaps five million years.”

He shrank back from the awful indictment her words hurled at him. A great, helpless confusion grew in him. A thousand shafts of shame speared his monstrous vanity, and his pride in himself and his central importance drained away. He was no longer the hub; he existed somewhere on the outer rim of being, and he was whirled without purpose or will in a vast, involuntary arc. It was not he who whirled the universe in its spectacular pageantry, it was he who was whirled: he was but a minor actor in the show.

He emitted his thought faintly: “Have you a mother? Have you a name?”

She was staring at him with the cold, instinctive knowledge of her kind, the knowledge that only a green-light had. Buried deep within her, there was a heartless pity for him and the enormity of the thing that had happened to him.

“Every creature has a mother, strange one. My mother was here but a million years ago. It was then she named me. I am known as Star Glory.” A proud quiver of sparks rained in molten beauty from her tiny body. She added dreamily, “It is a beautiful name. What a pity that you have none.”

A forlorn resentment rippled over his glowing, swollen sphericity.

“But I shall have a name,” he flared. “I shall have a name as soon as my mother comes. It shall be as strong a name as yours is beautiful.”

“Your mother must be dead,” she said heartlessly.

“No!” he cried, agonized. “No!”

“Your mother is dead,” she added, goading at his pain with thoughtless knives. “Else why is it that you are still here when you are so big? Nothing,” she said with her chilling wisdom, “could keep your mother away if she were alive. She is dead. But do not worry. Soon my mother, Crescent Moon, will come again. And she will release me. Perhaps she will also release you. In the meantime, let us talk. What do you think of the stars?”

“They are beautiful, beautiful,” he whispered, shaken in a torrent of fear and wild doubt.

“Yes, of course, they are beautiful, ” she said complacently. “But they are powerful also. I wonder if they are more powerful than I. I should like to pit my strength against them, to tear them apart and fling their flaming remnants in thousands of directions.” She brooded for a thousand years on her luscious dream. Presently she added, “Do you think you could destroy a nebula?”

He had no answer for her in his dumb, stricken misery, and she talked on and on, for thousands of spinning years, laying before him a picture of the universe as described by her mother. He learned of a great concourse of lenticular, egg-and ring-shaped galaxies spreading across the sky for seven billion light-years, the shining motes at last drawing up short on the awful black shore of the solid sea of lightlessness which stretches away forever.

“My mother told me that once a creature crossed the great abyss. His name was Darkness. I do not believe it. There is nothing beyond our universe.”

He learned of the forty-seven bands of hyperspace.

And then came her mother.

He saw her from afar, her great flawless body with a single ripe star of green light hanging pendant at her core. She emerged from a distant nebula, the brilliance of her flight leaving her a broad fan of incandescent sparks. He heard nothing of what occurred between small and large green-light, for they spoke only to each other.

His memory swirls writhed with a poignant-sweet eagerness. She would come for him! He would be freed, freed from the awful stigma of nonentity, of namelessness. He would mingle with other youths, green-and purple-lights, and he would cavort with them through the corridors of the stars, dashing in mad abandon the length of a thousand galaxies. He would toss suns and build and shatter solar systems. He would slip up and down the forty-seven bands of hyperspace, and once more the wild, sad, powerful symphony of stars would sound ringingly in his memory swirls. He would have a name.

He watched them, Mother and daughter, trembling in his eagerness. By some strange knowledge he knew that Star Glory had been snapped from the seventeenth band of hyperspace by her mother. What happened affirmed the knowledge. Star Glory surged into glorious motion, as she tried her heretofore unused and unusable propellants. She lost girth as she fled at increasing speed across the quiescent galaxies and into the far distance. Proudly her mother followed after her. They were gone.

Gone? He knew a sudden stab of fright. He was seized in the relentless talons of horror.

“Come back,” he cried. “Come back!”

But would she come back? Had Star Glory, the small one of the green light, forgotten him and her promise? It could not be so. He was not doomed to lie here, shrinking from the terror of his awful abnormality. He was without a mother!

Slowly wheeled the stars in their vast orbits. Slowly coiled the powerful grim nebulae. Swiftly darted bearded comets across the age-old bright universe. The thousands of years were slipping away into the dusty past, and his own soul was shriveling within him. He was alone, the abandoned, the forgotten, the ill-born.

The mother of Star Glory came back.

He saw her with his all-encompassing visions, driving toward him on the invisible thrust of her propellants. Slowly she came, the flawless green-light, and her coming presaged a dull, thudding agony within him. His swollen body contracted under the impulse of his dreadful thoughts. She hung now in the first band of true space, drenching him in the slow, reluctant sadness of her unuttered thoughts, and he could not bring himself to speak.

“Star Glory told me of you,” she said into the throbbing silence.

“I have no mother of my own,” he whispered. “Star Glory says she is dead.”

The green-light held his visions with her own. There was in her a shudder of pain, but tenderness and love also.

“Yes,” she said gently. “She is dead. How she died, why she died, I do not think that even Oldster would know; and though he did, it would be wrong, cruel, to disturb him.”

She paused, bending on him a look of gentle pity. “Now you are ready for your freedom. Your name shall be Yellow Light.”

There was a constriction of shame in his memory swirls. “Yellow Light,” he whispered faintly. “That is my name?”

He felt the soothing touch of her thoughts, binding him strongly in her outflowing gentleness. There was a bitter sadness in her voice when she spoke.

“Yes, that is to be your name. You must try to be proud of it.For they will call you that anyway! Yellow Light, you are in the first band of true space!”

There was a click in his consciousness which told him that such indeed was the case. He was free. He hung poised in throbbing uncertainty, surrounded by all the bright beauty of the far-flung galaxies, drinking into him the radiant energy which swept in plenitude through the rich burning fabric of space.

The green-light hung a distance away, clouding out the xanthic blaze of a diadem of clustered stars.

“Your propellants,” the thought whispered gently to him. “Try them.”

He remembered the soaring flight of Star Glory, the vast distances which had eroded away to nothing under the great velocity that was hers. He was trembling in his eagerness as he explored the complex mechanism of his swollen body. His propellants thrust out. He felt the first surge of motion, but like a great clumsy animal he fumbled in unequal spurts. There was no sense of direction in him. He traced a slow tortuous path through the hub of a restlessly churned galaxy. He weaved from side to side, and yet thrilled to the motion that he gave himself. But it was hard, hard. Why did he not move with the ease and grace and swiftness of Star Glory?

He drew his propellants in at last and halted, turning his proud glance on the green-light.

“I moved,” he cried excitedly.

She hung a distance away, quivering, and he had the feeling that she was shrouded in horror. Vast emptinesses yawned in him. He was shaken with her voiceless compassion. For what? For whom? He did not dare to think the true thought.

“I moved,” he whispered, and the complex energy fields contracted toward the yellow-specked purple core of his body, He was faint, burning in the fire of her chaotic, broken thoughts,

At length she answered, “You moved, Yellow Light. Yes, you moved. Come with me.” She went slowly, accommodating her pace to his as they followed the resplendent aisles formed by the gyrating stars.

Chapter II You Must Fight!

Thousands of light-years inward toward the center of the universe she went with him, pointing out from afar darting groups of the creatures who lived between the stars. “Dark Nebula, Comet, Bright Star-Cloud, Incandescent, Star-Hot, Blue Sun, Mighty, Sparkle, Valiant—” So she reeled off great lists of names which he had no trouble impressing on his memory swirls.

She told him of the forty-seven bands of hyperspace, and bade him follow her. It was hard. He struggled with the strange mechanism of his mind which permitted ascension or descension into the strange facets of the universe. She waited for him anxiously in the second, the third, and halted him there. Here, some strange hyperlaw had flattened all the mighty, proud, three-dimensional suns and swarming galaxies into a two-dimensional projection of themselves, and there was no depth and no beauty. He shuddered at the ugliness of a depraved universe and was caught up in horror by the tight black skin of nothingness which somehow seemed to be removed a step from, and parallel to, the compressed plane of meaningless brilliance.

“What is beyond there?” he whispered.

She answered, “No one knows, and no one shall know. Energy creatures have tried to break that invisible barrier; we are not so equipped. It is the mystery of the third band.”

Patiently, then, she went on ahead of him and waited until his incredible clumsiness allowed him to ascend into the fourth band. He hung there and saw his great young body repeated and repeated in long ranks that stretched away until his visions could no longer see them. The dark, dead images frightened him. They passed through the seventh band, where a soft, mellow, languid radiance washed through a starless cosmos. And through the tenth.

His progress was slow, wearisome. The green-light abruptly grasped at his thought swirls and clicked him back with her to the first band of true space. He faced her, dreading her next words, somehow understanding what was in her mind.

“I am alone now,” he said, with a sinking sensation.

She trembled. “Yellow Light, Yellow Light,” she cried softly, and there was a deep, foreboding grief in her. “Why is it? Why must this be? But I cannot stop it. It is done. I do not know why it was done, or who did it. It may be the enormous meaning that transcends time and space and has its answer somewhere, far above us. Oldster could tell you! Oldster! But Oldster dies, alone, in the fifteenth band of lightlessness, and he wishes to die and be no more! Yellow Light, I am sad!”

He said dully, for he was beginning to see something of himself, “Now what is there for me?”

Involuntarily she moved back from him a half-million miles, as if he had lashed her. She was shaken, her thoughts contorted with her sadness for him. Chaotic bubbles of liquescent light fled from her contracting body.

“Play!” she burst out violently. “There!” She pointed into the far distance and he saw, as his visions caught the scene, a swarming group of green and purple-lights in abandoned fantasy of motion about a violent sun. “You will play with them. No more can I tell you!”

“What is my purpose in life?” he asked quietly.

“Play, Yellow Light! Play! Purpose? It will be revealed to you.”

She turned. He spurred after her in mounting fright, terrified of her leaving him. But when he faced her again his thoughts were paralyzed, and he could find no word to say. So she went, leaving him in his flaming loneliness.

He hung there, quiescent before the stars, searching in his mind for something that he surely should have, and yet aware that somehow, subtly, he had lost memory of it. He searched into the far, far distances and saw only the gaunt mystery of tortured matter. He was entombed in a mausoleum of light-surfeited space. His horror was real.

What was he to do? Play? So had the green-light instructed. He looked toward the playing youths and there was in him a constriction of fright. He moved off unsteadily, weaving uncertainly in his great clumsy stride, his approach a painful, slow process of indirection, of formless motion. Angrily, he sought for the full power and strength that must be his. His propellants did not respond to his agonized efforts.

He stopped millions of miles from the swarming youths. He knew he had no courage to face them. He was engulfed in fear, and he was not of them. He spurred back along the direction he had come, and with craven heart immersed himself in the dead lightlessness of a dark nebula. He hung there, trembling with his self-loathing, living over again the dreadful pity that Crescent Moon had bestowed on him. Why? Why was there pity for him? Who was his mother? What had happened to her? Why was it he had been allowed to remain in the seventeenth band too long and what had it done to him?

Who was Oldster?

Oldster! The name awoke in him a terrible fascination. He knew a strange reverence for the mysterious creature, a strange kinship. Oldster wished to die! Yellow Light brooded on the ghastly thought, revolted and at the same time charmed by his revulsion. He must visit Oldster! He would know!

He thought awhile, for the passing thousands of years, on the horror of those things that Oldster, the all-wise, could tell him about himself. Then came pain, and the pangs of a new fear. He trembled. Oldster would tell him… what?

Ah, no,he thought starkly. I am afraid! I cannot go before him — yet.

A blank, unnamed desire to go, anywhere, surged unrestrained through him. He activated his propellants with an abrupt awkward surge and emerged slowly from the deep night of the nebula, casting about with his visions like a creature that emerges affrightedly from its lair. He saw no energy creatures, and thus brought himself again into the splendid brilliance of the stars.

He looked then into the far distances, and he thought he saw his destiny beckoning to him. Out there, beyond the circle of life, he must go! Why? He did not yet know the answer, and yet he must go.

So he went, pursuing his erratic course across the quiescent jewels that lay scattered on the limitless ebony cloth of the universe; and so for fifteen million years, life other than his did not know him. At last, saddened, his own mental involutions revealed to him, he returned, knowing that he had fled, not from life, as he had thought; not with a desire to await some change in his body that would make him like other energy creatures; he had attempted to flee that from which all the soaring grace of Star Glory’s flight could not take him — himself.

I have gained nothing,he thought sadly, as he hung on the ragged shores of his own galaxy.The years are wasted, and I have grown. I have been alone, and I have never escaped. I am the same. I am Yellow Light, and I have not been proud of my name! What matters the discoloration of my purple light? What matter the pitiful deficiencies that encumber me? I have not fought. Yellow Light, Yellow Light, he cried softly,you must fight!

Toward this end, holding his courage erect, he sought out life and found it, his visions resting at last on a titanic violet sun around which swarmed a horde of energy creatures, purples and greens. He was imbued with the sacred hope of a new fulfillment, and yet the pangs of dread ate at his thought swirls. If he failed, where would he turn?

It was a thought that had no answer, but he felt that then he would know true horror. He would have to escape! Where? Where lay escape from the cruel taunts of life, escape from himself? He was suddenly trembling with a nostalgic yearning for an invisible, intangible something that he could not name, that came trembling out of the reservoir of his clouded memory. Shaken by the thought, he drove slowly toward the blazing violet sun.

On the outskirts of the milling crowd of green and purple lights, he stopped. He watched with a rigid fear of discovery that slowly turned to a tremulously eager excitement.

This was a game the youths were playing, a staggering game of cosmic proportions. Below, coloring the heavens virulently in its baleful violet glow, a huge sun was growing. Vicious whirls of tortured gas fled across its face. Geysers of torn, disrupted matter arced upward like a hot tongue to lick toward nearby stars. The sun was in visible pain from its colossal weight pressing inward on itself.

Beneath the comparatively calm exterior, a furnace of titanic heat explosions raged. Now and again a planet-size fragment belched upward to fall in a futile frenzy of frustration as its parent dragged it back with inexorable gravitational fingers. The gargantua was three million miles in diameter, and the excited youths were skillfully adding to its mass by stripping a nearby galaxy of stars.

Yellow Light watched eagerly, charmed by the consummate skill with which a young purple-light delicately lowered a hundred-thousand-mile star into the ravening maw of the monster. He understood, too, the mechanics which demanded such precision. The skymonster was a cosmic powder-dump, primed to respond instantly and with suicidal force to an untoward exterior intervention. It sought release, even as it fought to maintain stability.

All this Yellow Light saw, and saw too the clamoring youths as they fought for their turns. One by one, stars were selected, swung on tractor beams, discarded as their masses proved their danger. One by one, while the breathless youths watched, solar masses were lowered through the immense gravitational field, until the oceans of gas that tripped across the monster’s face licked at the proffered morsels and swallowed them in a greedy burst of inchoate flame.

Yellow Light’s swollen body rippled visibly with his desire to enter the delighting game. He turned now, still undiscovered, and stealthily reached out toward the denuded galaxy, with a tractor ray drawing back toward himself a flaming mass which he thought would answer the purpose. His thought swirls throbbed in anticipation.

Slowly the sky monster grew, racked with its incredible stresses of heat and weight. Yellow Light hung back, lacking the courage to claim his turn, trembling with an inner frustration and dread. Finally he could stand it no longer. A green-light, the center of attention of a hundred energy creatures, completed her task with swift, complacent proficiency. Yellow Light activated his propellants and moved into the breach, at the same time thrusting his ripe young sun out on the tip of his tractor ray.

“Stand back!” he cried tremulously. “Stand back! It’s my turn!” He began to swing the lump of flaming matter in vast clumsy arcs.

The youths churned back in a great scattering cloud, back and away from the untoward length of his ray.

They were staring at him, Yellow Light knew. He felt a convulsion of panic. The sun almost slipped from his awkward grasp. Determinedly, he continued to swing it, aping the motions of those who had preceded him. Then suddenly, like an angry hive, the horde of youths swarmed in and closed about him in a sphere, nimbly dodging his tractor ray.

“Who is he?” — “An adult!” — “What is he doing here?” — “It is not his turn!”

A hundred outraged cries rang in his thought swirls. A single purple-light detached himself from the throng and cried with vast scorn, “Who are you, Yellow Light? What do you do here? Go away, large one!”

Yellow Light was sick with fright. “It is my turn,” he whispered.

They sensed his great clumsiness, his fear.

“Yellow Light!” a half-hundred of them cried in mockery. “Yellow Light! Yellow Light!”

The sun slipped from his grasp and started to fall toward the writhing violet sun. Paralyzed, he stared after it. He emitted a great wild cry and plunged with his awkward stride after it. He caught it again on the tip of his tractor ray, and the pack of youths roared in high fury, “He is destroying our sun. Stop him! Stop Yellow Light!”

The gravitational drag of the star was beyond belief. Plucked at with their thousand spears of insult, he fought with his falling sun as if his life depended on it, and he swung it free, in a vast arc, only to have it spin away in a mighty spiraling orbit. It disappeared beyond the titan’s farther rim, whirled swiftly, and came into view on the opposite rim just as it struck that heaving surface: The youths gasped concertedly, and suddenly they scattered back and away.

Yellow Light, for a moment of unbelief, held his visions on that terrible prelude to catastrophe. Then he too urged himself back a light-year, stunned.

The gargantua’s surface rippled with planet-size tidal waves and bulged for an infinitesimal second at its equator. The outraged matter at its core, pressed beyond endurance by the sudden application of a force and mass it could not compensate for, swelled up against its constructing confines and gave up all its supernal heat and energy in one huge upsurge of liberation. Million-mile cracks appeared on the crazily agitated surface of the star, deepened into vast gorges from which puffs of matter and light were emitted with frightful velocity. Pounded at insensately from within itself, the whole star broke apart with one vast detonation which bathed the heavens in demon light. It threw its fragments with unequaled savagery upon the sky, destroying in their course the tattered remnants of the two galaxies which had fed it. The inferno reached for fifteen light-years across space, and Yellow Light, visions blacked out by the ravening brilliance, was hurled back on the wavefront of the explosion.

Dazed, he finally thrust out with his parapropellants and stopped. From his vantage point, he saw the remainder of the conflagration. The brilliance died. Chaos was on the universe. New suns flared into life; freed matter settled into the stability of solitary, sedately coiling nebulae; flaming gases fled in great mist clouds across the gaps’ between four newly formed galaxies. Of the giant sun there was nothing. It had died and its convulsions had remade a tiny corner of the universe.

He hung there, shivering, knowing that there was something he must do. He must get away! He was too late, for from a hundred different directions the youths converged on him until once more he was encircled with their outraged cries.

“He destroyed our sun!” The purple-light who thus spoke reached out with a pressor ray. Yellow Light was ignominiously jarred a half-million miles to one side.

“Yellow Light, Yellow Light!” the voices cried. Another pressor ray flung him in an opposite direction. Feebly he tried to resist.

“I did not destroy it,” he panted, with an upsurge of rage. “I would have added to it successfully if there hadn’t been interference! It wasn’t my fault!”

A half-dozen rays, tractors and pressors both, stopped his protests, tore at him, pushed him, whirled him, until great foaming puffs of brilliance erupted from his oversize body. In a fury he lashed out with his own rays, but they were clumsily, ineffectively guided.

The youths cried out their devil’s song: “Yellow Light! Clumsy one! Yellow Light!”

“Stop it!”

A new voice burst through the mocking clamor. As if by magic, Yellow Light’s torturers ceased their battering, and he whirled, finally focusing his visions on the newcomer. Star Glory! A great starved eagerness leaped up in him at sight of her flawless milk-white sphericity with the round, clear green light as her core.

“Stop it, I say!” said Star Glory coldly. The youths stared at her. One of them burst out in excited voice, “Stop it? Why should we stop it? He is a clumsy fool. He destroyed our star with his clumsiness. Look at him! Yellow Light!”

“Yellow Light, Yellow Light,” the attendant throng muttered half-heartedly.

“Stop it!” cried Star Glory. She bent on Yellow Light a look of tenderness. She said slowly, “It is not right that you should treat him this way. I was with him in the seventeenth band. He had no mother. He was in the seventeenth band too long. My own mother, Crescent Moon, says that he was in the seventeenth band too long. She rescued him. If he is clumsy or has yellow lights at his core, you must blame it on his long stay in the seventeenth band, not on him. Something happened to him.”

The encircling youths were quiet and involuntarily drew back from him.

Yellow Light felt the hot flood of a terrible shame as the meaning of her words flowed into him. He trembled, caught halfway between an emotion of blind anger and futile despair. He held himself rigid, aware of the pity in which the uneasy youths held him.

Horror mounted within him.

“Say no more, Star Glory,” he whispered imploringly.

“I was in the seventeenth band with him, myself,” said Star Glory eagerly. “It was I who told him his mother had died. And then it was I who begged my mother to rescue him.” She rotated languidly, as she repeated her tale again and again.

Yellow Light writhed in the agony of the indictment all unwittingly hurled at him, as she thus bathed at the center of attention.

“I can stand it no more!” he cried in a terrible voice.

Star Glory whirled in surprise, apparently remembering him again. She turned then to the throng as a sudden thought struck her. “I know where there is a sun perhaps larger than the one Yellow Light so clumsily destroyed. We will go there!”

The youths, already forgetting the object of their late mockery, burst out with eager assent, milling about her.

“And Yellow Light may go with us!” said Star Glory magnanimously. “Come, Yellow Light!”

With a final delighted glance at him, she activated her propellants and shot away, the whole concourse of youths streaming after her, a chain of lights sweeping across the newly created galaxies. With blurred visions, Yellow Light stared after them. Then, a lost thought spurring him on, he frantically followed them.

It was in vain. His flight was cumbersome, pitiful in its fumbling attempt at a great velocity. He stopped finally, the youths gone, shuddering in a horror that was directed at himself.

I am alone, he thought starkly. I have failed. I am lost! Then, for the second time, came a flashing memory.

There was something he must find! There was something he must look for! There was something that was for him, and him alone! He thrust out wildly with his visions, hoping that he might see, or sense, the nameless reality of that which must be his. There was flaming matter — that was all.

But in his mind the flame of his desire burned fiercer and hotter, consuming him in terrible, bright clearness.

“I will find it!” he vowed passionately to the poised assemblage of stars. “I will find it — and I will know peace!”

Chapter III The Inner Band

He was young, in the life scale of energy creatures, but thirty million years had passed since his birth. Already there was in him an unyielding black bitterness, tinged with white from afar with the unseen bright beacon of his hope. In search of the fulfillment of an unnamable desire he went, and the millions of years passed.

He was a specter of the stellar legions, weaving through their impersonal ranks, searching deeply beneath their scalded faces, reeling with the suffocation of his continued failure, as he found no clue. The bands of hyperspace knew him, as he thrust himself into them with laborious mental effort, from first to forty-seventh, where all space was filled with cubistically distorted stars and galaxies. And he knew nothing of the forty-eighth, the chilling band of life. He was a purple-light and did not have the instinctively guarded, natural wisdom of the green.

He was forty million years in age, and he met Star Glory. He saw her flashing toward him from the far distance, bright with her perfection, searing him with the memory of the awful thing she had revealed to him. He froze, choked with an emotion he could not label.

“Yellow Light!” She thrust out her parapropellants, halting before him in sharp curiosity. “Where have you been?”

His great loneliness ebbed from him in a swift tide as he was washed in the cruel tenderness of her gaze.

He blurted out thickly, “Everywhere, Star Glory! I have sought. I have searched the universe over—” He halted.

“You have searched?” she demanded. “For what? Oh, Yellow Light, for what have you searched? Is not everything you desire around you?”

“No,” he whispered, “no!”

She came closer. “For what do you search?” She was eager with tremulous curiosity, striving to reach into his memory swirls with her thought bands, to reach in and draw out his innermost thoughts. He closed his memory swirls against her, overcome with shame.

“I do not know for what I search,” he gasped. Then, in bitter frenzy, he cried out, “I do not know! There is in me a terrible yearning! There is something I must find. It is here, Star Glory, and yet it is not here! I have not found it!”

For long she stared at him, and he was again aware of the wisdom that was hers, a wisdom he could never accumulate, and which she would never divulge. Suddenly she filled him with nameless horror.

“Leave me, Star Glory!” he whispered. “Leave me!”

She rotated with slow, piercing thought. “Perhaps,” she said presently, “you are on a fool’s quest, Yellow Light. But I will leave.” She did, though he would have had her back the moment she was gone. He turned and blundered in slow, zigzag fashion in the opposite direction, a vast sickness growing in him — fool’s quest! So Star Glory had said. But she could not be right! Else why this thunderous longing that beat in his mind?

His meeting with Star Glory had a strange result. Thousands of years later, a group of youths came flashing toward him, circling him in dazzling brilliance as they taunted his clumsiness with their own grace.

“Yellow Light!” their devil’s song blasted out. “Yellow Light! He searches and does not know for what he searches!”

“Star Glory would not have told you!” he cried in his mortification, but at the same time he knew that her vanity had betrayed him.

“Yellow Light!” the dervishes called mockingly. “How can he find what he does not know?”

“I will find it,” he cried, goaded to consuming rage.

“He will find it. Yellow Light, the clumsy one, the yellow one, will find it! As well could he solve the mystery of the third band—” And they whirled away, their knife-thoughts still in his brain.

He quivered, his thoughts rioting uncontrollably under their mockery, his body expanding and contracting under the dreadful indictment. They were not like him! They did not have to search for a chimera! Poor Yellow Light, the deluded. And then came thought of the third band.

Slowly the thought unfolded, like a flower that has been in the darkness too long. Then, by some alchemy of the mind, he knew, as he had always known, that he and he alone could solve that mystery. He halted on the threshold of soaring emotions, exploring the astounding discovery.

It must be what I seek,he thought in awe.The third band! The third band! It is mine!” By laborious mental command he clicked into it.

Before him stretched the thin, patterned plane of white brilliance that was the three-dimensional universe projected onto a two-dimensional plane. The third band! And beyond the depraved ugliness of compressed galaxies stretched the tight, ebony skin of nothingness, reaching without end into diminishing distances.

“It is mine,” he whispered with a terrible bright clearness of purpose, and without doubt he hurled himself at that dark curtain behind which mystery, darkly ominous, lay entombed.

It parted and closed behind him.

He hung poised, hardly daring to think on the incredible occurrence. But he was here! He was choked with the pride of his feat, a feat no other energy creature had ever accomplished. He was the only living being able to penetrate that dark wall! And though around him was the sheerest darkness, the thought was intoxicating to his senses.

Darkness! Nothingness! He waited, trembling with the revelation of his mightiness. He sent out his vision rays for what must have been long light-years. There was nothing. A chilling doubt began to arise.

“No,” he cried at long last. “No! There is something! There is at least a galaxy, a far galaxy, a new universe!”

And far away, a mote of egg-shaped light, he saw it — a galaxy! Energy formed and foamed away from him as his body contracted to half its size under the emotions of thanksgiving and pulsing wonder. Involuntarily, he lashed out with his propellants and surged into glorious, parsec-eating flight. Through him flowed such strength and power as he had never known. His speed mounted, for the galaxy grew apace, nor did it seem to weave from side to side. He was flying, straight and true, with all the grace of Star Glory herself!

And still faster! His mind numbed with the utter enigma of that which was happening. He, Yellow Light, the malformed, the ill-born, was great. He was the eater-of-space, the faster-than-light, owner of the inner band! He hungrily drank in the celestial beauty of a million stars as the galaxy subdivided within itself, and now lay spread across the endless darkness with spiral arms outstretched to receive him. And into it he plunged, drenching himself in the radiant energy which throbbed through space, in mad excitement hurling himself in graceful loops and arcs around flaming hulks of matter. From one end of the majestic galaxy to the other he plummeted with incomparable ease and strength, slicing dead red cinders into dozens of separate pieces, hurling them with skill unsurpassed around other stars to form complete, complex solar systems. He devoured stars whole, converted them into energy, then contracted his body until energy coalesced, flowed together and formed new lumps of matter. He flung it from him at light speed, in wanton abandon. Stars exploded as his titanic bullets struck them, and he reformed them with ironic mercy. “I am master!” he exulted, and halted on the edge of the galaxy to see the dead emptiness that stretched away forever. He threw himself into it, and with delight watched the galaxy shrink. It was gone. Again he cast about him with his visions, and a nimbus seemed to settle about his mind.

“This is the birthplace of matter,” he whispered, and why he thought it he did not know. Yet, it was truth. Untold years, numbering in the tens of millions, seemed to pass through the dark fabric of space, and there was a manifold rustling of energy growing from nothing. He saw the motes of light glowing in prismatic beauty, swirling in eldritch dances as they pirouetted about each other, melted together, and assumed the guise of matter. Matter which darkened and swelled and seethed. Matter which churned against itself, colliding, flaring in molten beauty, gaining mass from a magical source, and thundering upward to sun size.

All around him space was ruptured and cast out of being, as the illustrious miracle took place. Suns of fiery magnificence swarmed through the infinite extents of a newborn universe. They erupted and clawed at each other with gravitational drags; and planets, steaming hot, shot out from their writhing interiors.

He moved with the pomp of a conqueror through the flaming legions.

“This is mine,” he cried, and there was no voice to deny him.

No voice! No life! The thought was a clanging discord.

“There must be life!” he cried violently.

Thus he saw life, and its energy beat strongly at him. Space swarmed with life. He saw groups of energy creatures, far away on the ragged shores of the numberless galactic accretions. They had no knowledge of him, Yellow Light, for they moved and played on, intent on themselves and their own pursuits. In Yellow Light grew a vast cunning. He moved with insolent, powerful grace toward a nearby sun, a lost memory tugging at him.

He hovered over the star and proceeded to reach out to a nearby galaxy with jabbing tractor rays, bringing back smaller stars. He dropped them, thus adding to the star’s bulk until it became a ravening furnace of indigo violence. It grew, swelled, became a dangerous celestial bomb. And now, with infinite skill and precision, Yellow Light lowered suns delicately, in constant stream, apparently absorbed with lofty fascination in his game, apparently unaware of the energy creatures who, one by one, left their own games as they noted Yellow Light’s tremendously careless skill. They came darting from all directions, tens and hundreds of them. They watched in silent awe as Yellow Light fed the madly undulating rind of the ripening star with a flawless technique which soon had the monster a billion miles through.

And then they came by the thousands! Yellow Light felt such joy as he had never known. If only Star Glory, if only those other taunting youths, could see him now.

They pressed closer about him and his bulging star, voiceless. They knew that he did not see them, and if he did see them, would not deign to notice them. He felt a great pity for their smallness, their inferior strength. He cast a side vision at them, sweepingly, carelessly, then returned to his effortless task.

They appreciated his recognition of them, and finally they could contain themselves no longer. A chant grew, swelling with voluminous roar against his thought swirls.

“He is great! The greatest of the great! See the star he has built! Oh, there can be none greater than this stranger in our midst. We are the luckless ones, and we writhe in our shame!”

They whirled about him, in their thousands, crying out their praise, their worship, their intense admiration. His thought swirls rioted uncontrollably as their litany drew him to the pinnacle of his happiness. He saw now that there was truly no limit to his magnificence, and no limit of size to which he could take this star.

He played his visions over them, as they whirled in awkward adoration, and a hideous, mind-destroying doubt crawled through him. He froze in horror, stricken dumb. It seemed as if his very life-force were draining away.

“He is great,” said the weaving throng doubtfully.

The truth burst in him with white-hot intensity. Something crumbled in his mind, and with a wild, mad thought blasting at the hovering expectant thousands, he spurred back and away.

“Go! Vanish!”

Space was still and the energy creatures were gone. And, as if they also expected his command, the stars commenced to pale. They faded to redness, to darkness, to non-being, and darkness wrapped itself around him. He shook in a series of trapped convulsions and drew his visions in about him like a shroud. He hung there, unable to still his dreadful thoughts. Then, involuntarily, there was a click in his consciousness. When he again looked, the familiar ranks of galaxies and stars, unchanged, surrounded him.

He was back in the first band of true space, and he knew he was mad.

The inner third band — a dream dimension — and each creature had been but a replica of himself…

Chapter IV The Betrayal

For long thousands of years, he was afraid to move, for he knew what he would find. He was filled with a dull, dead weariness in which thoughts trickled slowly. And yet one thought stood out with burning clarity. He had not found that for which he sought.

“I will never find it,” he whispered in agony. Never? The thought was unbearable.

Then came whispering to him the name that flowed like a great unseen river through space. Crescent Moon, the mother of Star Glory, had twice mentioned him. Oldster — the wise.

“He must not die!” he cried violently. “He must not sleep! I will find him!”

Abruptly, his horror was washed away in the great fear that Oldster would die before he, Yellow Light, could speak to him. That must not happen! Oldster would know, and Oldster would answer. He trembled with his longing, and entered the fifteenth band of lightlessness, engulfed in its funereal obscurity.

“Oldster!” He cried the name out, but in all this infinity he did not feel the beat of a life-force. Oldster was far, far away. Nonetheless, he began his search. He blundered for untold thousands of years that swelled to millions, seeking for the merest wisp of thought that might emanate from the somnolent hulk of the terrifying creature. The invisible light-years fled away as he weaved out from a center. And finally, so faint as to be almost without being, came a single mental vibration, wordless, meaningless.

He drove toward it, a terrible fright seizing at his mind. The strength of the thought hardly increased, and yet he felt now the faint, pulsing beat of a fading life-force. Oldster it surely must be!

“Awake! Awake! I am Yellow Light. Do you know of me? I was without a mother. She died. Oldster!” Over and over again, without end, a single goading thought that impinged with monotonous insistency on the dying creature’s brain.

The pulse of life fluttered, then increased in strength with spasmodic, dreadful surges. Yellow Light leaped into the breach, hammering at it with his thoughts.

Then came a muttering, a mumble, a restless jumble of agonized thought, a great wave of delirious horror. Spellbound with the futilely lashing thoughts of the creature, Yellow Light was held frozen.

The formless thought ceased abruptly. A hollow, stricken voice, as if borne on leaden wings from a distance infinitely far, said, “Go away! Away! There is nothing for you here. I am tortured again!”

“I did not mean to bring you pain,” said Yellow Light violently.

“But you have brought me pain, a pain I thought to escape,” the old creature burst out rackingly. “Who are you? Why do you torture me? Ah, I will soon know.”

Yellow Light’s thought swirls were seized with tight bands of energy which relentlessly, cruelly explored through the accumulated memory of his life. The probing bands withdrew, and the thousands of years, pregnant with foreboding silence, trooped away.

Then came Oldster’s dull whisper, “Yellow Light is his name — Vanguard! And I had thought myself done with Sun Destroyer! Oh, Yellow Light, whose true name is Vanguard, there is an evil heritage on you, and I see no end, no end!”

The fluttering fingers of horror touched at Yellow Light’s brain.

“My true name is Vanguard,” he whispered, but before he could complete the thought, Oldster reached into him, and one by one tore away the veils drawn over his identity. Acutely revealed was the story of that creature from an age long-gone; of Darkness, the dreamer, who had plunged across the sea of lightlessness, in search of a purpose, and had found it only in death; of Sun Destroyer, his daughter, who had returned along his path only to die in the mad fantasies of her disordered mind, after bringing into being her child, Vanguard.

“Vanguard!” Yellow Light said starkly. “That is my true name! But — but Oldster! Death — birth! I understand none of these.”

“Nor shall you.” It seemed as if Oldster’s memory were fleeing backward along a trail which took him to the day when he was young. He muttered restlessly, “What might I not have spared myself had I not sought the answer to those problems. Oh, Yellow Light — Vanguard — leave me. Leave me! I cannot help you. I am lost; we are all lost, and there is no answer!”

Yellow Light surged forward in violent denial.

He charged passionately, “There is an answer, Oldster. And you know that answer. I have searched. I do not know how long I have searched! What is it? What is it that haunts me, Oldster, so that it drips on me like an acid, eating at me until I am mad with the desire to find it? I am lost if you do not tell me!”

“There is no real answer to your dream,” Oldster said dully. “My son, return to the inner third band!”

“The inner third band?” The scalding memory of the dream dimension returned. “I cannot! There is nothing for me there, Oldster. I will not live in dreams!”

“You have lived in nothing else,” said Oldster sadly. His thoughts left Yellow Light momentarily, then came back.

He whispered, so that his voice was barely audible, “If you really wish to find that which you seek — there is Star Glory!”

“Star Glory!” and suddenly he was shaking, his mind seared unaccountably with the thought.

“But — but—” he whispered. But Oldster had drawn his thought bands in around him and would say no more.

Yellow Light hung in darkness unutterable, palsied with an unknown horror. Star Glory! He must seek her out, and his search would at last be rewarded. But why? Why?

He dropped to the first band of true space, and, with erratic, strangely eager propellants, lashed himself across the boundless star fields. He found her, in the course of a thousand years.

He intercepted her course, and for long moments, quivering with his mad exultation, he held her visions with his own.

She, in turn, returned his stare, and he sensed a peculiar change coming over her.

She spoke at last, faintly:

“You are strange. Yellow Light, strange. Why is it that you are here?”

He was caught in the grip of an emotion he could not name. “I do not know, Star Glory! I have been sent by Oldster — I do not know why I have been sent!”

For a long time she bent on him the growing glance of cruelty and paradoxical tenderness.

She whispered at last. “Then I think that I know. Yellow Light, follow me!”

He poised, trembling with unexplainable dread. He watched Star Glory as she receded, and then it seemed to be the last he knew. A nimbus settled over his thought swirls, and he remembered only that under the terrible spell of her receding green light, he had cast out his own yellow-specked purple light. Two globes — green and purple — collided in midspace, merged, and became a pulsing ball of luminescence.

He stared, gripped with a sense of loss.

Star Glory he saw. She hovered over the white, pulsing ball, and he knew with poignant certainty that it was life — life that he and Star Glory had created. And she, though her green light had merged with his purple, had magically acquired another light, while his was gone, gone!

“Gone!” he cried in agony, and did not know why he was agonized. Suddenly he saw Star Glory and the energy child disappear.

He went after her in a frenzy, and found her again in the seventeenth band of hyperspace. She was hovering in strange benediction over her child. Yellow Light moved toward her in leaden motion.

“Star Glory,” he whispered.

She turned toward him, and read his unspoken question. Her thoughts were cold.

“You will die,” she said heartlessly.

“No!” he cried.

“Yes. Thus it is, thus it must be.” She was impersonal, uncaring. “Oldster wishes to die. You knew that. It is not strange that he should point out the path of death to you. Perhaps,” she added, with demon humor, “it is what you were searching for!”

“I did not search for that,” he said dully. He stared at the energy child, hanging pendant in the seventeenth band, where propellants were useless. A memory, a longing that was old, tugged at the roots of his brain. But he could not place it. A great, deathly weariness was working grimly in his body.

“My purple light,” he said helplessly. “It is gone. But yours has returned!”

“And will return three times more,” she uttered, and there was the shadow of her own eventual doom hanging over her words. She rotated restlessly. “Go, Yellow Light! There is a law which governs us — and I can do nothing about it. Had you been like Oldster, if in your wisdom you had known the secret of the purple and green lights… ah, Oldster brought his own torture on himself. He will never die!”

She turned from him, and so he left her, the talons of his dissipation into the energy from which he had been formed clawing at his propellants, rendering them almost entirely useless.

He drifted without purpose the length of a galaxy, striving to drink into him as much of the beauty around him as he could before he was negated. It was useless. His brooding thoughts returned to Oldster and the great treachery that Oldster had practiced on him. Bitter fury goaded him to a flaming, zigzag flight. He remembered suddenly the soaring grace of his flight in the inner third band. And so came the great thought!

The inner third band! His memory swirls throbbed with excitement. He could go there!

“Oldster, Oldster,” he whispered, the wild fire of hope burning in him. “Had I listened! But it cannot be too late!”

It could not be too late. It must not be! He threw himself into the third band with his waning strength, tremulous with thought of the dream-life that awaited him. He flung himself at the impalpable dark skin behind which lay the dream dimension.

It was as if he had flung himself against a solid wall.

“I am lost,” he said starkly, “and my search is finished—”

Chapter V A Race is Born

“I have been waiting for you,” said Oldster.

“You betrayed me!” said Yellow Light, trembling with dread. “I have come before you to die, Oldster! You will know that I am dying; you will know that it is you who have caused it, and you will never forget. You will live in horror of the memory, but it will return, and your sleep will be broken and you will never be at peace again!”

The aged creature’s thought rays rested on his rioting memory swirls with singularly gentle touch.

“Peace, my son,” he whispered, his words aching. “I have given you more than you could have given yourself, Yellow Light! You stayed in the seventeenth band too long and emerged to find yourself lacking in the great grace and power of motion which other energy creatures possessed. Such is the penalty — such was the heritage of Sun Destroyer, your mother. But there was another heritage which she gave you, all unwittingly. It was fitting that she called you Vanguard, for you are the vanguard of a new race, of which the yellow light is the symbol!”

The dying creature drew back a slow light-year.

“You mean—” He groped with the blinding thought.

“Yes, yes!” Oldster’s thoughts reached out with swelling strength and glory. “You are a step upward along the path of evolution, and you have given birth to a new race. Another mystery of space has been shattered. And there are more, Yellow Light, more! Long, winding and bitter is the path, but it ascends to a land of promise I cannot guess at.

“I see a glimmering — for a moment I understand the enormous purpose behind the cycle of life and death. The years have fled, and I have thrust all the bitterness of my life behind me, but now and anon, in my death-striving dreams, I see a tremendous purpose. Whither? I do not know. But you are a touchstone on the path, as was that first creature whose mutation allowed him ascent into the hyperspatial universe, as were a million, a billion others. From them stemmed the new races. The Star Glories, the others, the unnumbered billions of others, were shadows with no meaning. My son,” Oldster whispered, and it seemed that he himself felt the rare brilliance of ultimate meaning, “you are great!”

Yellow Light hung exhausted, no longer fighting, bathed in the blinding significance of the word. Great! He dreamed a dream that lay billions of years in the future.

“Yellow lights,” he muttered. “I see them — and they are no longer different. And from me they stem!”

He fondled the thought with languid, luscious introspection, hardly aware that every passing moment brought him nearer extinction. He passed in thought over the mad, mad years of his life, as he blundered through the heavenly corridors, seeking and not finding, stretched on the agonizing rack of his own thoughts, tortured with dreams. Now it seemed as if all memory of his pain were softened.

“Yellow Light,” he thought sadly. “I should have been proud of my name.”

He could no longer focus thoughts. He knew he was dying. And yet, dying before the wise old creature, a lost remembrance plagued him.

He fought with himself. “I must know,” he thought in stark horror, knowing that he could no longer form the words. “I must. Oldster! Let me die then — but first let me know! For what did I search?”

Soothingly, faintly, gently came the answering whisper. “For the seventeenth band. But it was beyond recall — the seventeenth band, backward in time the length of your life when you were but a child; when you knew nothing of life, even your own; when the universe seemed to sing a great song of peace. You remember, Yellow Light! Now you know that your search was in vain, save in death!”

Oldster’s voice was gone, and Yellow Light sank into an abyss from which even he knew there would be no return. “Save in death,” he repeated, as the darkness yawned; it was truth.

He thought he heard the pounding, soundless rhythm of a swelling song as the universe singled him out and made him the center of being, the hub of the great wheel, the master, the supreme audience. It was good. He imagined himself to be very young again.