Part 1

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REVOLT OF THE DEVIL STAR

By ROSS ROCKLYNNE

The Law of the Universe stated that all life must create and die. Devil Star defied the law--for did he not know the dread secret of his birth?

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy February 1951 Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

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The story of Darkness has been told. Darkness, the dreamer who crossed the immeasurable gulf of lightless emptiness between two universes. He, an energy creature tens of millions of miles in girth, sought the answer to life. Perhaps he found that answer in death, when he mated in the thus-far inaccessible forty-eighth band of life.

And the story of Darkness' daughter Sun Destroyer has been told. She plunged back along Darkness' trail to seek out that aged, sorrowing being whose name was Oldster. For Oldster was wise. He had counselled Darkness. Surely Oldster could lead Sun Destroyer to her life's completion in the forty-ninth band of hyper-space. But there was no forty-ninth band, unless it lay in Sun Destroyer's wild fantasies of impossible happiness. She too died, yearning for her son Vanguard, the infant purple light who lay helpless in the seventeenth band of hyper-space.

The story of Vanguard too has been told. He was renamed Yellow Light by his taunting playmates, because of imperfections in his central core. Physically disabled by his long stay in the seventeenth band, he was never to know happiness. Oldster, in his compassion and wisdom, led Vanguard to mate--to create and thus to die--for he knew Vanguard's true greatness, that he was destined to father a new race who would supplant the old.

And this is the last story of the Darkness, the story of the purple light named Devil Star.

Youth and play. Youth and that great yard of galaxies with the great high fence of the darkness. Youth and the joys of living ... and the deep-fluttering memory of his birth.

Into his ten-millionth year he never spoke of that memory. He kept it cold and suffocating in an unplumbed chamber of his thought swirls. Then it pressed upward in its wild escape.

"Moon Flame!"

His companion in the joyous race across that galaxy touched him briefly with his visions.

"You spoke?"

"Yes! Moon Flame, listen to me. I must know something. Whether you--if the others--if they remember. Remember the moment of birth! Remember the mother--the dying father-- the band of life --"

His aura quivered. He strove not to read concern in the gaze of Moon Flame.

"I do not remember it," said Moon Flame slowly. "Birth? Death? Father? You speak in riddles, Devil Star. Come now, faster! I see the others in the galaxy beyond. Forget that silliness!"

For a clairvoyant second in his time-scale, the raging thoughts of Devil Star swelled. And subsided.

He flung himself into Moon Flame's path.

"You must listen," he said tensely. "We must all beware. For all of us will die!"

Moon Flame did not lessen his speed. "Die?"

"You do not understand, Moon Flame. Death is our destiny. It was destined long before we were born."

Moon Flame stared. "Then if this strange thing is destined, no one can win against it."

"No one?" Devil Star swerved in his backward flight, brushing the violet furnace of a super-sun. He said, "I shall win, Moon Flame. I shall fight death--the death green lights will attempt to give us. I shall interrupt destiny. I shall be its master!"

But Moon Flame did not understand. He brushed Devil Star aside with an impatient tractor ray. With a scornful glance backward, he went shooting off leaving Devil Star caught in a wake of incandescent sparks.

Devil Star stared after him, but all he saw was the immortal blaze of his life's years.

He was the rebel. He would not die!

Devil Star had five million more years of peace, of caniptious play. And then....

He was alone, and cradling his loneliness, atop a galaxy shaped like a masterfully blown, brimming wine-glass, with the bubbles of stars clouding about its rim. The moment of his curse had come, for a vast cunning had grown in him. He would lie here, shielded by a giant star, and he would wait.

The waiting was not long. Came the beat of a life force. He felt himself tremble. Deep inside something was whispering that he should forget, turn back--play--skim along the surface of life as did Moon Flame and the other energy children. Accept destiny!

Destiny! The cunning shift and quiver of sub-atomic particles that began when the universe began.

He would not.

The life force pressed in, strengthened. And with a thread of vision he saw a matured green light, her central core burning with an hypnotic, frightening radiance.

Devil Star surged up closer to the star that shielded him, for now he sensed the swirl and pulse of another life. With a thinned ray of sight, he beheld the purple light ripping through space toward the deadly source of the vibration that drew him.

For one chaotic moment, Devil Star's purpose was as nothing. He knew this energy creature.

"Solar Cloud!"

His cry of warning blasted through space. He expanded to normal, came into full view of green and purple light. But neither heard his cry. They could not--would not--see or hear him. They were caught on that barbed law from which the mere interference of a Devil Star could not set them free. They hung motionless in space, the huge green light languidly rotating, the slightly smaller purple light, Solar Cloud, staring at her in hard, bright wonder. And Devil Star knew that they were speaking along such tight bands of energy he could not hear what they said.

"Solar Cloud," he whispered, "stop!"

And then reaction. The full knowledge of his ultimate triumph came to him. Solar Cloud would die. But Devil Star would live--would grow old beyond death.

At once he was transformed back into a creature of cunning.

The green light disappeared into a hyper-space. The purple light appeared bewildered. Then he too disappeared, and Devil Star, bitterly frightened that already he had lost them, felt the click in his thought swirls which transported him into the second band of the universe's forty-eight faces. Here was cosmos in wild, disordered motion. Spasms of pain ripped through Devil Star as eating vibrations impinged on him. For a nickering moment he allowed himself to wonder at the reason behind that amok universe. Causeless?

Nothing without cause!

Or was there?

He flicked into the next band, following green and purple light upward until around them were those cubed celestial bodies of the forty-seventh band.

The green light vanished.

Solar Cloud remained behind, bewilderedly searching for her. A wild excitement shook Devil Star. He must get closer. Solar Cloud knew nothing of a forty-eighth band, but surely the green light would somehow draw him into it. And Devil Star would inadvertently be drawn with him!

And, subtly, he knew why he must follow. There was the memory--the damning memory of his birth--and he must know if it was memory, or a phantasm without meaning in fact.

He moved closer to Solar Cloud ... and, abruptly, felt himself swept along in some giant tide. He had his moment of surprise before his consciousness momentarily blurred.

Then, sharply, he was aware.

His visions darted out, contracted. The full knowledge of where he was smote him. Crystalline tongues of fire quivered from his contracting body. He knew he had done an impossible thing.

He, unmatured, was in the forty-eighth band.

Time passed, the great, vital pulses of time, flowing like an unseen river through that band where life was born. Devil Star watched numbly, without horror, triumph, feeling.

He saw that mating of green and purple light as their central cores met in annihilating fusion.

He saw the grayness of coming death settle over Solar Cloud.

He drifted into a torpor, saw the pulsing white ball which heralded life, and saw nothing there. The moment was relived. The memory had been there.

Then, all that was gone. Against his will, he had been moved to the first band in true space.

His thoughts did not function. He hung in a box of emptiness between two stars, unable to plumb the depths of that staggering event.

Solar Cloud was dead, or dying.

As he, Devil Star, was destined to die.

Now the thoughts did start. An incredible thing had happened. Where had it begun? Ten thousand billion years ago? Or--a mere fragment of time away to that moment when Devil Star was born?

His thoughts took their upward surge. As full awareness came back, he felt a shock of knowledge.

He was being watched, and it was the green light, she who had conceived a life and heartlessly destroyed one, who was watching. A sudden cunning hate took hold of him. He held her stare, flung it back arrogantly. And she watched him with coldness from the eminence of her greater size.

She said chillingly, "I saw you there. And it was not meant to be. Will you forget?"

"Forget?" The cry was shocked from him. "You are begging me to forget, Comet Glow?"

And as he mockingly uttered her name, she drew back, a darkness creeping into the brilliant depths of her. Slowly: "If that is the word you wish to use, yes."

He surged closer to her. "It is the word, Mother of four children! Then let me also forget the arts of existence--the eating of energy, the dispelling of it--the use of my para-propellents. I would as soon forget them. And let me also forget the dread moment of my birth!"

And he knew what effect that had on her, for he had told none but Moon Flame. Involuntarily she expanded, looked at him with dawning horror.

"Remember--that?" The words were torn from her.

"I remember it. And I will not forget," and he was gone from her sight into another band of hyper-space. But she followed, reaching out with tight bands of energy, holding him fast, and yet at a distance.

"Devil Star!" The words came faintly. "What is it you search for?"

She was debasing herself, she, a green light, millions of years older than he. And he knew his moment of gloating should be put aside. He was young. There was much knowledge to be had.

"I am searching for--" He stopped. For what? A restless quiver of sparks leapt from him. "Comet Glow, perhaps I am seeking to be master of my own fate."

For long and long her somber gaze rested on him. "Devil Star, it is not possible."

Instantly he tore from her restraining bands of energy. "You say that," he cried, "who saw me, an unmatured purple light, in the band of life! Who knows that I have a memory which carries me to the moment of my own birth!"

And he stopped, chilled by her odd, pitying silence, by the dread answer she seemed to be giving him. Another thought rose clamoring. Green lights are--different. They have a cruel, natural wisdom purple lights cannot hope to possess.

And, mockingly, that ruinous other-thought: They?

He was sinking into his dreadful abyss.

"Devil Star." The sorrowing thoughts of Comet Glow came. "You are young. Live as life must live."

She pressed closer, laving him with her anxiety. "Do you seek to change the natal matrix of the vast universe? Ten thousand billion years ago--and perhaps even longer, Devil Star! The pattern of all that is was foreordained--and all that will be! No electron that moved along its path but what moved in response to a prior event.

"There has been no thought--and shall be none--that was not caused by a prior thought.

"No result without cause. And no event without result!"

His words came out of the tortured depths of him. "I was in the band of life. And it was against the pattern. There was no reason for it--no reason!"

"Yes," she whispered sadly. "There was a reason. And if you persist in searching for that reason, you will surely have further proof of the shackles destiny binds us with."

Alone in the quivering brightness hung Devil Star. Not make use of knowledge? No result without cause? The thoughts tugged and tore. Into his mind came the drugging answer to all problems. He slept. And in his sleep, an insidious process began working, a selection and burying of the hated answers.

And when he awoke he knew, coldly secret within him, that he was exterior to the pattern--the rebel, the one who would revolt against destiny.

Somewhere in the passing millions of years, the senseless, joyous years of youth, his Mother vanished forever. He took small note of it. Comet Glow, too, faded into a forgotten darkness. Other names passed from the scene. And in from the wings, for reasons none questioned, came other, younger energy creatures....

... He played. And there was a green light, one of the twin siblings of Comet Glow, who played along with him.

Her name was Dark Fire, and sometimes, looking down into the black whirling cauldron of a sun-spot, he could see the same primeval excitement with movement that marked her.

He felt a wonderful sense of companionship with that green light, a tenderness, perhaps because he too had her taste for the unexpected. The pattern of play in this surging universe concerned the helter-skelter rearrangement of galaxies themselves. But Dark Fire often explored more novel avenues of play. Out of a nebula's heart she would come racing, trailing hot streams of excess energy--would circle him--dance--afire with some tremendous importance.

But that friendship was to end.

"Come, Devil Star, look what I've done!"

He saw the planet she had made, and marvelled. A planet whose surface crawled with beings made of solid matter. An incredible kind of actual life whose base was silicon--or carbon; he did not try to find out.

"It dies so swiftly," he said.

"But its time-scale is different. I shall tend this planet," she dreamed. "The life-forms will improve on themselves. Maybe someday they will come on out into space." Excitement was in her. "And they will never know that she who created them watches their brave venture."

For long and long Devil Star brooded over that planet. In the sub-swirls of his mind a remembrance shook him.

"Something troubles you, Devil Star?"

"Yes," he said faintly. "The creation of that planet. It is ... against the pattern!"

She sensed the problem, but there was only cunning mockery in her gaze. "Against it? Devil Star, there is nothing against the pattern--and no one who can fight it."

"No!" he cried in denial. "Dark Fire, you had your choice--to create or not to create. You selected--you were master of yourself in that selection."

"No. I did that which I would do. I had no choice." She rotated along an axis, probing him, mocking him. "We shall explore this thought of yours. I have choice, so you would say, of destroying this life I have created, or of allowing it to exist. But I have no choice."

"You have choice!"

"No."

Again that mockery. And suddenly she drew back, lashing out with a destroying heat-ray that in a cosmic instant turned her planet into a molten, endless sea. Devil Star looked at it in horror, and a clamoring thought rose in him: As she would destroy me!

That shocked moment held. Then, mockingly,

"I made no choice, Devil Star. I could not have acted but as I did. For am I not the product of my Mother? Of all who went before her? Of all the events that have impinged on me to make me as I am? Am I not moved and swayed by cosmic tides that began long before I began? And you, Devil Star, are but a wave-curl in the tide ... an event in space-time, forcing me to make my so-called 'choice.' Choice? There was none. There was an inevitable act."

He stared at her askance. Then a thought shook him to the innermost part of his being.

"Dark Fire," he whispered, "until now we have been friends. We can no longer be friends. For soon a time will come when I must--when I shall --make a choice between two events. Do you understand?"

Puzzlement was in her gaze. "I do not understand," she said slowly. "We must always be friends."

A fuzzy-headed comet slashed its path across the dark heavens between them.

Devil Star said, in mirthless mockery, "Friends! Can green and purple lights ever be friends?"

For long and long she held that thought. Then, as if in involuntary reaction against the horror that rose from the instinctive matrix of her, she surged back across the heavens. From that distance, her amplifying fear and shock drove against him.

"You speak, and do not know whereof you speak!"

He followed in triumph, but Dark Fire dwindled more swiftly, as if knowing that to flee from him would dull her turmoil. But drifting back came her voice, cold and faint.

"Devil Star, there will be no choice!"

The friendship of Dark Fire and Devil Star was truly done. For even when they were members of the same playing group, there was this cold thought: I am destined to die, and to die in a certain manner. I shall therefore turn destiny aside. I shall not die!

When Dark Fire came for him, he would be ready for her.

When the time came, ironically, he was not ready....

He was in his forty-millionth year, still a youth in his vast time-scale, when he began drifting away from his other friends as well. For already he felt the hunger in him, the first deep pangs, and mistook it for his need to acquire knowledge.

His search for knowledge took him not into the macro, but into the microcosms. Surely the larger universe was near the end result while the smaller was near the beginning. Somewhere in that complexity of sub-particles he would find a result without cause!

His tools were crude. It was nothing to pluck a star from the heavens with a reaching tractor ray--to split it--explode it. But to shear a molecule from a parent mass, to hold it inviolate from its fellows, seemed impossible. He raged at the task for a million years, forgetting all the names linked to his life--forgetting the menace of Dark Fire.

And he succeeded.

His success lasted for one thrilling moment. In a vacuum of its own, untouched by outside force, that microcosm hung pendant. Devil Star saw it fuzzily, by the reflecting thread of electrons that he sent against it. And was to see it no more. For in that moment of triumph came the icy cold certainty that he was being watched.

That captured micro-universe was gone from his delicate grasp as if it had never been. With a violence beyond imagining, he expanded to half again his diameter. From a dozen portions of his body, his visions leaped out. And he saw Dark Fire.

He was gripped by the splendor of her, as she moved slowly down an aisle of stars toward him ... her visions already touching his, holding them with hard bright purpose. Against the dark background of space, her central green light was lustrous.

" Devil Star, there will be no choice! "

The sudden clangor of that voice from the past had no meaning to Devil Star, though he frantically tried to examine it. But meanings, reasons, coherent thinking were lost to him. As Dark Fire drifted nearer, he was enclosed in a vast peace. He knew at once that his searching, even his finding, was a patchwork substitute for this great longing that had been built into the very fabric of him.

Now came the voice of Dark Fire, humming, insidious.

"Devil Star, our moment has come--as we knew it would. Devil Star, follow me!"

And now he hung in the vibrant band of life, drawn there half by her will, half by his. And he trembled with the half-memory of death, and yet bathed by the hypnotic vibrations flooding from the central light of her, so that he knew peace and understood the answers to all questions.

She was dwindling. He knew what he must do.

As she would destroy me!

The thought raged, but he prepared.

Then hiatus ... the gulf of timelessness between two instants of time. There was a click deep in the subterranean caverns of his thought swirls. It was as if he had been transported to another band of hyper-space.

But was this another hyper-space? It could not be. In that depthless ladder of universes, and he had traversed them all, there was nothing similar.

He viewed this strange space with childish wonder, knowing that he was here, yet without a body, without a purple central light.

And he knew, too, that actually he was in the forty-eighth band of hyper-space, about to die, and at peace.

He was there--and here. Fantasy or reality? It did not matter. It came to him, in wonder as gentle as light scattering, that here there was a mystery he might never comprehend.

A queer, geometric, somehow logical universe. Yes, the idea of logic pressed insistently in on him. And yet, what happened did not seem logical. For all of these clean-cut star-systems, though vast distances stretched between them, seemed equally large to his sight. There was a feeling of distance--without perspective.

Between those star-systems were no dust-motes, no hurrying comets, no uncollected suns, no irregularity. There was dark, logical vacuum.

But suns, sometimes whole groups of suns, whirled sparkling across that vacuum from one spinning galaxy to another. That galaxy, in turn, urged another unit from its turning heart, or majestically rounded rim. The quiet, orderly exchange was magnificent to watch. The exchanged suns, or solar systems, quietly fell into new orbits that seemed prepared for them.

He moved quietly through this charmed universe, wondering about it. How quiet, how at peace, how right . And then, as he hung motionless again in dark vacuum, pondering, he saw a single glowing sun detach itself from the rounding rim of the nearby galaxy. It sped toward him, closer. And yet he would not move. The distance lessened. It was upon him, passing through him.

For a burning moment, he was locked in its fiery heart, and all of being blazed with hurt.

Surging, he fought his way out, sped away, looked back, bewildered. The speeding sun faltered in flight, was motionless. The entire universe seemed to quiver at that discord. Then the sun reversed direction, reluctantly falling back into its parent star system.

And the system exploded!

Frozen with horror, Devil Star--the bodiless entity of him--saw that sudden, senseless explosion, watched a hundred suns shot like vast bullets in a hundred flaming paths. Those suns plowed through nearby galaxies, drove relentlessly to new positions in other galactic accretions. The universe bubbled and seethed with irregularity. There were more explosions, more frantic exchanges. The universe was alight with flaming cores of brilliance. There was an urgent hustle and bustle.

Then the exchanged suns began to find their places without commotion. The explosions grew less in number. The heavens ceased their horrifying agitation. Order was restored. The orderly suns, sometimes with attendant planets, marched quietly across the dark sky.

Numbed, Devil Star did not dare to move. Then a clamoring need rose in him. There was something he must do. From the strange, dimensionless distances he saw a sun moving toward him. He rushed to meet it. Again that prolonged, fiery moment of agony.

And that universe, that industrious universe with its lawless logic--that universe was gone.

Devil Star was back in the forty-eighth band, watching Dark Fire.

The moment of watching drew out.

"Devil Star!" The cry blasted across space, imperative; but in the sub-strata of that cry was unspeakable horror.

And faintly Devil Star spoke: "No."

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.