Part 2

"You must die, Devil Star!" The mindless cacophony screamed at him. "You must die! You are in the band of life! And you must die!"

He spurred frantically back, but she followed. Desperately he felt that click in his mind which told him he was out of the forty-eighth band and into the forty-seventh. But she burst into that space after him--and the next and the next.

As he fled, a chilling certainty rose in Devil Star. The laws of life had been violated. No matter that he had triumphed in some obscure, staggering way that he could not yet comprehend. To Dark Fire, it made no difference. Her wisdom, her destroying hate, as with all green lights, must have its source in blind instinct. There had been outrage. He must die.

A cruel incisiveness claimed him as he dropped down the terraced spaces of the universe. Here and there, he plucked small suns from the heavens, converted them to seething energy. When she burst through after him into the second band of space, he was ready for her. All the quivering excess energy his swollen body held was channeled into a concentrated sword of destruction that smote her point-blank.

Shaken even beyond horror, he saw those clouds of fuming light that exploded from the core of her.

She hung without motion, lax, visions down, a sickly pale radiance creeping in waves through her. Across her central green light fitful waves of yellow surged. And then the force fields of her body lost their hold. Visibly she began to expand.

"I am dying!"

The hideous accusation blasted out at him.

"As you would have had me die!"

"No, no! Devil Star, you have done a terrible thing. You--do not yet know--how terrible. Terrible--for you."

"I had choice!" he cried bitterly.

Silence. Then, from a distance, muttering: "Choice. No. There could have been no--choice. It began--how long ago? Before you were born, Devil Star. Back to--the beginning. No thought but caused a thought. No motion but caused a motion. How--else could it be?

"Devil Star!" That muttering, distant voice held blind despair. "Your only immortality--truly, your only happiness--lay in that child you and I--would have created...."

Her voice stopped. In hideous fascination, Devil Star watched that expansive greyness sweeping across her. Then, convulsively, he thrust out his para-propellents, sped across the galaxies, not stopping, frantically seeking forgetfulness.

For a million years Devil Star continued that senseless pace. Finally, deep into the bottomless darkness that cupped the lenticular universe, he stopped. And there was ultimate horror in him. The memory was not sheared off. He could not outrun himself. He was cursed.

Cursed--but alive. The thought did not have wings to make him soar. For Dark Fire, the friend of his youth, was dead. No matter that all of nature had conspired against him, a purple light; no matter that Dark Fire, from some blind instinct, had sought with all her being to fulfill a supposedly incorruptible law of the universe. She was dead, and he had killed her.

He hung quivering and lost in that lightless emptiness. His triumph, for the moment, was tasteless. For was it triumph? Had that succession of events which resulted in Dark Fire's death been inevitable--part of the pattern after all?

Then he had not escaped!

He shrank into himself so that even the mother universe and its searching brilliance seemed not to exist. Now he was as alone as mortality could be, feeding on his inner resources, a circuitous being independent of the flux and strain of conflicting energies. He was master of himself for this naked, two dimensional instant of time!

... No. There was the past, whipping his every thought and action into submission with infinitely reaching arms of cause and result. He had not escaped....

In that moment of realization, a new fury entered the life of Devil Star. It came like the roar of a monster full-born in the sub-swirls of his mind ... a monster clawing, rearing, fighting for emergence into the searching light of his conscious mind--and unable to emerge!

He was shaken to the depths by that beast--that depthless, unuttered longing which he could not give a name. Entombed in his self-imposed darkness, away from the entropic surge and sway of the universe, he felt that longing engulf him.

"It is something I want," he gasped. "Something I must have. Must!"

... Then, slipping unbidden from another corner of his mind, came the feeling of solution. And that new thought held him rigid. He did not dare to believe that the monster was out of his prison. And yet, what else could it be? Hope surged through him.

"I was in another universe," his thoughts rioted. "In that moment before she would have had me fling out my central purple core and die, I was transported to another band of space, a band I never saw before. And when I returned to the band of life, my will to die was gone."

He hung laxly, surfeited with emotion. It was that he longed for. And if it were not--he thrust the clangorous thought away.

Like a cocoon unfolding, he pushed aside the darkness enclosing him. And as he beheld the resplendent lens of the vast universe, the prime conviction of his life returned. Surely that universe and its myriad avenues was not mirrored into being by the counterplay of energies at the beginning of time. Destiny could be turned aside. Had he not so turned it? And the answer to its turning lay in that hidden band of space.

He would find that band, would put his life into it. And would find the answer to all of being!

Devil Star drifted back into the universe again, captivated with the wonder of his upward spiraling thoughts. For, it seemed, the mind was a turbulent structure, as frantic in its upheavals and overthrows as the interior fury of a white dwarf star. Somewhere in his thought swirls, caged for this moment, were the sharpest agonies of his life. In their place had risen hope, and it was a thrilling hope indeed. The hidden band!

He would find that hidden band, though he had to roam the vast universe a hundred times over. And would still this thunderous longing.

He stepped up his velocity, thrusting out his visions in growing rapture as he hurled through the light-spattered outermost fringes of the dazzling universe. Here was splendor, conflict, movement! And he was part of it again. Then, the worse for its suddenness, a chill spread through him. He felt the unmistakable pulse of a nearby life force.

His one thought was to flee--to disappear again to some quiet corner of the cosmos--but no, for some reason he must stay....

" Devil Star, where have you been? "

Unerringly, without will to stop himself, he faced about in his flight, with deadly accuracy placing his visions on the green light who had uttered that question. She rode the bright heavens less than ten millions of miles away, and he was caught here, knowing her name and knowing her innermost purpose in life.

She repeated the question, naively unaware of its importance, staring at him with a bland curiosity. He gazed back blankly, wondering at that tremendous secret which she instinctively hid from purple lights.

He whispered, "World Rim, you do not know where I have been?"

She laughed. "Should I know?"

"No! No! You couldn't know. And you couldn't believe. I have been--"

And he stopped, faint with his knowledge of what she was and what she must be thinking deep in her mind. He must be cunning, strong, treacherous, too! He quivered with effort, laughed in the strange way that was possible for him.

"I have been," he chided, "ten billion light years away. I discovered fourteen million new comets and tied their beards together!"

She was piqued. "You must have been to a very interesting place," she decided. Tentatively: "Shall we go there together, Devil Star? I am tired of playing with those silly energy children. They're stupid."

Said Devil Star, magnanimously, "We shall go together! Now, or later?"

"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.

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 was 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.

You are young, Devil Star!

"I am young," came the unbidden thought, "and still able--" No!

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.

... Youth.

The fifteenth, the twentieth, the thirtieth bands. He searched them all, unhurrying, dawdling, experiencing no sense of failure. He was content.

You are young, Devil Star! You are still young!

The sub-thought was screaming at him.

He did not hurry.

He came to the thirty-fifth band, where unattached colors of violent hue did their spasmic dances through matterless space.

... Youth. There is still time, not for this, but for that other!

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 shall follow you ," 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?"

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.

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....

-- I thought to master destiny. But destiny masters me. I cannot exclude the universe which continues to give me life.

-- 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.

-- Yet I have learned. But what I have failed to learn is that which keeps my life burning.

-- 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.

-- In that vacuous cage, did that particle move in paths of its own choosing? If it did--without cause --

-- But no. The universe decays, and draws life into decadence with it. There is no hope....

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?

How long!

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!"

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.