Part 3

"No," he cried softly. "You speak of impossibilities! There are no answers. You are mockeries, and I want nothing of you--I do not want hope. Now leave me, leave me in my sadness!"

He lashed out at them, feeling his old agonies return, for they too were but atoms trampling over each other in that mad rush toward the bottom level of inertness. Even perfection must die, ruled by destiny.

He started to withdraw his vision when they, far from retreating, whirled nearer, their bright golden centers glowing in upon him until he was trapped in a blaze of fire. He stared, quivering with the dread that in spite of himself they would fill him with hope.

Then, thundering through his thought swirls, came that lordly measured voice, a voice sublime in the surety of its owner's purpose.

"Oldster! You have not failed!"

Involuntarily Oldster flung the words back.

"Not failed? You are mockeries, you golden lights. Not failed!" The words echoed in their frenzied dreariness. He felt the outer limits of his being expanding, quivering with miniscule flarings of yellow energy.

"I, Oldster, have failed in ways your blind minds could never perceive. You do not understand failure, you who stemmed from Vanguard. Could you ever feel the tortures of Vanguard himself--or of Sun Destroyer or Darkness? Ah, you have reached a perfection beyond such burrowings! And I shall not let you give me peace! For I have failed, and I shall continue to be tortured with my failures. You would not understand."'

"We understand."

That voice, with its merciless love of him, drove in.

"We understand, and we say you have not failed. For see! You have created, and has not that driving urge to create been the great pain of your life?"

His thoughts swept out in blind denial. "I have not created."

"You created us."

The sublime voice vibrated sweetly on the emptiness. And deep in the fabric of Oldster was chaos.

"You created us, Oldster, as surely as if you had sired Darkness himself. For did you not guide Darkness to his life's completion? Was it not the thought of you that brought Sun Destroyer back along Darkness' path? And was it not you who guided Vanguard, you who, in your greatness, saw us in him? Yes, Oldster, you are our creator--you are the creator of life!

"And it is life that shall endure, and has ultimate meaning."

Oldster hung laxly in that sphere of golden blaze. Deep within was a warning voice. But now he would not heed it. Not to rebel--ah, how sweet to accept!

He was theirs. Let it be so. Let them lead him to his life's completion. They, in their all-knowingness, could not be questioned. He had created. The thought held white and pure before him. Let the thought be so.

"Life that shall endure," he muttered.

"Life does endure!" The sublime voice rang. "Is not life the rebel from dead matter? Matter is death, Oldster, for it grows old and powders toward its entropic destiny. But life is the rebel. It builds, evolves toward its high destiny which we know, but which you cannot know. But this you shall know. Life masters itself. Life is outside destiny--and has choice!"

From somewhere, from a thousand different directions, Oldster felt the golden lights grasping at his thought swirls, filling him with that anesthetic peace he had known with Dark Fire, when he faced her in the band of life.

"Oldster." Inward hummed that lordly, loving voice. "Now you shall know you have not failed. For are you not life, and the greatest rebel of all life?

"And life has within it the dark rebel!"

He was transported to an unknown cosmos beyond time and space dimension. He was in the band of decision.

Again he looked upon those swinging suns. It was the same band, for which he had looked so long!

He drifted in that untrammeled vacuum, drank in the beauty of this faultless universe, its rounded glowing suns, and followed their quiet paths from one galaxy to another. Or were they not galaxies after all?

As those suns were not suns!

Not suns! Blindly his thoughts swept out.

"Then I have searched everywhere for my answers--except within myself!"

"Yes, Oldster." Distant, yet near, the sweet voice drifted in. "Now you inhabit that place you searched for. And it is a place that belongs to life alone."

The seeming-galaxies seemed to shimmer in answering accord.

"And now," cried Oldster, "my thoughts return to that moment when I trapped the universe's smallest particle in utter vacuum--and wondered if it could determine its own destiny. It could not!"

He drifted, his formless self somehow moving through these logically constructed "galaxies" toward some goal whose meaning hummed within him.

Then, echoing through and through this universe came the ringing voice that hovered outside himself.

"Now you see, Oldster, and know what it is you see. For life is the rebel, but dead matter knows no path but that given it.

"Oldster! Does not life have memory, emotion, volition? Do not even those functions need mechanism? Oldster--" the thought held no sadness, only an immeasurable love "--you know you have choice, and why you have choice. Now farewell! Your time of glory has come."

The fluttering of countless minds against his began to quiet. Without pain, he knew they were leaving--were gone--leaving the memory of their near-perfection, carrying with them the ultimate answers of life. And yet it did not matter. Did not matter!

He was within his fabled band of decision.

In mounting ecstasy, he hurled through those vast spaces that were yet small beyond calculation, went rushing toward his unseen goal. Those "galaxies," those mechanisms of which the golden lights spoke, slanted out behind him, and new ones rushed in to his sightless vision.

What old and new thoughts did those swinging "suns" evoke, what memories and dreams, in the slumbering conscious mind of that being who was called Oldster? Which configuration of "stars" and "galaxies" and what motion in and between them, called forth the haunting remembrances of Moon Flame, of Comet Glow and her twin child Dark Fire--of World Rim and the countless lost names of his unmeasured past?

Mind had mechanism. It could not be otherwise. And he inhabited, moved through, that band of decision.

And soon he would meet--his dark rebel!

His ecstasy soared as he burst across those dimensionless distances, unerringly swung into a blaze of light created by a seeming-sphere of galaxies. And he halted, feeling the throb of his certain knowledge as he fixed his strange vision on the writhing heart of the farthest concourse of stars.

Instantly a lone sun heaved from it, moved across darkness. Oldster was in its path as instantly.

Even in the midst of that blinding hurt his ecstasy endured. He knew there was no pain, that he did not see, that he was not here.

Yet, what did it matter what symbols he chose, symbols that he understood, but which were not real?

The dark rebel was within him in this mechanism of mind. And mind has choice!

He watched that sun falter in mid-space, watched it reverse direction, and fall back, with its message , to the untroubled galaxy that had urged it forth. His joy was a mighty song as that particle, of itself, jousted with the destiny that bade it continue along its straight-angle course--fought and won!

That rebel particle was rushing, rushing, back to the heart of the deep-buried mechanism that ejected it. Soon it would strike. And there would be--explosion!

And for him, now, was the time of glory.

For that particle, that sun, was himself, as all these turning, studious galaxies were himself--the mind of him. What need to question himself now? Why question the manner in which he was given access to this glory under his conscious mind? The golden lights knew. But the minds of those golden lights--the descendants of Vanguard--were wrapped in a spiritual blaze beyond his comprehension.

His thoughts rolled on, growing rich within him as that falling sun hurled itself along its returning path.

"Darkness--Sun Destroyer--Vanguard--and Devil Star! Rebels all. Where are those who followed the worn paths? Gone, of no consequence. But you Darkness, you Sun Destroyer, you Vanguard--" almost he could see the shadowy pained shapes of them beckoning to him out of a past beyond recall "--have we not created as no other energy creature has created? For there are the golden lights."

His thoughts dreamed on, and the strangely visible "galaxies" of his inner mind seemed to glitter their accord.

"The golden lights knew what you never knew, Darkness," he dreamed. "The answer to life itself. But even I, in these last moments, see some portion of that distant answer. Yes, Darkness! Life the rebel--the mighty force that combats the entropic gradient of the universe. Let the universe slope down, but life eternal moves upward, building on its own discarded forms. And life will rebuild all that is.

"Were we ourselves not changelings, mutations with strange powers? And it was the dark rebel within us that made us so! The dark rebel, that moves as it will...."

Into him, from some outer circle of being, came shrill warning. He ignored it. Let the conscious mind of him thrash about, in terror of what was to happen. He would not return to it. He was here, his bodiless entity, watching mind function in dauntless disobedience to the laws lifeless destiny laid down.

He watched the fall of that glowing particle in rigid fascination. Now would come the rearrangement of this vast webwork about him. New thoughts, different emotions--and volition that thwarted destiny. For destiny's only death for a purple light came from a green.

But destiny could not rule life's dark rebel.

Again the warning, the clamorous scream to return, to fight. But he would have none of it. He felt a tender pity for that being whose conscious mind was obedient to what the stresses and strains of his vast body demanded. He would not return.

The dark rebel struck.

In the timeless moment of its striking, all space seemed to still. And the conscious mind of Oldster, that aged being, stilled as well. His animal struggles ceased. Alone in his mausoleum of darkness, he was filled with a pulsing wonder. He felt the force fields girding him together lose their prime energy.

And then expansion.

"I am dying," he whispered.

He looked about him, peering into the darkness that would show him nothing. And suddenly he remembered that which he had seen in his inner being. The dark rebel, falling, falling, striking. The cataclysm that followed, the white light of explosion, the pell-mell exchange of suns. The rearrangement of desire.

And in full measure the meaning of that astounding event came. The thought hummed, swelled, until he was flinging it out beyond him in mocking wave after wave, into the face of that universe that had mocked him with its dead answers. In this last moment of expansion the pain and formless searching of his years vanished in the ultimate triumph. He had had choice between two events, being and not-being.

And as all thoughts that had ever been and were a part of him raced through his mind in that final moment, he caught one infinitesimal thought, one he had spawned in a long gone eternity. " To be or not to be--that is the question.... "

And he knew the answer. The age-old answer he had long sought. It was a matter of choice.

And he was content to die now, having chosen....