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."
--<i>I thought to master destiny. But destiny masters me. I cannot exclude the universe which continues to give me life.</i>
--<i>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.</i>
--<i>Yet I have learned. But what I have failed to learn is that which keeps my life burning.</i>
--<i>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.</i>