Pattern

By ROBERT H. ROHRER, JR.
Illustrated by ADKINS
Sometimes the only way to fight fire is with fire. One can hardly stop to consider what the second fire may destroy. Can one?
Rahll floated, a dim pattern of electrical impulse in the void of space. He was vaguely aware that he was dying into nothingness, and that in a short time he would be a meaningless mass of aimless patterning, with no consciousness and no unity. But there was nothing that could be done about it; his flexible impulse had woven itself into millions upon millions of varying thought-forms, and no solution to his situation had presented itself.
His impulse writhed into remembrance of the Great Pattern of countless centuries before. There had been thousands of impulses similar to himself, all banded together into one huge, unified Form, standing in this wasteland of space; thousands of impulses, all twisting in the shaping and reshaping of their own thoughts and emotions, but all connected by the central Great Pattern so that they stood, impulse to impulse, in a huge, delicately crystal-like structure of electricity.
And they had given each other life, replenishing their powers within themselves, and existing in the contentment of peace, for millennium upon millennium.
Until the Cataclysm. There had been some impulses who tired of the old pattern of unification, and wished to form a new one; however, they were opposed by other, more content impulses, who stubbornly held to the old pattern. The rebels, as they were called, formed their carefully planned new pattern in spite of the opposition; the result being that the two different patterns intertwined each other, fell into antagonizing frequencies, and blew the community apart.
Only Rahll's delicate impulse had escaped this Cataclysm. He had been badly wounded, unable to move in any direction; so for thousands of years after the explosion he had floated in darkness, waiting for a sign of another impulse with which to make contact and create mutual sustenance. But no sign had come, and Rahll's shape had slowly become warped with weakness and hunger into the jagged form of a pattern which had never been seen in the old community.