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!"