He followed in triumph, but Dark Fire dwindled more swiftly, as if knowing that to flee from him would dull her turmoil. But drifting back came her voice, cold and faint.
"Devil Star, there will be no choice!"
The friendship of Dark Fire and Devil Star was truly done. For even when they were members of the same playing group, there was this cold thought: I am destined to die, and to die in a certain manner. I shall therefore turn destiny aside. I shall not die!
When Dark Fire came for him, he would be ready for her.
When the time came, ironically, he was not ready....
He was in his forty-millionth year, still a youth in his vast time-scale, when he began drifting away from his other friends as well. For already he felt the hunger in him, the first deep pangs, and mistook it for his need to acquire knowledge.
His search for knowledge took him not into the macro, but into the microcosms. Surely the larger universe was near the end result while the smaller was near the beginning. Somewhere in that complexity of sub-particles he would find a result without cause!
His tools were crude. It was nothing to pluck a star from the heavens with a reaching tractor ray—to split it—explode it. But to shear a molecule from a parent mass, to hold it inviolate from its fellows, seemed impossible. He raged at the task for a million years, forgetting all the names linked to his life—forgetting the menace of Dark Fire.
And he succeeded.