"It is very funny! You wish to create, to die. But now you will be unable to do either. Nor can you reach the band of decision, for you believe it lies within the forty-eighth band. Yes, you've changed—changed!"
Paralyzed, he hung in space, the resplendent mindless giants of the universe seeming to fling her words back in brassy echoes.
She began drifting away, her thoughts roaring into his thought swirls, tripled in volume and strident with their connotations. "Only green lights remember the moments of their birth, Devil Star! Else how could they know their way back to the forty-eighth band when the time came?" Came her dwindling laughter, across the rushing spaces, into the maddened thought swirls of Devil Star.
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.