"Life does endure!" The sublime voice rang. "Is not life the rebel from dead matter? Matter is death, Oldster, for it grows old and powders toward its entropic destiny. But life is the rebel. It builds, evolves toward its high destiny which we know, but which you cannot know. But this you shall know. Life masters itself. Life is outside destiny—and has choice!"
From somewhere, from a thousand different directions, Oldster felt the golden lights grasping at his thought swirls, filling him with that anesthetic peace he had known with Dark Fire, when he faced her in the band of life.
"Oldster." Inward hummed that lordly, loving voice. "Now you shall know you have not failed. For are you not life, and the greatest rebel of all life?
"And life has within it the dark rebel!"
He was transported to an unknown cosmos beyond time and space dimension. He was in the band of decision.
Again he looked upon those swinging suns. It was the same band, for which he had looked so long!
He drifted in that untrammeled vacuum, drank in the beauty of this faultless universe, its rounded glowing suns, and followed their quiet paths from one galaxy to another. Or were they not galaxies after all?
As those suns were not suns!
Not suns! Blindly his thoughts swept out.