He moved closer to Solar Cloud ... and, abruptly, felt himself swept along in some giant tide. He had his moment of surprise before his consciousness momentarily blurred.
His visions darted out, contracted. The full knowledge of where he was smote him. Crystalline tongues of fire quivered from his contracting body. He knew he had done an impossible thing.
He, unmatured, was in the forty-eighth band.
Time passed, the great, vital pulses of time, flowing like an unseen river through that band where life was born. Devil Star watched numbly, without horror, triumph, feeling.
He saw that mating of green and purple light as their central cores met in annihilating fusion.
He saw the grayness of coming death settle over Solar Cloud.
He drifted into a torpor, saw the pulsing white ball which heralded life, and saw nothing there. The moment was relived. The memory had been there.
Then, all that was gone. Against his will, he had been moved to the first band in true space.
His thoughts did not function. He hung in a box of emptiness between two stars, unable to plumb the depths of that staggering event.
Now the thoughts did start. An incredible thing had happened. Where had it begun? Ten thousand billion years ago? Or--a mere fragment of time away to that moment when Devil Star was born?
His thoughts took their upward surge. As full awareness came back, he felt a shock of knowledge.
He was being watched, and it was the green light, she who had conceived a life and heartlessly destroyed one, who was watching. A sudden cunning hate took hold of him. He held her stare, flung it back arrogantly. And she watched him with coldness from the eminence of her greater size.
She said chillingly, "I saw you there. And it was not meant to be. Will you forget?"
"Forget?" The cry was shocked from him. "You are begging me to forget, Comet Glow?"
And as he mockingly uttered her name, she drew back, a darkness creeping into the brilliant depths of her. Slowly: "If that is the word you wish to use, yes."
He surged closer to her. "It <i>is</i> the word, Mother of four children! Then let me also forget the arts of existence--the eating of energy, the dispelling of it--the use of my para-propellents. I would as soon forget them. And let me also forget the dread moment of my birth!"