The sublime voice vibrated sweetly on the emptiness. And deep in the fabric of Oldster was chaos. "You created us, Oldster, as surely as if you had sired Darkness himself. For did you not guide Darkness to his life's completion? Was it not the thought of you that brought Sun Destroyer back along Darkness' path? And was it not you who guided Vanguard, you who, in your greatness, saw us in him? Yes, Oldster, you are our creator--you are the creator of life! "And it is life that shall endure, and has ultimate meaning." Oldster hung laxly in that sphere of golden blaze. Deep within was a warning voice. But now he would not heed it. Not to rebel--ah, how sweet to accept! He was theirs. Let it be so. Let them lead him to his life's completion. They, in their all-knowingness, could not be questioned. He had created. The thought held white and pure before him. Let the thought be so. "Life that shall endure," he muttered. "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!" <tb> 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. "Then I have searched everywhere for my answers--except within myself!" "Yes, Oldster." Distant, yet near, the sweet voice drifted in. "Now you inhabit that place you searched for. And it is a place that belongs to life alone." The seeming-galaxies seemed to shimmer in answering accord. "And now," cried Oldster, "my thoughts return to that moment when I trapped the universe's smallest particle in utter vacuum--and wondered if it could determine its own destiny. It could not!" He drifted, his formless self somehow moving through these logically constructed "galaxies" toward some goal whose meaning hummed within him. Then, echoing through and through this universe came the ringing voice that hovered outside himself.