Time Storm

32

He was offering his hand in ordinary fashion. I took it and shook it automatically. I had been expecting him, or at least someone like him; but the delay had been long enough, and he had appeared so suddenly that he had managed to knock me off balance with his appearance, in spite of all my expectations. I found myself going through the social routine... my wife, Ellen.”

“Ellen,” and he shook hands with Ellen, “my name’s Obsidian.”

He had a round, friendly face, a little flat-looking and mongoloid; and this, with the hairless skull, gave him something of a tough look.

“Hello,” said Ellen. “Where did you come from?”

“We’re perhaps two hundred miles from you.”

“Just a couple of hundred miles away?” I echoed.

“We had to keep you from finding us while we were studying you,” he answered. “You have to understand that we had to gather a lot of data on you in order to work out your language and customs. And, of course, we wanted to collect data toward understanding the accident that brought you here.”

“Accident?” I said. “We came here deliberately.”

He stared at me for a long second.

“You did?”

“That’s right,” I said. “I’d probably better take you down to see the lab and Porniarsk. Sorry, maybe I’m getting the cart before the horse. But after expecting you every day from the moment we landed here, and not having you show up until now—”

“Expecting me when you arrived?” Obsidian said.

We seemed to be talking at cross purposes.

“That’s right,” I said. “We came here because I wanted to contact you people who were doing something about the time storm—”

“Just a moment,” he said. “Excuse me.”

He disappeared.

He did not come back in a moment, either. He did not come back the rest of that day, nor the day after. It was nearly a week later that I stepped outside from the door of the summer palace that opened onto the parking area, and found him standing there, bright with the morning sun on his bare shoulders. Ellen stepped out just behind me.

“Excuse me for not getting back before this,” he said. “But possibly I got off on the wrong foot when I first visited you. I’ve talked the matter over with a number of others, and we’ve decided that our data was much more insufficient than we thought. Would you be willing to sit down with me and tell me the whole story of how you came to be here, so that we can have that information to work with?”

“I’ll be glad to,” I said, turning back toward the door. “Do you want to step inside?”

“No. If you don’t mind, no,” he said. “Later on, I’d like very much to have the chance to look inside your summer palace, but not just yet. Can we talk out here?”

“Certainly.”

“Good.” He dropped into a sitting position, cross-legged on the grass.

“If you don’t mind, I’ll use a chair,” I said.

“I don’t mind,” he said. “I’m very interested. Is it actually comfortable for you, sitting on that piece of furniture?”

“It’s more comfortable than sitting the way you are,” I said. “I can sit like that, but not for any length of time.”

“I see.”

I went inside and came out with chairs for myself and Ellen. We sat down.

“The chair was more a product of western culture in my time, though,” I said. “In the east, even then, people would be perfectly comfortable sitting the way you sit.”

“Thanks,” he said. “That’s the sort of data we appreciate.”

“All right,” I went on. “Where do you want me to start?”

“Any and all information you can give us will help,” he said.

“Suppose I start with the time storm then,” I said. “We’re together on that, aren’t we? You know what I mean when I talk about the time storm?”

“Oh yes,” Obsidian said. “We’re aware of the time storm.”

“Well, we weren’t,” I said, “until it hit us without warning one day. I was up in a northern, wild area of a state called Minnesota in the north central part of this continent....”

I picked up my own history from the moment when I had thought I was having a second heart attack and proceeded to tell it. I had thought it was something I could cover in an hour or so; but I had badly underestimated what there was to tell, and I had come nowhere near beginning to estimate how many things Obsidian would need explained. We began with the matter of my heart attack, which took some thirty minutes or so of explanation by itself, and went on from there, frequently dropping into what must have sounded like a vaudeville act built around the idea of two blind men meeting in the middle of the Sahara desert at midnight.

“But there’s no evidence of any damage to your heart, now.”

“There isn’t?”

“You mean you don’t know there isn’t?”

... And so on, far into the night. After a little while, Ellen sensibly got up and left us to bring Porniarsk out to join us, and to call Doc to let the rest of the community know what was going on. Within a few hours Obsidian and I had a quiet, attentive audience seated in a semicircle around us and consisting of everyone able to get from the town up to the landing area.

The talk went on for four days. Obsidian had clearly come with the intention of getting information, but giving little or none himself; but it proved impossible for us to communicate unless he explained something of his own time and civilization. He and I had nothing in common but the language his people had deduced from the first weeks of recording and then taught him to speak accentlessly, and by the end of the first hour, we were both realizing how inadequate this was by itself.

The words alone meant little without their connotative referents, and his connotative referents and mine were separated by thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of years. It was a curious sensation to hear a sentence made up of nothing but the old, familiar sounds and, at the same time, realize that I had not the slightest idea of what Obsidian meant as he uttered them. Luckily he was an intelligent person; and above and beyond this, he had a sense of humor. Otherwise the talks would have broken down out of sheer exasperation on the parts of each of us.

But he was bright enough and sensible enough to adapt, in spite of the consensus he had been sent out with, that he should listen but not talk. By the end of the third day, he was telling us as much about his people as we were telling him about us, and from that point on, the information exchange began to work, to a point, at least.

By this time we were once more talking privately; but with a tape recorder powered by a stepped-down automobile battery that had been charged by Bill’s windmill generator. The tapes were duplicated and made available to the rest of the community. To hit the high points of the information they gathered, Obsidian and his associates here on Earth numbered under a thousand individuals belonging to a race of latter-day humans that were primarily scattered, very thinly indeed, across the habitable worlds of this galaxy.

These humans did not think of themselves, however, so much as members of a race, but as members of a larger community, including representatives of some millions of other civilized races with whom they intermixed. Individuals of these other races were also thinly spread across the same habitable worlds; and some of them, as well as some of the humans, were to be found as well in other galaxies or elsewhere in the universe—although when this happened it was because of special circumstances Obsidian had not yet explained.

The reason for all these individuals being scattered so widely was apparently that (a) the time storm had cut populations on inhabited worlds to the point where there were several habitable worlds for each individual of intelligence; and (b) apparently there were means of travelling not merely faster than light, but many times faster than light, so that even visiting other galaxies was not impossible. Obsidian shied away from my questions when I tried to find out more about this means of travel. Evidently faster-than-light did not describe it directly in his terms; and he was clearly unsure of his ability to explain it to me at our present level of communication.

We had encountered a number of such points of noncommunication. The main problem was the complete dissimilarity of our referents, so that often we found ourselves talking at cross purposes. Some cultural differences only emerged more or less by accident. For example, it turned out that Obsidian was not his name—not at least in the way we think of “names.” In the way we used that word he had no specific name. This was because he had a certain unique identity, structure, or value—there was no way to express it properly in our terms—which was recognized as Mm by his fellow humans and other race individuals who had met him and experienced this unique identity of his.

For reference purposes, in the case of those who had never met him, he was referred to by a code word or symbol that essentially told where he had been born and what he had been doing since. But this was never used except for that sort of reference. For ordinary communicative purposes he had a number of—nicknames is not the right word for them, but it is the closest I can come— depending on how the individual referring to him associated him. The most common of these nicknames, the one he favored himself, and the one generally in use here among his fellows on Earth, was a name that compared him to the mineral we call “obsidian” and since it had been established, during the month or so they had been recording our speech, that we would recognize that word, he had identified himself with it when he first met Ellen and me.

It was not just an arbitrary difference from us, this matter of names, it seemed. It was something much more important than that. The whole name business had to do with the different way he and his community of humans and nonhumans thought and worked; and until I could understand why they did their naming that way, a vital chunk of their culture would remain a mystery to me. Accordingly, I struggled to understand and to make him explain himself so that I could understand.

The name business had something to do with identity in that word’s most basic sense, which was tied to occupation among them much more than it would be with us, which was, in turn, tied to a different sort of balance between individual and group responsibilities—which was all somehow connected with the fact that they had not approached us the moment we had appeared here, but had hid and studied us instead.

It had not been because they were in any way afraid of us. Fear seemed to have a more academic quality to Obsidian than it did to me. They had been obligated to be able to communicate with us before they could appear. Consequently, they had stayed out of sight of Doc in the plane—which was apparently not as hard as it might seem, since they used structures much less than we did. In fact, our buildings were almost a little forbidding to Obsidian, which was why he had refused my invitation to come inside the summer palace. Apparently, he was about as attracted to the interior of the summer palace as I might have been to the idea of a neighborly crawl through the tunnels and dens of a human-sized mole. Obsidian’s people built observatories and such, but these were generally constructed without walls or roof.

Apparently they did not need as much protection from the weather as we needed. When I asked about this, Obsidian demonstrated how he could envelop himself in a sort of cushion of invisible warmth, apparently just by wanting to do it—although he insisted that the heat was generated by mechanical, not mental, means. But beyond this, it was obvious to me early in our discussions that he had a far greater tolerance for temperature extremes and the discomfort of his physical surroundings than I did. In spite of the chilliness of the spring mornings or the heat of the afternoon, he showed the same indifference to the temperature and wore the same kilt, no more, no less. It was not until the third day that I discovered he was only wearing that out of courtesy to us, it having been established by them that we had some kind of clothing taboos.

It was about the third day, also, that a great many other things began to make sense. Surprisingly, my ability to communicate improved much more swiftly than did his; so much so, in fact, that he commented on it with unconcealed awe. The awe was almost more unsettling to me than the other mysteries about him. It gave me an uneasy feeling, mentally, to think that these people of the far future might not be so superior to us after all; that they might, in fact, be inferior in some ways. Obsidian and I worried over the communication discrepancy together and finally concluded that, paradoxically, Obsidian was in a sense being inhibited by the fine command of the spoken language he had exhibited the first time he appeared.

It emerged that his group was not used to translating concepts. Sounds and symbols, yes. These varied from race to race among them in infinite variety. But, just as they could agree on the unique identity of any single individual, they were apparently able to agree on the perfect value of any concept, so that translation, in that sense, was never necessary. When we first appeared, they had set up recording devices to pick up every sound made in our community and channelled these into a computer-like device which had sorted them out and deduced the rules and vocabulary of our language, with the observed or implied denotative values of each sound. With this done, they had pumped the information into the head of Obsidian and sent him to talk to us, confident that he could now communicate.

Only, he had run into trouble. The sounds he used turned out to have had meanings over and above what the language computer had deduced. In short, Obsidian and his fellows were in the uncomfortable position of people who have grown up with a single set of concepts, thinking there was no other, and who had then run into an entirely different set—ours. They were like the person who grows to adulthood before he discovers that there are other languages than the one he knows, and then has to struggle emotionally with the concept that anybody else can prefer some outlandish sound to what he knows in his heart of hearts is the only “real” sound for a thought or thing.

Because of this, his plans had gone awry. It had been planned that he would drop in on us, pump us dry of all other relevant data on us, feed that also into the computer, and come up with patterns of us in all departments, from which it could be figured how to adjust us to the culture of their time, if this was possible. Instead, here he was floundering at absorbing my patterns while I was picking up his, hand over fist.

Well, not exactly hand over fist. His patterns, unlike ours, were all logical and logically interrelated, which gave me a great advantage. But there were also abilities and concepts in his area that he took for granted and I could not get him to talk about because I had no way of describing what I was after.

It was not until the fourth day that I finally achieved a breakthrough in that respect; and it happened for a strange reason. That mind of mine, which could never leave a problem alone but must keep worrying at it and chewing it over until either mind or problem cracked wide open, had been at work on the two enigmatic conversations I had had with Marie, just before she left, and Ellen, the day that Obsidian had appeared.

I still could make no sense of what they said. For all my efforts to understand, my comprehension slid off the memories of their words to me as if both had been encased in glass. At the same time I had a reason to keep working at them, now. There was something in me which I evidently could not see, as I could not see my own eyeballs, except in a mirror, or the back of my head. There must be something in me, I thought, like a dark area, a shadow cast by the sensing mechanism itself, that was keeping me from the closeness I wanted to have with other people—and of all people, Ellen. I had been trying all sorts of approaches to the problem, trying to find some way of sneaking up on the unseeable, so to speak; and it occurred to me suddenly as I was talking to Obsidian that there might be a similarity between this problem and my problem of communication with him.

I had tried evoking the golden light as a means of reaching an understanding of Ellen. But I had found that when I tried to reach for the feeling of unity with all things for that reason, it was as it had been in the plane after leaving Paula’s camp—I could not evoke the state of unity. It came to me now that it would do no harm to try for it once more in the case of Obsidian and his people, where the emotional roots concerned did not go so deeply into the dark of my own soul.

So I tried. It helped that I had grown to like Obsidian in the last few intense days of talking. I thought I could almost grasp what he described as that unique identity element by which all other beings of his time recognized him. So I picked a moment when he was trying to explain to me what among them took the place of family structure, as we in our community knew it. I watched him as he talked, seated cross-legged on the ground. His face was animated and his hands wove patterns in the air. He had the attribute of seeming to be alive with energy even while he was obviously without tension and relaxed. It was an ability I had seen before in casual encounters with professional athletes in top condition.

I was hardly listening to what he said. That is, my mind was making automatic note of it, but I was comfortably aware of the fact that the tape recorder was catching his words and I would be able to review them again this evening in the quiet of the summer palace library. Most of my attention was concentrated on him as a complete entity; a sound-making, limb-moving individual extending energy to me in the form of sound and gesture. I squinted, mentally, to focus in on him in this sense; and when I had him in focus, slid on top of his image before me the emotional/intellectual gestalt that was my friend Obsidian, as I knew him.

The two melted together; and as they did I was able for the first time to take a step back from him and the present moment. I kept my point of view at that distance and slowly let the rest of the day soak into me.

We sat just outside the summer palace and I had my back to it; so that I looked past Obsidian, across the open stretch of the landing area and out over the descending slope of the trees to the town below and the tall grass marching in all directions to the horizon. It was, for once, a perfectly clear day; there was not a cloud in sight. But a small, cool wind was wandering back and forth across the mountainside where we sat.

I saw the treetops moving to it and felt the intermittent light touch of it on my face and hands, cancelling out now and again the warmth of the steady afternoon sunlight. It was too early for insects; but down on the wooded slope below me, a cloud of specks that were small birds burst up unexpectedly as I watched, to swarm dark against the far bright sky for a moment like a cloud of gnats, and then settled back down out of sight into the dark mass of the leaves below them again.

High up, another single speck swam against the cloudless sky. A hawk? My vision went out to the horizon and beyond. Slowly, I became conscious of a rhythm that was the beating of my own heart and at the same time the breathing of the world. Once again, the golden light began to grow around me and, once more, I felt myself touching all things in the earth, sky, and water, from pole to pole. I was touching all things, and I reached out to touch Obsidian.

I looked at him without moving my eyes and saw him in full dimension for the first time. For he was a part of the universe, as all these other things were a part of it; and that was what was at the core of his community’s difference from ours. They were aware of the universe of which they were a part, while we thought of ourselves as disparate and isolated from it. That was why Obsidian’s identity was unchangeable and instantly recognized by his fellows. It was because the dimensions of that identity were measured by the universe surrounding him, in which he was embedded, and of which he was a working part. All at once the gestalt formed, and I understood without words, without symbols, the different, fixed place he and all other thinking minds of his period had in this, their own time and place.

I had produced the golden light again and it had helped me find what I had been seeking. I sat, just feeling it for a moment-then let it go. The light faded, I came back into my ordinary body and smiled at Obsidian.

But he did not smile back. He had stopped talking, and he was staring at me with a startled expression.

“Obsidian—” I began, about to tell him what I now understood.

He vanished.