Time Storm

33

Once again, he did not come back for a while. He was missing all the rest of that day and through the next two days. Under the conditions applying up until five minutes before he left, I would have worried that I had somehow damaged the relationship building between the two of us, and between our people and his interstellar community. Following the moment of light and my sudden access to understanding, I was sure this was not the case; and I tried to reassure the other members of our group who were inclined to worry about his nonappearance.

“It’s not explainable in our words,” I told Ellen, Bill, Doc, Porniarsk and about five others of the community who had been emerging as leaders during the past few weeks. We were all sitting around the fireplace in the library on the second evening, with the windows open to the courtyard and the night sky outside. “But I’m sure I didn’t step on his toes in any way. I can’t tell you how I know it, but I know it.”

“Why did he take off, then?” Bill asked. “Can’t you give us some idea, Marc?”

“He recognized what I was doing—this universe association trick I’ve told you about. I’ve explained that the best I can, and I won’t try to explain it any more now. You’ll have to learn how to do it yourselves if you really want to understand.”

“You’d better start giving us lessons, then,” said Doc. They all laughed.

“I will,” I said. “Seriously, I will. When we’ve got the time.”

“Go on, Marc,” said Bill. “Finish what you were saying. He knew what you were doing... and that’s what disturbed him?”

“Not exactly disturbed, I’d say,” I told them. “He was just surprised. He’s gone back to check with his friends. The way they are —the way I now know they are—that sort of checking’s a responsibility on his part.”

“So that’s why you’re sure he’ll be back?” Bill asked.

“Isn’t that what I’ve been saying?”

“Porniarsk,” said Bill, turning to him, “can’t you help explain any of this? You’re from a more advanced race than we are.”

“By comparison with Obsidian and his associates,” said Porniarsk, “I’m essentially of the same primitiveness as the rest of you. Also, you’ll remember, I’m only an avatar. I’ve no creativity, and no imagination beyond what I acquired when I was produced in the image of Porniarsk. I’m not equipped to speculate or interpret.”

“Well,” said Bill. “Anyway, we’ve all got plenty of work to do while we’re waiting for him to come back. Marc, you’ll speak to him as soon as you can, about whether we can count on them for supplies or assistance in case we need it?”

“Yes,” I said. “I can talk to him about that as soon as he comes back. I was afraid earlier that I couldn’t explain what we wanted without muddying up the idea we intend to be independent here. We still do want to be independent and self-supporting, don’t we?”

I looked around the room. I did not really need the murmurs of agreement from all of them. I only wanted to remind them we were all together on that one point.

“If it’s only a station they’ve got here,” said Leland Maur, a thin, black man in his mid-twenties who was an architect and our construction and mechanical engineering expert, “my feeling’s that this world is ours by right of settlement anyway. Not theirs. We don’t want to start off owing any piece of it to someone else.”

That comment ended the business of the evening. We sat back to drink coffee and compare notes on how things were going with our individual work projects to get ready for winter; and after about an hour of this, most of us were ready to fold for the night.

The next day, Obsidian had still not come back. That morning happened to be the half-day a week we had begun to take off as a rest period, following the good effect of our one day holiday after the first windmill generator had been put into operation. We had found that there was a limit to the efficiency involved in working seven days a week. After several weeks of unbroken work, we ended up going through the motions of our labors, but getting less done in total than if we had taken a break and started in fresh again. Accordingly, that morning I could stay home with a clear conscience, instead of lending my strength to one of the work jobs down in the town. Ellen was also home and busy doing something with her clothes in one part of the summer palace. I took advantage of the chance to dig once more into the books I had been neglecting lately. But they did not seem to hold my attention, after all. The urge had been growing in me to try for the golden light state again and, once more, to try to reach toward Ellen as I had reached toward Obsidian.

I was encouraged in this by my success with Obsidian, and also by the fact I began to believe I was at last zeroing in on my inner search. The outer search had always been the time storm; but the inner search, I now began to suspect, went back to my relationship with Swannee—and my mother.

I put the book I was holding aside and looked out into the courtyard feeling once more for a unity with the universe. It did not come easily this time. It was almost as if it knew why I wanted it and was reluctant to help me in that direction. But slowly, as the minutes went by, first the room and then the courtyard and the sky I looked out on took on greater values of reality, as if I was seeing them with a dimension added, a greater depth, a beyondness, in addition to the ordinary height, depth and width of normal vision. My body slowed its breathing and its heartbeat and began to blend with the movements of the planet.

The light changed, the gold moved in, and once more, I had it.

I held where I was for some little time—perhaps as much as ten or twenty minutes, although in that state of concentration time seemed almost suspended—to make sure that my hold on the state I had evoked was firm. Then I reached out to feel Ellen, elsewhere in the palace.

My touch went out like a wave spreading up on a sloping beach.

I reached her, felt her there, lightly, and started to enfold her—and something far out in myself jerked back, so that the wave of my feeling was sucked away again, abruptly, and my touch against her was lost. All at once, the golden light was gone and the unity was destroyed. I was alone and isolated, in my armchair in the room, looking out through the glass window panes at a world I could no longer feel.

I sat there, dulled and numbed by my failure. But after a few moments, a miracle happened; because the door opened, Ellen walked in, bent over the chair and kissed me. Then, without a word, she turned and went back toward the door.

“Why?” I managed to croak as she opened it.

She looked back and smiled.

“I just felt like it,” she said.

She went out, closing the door behind her; and I sat there with my heart rising like a rocket. Because now I knew. I had not succeeded in fully touching her; but I knew that I was going in the right direction now; because she had felt me trying. If I lived, I would reach her eventually.

Our half-day holiday ended with noon. I put on work clothes and left the summer palace to go down and help the people who were insulating and expanding our largest Quonset, so that it could become a combination dining hall, hospital, and living quarters for those of us who might turn out to be too young, too old, or too feeble to live out the winter cold in the other, flimsier, buildings of the town. I had just shut the door of the summer palace behind me when Obsidian appeared in front of me.

“Can we talk?” he said.

“Of course,” I said. He came first before any rough carpentry of which I was capable.

“We’ve come to an important decision, my colleagues and I,” he said. “You remember I told you our original plan was to gather enough information on you so that we’d know how to educate you into adjustment with civilization? At least, educate you enough so that you could stay with us, here?”

“I remember,” I said.

“I’m afraid I didn’t tell you everything,” he said. “There was an alternative I didn’t mention. If it turned out you people couldn’t be adjusted to a civilized pattern, we were intending to send you back to your own time, the time you left to come here.”

“No, you didn’t tell me that,” I said. “But you didn’t have to. We primitives can think of those sort of alternatives without being prompted, you know.”

“Yes. Well,” Obsidian looked uncomfortable, “as it happens, you’ve turned out to be in some ways more than we guessed; in fact, more than we bargained for. In particular, you’re different, yourself, from anything we imagined. So, now we’ve come up with a third alternative. But for this we’re going to need your agreement.”

“Oh?” I said. He did not answer immediately, so I prompted him. “Agreement to what?”

“To an alternative that ties in to this desire of yours to get into the work of controlling what you call the time storm. Logically, it’s unthinkable to expect someone from as far back in the past as you are to be capable of learning to do a kind of work that’s done only by unusual, highly qualified individuals in our time. But because of certain anomalies about you, we’d like to test your aptitude for such work.”

“Fine,” I said. And for the second time that day my heart went up like a rocket.

“You understand,” Obsidian said, “this testing in no way changes the fact that by no stretch of the imagination could we expect you to actually be able to work in the temporal area. It’s simply a means of supplying us with data by which we can decide best what to do with all your group, here.”

“All right,” I said.

“Are you sure you understand? Our interest in whether you have any ability for temporal work is only academic.”

“I hear you,” I said. But my heart was still high inside me. Explain it any way he might, Obsidian could not hide from me the fact that, in offering me such tests, they were letting me come one step closer to the goal I had been working toward.

“Well, then,” said Obsidian, “even if you’re willing, there’s a further question. Ordinarily, there’d be no need for you to leave your area, here. But in this particular case some special conditions are involved; so that to be tested you have to be willing to go some distance across the galaxy. Now, if you want time to consider this—”

“Thanks. It’s not necessary. I’ll be happy to go wherever being tested requires.”

He gazed across the jeep at me for a full second.

“Are you sure you understand?”

“I think so,” I said. “You want to know if I’m willing to be tested for abilities in time storm fighting. I am. You also want to know if I’m agreeable to going a large chunk of light years to wherever I have to go to be tested. I am.”

“You understand this means travel between the stars, through space?”

“Well, I’d gathered that,” I said. But he did not echo my grin.

“I’m a little surprised,” he said. “I understood from what you told me that you’d never been off this one world in your life.”

“That’s right.”

“But you’re willing to go, without thinking it over? Without talking it over with the rest of your people?”

“I’ll check with them, of course,” I said. “But they’ve been getting along without my immediate help while I’ve been talking to you. They ought to be able to get along without me for a bit longer. How long would I be gone?”

“In terms of time here, not more than a couple of your weeks. Probably considerably less. It may be a single simple test will give us an answer, once you’ve reached your destination. It’s possible we might have to test further, but probably not more than a day or two.”

“I see,” I said. “The more ability I show, the more you’ll go on testing?”

“Essentially. But Marc,” said Obsidian, “if you’ve got hopes of our tests finding you to have very great ability in that area, I wish you’d temper those hopes. Believe me—”

“I believe,” I said. “I’m also willing to go. We’re agreed?”

“Yes,” he said, slowly.

“Good. The thing you have to understand about me, friend Obsidian,” I said, “is that I’ll do whatever I decide is best. I’m not going to leave the other people here in a bind because I didn’t bother to check. I’ll check first. But I said I want to go, and I’m going.”

“Forgive me,” he said.

“There’s nothing to forgive,” I said. “It’s just that this isn’t a matter of group discussion. This is me, saying what I choose to do.”

“All right,” he said. “But it’s not quite what I’m used to. You understand that? We have—”

“I know,” I said. “You people’ve got a pattern of responsibility. So’ve I. And I won’t violate my pattern any more than you’d violate yours. But I tell you, Obsidian, I want to go where your people will test me. The fact it’s across space doesn’t matter; because I’d go cross-universe as quickly as I’d go around this jeep to get that done.”

I had gotten a little warm on the subject; and I was braced to have him react with equal emotion. Instead he only looked at me, a long, questioning look. Then he nodded.

“This means more to you than we’d thought,” he said.

I stared back at him. Something other than the golden light was moving me now; a surge of feeling that was more like a tide, a running tide carrying me irresistibly forward.

“You don’t understand me at all,” I said, “do you?”

“No.” He shook his head.

“All right,” I told him. “See if it has meaning for you this way. I don’t know who my remote ancestors were; but what moves me as far as the time storm goes, must go as far back as they do. There’s something in me that’s certain about one thing; that anything can kill me, but until I’m killed I’m what lives. And as long as I live, I’ll fight. Come and get me out to face my special enemy, whoever that is; and while I can still move, I’ll stay after it. When I’m finally done for, I’ll still be happy; because I wasn’t deprived of my chance to do something. All I want is that chance—nothing else matters; and here you come asking me if the fact I have to cross some space to be tested might make me decide against going!”

I had really moved off the high end of the emotional scale this time, but I saw now that at last I had gotten through to him. I do not think even then that he understood what I was talking about, but he had registered the charge of the emotion that had ridden on top of my words.

“How much time do you need before you’ll be ready to go?” he said.

“Two—three hours, say.”

“Good. One more thing. We’d like, since we’re moving you this distance, to take advantage of the opportunity to do some testing of the avatar, as well. Do you think he’d be willing to come? He’s had experience in cross-space travel, I understand.”

“He has,” I said. “I’ll ask him. I think he’ll want to come.”

“Then I’ll be back in three of your hours.”

He vanished.

I turned back into the summer palace and went to find Porniarsk. It had not occurred to me until now to wonder what had been occupying him since we had arrived at our destination here in the future; and it struck me suddenly, now, that he had been busy in the lab all that time. But at what, I wondered? When I arrived, I found him working with the vision tank; and I asked him that question.

“I’ve been doing some charting,” he said, waving a stubby tentacle at the tank. “I thought perhaps if I could establish specifically what the inconsistencies were that we noted, I might be able to evolve a picture of what’s happening with the time storm at this future moment.”

“What did you find out?”

“I discovered that, except for certain areas where the force lines of the storm still seem to be breeding, the universe in general has been brought pretty much into the same sort of temporary, dynamic balance that we achieved around this planet back in our earlier time.”

“What about the breeding areas?” I asked.

“That’s interesting. Very interesting,” he said. “The force lines seem to be both breeding and healing—both increasing and decreasing in these areas. By the way, the areas I’m talking about are all out in the midsections of the galaxies. There’s none of them down in the very center of a galaxy—in what might be called the dead core area.”

“Dead core?”

“I thought you knew?” He glanced at me. “The center of most galaxies, like this one, is an area of very old stars, immersed in a dust cloud.”

“Where’s the closest activity to this solar system?”

“The blue-white supergiant star,” said Porniarsk, “that you call Rigel seems to be one of the near loci. But the main activity close to us is centered on the star you call S Doradus in the lesser Magellani Cloud, outside this galaxy, about a hundred and forty thousand light-years from us here.”

“S Doradus is a big, hot star, too, isn’t it?” I said.

“Like Rigel, one of the brightest.”

“Sounds like a large, bright star is necessary. Can you tell why?”

“No,” said Porniarsk. “All I know is that the lines of time storm activity in the area in question seem to center on S Doradus. And, then, there’s the matter that S Doradus has stopped radiating.”

“Stopped what?”

“It’s no longer radiating. It’s gone dark,” Porniarsk said. “I mean by that, that if you were in the immediate neighborhood of that star, it would no longer appear to be radiating. From our distance here, of course, it still seems to be shining; since we’re getting light that left it thousands of years ago.”

My head began to spin. The distances, the star sizes, and the rest of the information involved was on such a scale that my imagination struggled to get a grip on it.

“I’ve got a message for you,” I said, to shift the topic of conversation.

I told him about Obsidian taking me to be tested, and his question as to whether Porniarsk would be willing to go also.

“Of course,” said Porniarsk. “I’d be very interested to see how they do such testing.”