Time Storm

34

Three hours turned out to be less time than I thought in which to get hold of Ellen and the other leaders, explain what Porniarsk and I were going to be doing, and pack a suitcase. When Obsidian reappeared outside the summer palace at the landing area, he found about forty people—all who could possibly get up there to see Porniarsk and myself off. But it was not at the others he stared, or even at Porniarsk and me, but at the suitcase at my feet.

“Can I ask... he began.

“My bag,” I said. I guessed what was puzzling him. “Personal necessaries. Remember, I wear clothes, shave every morning, and things like that.”

“Oh,” he said. I had discovered by the end of our first day of acquaintance that the humans of his time had no body hair to speak of. “Of course.”

Following this conversation, there was a great deal of kissing and handshaking all around. In fact, our community nowadays was more like one large family than anything else. I almost spoiled the occasion by laughing out loud at the spectacle of Porniarsk solemnly promising people that he would be careful and take good care of himself. It was rather like a battleship assuring everyone that it would keep a wary eye out for sharks and take care not to get bitten.

But even the saying of goodbyes had to run down finally.

“We’re all set,” I told Obsidian.

“All right,” he said. “Then, if you’ll just stand close to me, here.”

Porniarsk and I moved in until we were almost nose to nose with him, leaving a ring of unoccupied ground about ten feet wide around us. All at once, we were standing elsewhere, in a little open space between the trunks of massive elms spaced about thirty feet apart. We stood on something that looked like a linoleum rug, but felt underfoot like deep carpeting, a solid dark green in color. About us were some walls at odd angles, several large puff-type cushions ranging up to a size that would have made a comfortable queen-sized bed, and several of what looked like control panels on stands apparently connected to nothing.

I looked around.

“This is your living area and working quarters?” I asked Obsidian.

“Yes,” he said. “I think you’ll find it comfortable for the three of us. I can arrange the walls so that you can have separate rooms for privacy, if you like.”

“Don’t bother,” I said. “I assume we won’t be here long in any case, will we?”

“About the equivalent of five days of local time.”

“Five days?” I said. “I thought we’d be leaving for wherever it is in a matter of hours, if not minutes?”

“Oh, we’ve already left,” he said. He waved his hand and something like a picture window appeared between us and the trees to our left. The view in the picture window, however, was a view of black space, bright pinprick stars as thick as pebbles on a beach, and a blue and white earth-globe nearly filling the lower right-hand corner of the view.

I stared at the earth-globe and confirmed my first impression that it was visibly shrinking in size as I watched.

“I thought you said this was your working and living area?”

“It is.”

“It’s a spaceship, too?”

Obsidian waved a hand.

“I suppose you could call it that,” he said. “Actually, it’s more accurate to say it’s simply living quarters. The process of travelling between the stars isn’t much more cumbersome if we bring it along, however; and it’s a lot more comfortable if we do so.”

I turned about in a circle, on my heel.

“The trees and all,” I said. “That’s just an illusion?”

“Out here, yes,” Obsidian said. “Back when we first arrived, of course, you were looking at the actual surrounding forest.”

“When did we take off?”

“As soon as we arrived. But to call it a takeoff—”

“I know,” I said, “—doesn’t exactly describe what happened. Never mind. I’m not really interested in the mechanics of it, right now. All right then, if we really are going to be here for five days, I believe I’d appreciate a room of my own, after all; and I’d imagine Porniarsk would too.”

“It makes no difference to me,” said Porniarsk. “But I am interested in the mechanics of your space flight. Can I examine those control panels?”

“By all means,” said Obsidian. “If you like, I’ll explain them to you. They’re for work back on the planet we just left, actually. Our trip will be handled automatically.”

“I’m interested in all things,” said Porniarsk. “This is the effective result of being the avatar of an individual, Porniarsk, who has always been interested in all things—”

He checked himself.

“—I should probably say, was interested in all things.”

“Do you miss him?” Obsidian asked. “This individual of whom you were an avatar?”

“Yes,” said Porniarsk, “in a sense I do. It’s a little like realizing that part of myself is gone, or that I had a twin I now know I’ll never see again.”

The tone of his voice was perfectly calm and ordinary; but suddenly I found myself looking at him closely. I had never stopped to think of Porniarsk as having emotions, or stopped to consider what he might have lost in a personal sense by going forward in time with us.

“I should have asked you if you wanted to come with us,” I said.

“If you had, I’d have answered yes,” said Porniarsk. “The process of discovery and learning is what I was constructed for.”

“Yes,” I said.

I was suddenly very tired, with an almost stupefying feeling of fatigue. Part of it, undoubtedly, was the work schedule we had been keeping in the community these last few weeks. But the greater part was something more psychological and psychic than physical. In spite of Obsidian’s insistence that the testing I was about to take was that and no more, I was at last certain that I had reached the last arena, the moment of final confrontation.

I was like someone who had trained physically for months and years for one battle. I felt loose, light and ready, but drained and empty inside, hollow of all but the inevitability of the conflict toward which I was now marching inexorably. Not even enthusiasm was left—only a massive and silent acceptance of what would be.

“I think,” I said to Obsidian, “I’d like that private room now, if you don’t mind. I think I’d like to get some sleep.”

“To be sure,” he said.

Suddenly, the white walls were around me. I had not moved, but now I was enclosed, alone with the picture window, or screen, showing the innumerable stars and the shrinking Earth. I turned to the largest of the cushions and fell on it. For a second the lighting was still daylight strong, but just before I closed my eyes, it dimmed to nonexistence; and the space in which I now rested was lit only by the star-glow from the window.

I slept.

When I woke, the stars in the picture window were different. Not merely a little different; they bore no relationship to anything I had ever seen in the skies of Earth. Puzzled, I lay there looking at them while gradually I came to full alertness; and either automatically, or in response to some way of sensing my urge for better visibility, the lighting in the room slowly increased, back to the level of sunlight. I got up, explored, and found a doorway that let me into a bathroom, which was too good a replica of what I was familiar with to be anything but a construct created expressly for me by Obsidian.

Still, I was grateful for the fact that it looked so familiar. Part of my waking up had always been a morning routine involving a sharp razor blade, soap and a good deal of hot water. This out of the way, I left my private quarters and found Obsidian sleeping quietly on one of the larger cushions of the main area, Porniarsk busy doing incomprehensible things with one of the control consoles.

“Good morning, Marc,” he said, turning to look at me as I came up.

“Morning, if that’s what it is—” I lowered my voice, glancing at Obsidian. “Sorry, I forgot about him sleeping there.”

“I don’t think you need worry,” said Porniarsk at ordinary conversational volume. “I don’t believe he hears any noise he doesn’t want to hear until he wakes at the time he wants to wake.”

I looked at Obsidian curiously.

“Good trick,” I said. “What’s the breakfast situation?”

“There’s food of various kinds in a room there,” said Porniarsk, pointing a tentacle at a doorway in one of the walls that had been there when we arrived.

I went to look and found he was right. It was a pleasant, small room, apparently surrounded completely by the illusion of the forest in forenoon sunlight. There were chairs, my style, and a table, my style; and a piece of furniture that looked like a heavy, old fashioned wooden wardrobe.

When I opened the door of this last piece of furniture, however, I found it filled with shelves full of all kinds of fresh earthly fruits and vegetables. There were fruit juices in transparent vessels, milk, and a pitcher of black liquid that turned out to be hot coffee; although what was keeping its temperature up was a mystery. There were no meat or eggs; and although I looked around carefully, I could not find a stove or any means of cooking any of the other foodstuffs. Well, at least the coffee was hot. I found a small empty vessel to pour it into and settled down to eat.

It was an interesting meal. There were no shocks, but some surprises. For one thing, the already-sliced loaf of bread I discovered turned out to be hot. Not toasted. Hot, like the coffee. The glass of what I had assumed was orange juice turned out to be slightly fizzy, as if it had been carbonated. There was no sugar and the honey tasted as if it had been spiked with vodka.

I finished up and went back into the other room. Obsidian was still asleep and Porniarsk was still at work.

“Have you eaten?” I asked Porniarsk. I knew he did eat; although Porniarsk and nutrition were something of a puzzle; because apparently he could go for weeks at a time without food. He had told me once that his bodily fueling system was almost as much a mystery to him as it was to the rest of us; since that was an area of information in which Porniarsk, the original Porniarsk, had no interest whatsoever. Apparently our Porniarsk, at least, had some way of getting a great deal more energy out of the sustenance he took in than we humans did. I had played with the picture of a small stainless steel fission engine under the thick armor plating of his body—although he had assured us he was pure animal protein in all respects.

“No,” he said now. “There’s no need. I’m greatly interested in this equipment.”

“It looks like we built up quite a velocity while I was asleep,” I said. “Where are we now?”

“That’s the fascination of this,” he said, nodding heavily at the control console. “Apparently, as Obsidian said, our trip’s completely under automatic control. But this console, since he showed me how to operate it, has been furnishing me with information on our movements as we make them. Right now we’re something like three million years in the past, and consequently, far displaced from your solar system—”

“Displaced?” I said. But even as I said it, even as he began to explain, my mind was jumping ahead to that explanation.

“Why, yes. Obsidian and his community,” said Porniarsk, “have evidently done a superb job of, first, balancing the large areas of time forces; and second, an equally excellent job of charting specific force lines in between the balanced areas. In fact, I’m inclined to think that the process of balancing was designed to leave just the network of working force lines that remain. The result has been that, although they can’t actually cross space at more than light speeds, by using the force lines they can jump distances equivalent to some hundreds or even thousands of light years, and arrive at their destination in a matter of hours, or even days. Watch the present stellar arrangement.”

He touched the console in front of him with a tentacle tip. Another picture window appeared, showing the starscape beyond. My memory for patterns now was too good to be deceived. This was a different view again of the galaxy than the one I had seen in the other room on waking up.

“We should be coming up on another transfer, momentarily…” said Porniarsk. “There!”

The starview abruptly changed, without jar, without sound, and so instantaneously that I did not even have the sensation of having blinked at the scene.

“We’ve gone down the ladder in time in order to make large shifts through space,” said Porniarsk. “In the smaller node of forces on Earth, the time jumps were also much smaller and the physical displacement was minor. Here, of course, when we take a large step forward or backward in time, the surrounding stars and other solid bodies move around us. What’s that phrase I once learned from Marie about Mahomet not being able to go to the mountain, therefore, the mountain must come to him? Obsidian’s people have learned to use the time storm to bring their mountains to them, instead of themselves making the journey to the mountains-”

He glanced at me. Porniarsk could not be said to have the most readable facial and body expressions in the universe; but I knew that hang of his tentacles well enough by now to tell when he was being apologetic.

“—I mean, of course,” he said, “to refer to the stars and other solid bodies of the universe as ‘mountains’.”

“I’d guessed you did,” I said.

“I’m afraid I’m sometimes a little pedantic,” he said. “So was Porniarsk himself, of course. It’s a failing that often goes with an enquiring mind.”

“Don’t let it bother you where I’m concerned,” I said. “One of my worst habits is telling other people what the situation is, at great length.”

“That’s true, of course,” he answered, with gentle unconcern for my feelings. “Nonetheless, two wrongs do not—I believe our host is waking up.”

He had creaked his head to one side as he spoke, to gaze at Obsidian, who now opened his eyes and sat up cross-legged on his cushion, all in one motion, apparently fully alert in the flicker of an eyelash.

“Are you rested, Marc?” he asked. “I finally had to take a nap, myself. Apparently Porniarsk needs very little sleep.”

“Damn little,” I said.

“We’ll have a little more than four days more before we reach our destination,” said Obsidian. “I’m looking forward to doing a lot more talking with you, Marc. I gather you’ve already come to a better understanding of the present time.”

“I think so,” I said. “Tell me if I’m wrong, but as I see it, all the intelligent races in the galaxy have joined together to fight for survival. Animate organisms against the inanimate forces that otherwise might kill you all off.”

“That’s a lot of it,” Obsidian said. “We’re concerned with survival first, because if life doesn’t survive, everything else becomes academic. So the first job is to control the environment, right enough. But beyond survival, we’re primarily interested in growth, in where life goes from here.”

“All right. But—” I checked myself. “Wait a minute. I ought to give you a chance to get all the way awake before I tie you up in a discussion like this.”

“But I am awake,” said Obsidian, frowning a little.

“Oh. All right,” I said, “in that case, suppose you start filling me in on the history of everything. How did this brotherhood of civilized entities start? What got it going?”

“As a matter of fact,” he answered, “what began the getting together of races that later became the present civilized community was what you call—excuse me, I’ll just use your word for it from now on—the time storm, itself. This was paradoxical; because it was the time storm that threatened the survival of all life, and here it made real civilization possible....”

With that, he was underway with a flood of information almost before I had time to find myself a seat on a nearby cushion. In the next four days, while his house, so to speak, flitted through space from time force line to time force line, and Porniarsk watched that process fascinatedly with the control console, Obsidian drew me a picture of some forty-odd thousand years of known history—on the time scale of our galaxy—and an unknown amount of time before that in which life was nearly destroyed by the time storm, but in which the foundation of a universal community was discovered and erected.

“The process was instinctive enough,” he said. “We tried to adapt to an environment that included the time storm and, in the process, learned to manipulate that environment, including the time storm, as far as we could. Right now the time storm makes possible a number of things we couldn’t have unless it existed. At the same time, by existing, it continues to threaten to kill us. So, we’re doing our best to control it. Note, we no longer want to wipe it out; we want to keep it, but under our domination.”

“Like taming a tiger,” I said, “to be a watchdog.”

He frowned for a second. Then his face cleared.

“Oh,” he said. “I see what you mean. Yes. We want to tame and use it.”

“So do I,” I said.

He looked unhappy.

“I was hoping,” he said, “that you’d be beginning to appreciate the difference between someone of your time and people of the present. We’ll be arriving shortly, in a matter of hours in fact; and I thought that, maybe, with the chance we’ve had to talk on the way here, you’d be seeing the vast gulf between what you know and are, and what anyone from the present would have to know and be.”

“It’s not that vast,” I said. “Now, wait a minute—”

He had opened his mouth, ready to speak again. When I held up my hand, he closed it again—but not with a particularly comfortable look on his face.

“All right, look,” I said. “You’ve evolved a whole science. But anyone born into this time of yours can learn it in that person’s lifetime, isn’t that so?”

“Oh, of course,” Obsidian said. “I didn’t mean to sound as if the hard knowledge itself was something more than you could learn. In fact we’ve got techniques and equipment which could teach you what you’d need to know in a matter of days. But the point’s that the knowledge by itself wouldn’t be any use to you; because to use it requires the sort of understanding of the time storm that only growing up and being educated in the present can give you.”

“What you’re saying,” I told him, “is that aside from the intellectual knowledge that’s necessary, I’d need the kind of understanding that comes from knowing a culture and a philosophy. And the cultural part is simply the same philosophy expressed on a nonsymbolic level. So, what it boils down to is understanding your basic philosophy; and you’ve just finished telling me that that’s been shaped by contact over generations with the time storm. All right, I’ve had contact with the time storm. I’ve had some contact with you. And I tell you that your culture and your philosophy isn’t that much different from what I’ve already understood myself where the time storm forces are concerned.”

He shook his head.

“Marc,” he said, “you’re aiming right at a disappointment.”

“We’ll see,” I answered.

“Yes.” He sighed. “I’m very much afraid we will.”

Just as there had been no sensation of taking off when we had left Earth, so there was no sensation of landing when we got to our destination. Simply, without warning, Obsidian broke off something he was saying about the real elements of art existing fully in the concept of the piece of artwork alone-a point with which I was disagreeing, because I could not conceive of art apart from its execution. What if the statue of Rodin’s Thinker could be translated into a string of symbolic marks? Would the intellectual appreciation of those marks begin to approach the pleasure of actually seeing, let alone feeling, the original statue with whatever microscopic incidentals of execution had resulted from the cuttings of the sculptor’s tools and the textural characteristics of the original material? The idea was absurd—and it was not the only absurd idea that I had heard from Obsidian, for all his personal like-ableness and intelligence, during the last five days.

At any rate, he broke off speaking suddenly and got to his feet in one limber movement from the cushion on which he had been seated cross-legged.

“We’re here,” he said.

I looked over at the picture window and still saw only a starscape in the picture window. Just one more, if once again different, starscape—with only a single unusual element about it, which was a large, dark area just to the right and below the center of it. Porniarsk was also watching the window from his post near one of the control consoles, and he saw the direction of my attention.

He trundled across the room and tapped with a tentacle at the screen surface over the dark area.

“S Doradus,” he said.

Obsidian turned his head a little sharply to look at the avatar.

“Aren’t we down on some planetary surface?” I asked Obsidian.

“Oh yes,” he said. The starscape winked out, to be replaced with a picture of a steep hillside littered with huge boulders. The sky was a dark blue overhead and what looked like beehives, colored a violent green and up to twenty or thirty feet in height, were growing amongst the rocks. “The scene you were just looking at is of space seen from the vantage point of this landing spot. Haven’t I mentioned that we nowadays have a tendency to surround ourselves with the type of scene that suits us at the moment, no matter where we are in a real sense?”

“You like the Earth forest scene yourself, then, Obsidian?”

“Not primarily,” he answered me, “but I supposed you did.”

“Thanks,” I said. I felt gratitude and a touch of humbleness. “I appreciate it.”

“Not at all. May I introduce—” he turned abruptly to face the several individuals who were now joining us from somewhere outside the illusion of the Earth forest.

There were only four of them; although my first impression when I saw them entering was that there were more. None of them wore anything resembling clothes or ornaments. In the lead was what I took to be a completely ordinary, male human, until I saw there was a sort of bony ridge, or crest, about three inches deep at the nape of his neck, running from his spine at midback up to the back of his head and blending into his skull there. He was somewhat taller than Obsidian. Next was a motley-colored individual with patches of skin almost as light as my own intermixed with other patches of rust-red and milk chocolate darkness. This one was less obviously humanoid, but seemed plainly female, and of about Obsidian’s size. The third was something like a squid-crab hybrid, with the squid growing out of the back shell of the crab— and he, or she—or for that matter, it—entered the room floating on a sort of three-foot high pedestal. I would have guessed this third individual’s weight at about a hundred pounds or so, Earthside.

The fourth was a jet-black, pipestem-limbed humanoid about three feet tall, with a sour face and no more hair than Obsidian. I was secretly relieved to find that everybody with a generally human shape, nowadays, was not someone I had to get a stiff neck looking up to. As they all came into the room, its area expanded imperceptibly until we stood in the middle of a space perhaps thirty by forty feet. The illusion of Earth forest now only occupied a portion of the perimeter about us. In the remaining space were four other scenes, ranging from a sort of swamp to a maroon-sand desertscape with tall, whitish buttes sticking up dramatically out of the level plain below.

I was so interested in watching all this that I almost missed the fact that Obsidian was trying to introduce me.

“Sunrise—” this was the individual with the neck crest. “Dragger—” (the particolored female); “one of the Children of Life—” (the squid-crab) and “Angel—” (the sour-faced, little black individual).

“It’s a remarkable thing to be able to meet you,” I told them. “I’d like you to know I appreciate the chance.”

“Compliments are unnecessary,” said Dragger, in a somewhat rusty voice. “I suppose we can call you Marc without offending you?”

“Certainly,” I said. “You speak my language very well.”

“It wouldn’t have been practical to have you learn ours,” Dragger said. She seemed to be the speaker for the group. “If you don’t mind, we’ll get on with the test. Would you give your attention to that panel just behind you?”

I turned. The panel she was pointing at was about three feet high by five feet long, sitting on top of a boxlike piece of equipment that had appeared with their entrance. As I looked, an elliptical pool of blackness seemed to flood out and cover the corner areas of the slab. I stepped close to it and found myself looking into, rather than at, the darkness, as if it had depth and I was looking down into a three-dimensional space.

As I focused in, deeper into the darkness, I saw that it was alive with shifting, moving fans of lights, something like the aurora borealis with its successions of milky colors spreading out over the northern sky at night. These lights I watched now moved much faster than the northern lights I was used to, and their pattern was much more complex. But, otherwise, they were remarkably similar.

They were similar to something else, too. I stared at them, unable to quite zero in on what they reminded me of. Then it burst on me.

“Of course!” I said, turning to Dragger and the others. “Those are time storm force line patterns, extremely slowed, but still force line patterns in action.”

The four of them looked at me. Then Dragger turned to Obsidian.

“Thank you, Obsidian,” she said. She looked back at me. “Thank you, Marc.”

She turned around and began to lead the rest out.

I stared after her, and at the rest of them.

“Wait a second!” I said.

“Marc,” said Obsidian behind me. “Marc, I said you might be working yourself up for a disappointment—”

“Disappointment!” I said. “The hell with that! I said they’re force line patterns, and they are. Come on back here—Dragger, the rest of you. You can’t just walk out. You owe me an explanation, if I want one. I’ve picked up enough about your time to know that!”

They slowed and stopped. For a moment they stood in a group, and I had the strong impression that a discussion was going on, although I could not hear a word or see a lip movement. Then they turned back into the room, Dragger still leading, and came to face me again.

“There is no explanation to give,” Dragger said. “We wished to test you for a sensitivity we feel is necessary, if you and your group are to be allowed to stay in the present. Unfortunately, you don’t seem to show that sensitivity.”

“And how do you figure that?” I said. “You showed me a pattern of time storm forces in action, I told you what they were— where’s the indication of a lack of sensitivity on my part?”

“Marc,” said Dragger, “I’m sorry to say that what you looked at was not what you said it was.”

“Not a pattern of force lines from the time storm?”

“No. I’m sorry.” Once more she turned to go and the others shifted with her.

“Damn it, come back here!”

“Marc—” It was Porniarsk, now, trying to interpose.

“Porniarsk, stay out of this! You too, Obsidian! Dragger, you others, turn around. Come back! I don’t know what the idea is, your trying to lie to me like this. But it’s not working. You think I don’t know time storm forces when I see them? Obsidian’s been told what I’ve done and been through with Porniarsk here. You must know what I told him—or didn’t you do your homework? If you do know what I told him, you know you can’t get away with showing me a pattern of the storm lines and claiming it’s something else.”

The four stood facing each other in silence. After a second, Obsidian took three quick steps across the floor and joined them. They stood motionless and voiceless, facing each other for a long minute. Then they all turned to face me.

“Marc,” said Obsidian, “I assure you, that was not a representation of lines of force from what you call the time storm. It was a projected pattern of conceptual rhythms common to all minds in our present-day culture. If you had shown a capability for responding to those rhythms, the pattern would have evoked some common images in your mind—water, gas, star, space... and so on. Apparently, it didn’t; so we have to conclude that you don’t have the capability to respond in modern terms. That’s all. You don’t gain anything by this insisting that you were looking at a representation of temporal force lines.”

“I see!” I said.

Because suddenly I did. And suddenly I was so sure I was right that I went ahead without even bothering to check the words out in my head before I said them.

“In fact,” I said, “I see a lot of things. One of them is that I understand you better than you understand me—and I’m going to prove that right now. You see, I know you can’t sluff me off and send me back with that answer, if I say the proper words. Your responsibility reflex won’t let you; and I’m going to say the proper words now. The words are—you and these people here, and everyone else you know, have one galloping cultural blindness. You’re dead blind in an area where I’m not; and I can see it where you can’t, because I’m standing outside your culture and looking in at it. Your whole set of rules is based on the fact that you can’t deny me a hearing on that point. Now that it’s been raised, you have to settle conclusively whether I’m right about what I’m saying, or wrong. If I’m wrong, then you can get rid me. But if I’m right, then you, all of you, are going to have to learn different—from me. Am I right?”

I stopped speaking and waited. They merely stood there.

“Well?” I said. “Am I right, or aren’t I? Am I entitled to a hearing or not?”

They looked at each other and stood for a moment longer. Then they all turned back to me.

“Marc,” said Obsidian, “we’ll have to consult about this. In theory at least, you’re right. You’ll get your hearing. But now we have to talk the whole matter over, and that’s going to take a little time. Meanwhile, because of the importance of your challenge to us, it seems you’re going to have to learn our way of communicating after all.”