Time Storm

35

It developed that the reason they had not tried to teach me, and Porniarsk .for that matter, how to communicate in their way was because of an assumption on their part that, conceptually, we were not up to such education. But since I had now told them that I believed the shoe was on the other foot, and that I knew things of which they couldn’t conceive, their original reason for not teaching me had become indefensible. In short, whether I could actually handle their language effectively, or not, I had to be given a chance to explain myself in it, so that the accusation couldn’t arise that I had failed to make my point because I had not been given the chance to state it in fully understandable terms.

That much established, the actual process of learning turned out to be easy. As Obsidian had said, they had devices and techniques for teaching. Within twenty-four hours, Porniarsk and I could handle all four modes of their communication. These were sound; signal (limb-waving, etc.); attitudinal (which was really another form of signal, since it meant communicating with physical attitudes—body language); and modification-of-surroundings, which essentially meant communicating by playing games with the surrounding scenery, whether illusory or real.

These four modes actually duplicated each other. That is, they had each been single, exclusive methods of communication originally, and had been combined as amplifying redundancies. Actually, I would be able to make my argument completely in the verbal mode. But if I should be questioned on a particular verbal statement, I could now nail down what I meant by repeating what I had said in one or more of the other modes. In theory, any statement made in as few as two modes established its message beyond any possibility of ambiguity.

So, I was ready for argument in twenty-four hours. The debate was not called to order, however, for the equivalent of three more Earth days. I was not too unhappy about that because it gave me time to do some thinking. Under pressure, I had jumped to a conclusion, there in that moment when Dragger and the others had turned to walk out; and that jump had been genuine inspiration. But now I needed to build that inspiration up into a solid, cohesive argument.

When the meeting was finally called to order once more, the number of the universal community’s members present had grown from five individuals to thirty-two. The space that arranged itself around us, consequently, was large and had sloping sides around the flat central area; so the spectators looked down on Dragger and me as if they were a crowd in a small arena or a lecture hall.

Dragger began by replaying what had happened on our first meeting. It was a little strange to stand there and see myself, in apparently solid replica, demanding that the five come back and listen to me. When this reached an end with Obsidian’s last words to me, the illusory figures of our former selves winked out and Dragger turned to me.

“You’re going to point out a cultural blindness to us, Marc,” she said. “Go ahead.”

“All right,” I said. “As briefly as possible, then—the first evidence I noticed of a cultural blindness was during the first few days that Obsidian and I talked. We found out then that he had trouble understanding what I meant, in spite of the fact that he’d been trained by your equipment. On the other hand, I was understanding him fairly well, in spite of the fact that he was trying to gather information on my culture, rather than teaching me about yours. You might want to check your records on that, sometime, to see what I mean.”

“We can show it,” put in Dragger.

The illusory figures appeared again. This time, they were Obsidian and myself talking back outside the summer palace. This was a bit of assistance I had not figured on. I stood there, as my image pointed out to Obsidian that he was like someone who had grown up thinking everyone spoke only one language and was having difficulty entertaining the idea that there might be other words possible for a familiar object.

The second set of figures disappeared.

“This started me thinking,” I went on. “From the beginning, in your contact with us, you’ve assumed the only possible solution to my group existing in the same time with you people would be for us to adopt everything that was part of your culture and discard anything of ours that didn’t fit. As with the language situation, your thought seemed to be that there was one, and only one, right way of doing things.”

I stopped and looked at Dragger, giving her a chance to argue this point. But she said nothing and seemed to be merely waiting. I went on.

“As far as I can gather,” I said, “you wouldn’t have had any intention of testing me for present-day abilities, even to this small extent you tried here a few days ago, except that Obsidian had turned up a couple of anomalies in the characters of me and my people that—because it’s a cultural imperative on you to base your conclusions on certainties—made it necessary to check. The first anomaly was that I said we had moved ourselves to your present time deliberately, using the time storm forces to do so.”

I stopped again and looked at Dragger.

“Would you like to replay that particular conversation?” said Dragger. “Very well.”

The figures of myself, Ellen, and Obsidian appeared before us.

“... And, of course, we wanted to collect data toward understanding the accident that brought you here,^” Obsidian was saying.

“Accident? We came here deliberately”

“You did?”

“That’s right,” I answered. “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?”

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

“Just a moment. Forgive me” said the figure of Obsidian; and he disappeared.

The figures of Ellen and me also winked out of existence.

“That bit of conversation,” I went on to Dragger and the rest of the audience, “shook Obsidian up, because here I was talking about deliberately making use of time storm forces back in a time long before anyone was supposed to be able to make use of them. The second anomaly, and the one that made it imperative that you test me, was the fact that Obsidian caught me making what I call a universal-identification—I note, by the way, that this is one area of my vocabulary in your languages that you haven’t filled in for me. You have to have a term for it yourselves—”

“We have,” said Dragger. “You just used it. We term it ‘universal-identification’.”

“Sorry,” I said. “My apologies. So you didn’t deliberately leave that part of my vocabulary out, then. At any rate, the point is, once more Obsidian had discovered that I could do something that I shouldn’t be able to do, being from as far back in prehistory as I was. But, making use of time storm forces to move in time or space, and the concept of the individual being able to share the identity of the universe or vice versa, are things you’ve believed belong to your time, not mine.”

“So far,” said Dragger, as I paused to look at her, “I hear nothing to disagree with. You must have more to say than this, though, I assume?”

“I have,” I said. “Let’s call me fish and you mammal, in the sense that I’m, in effect, your prehistoric ancestor. When you found I could breathe air the same way you did and had legs rather than fins, you had to classify me and those with me as something more than fish. So you thought you’d check me out to find if I was mammalian. But your first check turned up the fact that I’m an egg-laying creature. Since mammals, in your experience, don’t lay eggs, you assumed I must be a fish, after all. It didn’t occur to you that I might be something like a platypus.”

I had used the human word for “platypus”; because there was no alternative in their four communication modes. It was true their spoken language gave me the building blocks to construct an equivalent word; but from their point of view, that equivalent would have been a nonsense noise. Dragger and the rest stared at me in silence.

“Platypus,” I said. “An animal from my planet. A monotreme—” Now there was a word that was translatable into some sense in their language. Dragger spoke up.

“Just a minute, Marc,” she said.

There was a delay while the audience got a thorough briefing on the fauna of Earth in general, and that of Australia in particular.

“It’s understood, then?” I said, when this was over. “The platypus lays eggs, but nonetheless it’s a hair-wearing, lactating mammal.”

“Primitive mammal,” said Dragger.

“Don’t strain my analogy,” I said. “The point is, there was a possibility of my people and me belonging in a category which your culture had made you blind to.”

“That’s an assumption,” said Dragger.

“No,” I said. “It’s not. It’d be an assumption only if I was wrong about what you showed me having anything to do with the movement of time storm forces. Now, you were right in saying there was no connection between what you showed me and the storm. But in the overall sense, I was the one who was right, and you were wrong. Because the connection is there; and you’re so culturally blind to it that I’m willing to bet that, even in these last three days, none of you have checked out the possibility that that connection might actually be there.”

There was a second—only a second—of silence.

“You’re correct. There hasn’t been any check made of a possible connection,” said Dragger. “On the other hand, we’ve nothing but your guess that the connection exists.”

“I told you the last time I saw you,” I said, “it’s no guess. I’m neither fish nor fowl. I’m a monotreme. I’ve learned to use the time storm and to make a personal identification with the universe entirely without and apart from the history, culture, and techniques that you people have developed. I can read the time storm by reading patterns of movement. All movement falls into patterns.”

I looked around the room at the spectators.

“You’re probably not aware of it,” I said, “but the ways you’ve grouped and sorted yourselves around me, here, show certain patterns; and from those patterns, with what I now know about your culture and language, I can see a habit of social sorting by individual specialties or abilities.

“If I didn’t have that cultural information, I’d still be seeing these patterns, I just wouldn’t know what they implied. In the case of your groupings here, I now do know; and in the case of the time storm forces also, I do know.”

“This is assertion only, Marc,” said Dragger.

“No. It’s a case of my being on the outside of your culture, so I’m able to see clearly something you’re refusing to see. You people have struggled with the time storm for hundreds of generations. That struggle literally created your community the way it is now and dominated every element of it. It’s quite true the panel you showed me was supposed to be showing patterns of conceptual rhythms common to your time and culture; and that I didn’t recognize them as such because my own conceptual rhythms aren’t like that.”

I looked around at them.

“Marc,” said Dragger, “have we waited these several days and gathered together here only to hear you admit that we were right to begin with?”

“No!” I said. “Because you’re wrong. What I saw, and recognized, were time storm force patterns. You, all of you, couldn’t realize that because you don’t recognize how much the time storm’s become a part of you over this long struggle—part of your body, mind, and culture. Your conceptual rhythms are time storm rhythms. You don’t see that because they’re so much a part of you; you take them for granted. I can see it, because I’m standing outside your culture, looking at you. I’m the most valuable mind you’ve got in this present time of yours; and you’d better appreciate that fact!”

I was almost shouting at them now. This was a strong statement in their terms; but I needed to wake them up, to make them hear.

“Don’t take my word for it!” I said. “Check those conceptual rhythms on your instrument against the patterns of the time storm forces and pick up the identity between them for yourselves!”

I stopped talking. In my own past time, a moment of this would have provoked a buzz of unbelief from the spectators, or outcries against my idea or myself—anything but the way these individuals reacted, which was in a thoughtful silence. There was no visible evidence that I had attacked the very base of the culture they had always taken for granted.

But I knew what was happening in their minds. I knew, because I now knew more than a little about how they thought and about their obligation to consider any possibility for truth which that same culture put upon them. I knew they had been jarred, and jarred badly, by what I had just told them. But my knowledge of that was about all the emotional satisfaction I was likely to get from the situation. As far as appearances went, they showed no more reaction than they might have if I had told them that I planned on not shaving when I got up tomorrow.

The meeting was breaking up. Some of the figures in the stands were simply disappearing, some were walking off through visible doorways, some were simply melting into the illusions of surrounding scenery. I found myself alone with Porniarsk, Obsidian, and Dragger.

“We’ll check, of course,” said Dragger to me. “Tell me, Marc, what is it exactly you want?”

“I want to fight the time storm. Myself. Personally.”

“I have to say I can’t see how that can be anything but a complete impossibility,” she said. “On the other hand, there are always new things to be learned.”