Time Storm

38

“What’s been inside you?” Ellen echoed. She was still not speaking to me by the physical route Dragger had used; but what she said was now so clear to me that my mind supplied her voice as if both it and my ears were physically present.

“The storm,” I said, “the struggle. The fight to understand, and be understood by everyone else in the face of the equally strong need to be yourself and yourself only, that unique and completely free identity that never was before this moment in time and will never be again, once you’re gone. ‘I’ve got to do that, say that’ the identity says, ‘otherwise I can’t grow, I can’t make.’ ‘No, you can’t do that,’ say the other identities outside your skull, all also struggling to grow and be free. ‘If you do that, I won’t understand why. I’ll take it as a threat. I’ll isolate you; or I’ll fight you.’ So, before each action, along the road to each goal, there are all the interior battles to find a way of compromising what you want, and need to do, with what others will accept your doing. The storm within. Everyone has it; and the time storm without is its analogy.”

“I don’t see that,” said Ellen. “Why?”

“Because both storms are the result of conflict between two things that ought to be working together. Like a couple of millstones, badly adjusted, chewing each other up, throwing off stone chips and sparks instead of joining to mill the grain between them.”

“But even so,” said Ellen, “why’s that important, here and now, and with you, particularly?”

“Because I never knew how to quit, to give up,” I said. “When I ran into the inner storm I couldn’t stop trying to conquer it; but because it was inside me, because it was subconscious, instead of conscious, I couldn’t get at it. So I made everything else a surrogate for it—the stock market, the business, my heart attack... and at last, the time storm.”

“Even so, what good could it do to fight other things?”

“It could teach me how to fight. It could help me discover and forge weapons to fight my inner storm with. And it did! By God, it did! I’ve found the answer to the inner storm.”

“Not fighting,” said Ellen, very positively.

“All right. That—yes. But there’s more to it than just not fighting. The full answer’s in the unity of everything. Reaching out and becoming part of everyone and everything else. It was you and Sunday who first broke me in to being a part of someone else without struggle. You were both completely dependent on me, so it never occurred to me that I had to adjust myself to suit you.”

“There was something besides that,” said Ellen. “We cared for you.”

“I know,” I said. “I know. I took that for granted too. I’m sorry, I didn’t know any better than to take it for granted, then. I didn’t begin to know any better until Sunday was gone and I suddenly found the big hole in myself where he’d been. I didn’t realize then why it hit me as hard as it did; but actually, something of myself had just become suddenly dead. If Sunday hadn’t been killed, just then—”

I broke off, looking instinctively for her face before I remembered she was not there in the body to be seen.

“Would you have gone off with Tek, then, if Sunday hadn’t been killed?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “If I had, though, I think I’d have come back. I never loved Tek. But I couldn’t make you hear me or see me.”

“I remember-” The wraith of Sunday jumped up to hug my bodiless spirit with nonexistent forepaws and tried to lick my face that was not there. “It’s all right, Sunday. Down, cat! I’m not feeling bad now; I was just remembering something...

“But the time storm’s still there. You mean you can give up on it, now?” Ellen asked.

“I think I could—now.”

“But you don’t really want to.”

“No,” I said. “The truth is, no. If I give up, nothing’ll be done; and that means the end, for all of us.”

“You’re sure it does?”

“Yes. There’s been a situation building up for a few thousand years now, ever since the temporal engineers started working with the storm. They’ve been trying to cure an imbalance between energies in this universe by importing more energy from another universe, to shore up the weaker of the two energies here. It’s worked for a while, but it’s also been creating the potential of a bigger imbalance if the scale should suddenly tip the other way, and the weak side become the strong one, with all that extra, imported energy added to its natural advantage. And I think it’s about to tip-in this universe at least—in about nine months.”

“The engineers don’t know this?” Ellen asked. “You’re sure about that?”

“They know it, but they don’t realize how great the reaction can be.”

“In any case, what can you do by yourself?”

“I don’t know. I need to think. Quiet, cat. Leave me alone for a few minutes.”

Sunday stilled. His ghost body lay down with crossed paws, on nothingness, and resigned itself to patience. I still held my vision of unity with the universe, that had come on me after I had finally faced the fact that there was no hope from Dragger or her colleagues. I had found what I had stumbled toward and struggled for all this time; and now I wanted to live, as even more I wanted Ellen, Sunday, and my universe with everyone in it to live. It went against reason that I could have come this long journey through life and time without picking up the skill and knowledge to do something about the situation. Somewhere, there had to be a chance; and if there was a chance, my blessing/curse of being unable to turn away from an unsolved problem should keep my mind hunting until I found it.

“If I’m right about the parallel....” I began at last, slowly.

“What parallel?” said Ellen.

“The parallel about the time storm being an analogy of the inner storm. If I’m right about that, and I had to get outside myself to find the key to my inner storm, then....”

Ellen said nothing.

“Then,” I went on, after a moment, “the answer to the time storm has to be outside too. Outside the universe—outside this universe. If I go outside this universe, I ought to be able to see it.”

“But how can you do that?” asked Ellen.

I did not say anything.

“There’s no way you can do that, is there?”

“Yes,” I said, slowly, “there is. There’s the lens.”

“What lens?”

I told her.

“Marc!” said Ellen. “Are you crazy?”

“It’s the only way to get outside.”

“But it’s the center of a star—and worse than that. You’d be burned up before you got into the lens.”

“I’m not material at the moment, remember. It’s my mind only that’d be going.”

“But even if you could go through this lens without being destroyed, there’s the problem of getting back. How could you do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you check the idea out, first, with the temporal engineers?”

“They might want to stop me; and maybe they could,” I said. “They can’t help me, Ellen. The time storm’s too much inside all of them, just like my inner storm was too much inside me. I’m the only one who can do anything; and the only thing I can think of to do is go through the lens.”

She said nothing for a moment. The wraith of Sunday lay waiting, trusting, leaving it all up to me.

“If you don’t, we all die?”

“I believe so.”

She sighed.

“Then you do have to go. There actually is no choice,” she said. “All right. I’m going along.”

“I don’t think you can,” I said. “Where are you? Back down in the summer palace asleep?”

“I’m in my own bedroom at the summer palace,” said Ellen, “lying on the bed. But I don’t think I’m asleep.”

“You’re there, though. I’m here. Tell me, can you feel the downdraft?”

“The what?”

I explained what it was. She was quiet for a little while after I finished. Finally, she spoke.

“No,” she said.

“I thought so,” I said. “I’m probably reaching down to you, as much as you’re reaching up to me. You see, I really am out here in a sense. I’m an energy pattern projected by the engineering devices of the temporal engineers. I can go from place to place at faster than light speeds only because I can turn off my projection in one spot and turn it on at another.”

“If you’re a pattern of energy, then the energy coming through the lens can destroy you! Or at least, change you. Energy is material.”

“Maybe. I’ve got to try it, anyway.”

“There has to be some way I can go with you!”

“I don’t think so; and that’s good. Because then I couldn’t stop you from coming; and there’s no sense in both of us... going.”

“Let’s try and find a way. Wait a bit. You said we had nine months.”

“Nine months before the axe falls; but it may be already too late to stop its swing. I can’t wait. I’ve got to go, now.”

“Wait just a little bit. Come back home for a couple of days, or even one, so we can talk it over first.”

“If I did that, I might not go after all. Particularly not now, with the two of you around. Ellen, I’ve got to go. I’ve got to go now!”

We flowed together, we ghosts. She held me. Sunday held me. I held them.

“All right, go then,” she said at last. “Go now.”

“Goodby,” I said. “I love you. I love you both. I’ll be back.”

“You’ll be back,” said Ellen.

I pulled away from them and shut them out of my mind. I was alone among the stars; and, by reaching out for it, I could feel the funnel of energy and also the downdraft—weak, as Dragger had said, way out here, but unceasing, relentless.

I let the pull of the downdraft fill my mind. I let myself go with it. At first there was nothing; it was like floating on a lake. Then I noticed a slight movement, a drifting, and I became aware of the fact that I was dropping down below the galactic plane. I revolved and saw the direction of my movement, toward the Lesser Magellanic Cloud and a darkness there enclosing a young, blue-white giant star, a darkness I was still too far off to distinguish.

I let myself drift....

The plane of the galaxy receded above me. I was in intergalactic space. There was nothing to measure the speed of my movement now, but I sensed that it was increasing. I was falling faster and faster, down the funnel of extra-universal energy, reaching from the lens at S Doradus to our galaxy.

I fell a hundred and forty thousand light-years; and time became completely arbitrary. It may have been minutes, and it may have been months, that I fell with steadily increasing velocity until I must have been travelling faster than any pulsar measured in my early, original time. I think it was probably minutes rather than months, or at least hours rather than months, because I could feel that my acceleration was not merely steady, but steadily increasing all that time. I had no ordinary way to measure this—I only knew it, with some measuring back part of my mind.

It became plain to me, finally, that I would not see the lens before passing through it. By the time I would be close enough to make out the dark circle of the engine among the lights of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, I would be only a fractionless fraction of a second from entering the tachyonic universe, too small a moment of time for perception. I relaxed, letting myself go....

And it happened.

There was a shock that felt as if the subatomic particles of the energy pattern that was my identity were being torn apart and spread through endless spaces. Following that, incomprehensibility.

I was afloat in darkness, streaked by lines of light that shot past me on every side almost too fast to see. Other than these, there was nothing. But the darkness had a value and the lights had a value—even if I could not read them. Feeling stricken and dismembered, I floated helplessly, watching the shooting lights.

I had no power of movement. I had no voice. I could find no means by which I might measure the time, the space, or anything else about me. If I had indeed come into the tachyon universe, I had arrived completely helpless to learn what I needed to know, and helpless to take the knowledge back with me. Look about as best I might, I could see nothing left to me but to give up; and the only reason I did not do so immediately was because I was not sure if I was even able to do that.

I floated; and gradually, like a shocked heart starting to beat again, my ancient weird woke again in me. I could not give up, because even here, I was still lacking the reverse gear I had been born without. Alive, dead, or in living pieces less than electron size, I was still committed to chewing at any cage that held me until I could gnaw a way out.

But what way was there? Where do you begin when there is no starting point on which to stand? A journey of a thousand miles may begin with a single step; but where to begin—if you are not standing still, but skating across eternity in total darkness, with meteor-like lights flashing all around you? I hunted through myself for something to hang to, and found nothing. Then Ellen came to my rescue.

“Remember?” she said. “When you first found me, I was lost like that; and I found a way back.”

She was not speaking out loud to me. She was not even talking in my mind, as she had as I hung in space, normal space, just before I had come here. It was the Ellen which had become a part of me, speaking to me out of a corner of myself, as Sunday had come bounding back from death to hug me with nonexistent paws, out of a corner of myself where he had been all this time, without my realizing.

“If I did it, you can do it,” Ellen-that-was-me said. “Do it the way I did it before. Take what there is, and build from there.”

She was right, of course; and I drew strength from her. If she had been able to do it once, she was able to do it again. Therefore, I could do it, as long as she was part of me. I drew certainty from her and looked about once more at what I had.

I had the darkness and the lights. The lights were totally incomprehensible; but with Ellen’s certainty that I could build with them, I started to watch them. They were too momentary to form patterns... or were they?

I floated, watching; and the watching became a studying.

All that underwent change fell into patterns of alteration, eventually. It was a long time resolving to my understanding, but finally, I began to see the elements of patterns in the streaking lights. They were not entirely random after all.

If they had patterns, they were part of a larger identity in which such patterns could be held, a larger identity which was the universe of their context—whether that universe was as small as an atom of an atom, or larger than all other universes put together. If this was so, then there was a relationship between the universe that held them and the patterns that it held.

What I had learned in my own universe could be the key here, also. Incomprehensible as this place was, the unity of every part of it with the whole, the identity of every part of it with the whole, might be certain here, as it had been where I came from. If this was so, I had to be a part of this universe and it had to be a part of me, simply because I was now in it. Therefore, its patterns had to be part of me also, as understandable as my own physical speech in action when I was back in my old body, because a part of the whole cannot be either strange or alien to the whole, as I had found.

“Now you see,” said Ellen-that-was-me. “And, since you see, all you have to do now is reach out and touch.”

She was right again. There was no cardinal here, perched on a bird feeder; and the golden light was lost and left behind in another infinity. But she was still right; there was nothing to stop me from reaching out and trying to touch, to connect with, that of which I was now a part.

I reached. I felt outwards for my identity with this place surrounding me, just as I had felt in my home universe. Identity was slow coming; but in the end, it turned out to be only one step more than I had needed to make in reaching out for identity with Obsidian and his peers.

I touched something. It was something, or some things, with an ability to respond. After that, it was only a matter of mastering the necessary patterns to communicate with them; and in this they met me halfway. Apparently—I say apparently, because the situation does not translate into words easily if at all—the distinction between living matter and nonliving matter was not the sharp division existing in our own universe. Instead, the important division was between those, or that, which had finite lifetimes and those who, or that which, did not; and the lights I had been watching were each a single lifetime, lighting up from the apparently brief moment of its birth until the moment of extinguishment at its death.

But what seemed so brief was not necessarily so. Looked at from another viewpoint, what seemed to me a momentary lifetime could have existed the equivalent of billions of years in our universe. Also, to live here was to communicate; so that, in the end, I myself lived to communicate and communicated by living. It was a long moment for me, because I had a large job in making them understand what I wanted them to know about us and our situation.

But the time came when I got through; and after that, no more time was needed. I was left, with my mission accomplished, but myself isolated.

The only way I had of telling that I had gotten the message to them was by the change I could observe in their patterns. For, of course, there was no way they could speak directly to me any more than I had been able to speak to them. Actually, the most I had been able to do had been to signal crudely in their direction; like someone on a hilltop waving flags to people in a valley far below, to direct their attention to a distant danger. It was not just the mechanism of communication that was lacking between them and me—it was the fact that not merely our thinking processes, but our very existences, were too different.

So, there I was successful, but stranded. I had no conception of what might now be left to me; for I had no conception of what I might be, here, in this different universe. It was possible that, here, I had an incredibly long life before me; a slow, almost imperceptible decay into extinction like that of some radioactive element with a half-life measured in millions of years. It might be that I was only seconds from extinction, but that the vastly different perception of time would make this into a practical eternity. It might be that I was truly immortal here and would exist forever, observing and apart from a universe filled with a life for which “alien” was an insignificant, inadequate word, but unable to end.

Curiously, none of these prospects bothered me. I had done what I had set out to do and, in the larger measure, I was content. The only sadness left in me was because I could not tell my own people that the message had been carried, the battle won. Battles, I ought to say; because in coming here, in managing to get my message through to the life of this place, I had finally got outside myself, finally seen myself in full reflection, and come to the inner understanding I had been trying to find all along.

My hunt had been nothing more than the human search for love. Only I had been afraid of finding it even while I was pursuing it. So I had made sure to create masks for all those I encountered, so that if I became attached to any of them, my attachment would be to the mask and not to the real being behind it. That way, if the person betrayed me, it did not matter, because I had never really known them anyway. There was no way the living person behind the mask could sink emotional hooks into my soul because it was to the mask I had committed myself. In retrospect, I had put a mask on my mother and sister. I had put masks on Swannee and Marie and Paula. Those whom I feared I might love I gave unlovable masks. Only to those I was sure were unable to love me did I give masks that I could love.

It was a fail-safe system. It was only when I forgot to use it that I got tripped up. The crazy cat and the idiot girl-who would have suspected in the beginning that either of them would be able to reach through and tear me up inside? True, I had wakened to the danger in the girl and tried to put a mask on her, but by that time, it was too late. Meanwhile, the crazy cat had already got to me. When he was killed, for the first time in years, I hurt; and, hurting, I came back to life, whether I wanted to or not.

Now I was grateful for that return to life, because what I had been doing was wrong. It was against instinct and could only have led me nowhere finally, but to a desiccated hell of sheer loneliness that was at the opposite end of the spectrum from the contented isolation in which I now hung. This way I was alive. The other way, I would have been dead. The golden light had been first to give me the answer; but then, I had still struggled against it.