Gordon R. Dickson (22 page)

"He also said he was an
avatar," said Bill. "The incarnation of a deity."

Bill's carping pricked me the wrong
way.

"—Or the incarnation of an
idea, or a philosophy, or an attitude!" I said. "Why don't you read
all of the entry in the dictionary next time?" Abruptly, I realized that
he was scared; and my jumping on him was the last sort of move likely to help
matters. "Look, he's just the sort of thing we've been hunting for.
Someone out of the future who might be able to help us handle this time storm
business."

"I don't trust... him,"
said Bill stubbornly. "I think he's just planning to use us."

"He can't," I said,
without thinking.

"Why not?" Bill stared at
me.

He had me, of course. I had
responded out of my feelings rather than out of my head—or, to be truthful, out
of my reflex for pattern-hunting, which was still yelling that I might have
found the missing piece necessary to complete the jigsaw puzzle. I did not know
why I was so unthinkingly sure of the fact that while we might be able to use
Porniarsk, he could not use us. I had thought that the end result of my
certainty about Swannee's survival had taught me some healthy self-doubt. But
here I was, certain as hell, all over again.

"I've just got a hunch," I
said to Bill then. "But in any case, we can't pass him up. We've got to,
at least, try to get the information we need out of him. Now, you can see the
sense of that, can't you?"

He hesitated in answering. I had hit
him on his weak side—the side that believed in scientific question and
experimentation.

"Of course you can," I
went on. "There's no point to anything if we throw away the first good
lead we've found to making sense out of things. Let's go back now and take
Porniarsk along with us to the rest of them. There'll be plenty of time to find
out what he's after personally, once we've got him back in camp. Whatever he's
got, I'll feel a lot safer when he's got the dogs, Sunday and the rest of our
guns all around him—don't you agree?"

Bill nodded reluctantly.

"All right," he said.
"But I want to look into a few of these buildings, anyway."

"We'll do that, then." I
could afford to give in on a small point, now that he'd yielded on the large
one. "But I've got a hunch Porniarsk's right, and there's nothing to
find."

So, accompanied by Sunday, we
searched through a couple of the now-open buildings. But it was just as I'd
thought. Porniarsk had not been lying so far as we could discover. The
buildings were nothing but a lot of empty rooms—in immaculate condition,
without a trace of dust or damage—but empty. Echo-empty.

In the end we went back and
collected Porniarsk. He clattered to his feet as we came up and fell in step
with us when I told him we were headed back through the mistwall to the rest of
our people. However, I stopped when we came to the nearer edge of the wall.

"I'd like you to wait here,
Porniarsk," I told him, "while Bill and I go through first. Give us a
chance to tell the rest of our people about you and tone down the surprise when
you show up. Is that all right with you?"

"All right," said
Porniarsk, clunking down into lying position again. "Call when you want me
to come after you."

"We will," I said.

I led Bill and Sunday back through
the mist. When we opened our eyes on the other side, it was to find a deserted,
if cozy-looking, farmyard. The cooktent had been set up in the yard and Marie
had both charcoal grilles going, but no one was on duty except the dogs.
Clearly, the others were all inside the farmhouse—the very sort of place I had
ordered them never to go into unless I told them it was safe, and only after a
couple of us had done a room-by-room search with guns, first. There were too
many nasty surprises, from booby traps to ambushes, that could be set up in a
place like an abandoned building.

"Get out here!" I shouted.
"Get out here, all of you!"

I had the satisfaction of seeing
them come scrambling out of the door and even out of a couple of windows,
white-faced, possibly thinking we were under attack from somewhere, or perhaps
another mistwall was bearing down on us. It was not the best of all possible
times to rub a lesson in; but I took a few minutes once they were outside to
read them out for what they had done.

"Well, it's ridiculous!"
said Marie. "It isn't as if we walked in there blind. Tek and the girl
took their guns and checked it out first."

Of course that put a different face
on the matter, but I was hardly in a position to admit so at the moment. I
looked over at Tek and the girl. He, of course, had been too smart from the
beginning to make his own excuses; while the girl, of course, was simply
following her usual practice of not talking. But I met her eyes now; and grim,
angry eyes they were.

"They did, did they?" I
said. "And who ordered them to do that?"

"I asked them to," said
Marie.

"You did?"

"Yes, I did!" said Marie.
"For God's sake, Marc, the rest of us have to start doing things on our
own, sooner or later, don't we?"

I was finding myself slipping into a
public argument with my people—not the best thing for a leader, if he wants to
hold his position.

"Right! And I'll tell you when.
Meanwhile—" I went on before she, or any of the rest of them could say
something more, "Bill and I brought back someone for you all to meet.
Brace yourself— he's not human. Bill, do you want to call him?"

"Porniarsk!" shouted Bill,
turning to the mistwall.

Marie and the rest also turned
toward the mistwall, with a swiftness that cheered me up somewhat. I had meant
what I had said to Porniarsk about preparing them for the shock of meeting him.
Now the thought in my mind was that a little shock might have a salutary effect
on them. We were not an army of world-conquerers, after all. Half a dozen
determined adults with decent rifles could wipe us out, or make slaves of us at
a moment's notice, if we took no precautions.

Porniarsk came clanking through the
mistwall into view and stopped before us.

"I am Porniarsk Prime
Three," he announced, in exactly the same tones in which he had introduced
himself to Bill and me. "The third avatar of Porniarsk, an expert in
temporal science. I hope to work together with you so that we all may benefit
the universe."

"Yes," said Bill dryly.
"Only, of course we've a little more interest in helping ourselves
first."

Porniarsk swiveled his heavy head to
look at Bill.

"It is the same thing,"
Porniarsk said.

"Is it?" said Bill.

Porniarsk creaked off a nod.

"What you've observed as local
phenomena," he said, "are essentially micro-echoes of the larger
disturbance, which began roughly half a billion years ago, according to your
original time pattern."

"Oh?" said Bill. He was
trying to be indifferent, but I could catch the ring of interest in his voice
that he was trying to hide. "Well, just as long as it can be fixed."

"It cannot be fixed," said
Porniarsk. "The knowledge is not available to fix it."

"It isn't?" I said.
"Then what's all this about helping the universe?"

"The whole problem is beyond my
time pattern and any other time pattern I know," said Porniarsk.
"Yet, our responsibility remains. Though we cannot solve, we can attack
the problem, each of us like the ants of which you know, trying to level a
mountain such as you are familiar with. With each micro-echo, each
infinitesimal node attacked, we approach a solution, even if it is not for us
to reach it."

"Wait a minute—" began
Tek.

He had not liked my blowup over
their going into the house without my orders, even though he had said nothing.
And now, the note of potential rebellion was clear in his voice.

"Hold it!" I said, hastily.
"Let me get to the bottom of this first. Porniarsk, just how far does the
whole problem extend—this problem of which our troubles here are a
micro-echo?"

"I thought," said
Porniarsk, "I had made clear the answer to that question. The temporal
maladjustments are symptoms of the destruction of an entropic balance which has
become omnipresent. The chaos in temporal patterns is universal."

None of us said anything. Porniarsk
stood waiting for a moment and then realized he had not yet reached our basic
levels of understanding.

"More simply put," he
said, "all time and space are affected. The universe has been fragmented
from one order into a wild pattern of smaller orders, each with its own
direction and rate of creation or decay. We can't cure that situation, but we
can work against it. We
must
work against it; otherwise, the process
will continue and the fragmentation will increase, tending toward smaller and
smaller orders, until each individual particle becomes a universe unto
itself."

... And that's all of what he said
then that I remember, because about at that point my mind seemed to explode
with what it had just discovered—go into overdrive with the possibilities
developing from that—on a scale that made any past mental work I had ever done
seem like kindergarten-level playtime, by comparison. At last, my hungry rat's
teeth had found something they could tear into.

15

They tell me that, after a while, I
came to and gave everybody, including Porniarsk, orders to pack up and move on;
and I kept the avatar and all of us moving steadily for the better part of the
next three weeks. Just moving, not stopping to investigate what was beyond the
mistwall, or in any of the buildings or communities we passed. Pushing forward,
as if I was on a trek to some far distant land of great promise.

Moments of that trek, I dimly
remember. But only moments. I was too full of the end result of all the
speculations I had been making about the time storm—now paying off all at once.
I did have flashes of awareness of what I was doing, and of what was going on
around me. But it was all background, unimportant scenery, for the real place I
was in and the real thing I was doing, which was The Dream.

In The Dream I was the equivalent of
a spider. I say "the equivalent of," because I was still myself; I
was just operating like a spider. If that doesn't make sense, I'm sorry, but
it's the best I can do by way of explanation. As description, it hardly makes
sense to me either; but I've never found another way to describe what that particular
brain-hurricane was like.

In The Dream, then, I was
spider-like; and I was clambering furiously and endlessly about a confusion of
strands that stretched from one end of infinity to the other. The strands had a
pattern, though it would have taken someone infinite in size to stand back
enough to perceive it as a whole. Still, in a way I can't describe, I was aware
of that pattern. My work was with it; and that work filled me with such a wild,
terrible and singing joy that it was only a hairline away from being an agony.
The joy of working with the pattern, of handling it, sent me scrambling
inconceivable distances, at unimaginable speeds, across the strands that filled
the universe, with every ounce of strength, every brain cell engaged in what I
was doing, every nerve stretched to the breaking-point. It was a berserk
explosion of energy that did not care if it destroyed its source, that was
myself, as long as things were done to the pattern that needed doing; and
somehow this was all associated with my memories of my first determination to
put my brand on the world about me; so that the energy sprang from deep sources
within me.

Actually, what I was experiencing
was beyond ordinary description. The pattern was nameless. My work with it was
outside definitions. But at the same time, I knew inside me that it was the
most important work that ever had been and ever would be. It carried an
adrenalin-like drunkenness that was far beyond any familiar self-intoxication.
People talk, or used to talk, about drug highs. This high was not a matter of
chemistry but of physics. Every molecule of my body was charged and set
vibrating in resonance with the pattern and the work I was doing upon it.

Meanwhile, I continued, with some
detached part of my consciousness, to lead and direct my small band of
pilgrims; effectively enough, at least, so that they did not depose me as a
madman and set up some new leader in my place. Not—as I found out later—that
they did not all notice a difference in me and individually react to, or use,
that difference to their own purposes. When I returned wholly to myself, I
found that a number of things were changed.

It may have been sheer accident that
I was able to return at all, but I don't think so. I think I was ready to back
off from the pattern, at least for a while; and what triggered my return was
only a coincidence, or the first summons able to reach over the long distance
to that part of me that was out there on the web-strands of the universe.

It was Sunday—I almost said,
"of course"—who brought me back. Apparently, he had been sticking to
me like a paid attendant all through this three week period. I would guess he
had sensed enough of the fact that a major part of my mind was missing, to make
him worried. Most of the time I must have paid him no attention. But during my
brief flashes of awareness of those about me, I remember being annoyed by the
fact that I was literally tripping over him every time I turned around.