Gordon R. Dickson (24 page)

"All right, Porniarsk," I
said. "I need your help. You evidently know a lot more about the time
storm effects than we do. I want to stop this random moving around just in
hopes we'll run into a piece of country that's future enough for us to be able
to do something about the mistwalls and the rest of it. I need you to help me
figure out where to head."

"No," said Porniarsk.

"No?" I said.

"You do not need me to help you
find a trigger area," said Porniarsk.

"What's that supposed to
mean?" I said. This, coming on top of his rejection of Bill, was enough to
stir my temper again.

"It's supposed to mean that my
assistance is not required to set you on the road to the destination you wish.
You've already set yourself on that road."

I took rein on my emotions. I
reminded myself that I had to stop anthropomorphizing him. He was probably only
trying to tell me something, and the fact that he was not built to think like a
human was getting in the way.

"Since when?" I asked, as
calmly as I could.

"Since your temporary
abstraction, and during your partial involvement with the overall problem, ever
since the moment in which my words caused you to visualize the magnitude of it.
Am I making myself—" Porniarsk broke off uncharacteristically in
mid-sentence. "Am I talking sense?"

"I don't know," I said.
"How'd you know why I collapsed, or about how I've been since?"

"I've been watching you,"
he said, "and drawing conclusions from what you do. The conclusions are
those I just stated."

"What've I been doing,
then?"

"Going," he repeated, with
no hint of impatience in his voice, "toward a trigger area."

I felt a sort of delicate feeling—an
instinct to caution. There was no way he could have known what had been working
in the back of my mind with The Dream, these last few weeks; but he was talking
one hell of a lot as if he had read my mind.

"That could be an accident,"
I said. "What makes you think it's anything more than an accident?"

"You withdrew," he said.
"But then you recovered enough to guide your party, if not in a straight
line, in a consistent direction by the most travellable route, toward the location
of an area I know to contain devices of assistance at a technological level,
which might achieve a first step of halting the moving lines of temporal
alteration—temporal discontinuities, as Bill calls them, or mistwalls, as you
say."

I stared at him.

"If you know about a place like
that," I said, "why haven't you done something about the temporal—oh,
hell, whatever you want to call them—before now?"

"The devices are devices of
assistance, but not of a design which will assist me. I'm an avatar, as I told
you, an avatar of Porniarsk Prime Three. The devices would be of assistance to
Porniarsk himself, but he's otherwise engaged."

"Tell him to drop whatever's
otherwise engaging him then, and get over here."

"He wouldn't come," said
the avatar. "This planet is your problem. The problem of Porniarsk is a
larger one. It involves many planets like this. Therefore, he has such as I who
am his avatar, so he can have several manipulative sets of himself at work. But
all I am is an avatar. Alone, I can't manipulate the forces involved here, no
matter how competent the device of assistance available to me."

I shook my head.

"All right, then, Porniarsk—or
Porniarsk's avatar—" I began.

"Porniarsk is fine," he
interrupted. "You'll never meet Porniarsk himself, or any of his other
avatars, so there's no danger of confusion."

"I don't know about that,"
I said. "You've got me pretty confused right now. I don't understand any
of this."

"Of course," said
Porniarsk, agreeable. "You're uneducated."

"Oh? Is that it?"

"How could you be otherwise?
You've never had the chance to learn about these forces and their effects. I
can't educate you, but I can explain specific elements of the situation as you
run across them. Trying to explain them before you encounter them won't work
because you don't have either the vocabulary or the concepts behind the
vocabulary."

"But I will when I run into
these elements?" I said. "Is that it?"

"On encountering the
experience, you'll see the need for the appropriate terms, with which you might
then be able to understand enough of the underlying concepts to work
with."

"Oh?" I didn't mean to
sound sarcastic, but this kind of conversation with Porniarsk had a habit of
driving me to it. "My understanding's not guaranteed then?"

"Be reasonable," said
Porniarsk; and this kind of appeal in colloquial, uninfected English from the
genial gargoyle sitting next to me, had to be experienced to be believed.
"How can
I
guarantee
your
understanding?"

How, indeed? He had a point, there.

"I give up," I said, and I
meant it. "Just tell me one thing. How did I happen to know enough to head
in the right direction?"

"I don't know," Porniarsk
answered. "I'd expected that, sooner or later, you'd ask me if there were
any future areas containing the means to do something about the time storm
effects locally, that is, here on this world. Then I could have directed you to
such an area. However, you've directed yourself to one without me. I don't
understand how. Porniarsk himself wouldn't understand how, though perhaps he
could find the answer. I'm only an avatar. I can't."

"All right, tell me what to do
now, then," I said.

Porniarsk's head creaked in a
negative shaking.

"There's nothing I can advise
you on until you've experienced the immediate future area of the assistance
device technology," he said. "Now that I've seen you do this much by
yourself, I'd be cautious about advising you in any case. It might be that
you'll learn more, and faster, on your own."

"I see," I said.
"That's fine. That's just fine. Then tell me, why did you stop Bill from
coming out here with us, if you weren't going to tell me anything anyway?"

"Bill wouldn't believe
me," said Porniarsk. "He doesn't trust me."

"And I do?"

The gargoyle head leaned slightly,
almost confidentially, toward mine.

"You've learned something you
shouldn't have been able to learn by yourself," said Porniarsk.
"You've touched the greater universe. Of course, you don't trust me,
either. You're too primitive to trust an avatar of another kind, like myself.
But in your case, trust isn't necessary."

"Oh?" I said.
"Why?"

"Because you want to believe
me," said Porniarsk. "If what I'm saying is true, then you're headed
toward something you want very much. That's not the same thing as trust; but
trust can come later. For now, your wanting to believe will do."

16

So we drove back to camp in the last
of the twilight and in silence. I only asked him one question on the way back.

"Do you really give a damn
about any of us?" I said. "Or are you just interested in the time
storm?"

"Porniarsk cares for all
life," his steady voice answered. "If he didn't, he'd have no concern
with the time storm. And I am Porniarsk, only in an additional body."

It was cold comfort. I believed him;
but at the same time, I got the feeling that there was something more he was
withholding from me.

In any case, there was nothing to do
now but keep going. Oddly, I trusted him. Something had happened to me since
The Dream; and that was that, in a strange way, I had come to feel an affection
and responsibility for him, along with all the others. It was as if a corner of
my soul's house had put up a blind on one window to let in a little sunshine. I
did take Bill aside the next day and gave him a rough briefing on my
conversation with Porniarsk. Bill fulfilled Porniarsk's prediction by being
highly skeptical of the avatar's motives and implications.

"It sounds to me like a con
game," he said. "It's part of a con game to flatter your mark. Did
you feel you were headed any place in particular, these last three weeks?"

I hesitated. Somehow, I didn't get
the feeling that Bill was ripe right now for hearing an account of The Dream,
and how it had been with me. But there was no way to answer his questions fully
without telling him about my back-of-the-brain spiderwork.

"I had a feeling I was tied
into something important," I said. "That's as far as it went."

"Hmm," said Bill, half to
himself. "I wonder if Porniarsk's telepathic?"

"That's as far-fetched as me
supposed to be knowing where we're going, when I didn't know where we're
going," I said.

Bill shrugged.

"If we hit this trigger area
place soon, you'll have known where we're going," he said. "No reason
there shouldn't be as much truth to telepathy. When did Porniarsk say we'd
reach the area?"

Of course, wound up as I had been by
what he'd had to say about me personally, I'd forgotten to ask him.

"I'll find out," I said
and went off to look for the avatar.

Porniarsk politely informed me that
we should hit the trigger area in about a day and a half the way we were
travelling; and, yes, it would be behind a mistwall like all the other
mistwalls we'd seen. As to what was inside, it was best I experienced that for
myself first, before Porniarsk did any explaining.

He was not wrong. Late in the
afternoon of the following day, we spotted a stationary mistwall dead ahead;
and two hours later we set up evening camp a couple of hundred yards from it.

The countryside here was open
pastureland, rolling hills with only an occasional tree but small strands of
brush and marshy ponds. Here and there a farmer's fence straggled across the
landscape; and the two-lane blacktop road we had been following, since its
sudden appearance out of nowhere ten miles before, ran at an angle into the
mistwall and disappeared. The day had been cool. Our campfires felt good.
Autumn would be along before long, I thought, and with that began to turn over
ideas for the winter; whether to find secure shelter in this climate or head
south.

I made one more attempt to get
Porniarsk to tell me what lay on the other side of the mistwall; but he was
still not being helpful.

"You could at least tell us if
we're liable to fall off a cliff before we come out of the wall, or step into a
few hundred feet of deep water," I growled at him.

"You won't encounter any
cliffs, lakes, or rivers before you have a chance to see them," Porniarsk
said. "As far as the terrain goes, it's not that dissimilar from the land
around us here."

"Then why not tell us about
it?"

"The gestalt will be of
importance to you later."

That was all I could get out of him.
After dinner, I called a meeting. Porniarsk attended. I told the others that
Porniarsk believed that, beyond this particular mistwall, there was an area
different from any we'd run into so far. We might find equipment there that
would let us do something about the time storm and the moving mistwalls. Bill
and I, in particular, were interested in the chance of doing so, as they all
knew. For one thing, if we could somehow stop the mistwalls from moving, we
could feel safe setting down someplace permanently. Perhaps we could start
rebuilding a civilization.

It was quite a little speech. When I
was done, they all looked at me, looked at Porniarsk, who had neither moved nor
spoken, and then looked back at me again. None of them said anything. But
looking back at them, I got the clear impression that there were as many
different reactions to what I had just said as there were heads there to
contain the reactions.

"All right then," I said,
after a reasonable wait to give anyone else a chance to speak. "We'll be going
in, in the morning. The ones going will be Bill, me, and three others, all with
rifles and shotguns both, in one of the jeeps. Anybody particularly want to be
in on the expedition, or shall I pick out the ones to go?"

"I'll go," said Tek.

"No," I said. "I want
you to stay here."

I looked around the firelit circle
of faces, but there were no other volunteers.

"All right then," I said.
"It'll be Richie, Alan, and Waite. Starting with the best shot and working
down the list."

The fourth man, Hector Monsanto,
whom everybody called "Zig," did not look too unhappy at being left
out. He was the oldest of the four men we had acquired along with Tek, a short,
wiry, leathery-featured individual in his late thirties, who looked as if most
of his life had been spent outdoors. Actually, according to Tek, he had grown
up in a small town and had been a barber who spent most of his time in the
local bars.

He was the oldest of the four and
the least agile. The other three were in their early to mid-twenties and could
move fast if they needed to.