Gordon R. Dickson (36 page)

"You said this was some sort of
representation of the storm?" I said, turning to the tank.

"Yes," he answered.

"I don't see anything."

"It's not operating right
now," said Porniarsk. "But I can turn it on for you."

He went to a control panel on the
far wall and touched several studs and dials there with the tips of his
shoulder tentacles.

"What you'll see," he
said, coming back to Bill and me, "isn't actually a view of the time
storm. What it is, is a representation produced by the same equipment that was
in the station. Look into the tank. Not at it, into it."

I'd already been looking—but now I
realized my error. I had been staring the same way you might stare at a fish
tank from entirely outside it. But what this piece of equipment apparently
required—and require it did, for it was evidently already warming up, and I
could feel it drawing my attention psychically the way a rope might have pulled
me physically—was for an observer to put his point of view completely inside
it.

There was nothing remarkable about
the first signs of its activation. All I saw were little flickerings like
miniature lightning, or, even less, like the small jitterings of light that
register on the optic nerves when you close your eyes and press your fingers
against the outside of the eyelids. These small lights will-o-the-wisped here
and there through the blueness of whatever filled the tank; and I suddenly woke
to the fact that what I had taken to be a sort of blue-grey liquid was not
liquid at all. It was something entirely different, a heavy gas perhaps.
Actually, I realized, it had no color at all. It was any shade the subjective
attitude of the viewer thought it was. For me, now, it had become almost purely
black, the black of lightless space; and I was abruptly, completely lost in it,
as if it was actually the total universe and I stood invisible at the center of
it.

The little flickerings were the
forces of the time storm at work. They had been multiplying to my eye as my
point of view moved their centerpoint; and now they filled the tank in every
direction, their number finite, but so large as to baffle my perception of
them. I understood then that I was watching all the vectors of the full time
storm at work at once; and, as I watched, I began slowly to sort their
movements into patterns.

It was like watching, with the eyes
of a Stone Age savage, a message printing itself on a wall in front of you; and
gradually, as you watched, you acquired the skill of reading and the
understanding of the language in which the message was set down, so that random
marks began to orient themselves into information-bearing code. So, as I
watched, the time storm began to make sense to me—but too much sense, too large
a sense for my mind to handle. It was as if I could now read the message, but
what it told was of things too vast for my understanding and experience.

Two things, I saw, were happening.
Two separate movements were characteristic of the patterns of the
still-expanding storm. One was a wave-front sort of motion, like the spreading
of ripples created by a stone dropped in a pond, interacting and spreading; and
the other was like the spreading of cracks in some crystalline matrix. Both
these patterns of development were taking place at the same time and both were
complex. The wave-fronts were multiple and occurring at several levels and
intensities. They created eddies at points along their own line of advance
where they encountered solid matter, and particularly, when they encountered
gravitational bodies like stars. Earth had had its own eddy, and it had been
only the forces within that eddy that we had been able to bring into dynamic
balance.

The crystalline cracking effect also
intensified itself around gravity wells. It was this effect that threatened the
final result of the storm that Porniarsk had first warned us about—a situation
in which each particle would finally be at timal variance with the particles
surrounding it. The cracking extended and divided the universe into patterns of
greater and greater complexities until all matter eventually would be reduced
to indivisible elements....

So much I saw and understood of what
the tank showed. But in the process of understanding so much, my comprehension
stretched, stretched, and finally broke. I had a brief confused sensation of a
universe on fire, whirling about me faster than I could see... and I woke up on
the floor of the room, feeling as if I had just been levelled by an iron bar in
the hands of a giant. The heavy, gargoyle head of Porniarsk hung above me,
inches from my eyes.

"You see why you need to
develop yourself?" he asked.

I started to get up.

"Lie still," said the
voice of Bill, urgently; and I looked to see him on the other side of me.
"We've got a real doctor, now. I can get him on the radio from the
communications room here and have him up here in twenty minutes—"

"I'm all right," I said.

I finished climbing to my feet.
Looking beyond Porniarsk, I saw a huddled mass of black fur at the base of the
console, a helmet still on its head.

"Hey—the Old Man!" I said,
leading the way to him. Porniarsk and Bill followed.

He was still on the floor by the
time I reached him and took the helmet off; but apparently he, too, was coming
out of it. His brown eyes were open and looked up into mine.

"Yes," said Porniarsk,
"of course. He'll have been in monad with you just now."

The Old Man was all right. He
continued to stare at me for a second after I took his helmet off; then he got
to his feet as if nothing had happened. I thought that if he really felt as
little jarred as he looked, by what had decked us both, he was made of stronger
stuff than I. My knees were trembling.

"I just want to sit down,"
I said.

"This way," Bill answered.

He led me out of the room and down a
corridor, the Old Man tagging after us. We came to a solid, heavy-looking door
I had never seen before in the palace. He produced a key, looked at me for a
second with a shyness I'd never seen in him before, then unlocked the door and
pushed it open.

"Come in," he said.

I stepped through, feeling the Old
Man crowding close behind me—and stopped.

The room Bill had opened for us was
narrow and long; and one of its lengthier walls was all windows. They were
double windows, one row above the other so that, in effect, that wall of the
room was almost all glass; and the view through them was breathtaking. I had
seen what was to be seen through them, but not from this particular viewpoint.

From where I stood in the room, my
gaze went out and down the open slope just below the palace, over the tops of
the tree belt below to a familiar view, the village of the experimentals and
the human town beyond. But then it went further—for the angle of this room
looked out, between a gap in the lower vegetation, to the open land beyond,
stretching to the horizon and divided by a road that had not been there a year
and a half ago. Now this road stretched like a brown line to where earth and
sky met, with some small vehicle on it a mile or so out, moving toward us with
its dust plume, like a squirrel's tail in the air behind it.

"How do you like it?" I
heard Bill asking.

"Wonderful!" I said—and
meant it.

I turned to talk to him, and for the
first time focused in on the interior of the room itself. There was a rug
underfoot and a half a dozen armchairs—overstuffed armchairs, comfortable
armchairs. I had not realized until now that I had not seen a comfortable piece
of furniture in months. The kind of furniture that we tended to accumulate was
that which was most portable, utilitarian straight chairs and tables of wood or
metal. Those in this room were massive, opulent things meant for hours of
comfortable sitting.

But there was more than furniture
here. Most of the available floorspace was stacked with books and boxes
containing books. All in all, there must have been several thousand of them,
stacked around us. The piles of them stretched between the armchairs and right
up to a massive stone fireplace set in the middle of the wall opposite the
windows. There was no fire in the fireplace at the moment, but kindling and
logs had been laid ready for one. At the far end of the wall in which the
fireplace was set, I saw what the ultimate destination of the books would be,
for the first two vertical floor-to-ceiling shelves of built-in bookcases were
completed and filled with volumes, and framing for the rest of the shelves
stretched toward me what would eventually be four solid walls of reading
matter.

"Sit down," said Bill.

I took one of the armchairs, one
that faced the windows, so that I could gaze at the view. The small vehicle I
had seen—a pickup truck—was now close to the town. Without warning, the music
of The Great Gate of Kiev from Moussorgsky's
Pictures At An Expedition
poured forth around me into the room.

"I thought," said Bill
from behind me, "that we ought to have some place just for sitting...."

He was still being shy. The tones of
his voice carried half an apology, half an entreaty to me to like what I saw
around me.

"It's really magnificent,
Bill," I told him and turning, saw him standing at one end of the windows,
looking out himself. "Who's been building all this for you?"

"I've been doing it
myself," he said.

I took a long look at him. I had
known he was a good man in many ways; but I had never thought of him as a
carpenter, mason, or general man of his hands. He looked back at me stiffly.

"I wanted to surprise
people," he said. "Only just now you seemed jolted by what happened,
so... I actually wasn't going to tell anyone until I had it all finished, the
books on the shelves, and all that."

"Look. This room's the best
idea you could have had," I told him.

I meant it. God knows, if anyone
ever loved reading, it was me. I was no longer looking at the view now, I was
looking at the books, beginning to feel in me a stirring of excitement that I
would not have guessed was still possible. The books were suggesting a million
things to me, calling to me with a million voices. Maybe only a handful of
those voices had anything to tell me about the things I really needed to know;
but the possible smallness of their number did not matter. It was me against
the time storm and I was humankind; and what was humankind was locked up in
those codes of black marks on white paper that had once filled libraries all
over the earth.

Suddenly, I wanted to know a million
things, very strongly. There was the dry ache in my throat and the fever in my
head of someone athirst and lost in a desert.

25

I was reading the last paragraph of
Joyce's short story "The Dead" in his collection
Dubliners:

"Snow was general all over
Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the
treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward,
softly falling into the dark, mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon
every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.
It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of
the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the
snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent
of their last end upon all the living and the dead."

There was something there I told
myself, tight with certainty. There was something there. A certain part of
humankind and the All. A tiny something; but something.

I put down that book and went to
find the words of Ernest Hemingway, in the first paragraph of
A Farewell to
Arms:

"In the late summer of that
year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the
plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and
boulders, dry and white in the sun and the water was clear and swiftly moving
and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the
dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too
were dusty and the leaves fell early that year...

Something... I went looking further.

Hui-Nan Tzu, in the second century
before Christ, had written:

"Before Heaven and Earth had
taken form all was vague and amorphous. Therefore it was called the Great
Beginning. The Great Beginning produced emptiness and emptiness produced the
universe.... The combined essences of heaven and earth became the yin and yang...

Sigmund Freud:

"No one who, like me, conjures
up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast...

Tennyson, in
The Passing of
Arthur:

Last, as
by some one deathbed after wail

Of
suffering silence follows, or thro' death

Or
deathlike swoon, thus over all that shore,

Save for
some whisper of the seething seas,

A dead
hush fell; but when the dolorous day