Gordon R. Dickson (55 page)

Only, he had run into trouble. The
sounds he used turned out to have had meanings over and above what the language
computer had deduced. In short, Obsidian and his fellows were in the uncomfortable
position of people who have grown up with a single set of concepts, thinking
there was no other, and who had then run into an entirely different set—ours.
They were like the person who grows to adulthood before he discovers that there
are other languages than the one he knows, and then has to struggle emotionally
with the concept that anybody else can prefer some outlandish sound to what he
knows in his heart of hearts is the only "real" sound for a thought
or thing.

Because of this, his plans had gone
awry. It had been planned that he would drop in on us, pump us dry of all other
relevant data on us, feed that also into the computer, and come up with
patterns of us in all departments, from which it could be figured how to adjust
us to the culture of their time, if this was possible. Instead, here he was
floundering at absorbing my patterns while I was picking up his, hand over
fist.

Well, not exactly hand over fist.
His patterns, unlike ours, were all logical and logically interrelated, which
gave me a great advantage. But there were also abilities and concepts in his
area that he took for granted and I could not get him to talk about because I
had no way of describing what I was after.

It was not until the fourth day that
I finally achieved a breakthrough in that respect; and it happened for a
strange reason. That mind of mine, which could never leave a problem alone but
must keep worrying at it and chewing it over until either mind or problem
cracked wide open, had been at work on the two enigmatic conversations I had
had with Marie, just before she left, and Ellen, the day that Obsidian had
appeared.

I still could make no sense of what
they said. For all my efforts to understand, my comprehension slid off the
memories of their words to me as if both had been encased in glass. At the same
time I had a reason to keep working at them, now. There was something in me
which I evidently could not see, as I could not see my own eyeballs, except in
a mirror, or the back of my head. There must be something in me, I thought,
like a dark area, a shadow cast by the sensing mechanism itself, that was
keeping me from the closeness I wanted to have with other people—and of all
people, Ellen. I had been trying all sorts of approaches to the problem, trying
to find some way of sneaking up on the unseeable, so to speak; and it occurred
to me suddenly as I was talking to Obsidian that there might be a similarity
between this problem and my problem of communication with him.

I had tried evoking the golden light
as a means of reaching an understanding of Ellen. But I had found that when I
tried to reach for the feeling of unity with all things for that reason, it was
as it had been in the plane after leaving Paula's camp—I could not evoke the
state of unity. It came to me now that it would do no harm to try for it once
more in the case of Obsidian and his people, where the emotional roots
concerned did not go so deeply into the dark of my own soul.

So I tried. It helped that I had
grown to like Obsidian in the last few intense days of talking. I thought I
could almost grasp what he described as that unique identity element by which
all other beings of his time recognized him. So I picked a moment when he was
trying to explain to me what among them took the place of family structure, as
we in our community knew it. I watched him as he talked, seated cross-legged on
the ground. His face was animated and his hands wove patterns in the air. He
had the attribute of seeming to be alive with energy even while he was
obviously without tension and relaxed. It was an ability I had seen before in
casual encounters with professional athletes in top condition.

I was hardly listening to what he
said. That is, my mind was making automatic note of it, but I was comfortably
aware of the fact that the tape recorder was catching his words and I would be
able to review them again this evening in the quiet of the summer palace
library. Most of my attention was concentrated on him as a complete entity; a
sound-making, limb-moving individual extending energy to me in the form of
sound and gesture. I squinted, mentally, to focus in on him in this sense; and
when I had him in focus, slid on top of his image before me the
emotional/intellectual gestalt that was my friend Obsidian, as I knew him.

The two melted together; and as they
did I was able for the first time to take a step back from him and the present
moment. I kept my point of view at that distance and slowly let the rest of the
day soak into me.

We sat just outside the summer
palace and I had my back to it; so that I looked past Obsidian, across the open
stretch of the landing area and out over the descending slope of the trees to
the town below and the tall grass marching in all directions to the horizon. It
was, for once, a perfectly clear day; there was not a cloud in sight. But a
small, cool wind was wandering back and forth across the mountainside where we
sat.

I saw the treetops moving to it and
felt the intermittent light touch of it on my face and hands, cancelling out
now and again the warmth of the steady afternoon sunlight. It was too early for
insects; but down on the wooded slope below me, a cloud of specks that were
small birds burst up unexpectedly as I watched, to swarm dark against the far
bright sky for a moment like a cloud of gnats, and then settled back down out
of sight into the dark mass of the leaves below them again.

High up, another single speck swam
against the cloudless sky. A hawk? My vision went out to the horizon and
beyond. Slowly, I became conscious of a rhythm that was the beating of my own
heart and at the same time the breathing of the world. Once again, the golden
light began to grow around me and, once more, I felt myself touching all things
in the earth, sky, and water, from pole to pole. I was touching all things, and
I reached out to touch Obsidian.

I looked at him without moving my
eyes and saw him in full dimension for the first time. For he was a part of the
universe, as all these other things were a part of it; and that was what was at
the core of his community's difference from ours. They were aware of the
universe of which they were a part, while we thought of ourselves as disparate
and isolated from it. That was why Obsidian's identity was unchangeable and
instantly recognized by his fellows. It was because the dimensions of that
identity were measured by the universe surrounding him, in which he was
embedded, and of which he was a working part. All at once the gestalt formed,
and I understood without words, without symbols, the different, fixed place he
and all other thinking minds of his period had in this, their own time and
place.

I had produced the golden light
again and it had helped me find what I had been seeking. I sat, just feeling it
for a moment-then let it go. The light faded, I came back into my ordinary body
and smiled at Obsidian.

But he did not smile back. He had
stopped talking, and he was staring at me with a startled expression.

"Obsidian—" I began, about
to tell him what I now understood.

He vanished.

33

Once again, he did not come back for
a while. He was missing all the rest of that day and through the next two days.
Under the conditions applying up until five minutes before he left, I would
have worried that I had somehow damaged the relationship building between the
two of us, and between our people and his interstellar community. Following the
moment of light and my sudden access to understanding, I was sure this was not
the case; and I tried to reassure the other members of our group who were
inclined to worry about his nonappearance.

"It's not explainable in our
words," I told Ellen, Bill, Doc, Porniarsk and about five others of the
community who had been emerging as leaders during the past few weeks. We were
all sitting around the fireplace in the library on the second evening, with the
windows open to the courtyard and the night sky outside. "But I'm sure I
didn't step on his toes in any way. I can't tell you how I know it, but I know
it."

"Why did he take off,
then?" Bill asked. "Can't you give us some idea, Marc?"

"He recognized what I was
doing—this universe association trick I've told you about. I've explained that
the best I can, and I won't try to explain it any more now. You'll have to
learn how to do it yourselves if you really want to understand."

"You'd better start giving us
lessons, then," said Doc. They all laughed.

"I will," I said.
"Seriously, I will. When we've got the time."

"Go on, Marc," said Bill.
"Finish what you were saying. He knew what you were doing... and that's
what disturbed him?"

"Not exactly disturbed, I'd
say," I told them. "He was just surprised. He's gone back to check
with his friends. The way they are —the way I now
know
they are—that
sort of checking's a responsibility on his part."

"So that's why you're sure
he'll be back?" Bill asked.

"Isn't that what I've been
saying?"

"Porniarsk," said Bill,
turning to him, "can't you help explain any of this? You're from a more
advanced race than we are."

"By comparison with Obsidian
and his associates," said Porniarsk, "I'm essentially of the same
primitiveness as the rest of you. Also, you'll remember, I'm only an avatar.
I've no creativity, and no imagination beyond what I acquired when I was
produced in the image of Porniarsk. I'm not equipped to speculate or
interpret."

"Well," said Bill.
"Anyway, we've all got plenty of work to do while we're waiting for him to
come back. Marc, you'll speak to him as soon as you can, about whether we can
count on them for supplies or assistance in case we need it?"

"Yes," I said. "I can
talk to him about that as soon as he comes back. I was afraid earlier that I
couldn't explain what we wanted without muddying up the idea we intend to be
independent here. We still do want to be independent and self-supporting, don't
we?"

I looked around the room. I did not
really need the murmurs of agreement from all of them. I only wanted to remind
them we were all together on that one point.

"If it's only a station they've
got here," said Leland Maur, a thin, black man in his mid-twenties who was
an architect and our construction and mechanical engineering expert, "my
feeling's that this world is ours by right of settlement anyway. Not theirs. We
don't want to start off owing any piece of it to someone else."

That comment ended the business of
the evening. We sat back to drink coffee and compare notes on how things were
going with our individual work projects to get ready for winter; and after
about an hour of this, most of us were ready to fold for the night.

The next day, Obsidian had still not
come back. That morning happened to be the half-day a week we had begun to take
off as a rest period, following the good effect of our one day holiday after
the first windmill generator had been put into operation. We had found that
there was a limit to the efficiency involved in working seven days a week.
After several weeks of unbroken work, we ended up going through the motions of
our labors, but getting less done in total than if we had taken a break and
started in fresh again. Accordingly, that morning I could stay home with a
clear conscience, instead of lending my strength to one of the work jobs down
in the town. Ellen was also home and busy doing something with her clothes in
one part of the summer palace. I took advantage of the chance to dig once more
into the books I had been neglecting lately. But they did not seem to hold my
attention, after all. The urge had been growing in me to try for the golden
light state again and, once more, to try to reach toward Ellen as I had reached
toward Obsidian.

I was encouraged in this by my
success with Obsidian, and also by the fact I began to believe I was at last
zeroing in on my inner search. The outer search had always been the time storm;
but the inner search, I now began to suspect, went back to my relationship with
Swannee—and my mother.

I put the book I was holding aside
and looked out into the courtyard feeling once more for a unity with the
universe. It did not come easily this time. It was almost as if it knew why I
wanted it and was reluctant to help me in that direction. But slowly, as the minutes
went by, first the room and then the courtyard and the sky I looked out on took
on greater values of reality, as if I was seeing them with a dimension added, a
greater depth, a
beyondness,
in addition to the ordinary height, depth
and width of normal vision. My body slowed its breathing and its heartbeat and
began to blend with the movements of the planet.

The light changed, the gold moved
in, and once more, I had it.

I held where I was for some little
time—perhaps as much as ten or twenty minutes, although in that state of
concentration time seemed almost suspended—to make sure that my hold on the
state I had evoked was firm. Then I reached out to feel Ellen, elsewhere in the
palace.

My touch went out like a wave
spreading up on a sloping beach.