Gordon R. Dickson (58 page)

"That's true, of course,"
he answered, with gentle unconcern for my feelings. "Nonetheless, two
wrongs do not—I believe our host is waking up."

He had creaked his head to one side
as he spoke, to gaze at Obsidian, who now opened his eyes and sat up
cross-legged on his cushion, all in one motion, apparently fully alert in the
flicker of an eyelash.

"Are you rested, Marc?" he
asked. "I finally had to take a nap, myself. Apparently Porniarsk needs
very little sleep."

"Damn little," I said.

"We'll have a little more than
four days more before we reach our destination," said Obsidian. "I'm
looking forward to doing a lot more talking with you, Marc. I gather you've
already come to a better understanding of the present time."

"I think so," I said.
"Tell me if I'm wrong, but as I see it, all the intelligent races in the
galaxy have joined together to fight for survival. Animate organisms against
the inanimate forces that otherwise might kill you all off."

"That's a lot of it,"
Obsidian said. "We're concerned with survival first, because if life
doesn't survive, everything else becomes academic. So the first job is to
control the environment, right enough. But beyond survival, we're primarily
interested in growth, in where life goes from here."

"All right. But—" I
checked myself. "Wait a minute. I ought to give you a chance to get all
the way awake before I tie you up in a discussion like this."

"But I am awake," said
Obsidian, frowning a little.

"Oh. All right," I said,
"in that case, suppose you start filling me in on the history of
everything. How did this brotherhood of civilized entities start? What got it
going?"

"As a matter of fact," he
answered, "what began the getting together of races that later became the
present civilized community was what you call—excuse me, I'll just use your
word for it from now on—the time storm, itself. This was paradoxical; because
it was the time storm that threatened the survival of all life, and here it
made real civilization possible...."

With that, he was underway with a
flood of information almost before I had time to find myself a seat on a nearby
cushion. In the next four days, while his house, so to speak, flitted through
space from time force line to time force line, and Porniarsk watched that
process fascinatedly with the control console, Obsidian drew me a picture of
some forty-odd thousand years of known history—on the time scale of our
galaxy—and an unknown amount of time before that in which life was nearly
destroyed by the time storm, but in which the foundation of a universal
community was discovered and erected.

"The process was instinctive
enough," he said. "We tried to adapt to an environment that included
the time storm and, in the process, learned to manipulate that environment,
including the time storm, as far as we could. Right now the time storm makes
possible a number of things we couldn't have unless it existed. At the same
time, by existing, it continues to threaten to kill us. So, we're doing our
best to control it. Note, we no longer want to wipe it out; we want to keep it,
but under our domination."

"Like taming a tiger," I
said, "to be a watchdog."

He frowned for a second. Then his
face cleared.

"Oh," he said. "I see
what you mean. Yes. We want to tame and use it."

"So do I," I said.

He looked unhappy.

"I was hoping," he said,
"that you'd be beginning to appreciate the difference between someone of
your time and people of the present. We'll be arriving shortly, in a matter of
hours in fact; and I thought that, maybe, with the chance we've had to talk on
the way here, you'd be seeing the vast gulf between what you know and are, and
what anyone from the present would have to know and be."

"It's not that vast," I
said. "Now, wait a minute—"

He had opened his mouth, ready to
speak again. When I held up my hand, he closed it again—but not with a
particularly comfortable look on his face.

"All right, look," I said.
"You've evolved a whole science. But anyone born into this time of yours
can learn it in that person's lifetime, isn't that so?"

"Oh, of course," Obsidian
said. "I didn't mean to sound as if the hard knowledge itself was
something more than you could learn. In fact we've got techniques and equipment
which could teach you what you'd need to know in a matter of days. But the
point's that the knowledge by itself wouldn't be any use to you; because to use
it requires the sort of understanding of the time storm that only growing up
and being educated in the present can give you."

"What you're saying," I
told him, "is that aside from the intellectual knowledge that's necessary,
I'd need the kind of understanding that comes from knowing a culture and a
philosophy. And the cultural part is simply the same philosophy expressed on a
nonsymbolic level. So, what it boils down to is understanding your basic
philosophy; and you've just finished telling me that that's been shaped by
contact over generations with the time storm. All right, I've had contact with
the time storm. I've had some contact with you. And I tell you that your
culture and your philosophy isn't that much different from what I've already
understood myself where the time storm forces are concerned."

He shook his head.

"Marc," he said,
"you're aiming right at a disappointment."

"We'll see," I answered.

"Yes." He sighed.
"I'm very much afraid we will."

Just as there had been no sensation
of taking off when we had left Earth, so there was no sensation of landing when
we got to our destination. Simply, without warning, Obsidian broke off
something he was saying about the real elements of art existing fully in the
concept of the piece of artwork alone-a point with which I was disagreeing,
because I could not conceive of art apart from its execution. What if the
statue of Rodin's Thinker could be translated into a string of symbolic marks?
Would the intellectual appreciation of those marks begin to approach the
pleasure of actually seeing, let alone feeling, the original statue with
whatever microscopic incidentals of execution had resulted from the cuttings of
the sculptor's tools and the textural characteristics of the original material?
The idea was absurd—and it was not the only absurd idea that I had heard from
Obsidian, for all his personal like-ableness and intelligence, during the last
five days.

At any rate, he broke off speaking
suddenly and got to his feet in one limber movement from the cushion on which
he had been seated cross-legged.

"We're here," he said.

I looked over at the picture window
and still saw only a starscape in the picture window. Just one more, if once
again different, starscape—with only a single unusual element about it, which
was a large, dark area just to the right and below the center of it. Porniarsk
was also watching the window from his post near one of the control consoles,
and he saw the direction of my attention.

He trundled across the room and
tapped with a tentacle at the screen surface over the dark area.

"S Doradus," he said.

Obsidian turned his head a little
sharply to look at the avatar.

"Aren't we down on some
planetary surface?" I asked Obsidian.

"Oh yes," he said. The
starscape winked out, to be replaced with a picture of a steep hillside
littered with huge boulders. The sky was a dark blue overhead and what looked
like beehives, colored a violent green and up to twenty or thirty feet in
height, were growing amongst the rocks. "The scene you were just looking
at is of space seen from the vantage point of this landing spot. Haven't I
mentioned that we nowadays have a tendency to surround ourselves with the type
of scene that suits us at the moment, no matter where we are in a real
sense?"

"You like the Earth forest
scene yourself, then, Obsidian?"

"Not primarily," he
answered me, "but I supposed you did."

"Thanks," I said. I felt
gratitude and a touch of humbleness. "I appreciate it."

"Not at all. May I
introduce—" he turned abruptly to face the several individuals who were
now joining us from somewhere outside the illusion of the Earth forest.

There were only four of them;
although my first impression when I saw them entering was that there were more.
None of them wore anything resembling clothes or ornaments. In the lead was
what I took to be a completely ordinary, male human, until I saw there was a
sort of bony ridge, or crest, about three inches deep at the nape of his neck,
running from his spine at midback up to the back of his head and blending into
his skull there. He was somewhat taller than Obsidian. Next was a
motley-colored individual with patches of skin almost as light as my own
intermixed with other patches of rust-red and milk chocolate darkness. This one
was less obviously humanoid, but seemed plainly female, and of about Obsidian's
size. The third was something like a squid-crab hybrid, with the squid growing
out of the back shell of the crab— and he, or she—or for that matter,
it—entered the room floating on a sort of three-foot high pedestal. I would
have guessed this third individual's weight at about a hundred pounds or so,
Earthside.

The fourth was a jet-black,
pipestem-limbed humanoid about three feet tall, with a sour face and no more
hair than Obsidian. I was secretly relieved to find that everybody with a
generally human shape, nowadays, was not someone I had to get a stiff neck
looking up to. As they all came into the room, its area expanded imperceptibly
until we stood in the middle of a space perhaps thirty by forty feet. The
illusion of Earth forest now only occupied a portion of the perimeter about us.
In the remaining space were four other scenes, ranging from a sort of swamp to
a maroon-sand desertscape with tall, whitish buttes sticking up dramatically
out of the level plain below.

I was so interested in watching all
this that I almost missed the fact that Obsidian was trying to introduce me.

"Sunrise—" this was the
individual with the neck crest. "Dragger—" (the particolored female);
"one of the Children of Life—" (the squid-crab) and
"Angel—" (the sour-faced, little black individual).

"It's a remarkable thing to be
able to meet you," I told them. "I'd like you to know I appreciate
the chance."

"Compliments are
unnecessary," said Dragger, in a somewhat rusty voice. "I suppose we
can call you Marc without offending you?"

"Certainly," I said.
"You speak my language very well."

"It wouldn't have been
practical to have you learn ours," Dragger said. She seemed to be the
speaker for the group. "If you don't mind, we'll get on with the test.
Would you give your attention to that panel just behind you?"

I turned. The panel she was pointing
at was about three feet high by five feet long, sitting on top of a boxlike
piece of equipment that had appeared with their entrance. As I looked, an
elliptical pool of blackness seemed to flood out and cover the corner areas of
the slab. I stepped close to it and found myself looking into, rather than at,
the darkness, as if it had depth and I was looking down into a
three-dimensional space.

As I focused in, deeper into the
darkness, I saw that it was alive with shifting, moving fans of lights,
something like the aurora borealis with its successions of milky colors
spreading out over the northern sky at night. These lights I watched now moved
much faster than the northern lights I was used to, and their pattern was much
more complex. But, otherwise, they were remarkably similar.

They were similar to something else,
too. I stared at them, unable to quite zero in on what they reminded me of.
Then it burst on me.

"Of course!" I said,
turning to Dragger and the others. "Those are time storm force line
patterns, extremely slowed, but still force line patterns in action."

The four of them looked at me. Then
Dragger turned to Obsidian.

"Thank you, Obsidian," she
said. She looked back at me. "Thank you, Marc."

She turned around and began to lead
the rest out.

I stared after her, and at the rest
of them.

"Wait a second!" I said.

"Marc," said Obsidian
behind me. "Marc, I said you might be working yourself up for a
disappointment—"

"Disappointment!" I said.
"The hell with that! I said they're force line patterns, and they are.
Come on back here—Dragger, the rest of you. You can't just walk out. You owe me
an explanation, if I want one. I've picked up enough about your time to know
that!"

They slowed and stopped. For a
moment they stood in a group, and I had the strong impression that a discussion
was going on, although I could not hear a word or see a lip movement. Then they
turned back into the room, Dragger still leading, and came to face me again.

"There is no explanation to
give," Dragger said. "We wished to test you for a sensitivity we feel
is necessary, if you and your group are to be allowed to stay in the present.
Unfortunately, you don't seem to show that sensitivity."