Gordon R. Dickson (59 page)

"And how do you figure
that?" I said. "You showed me a pattern of time storm forces in
action, I told you what they were— where's the indication of a lack of sensitivity
on my part?"

"Marc," said Dragger,
"I'm sorry to say that what you looked at was not what you said it
was."

"Not a pattern of force lines
from the time storm?"

"No. I'm sorry." Once more
she turned to go and the others shifted with her.

"Damn it, come back here!"

"Marc—" It was Porniarsk,
now, trying to interpose.

"Porniarsk, stay out of this!
You too, Obsidian! Dragger, you others, turn around. Come back! I don't know
what the idea is, your trying to lie to me like this. But it's not working. You
think I don't know time storm forces when I see them? Obsidian's been told what
I've done and been through with Porniarsk here. You must know what I told
him—or didn't you do your homework? If you do know what I told him, you know
you can't get away with showing me a pattern of the storm lines and claiming
it's something else."

The four stood facing each other in
silence. After a second, Obsidian took three quick steps across the floor and
joined them. They stood motionless and voiceless, facing each other for a long
minute. Then they all turned to face me.

"Marc," said Obsidian,
"I assure you, that was not a representation of lines of force from what
you call the time storm. It was a projected pattern of conceptual rhythms
common to all minds in our present-day culture. If you had shown a capability
for responding to those rhythms, the pattern would have evoked some common
images in your mind—water, gas, star, space... and so on. Apparently, it
didn't; so we have to conclude that you don't have the capability to respond in
modern terms. That's all. You don't gain anything by this insisting that you
were looking at a representation of temporal force lines."

"I
see!"
I said.

Because suddenly I did. And suddenly
I was so sure I was right that I went ahead without even bothering to check the
words out in my head before I said them.

"In fact," I said, "I
see a lot of things. One of them is that I understand you better than you
understand me—and I'm going to prove that right now. You see, I know you can't
sluff me off and send me back with that answer, if I say the proper words. Your
responsibility reflex won't let you; and I'm going to say the proper words now.
The words are—you and these people here, and everyone else you know, have one
galloping cultural blindness. You're dead blind in an area where I'm not; and I
can see it where you can't, because I'm standing outside your culture and
looking in at it. Your whole set of rules is based on the fact that you can't
deny me a hearing on that point. Now that it's been raised, you have to settle
conclusively whether I'm right about what I'm saying, or wrong. If I'm wrong,
then you can get rid me. But if I'm right, then you, all of you, are going to
have to learn different—from me. Am I right?"

I stopped speaking and waited. They
merely stood there.

"Well?" I said. "Am I
right, or aren't I? Am I entitled to a hearing or not?"

They looked at each other and stood
for a moment longer. Then they all turned back to me.

"Marc," said Obsidian,
"we'll have to consult about this. In theory at least, you're right.
You'll get your hearing. But now we have to talk the whole matter over, and
that's going to take a little time. Meanwhile, because of the importance of
your challenge to us, it seems you're going to have to learn our way of communicating
after all."

35

It developed that the reason they
had not tried to teach me, and Porniarsk .for that matter, how to communicate
in their way was because of an assumption on their part that, conceptually, we
were not up to such education. But since I had now told them that I believed
the shoe was on the other foot, and that I knew things of which they couldn't
conceive, their original reason for not teaching me had become indefensible. In
short, whether I could actually handle their language effectively, or not, I
had to be given a chance to explain myself in it, so that the accusation
couldn't arise that I had failed to make my point because I had not been given
the chance to state it in fully understandable terms.

That much established, the actual
process of learning turned out to be easy. As Obsidian had said, they had
devices and techniques for teaching. Within twenty-four hours, Porniarsk and I
could handle all four modes of their communication. These were sound; signal
(limb-waving, etc.); attitudinal (which was really another form of signal,
since it meant communicating with physical attitudes—body language); and
modification-of-surroundings, which essentially meant communicating by playing
games with the surrounding scenery, whether illusory or real.

These four modes actually duplicated
each other. That is, they had each been single, exclusive methods of
communication originally, and had been combined as amplifying redundancies.
Actually, I would be able to make my argument completely in the verbal mode.
But if I should be questioned on a particular verbal statement, I could now
nail down what I meant by repeating what I had said in one or more of the other
modes. In theory, any statement made in as few as two modes established its
message beyond any possibility of ambiguity.

So, I was ready for argument in
twenty-four hours. The debate was not called to order, however, for the
equivalent of three more Earth days. I was not too unhappy about that because
it gave me time to do some thinking. Under pressure, I had jumped to a
conclusion, there in that moment when Dragger and the others had turned to walk
out; and that jump had been genuine inspiration. But now I needed to build that
inspiration up into a solid, cohesive argument.

When the meeting was finally called
to order once more, the number of the universal community's members present had
grown from five individuals to thirty-two. The space that arranged itself
around us, consequently, was large and had sloping sides around the flat central
area; so the spectators looked down on Dragger and me as if they were a crowd
in a small arena or a lecture hall.

Dragger began by replaying what had
happened on our first meeting. It was a little strange to stand there and see
myself, in apparently solid replica, demanding that the five come back and
listen to me. When this reached an end with Obsidian's last words to me, the
illusory figures of our former selves winked out and Dragger turned to me.

"You're going to point out a
cultural blindness to us, Marc," she said. "Go ahead."

"All right," I said.
"As briefly as possible, then—the first evidence I noticed of a cultural
blindness was during the first few days that Obsidian and I talked. We found
out then that he had trouble understanding what I meant, in spite of the fact
that he'd been trained by your equipment. On the other hand, I was
understanding him fairly well, in spite of the fact that he was trying to
gather information on my culture, rather than teaching me about yours. You
might want to check your records on that, sometime, to see what I mean."

"We can show it," put in
Dragger.

The illusory figures appeared again.
This time, they were Obsidian and myself talking back outside the summer
palace. This was a bit of assistance I had not figured on. I stood there, as my
image pointed out to Obsidian that he was like someone who had grown up
thinking everyone spoke only one language and was having difficulty
entertaining the idea that there might be other words possible for a familiar
object.

The second set of figures
disappeared.

"This started me
thinking," I went on. "From the beginning, in your contact with us,
you've assumed the only possible solution to my group existing in the same time
with you people would be for us to adopt everything that was part of your
culture and discard anything of ours that didn't fit. As with the language
situation, your thought seemed to be that there was one, and only one,
right
way of doing things."

I stopped and looked at Dragger,
giving her a chance to argue this point. But she said nothing and seemed to be
merely waiting. I went on.

"As far as I can gather,"
I said, "you wouldn't have had any intention of testing me for present-day
abilities, even to this small extent you tried here a few days ago, except that
Obsidian had turned up a couple of anomalies in the characters of me and my
people that—because it's a cultural imperative on you to base your conclusions
on certainties—made it necessary to check. The first anomaly was that I said we
had moved ourselves to your present time deliberately, using the time storm
forces to do so."

I stopped again and looked at
Dragger.

"Would you like to replay that
particular conversation?" said Dragger. "Very well."

The figures of myself, Ellen, and
Obsidian appeared before us.

"... And, of course, we wanted
to collect data toward understanding the accident that brought you here,
^"
Obsidian was saying.

"Accident? We came here
deliberately"

"You did?"

"That's right,"
I answered. "
I'd probably
better take you down to see the lab and Porniarsk. Sorry, maybe I'm getting the
cart before the horse. But after expecting you every day from the moment we
landed here, and not having you show up until now—"

"Expecting me when you
arrived?"

"That's right. We came here
because I wanted to contact you people who were doing something about the time
storm—"

"Just a moment. Forgive
me"
said the
figure of Obsidian; and he disappeared.

The figures of Ellen and me also
winked out of existence.

"That bit of
conversation," I went on to Dragger and the rest of the audience,
"shook Obsidian up, because here I was talking about deliberately making
use of time storm forces back in a time long before anyone was supposed to be
able to make use of them. The second anomaly, and the one that made it
imperative that you test me, was the fact that Obsidian caught me making what I
call a universal-identification—I note, by the way, that this is one area of my
vocabulary in your languages that you haven't filled in for me. You have to
have a term for it yourselves—"

"We have," said Dragger.
"You just used it. We term it 'universal-identification'."

"Sorry," I said. "My
apologies. So you didn't deliberately leave that part of my vocabulary out,
then. At any rate, the point is, once more Obsidian had discovered that I could
do something that I shouldn't be able to do, being from as far back in
prehistory as I was. But, making use of time storm forces to move in time or
space, and the concept of the individual being able to share the identity of
the universe or vice versa, are things you've believed belong to your time, not
mine."

"So far," said Dragger, as
I paused to look at her, "I hear nothing to disagree with. You must have
more to say than this, though, I assume?"

"I have," I said.
"Let's call me fish and you mammal, in the sense that I'm, in effect, your
prehistoric ancestor. When you found I could breathe air the same way you did
and had legs rather than fins, you had to classify me and those with me as
something more than fish. So you thought you'd check me out to find if I was
mammalian. But your first check turned up the fact that I'm an egg-laying
creature. Since mammals, in your experience, don't lay eggs, you assumed I must
be a fish, after all. It didn't occur to you that I might be something like a
platypus."

I had used the human word for
"platypus"; because there was no alternative in their four
communication modes. It was true their spoken language gave me the building
blocks to construct an equivalent word; but from their point of view, that
equivalent would have been a nonsense noise. Dragger and the rest stared at me
in silence.

"Platypus," I said.
"An animal from my planet. A
monotreme—"
Now there was a word
that was translatable into some sense in their language. Dragger spoke up.

"Just a minute, Marc," she
said.

There was a delay while the audience
got a thorough briefing on the fauna of Earth in general, and that of Australia
in particular.

"It's understood, then?" I
said, when this was over. "The platypus lays eggs, but nonetheless it's a
hair-wearing, lactating mammal."

"Primitive mammal," said
Dragger.

"Don't strain my analogy,"
I said. "The point is, there was a possibility of my people and me
belonging in a category which your culture had made you blind to."

"That's an assumption,"
said Dragger.

"No," I said. "It's
not. It'd be an assumption only if I was wrong about what you showed me having
anything to do with the movement of time storm forces. Now, you were right in
saying there was no connection between what you showed me and the storm. But in
the overall sense, I was the one who was right, and you were wrong. Because the
connection
is
there; and you're so culturally blind to it that I'm
willing to bet that, even in these last three days, none of you have checked
out the possibility that that connection might actually be there."