Gordon R. Dickson (60 page)

There was a second—only a second—of
silence.

"You're correct. There hasn't
been any check made of a possible connection," said Dragger. "On the
other hand, we've nothing but your guess that the connection exists."

"I told you the last time I saw
you," I said, "it's no guess. I'm neither fish nor fowl. I'm a
monotreme. I've learned to use the time storm and to make a personal
identification with the universe entirely without and apart from the history,
culture, and techniques that you people have developed. I can read the time
storm by reading patterns of movement. All movement falls into patterns."

I looked around the room at the
spectators.

"You're probably not aware of
it," I said, "but the ways you've grouped and sorted yourselves
around me, here, show certain patterns; and from those patterns, with what I
now know about your culture and language, I can see a habit of social sorting
by individual specialties or abilities.

"If I didn't have that cultural
information, I'd still be seeing these patterns, I just wouldn't know what they
implied. In the case of your groupings here, I now do know; and in the case of
the time storm forces also, I do know."

"This is assertion only,
Marc," said Dragger.

"No. It's a case of my being on
the outside of your culture, so I'm able to see clearly something you're
refusing to see. You people have struggled with the time storm for hundreds of
generations. That struggle literally created your community the way it is now
and dominated every element of it. It's quite true the panel you showed me was
supposed to be showing patterns of conceptual rhythms common to your time and
culture; and that I didn't recognize them as such because my own conceptual
rhythms aren't like that."

I looked around at them.

"Marc," said Dragger,
"have we waited these several days and gathered together here only to hear
you admit that we were right to begin with?"

"No!" I said.
"Because you're wrong. What I saw, and recognized,
were
time storm
force patterns. You, all of you, couldn't realize that because you don't
recognize how much the time storm's become a part of you over this long
struggle—part of your body, mind, and culture. Your conceptual rhythms
are
time storm rhythms. You don't see that because they're so much a part of you;
you take them for granted. I can see it, because I'm standing outside your
culture, looking at you. I'm the most valuable mind you've got in this present
time of yours; and you'd better appreciate that fact!"

I was almost shouting at them now.
This was a strong statement in their terms; but I needed to wake them up, to
make them
hear.

"Don't take my word for
it!" I said. "Check those conceptual rhythms on your instrument
against the patterns of the time storm forces and pick up the identity between
them for yourselves!"

I stopped talking. In my own past
time, a moment of this would have provoked a buzz of unbelief from the
spectators, or outcries against my idea or myself—anything but the way these
individuals reacted, which was in a thoughtful silence. There was no visible
evidence that I had attacked the very base of the culture they had always taken
for granted.

But I knew what was happening in
their minds. I knew, because I now knew more than a little about how they
thought and about their obligation to consider any possibility for truth which
that same culture put upon them. I knew they had been jarred, and jarred badly,
by what I had just told them. But my knowledge of that was about all the
emotional satisfaction I was likely to get from the situation. As far as
appearances went, they showed no more reaction than they might have if I had
told them that I planned on not shaving when I got up tomorrow.

The meeting was breaking up. Some of
the figures in the stands were simply disappearing, some were walking off
through visible doorways, some were simply melting into the illusions of
surrounding scenery. I found myself alone with Porniarsk, Obsidian, and
Dragger.

"We'll check, of course,"
said Dragger to me. "Tell me, Marc, what is it exactly you want?"

"I want to fight the time
storm. Myself. Personally."

"I have to say I can't see how
that can be anything but a complete impossibility," she said. "On the
other hand, there are always new things to be learned."

36

"They're a great people,
Marc," said Porniarsk, once we were alone again in the ordinary
configuration of Obsidian's quarters— which Obsidian had, by now, largely given
over to our own private use. "You shouldn't forget that."

"You think they are?" I
said.

I heard him as if from a middle distance.
I was once more as I had been when we had just left Earth on the way here in
Obsidian's quarters; like someone who had trained years for a single conflict.
I was light and empty inside, remote and passionless, hollow of everything but
the thought of the battle that would come, which nothing could avert or delay.

"Yes," he said,
"they've survived the time storm. They've learned to live with it, even to
use it for their own benefit, and they've made a community of innumerable
races, a community that's a single, working unit. Those are great achievements.
They deserve some honor."

"Let other people honor them,
then," I said. It was still as if I was talking to him from some distance
off. "I've got nothing left except for what I've still got waiting for
me."

"Yes," he said. He sounded
oddly sad. "Your foe. But these people aren't your foe, Marc. Not even the
time storm's your foe."

"You're wrong there," I
told him.

"No." He shook his
ponderous head.

I laughed.

"Marc," he said,
"listen to me. I'm alive, and that alone surprises me. I'd expected I'd
stop living, once I was taken from the time in which Porniarsk existed. But it
seems, to my own deep interest, that in some way I've got an independent life
now, a life of my own. But even if this is true, it's a single life only. I was
constructed, not engendered. I can't have progeny. My life's only this small
moment in which I live it; and I'm concerned with what and whom I share that
moment. In this case, it's you, Ellen, Bill, Doc, and the rest."

"Yes," I said. At another
time, what he had said might have moved me deeply. But at the moment, I was too
remote, too concentrated. I heard and understood what he told me; but his words
were like a listing of academic facts, off somewhere on the horizon of my existence,
shrunken by their distance from what obsessed me utterly.

"Because of this," he
said, "I'm concerned with what you're planning to do. I'm afraid for you,
Marc. I want to save what I've got no other words to call but your soul. If
that's to be saved, sooner or later, you'll have to reconcile yourself with
things as they are. And unless you do it in time, you'll lose your battle.
You'll die."

"No," I said. The need for
sleep was deep in me and I only wanted to end the talking. "I won't lose.
I can't afford to. Now I've got to get some rest. I'll talk to you after I wake
up, Porniarsk."

But when I finally woke up, Dragger
was standing over the cushion on which I lay.

"Marc," she said,
"your training as a temporal engineer is going to begin at once; and if you
can absorb that, you'll be taken out to where the line of battle runs with the
time storm forces."

I was suddenly fully awake and on my
feet. She was going on, still talking. Porniarsk was also to be given the
training. This was a bonus, because in no way had I dared to hope I could win
for him also what I had wanted for myself. But now he, too, would have the
chance. There was a comfort for me in the sight of his ugly, heavy bulldog
shape. He was like a talisman from home, a good omen.

Obsidian took us far across space
again. For the first time we came to another vehicle. It was like a raft the
size of a football field, with some sort of invisible, impalpable shield, like
a dome, over it to keep in an atmosphere that would preserve workable
temperatures and pressures for the massive engineering equipment it carried.
Barring the star scene that arched over us in every direction, it was like
nothing so much as being in the engine room of an incredibly monstrous
battleship.

All the way out to this star raft in
Obsidian's quarters, and for nearly two weeks of Earth time after we got there,
Porniarsk and I were force-fed with information from the teaching machines
Obsidian had talked about. It was an unnerving process. We were like blank
cassette tapes in a high speed duplicator. There was no physical sensation of
being packed with instruction; and in fact, the information itself did not
become usable until later, when contact with some of the actual engineering
work going on aboard the raft tapped it, the way a keg of wine might be tapped.
But at the same time, there was a psychic consciousness of mental lumber being
added to our mental warehouses that was curiously exhausting in its own way.
The sensation it produced was something like that which can come from weeks of
overwork and nervous strain, to the point where the mind seems almost
physically numb.

How Porniarsk reacted to it was
something I had no way of knowing, because we were kept separated. Emotionally
isolated by my own purpose, I was generally indifferent to what was being done
to me, physically or mentally; and when, in due time, the process of
information-feeding ended, I fell into a deep sleep that must have lasted well
beyond the six hours of my normal slumber period. When I woke, suddenly, all the
knowledge that had been pumped into me exploded from the passive state into the
active.

I had opened my eyes in the same
unstressed state of thoughtlessness that normally follows a return from the
mists of sleep. I was at peace, unthinking—and then, suddenly the reality of
the universe erupted all about me. I was all at once bodiless, blind, and lost,
falling through infinity, lifetimes removed from any anchor point of sanity or
security.

I tumbled; aware—too much aware—of
all things. Panic built in me like a deep-sea pressure against the steel
bulkhead of my reason, threatening to burst through and destroy me. There was
too much, all at once, crowding my consciousness. Suddenly I had too much
understanding, too much awareness...

I felt the pressure of it starting
to crack me apart; and then, abruptly, my long-held purpose came to my rescue.
Suddenly I was mobilized and fighting back, controlling the overwhelming
knowledge. I had not come this far in time and space and learning to
disintegrate now in an emotional spasm. The universe was no bigger than my own
mind. I had discovered that for myself, before this. I had touched the
universe, not once, but several times previously. It was no great frightening
and unknowable entity. It was part of me, as I was part of it. A thing did not
frighten itself. An arm did not panic at discovering it was attached to a body.

I surged back. I matched pressure
for pressure. I held.

But my mind was still far removed
from my body, back on the raft. It felt as if, at the same time, I was floating
motionless, and flying at great speed through infinity. My vantage point was
somewhere between the island universes, out in intergalactic space. In a sense,
it was as if I stood on the peak of a high mountain, from which I could see the
misty limits of all time and space. Almost, it seemed, I could see to the ends
of the universe; and for the first time, the total action of the time storm
activity became a single pattern in my mind.

"So, Marc," said a
voice—or a thought. It was both and neither, here where there were no bodies
and no near stars—"you survived."

It was Dragger speaking. I looked
for her, instinctively, and did not see her. But I knew she was there.

"Yes," I said. I was about
to tell her that I had never intended anything else, but a deeper honesty moved
me at the last second. "I had to."

"Evidently. Do you understand
the temporal engineering process, now?"

"I think so," I said; and
as I said it, the knowledge that had been pumped into me began to blend with
what I was now experiencing, and the whole effort they were making unrolled
into order and relationship, like a blueprint in my mind.

"This isn't the way I imagined
it," I said. "You're actually trying to stop the time storm, by
physical efforts, to reverse its physical effect on the universe."

"In a sense."

"In a sense? All right, say in
a sense. But it's still physical reversal. To put it crudely, in the sort of
terms you're most familiar with, the normal decay of entropy began to stop and
reverse itself when the universe stopped expanding. Then, when the farther
stars and the outer galaxies started falling back here and there, they set up
areas where entropy was increasing rather than decaying. Isn't that right,
Dragger? So it had to be these stresses, these conflicts between the two states
of entropy in specific areas, that spawned the nova implosions and triggered
the time faults, so that on one side of a sharp line, time was moving one way,
and on the other, a different way. So that's what made the time storm! But I assumed
you'd be attacking the storm directly to cure it."