Gordon R. Dickson (63 page)

Once, I might have made it to there.
God knows I had tried, with my mother, with Swannee... but now it was too late;
and that was no one's fault. It was not even my fault, in a sense. Because at
each fork in the road along the way, I had made the best choice I knew to make;
and all those choices had led me here. If here was outside forever, still,
getting here had led me to many good things, beginning with Ellen and the crazy
cat and continuing to this same moment, which was also, in its own way, good.
For if I was lonely out here in the dark, looking at the lighted shades of the
windows and knowing I could not be behind them, I was less lonely knowing who
and what were there, and that their lives, which were part of me now, could be
warm and bright.

Thinking this, I felt some of the
warmth come out and enter me, after all. I remembered that I had discovered
before this, that there was no real separateness. I was all things and all
things were me... and, with that bit of remembering, I began to move again into
touch with the universe. I flowed out to be part of the breeze around me, the
ground under me and the trees beyond me, part of all the houses below with
their lights and separate lives. I felt the summer palace behind me and reached
into it to touch everyone there. There was no light, but the gold came into
everything again. I saw them all behind the walls at my back, the
eternally-sleeping Sunday, Doc, Bill, Porniarsk and Ellen. I saw Ellen and I
touched her; and she was the key to all the rest between the walls of infinity
and all infinities beyond those walls. I had a larger picture of this universe
and all others now. I went out and out....

"Marc!"

I turned to vanish, to step back
into Obsidian's quarters; and even as I turned, I knew it was already too late.
I came all the way around to face the summer palace and saw, darker shadow within
shadow, Ellen there.

"Ellen," I said, "how
did you know I was here?"

She came toward me.

"I know where you are,"
she said, stopping in front of me. I could barely make out her face. "I
always know where you are. Porniarsk was back, and when you didn't come in, you
had to be here."

"Go back inside," I said.
My voice was a little hoarse. "Go back in. I'll be along in a
moment."

"No you won't," she said.
"You were going to leave and not come in."

I said nothing.

"Why, Marc?"

Still, I could not answer. Because
suddenly, I knew why. What had been niggling at me all the time I had been
studying the force lines now suddenly rearranged itself from a possibility to a
certainty, from a suspicion to a knowledge, as the absolute vision of my unity
with the universes took hold.

I had been turning away because I
knew I would not be coming back.

"Why?"

I realized, then, that she was not
asking me why I had been leaving. She already knew it was because I would not
be back. She was asking me why I would go to something from which I would never
return.

"I have to," I said.

She put her arms around me. She was
very strong, but we both knew she could not hold me there. The whole damn
universe was pulling me in the other direction. There always was Doc for her, I
thought bleakly, looking down at her. I had seen the way he felt about her. But
I was wiser now than I had been; and I knew better than to mention that to her
now.

"I do love you, Ellen," I
said.

"I know you do," she said,
still holding me. "I know you do. And you don't have to go."

"I do," I said. "It's
the time storm."

"Let somebody else do it."

"There isn't anyone else."

"That's because you've made it
so there isn't."

"Ellen, listen." I felt
terribly helpless. "The whole universe is going to blow wide open unless I
do something."

"When?"

"When?" I echoed.

"I said, when? Ten years from
now? Ten months? Two weeks? Two days? If it's two days, take the two days-the
first two, real days of your life—stay here and let it blow."

"I can't do that."

"Can't?" she said. She let
go and stepped back from me. "No, that's right. You can't."

"Ellen..." I said. I
stepped toward her; but she moved back again, out of reach.

"No," she said. "You
go now. It's all right."

"It isn't all right," I
said.

"It's all right," she
repeated. "You go."

I stood there for a second more. But
there was no way I could reach her, and I had no more words to say that would
do any good. She already knew I yearned to stay. She knew I wouldn't. What was
there to tell her beyond that?

I went. It was like tearing myself
down the middle and leaving the larger half behind.

I stepped back into Obsidian's
quarters and turned to the console to put in a call to Dragger. There was a
little delay, and then Dragger's voice spoke to me out of the air of the softly
lit room, with its cushions and its nighttime trees all around.

"Forgive me, but I'm working
now and can't be disturbed. Leave word if you want me to call you back."

It was a canned message.

"This is Marc," I said.
"Call me as soon as you get this message. It's critical."

I sat down on the cushion I had
gotten up from earlier and sent my mind back out among the stars.

The forces of the time storm were
still out there, waiting for me. Now that I came back to them with the
additional insight of my momentary contact with the universe, outside the
summer palace, what I had only suspected before showed as not only certain but
unavoidably obvious. But whether I could convince Dragger and the other
engineers of its obviousness was by no means certain. My conviction rested on
my own way of interpreting the forces, which was different from theirs.

The time storm was too much in their
blood and bones for them to hate it and love it the way that I did. For I did,
I realized now, both hate and love it. I hated it for what it had done, for the
millions of lives it had swept out of existence. Or perhaps they were all still
in existence somewhere else—locked up in little dead end universes—my wife,
Swannee; and all those Ellen had known; Marie's husband; Samuelson's family;
and the countless others erased by moving mistwalls, not only on Earth but all
through the universe. But I loved it, even as I hated it, for being my
opponent, for giving me an enemy to grow strong in fighting.

So it was because of both the love
and hate that I could see where it was trending now; and it was because they
saw it only as a technological problem that I feared the temporal engineers
like Dragger would not. I traced the lines of my suspicion again now, through
the network of forces, out beyond my sector, out beyond the galaxy and the
influence of the one lens I had seen, until I had checked it out against the
storm across all the viewable universe. What I feared was there, all right. I
could trace the paths of my suspicions, I could see the connections to my own
satisfaction, but I could not turn up any solid evidence to present to the
engineers.

I was still searching for something
to prove what I believed when Dragger called me back.

"Marc?" her voice sounded
in my mind. "You had something critical to talk to me about?"

"The time storm's going to get
out of hand," I said. "It's going to get out of hand right here in
our own galaxy, and possibly in a number of others throughout the universe, at
the same time. The pattern's already evolving out of the patterns of the last
thousand years. You've already got evidence of it. You told me there'd be
increased activity here in nine months or so, my local time. That isn't just
going to be increased activity. It's going to be activity that's quadrupled,
sextupled, a hundred or a thousand times increased, all at once."

"What makes you say so,
Marc?"

"The character of the patterns
I see evolving."

There was a little silence.

"Marc, can you describe what
you mean by 'character'?"

"The color, the feel, the
implications of the patterns in the way they form and change."

There was another silence.

"None of these words you
mention have any precise meaning for me, Marc," she said. "Can you
describe what you're talking about in hard concepts? Failing that, can you give
me the concepts you're talking about in more than one mode?"

"No," I said,
"because these verbal symbols of your language only approximate my
personal meanings. I'm translating verbal symbols from my own language. Symbols
that have special value derived out of my experience, my experience with all
sorts of things outside your experience, my experience with buying and selling
shares of stock in a market, with painting pictures in varied colors, with
understanding what is written and carved in the name of art, with thousands of
things that move intelligent and nonintelligent life, and make it the way it
is."

"I think I understand,"
Dragger said. "But to convince me you're right about this coming emergency
you're talking about, you'll need to give me evidence in terms and symbols I
can value and weigh exactly as you do. The only symbols like that are in my
language, which you now also know."

"I can't explain things your
language hasn't any symbols for."

"Then you're saying that you
can't convince me of what you guess is going to happen,"

"Not guess.
Know."

"If you know, show me how you
know."

There was an emptiness of
desperation in me. I had known it would be like this, but I had hoped anyway.
Somehow, I had hoped, the gap would be bridged between our two minds.

"Dragger, don't you remember
how I explained to you how I'd learned about the time storm by a different
route than the rest of you? That route gave me a view of it you others don't
have; and that view gives me insights, knowledge, you don't have. Don't you
remember how I convinced you I had a right to be tested? And didn't I pass
those tests?"

"But have you actually passed
the last part of that test, now?" Dragger said. "Or are you finding
some incapability in yourself in actual practice, an incapability which you hide
from yourself by imagining there's an emergency condition building, that none
of the rest of us can see and you can't substantiate?"

"Dragger," I said. "I
know
this is going to happen!"

"I believe you think you know.
I don't yet believe you're correct."

"Will you check?"

"Of course. But if I understand
you, my checking isn't likely to turn up any evidence that agrees with
you."

"Check anyway."

"I've said I will. Call me
again if you find something more to prove what you say."

"I will."

She said no more. She had gone then.
I said no more, either, merely hung there, a point of nothingness in open
space. The conclusion was the conclusion I'd feared. I was alone, as I had
always been, as I still must be.

Dragger would check, but find
nothing to convince her I was right. It was up to me either to find something
she could understand, or stop the time storm myself.

It was the latter that I'd come to,
eventually—I might as well face that now. It had been inevitable from the
first, that the time storm and I should come to grips at last, alone, like
this. I had come this far forward in time to find the tools to fight it and the
allies to help me. I had not found the allies after all; but I had found some
tools. Thanks to Dragger and the others, I knew that the storm could be
affected by massive use of energy. Thanks to myself, I now knew that all
things, all life, all time, were part of a piece; and if I could just reach out
in the right way, I could become part of that piece and understand any other
part as if it was part of me.

The thought was calming. Now that
there was no hope of outside help, the solitary and abandoned feeling began
losing its edge in me. It was ironic that I had come this far forward to find
help who could handle a time storm I believed was too big for me to handle
alone, only to discover that, while the help was here, it would not aid me. But
now the irony no longer mattered. All that did was that I was back at ground
zero, alone; and there was no need to waste any more effort on false hopes.

If anything was to be done, I would
have to do it, by myself; and if nothing could be done, nothing could be done.

I felt more at peace than I could
have dreamed I would, at this point. The unity with the universe came on me
without my reaching for it, and I hung bodilessly in the midst of the galaxy
that had produced my race and myself, sensing and touching all things in it. I
had thought of failure as inconceivable. Nothing was inconceivable. Ellen had
said to let the universe blow and take what time remained for myself, even if
it was only a couple of days. It would be more than a couple of days, of
course. It would be months, at least; and each day of that could be a lifetime
if I lived it touching everything around me.