Gordon R. Dickson (64 page)

Ellen had been right in her own way,
and I should have told her so. I thought of going back now and saying it—and
then I realized that she was reaching for me.

"Ellen?" I said; as I
might have spoken to Dragger.

No words came back. She could not
speak to me in symbols, because she did not have access to the technological
equipment of the engineers. But across the touch between us, I could feel her
thought, even though it was not in words.

I shouldn't have let you go like
that,
she was
telling me.

"It's all right," I told
her. "I'll come back."

No,
she told me,
you mustn't come
back. Not as long as you still think you can do something and want to do it. I
want you to do what you want to do. I just didn't want to cut you off; I didn't
want to be separated from you.

"You don't have to be," I
said. "You never have to be separated from anything as long as you can
really hold it in your mind. I didn't know that before; but I know it
now."

A sudden discovery moved in me.

"Ellen," I said,
"where are all the short words, and the short speeches? You're thinking
just the way everybody talks."

It just always came out the other
way,
she answered.
But I talked to you like this, in my head, from the very beginning, from the
first day you picked me up.

"I should have known," I
said. "Anyway, I know now. Ellen, I'm coming home."

No,
she told me.
You mustn't unless
you're sure you don't want to stay at all. Are you sure?

We no longer talked in a place where
there were any rooms to hide what I did not want her to know.

"No," I said. "You're
right. There may not be anything at all I can do, but I want to try. I've got
to try."

Then try
, she said.
It's whatever you
want, because I'm with you now. Aren't I with you?

"Oh, you are," I said. And
I reached, forgetting how I was bodiless, to hold her.

With that she came to me, like a
wraith but real, across the light-years of space from our little planet, to
where I now floated. And with her came another wraith, a bounding, furry shape
that bounced against me and sandpapered my face and hands with its rough tongue
and crowded between our legs as we clung together.

"Sunday!" I said.

Of course,
Ellen told me,
he was always
there if only you'd reached for him.

With them both there, with the three
of us—we three ghosts-together once more, my heart broke apart with happiness
and out of the broken pieces rose a strength that spread and towered in me like
a genie let loose from a bottle when the Solomon's seal is snapped. There was
no universe or combination of universes that I was not now ready to attack, to
save what I now held; and I reached to the ends of all time and all spaces.
So-at last—by the one route I had never dreamed existed, understanding dawned
on me.

"I should have realized
it," I said to Ellen. "It's one and the same thing, the time storm
and what's always been inside me, what's always been inside all of us."

38

"What's been inside you?"
Ellen echoed. She was still not speaking to me by the physical route Dragger
had used; but what she said was now so clear to me that my mind supplied her
voice as if both it and my ears were physically present.

"The storm," I said,
"the struggle. The fight to understand, and be understood by everyone else
in the face of the equally strong need to be yourself and yourself only, that
unique and completely free identity that never was before this moment in time
and will never be again, once you're gone. 'I've got to do that, say that' the
identity says, 'otherwise I can't grow, I can't make.' 'No, you can't do that,'
say the other identities outside your skull, all also struggling to grow and be
free. 'If you do that, I won't understand why. I'll take it as a threat. I'll
isolate you; or I'll fight you.' So, before each action, along the road to each
goal, there are all the interior battles to find a way of compromising what you
want, and need to do, with what others will accept your doing. The storm
within. Everyone has it; and the time storm without is its analogy."

"I don't see that," said
Ellen. "Why?"

"Because both storms are the
result of conflict between two things that ought to be working together. Like a
couple of millstones, badly adjusted, chewing each other up, throwing off stone
chips and sparks instead of joining to mill the grain between them."

"But even so," said Ellen,
"why's that important, here and now, and with you, particularly?"

"Because I never knew how to
quit, to give up," I said. "When I ran into the inner storm I
couldn't stop trying to conquer it; but because it was inside me, because it
was subconscious, instead of conscious, I couldn't get at it. So I made everything
else a surrogate for it—the stock market, the business, my heart attack... and
at last, the time storm."

"Even so, what good could it do
to fight other things?"

"It could teach me how to
fight. It could help me discover and forge weapons to fight my inner storm
with. And it did! By God, it did! I've found the answer to the inner
storm."

"Not fighting," said
Ellen, very positively.

"All right. That—yes. But
there's more to it than just not fighting. The full answer's in the unity of
everything. Reaching out and becoming part of everyone and everything else. It
was you and Sunday who first broke me in to being a part of someone else
without struggle. You were both completely dependent on me, so it never
occurred to me that I had to adjust myself to suit you."

"There was something besides
that," said Ellen. "We cared for you."

"I know," I said. "I
know. I took that for granted too. I'm sorry, I didn't know any better than to
take it for granted, then. I didn't begin to know any better until Sunday was
gone and I suddenly found the big hole in myself where he'd been. I didn't
realize then why it hit me as hard as it did; but actually, something of myself
had just become suddenly dead. If Sunday hadn't been killed, just then—"

I broke off, looking instinctively
for her face before I remembered she was not there in the body to be seen.

"Would you have gone off with
Tek, then, if Sunday hadn't been killed?"

"I don't know," she said.
"If I had, though, I think I'd have come back. I never loved Tek. But I
couldn't make you hear me or see me."

"I remember-" The wraith
of Sunday jumped up to hug my bodiless spirit with nonexistent forepaws and
tried to lick my face that was not there. "It's all right, Sunday. Down,
cat! I'm not feeling bad now; I was just remembering something...

"But the time storm's still
there. You mean you can give up on it, now?" Ellen asked.

"I think I could—now."

"But you don't really want
to."

"No," I said. "The
truth is, no. If I give up, nothing'll be done; and that means the end, for all
of us."

"You're sure it does?"

"Yes. There's been a situation
building up for a few thousand years now, ever since the temporal engineers
started working with the storm. They've been trying to cure an imbalance
between energies in this universe by importing more energy from another
universe, to shore up the weaker of the two energies here. It's worked for a
while, but it's also been creating the potential of a bigger imbalance if the
scale should suddenly tip the other way, and the weak side become the strong
one, with all that extra, imported energy added to its natural advantage. And I
think it's about to tip-in this universe at least—in about nine months."

"The engineers don't know
this?" Ellen asked. "You're sure about that?"

"They know it, but they don't
realize how great the reaction can be."

"In any case, what can you do
by yourself?"

"I don't know. I need to think.
Quiet, cat. Leave me alone for a few minutes."

Sunday stilled. His ghost body lay
down with crossed paws, on nothingness, and resigned itself to patience. I
still held my vision of unity with the universe, that had come on me after I
had finally faced the fact that there was no hope from Dragger or her
colleagues. I had found what I had stumbled toward and struggled for all this
time; and now I wanted to live, as even more I wanted Ellen, Sunday, and my
universe with everyone in it to live. It went against reason that I could have
come this long journey through life and time without picking up the skill and
knowledge to do something about the situation. Somewhere, there had to be a
chance; and if there was a chance, my blessing/curse of being unable to turn
away from an unsolved problem should keep my mind hunting until I found it.

"If I'm right about the
parallel...." I began at last, slowly.

"What parallel?" said
Ellen.

"The parallel about the time
storm being an analogy of the inner storm. If I'm right about that, and I had
to get outside myself to find the key to my inner storm, then...."

Ellen said nothing.

"Then," I went on, after a
moment, "the answer to the time storm has to be outside too. Outside the
universe—outside
this
universe. If I go outside this universe, I ought
to be able to see it."

"But how can you do that?"
asked Ellen.

I did not say anything.

"There's no way you can do that,
is there?"

"Yes," I said, slowly,
"there is. There's the lens."

"What lens?"

I told her.

"Marc!" said Ellen.
"Are you crazy?"

"It's the only way to get
outside."

"But it's the center of a
star—and worse than that. You'd be burned up before you got into the
lens."

"I'm not material at the
moment, remember. It's my mind only that'd be going."

"But even if you could go
through this lens without being destroyed, there's the problem of getting back.
How could you do that?"

"I don't know."

"Why don't you check the idea
out, first, with the temporal engineers?"

"They might want to stop me;
and maybe they could," I said. "They can't help me, Ellen. The time
storm's too much inside all of them, just like my inner storm was too much
inside me. I'm the only one who can do anything; and the only thing I can think
of to do is go through the lens."

She said nothing for a moment. The
wraith of Sunday lay waiting, trusting, leaving it all up to me.

"If you don't, we all
die?"

"I believe so."

She sighed.

"Then you do have to go. There
actually is no choice," she said. "All right. I'm going along."

"I don't think you can," I
said. "Where are you? Back down in the summer palace asleep?"

"I'm in my own bedroom at the
summer palace," said Ellen, "lying on the bed. But I don't think I'm
asleep."

"You're there, though. I'm
here. Tell me, can you feel the downdraft?"

"The what?"

I explained what it was. She was
quiet for a little while after I finished. Finally, she spoke.

"No," she said.

"I thought so," I said.
"I'm probably reaching down to you, as much as you're reaching up to me.
You see, I really am out here in a sense. I'm an energy pattern projected by
the engineering devices of the temporal engineers. I can go from place to place
at faster than light speeds only because I can turn off my projection in one
spot and turn it on at another."

"If you're a pattern of energy,
then the energy coming through the lens
can
destroy you! Or at least,
change you. Energy
is
material."

"Maybe. I've got to try it,
anyway."

"There has to be some way I can
go with you!"

"I don't think so; and that's
good. Because then I couldn't stop you from coming; and there's no sense in
both of us... going."

"Let's try and find a way. Wait
a bit. You said we had nine months."

"Nine months before the axe falls;
but it may be already too late to stop its swing. I can't wait. I've got to go,
now."

"Wait just a little bit. Come
back home for a couple of days, or even one, so we can talk it over
first."

"If I did that, I might not go
after all. Particularly not now, with the two of you around. Ellen, I've got to
go. I've got to go now!"

We flowed together, we ghosts. She
held me. Sunday held me. I held them.

"All right, go then," she
said at last. "Go now."

"Goodby," I said. "I
love you. I love you both. I'll be back."

"You'll be back," said
Ellen.