Gordon R. Dickson (65 page)

I pulled away from them and shut
them out of my mind. I was alone among the stars; and, by reaching out for it,
I could feel the funnel of energy and also the downdraft—weak, as Dragger had
said, way out here, but unceasing, relentless.

I let the pull of the downdraft fill
my mind. I let myself go with it. At first there was nothing; it was like
floating on a lake. Then I noticed a slight movement, a drifting, and I became
aware of the fact that I was dropping down below the galactic plane. I revolved
and saw the direction of my movement, toward the Lesser Magellanic Cloud and a
darkness there enclosing a young, blue-white giant star, a darkness I was still
too far off to distinguish.

I let myself drift....

The plane of the galaxy receded
above me. I was in intergalactic space. There was nothing to measure the speed
of my movement now, but I sensed that it was increasing. I was falling faster
and faster, down the funnel of extra-universal energy, reaching from the lens
at S Doradus to our galaxy.

I fell a hundred and forty thousand
light-years; and time became completely arbitrary. It may have been minutes,
and it may have been months, that I fell with steadily increasing velocity
until I must have been travelling faster than any pulsar measured in my early,
original time. I think it was probably minutes rather than months, or at least
hours rather than months, because I could feel that my acceleration was not
merely steady, but steadily increasing all that time. I had no ordinary way to
measure this—I only knew it, with some measuring back part of my mind.

It became plain to me, finally, that
I would not see the lens before passing through it. By the time I would be
close enough to make out the dark circle of the engine among the lights of the
Lesser Magellanic Cloud, I would be only a fractionless fraction of a second
from entering the tachyonic universe, too small a moment of time for
perception. I relaxed, letting myself go....

And it happened.

There was a shock that felt as if
the subatomic particles of the energy pattern that was my identity were being
torn apart and spread through endless spaces. Following that,
incomprehensibility.

I was afloat in darkness, streaked
by lines of light that shot past me on every side almost too fast to see. Other
than these, there was nothing. But the darkness had a value and the lights had
a value—even if I could not read them. Feeling stricken and dismembered, I
floated helplessly, watching the shooting lights.

I had no power of movement. I had no
voice. I could find no means by which I might measure the time, the space, or
anything else about me. If I had indeed come into the tachyon universe, I had
arrived completely helpless to learn what I needed to know, and helpless to
take the knowledge back with me. Look about as best I might, I could see
nothing left to me but to give up; and the only reason I did not do so
immediately was because I was not sure if I was even able to do that.

I floated; and gradually, like a
shocked heart starting to beat again, my ancient weird woke again in me. I
could not give up, because even here, I was still lacking the reverse gear I
had been born without. Alive, dead, or in living pieces less than electron
size, I was still committed to chewing at any cage that held me until I could
gnaw a way out.

But what way was there? Where do you
begin when there is no starting point on which to stand? A journey of a
thousand miles may begin with a single step; but where to begin—if you are not
standing still, but skating across eternity in total darkness, with meteor-like
lights flashing all around you? I hunted through myself for something to hang
to, and found nothing. Then Ellen came to my rescue.

"Remember?" she said.
"When you first found me, I was lost like that; and I found a way
back."

She was not speaking out loud to me.
She was not even talking in my mind, as she had as I hung in space, normal
space, just before I had come here. It was the Ellen which had become a part of
me, speaking to me out of a corner of myself, as Sunday had come bounding back
from death to hug me with nonexistent paws, out of a corner of myself where he
had been all this time, without my realizing.

"If I did it, you can do
it," Ellen-that-was-me said. "Do it the way I did it before. Take what
there is, and build from there."

She was right, of course; and I drew
strength from her. If she had been able to do it once, she was able to do it
again. Therefore, I could do it, as long as she was part of me. I drew
certainty from her and looked about once more at what I had.

I had the darkness and the lights.
The lights were totally incomprehensible; but with Ellen's certainty that I
could build with them, I started to watch them. They were too momentary to form
patterns... or were they?

I floated, watching; and the
watching became a studying.

All that underwent change fell into
patterns of alteration, eventually. It was a long time resolving to my
understanding, but finally, I began to see the elements of patterns in the
streaking lights. They were not entirely random after all.

If they had patterns, they were part
of a larger identity in which such patterns could be held, a larger identity
which was the universe of their context—whether that universe was as small as
an atom of an atom, or larger than all other universes put together. If this
was so, then there was a relationship between the universe that held them and
the patterns that it held.

What I had learned in my own
universe could be the key here, also. Incomprehensible as this place was, the unity
of every part of it with the whole, the identity of every part of it with the
whole, might be certain here, as it had been where I came from. If this was so,
I had to be a part of this universe and it had to be a part of me, simply
because I was now in it. Therefore, its patterns had to be part of me also, as
understandable as my own physical speech in action when I was back in my old
body, because a part of the whole cannot be either strange or alien to the
whole, as I had found.

"Now you see," said Ellen-that-was-me.
"And, since you see, all you have to do now is reach out and touch."

She was right again. There was no
cardinal here, perched on a bird feeder; and the golden light was lost and left
behind in another infinity. But she was still right; there was nothing to stop
me from reaching out and trying to touch, to connect with, that of which I was
now a part.

I reached. I felt outwards for my
identity with this place surrounding me, just as I had felt in my home
universe. Identity was slow coming; but in the end, it turned out to be only
one step more than I had needed to make in reaching out for identity with
Obsidian and his peers.

I touched something. It was
something, or some things, with an ability to respond. After that, it was only
a matter of mastering the necessary patterns to communicate with them; and in
this they met me halfway. Apparently—I say apparently, because the situation
does not translate into words easily if at all—the distinction between living
matter and nonliving matter was not the sharp division existing in our own
universe. Instead, the important division was between those, or that, which had
finite lifetimes and those who, or that which, did not; and the lights I had
been watching were each a single lifetime, lighting up from the apparently
brief moment of its birth until the moment of extinguishment at its death.

But what seemed so brief was not
necessarily so. Looked at from another viewpoint, what seemed to me a momentary
lifetime could have existed the equivalent of billions of years in our
universe. Also, to live here was to communicate; so that, in the end, I myself
lived to communicate and communicated by living. It was a long moment for me,
because I had a large job in making them understand what I wanted them to know
about us and our situation.

But the time came when I got
through; and after that, no more time was needed. I was left, with my mission
accomplished, but myself isolated.

The only way I had of telling that I
had gotten the message to them was by the change I could observe in their
patterns. For, of course, there was no way they could speak directly to me any
more than I had been able to speak to them. Actually, the most I had been able
to do had been to signal crudely in their direction; like someone on a hilltop
waving flags to people in a valley far below, to direct their attention to a
distant danger. It was not just the mechanism of communication that was lacking
between them and me—it was the fact that not merely our thinking processes, but
our very existences, were too different.

So, there I was successful, but
stranded. I had no conception of what might now be left to me; for I had no
conception of what I might be, here, in this different universe. It was
possible that, here, I had an incredibly long life before me; a slow, almost
imperceptible decay into extinction like that of some radioactive element with
a half-life measured in millions of years. It might be that I was only seconds
from extinction, but that the vastly different perception of time would make
this into a practical eternity. It might be that I was truly immortal here and
would exist forever, observing and apart from a universe filled with a life for
which "alien" was an insignificant, inadequate word, but unable to
end.

Curiously, none of these prospects
bothered me. I had done what I had set out to do and, in the larger measure, I
was content. The only sadness left in me was because I could not tell my own
people that the message had been carried, the battle won. Battles, I ought to say;
because in coming here, in managing to get my message through to the life of
this place, I had finally got outside myself, finally seen myself in full
reflection, and come to the inner understanding I had been trying to find all
along.

My hunt had been nothing more than
the human search for love. Only I had been afraid of finding it even while I
was pursuing it. So I had made sure to create masks for all those I
encountered, so that if I became attached to any of them, my attachment would
be to the mask and not to the real being behind it. That way, if the person
betrayed me, it did not matter, because I had never really known them anyway.
There was no way the living person behind the mask could sink emotional hooks
into my soul because it was to the mask I had committed myself. In retrospect,
I had put a mask on my mother and sister. I had put masks on Swannee and Marie
and Paula. Those whom I feared I might love I gave unlovable masks. Only to
those I was sure were unable to love me did I give masks that I could love.

It was a fail-safe system. It was
only when I forgot to use it that I got tripped up. The crazy cat and the idiot
girl-who would have suspected in the beginning that either of them would be
able to reach through and tear me up inside? True, I had wakened to the danger
in the girl and tried to put a mask on her, but by that time, it was too late.
Meanwhile, the crazy cat had already got to me. When he was killed, for the
first time in years, I hurt; and, hurting, I came back to life, whether I
wanted to or not.

Now I was grateful for that return
to life, because what I had been doing was wrong. It was against instinct and
could only have led me nowhere finally, but to a desiccated hell of sheer
loneliness that was at the opposite end of the spectrum from the contented
isolation in which I now hung. This way I was alive. The other way, I would
have been dead. The golden light had been first to give me the answer; but
then, I had still struggled against it.

39

I was in my own bedroom of the summer
palace. For a moment, the terrible thought came that the whole thing had only
been some sort of dream. But then, I knew better.

I looked around and saw Ellen,
standing beside my bed with Porniarsk and Dragger.

"Hello," I said to Ellen,
and my own physical voice echoed strangely in my ears. "I'm back."

"Yes," she answered.

It was the sort of answer I would
have expected from her. I lay there, savoring the familiar goodness of it,
feeling warm and comfortable, while the three of them stood watching me with a
careful concern, as if I were some sort of carefully brooded egg which was
about to hatch and which might produce something strange. I thought over half a
dozen things to say; decided against all of them and simply held out my arms to
Ellen, who came and hugged me.

"How did I get back here?"
I asked, finally, when she let me go. Outside of feeling as weak as dishwater,
I seemed to be fine.

"We brought your body here
right away," said Dragger, speaking twentieth century English now, as well
as Obsidian ever had. "Just as soon as we caught you. We were barely in
time to keep your identity from going through the lens."

I stared at her.

"No, you weren't," I said.

At that, Dragger looked embarrassed,
like someone caught in a lie, which surprised me. I would not have thought it
possible for her to show that particular reaction; and I would not have
expected myself to be able to interpret it, if she had. But there was no doubt
about what I was seeing now.