Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

I thought of calling Dragger and immediately saw the pitfall on that path. Dragger had warned me that the only way, in the end, to prove I could work with the time storm was for me to work with it. My starting at shadows, if indeed that was what I was doing now and there was nothing really for me to worry about, might strike her as just the sort of sign she had been talking about, that I could not deal with the storm.

She might even be right in thinking that. She had given me no reason to think there was any dangerous situation building up here; in fact, she had deliberately reassured me this was not the case.

Maybe, I thought, the best thing for me was to put it out of my mind and follow Porniarsk back down to Earth’s surface. I had been paying little attention to time, but now I realized that at least as many hours had gone by as Dragger had said it would take before Obsidian was due back on Earth with Porniarsk’s body and mine. I should go to his station now, pick up my body and go back to my own clan.

I turned and went Mentally, it was only a single stride to Obsidian’s quarters, in the forest east of our community. Obsidian himself was not there when I arrived, nor was the body of Porniarsk, which meant that the avatar must already be back home. But my own body was waiting for me; and I sat up in it on the edge of the cushion on which it had been lying, feeling the strangeness of experiencing the weight and mass of it under the pull of gravity once more.

As I sat up, the illumination of the room increased around me, responding to my increased heart beat, temperature, and half a dozen other signals picked up by its technology from my now activated body. I stood up and moved to one of the two consoles that still stood in roughly the same places they had stood on our voyage out.

I knew how to use these now. I touched the keys of one of them and stepped from the room in Obsidian’s quarters to the spot on the landing area, outside the door of the summer palace, where Obsidian had always appeared.

The darkness about me when I arrived came as a small shock. Waking in the room at Obsidian’s, I had not realized I might have come home during the hours when that face of my planet was away from our sun. For a second after appearing there, I felt oddly as if I had not come home in the body, after all, but as if I was still only a point of view, hovering there, as I had hovered in space a few moments past, overlooking the whole galaxy and all the stars that were now shining down upon me.

The drawn shades on the windows of the summer palace were warm with light. Everyone there would be celebrating Porniarsk’s return and expecting me at any moment. I turned and looked away, down the slope to the town below; and under the bright new moon of midsummer, I saw the buildings down there had their windows also warmly lit against the night. I had been intending to turn to the door immediately, and go on into the palace; but now I found myself caught where I was.

The small, cool wind of the after sunset hours wrapped itself around me. I could hear it moving also in the distance, whistling faintly amongst the trees on the slope below. No night bird called; and the chill and the silence held me apart from the light and the talk that would be indoors. Out of the avalanche of printed words I had read during my mad period crept something more for me to remember. Not a quote this time, but a story—the French-Canadian legend of La Chasse Galerie. It was a myth about the spirits of the old voyagers who had died away from home, out on the fur trade routes, coming back in a large ghost canoe on New Year’s Eve for a brief visit with their living families and the women they had loved.

Standing alone in the darkness, strangely held from going inside, I felt myself like one of those returned ghosts. Inside the lighted windows there were the living; but no matter how much I might want to join them, it would be no use. Like the ghosts of the voyagers, I was no longer one of them, within. I had become something else, part of another sort of place and time. It seemed to me suddenly that the small cold breeze I felt and heard no longer wrapped around me, but blew straight through my bones, as it did through the tree limbs below me; and I thought that all my life I had been outside, looking at lighted windows, thinking how good it would be to be inside.

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.”