Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

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.

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.”

“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.”