Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

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.