Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

“You did?”

“Yes, I did!” said Marie. “For God’s sake, Marc, the rest of us have to start doing things on our own, sooner or later, don’t we?”

I was finding myself slipping into a public argument with my people—not the best thing for a leader, if he wants to hold his position.

“Right! And I’ll tell you when. Meanwhile—” I went on before she, or any of the rest of them could say something more, “Bill and I brought back someone for you all to meet. Brace yourself— he’s not human. Bill, do you want to call him?”

“Porniarsk!” shouted Bill, turning to the mistwall.

Marie and the rest also turned toward the mistwall, with a swiftness that cheered me up somewhat. I had meant what I had said to Porniarsk about preparing them for the shock of meeting him. Now the thought in my mind was that a little shock might have a salutary effect on them. We were not an army of world-conquerers, after all. Half a dozen determined adults with decent rifles could wipe us out, or make slaves of us at a moment’s notice, if we took no precautions.

Porniarsk came clanking through the mistwall into view and stopped before us.

“I am Porniarsk Prime Three,” he announced, in exactly the same tones in which he had introduced himself to Bill and me. “The third avatar of Porniarsk, an expert in temporal science. I hope to work together with you so that we all may benefit the universe.”

“Yes,” said Bill dryly. “Only, of course we’ve a little more interest in helping ourselves first.”

Porniarsk swiveled his heavy head to look at Bill.

“It is the same thing,” Porniarsk said.

“Is it?” said Bill.

Porniarsk creaked off a nod.

“What you’ve observed as local phenomena,” he said, “are essentially micro-echoes of the larger disturbance, which began roughly half a billion years ago, according to your original time pattern.”

“Oh?” said Bill. He was trying to be indifferent, but I could catch the ring of interest in his voice that he was trying to hide. “Well, just as long as it can be fixed.”

“It cannot be fixed,” said Porniarsk. “The knowledge is not available to fix it.”

“It isn’t?” I said. “Then what’s all this about helping the universe?”

“The whole problem is beyond my time pattern and any other time pattern I know,” said Porniarsk. “Yet, our responsibility remains. Though we cannot solve, we can attack the problem, each of us like the ants of which you know, trying to level a mountain such as you are familiar with. With each micro-echo, each infinitesimal node attacked, we approach a solution, even if it is not for us to reach it.”

“Wait a minute—” began Tek.

He had not liked my blowup over their going into the house without my orders, even though he had said nothing. And now, the note of potential rebellion was clear in his voice.

“Hold it!” I said, hastily. “Let me get to the bottom of this first. Porniarsk, just how far does the whole problem extend—this problem of which our troubles here are a micro-echo?”

“I thought,” said Porniarsk, “I had made clear the answer to that question. The temporal maladjustments are symptoms of the destruction of an entropic balance which has become omnipresent. The chaos in temporal patterns is universal.”

None of us said anything. Porniarsk stood waiting for a moment and then realized he had not yet reached our basic levels of understanding.

“More simply put,” he said, “all time and space are affected. The universe has been fragmented from one order into a wild pattern of smaller orders, each with its own direction and rate of creation or decay. We can’t cure that situation, but we can work against it. We must work against it; otherwise, the process will continue and the fragmentation will increase, tending toward smaller and smaller orders, until each individual particle becomes a universe unto itself.”

... And that’s all of what he said then that I remember, because about at that point my mind seemed to explode with what it had just discovered—go into overdrive with the possibilities developing from that—on a scale that made any past mental work I had ever done seem like kindergarten-level playtime, by comparison. At last, my hungry rat’s teeth had found something they could tear into.

They tell me that, after a while, I came to and gave everybody, including Porniarsk, orders to pack up and move on; and I kept the avatar and all of us moving steadily for the better part of the next three weeks. Just moving, not stopping to investigate what was beyond the mistwall, or in any of the buildings or communities we passed. Pushing forward, as if I was on a trek to some far distant land of great promise.

Moments of that trek, I dimly remember. But only moments. I was too full of the end result of all the speculations I had been making about the time storm—now paying off all at once. I did have flashes of awareness of what I was doing, and of what was going on around me. But it was all background, unimportant scenery, for the real place I was in and the real thing I was doing, which was The Dream.

In The Dream I was the equivalent of a spider. I say “the equivalent of,” because I was still myself; I was just operating like a spider. If that doesn’t make sense, I’m sorry, but it’s the best I can do by way of explanation. As description, it hardly makes sense to me either; but I’ve never found another way to describe what that particular brain-hurricane was like.

In The Dream, then, I was spider-like; and I was clambering furiously and endlessly about a confusion of strands that stretched from one end of infinity to the other. The strands had a pattern, though it would have taken someone infinite in size to stand back enough to perceive it as a whole. Still, in a way I can’t describe, I was aware of that pattern. My work was with it; and that work filled me with such a wild, terrible and singing joy that it was only a hairline away from being an agony. The joy of working with the pattern, of handling it, sent me scrambling inconceivable distances, at unimaginable speeds, across the strands that filled the universe, with every ounce of strength, every brain cell engaged in what I was doing, every nerve stretched to the breaking-point. It was a berserk explosion of energy that did not care if it destroyed its source, that was myself, as long as things were done to the pattern that needed doing; and somehow this was all associated with my memories of my first determination to put my brand on the world about me; so that the energy sprang from deep sources within me.

Actually, what I was experiencing was beyond ordinary description. The pattern was nameless. My work with it was outside definitions. But at the same time, I knew inside me that it was the most important work that ever had been and ever would be. It carried an adrenalin-like drunkenness that was far beyond any familiar self-intoxication. People talk, or used to talk, about drug highs. This high was not a matter of chemistry but of physics. Every molecule of my body was charged and set vibrating in resonance with the pattern and the work I was doing upon it.

Meanwhile, I continued, with some detached part of my consciousness, to lead and direct my small band of pilgrims; effectively enough, at least, so that they did not depose me as a madman and set up some new leader in my place. Not—as I found out later—that they did not all notice a difference in me and individually react to, or use, that difference to their own purposes. When I returned wholly to myself, I found that a number of things were changed.

It may have been sheer accident that I was able to return at all, but I don’t think so. I think I was ready to back off from the pattern, at least for a while; and what triggered my return was only a coincidence, or the first summons able to reach over the long distance to that part of me that was out there on the web-strands of the universe.