Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

High up, another single speck swam against the cloudless sky. A hawk? My vision went out to the horizon and beyond. Slowly, I became conscious of a rhythm that was the beating of my own heart and at the same time the breathing of the world. Once again, the golden light began to grow around me and, once more, I felt myself touching all things in the earth, sky, and water, from pole to pole. I was touching all things, and I reached out to touch Obsidian.

I looked at him without moving my eyes and saw him in full dimension for the first time. For he was a part of the universe, as all these other things were a part of it; and that was what was at the core of his community’s difference from ours. They were aware of the universe of which they were a part, while we thought of ourselves as disparate and isolated from it. That was why Obsidian’s identity was unchangeable and instantly recognized by his fellows. It was because the dimensions of that identity were measured by the universe surrounding him, in which he was embedded, and of which he was a working part. All at once the gestalt formed, and I understood without words, without symbols, the different, fixed place he and all other thinking minds of his period had in this, their own time and place.

I had produced the golden light again and it had helped me find what I had been seeking. I sat, just feeling it for a moment-then let it go. The light faded, I came back into my ordinary body and smiled at Obsidian.

But he did not smile back. He had stopped talking, and he was staring at me with a startled expression.

“Obsidian—” I began, about to tell him what I now understood.

He vanished.

Once again, he did not come back for a while. He was missing all the rest of that day and through the next two days. Under the conditions applying up until five minutes before he left, I would have worried that I had somehow damaged the relationship building between the two of us, and between our people and his interstellar community. Following the moment of light and my sudden access to understanding, I was sure this was not the case; and I tried to reassure the other members of our group who were inclined to worry about his nonappearance.

“It’s not explainable in our words,” I told Ellen, Bill, Doc, Porniarsk and about five others of the community who had been emerging as leaders during the past few weeks. We were all sitting around the fireplace in the library on the second evening, with the windows open to the courtyard and the night sky outside. “But I’m sure I didn’t step on his toes in any way. I can’t tell you how I know it, but I know it.”

“Why did he take off, then?” Bill asked. “Can’t you give us some idea, Marc?”

“He recognized what I was doing—this universe association trick I’ve told you about. I’ve explained that the best I can, and I won’t try to explain it any more now. You’ll have to learn how to do it yourselves if you really want to understand.”

“You’d better start giving us lessons, then,” said Doc. They all laughed.

“I will,” I said. “Seriously, I will. When we’ve got the time.”

“Go on, Marc,” said Bill. “Finish what you were saying. He knew what you were doing... and that’s what disturbed him?”

“Not exactly disturbed, I’d say,” I told them. “He was just surprised. He’s gone back to check with his friends. The way they are —the way I now know they are—that sort of checking’s a responsibility on his part.”

“So that’s why you’re sure he’ll be back?” Bill asked.

“Isn’t that what I’ve been saying?”

“Porniarsk,” said Bill, turning to him, “can’t you help explain any of this? You’re from a more advanced race than we are.”

“By comparison with Obsidian and his associates,” said Porniarsk, “I’m essentially of the same primitiveness as the rest of you. Also, you’ll remember, I’m only an avatar. I’ve no creativity, and no imagination beyond what I acquired when I was produced in the image of Porniarsk. I’m not equipped to speculate or interpret.”

“Well,” said Bill. “Anyway, we’ve all got plenty of work to do while we’re waiting for him to come back. Marc, you’ll speak to him as soon as you can, about whether we can count on them for supplies or assistance in case we need it?”

“Yes,” I said. “I can talk to him about that as soon as he comes back. I was afraid earlier that I couldn’t explain what we wanted without muddying up the idea we intend to be independent here. We still do want to be independent and self-supporting, don’t we?”

I looked around the room. I did not really need the murmurs of agreement from all of them. I only wanted to remind them we were all together on that one point.

“If it’s only a station they’ve got here,” said Leland Maur, a thin, black man in his mid-twenties who was an architect and our construction and mechanical engineering expert, “my feeling’s that this world is ours by right of settlement anyway. Not theirs. We don’t want to start off owing any piece of it to someone else.”

That comment ended the business of the evening. We sat back to drink coffee and compare notes on how things were going with our individual work projects to get ready for winter; and after about an hour of this, most of us were ready to fold for the night.

The next day, Obsidian had still not come back. That morning happened to be the half-day a week we had begun to take off as a rest period, following the good effect of our one day holiday after the first windmill generator had been put into operation. We had found that there was a limit to the efficiency involved in working seven days a week. After several weeks of unbroken work, we ended up going through the motions of our labors, but getting less done in total than if we had taken a break and started in fresh again. Accordingly, that morning I could stay home with a clear conscience, instead of lending my strength to one of the work jobs down in the town. Ellen was also home and busy doing something with her clothes in one part of the summer palace. I took advantage of the chance to dig once more into the books I had been neglecting lately. But they did not seem to hold my attention, after all. The urge had been growing in me to try for the golden light state again and, once more, to try to reach toward Ellen as I had reached toward Obsidian.

I was encouraged in this by my success with Obsidian, and also by the fact I began to believe I was at last zeroing in on my inner search. The outer search had always been the time storm; but the inner search, I now began to suspect, went back to my relationship with Swannee—and my mother.

I put the book I was holding aside and looked out into the courtyard feeling once more for a unity with the universe. It did not come easily this time. It was almost as if it knew why I wanted it and was reluctant to help me in that direction. But slowly, as the minutes went by, first the room and then the courtyard and the sky I looked out on took on greater values of reality, as if I was seeing them with a dimension added, a greater depth, a beyondness, in addition to the ordinary height, depth and width of normal vision. My body slowed its breathing and its heartbeat and began to blend with the movements of the planet.

The light changed, the gold moved in, and once more, I had it.

I held where I was for some little time—perhaps as much as ten or twenty minutes, although in that state of concentration time seemed almost suspended—to make sure that my hold on the state I had evoked was firm. Then I reached out to feel Ellen, elsewhere in the palace.

My touch went out like a wave spreading up on a sloping beach.

I reached her, felt her there, lightly, and started to enfold her—and something far out in myself jerked back, so that the wave of my feeling was sucked away again, abruptly, and my touch against her was lost. All at once, the golden light was gone and the unity was destroyed. I was alone and isolated, in my armchair in the room, looking out through the glass window panes at a world I could no longer feel.