Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

He touched the console in front of him with a tentacle tip. Another picture window appeared, showing the starscape beyond. My memory for patterns now was too good to be deceived. This was a different view again of the galaxy than the one I had seen in the other room on waking up.

“We should be coming up on another transfer, momentarily…” said Porniarsk. “There!”

The starview abruptly changed, without jar, without sound, and so instantaneously that I did not even have the sensation of having blinked at the scene.

“We’ve gone down the ladder in time in order to make large shifts through space,” said Porniarsk. “In the smaller node of forces on Earth, the time jumps were also much smaller and the physical displacement was minor. Here, of course, when we take a large step forward or backward in time, the surrounding stars and other solid bodies move around us. What’s that phrase I once learned from Marie about Mahomet not being able to go to the mountain, therefore, the mountain must come to him? Obsidian’s people have learned to use the time storm to bring their mountains to them, instead of themselves making the journey to the mountains-”

He glanced at me. Porniarsk could not be said to have the most readable facial and body expressions in the universe; but I knew that hang of his tentacles well enough by now to tell when he was being apologetic.

“—I mean, of course,” he said, “to refer to the stars and other solid bodies of the universe as ‘mountains’.”

“I’d guessed you did,” I said.

“I’m afraid I’m sometimes a little pedantic,” he said. “So was Porniarsk himself, of course. It’s a failing that often goes with an enquiring mind.”

“Don’t let it bother you where I’m concerned,” I said. “One of my worst habits is telling other people what the situation is, at great length.”

“That’s true, of course,” he answered, with gentle unconcern for my feelings. “Nonetheless, two wrongs do not—I believe our host is waking up.”

He had creaked his head to one side as he spoke, to gaze at Obsidian, who now opened his eyes and sat up cross-legged on his cushion, all in one motion, apparently fully alert in the flicker of an eyelash.

“Are you rested, Marc?” he asked. “I finally had to take a nap, myself. Apparently Porniarsk needs very little sleep.”

“Damn little,” I said.

“We’ll have a little more than four days more before we reach our destination,” said Obsidian. “I’m looking forward to doing a lot more talking with you, Marc. I gather you’ve already come to a better understanding of the present time.”

“I think so,” I said. “Tell me if I’m wrong, but as I see it, all the intelligent races in the galaxy have joined together to fight for survival. Animate organisms against the inanimate forces that otherwise might kill you all off.”

“That’s a lot of it,” Obsidian said. “We’re concerned with survival first, because if life doesn’t survive, everything else becomes academic. So the first job is to control the environment, right enough. But beyond survival, we’re primarily interested in growth, in where life goes from here.”

“All right. But—” I checked myself. “Wait a minute. I ought to give you a chance to get all the way awake before I tie you up in a discussion like this.”

“But I am awake,” said Obsidian, frowning a little.

“Oh. All right,” I said, “in that case, suppose you start filling me in on the history of everything. How did this brotherhood of civilized entities start? What got it going?”

“As a matter of fact,” he answered, “what began the getting together of races that later became the present civilized community was what you call—excuse me, I’ll just use your word for it from now on—the time storm, itself. This was paradoxical; because it was the time storm that threatened the survival of all life, and here it made real civilization possible....”

With that, he was underway with a flood of information almost before I had time to find myself a seat on a nearby cushion. In the next four days, while his house, so to speak, flitted through space from time force line to time force line, and Porniarsk watched that process fascinatedly with the control console, Obsidian drew me a picture of some forty-odd thousand years of known history—on the time scale of our galaxy—and an unknown amount of time before that in which life was nearly destroyed by the time storm, but in which the foundation of a universal community was discovered and erected.

“The process was instinctive enough,” he said. “We tried to adapt to an environment that included the time storm and, in the process, learned to manipulate that environment, including the time storm, as far as we could. Right now the time storm makes possible a number of things we couldn’t have unless it existed. At the same time, by existing, it continues to threaten to kill us. So, we’re doing our best to control it. Note, we no longer want to wipe it out; we want to keep it, but under our domination.”

“Like taming a tiger,” I said, “to be a watchdog.”

He frowned for a second. Then his face cleared.

“Oh,” he said. “I see what you mean. Yes. We want to tame and use it.”

“So do I,” I said.

He looked unhappy.

“I was hoping,” he said, “that you’d be beginning to appreciate the difference between someone of your time and people of the present. We’ll be arriving shortly, in a matter of hours in fact; and I thought that, maybe, with the chance we’ve had to talk on the way here, you’d be seeing the vast gulf between what you know and are, and what anyone from the present would have to know and be.”

“It’s not that vast,” I said. “Now, wait a minute—”

He had opened his mouth, ready to speak again. When I held up my hand, he closed it again—but not with a particularly comfortable look on his face.

“All right, look,” I said. “You’ve evolved a whole science. But anyone born into this time of yours can learn it in that person’s lifetime, isn’t that so?”

“Oh, of course,” Obsidian said. “I didn’t mean to sound as if the hard knowledge itself was something more than you could learn. In fact we’ve got techniques and equipment which could teach you what you’d need to know in a matter of days. But the point’s that the knowledge by itself wouldn’t be any use to you; because to use it requires the sort of understanding of the time storm that only growing up and being educated in the present can give you.”

“What you’re saying,” I told him, “is that aside from the intellectual knowledge that’s necessary, I’d need the kind of understanding that comes from knowing a culture and a philosophy. And the cultural part is simply the same philosophy expressed on a nonsymbolic level. So, what it boils down to is understanding your basic philosophy; and you’ve just finished telling me that that’s been shaped by contact over generations with the time storm. All right, I’ve had contact with the time storm. I’ve had some contact with you. And I tell you that your culture and your philosophy isn’t that much different from what I’ve already understood myself where the time storm forces are concerned.”

He shook his head.

“Marc,” he said, “you’re aiming right at a disappointment.”

“We’ll see,” I answered.

“Yes.” He sighed. “I’m very much afraid we will.”

Just as there had been no sensation of taking off when we had left Earth, so there was no sensation of landing when we got to our destination. Simply, without warning, Obsidian broke off something he was saying about the real elements of art existing fully in the concept of the piece of artwork alone-a point with which I was disagreeing, because I could not conceive of art apart from its execution. What if the statue of Rodin’s Thinker could be translated into a string of symbolic marks? Would the intellectual appreciation of those marks begin to approach the pleasure of actually seeing, let alone feeling, the original statue with whatever microscopic incidentals of execution had resulted from the cuttings of the sculptor’s tools and the textural characteristics of the original material? The idea was absurd—and it was not the only absurd idea that I had heard from Obsidian, for all his personal like-ableness and intelligence, during the last five days.