Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

“Accident? We came here deliberately”

“You did?”

“That’s right,” I answered. “ I’d probably better take you down to see the lab and Porniarsk. Sorry, maybe I’m getting the cart before the horse. But after expecting you every day from the moment we landed here, and not having you show up until now—”

“Expecting me when you arrived?”

“That’s right. We came here because I wanted to contact you people who were doing something about the time storm—”

“Just a moment. Forgive me” said the figure of Obsidian; and he disappeared.

The figures of Ellen and me also winked out of existence.

“That bit of conversation,” I went on to Dragger and the rest of the audience, “shook Obsidian up, because here I was talking about deliberately making use of time storm forces back in a time long before anyone was supposed to be able to make use of them. The second anomaly, and the one that made it imperative that you test me, was the fact that Obsidian caught me making what I call a universal-identification—I note, by the way, that this is one area of my vocabulary in your languages that you haven’t filled in for me. You have to have a term for it yourselves—”

“We have,” said Dragger. “You just used it. We term it ‘universal-identification’.”

“Sorry,” I said. “My apologies. So you didn’t deliberately leave that part of my vocabulary out, then. At any rate, the point is, once more Obsidian had discovered that I could do something that I shouldn’t be able to do, being from as far back in prehistory as I was. But, making use of time storm forces to move in time or space, and the concept of the individual being able to share the identity of the universe or vice versa, are things you’ve believed belong to your time, not mine.”

“So far,” said Dragger, as I paused to look at her, “I hear nothing to disagree with. You must have more to say than this, though, I assume?”

“I have,” I said. “Let’s call me fish and you mammal, in the sense that I’m, in effect, your prehistoric ancestor. When you found I could breathe air the same way you did and had legs rather than fins, you had to classify me and those with me as something more than fish. So you thought you’d check me out to find if I was mammalian. But your first check turned up the fact that I’m an egg-laying creature. Since mammals, in your experience, don’t lay eggs, you assumed I must be a fish, after all. It didn’t occur to you that I might be something like a platypus.”

I had used the human word for “platypus”; because there was no alternative in their four communication modes. It was true their spoken language gave me the building blocks to construct an equivalent word; but from their point of view, that equivalent would have been a nonsense noise. Dragger and the rest stared at me in silence.

“Platypus,” I said. “An animal from my planet. A monotreme—” Now there was a word that was translatable into some sense in their language. Dragger spoke up.

“Just a minute, Marc,” she said.

There was a delay while the audience got a thorough briefing on the fauna of Earth in general, and that of Australia in particular.

“It’s understood, then?” I said, when this was over. “The platypus lays eggs, but nonetheless it’s a hair-wearing, lactating mammal.”

“Primitive mammal,” said Dragger.

“Don’t strain my analogy,” I said. “The point is, there was a possibility of my people and me belonging in a category which your culture had made you blind to.”

“That’s an assumption,” said Dragger.

“No,” I said. “It’s not. It’d be an assumption only if I was wrong about what you showed me having anything to do with the movement of time storm forces. Now, you were right in saying there was no connection between what you showed me and the storm. But in the overall sense, I was the one who was right, and you were wrong. Because the connection is there; and you’re so culturally blind to it that I’m willing to bet that, even in these last three days, none of you have checked out the possibility that that connection might actually be there.”

There was a second—only a second—of silence.

“You’re correct. There hasn’t been any check made of a possible connection,” said Dragger. “On the other hand, we’ve nothing but your guess that the connection exists.”

“I told you the last time I saw you,” I said, “it’s no guess. I’m neither fish nor fowl. I’m a monotreme. I’ve learned to use the time storm and to make a personal identification with the universe entirely without and apart from the history, culture, and techniques that you people have developed. I can read the time storm by reading patterns of movement. All movement falls into patterns.”

I looked around the room at the spectators.

“You’re probably not aware of it,” I said, “but the ways you’ve grouped and sorted yourselves around me, here, show certain patterns; and from those patterns, with what I now know about your culture and language, I can see a habit of social sorting by individual specialties or abilities.

“If I didn’t have that cultural information, I’d still be seeing these patterns, I just wouldn’t know what they implied. In the case of your groupings here, I now do know; and in the case of the time storm forces also, I do know.”

“This is assertion only, Marc,” said Dragger.

“No. It’s a case of my being on the outside of your culture, so I’m able to see clearly something you’re refusing to see. You people have struggled with the time storm for hundreds of generations. That struggle literally created your community the way it is now and dominated every element of it. It’s quite true the panel you showed me was supposed to be showing patterns of conceptual rhythms common to your time and culture; and that I didn’t recognize them as such because my own conceptual rhythms aren’t like that.”

I looked around at them.

“Marc,” said Dragger, “have we waited these several days and gathered together here only to hear you admit that we were right to begin with?”

“No!” I said. “Because you’re wrong. What I saw, and recognized, were time storm force patterns. You, all of you, couldn’t realize that because you don’t recognize how much the time storm’s become a part of you over this long struggle—part of your body, mind, and culture. Your conceptual rhythms are time storm rhythms. You don’t see that because they’re so much a part of you; you take them for granted. I can see it, because I’m standing outside your culture, looking at you. I’m the most valuable mind you’ve got in this present time of yours; and you’d better appreciate that fact!”

I was almost shouting at them now. This was a strong statement in their terms; but I needed to wake them up, to make them hear.

“Don’t take my word for it!” I said. “Check those conceptual rhythms on your instrument against the patterns of the time storm forces and pick up the identity between them for yourselves!”

I stopped talking. In my own past time, a moment of this would have provoked a buzz of unbelief from the spectators, or outcries against my idea or myself—anything but the way these individuals reacted, which was in a thoughtful silence. There was no visible evidence that I had attacked the very base of the culture they had always taken for granted.

But I knew what was happening in their minds. I knew, because I now knew more than a little about how they thought and about their obligation to consider any possibility for truth which that same culture put upon them. I knew they had been jarred, and jarred badly, by what I had just told them. But my knowledge of that was about all the emotional satisfaction I was likely to get from the situation. As far as appearances went, they showed no more reaction than they might have if I had told them that I planned on not shaving when I got up tomorrow.