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.
The meeting was breaking up. Some of the figures in the stands were simply disappearing, some were walking off through visible doorways, some were simply melting into the illusions of surrounding scenery. I found myself alone with Porniarsk, Obsidian, and Dragger.
“We’ll check, of course,” said Dragger to me. “Tell me, Marc, what is it exactly you want?”
“I want to fight the time storm. Myself. Personally.”
“I have to say I can’t see how that can be anything but a complete impossibility,” she said. “On the other hand, there are always new things to be learned.”
36
“They’re a great people, Marc,” said Porniarsk, once we were alone again in the ordinary configuration of Obsidian’s quarters— which Obsidian had, by now, largely given over to our own private use. “You shouldn’t forget that.”
“You think they are?” I said.
I heard him as if from a middle distance. I was once more as I had been when we had just left Earth on the way here in Obsidian’s quarters; like someone who had trained years for a single conflict. I was light and empty inside, remote and passionless, hollow of everything but the thought of the battle that would come, which nothing could avert or delay.
“Yes,” he said, “they’ve survived the time storm. They’ve learned to live with it, even to use it for their own benefit, and they’ve made a community of innumerable races, a community that’s a single, working unit. Those are great achievements. They deserve some honor.”
“Let other people honor them, then,” I said. It was still as if I was talking to him from some distance off. “I’ve got nothing left except for what I’ve still got waiting for me.”
“Yes,” he said. He sounded oddly sad. “Your foe. But these people aren’t your foe, Marc. Not even the time storm’s your foe.”
“You’re wrong there,” I told him.
“No.” He shook his ponderous head.
I laughed.
“Marc,” he said, “listen to me. I’m alive, and that alone surprises me. I’d expected I’d stop living, once I was taken from the time in which Porniarsk existed. But it seems, to my own deep interest, that in some way I’ve got an independent life now, a life of my own. But even if this is true, it’s a single life only. I was constructed, not engendered. I can’t have progeny. My life’s only this small moment in which I live it; and I’m concerned with what and whom I share that moment. In this case, it’s you, Ellen, Bill, Doc, and the rest.”
“Yes,” I said. At another time, what he had said might have moved me deeply. But at the moment, I was too remote, too concentrated. I heard and understood what he told me; but his words were like a listing of academic facts, off somewhere on the horizon of my existence, shrunken by their distance from what obsessed me utterly.
“Because of this,” he said, “I’m concerned with what you’re planning to do. I’m afraid for you, Marc. I want to save what I’ve got no other words to call but your soul. If that’s to be saved, sooner or later, you’ll have to reconcile yourself with things as they are. And unless you do it in time, you’ll lose your battle. You’ll die.”
“No,” I said. The need for sleep was deep in me and I only wanted to end the talking. “I won’t lose. I can’t afford to. Now I’ve got to get some rest. I’ll talk to you after I wake up, Porniarsk.”
But when I finally woke up, Dragger was standing over the cushion on which I lay.
“Marc,” she said, “your training as a temporal engineer is going to begin at once; and if you can absorb that, you’ll be taken out to where the line of battle runs with the time storm forces.”
I was suddenly fully awake and on my feet. She was going on, still talking. Porniarsk was also to be given the training. This was a bonus, because in no way had I dared to hope I could win for him also what I had wanted for myself. But now he, too, would have the chance. There was a comfort for me in the sight of his ugly, heavy bulldog shape. He was like a talisman from home, a good omen.