“Sunday!” I said.
Of course, Ellen told me, he was always there if only you’d reached for him.
With them both there, with the three of us—we three ghosts-together once more, my heart broke apart with happiness and out of the broken pieces rose a strength that spread and towered in me like a genie let loose from a bottle when the Solomon’s seal is snapped. There was no universe or combination of universes that I was not now ready to attack, to save what I now held; and I reached to the ends of all time and all spaces. So-at last—by the one route I had never dreamed existed, understanding dawned on me.
“I should have realized it,” I said to Ellen. “It’s one and the same thing, the time storm and what’s always been inside me, what’s always been inside all of us.”
38
“What’s been inside you?” Ellen echoed. She was still not speaking to me by the physical route Dragger had used; but what she said was now so clear to me that my mind supplied her voice as if both it and my ears were physically present.
“The storm,” I said, “the struggle. The fight to understand, and be understood by everyone else in the face of the equally strong need to be yourself and yourself only, that unique and completely free identity that never was before this moment in time and will never be again, once you’re gone. ‘I’ve got to do that, say that’ the identity says, ‘otherwise I can’t grow, I can’t make.’ ‘No, you can’t do that,’ say the other identities outside your skull, all also struggling to grow and be free. ‘If you do that, I won’t understand why. I’ll take it as a threat. I’ll isolate you; or I’ll fight you.’ So, before each action, along the road to each goal, there are all the interior battles to find a way of compromising what you want, and need to do, with what others will accept your doing. The storm within. Everyone has it; and the time storm without is its analogy.”
“I don’t see that,” said Ellen. “Why?”
“Because both storms are the result of conflict between two things that ought to be working together. Like a couple of millstones, badly adjusted, chewing each other up, throwing off stone chips and sparks instead of joining to mill the grain between them.”
“But even so,” said Ellen, “why’s that important, here and now, and with you, particularly?”
“Because I never knew how to quit, to give up,” I said. “When I ran into the inner storm I couldn’t stop trying to conquer it; but because it was inside me, because it was subconscious, instead of conscious, I couldn’t get at it. So I made everything else a surrogate for it—the stock market, the business, my heart attack... and at last, the time storm.”
“Even so, what good could it do to fight other things?”
“It could teach me how to fight. It could help me discover and forge weapons to fight my inner storm with. And it did! By God, it did! I’ve found the answer to the inner storm.”
“Not fighting,” said Ellen, very positively.
“All right. That—yes. But there’s more to it than just not fighting. The full answer’s in the unity of everything. Reaching out and becoming part of everyone and everything else. It was you and Sunday who first broke me in to being a part of someone else without struggle. You were both completely dependent on me, so it never occurred to me that I had to adjust myself to suit you.”
“There was something besides that,” said Ellen. “We cared for you.”
“I know,” I said. “I know. I took that for granted too. I’m sorry, I didn’t know any better than to take it for granted, then. I didn’t begin to know any better until Sunday was gone and I suddenly found the big hole in myself where he’d been. I didn’t realize then why it hit me as hard as it did; but actually, something of myself had just become suddenly dead. If Sunday hadn’t been killed, just then—”
I broke off, looking instinctively for her face before I remembered she was not there in the body to be seen.
“Would you have gone off with Tek, then, if Sunday hadn’t been killed?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “If I had, though, I think I’d have come back. I never loved Tek. But I couldn’t make you hear me or see me.”
“I remember-” The wraith of Sunday jumped up to hug my bodiless spirit with nonexistent forepaws and tried to lick my face that was not there. “It’s all right, Sunday. Down, cat! I’m not feeling bad now; I was just remembering something...
“But the time storm’s still there. You mean you can give up on it, now?” Ellen asked.
“I think I could—now.”
“But you don’t really want to.”
“No,” I said. “The truth is, no. If I give up, nothing’ll be done; and that means the end, for all of us.”
“You’re sure it does?”
“Yes. There’s been a situation building up for a few thousand years now, ever since the temporal engineers started working with the storm. They’ve been trying to cure an imbalance between energies in this universe by importing more energy from another universe, to shore up the weaker of the two energies here. It’s worked for a while, but it’s also been creating the potential of a bigger imbalance if the scale should suddenly tip the other way, and the weak side become the strong one, with all that extra, imported energy added to its natural advantage. And I think it’s about to tip-in this universe at least—in about nine months.”
“The engineers don’t know this?” Ellen asked. “You’re sure about that?”
“They know it, but they don’t realize how great the reaction can be.”
“In any case, what can you do by yourself?”
“I don’t know. I need to think. Quiet, cat. Leave me alone for a few minutes.”
Sunday stilled. His ghost body lay down with crossed paws, on nothingness, and resigned itself to patience. I still held my vision of unity with the universe, that had come on me after I had finally faced the fact that there was no hope from Dragger or her colleagues. I had found what I had stumbled toward and struggled for all this time; and now I wanted to live, as even more I wanted Ellen, Sunday, and my universe with everyone in it to live. It went against reason that I could have come this long journey through life and time without picking up the skill and knowledge to do something about the situation. Somewhere, there had to be a chance; and if there was a chance, my blessing/curse of being unable to turn away from an unsolved problem should keep my mind hunting until I found it.
“If I’m right about the parallel....” I began at last, slowly.
“What parallel?” said Ellen.
“The parallel about the time storm being an analogy of the inner storm. If I’m right about that, and I had to get outside myself to find the key to my inner storm, then....”
Ellen said nothing.
“Then,” I went on, after a moment, “the answer to the time storm has to be outside too. Outside the universe—outside this universe. If I go outside this universe, I ought to be able to see it.”
“But how can you do that?” asked Ellen.
I did not say anything.
“There’s no way you can do that, is there?”
“Yes,” I said, slowly, “there is. There’s the lens.”
“What lens?”
I told her.
“Marc!” said Ellen. “Are you crazy?”
“It’s the only way to get outside.”
“But it’s the center of a star—and worse than that. You’d be burned up before you got into the lens.”
“I’m not material at the moment, remember. It’s my mind only that’d be going.”
“But even if you could go through this lens without being destroyed, there’s the problem of getting back. How could you do that?”