“Going,” he repeated, with no hint of impatience in his voice, “toward a trigger area.”
I felt a sort of delicate feeling—an instinct to caution. There was no way he could have known what had been working in the back of my mind with The Dream, these last few weeks; but he was talking one hell of a lot as if he had read my mind.
“That could be an accident,” I said. “What makes you think it’s anything more than an accident?”
“You withdrew,” he said. “But then you recovered enough to guide your party, if not in a straight line, in a consistent direction by the most travellable route, toward the location of an area I know to contain devices of assistance at a technological level, which might achieve a first step of halting the moving lines of temporal alteration—temporal discontinuities, as Bill calls them, or mistwalls, as you say.”
I stared at him.
“If you know about a place like that,” I said, “why haven’t you done something about the temporal—oh, hell, whatever you want to call them—before now?”
“The devices are devices of assistance, but not of a design which will assist me. I’m an avatar, as I told you, an avatar of Porniarsk Prime Three. The devices would be of assistance to Porniarsk himself, but he’s otherwise engaged.”
“Tell him to drop whatever’s otherwise engaging him then, and get over here.”
“He wouldn’t come,” said the avatar. “This planet is your problem. The problem of Porniarsk is a larger one. It involves many planets like this. Therefore, he has such as I who am his avatar, so he can have several manipulative sets of himself at work. But all I am is an avatar. Alone, I can’t manipulate the forces involved here, no matter how competent the device of assistance available to me.”
I shook my head.
“All right, then, Porniarsk—or Porniarsk’s avatar—” I began.
“Porniarsk is fine,” he interrupted. “You’ll never meet Porniarsk himself, or any of his other avatars, so there’s no danger of confusion.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “You’ve got me pretty confused right now. I don’t understand any of this.”
“Of course,” said Porniarsk, agreeable. “You’re uneducated.”
“Oh? Is that it?”
“How could you be otherwise? You’ve never had the chance to learn about these forces and their effects. I can’t educate you, but I can explain specific elements of the situation as you run across them. Trying to explain them before you encounter them won’t work because you don’t have either the vocabulary or the concepts behind the vocabulary.”
“But I will when I run into these elements?” I said. “Is that it?”
“On encountering the experience, you’ll see the need for the appropriate terms, with which you might then be able to understand enough of the underlying concepts to work with.”
“Oh?” I didn’t mean to sound sarcastic, but this kind of conversation with Porniarsk had a habit of driving me to it. “My understanding’s not guaranteed then?”
“Be reasonable,” said Porniarsk; and this kind of appeal in colloquial, uninfected English from the genial gargoyle sitting next to me, had to be experienced to be believed. “How can I guarantee your understanding?”
How, indeed? He had a point, there.
“I give up,” I said, and I meant it. “Just tell me one thing. How did I happen to know enough to head in the right direction?”
“I don’t know,” Porniarsk answered. “I’d expected that, sooner or later, you’d ask me if there were any future areas containing the means to do something about the time storm effects locally, that is, here on this world. Then I could have directed you to such an area. However, you’ve directed yourself to one without me. I don’t understand how. Porniarsk himself wouldn’t understand how, though perhaps he could find the answer. I’m only an avatar. I can’t.”
“All right, tell me what to do now, then,” I said.
Porniarsk’s head creaked in a negative shaking.
“There’s nothing I can advise you on until you’ve experienced the immediate future area of the assistance device technology,” he said. “Now that I’ve seen you do this much by yourself, I’d be cautious about advising you in any case. It might be that you’ll learn more, and faster, on your own.”
“I see,” I said. “That’s fine. That’s just fine. Then tell me, why did you stop Bill from coming out here with us, if you weren’t going to tell me anything anyway?”
“Bill wouldn’t believe me,” said Porniarsk. “He doesn’t trust me.”
“And I do?”
The gargoyle head leaned slightly, almost confidentially, toward mine.
“You’ve learned something you shouldn’t have been able to learn by yourself,” said Porniarsk. “You’ve touched the greater universe. Of course, you don’t trust me, either. You’re too primitive to trust an avatar of another kind, like myself. But in your case, trust isn’t necessary.”
“Oh?” I said. “Why?”
“Because you want to believe me,” said Porniarsk. “If what I’m saying is true, then you’re headed toward something you want very much. That’s not the same thing as trust; but trust can come later. For now, your wanting to believe will do.”
16
So we drove back to camp in the last of the twilight and in silence. I only asked him one question on the way back.
“Do you really give a damn about any of us?” I said. “Or are you just interested in the time storm?”
“Porniarsk cares for all life,” his steady voice answered. “If he didn’t, he’d have no concern with the time storm. And I am Porniarsk, only in an additional body.”
It was cold comfort. I believed him; but at the same time, I got the feeling that there was something more he was withholding from me.
In any case, there was nothing to do now but keep going. Oddly, I trusted him. Something had happened to me since The Dream; and that was that, in a strange way, I had come to feel an affection and responsibility for him, along with all the others. It was as if a corner of my soul’s house had put up a blind on one window to let in a little sunshine. I did take Bill aside the next day and gave him a rough briefing on my conversation with Porniarsk. Bill fulfilled Porniarsk’s prediction by being highly skeptical of the avatar’s motives and implications.
“It sounds to me like a con game,” he said. “It’s part of a con game to flatter your mark. Did you feel you were headed any place in particular, these last three weeks?”
I hesitated. Somehow, I didn’t get the feeling that Bill was ripe right now for hearing an account of The Dream, and how it had been with me. But there was no way to answer his questions fully without telling him about my back-of-the-brain spiderwork.
“I had a feeling I was tied into something important,” I said. “That’s as far as it went.”
“Hmm,” said Bill, half to himself. “I wonder if Porniarsk’s telepathic?”
“That’s as far-fetched as me supposed to be knowing where we’re going, when I didn’t know where we’re going,” I said.
Bill shrugged.
“If we hit this trigger area place soon, you’ll have known where we’re going,” he said. “No reason there shouldn’t be as much truth to telepathy. When did Porniarsk say we’d reach the area?”
Of course, wound up as I had been by what he’d had to say about me personally, I’d forgotten to ask him.
“I’ll find out,” I said and went off to look for the avatar.
Porniarsk politely informed me that we should hit the trigger area in about a day and a half the way we were travelling; and, yes, it would be behind a mistwall like all the other mistwalls we’d seen. As to what was inside, it was best I experienced that for myself first, before Porniarsk did any explaining.