“What is it?” asked Bill, almost in a whisper. He was standing with Porniarsk and me on the raised platform but, unlike us, turning continually on his heel as if he wanted to get a view of all hundred and eighty degrees of the room at once.
“It is,” said Porniarsk, “something you might think of as a computer, in your terms. It’s a multiple facility for the use of observers who’d wish to draw conclusions from their observations of the inhabitants in the village.”
“Computer?” Bill’s voice was louder and sharper. “That’s all?”
“It’s working principle isn’t that of the computers you’re familiar with,” said Porniarsk. “This uses the same principle that’s found in constructs from the further future, those I’ve referred to as devices-of-assistance. You’ll have to trust me to put this construct into that future mode so it’ll be useful in the way we need.”
“How’ll we use it?” Bill asked.
“You won’t use it,” said Porniarsk. “Marc will use it.”
They both turned their heads toward me.
“And you’ll teach me how?” I said to Porniarsk.
“No. You’ll have to teach yourself,” Porniarsk answered. “If you can’t, then there’s nothing anyone can do.”
“If he can’t, I’ll try,” said Bill tightly.
“I don’t think the device will work for you if it fails for Marc,” said Porniarsk to him. “Tell me, do you feel anything at this moment? Anything unusual at all?”
“Feel?” Bill stared at him.
“You don’t feel anything, then,” said Porniarsk. “I was right. Marc should be much more attuned. Marc, what do you feel?”
“Feel? Me?” I said, echoing Bill. But I already knew what he was talking about.
I had thought, at first, I must be feeling a hangover from the fight with the inhabitants of the village. Then I’d thought the feeling was my curiosity about what was inside this building, until I saw what was there. Now, standing on the platform in the center of the structure, I knew it was something else—something like a massive excitement from everywhere, that was surrounding me, pressing in on me.
“I feel geared-up,” I said.
“More than just geared-up, I think,” Porniarsk said. “It was a guess I made only on the basis of Marc’s heading for this area; but I was right. Porniarsk hoped only that a small oasis of stability might be established on the surface of this world, in this immediate locality. With anyone else, such as you, Bill, that’d be all we could do. But with Marc, maybe we can try something more. There’s a chance he has an aptitude for using a device-of-assistance.”
“Can’t you come up with a better name for it than that?” said Bill. His voice was tight—tight enough to shake just a little.
“What would you suggest?” asked Porniarsk.
I turned and walked away from them, out of the building through the door that opened before me and shut after me. I walked into the solitude of the thin, clean air and the high sunlight. There was something working in me; and for the moment, it had driven everything else, even Ellen, out of my mind. It was like a burning, but beneficent, fever, like a great hunger about to be satisfied, like the feeling of standing on the threshold of a cavern filled with treasure beyond counting.
It was all this, and still it was indescribable. I did not yet have it, but I could almost touch it and taste it; and I knew that it was only a matter of time now until my grasp closed on it. Knowing that was everything, I could wait now. I could work. I could do anything. The keys of my kingdom were at hand.
18
Then began a bittersweet time for me, the several weeks that Porniarsk worked on the equipment in what we were now calling the “roundhouse.” It was sweet because, day by day, I felt the device-of-assistance coming to life under the touch of those three tentacle-fingers Porniarsk had growing out of his shoulders. The avatar had been right about me. The original Porniarsk had not suspected there would be anyone on our Earth who could use the device without being physically connected to it. But evidently I was a freak. I had already had some kind of mental connection with this place, if only subconsciously, during the days of The Dream in which I had pushed us all in this direction and to this location. I said as much to Porniarsk one day.
“No,” he shook his head, “before that, I’d think. You must have felt its existence, here, and been searching for it from the time you woke to find your world changed.”
“I was looking,” I said. “But I didn’t have any idea what for.”
“Perhaps,” said Porniarsk. “But you might find, after the device is ready and you can look back over all you’ve done, that you unconsciously directed each step along the way toward this place and this moment, from the beginning.”
I shook my head. There was no use trying to explain to him, I thought, how I had never been able to let a problem alone. But I did not argue the point any further.
I was too intensely wrapped up in what I could feel growing about me—the assistance of the device. It was only partly mechanical. Porniarsk would not, or could not, explain its workings to me, although I could watch him as he worked with the small colored cubes that made up the inner parts of seven of the consoles. The cubes were about a quarter the size of children’s blocks and seemed to be made of some hard, translucent material. They clung together naturally in the arrangement in which they occurred behind the face of the console; and Porniarsk’s work, apparently, was to rearrange their order and get them to cling together again. Apparently, the rearrangement was different with each console; and Porniarsk had to try any number of combinations before he found it. It looked like a random procedure but, evidently, was not; and when I asked about that, Porniarsk relaxed his no-information rule enough to tell me that what he was doing was checking arrangements of the cubes in accordance with “sets” he already carried in his memory center, to find patterns that would resonate with the monad that was me. It was not the cubes that were the working parts, evidently, but the patterns.
Whatever he was doing, and however it was effective, when he got a collection of cubes to hang together in a different order, I felt the effect immediately. It was as if another psychic generator had come on-line in my mind. With each addition of power, or strength, or whatever you want to call it, I saw more clearly and more deeply into all things around me.
—Including the people. And from this came the bitter to join with the sweet of my life. For as, step by step, my perceptions increased, I came to perceive that Ellen was indeed intending to leave with Tek as soon as my work with the device had been achieved. She was staying for the moment and had talked Tek into staying, only so that he and she could hold down two of the consoles, as Porniarsk had said all of the adults in our party would need to do when I made my effort to do something about the time storm. After that, they would go; and nothing I could say would stop her.
The reasons why she had turned to Tek as she had, I could not read in her. Her personal feelings were beyond the reach of my perception. Something shut me out. Porniarsk told me, when I finally asked him, that the reason I could not know how she felt was because my own emotions were involved with her. Had I been able to force myself to see, I would have seen not what was, but what I wanted to see. I would have perceived falsely; and since the perception and understanding I was gaining with the help of the device were part of a true reflection of the universe, the device could give only accurate information; consequently, it gave nothing where only inaccuracy was possible.
So, I was split down the middle; and the division between the triumph and the despair in me grew sharper with the activation of each new console. After the fourth one, the avatar warned me that there was a limit to the step-up I could endure from the device.