He had a round, friendly face, a little flat-looking and mongoloid; and this, with the hairless skull, gave him something of a tough look.
“Hello,” said Ellen. “Where did you come from?”
“We’re perhaps two hundred miles from you.”
“Just a couple of hundred miles away?” I echoed.
“We had to keep you from finding us while we were studying you,” he answered. “You have to understand that we had to gather a lot of data on you in order to work out your language and customs. And, of course, we wanted to collect data toward understanding the accident that brought you here.”
“Accident?” I said. “We came here deliberately.”
He stared at me for a long second.
“You did?”
“That’s right,” I said. “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?” Obsidian said.
We seemed to be talking at cross purposes.
“That’s right,” I said. “We came here because I wanted to contact you people who were doing something about the time storm—”
“Just a moment,” he said. “Excuse me.”
He disappeared.
He did not come back in a moment, either. He did not come back the rest of that day, nor the day after. It was nearly a week later that I stepped outside from the door of the summer palace that opened onto the parking area, and found him standing there, bright with the morning sun on his bare shoulders. Ellen stepped out just behind me.
“Excuse me for not getting back before this,” he said. “But possibly I got off on the wrong foot when I first visited you. I’ve talked the matter over with a number of others, and we’ve decided that our data was much more insufficient than we thought. Would you be willing to sit down with me and tell me the whole story of how you came to be here, so that we can have that information to work with?”
“I’ll be glad to,” I said, turning back toward the door. “Do you want to step inside?”
“No. If you don’t mind, no,” he said. “Later on, I’d like very much to have the chance to look inside your summer palace, but not just yet. Can we talk out here?”
“Certainly.”
“Good.” He dropped into a sitting position, cross-legged on the grass.
“If you don’t mind, I’ll use a chair,” I said.
“I don’t mind,” he said. “I’m very interested. Is it actually comfortable for you, sitting on that piece of furniture?”
“It’s more comfortable than sitting the way you are,” I said. “I can sit like that, but not for any length of time.”
“I see.”
I went inside and came out with chairs for myself and Ellen. We sat down.
“The chair was more a product of western culture in my time, though,” I said. “In the east, even then, people would be perfectly comfortable sitting the way you sit.”
“Thanks,” he said. “That’s the sort of data we appreciate.”
“All right,” I went on. “Where do you want me to start?”
“Any and all information you can give us will help,” he said.
“Suppose I start with the time storm then,” I said. “We’re together on that, aren’t we? You know what I mean when I talk about the time storm?”
“Oh yes,” Obsidian said. “We’re aware of the time storm.”
“Well, we weren’t,” I said, “until it hit us without warning one day. I was up in a northern, wild area of a state called Minnesota in the north central part of this continent....”
I picked up my own history from the moment when I had thought I was having a second heart attack and proceeded to tell it. I had thought it was something I could cover in an hour or so; but I had badly underestimated what there was to tell, and I had come nowhere near beginning to estimate how many things Obsidian would need explained. We began with the matter of my heart attack, which took some thirty minutes or so of explanation by itself, and went on from there, frequently dropping into what must have sounded like a vaudeville act built around the idea of two blind men meeting in the middle of the Sahara desert at midnight.
“But there’s no evidence of any damage to your heart, now.”
“There isn’t?”
“You mean you don’t know there isn’t?”
... And so on, far into the night. After a little while, Ellen sensibly got up and left us to bring Porniarsk out to join us, and to call Doc to let the rest of the community know what was going on. Within a few hours Obsidian and I had a quiet, attentive audience seated in a semicircle around us and consisting of everyone able to get from the town up to the landing area.
The talk went on for four days. Obsidian had clearly come with the intention of getting information, but giving little or none himself; but it proved impossible for us to communicate unless he explained something of his own time and civilization. He and I had nothing in common but the language his people had deduced from the first weeks of recording and then taught him to speak accentlessly, and by the end of the first hour, we were both realizing how inadequate this was by itself.
The words alone meant little without their connotative referents, and his connotative referents and mine were separated by thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of years. It was a curious sensation to hear a sentence made up of nothing but the old, familiar sounds and, at the same time, realize that I had not the slightest idea of what Obsidian meant as he uttered them. Luckily he was an intelligent person; and above and beyond this, he had a sense of humor. Otherwise the talks would have broken down out of sheer exasperation on the parts of each of us.
But he was bright enough and sensible enough to adapt, in spite of the consensus he had been sent out with, that he should listen but not talk. By the end of the third day, he was telling us as much about his people as we were telling him about us, and from that point on, the information exchange began to work, to a point, at least.
By this time we were once more talking privately; but with a tape recorder powered by a stepped-down automobile battery that had been charged by Bill’s windmill generator. The tapes were duplicated and made available to the rest of the community. To hit the high points of the information they gathered, Obsidian and his associates here on Earth numbered under a thousand individuals belonging to a race of latter-day humans that were primarily scattered, very thinly indeed, across the habitable worlds of this galaxy.
These humans did not think of themselves, however, so much as members of a race, but as members of a larger community, including representatives of some millions of other civilized races with whom they intermixed. Individuals of these other races were also thinly spread across the same habitable worlds; and some of them, as well as some of the humans, were to be found as well in other galaxies or elsewhere in the universe—although when this happened it was because of special circumstances Obsidian had not yet explained.
The reason for all these individuals being scattered so widely was apparently that (a) the time storm had cut populations on inhabited worlds to the point where there were several habitable worlds for each individual of intelligence; and (b) apparently there were means of travelling not merely faster than light, but many times faster than light, so that even visiting other galaxies was not impossible. Obsidian shied away from my questions when I tried to find out more about this means of travel. Evidently faster-than-light did not describe it directly in his terms; and he was clearly unsure of his ability to explain it to me at our present level of communication.
We had encountered a number of such points of noncommunication. The main problem was the complete dissimilarity of our referents, so that often we found ourselves talking at cross purposes. Some cultural differences only emerged more or less by accident. For example, it turned out that Obsidian was not his name—not at least in the way we think of “names.” In the way we used that word he had no specific name. This was because he had a certain unique identity, structure, or value—there was no way to express it properly in our terms—which was recognized as Mm by his fellow humans and other race individuals who had met him and experienced this unique identity of his.