I had tried evoking the golden light as a means of reaching an understanding of Ellen. But I had found that when I tried to reach for the feeling of unity with all things for that reason, it was as it had been in the plane after leaving Paula’s camp—I could not evoke the state of unity. It came to me now that it would do no harm to try for it once more in the case of Obsidian and his people, where the emotional roots concerned did not go so deeply into the dark of my own soul.
So I tried. It helped that I had grown to like Obsidian in the last few intense days of talking. I thought I could almost grasp what he described as that unique identity element by which all other beings of his time recognized him. So I picked a moment when he was trying to explain to me what among them took the place of family structure, as we in our community knew it. I watched him as he talked, seated cross-legged on the ground. His face was animated and his hands wove patterns in the air. He had the attribute of seeming to be alive with energy even while he was obviously without tension and relaxed. It was an ability I had seen before in casual encounters with professional athletes in top condition.
I was hardly listening to what he said. That is, my mind was making automatic note of it, but I was comfortably aware of the fact that the tape recorder was catching his words and I would be able to review them again this evening in the quiet of the summer palace library. Most of my attention was concentrated on him as a complete entity; a sound-making, limb-moving individual extending energy to me in the form of sound and gesture. I squinted, mentally, to focus in on him in this sense; and when I had him in focus, slid on top of his image before me the emotional/intellectual gestalt that was my friend Obsidian, as I knew him.
The two melted together; and as they did I was able for the first time to take a step back from him and the present moment. I kept my point of view at that distance and slowly let the rest of the day soak into me.
We sat just outside the summer palace and I had my back to it; so that I looked past Obsidian, across the open stretch of the landing area and out over the descending slope of the trees to the town below and the tall grass marching in all directions to the horizon. It was, for once, a perfectly clear day; there was not a cloud in sight. But a small, cool wind was wandering back and forth across the mountainside where we sat.
I saw the treetops moving to it and felt the intermittent light touch of it on my face and hands, cancelling out now and again the warmth of the steady afternoon sunlight. It was too early for insects; but down on the wooded slope below me, a cloud of specks that were small birds burst up unexpectedly as I watched, to swarm dark against the far bright sky for a moment like a cloud of gnats, and then settled back down out of sight into the dark mass of the leaves below them again.
High up, another single speck swam against the cloudless sky. A hawk? My vision went out to the horizon and beyond. Slowly, I became conscious of a rhythm that was the beating of my own heart and at the same time the breathing of the world. Once again, the golden light began to grow around me and, once more, I felt myself touching all things in the earth, sky, and water, from pole to pole. I was touching all things, and I reached out to touch Obsidian.
I looked at him without moving my eyes and saw him in full dimension for the first time. For he was a part of the universe, as all these other things were a part of it; and that was what was at the core of his community’s difference from ours. They were aware of the universe of which they were a part, while we thought of ourselves as disparate and isolated from it. That was why Obsidian’s identity was unchangeable and instantly recognized by his fellows. It was because the dimensions of that identity were measured by the universe surrounding him, in which he was embedded, and of which he was a working part. All at once the gestalt formed, and I understood without words, without symbols, the different, fixed place he and all other thinking minds of his period had in this, their own time and place.
I had produced the golden light again and it had helped me find what I had been seeking. I sat, just feeling it for a moment-then let it go. The light faded, I came back into my ordinary body and smiled at Obsidian.
But he did not smile back. He had stopped talking, and he was staring at me with a startled expression.
“Obsidian—” I began, about to tell him what I now understood.
He vanished.
33
Once again, he did not come back for a while. He was missing all the rest of that day and through the next two days. Under the conditions applying up until five minutes before he left, I would have worried that I had somehow damaged the relationship building between the two of us, and between our people and his interstellar community. Following the moment of light and my sudden access to understanding, I was sure this was not the case; and I tried to reassure the other members of our group who were inclined to worry about his nonappearance.
“It’s not explainable in our words,” I told Ellen, Bill, Doc, Porniarsk and about five others of the community who had been emerging as leaders during the past few weeks. We were all sitting around the fireplace in the library on the second evening, with the windows open to the courtyard and the night sky outside. “But I’m sure I didn’t step on his toes in any way. I can’t tell you how I know it, but I know it.”
“Why did he take off, then?” Bill asked. “Can’t you give us some idea, Marc?”
“He recognized what I was doing—this universe association trick I’ve told you about. I’ve explained that the best I can, and I won’t try to explain it any more now. You’ll have to learn how to do it yourselves if you really want to understand.”
“You’d better start giving us lessons, then,” said Doc. They all laughed.
“I will,” I said. “Seriously, I will. When we’ve got the time.”
“Go on, Marc,” said Bill. “Finish what you were saying. He knew what you were doing... and that’s what disturbed him?”
“Not exactly disturbed, I’d say,” I told them. “He was just surprised. He’s gone back to check with his friends. The way they are —the way I now know they are—that sort of checking’s a responsibility on his part.”
“So that’s why you’re sure he’ll be back?” Bill asked.
“Isn’t that what I’ve been saying?”
“Porniarsk,” said Bill, turning to him, “can’t you help explain any of this? You’re from a more advanced race than we are.”
“By comparison with Obsidian and his associates,” said Porniarsk, “I’m essentially of the same primitiveness as the rest of you. Also, you’ll remember, I’m only an avatar. I’ve no creativity, and no imagination beyond what I acquired when I was produced in the image of Porniarsk. I’m not equipped to speculate or interpret.”
“Well,” said Bill. “Anyway, we’ve all got plenty of work to do while we’re waiting for him to come back. Marc, you’ll speak to him as soon as you can, about whether we can count on them for supplies or assistance in case we need it?”
“Yes,” I said. “I can talk to him about that as soon as he comes back. I was afraid earlier that I couldn’t explain what we wanted without muddying up the idea we intend to be independent here. We still do want to be independent and self-supporting, don’t we?”
I looked around the room. I did not really need the murmurs of agreement from all of them. I only wanted to remind them we were all together on that one point.
“If it’s only a station they’ve got here,” said Leland Maur, a thin, black man in his mid-twenties who was an architect and our construction and mechanical engineering expert, “my feeling’s that this world is ours by right of settlement anyway. Not theirs. We don’t want to start off owing any piece of it to someone else.”