“Like taming a tiger,” I said, “to be a watchdog.”
He frowned for a second. Then his face cleared.
“Oh,” he said. “I see what you mean. Yes. We want to tame and use it.”
“So do I,” I said.
He looked unhappy.
“I was hoping,” he said, “that you’d be beginning to appreciate the difference between someone of your time and people of the present. We’ll be arriving shortly, in a matter of hours in fact; and I thought that, maybe, with the chance we’ve had to talk on the way here, you’d be seeing the vast gulf between what you know and are, and what anyone from the present would have to know and be.”
“It’s not that vast,” I said. “Now, wait a minute—”
He had opened his mouth, ready to speak again. When I held up my hand, he closed it again—but not with a particularly comfortable look on his face.
“All right, look,” I said. “You’ve evolved a whole science. But anyone born into this time of yours can learn it in that person’s lifetime, isn’t that so?”
“Oh, of course,” Obsidian said. “I didn’t mean to sound as if the hard knowledge itself was something more than you could learn. In fact we’ve got techniques and equipment which could teach you what you’d need to know in a matter of days. But the point’s that the knowledge by itself wouldn’t be any use to you; because to use it requires the sort of understanding of the time storm that only growing up and being educated in the present can give you.”
“What you’re saying,” I told him, “is that aside from the intellectual knowledge that’s necessary, I’d need the kind of understanding that comes from knowing a culture and a philosophy. And the cultural part is simply the same philosophy expressed on a nonsymbolic level. So, what it boils down to is understanding your basic philosophy; and you’ve just finished telling me that that’s been shaped by contact over generations with the time storm. All right, I’ve had contact with the time storm. I’ve had some contact with you. And I tell you that your culture and your philosophy isn’t that much different from what I’ve already understood myself where the time storm forces are concerned.”
He shook his head.
“Marc,” he said, “you’re aiming right at a disappointment.”
“We’ll see,” I answered.
“Yes.” He sighed. “I’m very much afraid we will.”
Just as there had been no sensation of taking off when we had left Earth, so there was no sensation of landing when we got to our destination. Simply, without warning, Obsidian broke off something he was saying about the real elements of art existing fully in the concept of the piece of artwork alone-a point with which I was disagreeing, because I could not conceive of art apart from its execution. What if the statue of Rodin’s Thinker could be translated into a string of symbolic marks? Would the intellectual appreciation of those marks begin to approach the pleasure of actually seeing, let alone feeling, the original statue with whatever microscopic incidentals of execution had resulted from the cuttings of the sculptor’s tools and the textural characteristics of the original material? The idea was absurd—and it was not the only absurd idea that I had heard from Obsidian, for all his personal like-ableness and intelligence, during the last five days.
At any rate, he broke off speaking suddenly and got to his feet in one limber movement from the cushion on which he had been seated cross-legged.
“We’re here,” he said.
I looked over at the picture window and still saw only a starscape in the picture window. Just one more, if once again different, starscape—with only a single unusual element about it, which was a large, dark area just to the right and below the center of it. Porniarsk was also watching the window from his post near one of the control consoles, and he saw the direction of my attention.
He trundled across the room and tapped with a tentacle at the screen surface over the dark area.
“S Doradus,” he said.
Obsidian turned his head a little sharply to look at the avatar.
“Aren’t we down on some planetary surface?” I asked Obsidian.
“Oh yes,” he said. The starscape winked out, to be replaced with a picture of a steep hillside littered with huge boulders. The sky was a dark blue overhead and what looked like beehives, colored a violent green and up to twenty or thirty feet in height, were growing amongst the rocks. “The scene you were just looking at is of space seen from the vantage point of this landing spot. Haven’t I mentioned that we nowadays have a tendency to surround ourselves with the type of scene that suits us at the moment, no matter where we are in a real sense?”
“You like the Earth forest scene yourself, then, Obsidian?”
“Not primarily,” he answered me, “but I supposed you did.”
“Thanks,” I said. I felt gratitude and a touch of humbleness. “I appreciate it.”
“Not at all. May I introduce—” he turned abruptly to face the several individuals who were now joining us from somewhere outside the illusion of the Earth forest.
There were only four of them; although my first impression when I saw them entering was that there were more. None of them wore anything resembling clothes or ornaments. In the lead was what I took to be a completely ordinary, male human, until I saw there was a sort of bony ridge, or crest, about three inches deep at the nape of his neck, running from his spine at midback up to the back of his head and blending into his skull there. He was somewhat taller than Obsidian. Next was a motley-colored individual with patches of skin almost as light as my own intermixed with other patches of rust-red and milk chocolate darkness. This one was less obviously humanoid, but seemed plainly female, and of about Obsidian’s size. The third was something like a squid-crab hybrid, with the squid growing out of the back shell of the crab— and he, or she—or for that matter, it—entered the room floating on a sort of three-foot high pedestal. I would have guessed this third individual’s weight at about a hundred pounds or so, Earthside.
The fourth was a jet-black, pipestem-limbed humanoid about three feet tall, with a sour face and no more hair than Obsidian. I was secretly relieved to find that everybody with a generally human shape, nowadays, was not someone I had to get a stiff neck looking up to. As they all came into the room, its area expanded imperceptibly until we stood in the middle of a space perhaps thirty by forty feet. The illusion of Earth forest now only occupied a portion of the perimeter about us. In the remaining space were four other scenes, ranging from a sort of swamp to a maroon-sand desertscape with tall, whitish buttes sticking up dramatically out of the level plain below.
I was so interested in watching all this that I almost missed the fact that Obsidian was trying to introduce me.
“Sunrise—” this was the individual with the neck crest. “Dragger—” (the particolored female); “one of the Children of Life—” (the squid-crab) and “Angel—” (the sour-faced, little black individual).
“It’s a remarkable thing to be able to meet you,” I told them. “I’d like you to know I appreciate the chance.”
“Compliments are unnecessary,” said Dragger, in a somewhat rusty voice. “I suppose we can call you Marc without offending you?”
“Certainly,” I said. “You speak my language very well.”
“It wouldn’t have been practical to have you learn ours,” Dragger said. She seemed to be the speaker for the group. “If you don’t mind, we’ll get on with the test. Would you give your attention to that panel just behind you?”