When the meeting was finally called to order once more, the number of the universal community’s members present had grown from five individuals to thirty-two. The space that arranged itself around us, consequently, was large and had sloping sides around the flat central area; so the spectators looked down on Dragger and me as if they were a crowd in a small arena or a lecture hall.
Dragger began by replaying what had happened on our first meeting. It was a little strange to stand there and see myself, in apparently solid replica, demanding that the five come back and listen to me. When this reached an end with Obsidian’s last words to me, the illusory figures of our former selves winked out and Dragger turned to me.
“You’re going to point out a cultural blindness to us, Marc,” she said. “Go ahead.”
“All right,” I said. “As briefly as possible, then—the first evidence I noticed of a cultural blindness was during the first few days that Obsidian and I talked. We found out then that he had trouble understanding what I meant, in spite of the fact that he’d been trained by your equipment. On the other hand, I was understanding him fairly well, in spite of the fact that he was trying to gather information on my culture, rather than teaching me about yours. You might want to check your records on that, sometime, to see what I mean.”
“We can show it,” put in Dragger.
The illusory figures appeared again. This time, they were Obsidian and myself talking back outside the summer palace. This was a bit of assistance I had not figured on. I stood there, as my image pointed out to Obsidian that he was like someone who had grown up thinking everyone spoke only one language and was having difficulty entertaining the idea that there might be other words possible for a familiar object.
The second set of figures disappeared.
“This started me thinking,” I went on. “From the beginning, in your contact with us, you’ve assumed the only possible solution to my group existing in the same time with you people would be for us to adopt everything that was part of your culture and discard anything of ours that didn’t fit. As with the language situation, your thought seemed to be that there was one, and only one, right way of doing things.”
I stopped and looked at Dragger, giving her a chance to argue this point. But she said nothing and seemed to be merely waiting. I went on.
“As far as I can gather,” I said, “you wouldn’t have had any intention of testing me for present-day abilities, even to this small extent you tried here a few days ago, except that Obsidian had turned up a couple of anomalies in the characters of me and my people that—because it’s a cultural imperative on you to base your conclusions on certainties—made it necessary to check. The first anomaly was that I said we had moved ourselves to your present time deliberately, using the time storm forces to do so.”
I stopped again and looked at Dragger.
“Would you like to replay that particular conversation?” said Dragger. “Very well.”
The figures of myself, Ellen, and Obsidian appeared before us.
“... And, of course, we wanted to collect data toward understanding the accident that brought you here,” Obsidian was saying.
“Accident? We came here deliberately”
“You did?”
“That’s right,” I answered. “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?”
“That’s right. We came here because I wanted to contact you people who were doing something about the time storm—”
“Just a moment. Forgive me” said the figure of Obsidian; and he disappeared.
The figures of Ellen and me also winked out of existence.
“That bit of conversation,” I went on to Dragger and the rest of the audience, “shook Obsidian up, because here I was talking about deliberately making use of time storm forces back in a time long before anyone was supposed to be able to make use of them. The second anomaly, and the one that made it imperative that you test me, was the fact that Obsidian caught me making what I call a universal-identification—I note, by the way, that this is one area of my vocabulary in your languages that you haven’t filled in for me. You have to have a term for it yourselves—”
“We have,” said Dragger. “You just used it. We term it ‘universal-identification’.”
“Sorry,” I said. “My apologies. So you didn’t deliberately leave that part of my vocabulary out, then. At any rate, the point is, once more Obsidian had discovered that I could do something that I shouldn’t be able to do, being from as far back in prehistory as I was. But, making use of time storm forces to move in time or space, and the concept of the individual being able to share the identity of the universe or vice versa, are things you’ve believed belong to your time, not mine.”
“So far,” said Dragger, as I paused to look at her, “I hear nothing to disagree with. You must have more to say than this, though, I assume?”
“I have,” I said. “Let’s call me fish and you mammal, in the sense that I’m, in effect, your prehistoric ancestor. When you found I could breathe air the same way you did and had legs rather than fins, you had to classify me and those with me as something more than fish. So you thought you’d check me out to find if I was mammalian. But your first check turned up the fact that I’m an egg-laying creature. Since mammals, in your experience, don’t lay eggs, you assumed I must be a fish, after all. It didn’t occur to you that I might be something like a platypus.”
I had used the human word for “platypus”; because there was no alternative in their four communication modes. It was true their spoken language gave me the building blocks to construct an equivalent word; but from their point of view, that equivalent would have been a nonsense noise. Dragger and the rest stared at me in silence.
“Platypus,” I said. “An animal from my planet. A monotreme—” Now there was a word that was translatable into some sense in their language. Dragger spoke up.
“Just a minute, Marc,” she said.
There was a delay while the audience got a thorough briefing on the fauna of Earth in general, and that of Australia in particular.
“It’s understood, then?” I said, when this was over. “The platypus lays eggs, but nonetheless it’s a hair-wearing, lactating mammal.”
“Primitive mammal,” said Dragger.
“Don’t strain my analogy,” I said. “The point is, there was a possibility of my people and me belonging in a category which your culture had made you blind to.”
“That’s an assumption,” said Dragger.
“No,” I said. “It’s not. It’d be an assumption only if I was wrong about what you showed me having anything to do with the movement of time storm forces. Now, you were right in saying there was no connection between what you showed me and the storm. But in the overall sense, I was the one who was right, and you were wrong. Because the connection is there; and you’re so culturally blind to it that I’m willing to bet that, even in these last three days, none of you have checked out the possibility that that connection might actually be there.”