Gordon R. Dickson (54 page)

"Ellen," and he shook
hands with Ellen, "my name's Obsidian."

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.

For reference purposes, in the case
of those who had never met him, he was referred to by a code word or symbol
that essentially told where he had been born and what he had been doing since.
But this was never used except for that sort of reference. For ordinary
communicative purposes he had a number of—nicknames is not the right word for
them, but it is the closest I can come— depending on how the individual
referring to him associated him. The most common of these nicknames, the one he
favored himself, and the one generally in use here among his fellows on Earth,
was a name that compared him to the mineral we call "obsidian" and
since it had been established, during the month or so they had been recording
our speech, that we would recognize that word, he had identified himself with
it when he first met Ellen and me.

It was not just an arbitrary
difference from us, this matter of names, it seemed. It was something much more
important than that. The whole name business had to do with the different way
he and his community of humans and nonhumans thought and worked; and until I
could understand why they did their naming that way, a vital chunk of their
culture would remain a mystery to me. Accordingly, I struggled to understand
and to make him explain himself so that I could understand.

The name business had something to
do with identity in that word's most basic sense, which was tied to occupation
among them much more than it would be with us, which was, in turn, tied to a
different sort of balance between individual and group responsibilities—which
was all somehow connected with the fact that they had not approached us the
moment we had appeared here, but had hid and studied us instead.

It had not been because they were in
any way afraid of us. Fear seemed to have a more academic quality to Obsidian
than it did to me. They had been obligated to be able to communicate with us
before they could appear. Consequently, they had stayed out of sight of Doc in
the plane—which was apparently not as hard as it might seem, since they used
structures much less than we did. In fact, our buildings were almost a little
forbidding to Obsidian, which was why he had refused my invitation to come
inside the summer palace. Apparently, he was about as attracted to the interior
of the summer palace as I might have been to the idea of a neighborly crawl
through the tunnels and dens of a human-sized mole. Obsidian's people built
observatories and such, but these were generally constructed without walls or
roof.

Apparently they did not need as much
protection from the weather as we needed. When I asked about this, Obsidian
demonstrated how he could envelop himself in a sort of cushion of invisible
warmth, apparently just by wanting to do it—although he insisted that the heat
was generated by mechanical, not mental, means. But beyond this, it was obvious
to me early in our discussions that he had a far greater tolerance for
temperature extremes and the discomfort of his physical surroundings than I
did. In spite of the chilliness of the spring mornings or the heat of the
afternoon, he showed the same indifference to the temperature and wore the same
kilt, no more, no less. It was not until the third day that I discovered he was
only wearing that out of courtesy to us, it having been established by them
that we had some kind of clothing taboos.

It was about the third day, also,
that a great many other things began to make sense. Surprisingly, my ability to
communicate improved much more swiftly than did his; so much so, in fact, that
he commented on it with unconcealed awe. The awe was almost more unsettling to
me than the other mysteries about him. It gave me an uneasy feeling, mentally,
to think that these people of the far future might not be so superior to us after
all; that they might, in fact, be inferior in some ways. Obsidian and I worried
over the communication discrepancy together and finally concluded that,
paradoxically, Obsidian was in a sense being inhibited by the fine command of
the spoken language he had exhibited the first time he appeared.

It emerged that his group was not
used to translating concepts. Sounds and symbols, yes. These varied from race
to race among them in infinite variety. But, just as they could agree on the
unique identity of any single individual, they were apparently able to agree on
the perfect value of any concept, so that translation, in that sense, was never
necessary. When we first appeared, they had set up recording devices to pick up
every sound made in our community and channelled these into a computer-like
device which had sorted them out and deduced the rules and vocabulary of our
language, with the observed or implied denotative values of each sound. With
this done, they had pumped the information into the head of Obsidian and sent
him to talk to us, confident that he could now communicate.