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and (b) apparently there were means of travelling not merely faster than
fight, but many times faster than fight, 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 bis terms; and he
was dearly 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. Hie mam
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 bad a certain unique
identity, structure, or value-there was no way to express it properly hi our
terms-which was recognized as him 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 mat
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 wan we did. In fact,
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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 hi
a sort of cushion of invisible warmth, apparently just by wanting to do
it-although he insisted that die heat was generated by mechanical, not mental,
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