Up the Walls of the World

by James Tiptree Jr.

  Oh God of horrors, no. It is a last time eddy, contravening the release of death.

  The savagery of it. Are they doomed to be brought back endlessly, to die again and again?

  He can only watch helplessly, too horror struck to think. But then he notices that this time-change seems different. The others had transported him instantaneously to the past. This seems to be a strange, slow, regress, as though time itself was somehow being rolled backward in a dreamlike stasis.

  The death-cries around him have faded, the world is hushed. Even the all-devouring shrieking of the Sound has stilled. A sense of something unimaginable impends.

  With a lightless flash the sky splits open. Through the hush there strikes down on them a great ray or beam of power beyond comprehension, pouring in on them from beyond the world.

  From the heart of death a call comes without voice.

  COME TO ME. COME!

  Chapter 19

  He is alive!

  The pinpoint triumph of his own life blooms into being in the void: He, Giadoc, lives!

  He is no more than an atom of awareness, yet as soon as he feels himself existent the skills of a Hearer of Tyree wake to ghostly life. He gropes for structure and vitality, strives to rebuild complexity, to energize and reassemble his essential subsystems. Memory comes; he achieves preliminary coherence, strenghtens. At first he fancies he is suffering the aftermath of a childhood rage, when he had been required to reorganize himself unaided.

  But this is not that far-off time, not Tyree. As consciousness grows he knows himself totally alone in infinite emptiness and darkness. He has fallen out of all Wind into some realm beyond being. And he is without body, fleshless and senseless, re-forming himself on nothing at all.

  Characteristically, marveling curiosity awakes. How can this be? Life must be based on bodily energy—yet he lives! How?

  He possesses himself of more memory and recalls his last instants when the Beam had shriveled, abandoning him in space. His last perception was of the hideous Destroyer ahead and his own fading remnants plunging toward it. Has he somehow entered the Destroyer itself, and lived? But how? On what?

  He checks his being cautiously—and finds, he doesn’t knows what: a point-source, a tiny emanation unlike anything he knows. It’s totally nonliving, weirdly cold and steady. Yet it nourished him, seems to support his life here in the realms of death between the worlds.

  How marvelous and strange!

  An idea comes. Perhaps this Destroyer is not only deathly, perhaps it is really dead. A huge dead animal of space. Could he be subsisting on the last life of one of its dying ganglia?

  Giadoc has heard of dubious attempts to tap the fading energies of dead animals like the fierce little curlu. Perhaps he has done something of this sort on an enormous scale. If this is the case, he has not long to live. But the things of space are vast and slow, he reminds himself; the huge energies of a Destroyer must take time to decay. Perhaps he will have time to explore, to try to find some way to relocate the Beam.

  As he thinks this the grievous memory of his world comes to full life and nearly overwhelms him. Tyree—beloved, far Tyree now under fiery destruction, and Tivonel with it, lost forever. And his son Tiavan, his proud one who betrayed him, committed life-crime and fled with his child to that grim alien world…

  For a moment his mind is only a fierce cry to the bright image of all he loves and has lost.

  But then his disciplines and skills come to him. Ahura! This is no time to feel. Resolutely he disengages the urgent pain; as no human could, he compacts and encapsulates it in the storage-cycles of his mind. Now for what time is left him he must see what he can do, find what this unknown level of existence holds.

  He concentrates intently on the void about him. He has no bodily senses; he is in black silence, without pattern or pressure-gradient or change. He can receive nothing here but the emanations of life itself. If any structures of the Destroyer are near him, they give off no life-signs. For a time he receives only emptiness and darkness so deep that despair chills him. He is foolish; what can he hope for here?

  But then suddenly—there, in that direction—is a tiny life-transmission, at extreme range. Something living is here besides himself. What is it, can he reach it?

  As another had done before him but with infinitely greater skill, he extends himself exploratorily toward the far life-signal. Presently he touches another of the strange unliving energy-points. Without hesitation he flows and coalesces himself around it and reaches out again. Yes; there are more here, he can move as he will! Splendid.

  Jubilantly he moves onward through nowhere, wondering as he goes whether he is actually enormous, spread out like a vast space-cloud. Or perhaps he is as tiny as a point? No matter! his essential structure is here, he has emotion, memory, thought. Right now he is feeling an acute joy of discovery-in-strangeness, he is an explorer of the dimensionless void. A mutinous thought of Tivonel intrudes; perhap this is the joy that females speak of, the pleasures of venturing into unknown realms. Certainly it is quite unFatherly, though it requires all his male field-strength. It does not occur to him that he is brave; such concepts are of the female world.

  The signal is much stronger now, he is closing on it. It takes on definition: it is a transmission of pain.

  He slows, studying it. The pain is bewilderment, despair. Oh, winds—it is only another lost here like himself!

  Instantly his Fatherly instincts surge to comfort it, but he makes himself stop. He must be wary, he has no idea of the life-strength of the thing. Cautiously he flows closer ready to leap away, extending only a receptor-node. What manner of life can it be?

  The thing seems not to sense him at all. Its field is apparently drifting or flaring hopelessly in all directions like a lost child. His urge to Father it is terribly strong, but he makes himself wait.

  Presently a wandering thought-tendril brushes him, too chaotic for comprehension. Then another—and this time he can catch definite imagery among the emanations of woe. Why, he recognizes them! They are of the alien world that Giadoc has just mind-traveled to!

  Undoubtedly this is a mind displaced by the life-criminals of Tyree. Certainly it’s not dangerous to him, and it’s in despair.

  Giadoc yields to his Father-soul.

  All in one motion he flows to a nearer base, forming his life into a Father-field. Working by blind mind-touch alone, he extends himself delicately around the ragged eddies of the other, seeking to envelop its disorder within a shell of calm.

  At his first touch the alien flares up in terror, launching frightened demands.

  Calm, calm, you’re safe. Don’t be afraid anymore. Giadoc has englobed the other now, he sends in waves of reassurance as he starts the work of resolving the eruptions of fright and draining down the fear.

  The other being struggles ignorantly, yielding and subsiding in area after area. As Giadoc penetrates tactfully, he is pleased to notice that a linkage to the language he had used on that world still remains with him. He can make out the recurrent words, I’m dead. And then images of queer pale aliens with wings. Are you an angel? Am I in—?

  He ignores these incomprehensible transmissions and merely encourages it subverbally. Calm, calm. Gather yourself in, be round. I’m helping you. You’re safe, Father’s here. The being is dreadfully disorganized. When he judges its fear is sufficient attenuated, he presses in with a mild counter-bias to stop the topmost commotions. It has another surge of terror, and then accepts a simple surface organization. Is it perhaps a child, or a little crazy from field-stress? For that matter, how sane is he himself now? He finds a functional speech center and links directly to it. “Be round, little one. Round like an egg.”

  “What—doing to me?” The other leaps, Giadoc taps more fear away from the thought. He does not want to drain it too deeply lest it go into sleeping mode. A part of his mind wonders what in the name of the wind he will do with this helpless alien anyway. But that does not worry him while he is still in
Father-mode. “Calm, round, you’re all right now. I’m here.”

  At this moment the alien seems to gather itself internally, and suddenly bursts up in a verbal thought so strong that Giadoc gets every word.

  “I’m not an egg! I’m Ensign Theodore Yost. Who are you? Where are we?”

  Startled and delighted in his Father-heart, Giadoc perceives that the alien has more field-strength than he had believed. Moreover, he recognizes it now that it is more fully conscious.

  It’s the young male with the injured body, Tedyost, the one who had longed for the place of beauty.

  He relaxes his Father-field and transmits a careful minimal link, an engram of mind-contact, hoping not to frighten Tedyost further. When this seems to be accepted he transmits through in verbal mode: “Welcome Tedyost. I too am lost in this place like you. I am Giadoc of the world of Tyree. We have met before.”

  Far from being frightened, the other flails toward him questioningly. It seems to be trying to form a crude receptor-node under the deafening tangle of “Where? Who? What—?”

  What can he do with this creature? Giadoc transmits a strong wave of desire for calm. “Please try to control your thoughts, I am receiving you violently. Will you allow me to help you so we can understand each other?”

  “Help!— Yes—” The other all but thrashes into him. Giadoc recalls how totally unaware these aliens are, how he had probed them freely.

  Disregarding all courtesy, he gathers the blind demands and disengages their emotion. At the same time he goes into the nearest layers, modeling and firming a proper receptor-field. “Calm, Tedyost, I hear you. Hold your mind thus, touch slightly and steadily. I will pass you my memory of this place, I will show you all I know.”

  At length, in timeless emptiness and darkness, Giadoc has the other quieted into rough receptive-mode. He forms a compact memory of his experiences and passes it into the alien’s mind, ending with his guess about the huge dead space-animal they are in. “We call it the Destroyer.”

  The other being churns with excitement, it seems delighted and astonished by the communication. Then it surges with effort, apparently trying to do likewise. Yes—a projection rushes at him, surprisingly powerful and half-bodied in verbal shreds. “Destroyer! We’re in a ship!”

  Giadoc sorts out the transmission, fascinated by the alien sensory data. As he expected, Tedyost too had found himself rushing through emptiness, then intercepted by dark and dread; almost extinguished. He too had fought back to life with the aid of the strange energy. But he had thought himself marooned, unable to move. The information that they are mobile fills him with such pleasure that Giadoc suspects again that Tedyost is not entirely sane.

  Moreover, his image of their predicament is bizarre; where Giadoc deduces an animal, Tedyost believes they are in a huge lifeless pod, cold hollow “ship” moving through space. With this comes the intense yearning Giadoc had read before, the beautiful vision of streaming wind or liquid, vast and rushing with a myriad lights—a tremendous turbulent glory outside the darkness. Tedyost longs toward this with a pure fervor. “I want to see out!”

  In his thought also is a strong directional urge: Giadoc must show him how to move at once toward some kind of nucleus or central control point. “We have to find the bridge! The captain will help us.”

  Giadoc considers. The idea of a monstrous pod is fantastic, but Tedyost’s notion about a central nucleus is promising. If this is an animal it should have a brain, and the dead or dying brain should have more of the strange energy than the ganglia out here. If they could reach it, perhaps he could draw on its power to send out a signal, perhaps the Hearers on Tyree could detect him and restore the Beam. A long chance and a faint hope, but what better?

  Only, in which direction should we seek? The Destroyer’s brain, if it exists, must be composed of this nonliving power which does not register on the life-bands. And aside from the clamor of Tedyost’s mind, he can detect nothing but emptiness around them. Nevertheless, he must try.

  He transmits back agreement with the plan of finding the nucleus or “bridge,” and a strong desire that Tedyost learn to damp himself so they can listen for some emanation which will tell them where to go.

  After some confusion, Tedyost achieves a creditable silence, and Giadoc bends all his attention to the structure of this place. But he detects nothing; no discrepancy of any sort distinguishes one direction from another.

  Tedyost reacts stoically to this information, and sends back an image of an expanding spiral course which he calls a “search pattern.”

  Well, if they must set off blindly, they must. But Giadoc recalls that there is one more thing they can try. It’s embarrassing, permitted only to very young children. For an adult, conceivable only in extreme emergency. Well, is this not an extreme emergency? Any embarrassment is irrelevent here—although to a proud Hearer of Tyree, it is real.

  Sternly repressing his queasiness, Giadoc transmits an image of the method, in a matrix of apology-for-crudeness.

  To his surprise, the other does not seem disturbed. Perhaps he doesn’t realize the depth and intimacy of the procedure. Giadoc amplifies. “This is a thing no adult would tolerate on my world. It means our minds will be open to each other at every level. Do you truly understand?”

  Still the other doesn’t hesitate. “You’re the expert. Go ahead.”

  What an extraordinary creature! Very well.

  “Hold your whole mind as relaxed as possible while I merge. If I detect any signal you will receive it too. Bear the location tightly in mind; it will vanish when we separate.”

  “Right.”

  Distasteful, self-conscious, Giadoc brings himself into full close confrontation with the other life-field, following its delicate play of biassing energies precisely. Then abruptly, he sends the complementary configuration through his own field surface—and with a soundless snap the two minds fuse tight together.

  It is dizzying—he is doubled, swamped with alien emotions, meanings, life. Alien energies rush through him and he has to fight from shrinking away, from knowing himself known. For moments his purpose is lost. But then his greater strength asserts itself; he pushes all else aside and draws the doubled energies into receptor focus. This is their one chance. He tunes their joint sense-power hungrily for the faintest discrepancy in the unknown void around.

  At first nothing comes. He strains harder, pulling on all Tedyost’s strength. Then suddenly he is rewarded.

  There—on that bearing—is a faint spark. A life-source!

  He allows a moment for the perception to strike through their joined minds. Then with an effort he begins the work of rebiassing himself, disentangling his configuration area by area from their combined world of thought. As he does so he holds desperately to the now-vanishing directional vector he had perceived.

  The act of separation is disorienting and curiously saddening. As the opposing bias peels them apart, he feels he is leaving behind his own thoughts, dreams, understandings, a part of his very self. But he is a Hearer; he manages to bring his mind out smoothly, in the physical direction in which he believes the far point lay.

  “Did you perceive it?”

  “Yes. Hey, man, I see what you mean! I felt—”

  “No time. Come, stretch yourself this way.”

  And thus fumblingly, in tenuous touch, the two tiny sparks of life begin to traverse the immense icy blackness. It is a long journey, increasingly interrupted by course-corrections in which Giadoc feels less and less confidence. Has the invisible source moved, or are they simply lost? And will the unknown cold energy-points on which they move continue to hold out?

  He could of course again perform the overwhelming merger that would double their sensory range. But he shrinks from it, even were Tedyost willing. In his weak state here, he cannot be sure that he could again achieve complete separation of identity. Even now he feels traces of a peculiar, unTyrennian comradeship that warns him that something of Tedyost will always linger with him. What i
f he were to become permanently mingled with this crazy untrained alien mind? And yet, as the enormous emptiness presses on him, he begins to wonder if there is any other way.

  Just as he is coming reluctantly to consider it, the emptiness is broken by a point of presence. Yes—the strange signal is there, only somewhat to one side.

  “Can you sense it, Tedyost?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “Come, then. This way!”

  Movement remains possible. The emanation strengthens.

  Finally Tedyost senses it too. “That’s—life?”

  “Yes. But strange, strange. I don’t recognize it.”

  The peculiar signal strengthens as they make their way closer. It comes to resemble a confined cloud or mist of energic veins, threaded with life like a huge flickering plant-form. Giadoc has doubts. Is this only a plant, or some system of dead energy like those he had seen in Tedyost’s world?

  But no; fused in among the blurred flickerings is the strong output of a living mind. It seems calm, not at all troubled. And it does not appear dead or injured. Evidently it belongs here, wherever here is. A great cool hatred laps at the margins of Giadoc’s thoughts, stronger than any he has ever felt. Is he perceiving the actual mind of a killer of worlds? Is this the brain of the Destroyer? Perhaps his duty is to kill it, if such a thing is possible here.

  “That’s the captain! He’ll help us!” Tedyost is transmitting excitedly.

  At that moment Giadoc’s outstretched being touches, not more life-points, but a wall of deathly cold. He recoils, searching out gingerly. The barrier seems to extend in all directions and its very substance is frightening. Moreover it is impossible to tell distance; the brain may be far beyond it or very close.

  “We are blocked. We cannot go closer.”

  “There has to be a way to call to him.”