Up the Walls of the World

by James Tiptree Jr.

  He flows or leaps along in her wake, exerting all his efforts to hold the contact lightly. Once or twice she checks and changes direction, and he has a fleeting sense of other presences. She must be guiding them around groups of Tyrenni in their path. Or over or under—all directions have the same valence here. How could a disembodied mind know weight?

  Preoccupied, he blunders into the outskirts of another mind, a quick bright impression of many words mixed with musics, and an unmistakably hostile laugh. “Frodo!” Trying to transmit apology, he swerves away. His new “posture” is becoming slightly more natural, but he still feels like a man trying to bicycle a tightwire while holding out an ear-trumpet with both hands.

  And Earthly questions are waking in him again. What in God’s name is this place? It has physical existence, he is sure of that. They are actually moving. But what and where are they?

  As if in answer, another light contact jolts him and a strange word jumps into his mind. “Superconductive circuits.”

  Who’s there? He lunges awkwardly for an instant before recalling how to project? “Chris? Chris Costakis?” The absurdity of human names here in astral nothingness.

  A cryptic emanation brushes him, flavored with acidity and wistfulness. “Keep moving, Doc.”

  It’s gone. So what had been the little man is still here, still his characteristic self.

  Dann resumes his progress, pondering. Superconductors? Chris must have “heard” him puzzling over this place, he must be puzzling too. Superconductors are something that happens in extreme cold, he recalls. Currents cycle endlessly. No friction… He knows nothing of such things. Could they in fact be sustained by, be moving among, some such cold circuitry of space? Could a living mind be compatible with such energies? It seems as likely as anything… The words ghost-program come back to him; he thrusts them away. Lost, gone forever, with everything else. Don’t think of her. Keep moving in this unreality, it’s all that’s left.

  Without knowing it, he must have sent out a sign or squeak of pain. A firmness brushes him, palpable as a finger laid on his lips. Not human, he thinks. Some passing Tyrenni has admonished him. Anguish is not permitted. Well, perhaps he can learn. He must; there are no drugs here.

  Just then he becomes aware of a new extraordinary thing: For some time he has not been in total lightlessness. Out on the edges of his mind he has been sensing something, like seeing at night from the corners of the eye. It is not in his visual system at all, really—but there is something spatial, blurs or presences. Faint swirls, the memories of reflections in dark water; ghostly differentiations too faint to make out except that three of them seem to be moving with him against a background of others. He tries to “look” harder, and they vanish. He thinks of closing his eyes, and slowly they come back: dim, moonlit glimmers, but there. Is this perhaps what they meant by the life-bands, is he starting to “see” life?

  Excitedly he tries again and again, failing more often then he succeeds. He is trying too hard, maybe. Relax. Think away. Yes—there they are again, moving with him. What he takes to be Valerie ahead is clearest, if any of this can be called clear. But what happiness to have something like vision again, even in this faint mode!

  At this moment she checks and he has to strive away from colliding.

  “Look.”

  He can “see” nothing, but somehow the space before them seems different, as if it framed or led up to something. And then he becomes aware that he is perceiving: Some sort of pattern is forming like a hypnagogic scene behind his nonexistent eyelids, a hologram in black light.

  The bright points—why, it is a picture of stars! And as he attends, the scene recedes, growing, and turns into an image he cannot fail to recognize—a great spiral galaxy seen like photos of Andromeda, in tilted view.

  He and the others hover there transfixed, while the transmission changes and unrolls, as Giadoc and Heagran had seen it do at the nucleus. But these are human minds, turned to Earthly modalities.

  “P.A. system,” Chris’ thought touches his abruptly. “Probably a lot of them scattered around.”

  “Frodo says it’s a transit diagram,” Valerie’s “voice” smiles in the void. “It’ll show an arrow: You are here, take Line L2 for Bethesda.”

  And indeed, as Dann “watches,” or experiences the thing, he feels it has a mechanical quality, like a recording. And it seems to resonate from many points, like the abstract voice in a plane. This is your Captain speaking. Have they encountered or triggered some kind of information-post? Is this place an artifact, a ship of some inconceivable race?

  The scene is now “showing” the fleet of star-Destroyers spreading their zone of death around the central fires of the Galaxy. Suddenly the memory of a long-ago summer in Idaho surfaces in Dann’s mind. Comprehension breaks.

  “Good God, it’s a firelane!”

  Feeling Val wince, he modulates down. “It’s a galactic fire-break! If that’s our galaxy. We must be seeing millions of years, speeded up. See that explosion at the center?” He realizes he is transmitting a jumble, half-words, half-pictures, and tries for coherence. “An explosion like that could start a chain reaction, propagate out to all the central stars. Maybe even to the arms. I think those ships or whatever are starting backfires, they’re clearing out a zone around the center to stop the spread. To save the outer stars. But aeons of time, a galaxy—a whole great galaxy—”

  He falls silent before the enormity of the thing.

  Through Valerie’s touch he can feel the reflection of her wonder. Do they truly grasp it? It’s too vast, I don’t grasp it, he thinks numbly, “seeing” the things, whatever they are, complete their task, form up and speed away. Then the whole scene expands and begins to repeat again.

  The four hover before it, hypnotized.

  How can they annihilate matter, Dann wonders, without generating worse energies? Do they somehow disperse it below criticality? Are they beings or machines?

  Suddenly Valerie’s “voice” says excitedly, “Look! Look at those ones going in ahead. Can’t you feel the life there? I think they’re rescuing life, they’re taking living things off before they burn up. Maybe that’s what we’re in.”

  “A rescue squad,” Chris comments tersely.

  “Frodo thinks they’re alive,” Valerie goes on. “Like space-fish. Maybe we’re in a whale, like Jonah.” Her soundless laugh is warm in the endless night. “Or in a kangaroo’s pouch… We better move on and find the others.”

  Her nonexistent fingers tug gently. Dann tears himself away from the mesmeric image and follows, marveling at her composure. She accepts that they are in a thing. Are they jumping between the electrons of a space-fish? Or hurdling interstellar distances? No way to tell. How big is the structure of a mind? The ancient theologians had been sure that angels could throng on a pinhead. Perhaps he is sub-pinhead size? But he is not an angel, none of them are. We are the miraculously undead, he thinks; joy and pain and wonder and tension live among us still.

  They skirt another of the uncanny communicative projectors, triggering it in midscene. As the great galaxy flashes to life in his mind’s eye, Dann muses again on the incredible grandeur of the thing. Beings or machines whose task is to contain galactic fire-storms! Ungraspable in its enormity. Are they manned ships, or could it be instinctive, like great animals? Or maybe devices of a super-race to rescue endangered habitats of life?

  His own mind reels, yet the others with him seem undisturbed. He recalls that their Earthly selves read, what was it, science fiction. Galaxies, super-races, marvels of space. They’re used to such notions. He himself had seen the stars as stars; they saw them as backgrounds for scenarios. Well, maybe theirs was the best preparation for reality, if wherever they are is indeed reality.

  He is distracted by the faint persistent glimmer of more presences that seem to be moving parallel with them. Two, no, three others are here. An instant later he feels a strong, skillful Tyrenni mind-touch, is electrified by recognition. “Tanel!”


  “Tivonel, my dear, is that you? Are you—”

  “Tanel, stop, you’re terrible .” Image of coral laughter leaping away. He subsides abashed. It comes to him that he was “sending” in a sort of pidgin, half-human, half Tyrenni words. Will there, incredibly, be language problems here?

  It seems so. She is “speaking” again, but he retains only enough of her speech to catch a sense of impending events and the names of Heagran and Giadoc. This last comes through with such joy that he is pricked by a ludicrous flash of jealousy. Apparently the famous Giadoc has been found—of course, he called them here. Now his little friend is reunited with her love. For an instant he chafes, until the ultimate absurdity of his reaction here in this gargantuan abyss comes to his rescue.

  It seems they are to go on. But just as he starts, Valerie’s invisible touch checks, and he is jolted by a brush with an unfamiliar, warm complex of mind-stuff.

  “Oh Winnie, I’m so glad you’re all right!” Val’s thought comes while he tries apologetically to back away from their contact. He can hear Winona’s transmission almost as if her voice were in his human ears. “Yes, I have Kenny here too, with his doggie. They’re dreaming of hunting. Oh, hello, Doctor Dann! How wonderful!”

  “Yes.” He disengages, and finds again Val’s light touch tugging him on through nowhere. As they go on amid unfathomable strangeness, Dann broods on the concept of being “all right,” here between the stars without bodies or proper senses, perhaps inside some creature or machine of the void. Well, the alternative was burning to death in mortal bodies; they have in fact been rescued from real death. Maybe the mind really is all, as he had told himself. Maybe to these telepaths the body is less necessary. But he, how will he get on with his mere human mind as his only resource in this terrible isolation? Rescued from death… a coldness touches him. Are they perhaps truly rescued from mortal death, is this condition to be—don’t think of it.

  He is so preoccupied that he almost misses Val’s pull backward, her sense of warning. He stops, but not before he has touched against a hostile iciness—manifestly a barrier.

  He recoils onto the nearest sustaining point like a man teetering on a brink. What menace is here? He tries to “look” in his new averted way, and finally achieves an impression of a great swirl of pale energies confined in a pyramidal or tetragonal shape. It is huge, complex, indefinably sinister. And it is apparently their goal; he can sense other lives waiting nearby.

  There is a short time of confusion. He has lost contact, but he can feel their lives all about him, and waits, trusting that someone will link up with him again. Presently he feels a vague, cloudy presence, and tries hopefully to “receive” at it. But nothing comes to him.

  Then through the bewilderment cuts Tivonel’s mind-send, so clear that it seems to revive his memory of her speech:

  “Winds! Can’t you people get into communication-mode at all?”

  Communication-mode, what could that be? Another mental gymnastic stunt? A ghostly outstretched hand comes into his consciousness and a human voice speaks strongly in his mental ear.

  “Waxman here. Let me help. I have like hands to spare.”

  Slowly Dann succeeds in imagining himself clasping the hand, wondering if it is Ron or Rick. As he does so, an odd kind of extended clarity comes into being. He has a sudden weird picture of them each clasping one of the joined twins’ four hands, as if Waxman were making himself into a kind of astral conference hook-up. Is this perhaps literally true? It would be logical, he thinks daftly.

  “That seems to be a plant you’re in, Dann. Better get loose.”

  He manages to retract himself or shake free from the nebulous presence, without losing Waxman’s grip. As he does so, a mental voice says faintly, “I’ll hang in with Doc here.”

  It’s Chris, he’s sure. So shyness continues into astral realms. He imagines his other hand outstretched in that direction, and feels a small, oddly hard touch.

  “Ready,” says Waxman’s “voice.”

  Next moment Dann is receiving a clear formal transmission which seems to be echoing through Waxman to them all.

  “Greetings, all, and to you, Doctordan. I am Giadoc of Tyree.”

  So this is Giadoc, lost sky-traveler and late occupant of Dann’s own human body! He seems to be sending in English, too. But there is no time for curiosity, the transmission is going on, part-speech, part-pictures.

  “Eldest Heagran and others are with me. We are in what we call the Destroyer.” Image of a great, too-familiar huge blackness, and then in rapid sequence Giadoc’s story unrolls through their linked minds; his awakening and finding Ted Yost, their search for the brain, and Ted Yost’s strange apparent communication with it; then the tale of Giadoc’s own call to them and its consequences. “It came alive as you find it now.”

  During the recital Dann is irresistibly reminded of certain eager young interns he has known. A good type. Well, the young belong to each other, even in darkness and supreme weirdness.

  He is jerked from his benevolence by Giadoc’s urgent news. “The energies around us are sinking back to death or turning off. Unless we can contact this brain again and reverse its condition we are all doomed. Ted Yost seems our only link. We cannot rouse him. Can you help?”

  Before Dann can react, Waxman’s thought comes. “Cryostasis. Maybe it’s packing us up for a trip. Like thousands of years.”

  Dann recalls Rick’s tale about the Japanese time-machine. The imagination is still alive in Waxman but it doesn’t sound so fantastic here. Not at all. He now senses, or thinks he senses, a slow but definite ebbing-down of energies around their perimeter. The murmurs of life seem to be slowing, lessening. Is it drawing closer? He shudders.

  “I don’t want to be put to sleep for thousands of years,” Val protests. Frodo’s thought echoes her.

  “Why did it bring us here if it didn’t want to rescue us?” Winona’s mind asks. The sense of normal conversation is so absurdly strong in this incredible situation; for an instant Dann is back in the Deerfield messhall.

  “Maybe it wants to use us as fuel,” Frodo suggests. “Maybe it runs on life.”

  “No…” Winona “says” hesitantly. “No, I don’t get that feeling.”

  “ Whatever, we have to get through to it before it turns us all off,” Waxman’s thought comes decisively. “Who wants to try contacting Ted?”

  “It’s dangerous,” Val comments. “Ted’s a strong dreamer.”

  There is a pause filled with almost-speech, and suddenly Chris sends right through Dann, so loudly it makes him resonate: “I’ll try if Doc’ll hold onto me.”

  “Right, good,” Waxman replies. “Over here, Chris. Be careful.”

  Dann can only marvel at their sense of organization in this weird modality. He feels more tugging, and their misty constellation seems to revolve slowly, until the half-seen life that must be Chris hanging to him converges toward a vague small pallor. Can that be poor Ted’s mind, curled around an isolated node? Chris seems to change balance, accompanied by a tightening mental hand-clasp; surprisingly, Chris’ “hand” feels bigger now, a full man’s hand.

  “Hang tight, Doc.”

  Dann strengthens the imaginary grip, beginning roughly to understand what is involved here. Chris is proposing to enter a hallucinated mind, perhaps as dangerous as the panic-vortex he himself had experienced. Belatedly, he remembers to cling hard onto Waxman’s grip too.

  “Okay.”

  There is a sense of he knows not what happening at Chris’ end, and all at once Dann finds himself invaded by a brilliant vision of sunlit tropical waters, streaming foam. The vision comes in fragmentary bursts; through it he manages to maintain his mental holds. But it is hard. Now he is feeling his own body rush through the water, flinging spray from his flanks as he leaps. Good God, is he a porpoise? Hang on. Even though with flippers splashing, he is hanging on through sun and green water and a confused sense of shouting—until suddenly the vision snaps out, and he is back in dark spac
e, feeling Chris’ mind-touch tremble against his own.

  “No good.” Chris transmits weakly, like a man gasping. “I couldn’t break him out. He made me into a goddamn fish. The computer screen’s still there, I could see the words NEGATIVE and HELP CANCEL. He won’t look anymore, he’s in heaven.”

  A dismayed silence, humming with stray half-thoughts. Then Giadoc’s “voice” repeats clearly, “He is our only link.”

  “If we all try to break him out together I think he’d go crazy,” Waxman sends. Other minds agree. “That wouldn’t help.”

  They fall silent again, conscious of the ominous quietude creeping closer and closer, conscious of the cryptic fortress of energies so near at hand yet so impregnable. Abruptly Winona’s thought explodes in their minds:

  “Look! Look, inside that brain or whatever! Don’t you see?”

  What, where? Dann tries to “look” at the thing, loses it, finally gets a focus long enough to see that its interior is now in slow, intricate motion, as if strands of pale, cold light mingled in complex dance. One spot seems brighter than the rest.

  “That’s Margaret in there?” Winona shakes them all. “It’s Margaret! I’d recognize her anywhere.”

  Margaret?

  Margaret, his lost one, here? All at once Dann’s human life comes pouring back through him as if an inner dam had broken. The bits and pieces he has been idling with suddenly fall together, making overwhelming order.

  The great black shape that swallowed her, the Destroyer, that’s where they are. She fled into this. Is it possible she’s still alive, in whatever mode of life this is, is she trapped in there?

  He focusses with all his might in the crazy indirect way he can “see” here. That bright spot. Can it be the very flame, the life-spark he had followed so desperately? Yes! Yes—it is she! He is sure.