Up the Walls of the World

by James Tiptree

  But perhaps there is no one up there, only mindless plants or animals. She has been told that Tyree is exceptionally favorable for intelligent life with its rich eternal Wind. Perhaps only here could minds develop and look toward other worlds? How lonely….

  But her buoyant spirit will not be dashed. How lucky to live at the time when all these mysteries are becoming known! In the old days people believed the Companions were spirits above the Wind, mythical food-beasts, or dead people. Even today, some people down in Deep hold that there are good and bad spirits up here: idiots who’ve never been out of Deep, never sensed the sky except through thick life-clouds. Her Father warned her that such beliefs may grow, now that Deep is becoming so self-sufficient. Tivonel is in no danger of such stupidities, up here where she can receive the blazing music and life-emanations of the sky!

  But another life-signal has grown strong and jolts her from her musings. Hearers, quite close above! Tivonel realizes abashedly that her own emanations must be equally clear to them, perhaps impinging on their work. Hurriedly she compacts her awareness, nulling her output as much as possible. How awful if she has already offended Giadoc!

  She jets slowly up along the Wall, very cautiously scanning for Giadoc’s distinctive field. She can always recognize that characteristic intensity, so open yet so focused-beyond.

  At the end of a line of other fields she detects him—Giadoc, but grown even stronger and more strange! He must be preoccupied, experimenting with something unheard-of. All the Hearer’s emanations are weird, intense but muted. Bursting with curiosity, she pushes through a tangle of vegetable life and hears the lights of his voice. How deep and rich, a true Father! Yet strange, too.

  His tone becomes more normal, is answered by other Hearers. They seem to be finished with whatever they are doing. Keeping herself as null as possible, she clears the plants and lets her mantle form his name in a soft rosy light-call. “Giadoc?” No response. She repeats, embroidering with the yellow-green of her own name. “Giadoc? It is Tivonel here.”

  To her joy comes an answering deep flash. “Tivonel, Egg-bearer-of-my-child!”

  “Do I disturb? I came to see you, dear-Giadoc.”

  “Welcome.” In a moment he appears, swooping toward her. How huge he is! Overjoyed, she lets her own field stream at him, her mantle rippling questions.

  “Are you well? Have you discovered many marvels? Do you recall—” She checks herself in time and changes it to, “Is Tiavan well? I have been away. I was up in the Wild, we rescued the Lost One’s children.”

  “Yes, I heard.” He hovers before her, resplendent. “Tiavan-our-child is well. He has decided to study with Kinto, to become a Memory-Keeper—when his Fatherhood is over, of course. Was your mission successful?”

  His signals are in the friendliest mode, but so formal. He can’t have thought of at all, she tells herself, meanwhile shyly proffering her field-engram. “I have prepared a memory for you, dear-Giadoc. I thought you would like to know of our discoveries.”

  He hesitates, then signals “Accept with pleasure.” A dense eddy of his mind-field comes out and touches hers.

  The contact jolts her deliciously; she has an instant of struggle to keep unformed thought from pouring into the memory. Then she becomes aware that he is passing her a terse account of Tiavan. Loathe to break the exciting contact, she accepts it lingeringly. Just as he separates himself she finds the impudence to let a tiny tickle of polarization tickle his withdrawing field. They snap apart, but he makes no acknowledgment. Instead he only says, deep and Father-like, “Truly praiseworthy, dear-Tivonel. You have learned how to apply your wild energies.”

  She doesn’t want a Father. And his field wasn’t really Fatherly at all.

  “Thank you for the news of Tiavan,” she signs. How can she get closer to him? Impulsively, she flashes, “Is anything wrong, Giadoc? You seem so reserved. Is it that I intrude?”

  “Nothing personal, dear-Tivonel,” he replies, still formal. Then his tone softens. “Much has been happening here. You have been out of touch a long time. There has been news from Near Pole which has affected us all.”

  Near Pole! It’s the last thing she wants to hear of. But he sounds so serious, and he has never attracted her more. Groping for a topic to keep him from leaving, she asks, “Is it true that you have actually touched the lives of beings on other worlds? How incredible, Giadoc, how fascinating.”

  “You don’t know how incredible,” he answers quietly. “You can have no true concept of the distances. Even I find it hard to grasp. But yes, we have touched. Some of us have even been able to merge briefly.”

  “What did you learn? I was just hoping that other intelligences are out there. Are they like us?”

  “Very unlike. Yes, a few are intelligent. But very, very strange.”

  His tone has become warmer, more intense. “If only I could try it,” she laughs flirtatiously to remind him of her femaleness, and allows another tiny potential-bias to tease at his field.

  But he only signs somberly, “It is dangerous and harsh. Much more painful than your Lost Ones, dear-Tivonel.”

  “But you do it for pleasure, for strangeness, don’t you, Giadoc? Perhaps you are a bit of a female at heart!”

  “It is interesting.” Suddenly his field changes, his mantle signs in deep red emotion, “I do love what you call strangeness. I love exploring the life beyond my world. It will be my work so long as we all survive.”

  To her surpirse, he ends on an archaic light-pattern meaning over-mastering devotion. But this is not what she was hoping for at all.

  “How unFatherly,” she almost says—and then something in his tone reaches her. “What do you mean, as long as we survive?”

  “The trouble I spoke of. You’ll learn when you go down.” His voice is grave again.

  Exasperated, she can only wish that they were in the wind, not in this eddy. If she could move straight upwind of him, that would convey! I’d do it, too, she thinks. But here there is nothing to do but say it.

  “Giadoc.” Her aura comes to formal focus, compelling his attention. “I have lived and had valuable experience, don’t you think? It seems to me I am entitled to a second child. An advantaged egg,” she signs explicitly. “I thought—dearest-Giadoc, I have been thinking so much of you. Do you remember us, how beautiful it was?”

  “Dearest-Tivonel!” Another wave of emotion sweeps him, his field is intense. But still he does not polarize.

  Stunned by his rejection, she flashes at him, “How you’ve changed! How unFatherly you are! So I don’t please you, now.” She turns to go.

  “Tivonel, Tivonel!” His tone is so wild and sad it stops her. “Yes,” he says more quietly, “I have changed, I know. It is the effect of outreach, of touching alien lives. But there is more than that. Dearest-Tivonel, listen. I cannot bring a child into this world now.” His tone is white, solemn. “You will learn it for yourself. We are all about to die soon.”

  “Die?” Astounded, she opens her field in receptive-mode. But he only signs verbally, “When you understand what has been observed you’ll realize. Our world, Tyree, is about to end.”

  “You mean, like the time of the great explosion? But that’s a joke!” Angrily she lets her mantle glitter sarcasm. Everyone knows the old stories of how the end of Deep was falsely foretold. “We’re safe now, you know the forces of the Abyss are far away.”

  “This isn’t from the Abyss. Destruction is coming from beyond the sky.”

  “You mean another fireball? But—”

  “Worse, much worse. Didn’t you listen to any of the news from Near Pole before you left?”

  “Oh, something about dead worlds—”

  Agony hits her. Pain! What hideous pain! A searing life-grief is ripping through her field, feeding back anguish, numbing her senses.

  Barely able to hold herself in the wind, she contracts her mind desperately, trying to escape. It’s a blast on the life-bands, like a million-fold amplification of the tiny death-c
ries of the Wild. But so strong, unbearable. With shame she realizes she’s transmitting waves of personal suffering as the shocking pangs sweep through her. She struggles to hold herself null, but she can’t. The torment is building toward some lethal culmination—

  Suddenly it slackens. It takes her a moment to understand that Giadoc is shielding her. He has thrown a Father-field around her, holding the terrible signals off as if she was a child.

  “Hold on, it will pass.” He transmits courage. Grateful and ashamed, she reorders herself within his sheltering field. The pain is still quite severe, it must be horrible for him. She finds she has let herself merge with him like a baby, and tries tactfully to withdraw. As she does so she feels strange new emotions in herself; he must have let her touch him deeply, an unheard-of intimacy among adults.

  Humbly but proudly she detaches herself. The hurt is less now.

  “No more need.” She signals intense-thanks.

  “It is passing. Be careful, dear-Tivonel.” Slowly he withdraws protection. The pain is still there, but fading, passing from her nerves. They find they have become entangled in a plant-thicket and right themselves.

  “What was it, Giadoc? What hurt so?”

  “The death-cry of a world,” he tells her solemnly. “The death-cry of a whole world of people like ourselves.”

  The deep sadness in his tone affects her; she understands now.

  “Here at the Poles we receive them very strongly. Near Pole has been hit by them all this past year, the life-bands there are torn with these cries. World after world is being killed. Some die slowly, some very fast.”

  She is still disoriented by horror and wonder. “But they’re so far away.”

  “The deaths are coming closer to Tyree all the time, Tivonel. Near Pole says there are now only five living worlds between us and the destroyed zone.”

  She tries to grasp it, to recall her lessons. “The Sounds are so crowded above Near Pole, aren’t they? Are they colliding, like people in a storm?”

  “No. It’s not natural.” He pauses, gravely expanding his field. “Something out there is killing worlds. Deliberately murdering them. We don’t know why. Perhaps they are eating them.”

  “How hideous…. But—how can you know?”

  “We have touched them,” he signs, his words tinged with deep green dread. “We have touched the killers. They are alive. A terrible, incomprehensible form of life between the worlds.”

  At his words, she finds in herself a fragment of his memory: a terrifying huge dark sentience, unreachable and murderous. That—approaching their own dear Tyree? Her mantel turns pale.

  “And one of the beings, whatever they are, has passed this way alone. It is out beyond Far Pole now, destroying. Undoubtedly that was what we felt. It may be preparing to destroy us.”

  “Can’t you turn its mind, the way we do animals?”

  “No. Iro tried and was injured by the mere contact. It’s inconceivably alien, like touching death.” With an effort, he changes his tone to the gold of affectionate-converse. “Now you understand, dear-Tivonel. I must go back to our work. A committee from Deep is coming up to discuss the situation.”

  “Yes.” She signs reverent-appreciation. But then her energetic spirit breaks out in protest. How can she leave him now? How can she go back and occupy herself with some meaningless activity while all is in danger?

  “Giadoc! I want to stay here and help you. I’m strong and hardy, I can hunt for you and keep your Hearers supplied. Please, may I stay?”

  His great mind-field eddies curiously toward her. “Are you serious, Tivonel? I’d like nothing better than to have your bright spirit near me. And it’s true we don’t have the food we need. But this is dangerous and it will go on. To the death, perhaps.”

  “I undersatnd,” she signs stubbornly. “But I proved on the mission that I can stand boredom and persevere, even if I’m a female. The Fathers said so. I was useful.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Please, Giadoc. I feel—I feel very strongly about you. If there’s danger I want to be with you.”

  His mantle has taken on deep, melodious ringing hues, his field is intense. She has never thought him so beautiful. Suddenly he flares out, “How I wish we had met again in better times! Yes, dearest-Tivonel, I remember us. Even if I’ve fallen in love with the strangness of the sky, I remember us. Perhaps I can show you—” He falls silent, and adds quietly, “Yes, then. I’m sure Lomax, our chief, will agree. But—”

  She is deeply happy. “But what, Giadoc?”

  “I fear that what you experience here will dim your brightness forever.”

  Chapter 6

  Thursday morning means the Military Air Transport terminal, a scruffy extension of the National Airport warren. It reminds Doctor Daniel Dann of a small-town airport. Crowded, not many uniforms visible, the air-conditioning already beginning to fail.

  He makes his way around a party escorting a famous senator—much shorter than his photos—and gets caught among five plump women gretting a saluki dog. Beyond them is Lieutenant Kendall Kirk’s yellow hair.

  “Ah, there you are, Dan.” Noah Catledge bustles up. “Two to go. Good morning, Winona.”

  Winona turns out to be T-22, the Housewife, in a turquoise knit pantsuit. “This is so exciting!” She giggles up at him.

  “Put your bag over there,” Kirk says officiously. To Dann’s surprise, Kirk also has a dog on a lead, a large, calm, black Labrador bitch. He recalls that Deerfield is supposed to be in a forest preserve. Evidently one of the military’s many private hunting grounds.

  He looks around, telling himself not to hope. Beyond Winona is the bearded, leukemic ensign, Ted Yost. And there’s the little man, K-30—wait a minute: Chris Costakis. Beside him are the two girls, W-11 and W-12, the Princess and the Frump. The Frump is a thin, short, sullen creature in grimy brown jeans with a black knapsack. Beside her the Princess looks like Miss America, pink-cheeked, with a wide, white-toothed Nordic smile. Dann notices the meanness of his thought, knows what’s the matter with himself.

  Next minute nothing’s the matter. Behind the senatorial party a tall beige-and-black figure is drifting toward them. She’s coming with us. He catches himself grinning like fool and turns away.

  “Ah, there you are, Rick. All here.”

  Rick is the twin, R-95. He ambles up expressionlessly, hung with a bright orange plastic bag labeled Dave’s Dive Shop.

  Kirk herds them all out the end gate. It feels strange not having tickets. At the main gate the senator and entourage are boarding a shiny executive jet with Air Force markings. Three huge, dusty Air Force cargo planes wait beyond. Their own plane turns out to be a small unmarked twin-engine Lodestar, rather beat-up looking.

  For a moment a queer sense of alien reality pierces Dann’s insulation. Kirk’s pompousness about the supersecret installation, the code names, their “classified” status had all seemed to him absurd games played by grown boys. But the very normal, busy, used look of this big terminal impresses him. The planes: millions of miles flown on unknown errands apart from the civilian world. A whole worldwide secondary transport system in the shadows…. He hopes it is secondary.

  Behind him she is coming too.

  At the plane Kirk is talking to a shirt-sleeved man holding a clipboard. The Labrador patiently sits.

  “The Gates of Mordor,” the Frump said loudly as they climb up into the Lodestar. What does that mean? R-95—Rick—looks around at her. The Princess smiles, suddenly looking like a worried young girl.

  Dann sits by a window. Obviously she won’t sit by him. No; the long beige-clad legs pace by and stop beside the turquoise bulges of Winona. Into the seat beside him drops little K-30, Chris Costakis. His legs don’t reach the floor. Pituitary dysfunction, probably could have been prevented, Dann thinks automatically. The clipboard man closes them in and goes up front.

  With no ceremony, the engines start and they are taxiing to the runway. A minimal engine run-up, no waitin
g. Almost at once they are in the air.

  Absurd happiness blooms inside Dann. She can’t leave now. We’re really going on this trip together. Stop being childish.

  Chris Costakis is speaking in his high, unconvincingly tough voice.

  “Heading south. We’re not going far in this, has to be around Norfolk.”

  Dann doesn’t care if it’s around Vladivostock, but he nods politely.

  “We’ll be comfortable. The Navy does itself good.”

  They chat desultorily. Costakis turns out to be a locksmith, semi-retired. “They call us security engineers now. Eighty percent of my jobs are electronic. I had to slow down when my liver acted up.”

  That confirms Dann’s note of the fiery flush in the little man’s palms. An old wives’ sign but often accurate.

  “How in the world did you get into this?”

  “I did a lot of work for Annapolis, the Navy security people. Catledge came around looking for volunteers to test. I got what you call a sixth sense about combinations, always had. So I tried out. I scored real high.”

  “You mean you can guess the numbers in a combination without, ah, listening to the tumblers or whatever one does?” Dann is happy enough to take any nonsense seriously.

  “It’s not guessing.” Costakis’ shiny, bulbous face closes up; he gives Dann a sly look.

  “Of course. I beg your pardon. Please go on.”

  “Well … Numbers, see. Some days I’ve gone as high as thirty out of fifty. But it has to be a man. From a woman I can’t pick up a thing.”

  Dann gazes at the little man’s high, ill-formed forehead, his few sandy hairs. Hundreds of times he’s fastened electrodes to that skull. Does some unnatural ability really lurk in there? His thoughts touch the closed compartment in which lies the memory of a sliding water glass, and veer off, shaken. And all these others here, can they really do something abnormal? Incredible. Yet this is a real plane, taking them to a real place. Real money is being spent. Even more incredible, is a submarine actually steaming out to sea with Rick’s twin in it? Crazy.