Up the Walls of the World

by James Tiptree

  “Life-crime …” Suddenly, the words convey a kind of remote abomination to him. Of course, stealing another’s body. “Yes,” he says. “But you know, I don’t quite feel it—it’s so far from our abilities.”

  “You better,” she says, suddenly sober. “Look down there, that Father Scomber coming up. And Heagran behind him. Did you get it all about that?”

  He looks, and marveling, knows them. The huge energic oncoming form is Father Scomber, leader of the move to flee by life-crime. And the even larger shape behind him, veiled and crusted with majestic age: Father Heagran, the Conscience of Tyree. Incredible! Enlightenment, understanding opens in him like a true dream—the wonders of Deep City, the proud civilization of the air; joys, duties, deeds innumerable, the wild life of the upper High—a world, Tyree, is living in his mind!

  Through his preoccupation he notices that several more are struggling up toward him, apparently finding the ascent difficult. And they’re oddly formed.

  “Those two, there—wait, Fathers—what’s wrong with their, their fields?” He asks her.

  “Oh, winds, did I forget to give you that? Can’t you see their double fields? They’re Fathers with children. In their, well, their pouches. It’s not polite to say that. She giggles. “You have one, Tanel.”

  Her voice has flickered through the lavendar tones he understands as reverence.

  “Amazing.” Yes, he can see now the small life-nuclei nestled in their great auroras. Fathering?

  “Here comes Avan back with her pal Palarin to hear you. And there goes old Janskelen, she hasn’t forgotten how to ride wind. Some of those Deepers are a mess, they wouldn’t be as scared on your world as I was. Don’t worry, though. They aren’t going. Oh—feel the signal? The Beam is up! Goodbye again, Tanel.”

  A shudder has raced through the world.

  “Must I go, Tivonel?”

  “Yes. But I’ll remember you Tanel. Goodbye, fair winds.”

  “Fair winds.” He can barely speak. This wonderful doomed world, the brightness of her spirit. Briefly he as lived in a dream more real than all his miserable life. “I’ll always remember you, Tivonel. I hope, I hope—”

  He cannot say it, can only pray that she will not be incinerated under that dreadful sun. The hideous background drone is rising and he thinks he hears, or sees, grey whines of sickness from the vegetation above. All too likely these wonderful bodies have already taken a lethal dose. Don’t think of it. He feels a charming touch of warmth upon his mind, and sees that she has let a thought-tendril eddy gently to him. Just in time he forces his reaction to be still.

  Another signal snaps through them all.

  “That’s it! Oh, wait a minute—look at Lomax!”

  The Chief Hearer and Bdello are forms of static fire, their fields pouring up to the great arc overhead. Lomax’ mantle seems to be flickering in anger. Dann has the impression he is cursing.

  “Trouble. Ugh, the Destroyer. Well, they had that before. Wait.”

  The Destroyer … an image of huge dark deathliness. But not new to him—a vanishing spark dies again, and he shudders. Push it away.

  “It’s fixed now. Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye.” A thought strikes through his self-absorption. “Will my friend, will Ron go back too?”

  “He’ll be all right,” she answers mutedly. “I hope.”

  Dann waits, puzzling. Something unclear here, but nothing he can do.

  The thrumming energies densen above him, he feels their pull. Any instant now he will feel the nudge that will be Giadoc returning to his body, pushing Dann out. And he will be whirled away through darkness, will awake to find himself in his own human body, Doctor Daniel Dann, the grey man of loss and grief. A new death…. Idly, he wonders what this Giadoc will have done as Dann. Will he find himself in some incredibly far future? Or will he awaken in Deerfield’s disturbed ward, under restraint? No matter. Wait.

  The sense of tension heightens, brims intolerably. Dann hears from beside him a soft mental murmur. “Giadoc.” He muses on love, young love. And he himself has been briefly young again, in this magnificent alien form. He takes a last exultant grip of the great winds, reveling in his vigor, with the result that he side-slips abruptly. Behave yourself, old Dann … The memory of his inadvertent sexual episode stirs in him deliciously. How bizarre, yet how right. “The egg,” she said. These people must be oviparous. And the males rear their young. Now he thinks about it, he can feel some massive organ underneath. My pouch! Really!… And it’s some kind of political issue here, his new memory half-tells him why Avan had been so excited:…. But the minutes are passing, nothing has changed. What are they waiting for?

  He scans around. Bdello is speaking now, the light-whisper from his mantle faint with effort.

  “Someone’s alive!” Tivonel exclaims. “Oh, it’s Terenc. But that means Giadoc’s alive, he’s all right, he’s alive!”

  Senior Fathers are closing around the Hearers. Dann has a confused impression of conflict, of commands and countercommands, verbal and telepathic.

  “Oh, no,” Tivonel says angrily. “Terenc won’t come back! How nasty!”

  But that means that Ron—Dann scans around, locates the still-sleeping form. If this Terenc won’t return, is poor Ron doomed to die here in that? For a moment the scene turns hellish and horror alienae shakes him. But a thought comes to his rescue: This is farther than China. Maybe poor Rick will be free at last.

  “I should stay, I should help Ron.”

  “You can’t, Tanel.”

  True … He notices that a different female is guarding Ron. She has ragged, blistered vanes. “Who’s that?”

  “She’s my friend, Iznagel. I had her take care of him after Avanil took off.”

  He’d missed the exchange; he is doubtless missing a lot.

  “Try to help him, when I’m gone.”

  “I will. We’ll take him right down where it’s safer.”

  Safer—for how long? Meanwhile the resonating tension is becoming painful; the world seems drained. Hewishes thewhole sad business over.

  But the argument around the Hearers has grown fiercer. Purple blasts from the senior Fathers ride over excited cries. Even Avan and other females are there.

  “They’ve found Giodac!” Tivonel bursts out. “Oh, he’s coming, he’s coming! I knew he would!”

  Dann braces.

  But at that moment the disputants around Lomax draw slightly apart and there is a crimson shout from Scomber. “Better a live criminal than a dead child! Heagran, we are doomed here.”

  “No! Take down the Beam, Lomax!” Heagran bellows back, and several seniors echo him. “Take it down. End this!”

  “No! Our children must live!”

  The uproar is suddenly drowned in a world-tearing scream. A flame-shrieking fireball rips down the sky and buries itself, exploding, in a high sector of the great wind-wall. The sound is unendurable, gales buffet them. Dann feels a blast of burning heat up his vanes. Through the confusion he sees the great shape of Scomber spreading himself above Lomax.

  “TYREE IS DOOMED!” he thunders. “FATHERS! SAVE YOUR CHILDREN! COME, MY LIFE WILL BE YOUR BRIDGE!”

  His energy-field bursts up brilliantly, entwining that of Lomax, towering up to the arc of the Beam itself.

  “NO!” Heagran’s mental roar tears through them. “CRIMINAL, CEASE!” His great field launches itself at Scomber’s.

  But rearing up between them are other energies, coming from the Elders and Fathers around. Energies crackle, writhe, lash to and fro. Dann is watching an astral fire-fight, a literal conflict of will against will! It rages in intensity, seeming to suck or damp his own life-force, and then dies back.

  To his dismay, Dann sees that Heagran and his allies have been bested; their fields are sinking, leaving Scomber’s triumphant blaze intact. As his mind recovers, it comes to him that he is seeing nothing less than the start of an invasion of Earth. The desperate victors are proposing to steal human bodies, to send human minds
here, to die on Tyree.

  What can he do?

  He can only watch appalled, shuddering to Scomber’s triumphant summons. “FATHERS! COME, SAVE YOUR CHILDREN! USE MY LIFE!”

  And they are coming; below Dann a mob of Fathers is starting upward, struggling against the great winds, joined every moment by more. The two young Fathers near Scomber have already launched their life-fields upon his, bearing the nodes that are the lives of their children, leaving their bodies floating darkly behind.

  “NO, COLTO! TIAVAN, COME BACK!” Heagran’s mind-command jolts even Dann’s opaque senses. Beside him Tivonel is sobbing wordlessly.

  But Dann is transfixed, it is the most amazing spectacle he has ever seen. Those two life-minds striving up to the focus of the Beam—he sees them now as desperate parents racing with their precious burdens up out of a world on fire. Escape, escape! Caught in the deep imperative, he cheers on their mortal struggle, feels triumph as they gain height and flash away. The other Fathers below him are closer now, laboring with their babies toward tbe miraculous bridge of Scomber’s life.

  But as they come a small form jets to Scomber’s side.

  “Sisters! To a better world!” The cry rings out.

  It is the female, Avan. In a moment her small life and another are racing upward along Scomber’s energy-bridge.

  “No! Come back!” A deeper female voice cries, and then another node of energy is pursuing them.

  “Janskelen!” Tivonel cries out in shock, and then sobs, “Oh, Tiavan, how could you? Giadoc, Giadoc, come back!”

  Her words are lost in the wind-rush as the first group of Fathers jet exhaustedly past, expending their last energies to reach Scomber and the promise of escape. From the dark bodies floating around Scomber a thin green screaming is adding itself to the uproar. Confusedly, Dann realizes that this should mean something to him.

  But at that instant the roof of the world tears apart in a thunderous blast of lightning, and a storm of energies rains upon them all. Stunned, Dann flounders among random life-jolts, deafened by myriad screams.

  “THE DESTROYER! THE DESTROYER HAS BROKEN THE BEAM!”

  Slowly his senses clear. He is tumbling slowly by the great Wall, while above them the immaterial power that had been the Beam is shredded, raveling down to nothing. Where Scomber blazed below his defiant mind-bridge only dark bodies drift. It is clear that catastrophe has come. The mob of Fathers mills in fright, barely able to balance in this turbulent air.

  “The Beam is down! Giadoc—they’ve got to find him!”

  Tivonel is jetting past, heading up for Lomax. Dann follows dazedly. If the Beam, the connection with Earth is gone, is he marooned here to die of radioactivity? He doesn’t really mind; he has, it seems, died several times over already. Another won’t hurt. Maybe he can help Ron.

  He becomes aware that his only real emotion, as he jets up through the gales of Tyree, is irritation with this unknown character Giadoc. If he and Tivonel are to perish together, it would be nice if she would forget about Giadoc long enough to remember him. The absurdity of his thought strikes him; he chuckles inwardly. Extraordinary what one does in apocalypse. Extraordinary, too, to think that this Giadoc is somewhere on Earth, walking about in Daniel Dann’s old body. Dann wishes him joy of it, consciously savoring his winged youth and strength. Pity it won’t last. Well, good to have known it…. The green screeches coming from below nag at him, but he puts them aside.

  They reach Lomax to find him pale and drained but steady. His aide, Bdello, is still feebly righting himself, his life-field in disarray. Dann is reminded of an exhausted medium, or perhaps an inventor crawling out of the wreckage of his latest effort.

  Beside them hovers the huge form of Father Heagran. Tivonel halts respectfully.

  “Lomax, I have changed my view,” Heagran is saying. “We cannot watch the children die. I cannot. But neither will I commit life-crime upon intelligent beings. Therefore I request you and your Hearers to find a world with only simple life-forms. Animals only, you understand. If you can find one such we will bear the children there. It will not be life as we know it,” he says in deep sadness. “It will be degradation. But perhaps in centuries to come, perhaps something of Tyree will grow again.”

  The tragic colors of his voice are echoed on the mantles of the Elders nearby.

  “But Heagran,” Lomax protests, “my people are exhausted, in shock. Some are already scorched at the high stations. We cannot raise a Beam. And the accursed Destroyer is blocking half the sky.”

  “You must try.”

  “Very well. Those of us who can will probe singly, as we used to do.”

  “Chief Lomax!” bursts out Tivonel. “You have to rescue Giadoc, you must. You know he’s trying to return.”

  The others darken in disapproval, but Lomax says gently, “Giadoc is beyond reach if he is on the alien world, little Tivonel. The Destroyer is between us. If he was on the Beam, he is already lost.”

  “He’s trying to get back, I know it!”

  “Then it is possible he will sense our probes.” Lomax turns away with finality.

  “He’ll find a way,” Tivonel mutters rebelliously.

  I’ll come to thee by moonlight, though Hell should bar the way, Dann quotes to himself. Or is he thinking of the poem about the girl who waited in Hell for her false lover? Never mind—the meaning of the terrified shrieks has suddenly got through to him.

  “Tivonel! Haven’t more of my people come here! In those bodies, the way Ron and I did? I should go to them, I must help them if I can.”

  “Why, the Fathers are fixing them, Tanel. Winds, you don’t think they’d let that go on!”

  Dann look-listens; in fact the agonized green has subsided to intermittent squalls coming from the group below them, where Scomber was. Only the body containing Ron is nearby, its mantle murmuring in dreamy light, Iznagel still faithfully guarding it.

  “I should go down there to them anyway, Tivonel.”

  “Right. Iznagel, you better bring that one further down too. Here, I’ll help.”

  She and Iznagel start gliding with Ron’s huge body down the wind. As they go Dann hears Iznagel saying, “It’s like an animal, Tivonel. I think they’re crazy.” Tivonel shushes her, explaining that Dann is one of the “crazy” aliens. “Oh, Tanel, meet Iznagel of the High.”

  Dann accepts the introduction absently; he has made out three or four small groups around bodies from which shrill yells are still erupting. Who will these new displaced human minds be? People from Deerfield? Good Lord, what if it’s Major Fearing? Or is the Beam physically random? Could these be members of the French senate, or a group of Mongolians?

  The figures are shrouded in plant-life, but he can clearly see a big male hovering over each, his energies blanketing the form beneath. Green cries flash, mind-flares are being pursued, recaptured, somehow molded down to dark. It reminds Dann of firemen converging on stubborn little blazes. Only the big body of Scomber appears to be permanently dark, untenanted. It must be truly dead.

  “We can’t go closer, not till they’re drained.”

  The idea of electroshock jumps to his mind.

  “What do you mean, drained? Are they being hurt, will they be all right?”

  “Of course. Drained means drained, like Ustan did you. Resolving all the bad emotions, channeling the energy back. My father used to do it to me a lot when I was a child, I had tantrums. You don’t know anything, do you?”

  “Apparently not.”

  He watches the nearest group, marveling. Is he actually seeing the direct reconstruction of a human mind, the reformation of a Psyche? What a therapeutic technique! But who are these human minds?

  Father Heagran has joined the group; there seems to be still some problem, judging by the uncontrolled screams.

  “Oh!” Iznagel cries. “They’re taking the babies out of the Father’s—Oh, how dreadful! I can’t look.”

  “They have to,” Tivonel tells her. “Don’t you understand? Those
probably aren’t babies. I mean the minds may be grown-up adults. And the Fathers aren’t their Fathers. They have to take them apart.”

  But Iznagel only mutters bluely, “It’s indecent,” and furls herself in disapproval. Dann has the impression that she is peeking, like a matron caught at a porno film.

  “Will they be all right? I mean, as babies?”

  “Oh yes. Those are pretty big kids.”

  I should get over there. I’m a—” He tries to say doctor but it comes out “Body-Healer.”

  “Not while they’re Fathering, Tanel. Listen, if you’re a Healer, don’t you think it’s getting bad up here? I feel more burning, and it’s like I’d eaten something dead. Shouldn’t they move down?”

  “Yes.” What’s the use of saying that he thinks it is much too late. These bodies must have taken a lethal dose already unless their nature is very different. “Yes. You should go down right away.”

  “Not me, them. I’m staying by Lomax. Giadoc will come, you’ll see.”

  “Then I must stay with you. I have his body.”

  “Well … yes.” A warm thought brushes him; he is mollified.

  The activity around the nearest bodies is apparently completed. All but one Father move away.

  “I’m going to them.”

  “I guess it’s all right now. Fair winds, Iznagel.”

  The bodies turn out to be small; two females, Dann guesses. What minds lurk there? They are being guarded by a seemingly elderly big male, his vanes noded, his huge life-aura complexly patterned but pale.

  “Greetings, Father Omar. This is the alien Tanel, he is a Healer.”

  The old being signs a formal response, then says abruptly, “To think that my Janskelen has committed life-crime! It is beyond bearing. After all our years!”

  “I’m sure she didn’t mean to go, Father. She was trying to stop them. That Beam pulls you.”

  “Nonetheless, she went.”

  They survey the bodies. Dann notices that the life-auras seem quiet and lax. Is it possible he is seeing human minds?

  “That’s Janskelen,” Tivonel flicks a vane. “And that’s Avan’s friend Palarin. I hope they like your world.”