James Tiptree Jr. - Up the Walls of the World

NOTHING OCCURS, HOWEVER, EXCEPT A PECULIAR INTUITION OF RIGHT-WRONGNESS, AN ALMOST-IDEA TOO FAINT TO GRASP. MEANWHILE ITS LITTLE PASSENGER HAS BECOME EVEN MORE STIMULATED AND IS ENGAGING IN MUCH INTERNAL TRANSMISSION, REPEATING ITS PERENNIAL SIGNAL, ACTIVATE***ACTIVATE//

THIS CORRELATES WITH NOTHING UNUSUAL GOING ON OUTSIDE. ONLY ONE OR TWO NEARBY SUNS ARE DISSIPATING, EMITTING FROM THEIR TRAINS THE USUAL INCOMPREHENSIBLE ENERGIES THAT HAD BEEN SO INTERESTING. DOUBTLESS THIS IS A MARGINAL EFFECT OF THAT GREAT TASK, THE GREAT ONE DECIDES—AND WITH THIS COMES THE REALIZATION THAT IT HAS UNWITTINGLY DRIFTED BACK CLOSER TO THE ZONE OF OPERATIONS.

GRIEF STRIKES THROUGH THE VAST SPACE-BOURNE TENUOSITY. ITS RACE, THE TASK, ITS VERY LIFE, ALL ARE LOST TO IT NOW. IT TURNS ITS ENORMOUS EMPTINESS, PREPARING TO SET COURSE AWAY.

BUT AS IT DOES SO, AN INPUT OCCURS WHICH MAKES IT FORGET ALL ELSE.

FROM EXTREME RANGE, BUT UNMISTAKABLE: A GREAT TRANSMISSION RISING ON THE TIME-BANDS, A COMPLEX CALL OF EXULTATION, EFFORT AND THANKSGIVING.

THE TASK HERE IS FINISHING, THE OUTCAST BEING REALIZES. AND THEY HAVE BEEN SUCCESSFUL. THE LAST DESTRUCTIONS HAVE BEEN ACHIEVED, THE LAST ONSLAUGHTS OF THE ENEMY CONTAINED.

SAD AND ALONE, THE EXILE REVERBERATES TO THE GREAT CRY WELLING FROM FAR AWAY:

“VICTORY! . . . VICTORY! . . . VICTORY! . . . VICTORY! …”

A dream…

“Calm, calm. Don’t be afraid.”

Afraid? Dann is not, he thinks dimly, afraid. He is merely dead.

Deadness will claim him any minute. He waits.

But the delirium is not fading, and under it is a memory of agonizing loss. Unwelcomely, Dann begins to suspect that he exists, is somehow again embodied in… in he does not know what.

“Calm, I’m here. I’ll help you. You’re safe now.”

Is someone really here? Yes… yes. A warm, tentative someone speaking without words, touching without touch. A living presence like an arm pressing, not his body but his mind. A nurse?

“Gently, wake up now. You’re all right. Wake up.”

Perverse, he refuses consciousness. A confusion of memories coming now: being pulled, fighting vast currents. Is he back on that beach of childhood when the lifeguard girl had pulled him out of a rip-tide? She wore a copper bracelet, he remembers. Sissy somebody. Now he is dead and he has been saved again. But not by any Sissy; this time he knows he is on no mortal beach.

“You’re all right really, you’ll be home soon. Don’t be afraid.”

No voice, he understands. Only words coming into his, his head? And the arm is not flesh but a current of all-rightness flowing in. Human questions suddenly flare up in him. “ Who’s there? Where am I? What—?” And as he asks, or tries to, he feels a wince, a jumping-away.

“No! Please don’t! I want to help you!” The presence is a receding whisper in his mind.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he stammers effortfully, and is further confused by knowing he is indeed speaking aloud, but not in any earthly voice. Deliberately he opens his eyes, or, rather, succeeds in unclosing something. As he does so he understands finally that the senses he is activating, or focussing, are no organs ever owned or imagined by Doctor Daniel Dann.

—Who now finds what may be himself resting upon nothingness, perceiving an enormous curved and whirling landscape. Beside him towers a great rushing wall gloriously patterned with strange energies and emanating deep musics. Beautiful. And above, far above, is a weird, pale, rooflike arch he feels as potent, while far below, the great typhoon dwindles into the silent dark. A landscape of magical grandeur; even in exhaustion his spirit feels a faint delight.

Another fact comes; he seems to be “seeing” or perceiving in all directions at once, he is at the center of a perceptual globe in which he has only to focus. Extraordinary. Bemused by finding that the dead can feel curiosity, he tries to attend inward, and “sees,” in the midst of a queer streaming energy, a huge mass of enigmatic surfaces or membrances, flickering here and there with vague lights. Can this be… his body?

Dreamily, he notices movement. The great fans or wings are tilting gently, continually readjusting themselves. From beneath come small, jetlike pulsations which he can now vaguely sense. He feels himself at rest yet riding, balancing without effort on moving pressure-gradients, the vast turbulences of this air. To this body, the whirlwind is home.

Understanding can no longer be postponed. He is—is in— a giant alien form like those he now recalls having glimpsed or dreamed of.

Oddly, this fails to frighten him, but only charms him further. It is not generally realized, he thinks hysterically, that what the totally destroyed need is for something interesting to happen… But where is his “nurse,” the friendly stranger?

He scans more carefully. Deep below he senses living energies, like a great crowd; but they are much too far. Nearer to him on the wind-wall are a few isolated presences. Two are quite close, he can “see” them hovering on the wind, surrounded by the odd veils, like Elmo’s fire. Still too far away. He focusses upward—and there it is.

A shape like his own, but smaller, clothed in an auroralike discharge. How he perceives this he doesn’t know; it seems to be his main sense-channel, like seeing a thing he remembers from another life, a Kirlian photograph. As he thinks this he notes absently that the “fire” around himself has suddenly flared up toward the other.

“Look out! Please! Can’t you control yourself at all?”

The words are clear. But the voice—it is an instant before he puzzles out that this real, audible cry was not a voice at all, but a pattern of light flickering on the membranes of the other’s body. And yet his senses “heard” the light as speech. More mystery. Experimentally he wills himself to say, “I’m sorry”—and “hears” his words as a light-ripple on himself.

Incredible. Strangeness beyond strangeness brims up in him, overfloods his dikes. A dream? No, an ur-life; unreal reality. Nothing is left of him, yet here at the end of all he giggles.

“I am a giant squid in a world tornado, apologizing in audible light to another monstrous squid.”

Evidently he has tried to say it aloud but without words for the alien concepts. He hears himself uttering garble mixed with orange laughter.

The laughter at least gets through. The creature above him laughs too, a charming lacy sparkle.

“Hello,” he says tentatively.

“Hello! You feel better. What’s your name? I am Tivonel, a female. Are you a male?”

Male, female? He gazes up at “her,” letting himself slip deeper and deeper into this alien normalcy. He feels, he realizes, quite well; this body has a health, a vigor his own had lost long ago. It comes to him as he gazes that the being above him is indeed a female, in fact, a girl—a nice girl who just happens to be, in some sense, a thirty-meter giant manta-ray or whatever.

He is in no condition to criticize this.

“I’m Dann,” he tells her. “Daniel Dann.” Is the name getting through? “I’m a male, yes.”

“Taneltan? Taneltan!” She laughs again, sparkling disbelief. “Males don’t have three-names. I’ll call you Tanel, it sounds more respectable.” She sobers. “If you really are better, can you control yourself so I can come closer? I want to help you.”

“Control myself? I don’t understand.”

“Hold your field in decently. Look at yourself, you’re all over and inside out, you could even lose some.”

“My… field?”

“Yes. Look at you.”

“You mean that, that energy-stuff?” he tries to say. “Around… me?”