James Tiptree Jr. - Up the Walls of the World

“It’s not around you, it’s you. Your mind, your life. You have to hold it in and arrange it properly. Ahura. Wait—watch me.”

He watches her, and, marveling, sees the energy-halo englobe itself, shrink, spread out in patterns, expand to pseudo-forms, retract through a whirl of permutations and end in a delicately layered toroid around her corporeal body. Is he watching motions or dispositions of the actual mind, some kind of mysterious psychic art?

“I don’t know how to do that,” he says helplessly.

“Well, try. Oh, start by thinking yourself round, like an egg.”

He doesn’t believe in any of this, but is willing to be entertained. Awkwardly, he tries to “think himself round,” and as he does so sees surprisedly that his pale fire-streamers are raggedly lurching inward in a crudely globular form. Good— but no, half of himself has perversely blown right out again. Because he noticed it? Not easy, he perceives, and concentrates again. Roundness… the flare retracts. He’s getting it—Ooops, now his other side has bulged wildly away. He hears her laugh. Roundness… roundness …

“You’re just like a big baby, that’s what Giadoc said.”

“Giadoc?” Still striving for some weird combination of control and alertness, he half-remembers… something.

“You’re in Giadoc’s body. He’s my friend. Don’t be afraid, he’ll come back soon and you’ll be back in yours.”

“Giadoc… did he speak to me, when I, when I, uh, died?”

“He did? Oh good, that means he’s all right. He’ll be back soon. First they have to let the Beam down and raise it again. Look—I think they’re letting down now. Maybe you’ll go right back. Look up, see?”

Forgetting his “field,” he looks up. The great arching of energy above is draining, dwindling down to its enormous perimeter. As it does so, the world around him brightens and strengthens, his own energies seem to sharpen.

“Well, you’re still here,” his new friend Tivonel says briskly. “That means you just have to wait til they raise it again. Now you simply have to control yourself. Do you know you nearly fell out of the Wind? The only reason I could pull you back was that you were sick. I was afraid you’d hit me, like the other one.”

“The other one?”

“The other one who came here in Giadoc’s body. I tried to help it but it hit me with its mind. It knocked me away. Can you all do that?”

“The other one… who came here…” In Dann’s mind a forgotten glass of water slid on a bedstand, a voice wails Margaret into darkness. Did she come here? Pain knifes at him. Stop it, stop it. No more reality.

“Oh, you are hurt!”

“No, no,” be manages to say from a million miles distant, aware of a timbre that his lost human mind calls green, but he knows here is pain. Gone forever in the dark—push it away. Get back in the dream-life, the dream of being a giant alien flying at ease in a world-typhoon, which is a pleasant afternoon. Chatting with a girl alien, feeling strong.

She has come closer. As he sees this, a filament of his mind-cloud seems to whip toward her and she whisks away, crying exasperatedly, “ No! That’s what you mustn’t do. It’s very rude, pushing your thoughts into people.”

“What? You mean… if it touched like that, you can read my mind?”

“Well of course.”

“I don’t believe it,” he says wonderingly.

“Well, I’ll show you, but you have to hold perfectly still. Can you hold your field still now?”

“I don’t know. I’ll try.” Watching his awkwardly eddying life energies, he recalls he had once tried to learn a meditation technique. It didn’t help then; maybe it will now. Effortfully he strives to concentrate, to recapture the deep quietude. Shrink consciousness to a point, watch nothing. But he is still aware that an eddy of her field is flowing toward him. Don’t watch. At the tangible nudge in his mind he reacts helplessly.

“Ouch!” She is swirling up into the wind.

“I’m sorry. I did that wrong.”

“It’s all right, you weren’t too bad. Only you’re so much stronger than a baby. Did you get it?”

“Get what?”

“The memory I gave you, silly. Look in your memory. Where are you?”

Where, indeed? Does ur-reality have a name, am I actually somewhere? Where?

—And he realizes he knows. He knows!

“Why, I, I’m on T-Tyree—that’s your world. Tyree.”

“You see!” She curves closer again, mischievous.

“My God,” he tries to say, but it comes out “Great winds!”

“See if you got the rest. Think about Tyree.”

“Tyree… Oh, yes, you’re in trouble. Radiation is—” But this language has no words, he hears himself babbling about burning in the Wind and intolerable loudness of the Sound. The Sound? Sunlight? Of course, they think in other modes. “And wait, yes—you’re trying to escape by sending your minds away somehow—no, that’s wrong—”

“Very good! Very good!” Her laugh is so merrily coral, laced with empathic mockery it lifts Dann’s leaden spirit. Why, this little Tivonel is indeed an attractive one. Bright spirit of the wind.

“But you, your world is in danger. You may die.”

“Maybe.” Undismayed, a brave little alien being who is every instant less alien. And then Dann learns something else.

“Don’t worry. Giadoc will come back and send you home. He won’t commit life-crime, he said so.”

The melting tones are unmistakable; across the light-years he recognizes the colors of love. Love and sharing unto death, she and this Giadoc whose body he has somehow acquired. And will he, Dann, be thrown back to his grey private death, leaving her on a burning world? The memory of the inferno he had glimpsed… So the charming ur-life is tragic after all. Pity… if he believed any of this.

“Please! Hey, please, your field!”

Confused, he perceives that his “mind-field” has eddied strongly toward her, is coalescing into a peculiar surface whose vibrancy suddenly thrills him. An excitement his own old human body had long forgotten, a potent shivering delight—

“Stop that! You don’t know what you’re doing!” She is laughing wildly, her life-field suddenly intensified, recoiling yet linked to his by ever-increasing intensities. Urgency flames up in him, he needs to drive her higher into the wind, to push her away upon the power of his desire. Wild incomprehensible images of wind and energy flood through him, he is about to do he knows not what—but in a rush of flashing jets she shoots aside, and the tension breaks.

Shaken and roiled, it takes him a moment to locate her below him down the wind.

“You—you—!” She splutters unintelligibly. “You almost, I mean, you biassed, in a minute we would have—”

“What? What happened?” But he suspects now. The joy!

“Well!” She planes up nearer. “I don’t know how to explain. Made a repulsion.” She giggles. “Whew! Giadoc is very energic. We call it sex.”

He hangs there astounded, conscious of himself as a monster riding an alien gale who has somehow committed an indelicacy. The etiquette of apocalypse. It was so good.

“We call it sex too,” he tells her slowly. “Only with us the two people touch.”

“How weird.” Her vanes bank gracefully, he notices her beautiful command of the wind. Something else, too; his body seems to know that her position relative to him has changed things. With the wind coming from him to her she is still a charming one, but not dangerously so. Neutralized. Of course; they live in the wind, function evolves to its direction. Mysteries…