James Tiptree Jr. - Up the Walls of the World

“But how do your eggs get exposed?” she is asking curiously.

He is about to enter on new fascinations, but his senses are assaulted by a dreadful scream. Terror! Someone is shrieking intolerably.

Dann peers about, discovers they have drifted closer to the pair of aliens he had noticed before. The large one is uttering the nerve-shattering green wail. It is thrashing about and tumbling, its energies wild. A smaller alien is in pursuit.

“What a shame,” Tivonel says above the uproar. “I thought Avanil had it calm.”

“What is it? What’s happening?”

“I forgot to tell you. That’s one of your people, there in Terenc’s body. You better start Fathering it right away.”

“One of my people?”

All at once the screamer shoots toward him and long streamers of its flaring field lash out. A jolting sbock—his mind is inundated with a kaleidoscope effaces, smells, bulkheads and valves, a foreshortened human penis against blue blankets, a Gatorade bottle—while over everything a face that he remembers, shrieks “RICKY—RICKY—HELP—”

The scene clears, leaving him reeling in twinned realities. The strange body is still before him, blasting out green screams.

“It’s Ron!” Dann exclaims. “It’s Ron from the, the water—’

“You better Father it before is loses field. You can, can’t you? However you do it?”

“RICKY! RICKY, WHERE ARE YOU? HELP ME!”

The pain is intolerable. “I’m a doctor,” Dann tries to say absurdly, moving toward the agonized form with no idea what he can do.

“Ron! You’re all right, calm down! Listen to me, it’s Doctor Dann.”

—BLOOIE!

The next few moments or years exist only as a terror beyond all drug nightmares, beyond anything he has imagined of psychosis—rape—disaster. He is invaded, frantic, rolling in dreadful pounding synchrony of panic, sensing only in flashes that he is howling RICKY—RICKY-TRICKY—is also yelling RON SHUT UP YOU’RE ALL RIGHT I’M DOCTOR DANN—only to be swept under the terrified crashing chaos, reverberating insanity. How long it lasts he never knows, understands only a sudden immense cool relief, like a great scalpel of peace cutting him free. Sanity returns.

As his separate existence strengthens Dann finds his body pumping air. He lets the scene steady into the strange-familiar world around him, is again his new self riding the gentle gales beside a wall of beautiful storm.

“Control yourself, Tanel, it’s all right now.”

The words are warmly golden; his friend Tivonel is hovering nearby.

Before him floats a great disarrayed dark mass, its small energy-field pale and calm. This seems to be the alien body containing Ron. Is he unconscious or dead? Not Dead; jets are pulsing. The smaller alien is helping it keep steady on the wind.

Dann’s gaze turns upward.

Looming above them hovers a huge energic alien form, its vanes half-spread, its mantles and aura a deep, rich glory. It—no, unmistakably he — seems to be surveying them severely. Dann has a momentary memory of his school coach separating furious small boys.

“In the name of the Wind, Father Ustan, thank you.” Tivonel’s light-speech is in a new, formal mode.

“Thanks be that you were nearby, Father,” the other alien adds, in the same mode. Dann senses that it is another female.

“What happened? Is my friend all right?”

“You made a panic vortex,” the great stranger says in grave violet lights. “If I had not separated you in time you would both have been damaged for life. The being you call Ron is drained and sleeping. Avanil here will guard it. But you, Tanel, are you not a Father? Why did you permit this disorder to happen?”

“We, we have no such skills on our world,” Dann says weakly.

The great being, Ustan, flickers a wordless grey sign in which Dann reads skepticism, scornful pity—the equivalent of a raised eyebrow. Majestically, he tilts up into the wind. But the female Avanil calls to him.

“Father Ustan, wait! Don’t you notice the Sound is getting very strong up here? I feel burning, that’s why I started to move Terenc’s body. Look at all the dead life above us, too. I don’t think this level is safe anymore.”

“The Sound doesn’t rise here now,” Tivonel objects.

“Well, something up here is wrong. Look at the Airfall, it’s all dead, too. I think we should go down to where Lomax and Bdello are.”

Dann, “listening,” realizes he has been noticing a rising hiss of light, or sound. It has a wicked feel, like a great subsonic machine-whine running wild.

Big Ustan has paused, spreading internal membranes.

“Avanil is correct,” he announces. “I too sense dangerous energies. By all means, move them down to Chief Hearer’s station to wait. I will take the distraught one.”

“I can take him, Ustan,” Avanil protests.

But Ustan has floated down to Ron’s sleeping body, furling out the membranes under his main vanes. Dann has a glimpse of small, soft-looking flexible limbs. Then Ustan is covering him, swooping away like an eagle with its trailing prey. Next moment his great complex vanes fan out side, tilt up—and he becomes suddenly an abstract shade of flight, falling away from them on an awesome dwindling curve, down—down—

It is so dazzling Dann finds himself pumping air. Next moment the far-flying form has changed again and fetched up floating calmly by the two other presences below.

“That’s Lomax and Bdello,” Tivonel says. “Now you go.”

“Me? Down there? I—” Dann is stammering, aware that his voice has a greenish squeak. His human senses have brushed him with vertigo. “I don’t think—”

“Well, try” Tivonel says severely. “Giadoc was able to move around on your awful world. With no wind. You don’t have to go that fast,” she adds more gently. “Just tell yourself to go down, the body remembers. We’ll help if you need it. Oh, I forgot. This is Avanil. I mean Avan. Avan, meet Tanel. He’s a male so I call him that.”

“Greetings, Tanel.” The other’s tone is like a curt handshake, he is reminded of a girl on a vanished world.

“Hello, Avan,” Aware that he is delaying the awful drop, he lets himself take a last look at the grandeur of these heights. A million Grand Canyons of the wind, he thinks. No, far more beautiful. But that sound, that faint deadly roaring… All in a moment the beauty drops away, he recalls his momentary vision of this world and its raging sun, the terrible exploding shells and angry streamers of a star gone mad. It was blowing up—that’s what he “hears.” Hard radiation. And these people, these real people, are on a planet about to be incinerated. Terrible… His mood is broken by a tangible nudge.

“Let’s go,” says Tivonel.

Down. Okay.

Focussing with all his might on the dots below, Dann lets himself spread something. His vanes adjust, he’s dropping, swooping down While his body takes the air-rush, seeming to steer itself. Faster, intoxicatingly! The dots swirl, are lost and recaptured, the wind is full in him, is his element—it is glorious! The dots have grown to bodies, he realizes he must stop now. Stop! But how? Gales call him!

From nowhere two figures cut in before him, changing the rushing air. His vanes manage to bite the right angle. He slows, has stopped, hearing laughter all around.

Three figures that must be Ustan and the Hearers are above him. He feels a double nudge at his vanes, and finds himself lurching upward, with a ludicrous mental image of his staggering human self supported by two giggling girls.

“Thanks, Avan,” Tivonel is saying. “Whew, wow! Tanel, I thought you were going all the way to Deep.”

“I thought I did rather well.” Dann finds himself chuckling too, all nightmare gone. He hasn’t felt happy and strong like this in years. How great must be this life on the winds of Tyree!