James Tiptree Jr. - Up the Walls of the World

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. He wishes the whole 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.