James Tiptree Jr. - Up the Walls of the World

It is true, Giadoc sees, but he is thinking of protecting Tiavan. He can now read Fearing’s intention to call in his followers and seize the helpless Tyrenni. Great Wind, what can he do? Can he mind-turn Fearing as one would an animal? For even that he needs another Father’s help.

“Tiavan, Colto! Help me for your children’s sake! Tiavan —

As he mind-shouts the Beam falters, rises, sinks away worse than before. Is he about to be trapped here? “Tiavan—Colto—” Meanwhile Fearing is saying with eerie calm, “Remarkable range and accuracy, Doctor. I compliment you. I obviously did not take this as seriously as I should. Fortunately I have been able to make immediate security arrangements.”

“What do you mean, security arrangements?” Noah demands confusedly.

“In your natural enthusiasm, Doctor Catledge, you have overlooked the first and basic consideration of any intelligence capability. Control. Control. This remarkable demonstration makes speed all the more imperative.”

He turns toward the door, flicking a snap of cold energy from his wrist.

It is the last instant for them all, Giadoc understands. “ Tiavan! Colto! They are about to take and harm your children! Send them back!”

“But these are people, Major,” Noah is shouting. “This is the United States of America!”

“Precisely,” Fearing says.

At that moment the power of the Beam rises momentarily, and a bolt of life-energy flies through the room, dazing them all. When Giadoc’s senses clear, Fearing is prone on the floor beside the dog, who is squealing and jerking frantically.

Fearing rises awkwardly to one knee and Giadoc, astounded, sees what has happened.

“Janskelen!”

“Y-y-yes,” says the mouth of Fearing.

The door of the room opens and a large alien stands there, its small field oriented to Fearing. “Sir?”

Giadoc abandons all civility and sends a hard mental command into the old female’s mind. Janskelen flinches, but she is quick.

“Remove… that… animal,” she says with Fearing’s voice.

The dog is slavering, attempting to walk on its hind legs, with Fearing’s mind-field whirling about it so madly that it seems impossible the alien does not see. But he only advances a step, studying it phlegmatically.

Noah starts to speak, but Giadoc mind-quells him.

The dog howls and scrambles awkwardly onto the desk.

“Be careful, it is dangerous,” Giadoc says involuntarily.

“Yes sir.” Still with no animation the alien turns to the door and calls. “Deming! Bring a net and a can of four-oh-eight!”

At this the dog screams again and leaps straight for him. The alien ducks aside and the dog bolts out the open door. Shouting from outside. Then the alien turns back and asks, “Do you want Doctor Harris’ team here now, sir?”

Again Giadoc improvises mental commands, and “Fearing” says slowly, “No. Tell them… to go. That will be… all.”

“Yessir.” The alien departs.

Safe, for the moment at least. But the Beam is fading badly, Giadoc must go now or be forever trapped.

“Tyrenni! You are still in peril. Tell this old alien Noah who you are. He may help you. I will not commit life-crime. I go.”

Gathering himself to the failing power, he casts a last scan back on the scene that holds his only child—he will remember it always—and hurls his life up and out onto the frail life-thread. He is just in time, he feels being caught, stretched immaterially in a flash through nowhere. Back to doomed Tyree, back to Tivonel! And Doctordan back to his rightful body. He has made it, he hurtles exultantly. The Beam holds true!

But just as he exults—his universe vanishes.

The skein of vitality that bore him has gone to nothing, there is no Beam. All energy has died. He is only a dwindling nothing adrift in nowhere, all life is draining out of him. He is about to die. And ahead looms a dreadful blackness that his fading mind knows only too well.

The Destroyer.

Goodbye Tyree… Goodby Tivonel… Thought dies. Helpless in cold and dark, that which had been Giadoc plunges into death.

In cold black nowhere a tiny thing will not die.

Alone in dark immensity, the energy-configuration that has been a life is almost extinguished. It is stripped of all qualities, shrunk to a single point of not-death in a universe of deathliness. Blind and mindless it strives against annihilation, fighting with no weapons but its puny naked will.

Aeons earlier it had shot here seeking obliteration. But at the end, the life at its core will not let go.

It is alone, alone in the ultimate icy void, falling without motion ever deeper into dark nothingness. Only a fading spark strains, strives for some possibility, some dimension or current or difference to save it from the final dark. It flails limblessly, grasps nothing, struggles without strength or hope against the overwhelming death around it. Deeper and deeper it is swallowed. Its last existence flickers; it is almost gone.

But at this final instant its immaterial being meets an infinitesimal resistance. Something—something is tenuously touched!

Too weak even to feel reprieve, the spark clutches, clings to the unknown contact. And as it does, slow help comes to it. The faltering energy finds itself minutely sustained; the potential gradient that had fallen nearly to zero halts, and begins painfully to steepen again. After an unknown time it is able to stabilize. Now it is more than a point. It becomes a faint but growing constellation around the nucleus. Fragments of its dead self come back to spectral being.

With them comes a first emotion of life—fear. Hideous images of being strangled, frozen, asphyxiated, destroyed in a myriad terrifying ways assault it. The being struggles harder, a frantic mote in the maw of death. It clings to the unknown sustenance, fighting simply to continue to be. And as it strives it strengthens, recruiting the shadowy energy-circuits and complexities of its former life.

Presently there comes to it a kind of half-consciousness, and it perceives mistily that it cannot be strangled nor frozen, since it is without breath or pulse in infinite dark. These are only specters of sensation evoked by terror of the huge menace all around. Knowing itself dead yet not-dead, it tries fiercely to collect itself, to recreate its shattered entity. It drives toward existence as a drowner drives toward air, it exerts stress upon the texture of nonbeing. Strength grows in it, presses hard and harder against nothingness. Pressure mounts, a substanceless film bulges without dimension. Until suddenly nothingness yields, and there is a blossoming, tearing pain like orgasmal birth.

The ghostly circuitry of a living woman exists again, strung out between the stars.

The sense of re-existence is acute, paroxysmal. The being convulses in long shudders of awareness. With wonder it perceives itself, knows that is has coherence, complexity, a history, even a name.

It is Margaret Omali.

No! She clenches herself away, would shriek out if she could. The name is a damnation, it brings pouring in on her the pain of a life she had meant only to end. What cruelty is this, why is she not dead?

She shrinks, trying to cancel consciousness, disappear from being. But she cannot; she senses that her despair is fueling the energy that sustains her. Her human life streams back, activates even the echo of her last human thought: My insurance. Donny will be all right.

What dreadful happening has cheated her of death?

Sick and grieving she drifts, uncaring that the unknown sustenance continues. The energy that is her life augments and completes itself in phantom structure. And at length her despair is penetrated by dull puzzlement. Something is different. At first idly, then with sharpening attention, she examines this strangeness. Can it be true?