James Tiptree Jr. - Up the Walls of the World

As she surveys it again, she becomes aware of a curious pull or emphasis trying to draw her mind’s eye. Again and again she finds herself considering a section at the center, close by TOTAL’S familiar keys. A single roll-over switch gleams there. She concentrates on it, pointing a meditative finger. The surface around it shines, the switch is of an unknown color, surmounted by one symbol. It is very clearly in the Off position.

As she attends to it, an almost tangible sense of pleading pressure comes to her and TOTAL’S small read-out lights.

//ACTIVATE//

Almost her hallucinatory finger presses the switch—and then she pauses. That image cloaks real power, she understands. It is a connection or interface with something vast and real. Is this why the computer-spirit has brought her here, so that her own small power may give some necessary push, initiate real access? Does TOTAL “want” her to manipulate an actual connection on behalf of whatever dark presence or machinery surrounds her? Genially she recalls the earthly TOTAL’S appetite for access, the spontaneous linkages it seemed to have achieved. Has it found some ghostly ultimate network here in the dark?

//ACTIVATE * ACTIVATE * ACTIVATE//

The energic constellation that had been Margaret Omali considers the plea, and a last human willfulness awakes. She is not yet a phantom, a mere pliable pawn. She will not comply with this directive… yet. Quite humanly, she is tired of acting in mystery. She has come through dangers and blackness to this place of power and now she has some mental desires to fulfill. Before assenting further, she will know where she is and among what powers and conditions this strange life is set.

How will she get answers, here?

Deliberately she summons TOTAL to the small strange vein of power in her mind, and frames a command to data-access, her thoughts sketching and shaping a program of real-time inputs of fact and space. Am I in a computer? Is this a dream? Her familiar keyboard glimmers before her; her fingers go to it and firmly press TOTAL’S keys.

Query this location. Display.

With a great soundless rush the blackness around her vanishes. She is floating in a universe of jeweled lights.

It worked, she exults. I have power—and then all thought is inundated by sheer magnificence. On every side, above, below, before, beyond, blaze steady fires of amethyst and topaz and ruby, emerald and diamond and ultramarine—drift upon drift of them, burning against blackness or veiled in filaments and gauzes of hypnotic allure.

They are, she realizes slowly, stars. The unwinking suns of space. She is floating amid the glory of the universe, seeing without eyes the incomprehensible vast unhuman beauty of the void. Her mind which had always flinched from the hot closeness of human color is enchanted with this infinity of spectral fires.

But a vague doubt troubles her. Is this real? Someone had told her of the stars; is all this merely some simulacrum of her dead and dreaming human mind?

How can she test? She selects a beautiful pair of sapphire and yellow suns.

Magnify.

Obediently, they grow, seem to approach and separate, and reveal a dim violet companion, all filmed in a wispy nebula in which are points of light. At the same time she becomes aware of a rise in input on one of the unregarded bands, as if these stars were giving off a train of signals. The impression of reality is overwhelming. But still she doubts.

She turns to TOTAL’S keyboard, thinking hard. What would unmask a dream? At length she frames a demand on TOTAL’S memory-banks.

Specify.

The screen lights. // BETA * CYGNUS // COMMON * NAME * ALBIREO * DERIVED * FROM * ERROR * IN * INTERPRETATION * OF * ALMAGEST * 1515 // MAGS * 5.5 * 4.5 // PA * 055 / / SEP * 34.6’ / / SPECTRAL * CLASS * OF* PRIMARY * A5—

Her attention goes back to the triple beauties, considering. The names Beta Cygnis, Albireo, are utterly unknown to her; all these data could not have come from her human mind. This must be real. Somehow she can call up earthly information, here between the stars.

How this could be does not trouble her, she is too far from human considerations; she no longer remembers NASA, nor the flap about TOTAL’S wiped memory-cores. She merely accepts it as one more aspect of this wondrous death and feels her soul smile. In due course she may inquire further; when she is moved to it, she may probe, perhaps, the nature of this huge cold power whose perceptions she seems to share. Now she is content to exist at ease, to dream amid marvels.

The odd energy-output of the brilliant triple system she has summoned presently attracts her curiosity, and she puts another question to TOTAL.

Query. Is life there?

//AFFIRMATIVE// the screen responds. And the peculiar pulse trains seem to amplify, as if unknown receptors had been tuned to them.

She “listens” uncomprehendingly, amused by this new dimension of experience, and sensing that some indefinable significance has been evoked. But if this is “life” she can make nothing of it. I am not concerned with life, she thinks, and dismisses Beta Cygnis. Compliantly the pulse-trains fade, the splendid triple system fades back into the jewel-drifts of space.

But in another dimension of her mind, the ghostly center-panel of the great console still shows its unknown switch: she senses still the faint urgency. What unimaginable program would it execute? She wonders briefly and again dismisses it. For the moment she wants nothing more.

Her attention returns to the outer radiance in which she floats, and now she becomes aware of something new. Motion is here; slow but increasingly perceptible. Like themes of silent music, the orbital elements of the nearer stars reveal themselves to her mind. Suns weave hugely about each other, develop subcomponents of direction, or glide in concert athwart a general flow. Slowly the motion spreads away to the farthest reaches, until the whole is in sublime and complex dance.

Delighted, she bends all her thoughts on this new wonder, understanding that somehow her phantom senses have slowed, or speeded, to a cosmic scale. Beyond the sheer splendor of the fires of space she now sees a deeper, causal, magnificence. She can almost sense directly the interlocking webworks of field forces, the lawfulness of every accidental configuration. And more: beneath the macro-order, if she cares to look, there is revealed the play of another lawfulness, that of the acutely small. The stars are not constant, but changing: they alter in color, shrink or swell or blaze to slow immense explosions. All this she understands as the expression of sub-atomic transformations and events. The ultimate minute causalities are hers too, when she wills to look deep.

Her human mind that since childhood had yearned dimly toward the enchantment of relation, had groped toward it beneath the veil of number and symbol, experiences a long slow gasp of immaterial rapture. Here is the beloved naked to her view.

Time no longer exists. What had been Margaret Omali slips toward irreversible fusion with something huge and alien whose powers she partially shares. A last corner of her personality laughs with a child’s purity, envisioning a vast control-room of the stars. Of herself she knows only that she exists in peace and exaltation. The grandeur of the universe unfolds as the tapestry of her understanding. She opens herself entirely to the pure, cold pleasure. The mind that had been a human woman floats out to lose itself in the justice of the play of suns and atoms, the intricate beauty of cosmologic cause.

Aeons, or instants, later, a minute distraction penetrates her consciousness. A stray human engram focusses on it, flickers the impression of a midgelike vibration somewhere about.