James Tiptree Jr. - Up the Walls of the World

Incomprehensible pursing from the body in the thicket. A telepath frightened of telepathy. Get his mind off it.

“By the way, Chris, it may interest you to know that you’re in the body of a very large young male. You should come out and try the air. I’ve had a glorious time, flying. Look at your wingspread, you’re huge.”

More mutters, but presently Dann sees one big vane spread cautiously out. “Yeah? You mean I’m, I’m not…?” The secondary vanes lift, the big body lofts upward. After a moment of confusion Costakis is hovering over the plant-roots, tilting and testing his jets.

“Hey, you meant it.” The life-field has expanded raggedly, the cursing has stopped.

“Yes, you got the best bargain of us all. Watch it, it’s intoxicating.” It comes to Dann that he isn’t talking to a dream or even a patient, but to a fellow human in a situation that however fantastic is dreadfully real. How sad that this new deal for poor Costakis won’t last.

Chris seems to be slowly scanning round. Dann becomes conscious that the background drone from the sky has risen, and the painful signals of dying life seem much stronger.

“What were you and big boy there talking about?” Costakis asks.

“Well, there’s a problem here, Chris. The energy, I mean, the transmissions from the Sound—this language doesn’t have words. I’m trying to say that this world is getting too much sky-energy. Can you get what I mean at all?” An idea strikes Dann; Costakis knew electronics, maybe some physics. Perhaps the facts will distract him from his other fears. “The people here don’t understand these things. I—we need your advice.”

The scanners of the big body before him extrude, membranes shift.

“You’re not telling me the whole story, Doc.”

The voice is so exactly that of the lonely, suspicious, jaunty little man that Dann can almost see his balding head.

“Yes. I think it’s bad. I didn’t want to alarm the others, I haven’t told anybody else. You know more than I about energy. I’d be grateful for your help. For instance, how much time do you think we have?”

At this moment an inarticulate cry flares from the female body beyond the thicket. Overhead, big Omar gives a monitory grunt, spreading his field.

“T-T-Tokra! Docra! Tann!”

Someone is clearly trying to call him.

“I’m coming. Excuse me, Chris.”

He jets over to the wakening form, so intent that he almost forgets to keep his mind away from its big, out-reaching field.

“Who are you? I’m Dann, Doctor Dann. Who’s there?”

“Oh, Doctor! Can’t you tell, I’m Valerie!”

He surveys the writhing manta-form—vanes, membranes, strange stalked appendages—and a sudden visual revulsion strikes him. Valerie, in that! A poignant memory rises of the girl in her own form, the darling curves of breast and waist, the little yellow-covered mons, the charming smile. To be in this thing— this giant monster that has eaten a human girl. Oh, vile!

He reels on the wind—and without warning, literally falls through her mind.

He has no idea what is happening, though afterwards he thinks it must have been like two galaxies colliding, two briefly interpenetrating webs of force. Now he knows only that he is suddenly in another world—a world named Val, a strange vivid landscape in space and time, composed of a myriad familiar scenes, faces, voices, objects, musics, body sensations, memories, experiences—all centered round his Val-self. His self incarnated in a familiar/unfamiliar five-foot-three body; tender-skinned, excitable, occasionally aching, with sharp sight and and hearing and clever, double-jointed hands; the only, the normal way to be. And all these are aligned in a flash upon dimensions of emotion—hope, pride, anxiety, joy, humor, aversion, a force-field of varied feeling-tones, among which one stands out for which his mind has no equivalent: fear, vulnerability everywhere. This world is dangerous, pervaded by some intrusive permanent menace, a lurking, confining cruelty like an occupying enemy. A host of huge crude male bodies ring it, rough voices jeer, oblivious power monopolies all free space, alien concepts rule the very air. And yet amid this hostile world hope is carried like a lamp in brave, weak hands; a hope so bound with self that it has no name, but only the necessity of going on, like a guerilla fighter’s torch.

All this reality unrolls through him instantly, he is in it—but it is background for one central scene: Five bare toes in sunlight, his living leg cocked up on the other knee above a yellow spread. And on his/her/my naked stomach is resting an intimately known head of brown hair. A head which is We Love —is a complex of tenderness, ambiguous resentments, sweet sharing, doubts, worry, wild excitements, resolves, and dreams. All existent in a magic enclave, a frail enchanted space outside which looms the injustice called daily life—and within which, gleaming in the sunshine, lie two Canadian travel folders and a box of health biscuits, about to be shared with love.

Almost as all this penetrates Dann, the vision of strange self shimmers, dissolves its overwhelming reality. Doubleness slides back and grows. The invading mental galaxy is withdrawing itself out and away.

Daniel Dann comes back to himself, spread on the winds of Tyree beside another alien form.

But he is not himself; not as he was nor ever will be again. For the first time he has really grasped life’s most eerie lesson:

The Other Exists.

Cliché, he thinks dazedly. Cliché, like the big ones. But I never understood. How could I? Only here, forever removed from Earth in perishing monstrous form, could I have felt the reality of a different human world. A world in which he is a passing phenomenon, as she was in mine. And to have mistaken that charged world-scape for a seductive little belly in a yellow bathing suit! Shame curdles him.

But now he must act, repair his irreparable blunder, attend to the business at hand.

“Valerie? I, I’m sorry—”

“It’s all right. You aren’t… You didn’t…” Gently, her thought brushes his. How could he have thought her wind-borne form ugly? The mind is all, it really is.

“But listen,” she is saying, her voice tinged pale with fear. “Major Fearing isn’t here, is he? The one you were talking to?”

“No. It’s Chris Costakis.” Irrationally he feels cheered that at least one of these telepaths has made the same mistake. Maybe he’s learning. “I don’t think you have to worry about Fearing ever anymore.”

“Oh.” Her voice-color mellows. “But we are in some kind of trouble, aren’t we? I mean, this isn’t a dream?”

“I’m afraid not. Didn’t your guardian up there tell you where we are?”

“He started to, I think, but I went to sleep.”

“Well, so far it’s been rather pleasant, believe it or not. Winona is here, she’s in a crowd of Fathers who want to talk with her about raising babies. Kirk is here too, but they regressed him to infancy. Winona thinks he’s cute. And Rick and Ron have found each other, they call themselves one person named Waxman now. Only Chris seems to be horrified that someone will read his mind.”

Time enough to mention the bad stuff later. He watches her glow and stretch her new body, becoming more fully awake. She must be in that state of dreamy euphoria that seems to attend waking up oh Tyree. Come to think of it, he’s still in it himself.

“Now who’s this, do you know?” He floats over to the body lying close by big Omar’s protective field. It has to be a much younger person; the mantle is short, the vanes half-grown. Protruding from the central membranes are a set of strong-looking claspers. Do Tyrenni children make much more use of their manipulative limbs? A section of pouch is exposed too, this must be a male child, one of the children he had seen carried up and away. He remembers to look at the life-aura; it seems to be sizable, cautiously eddying out. But odd, lop-sided.