James Tiptree Jr. - Up the Walls of the World

“I dreamed something,” Val is saying, “before I got so scared. But then I went to sleep. They do that, don’t they?”

“Yes. It’s their way of fixing up fear and bad feelings.”

“How wonderful!” She stretches again, laughs gaily. “Don’t worry about what happened, you know. Oh, I feel so free!” She makes an experimental caracole above the plants, lifts all her vanes. “Free and strong—why, I could go miles and miles, couldn’t I? Anywhere in the sky!”

“That’s right. As a matter of fact, on this world the females seem to do all the traveling and exploring while the males tend the kids.”

“Oh, wow!” Then she sobers. “But we should wake up—whoever this is.”

They hover together over the quiet form. Dann notices again the peculiar tight-held formation of parts of its life-energies. Another frightened one like Costakis?

Suddenly the dark, mantle lights concisely.

“Don’t bother,” says the voice of Fredericka Crespinelli. “Are you all right, Val?”

“Frodo! I dreamed, I was sure you were here.”

“I heard you. Hello, Doc.”

“Hello Frodo. Have you been awake long?”

“Awhile. Listen, what in the name of the Abyss—now why did I say that? What did they do to me?” The words glimmer with the tinge of fear.

“Don’t be scared, Frodo,” Val says loftily. “They didn’t do anything, to your mind, it’s just that you can say what they have words for. I figured that out right away.”

“All right.” Dann can see she is much more disturbed than Val. “What are we here for, Doc? What’s going on?”

To distract her he says the first thing that comes into his head.

“Well, for one thing you’re a young male now. Your body, I mean. A boy, like twelve or fifteen I’d guess.”

“Who, me?”

She twists in midair, trying to see all of herself at once, and succeeds in blowing into a tangle of vanes and vines. Val laughs merrily, trying to help, but there seems to be no easy way of physical assistance in this world. Frodo finally jets free.

“When you grow up you’ll be like that enormous old chap up there. He’s a Father, that’s the highest rank here.” Grinning to himself, Dann can’t resist adding, “As a male your main job will be raising babies. It’s the high-status thing here. The females like Val aren’t allowed to touch them.”

“What?!” The rainbow-hued exclamations end in delicious laughter. Dann joins in. Enjoy while we can, the absurd delight in the magical winds of Tyree. The others are experimentally flying barrel-rolls.

“Wait a minute, you two. I suggest you learn more about this world before you make the mistakes I did. The way you do it is to ask someone for a memory.”

“A memory?”

“The most amazing teaching method you ever saw. Wait. Father Omar!” he calls. “May I present Valerie and Frodo, two former females of my world? They would like to be given a memory, but we are ignorant of the correct way to receive. Would you instruct them?”

“Very well,” the old being replies, and a sad sigh gleams on his sides. “Perhaps I too will ask a memory of your world, since my Janskelen has gone there.”

“Now you’ll be fine,” Dann tells them. “Just do what he says and you’ll be astounded. I’m going to check on the others. Maybe I can bring back my friend to meet you, a real young female of Tyree.”

… And so it had gone, a dreamlike happiness in the high beauty of the Wall. But then another fireball had crashed close, and started a precipitous exodus down, and down again.

Tivonel will not stray far from Lomax and the old Hearer stays bravely above the rest, still reaching his mind to the sky.

Dann feels duty-bound to stay near, since he has Giadoc’s body; privately he is sure all this is futile. Meantime his human friends are one by one beginning to feel the burning in the wind.

“Chris, will you take charge? Make them get under what shelter they can and get them lower down the Wall. I have to stay by the Hearers because the person who owns my body may be trying to come back.”

“You leaving us, Doc?’

“I doubt it. I even doubt I want to, believe it or not.”

Suddenly Costakis displays an unChrislike opalescent laugh; a true laugh of human acceptance.

“I believe you, Doc.”

He planes off down the wind, to round up Winona’s group. Costakis “believes”? Dan has a momentary realization of what sheer size and strength has done for Chris. The simple fact of presence that he himself unthinkingly enjoyed so long. To be listened to, to have no need to strive.

It is in fact Chris who gives them concrete help.

He presently reappears by Dann and Heagran, towing a thorny-looking bundle of plant-life.

“Doc, I’ve been looking around. This stuff must have some, what’s the word, hard matter in it, it blocks off the energy pretty well. You know, the sky-sound. If we make a big raft of it we’d have a shelter from the burning. Trouble is, I’ve got everything but, uh, manipulators.”

He flaps his mantle, wiggling his weak claspers as if to say, “No hands.” Several nearby Fathers color embarrassedly.

“What are you doing with that frikkon-weed?” Tivonel jets up. “That’s awful stuff, it tears your vanes.”

“Yeah, but it’ll stick together without weaving,” Chris replies. “You have that long vine, too. We can throw lines over the mats to hold them down by. Doc, these people ought to make some for themselves if they want to last much longer. Tell them.”

Heagran has been following the conversation with distant puzzlement. Now he says haughtily, “Stranger, it seems you do not know that making objects and weaving is children’s work. This is no time for child-play!”

“Suit yourself. I’m trying to show you how to keep from being burned alive.”

“Wait, Chris,” Dann puts in. “They won’t understand at all, we’ll never get anywhere with words. Can you form a mental picture of the danger and exactly the kind of shelters you mean?”

“And let them read my mind?” Chris jets backward nervously.

“Just that one single item, Chris. I guarantee it, these people have deep respect for privacy. Just form a picture of the damage from the energy, and how the mat should be made to hold it off. Show it protecting children.”

“I don’t want anyone in my head,” Chris says. Dann hears the shifting colors of indecision.

“Please, Chris. At least for the kids’ sake. Father Heagran, my friend here is expert at such energy-dangers. He wishes to show you how to protect your young. But he is frightened that his whole life will be known. Can you assure him that you will take only this information?”

Big Heagran is a rainbow of exasperation, weariness, skepticism, and worry.

“If you can form an engram, stranger, naturally no Tyrenni would seek more.” His tone carries convincing repugnance.

“See, Chris? An engram, he means a kind of concentrated image—”

“I know what an engram is,” Chris says sullenly. “All right. But not til I say go.” His big body has become quiet, the immaterial energy of his life tight-held around it. Then Dann sees the hazy field begin to bulge toward Heagran, swirling and condensing a small nucleus, rather like an amoeba preparing to divide. Heagran’s field extends a leisurely energy-tendril toward the bulge.

“Remember about the children,” Dann calls.

“Go,” says Chris muffledly, and at that instant his bulge seems to explode toward Heagran.

Dann is blinded by a sudden brilliant stop-sequence like a film display—pictures of the radiation-storm, and progressively burned bodies, extraordinary, detailed images of the making of protective floating rafts, with ropes of gura-vine to anchor them. It’s like a vivid how-to book, even to insets showing enlarged details. The final image shows a raft holding off the burning rays above a crowd of bodies who are odd amalgams of human and Tyrenni children.