James Tiptree Jr. - Up the Walls of the World

Exulting, he feels the lives meshed round him, knows himself a part of a tremendous striving, a battle of essence against oblivion, a drive toward unknown salvation beyond the sky. And they are winning! The surge is immense, victorious. Far behind them dwindles the burning world bearing their destroyed flesh. And from ahead now he can sense a faint welcoming call. They have made it, they are winning through! In an instant they will be saved!

But even as the sense of haven reached opens to his unbodied mind, a terrible faintness strikes through him. The rushing energy upbearing him begins to weaken, to wane and dissolve. In utmost horror he feels the life-power sinking back through hostile immensities. Oh God. Oh no—it was too far, too far for the exhausted strivers. They have failed. With dreadful speed the fading Beam collapses, back, back alid down, losing all cohesion.

In deathly weariness and disarray, the minds that formed it faint and fall back into their dying bodies in the hell-winds of Tyree.

Silence, under the fire-roaring sky. Only the occasional green whimper of a child comes from the stricken crowd. Their last hope has failed, there can be no more. Ahead lies only death.

After a time old Heagran stirs and orders the others to seek what shelter they can. His voice is drained, inexpressibly weary. Painfully, by ones and twos, the crowd obeys.

“Of what use?” says Bdello bitterly. But he too goes to help secure their abandoned shelter.

“We were so close, so close,” Tivonel cries softly. Her mantle is so burnt she can barely form the words. “He would have saved us. He tried.”

“Yes.”

“You understood, Tanel. I am to die with you, as you said.”

“I’m sorry, Tivonel. I too loved your world. Now you must let me heal you one last time.”

“No.” Her weak light-tones are proud. But he persists, and finally she allows him to restore the worst of her burns, though he all but faints with her pain.

The next hours or years drag on through nightmare. The agonizing death-signals are louder and closer now; Tyrenni are dying all around. So far he has been able to preserve all of his little band of humans, and Tivonel. But his strange ability to heal seems to be weakening as his own body suffers more damage, and his courage to bear their pain is failing him fast.

Frodo seems to be worst off; he forces himself to summon the will to make his healing will touch her mind-field. But the effort effects only a slight improvement, at the cost of agonies he hadn’t believed bearable. She must be, he sees, about to die. They all are. End this, he prays to emptiness. End this soon.

As if in answer to his plea, another huge fireball comes screaming down through the murk. Dully he realizes that this one is coming close. Close—closer—the air is in flames. All in one roaring shock he feels his own flesh burning and sees it explode among the Tyrenni beyond.

Oh God, it hasn’t killed him. He is in pain beyond his power to feel it; even as he hears his own voice screaming he finds himself existent as a tiny mote of consciousness somehow apart from the incineration of his flesh. He has heard of such terminal mercies, can only hope that others are finding it too. But it is perilously frail, is passing. In a moment he will be swallowed in mindless pain.

He can see darkly where the charred bodies of the hearers and the Senior Fathers drift. A few death-moans rend his mind. This is the end. Goodbye, fair dream-world. He wishes he could send or receive a last warm touch. But an overwhelming agony is cresting up, is about to fall on him forever.

He waits. Still it hangs over him, an unbreaking wave. Around him the world seems to be quieting, a strange effect of lightening and darkening at once. His senses must be dying. Let me die too, before I recover the full power to feel the pain. Disorientation washes over him. Death, take me.

But strangely he still lingers in crepuscular consciousness. And then a horrible perception penetrates his agony. The blackened, shriveled bodies in his view are beginning to stir. They change, expand, are again limned in living energies. Others too seem to be coming back to ghostly life. And his own pain is slackening, receding back.

Oh God of horrors, no. It is a last time eddy, contravening the release of death.

The savagery of it. Are they doomed to be brought back endlessly, to die again and again?

He can only watch helplessly, too horror struck to think. But then he notices that this time-change seems different. The others had transported him instantaneously to the past. This seems to be a strange, slow, regress, as though time itself was somehow being rolled backward in a dreamlike stasis.

The death-cries around him have faded, the world is hushed. Even the all-devouring shrieking of the Sound has stilled. A sense of something unimaginable impends.

With a lightless flash the sky splits open. Through the hush there strikes down on them a great ray or beam of power beyond comprehension, pouring in on them from beyond the world.

From the heart of death a call comes without voice.

COME TO ME. COME!

He is alive!

The pinpoint triumph of his own life blooms into being in the void: He, Giadoc, lives!

He is no more than an atom of awareness, yet as soon as he feels himself existent the skills of a Hearer of Tyree wake to ghostly life. He gropes for structure and vitality, strives to rebuild complexity, to energize and reassemble his essential subsystems. Memory comes; he achieves preliminary coherence, strenghtens. At first he fancies he is suffering the aftermath of a childhood rage, when he had been required to reorganize himself unaided.

But this is not that far-off time, not Tyree. As consciousness grows he knows himself totally alone in infinite emptiness and darkness. He has fallen out of all Wind into some realm beyond being. And he is without body, fleshless and senseless, re-forming himself on nothing at all.

Characteristically, marveling curiosity awakes. How can this be? Life must be based on bodily energy—yet he lives! How?

He possesses himself of more memory and recalls his last instants when the Beam had shriveled, abandoning him in space. His last perception was of the hideous Destroyer ahead and his own fading remnants plunging toward it. Has he somehow entered the Destroyer itself, and lived? But how? On what?

He checks his being cautiously—and finds, he doesn’t knows what: a point-source, a tiny emanation unlike anything he knows. It’s totally nonliving, weirdly cold and steady. Yet it nourished him, seems to support his life here in the realms of death between the worlds.

How marvelous and strange!

An idea comes. Perhaps this Destroyer is not only deathly, perhaps it is really dead. A huge dead animal of space. Could he be subsisting on the last life of one of its dying ganglia?

Giadoc has heard of dubious attempts to tap the fading energies of dead animals like the fierce little curlu. Perhaps he has done something of this sort on an enormous scale. If this is the case, he has not long to live. But the things of space are vast and slow, he reminds himself; the huge energies of a Destroyer must take time to decay. Perhaps he will have time to explore, to try to find some way to relocate the Beam.

As he thinks this the grievous memory of his world comes to full life and nearly overwhelms him. Tyree—beloved, far Tyree now under fiery destruction, and Tivonel with it, lost forever. And his son Tiavan, his proud one who betrayed him, committed life-crime and fled with his child to that grim alien world…

For a moment his mind is only a fierce cry to the bright image of all he loves and has lost.

But then his disciplines and skills come to him. Ahura! This is no time to feel. Resolutely he disengages the urgent pain; as no human could, he compacts and encapsulates it in the storage-cycles of his mind. Now for what time is left him he must see what he can do, find what this unknown level of existence holds.