James Tiptree Jr. - Up the Walls of the World

Tivonel is reaching toward it.

“Be careful,” Giadoc warns. “ It is protected. We can’t reach in.”

She has met the barrier. He feels her recoil away.

“So we are in a pod with no driver,” Heagran sums up succinctly.

Belatedly Giadoc’s reviving mind remembers poor Tedyost.

“There is an alien here who seemed to be in contact with it. I must help him, I used his strength to call. He is one of those displaced by Scomber’s crime.”

“Find it.”

Slowly, feeling himself still weak, Giadoc begins to search from point to point around the circumference of the brain-wall. The others follow. Presently he locates a feeble emanation almost at the barrier itself and recognizes Tedyost. He is shocked by its weakness. How could he have been so unFatherly as to forget the other’s need? Remorsefully, he forms a penetration to infuse some of his own renewed strength.

The experience is abruptly disorienting. Streaming through the interface comes an alien sensory landscape of sky and silent light and great billows of liquid water, all permeated with joy. Riding the moving crests of water is a dream-pod, or rather, a remarkably detailed vision of three open pods braced together, surmounted by a big wind-filled vane which is pulling the leaping pods along. In the center hull reclines an alien figure, Tedyost himself, but naked and strangely dark hued. He is apparently happily driving or steering his imaginary craft.

Giadoc probes for deeper contact. “ Tedyost!”

He finds himself speaking from the form of an alien flying animal, a white “bird” perched on the pod’s prow.

“Hi there,” the mental construct of Tedyost says cheerfully.

Giadoc finds himself so caught up he must struggle for reality.

“Are you still in contact with the Destroyer? Remember! The brain, your ‘captain’?”

“I’m the captain,” Tedyost’s mind replies peacefully.

The creature is mad. Effortfully Giadoc pushes through the bewildering pseudo-reality, sends a jolt of life-force into the other nucleus. Remember!

But to his dismay the visionary world only grows stronger; he is still in bird-form, teetering for balance as the breeze and the hissing spray blow past the craft. The only trace of his efforts is that Tedyost’s dream now contains an image of the Destroyer’s speaking-screen, fixed to the edge of one pod. It shows blue lights and symbols, but Tedyost’s attention does not turn to it.

The alien will not rouse at this level, Giadoc sees. He himself is too weak to do more. He must disengage at once.

With more difficulty than he expects, Giadoc disentangles himself from the charming dream-world. When he reports to the others what he has found, Heagran’s mind-tone is grave.

“This place has dangers. The fantasy mode is very strong here. Without true senses we must all be on our guard. We must keep each other sane.”

They are all silent a moment, scanning the enigmatic brain so close yet so unreachable.

“ We must understand and control the reality of this place,” Heagran transmits again. “ If not, we will one by one drift into dreaming and be lost. Giadoc, you must devise means of contact. I will summon the surviving Fathers here to help.”

With grave formality he sends the ancient Tyrenni council-call out to the nearest minds. Giadoc can sense it being taken up and passed on.

“We should get the other aliens here too,” Tivonel puts in excitedly. “Maybe Tanel knows how to reach this one. Oh, I hope he’s alive.”

“Again this female has a sound idea.” Heagran’s tone is benevolent. “Young Tivonel, go quest for them in my name.”

With a warm touch she disengages, and Giadoc can sense her life-field flowing away from point to point among the throng of Tyrenni. He and Heagran wait, contemplating the pale cryptic forms writhing within the nucleus and the passive emanation of Tedyost.

All at once they notice that the structures of energy within the huge brain are changing, fading from their scan. It seems to be becoming wholly opaque. As it does so, a new surface configuration glimmers into being, very close, definite and stable; apparently a shallow energy-pattern. As they watch, it coalesces sharply to a field of brilliant points: Giadoc is reminded of something—the sky, seen from Tyree’s Near Pole.

“Heagran! It is showing us the Companions.”

As if in confirmation, the pattern lingers, then begins to change as though receding in a steady, unliving way. New sparks pour in on all sides while the familiar sky-field shrinks until it is only a part of what seems a huge globular mass of brilliance. Then that too shrinks further and is lost in a great flattened swirl, like a big plant of light spinning in an eddy. At the center of the slow light-whirl is a disorderly bright flare.

As Giadoc studies this he receives the impression of wrongness, danger; it is insistent, like the warning engrams that explorers sometimes impose on poisonous plants.

“This is some kind of message or communication, Heagran. Perhaps it is showing the true shape of the whole sky.”

“Can you decipher it, young Giadoc?”

“No. But maybe it is warning us of trouble among the Companions, or the death of Sounds.”

“We know that already.”

“Wait. See!”

Into the strange cold swirl of unliving light a squadron of dark shapes have come. They appear small, but Giadoc realizes they must be huge by comparison with the lights that represent a myriad Sounds, They remind him of the schools of mindless animals that feed on the plant-rafts of the high winds. As he attends, they spread out, deploy in ranks, and in fact begin something that looks like feeding. The Companions before them seem to vaporize or disappear at their approach; the black ranks are cutting a slow swathe of darkness through the brilliance of the central fires. Soon a zone or arc of empty deadness is being carved out of the great glowing swirl, between the inmost center and the roots of the streaming, spangled arms. A flare from the center washes toward the dark zone and subsides, and still the “feeding” goes on.

“Heagran, I believe it is showing us the other Destroyers. The eaters of Sounds.”

“ We know that too. To what purpose?”

“I can’t tell. It seems unliving, like a dead engram.”

Old Heagran churns angrily, and transmits with all his force straight at the brain behind the image.

“WHY? WHY DO YOU KILL?”

No reaction. The strange panoramic engram continues to unfold. The dead zone of destruction continues to expand around the center; now it has almost enclosed it. Giadoc is sure this is some recording, but a vastly speeded-up image or diagram of unimaginable scope. And now he notices a new detail of the scene: here and there among the shoals of the Destroyers are a few of different sort, moving in advance of the general line. They pause now and again, and from them come faint simulacra of the signals of life. Then these few turn and speed out beyond the area of annihilation, only to return and repeat.

Giadoc can make nothing of this, yet he senses it is intended as significant. He has not long to wonder; now the globe or shell of darkness has been joined around the central fires of the image. As if this were a signal, the dark shapes of the Destroyers draw together like a school of flying animals, then turn as one and flee outward from the scene. In a moment they have dwindled to a vanishing point in the void beyond all light.

The image holds for a moment, then darkens and expands back to the original sky-field, showing again the familiar Companions. Then this begins to shrink and condense as before. Giadoc realizes that it is about to repeat the entire sequence all over again. Can this be communication, or a fantastically detailed engram impressed somehow on unliving energy?