James Tiptree Jr. - Up the Walls of the World

Very well, ahura, whatever that is. But what to do? And who is his invisible mentor? As quietly as he can he shapes the question.

He “hears” no reply, but suddenly finds himself recalling big Father Ustan, who had separated him from Ron in the winds of Tyree. At first he takes it only for memory, until something in its insistence tells him it is communication. Dear God, if this is mind-speech, how will he ever learn?

In answer, his surface thought is suddenly invaded by a point that unfolds into a picture or diagram, an abstract multidimensional web-work glimmering in his mind. He puzzles, finally guesses that he is being shown a field-organization, a teaching picture of how to shape himself to function here. But it means nothing to him; he has not the concepts.

For a moment he fully appreciates his barbarous mental state. The Tyrenni train themselves from childhood in all this. Random human exhortations recur to him: Brace up, Relax, Concentrate, Make up your mind, Forget it, Think positively, Cool it, Meditate. How ludicrously inadequate, even the portentous admonitions of psycho-therapy! Here before him are precise instructions on how to organize his mind-self—and he doesn’t know how.

He has no pride left; pride is not the issue here.

Help me, he cries or pleads.

Next second he has an experience so astounding he forgets to be terrified. What he has felt as gentle external pressure becomes suddenly a real invasion—some part of his inmost being is grasped and shifted. He feels moods being seized and compressed, memories manipulated; his very focus of attention suddenly seems to dissolve, to flow in unknown directions and recover itself on some unexperienced dimension. Tensions he was unaware of melt with a snap, events on the borders of consciousness careen about and disappear. It is intimate, clinical, appalling, nothing at all. Beyond description.

He yields. He has no choice nor concepts to define what is happening to him. One last panicky thought wonders if he is going mad or has forever lost himself. Then that too vanishes.

With a twist like a chiropractor’s jerk he finds himself precariously stabilized in what feels like an internal gymnastic pose. His dizzied awareness comes back to him in a ludicrous picture of himself twisted into a pretzel with his heels behind his ears.

“There. Thus.”

He receives the “voice” distinctly but at some receptor-focus separate from his normal center, like an ear held out.

“Speak so. I have assisted you to form a receptor-node. Place a thought here to pass it on.”

Good grief, is this what telepaths do? Feeling like an untrained contortionist, Dann tries to form a thought of gratitude and hold it apart, “there,” at this new center of his mind. “ Where are my friends?”

“They are nearby. You are Tanel. A message: You must all join Father Heagran. That way.” A sense of direction imprints itself together with the words, coupled with an impression of stretching or flowing across points.

“Where are we? What is this place?” he tries to ask, but in his urgency forgets the correct procedure. When he recovers himself and goes through the new convoluted channel, nothing answers him. He receives only a sense of disapproving departure. Father Ustan has gone away.

Very well. To go that way. Trying to hold his strange new configuration, he reaches out and finds himself able to flow from base to charged base. As he masters this mode of locomotion, he tries to call or send out as discreetly as he can the names of the others. “ Someone from Earth, are you there? Please answer if you can.”

And suddenly, delightingly, someone is here, saying soundlessly at his new “ear.” “ Doctor Dann!”

It’s Valerie, he’s sure of it, the warmth, the indefinable flavor of personality. Forgetting composure, he rushes at the touch and is rewarded by a startling buffet of reproof-laughter-drawing-away, coupled with a picture of himself, absurdly shaggy, falling in a bear-hug onto Valerie’s figure.

“Excuse me, please, I’m sorry I don’t know how —” Awkwardly he pulls back, reforming his configuration, terrified that he will lose her.

“Think about just touching hands lightly.” The tiny gentle “voice” comes in his brain.

It is like Tyree all over again, with no body. He tries to comply, and is rewarded by a definite sense of impalpable contact.

“Frodo is here. And Chris is around but he won’t talk. Now we better go. I’ll lead, right?”

“Yes.”

He feels the touch pull or draw delicately, and flows himself with it, marveling. The quality of the contact is Valerie’s but not the same defensive young mind he had known before. Strength flows gently from her, and—something like elation. Leading them through this lightless, soundless, senseless place beyond life she is excited, unafraid. And far more skilled than he. The vulnerability was left on Earth, he thinks. Here nothing scares her.

He flows or leaps along in her wake, exerting all his efforts to hold the contact lightly. Once or twice she checks and changes direction, and he has a fleeting sense of other presences. She must be guiding them around groups of Tyrenni in their path. Or over or under—all directions have the same valence here. How could a disembodied mind know weight?

Preoccupied, he blunders into the outskirts of another mind, a quick bright impression of many words mixed with musics, and an unmistakably hostile laugh. “ Frodo!” Trying to transmit apology, he swerves away. His new “posture” is becoming slightly more natural, but he still feels like a man trying to bicycle a tightwire while holding out an ear-trumpet with both hands.

And Earthly questions are waking in him again. What in God’s name is this place? It has physical existence, he is sure of that. They are actually moving. But what and where are they?

As if in answer, another light contact jolts him and a strange word jumps into his mind. “ Superconductive circuits.”

Who’s there? He lunges awkwardly for an instant before recalling how to project? “ Chris? Chris Costakis?” The absurdity of human names here in astral nothingness.

A cryptic emanation brushes him, flavored with acidity and wistfulness. “ Keep moving, Doc.”

It’s gone. So what had been the little man is still here, still his characteristic self.

Dann resumes his progress, pondering. Superconductors? Chris must have “heard” him puzzling over this place, he must be puzzling too. Superconductors are something that happens in extreme cold, he recalls. Currents cycle endlessly. No friction… He knows nothing of such things. Could they in fact be sustained by, be moving among, some such cold circuitry of space? Could a living mind be compatible with such energies? It seems as likely as anything… The words ghost-program come back to him; he thrusts them away. Lost, gone forever, with everything else. Don’t think of her. Keep moving in this unreality, it’s all that’s left.

Without knowing it, he must have sent out a sign or squeak of pain. A firmness brushes him, palpable as a finger laid on his lips. Not human, he thinks. Some passing Tyrenni has admonished him. Anguish is not permitted. Well, perhaps he can learn. He must; there are no drugs here.

Just then he becomes aware of a new extraordinary thing: For some time he has not been in total lightlessness. Out on the edges of his mind he has been sensing something, like seeing at night from the corners of the eye. It is not in his visual system at all, really—but there is something spatial, blurs or presences. Faint swirls, the memories of reflections in dark water; ghostly differentiations too faint to make out except that three of them seem to be moving with him against a background of others. He tries to “look” harder, and they vanish. He thinks of closing his eyes, and slowly they come back: dim, moonlit glimmers, but there. Is this perhaps what they meant by the life-bands, is he starting to “see” life?