James Tiptree Jr. - Up the Walls of the World

Excitedly he tries again and again, failing more often then he succeeds. He is trying too hard, maybe. Relax. Think away. Yes—there they are again, moving with him. What he takes to be Valerie ahead is clearest, if any of this can be called clear. But what happiness to have something like vision again, even in this faint mode!

At this moment she checks and he has to strive away from colliding.

“Look.”

He can “see” nothing, but somehow the space before them seems different, as if it framed or led up to something. And then he becomes aware that he is perceiving: Some sort of pattern is forming like a hypnagogic scene behind his nonexistent eyelids, a hologram in black light.

The bright points—why, it is a picture of stars! And as he attends, the scene recedes, growing, and turns into an image he cannot fail to recognize—a great spiral galaxy seen like photos of Andromeda, in tilted view.

He and the others hover there transfixed, while the transmission changes and unrolls, as Giadoc and Heagran had seen it do at the nucleus. But these are human minds, turned to Earthly modalities.

“P.A. system,” Chris’ thought touches his abruptly. “ Probably a lot of them scattered around.”

“Frodo says it’s a transit diagram, ” Valerie’s “voice” smiles in the void. “ It’ll show an arrow: You are here, take Line L2 for Bethesda.”

And indeed, as Dann “watches,” or experiences the thing, he feels it has a mechanical quality, like a recording. And it seems to resonate from many points, like the abstract voice in a plane. This is your Captain speaking. Have they encountered or triggered some kind of information-post? Is this place an artifact, a ship of some inconceivable race?

The scene is now “showing” the fleet of star-Destroyers spreading their zone of death around the central fires of the Galaxy. Suddenly the memory of a long-ago summer in Idaho surfaces in Dann’s mind. Comprehension breaks.

“Good God, it’s a firelane!”

Feeling Val wince, he modulates down. “ It’s a galactic fire-break! If that’s our galaxy. We must be seeing millions of years, speeded up. See that explosion at the center?” He realizes he is transmitting a jumble, half-words, half-pictures, and tries for coherence. “ An explosion like that could start a chain reaction, propagate out to all the central stars. Maybe even to the arms. I think those ships or whatever are starting backfires, they’re clearing out a zone around the center to stop the spread. To save the outer stars. But aeons of time, a galaxy — a whole great galaxy —”

He falls silent before the enormity of the thing.

Through Valerie’s touch he can feel the reflection of her wonder. Do they truly grasp it? It’s too vast, I don’t grasp it, he thinks numbly, “seeing” the things, whatever they are, complete their task, form up and speed away. Then the whole scene expands and begins to repeat again.

The four hover before it, hypnotized.

How can they annihilate matter, Dann wonders, without generating worse energies? Do they somehow disperse it below criticality? Are they beings or machines?

Suddenly Valerie’s “voice” says excitedly, “ Look! Look at those ones going in ahead. Can’t you feel the life there? I think they’re rescuing life, they’re taking living things off before they burn up. Maybe that’s what we’re in.”

“A rescue squad,” Chris comments tersely.

“Frodo thinks they’re alive,” Valerie goes on. “ Like space-fish. Maybe we’re in a whale, like Jonah.” Her soundless laugh is warm in the endless night. “ Or in a kangaroo’s pouch… We better move on and find the others.”

Her nonexistent fingers tug gently. Dann tears himself away from the mesmeric image and follows, marveling at her composure. She accepts that they are in a thing. Are they jumping between the electrons of a space-fish? Or hurdling interstellar distances? No way to tell. How big is the structure of a mind? The ancient theologians had been sure that angels could throng on a pinhead. Perhaps he is sub-pinhead size? But he is not an angel, none of them are. We are the miraculously undead, he thinks; joy and pain and wonder and tension live among us still.

They skirt another of the uncanny communicative projectors, triggering it in midscene. As the great galaxy flashes to life in his mind’s eye, Dann muses again on the incredible grandeur of the thing. Beings or machines whose task is to contain galactic fire-storms! Ungraspable in its enormity. Are they manned ships, or could it be instinctive, like great animals? Or maybe devices of a super-race to rescue endangered habitats of life?

His own mind reels, yet the others with him seem undisturbed. He recalls that their Earthly selves read, what was it, science fiction. Galaxies, super-races, marvels of space. They’re used to such notions. He himself had seen the stars as stars; they saw them as backgrounds for scenarios. Well, maybe theirs was the best preparation for reality, if wherever they are is indeed reality.

He is distracted by the faint persistent glimmer of more presences that seem to be moving parallel with them. Two, no, three others are here. An instant later he feels a strong, skillful Tyrenni mind-touch, is electrified by recognition. “ Tanel!”

“Tivonel, my dear, is that you? Are you —”

“Tanel, stop, you’re terrible .” Image of coral laughter leaping away. He subsides abashed. It comes to him that he was “sending” in a sort of pidgin, half-human, half Tyrenni words. Will there, incredibly, be language problems here?

It seems so. She is “speaking” again, but he retains only enough of her speech to catch a sense of impending events and the names of Heagran and Giadoc. This last comes through with such joy that he is pricked by a ludicrous flash of jealousy. Apparently the famous Giadoc has been found—of course, he called them here. Now his little friend is reunited with her love. For an instant he chafes, until the ultimate absurdity of his reaction here in this gargantuan abyss comes to his rescue.

It seems they are to go on. But just as he starts, Valerie’s invisible touch checks, and he is jolted by a brush with an unfamiliar, warm complex of mind-stuff.

“Oh Winnie, I’m so glad you’re all right!” Val’s thought comes while he tries apologetically to back away from their contact. He can hear Winona’s transmission almost as if her voice were in his human ears. “ Yes, I have Kenny here too, with his doggie. They’re dreaming of hunting. Oh, hello, Doctor Dann! How wonderful!”

“Yes.” He disengages, and finds again Val’s light touch tugging him on through nowhere. As they go on amid unfathomable strangeness, Dann broods on the concept of being “all right,” here between the stars without bodies or proper senses, perhaps inside some creature or machine of the void. Well, the alternative was burning to death in mortal bodies; they have in fact been rescued from real death. Maybe the mind really is all, as he had told himself. Maybe to these telepaths the body is less necessary. But he, how will he get on with his mere human mind as his only resource in this terrible isolation? Rescued from death… a coldness touches him. Are they perhaps truly rescued from mortal death, is this condition to be—don’t think of it.

He is so preoccupied that he almost misses Val’s pull backward, her sense of warning. He stops, but not before he has touched against a hostile iciness—manifestly a barrier.

He recoils onto the nearest sustaining point like a man teetering on a brink. What menace is here? He tries to “look” in his new averted way, and finally achieves an impression of a great swirl of pale energies confined in a pyramidal or tetragonal shape. It is huge, complex, indefinably sinister. And it is apparently their goal; he can sense other lives waiting nearby.