James Tiptree Jr. - Up the Walls of the World

Without thought he gathers his strength as a man might take a deep breath, drawingunknowingly on all the lives around him, and hurls a mental cry at the Destroyer’s wall:

“MARGARET! MY DARLING, I’LL HELP YOU!”

He falls back, hit by a sense of stunned disengagement.

“Don’t do that again,” comes Waxman’s distant “voice.”

But someone else is exlaiming, “ Look! Look!”

Dann’s attention is all on the cloudy pale fires within. The star that he knows is Margaret seems to be drawing nearer to him.

“He reached it.” Val’s “hand” touches him. “ Let him try again.”

“All right.” Waxman’s phantom hand comes back too. “ But take it easy this time, Doc.”

Trying to modulate himself, Dann grasps at their tenuous touch.

“Margaret! It’s Dann here, Doctor Dann. Can you speak to me?”

More silent swirlings, the starlike point brightens. But no sense of thought or word comes. Instead, as it had done for Ted Yost, an image seems to rise and glimmer in his mind. He recognizes it incredulously—Margaret’s computer screen. Oh God, is this her only mode of communication here? He tries to bring it in focus, tries also to maintain contact with the others. Do they see it too?

Pale blue letters come to life on the ghostly screen:

/ / DOCTOR*DANN*IS*THAT*YOU/ /

“Yes! Yes!” he projects eagerly.

But the letters have changed, grown huge and ominous. They march across the screen, repeating meaninglessly:

— I MUST FOLLOW—I MUST SEARCH—I MUST FOLLOW—I MUST SEARCH—as though a vast mechanical voice is intervening.

“Margaret!”

At his cry the letters break down to normal size.

//DOCTOR*DANN*YOU*WON’T*HURT*ME*WILL*YOU//

“No, never my dear! Never! Tell me what to do!”

But the silently booming symbols are back, filling the screen. — I MUST FOLLOW—I MUST SEARCH—I MUST FOLLOW—

“Margaret! Margaret, tell me how to help you!”

— I MUST FOLLOW—I MUST SEARCH—I MUST—

Desperate, Dann pulls on the strengths around him.

“MARGARET!”

Again the normal screen comes back.

//CANT * TURN * OFF * NEED * MORE * STRENGTH// I * WILL * OPEN * WAY * IN * JUST * YOU// And then her words are swept away by the maniacal huge intruders:— I MUST FOLLOW—I MUST SEARCH—

He senses she has spent all her strength. The next move is up to him.

“I’m going to try to get to her. She said she can open it. Waxman, can you hang onto me somehow?”

“Right.”

Dann has no idea what to do, but he hurls himself across the cold chasm right at the brightness glimmering through the Destroyer’s nucleus. The contact with the wall is horrible, he shrinks and convulses like a soft thing dropped on fiery ice. But in the midst of his pain he feels it—a chink or opening, no more than a small weak spot in the terrifying surface.

Is he to go in that? Yes—because Margaret is trapped in there, he must reach her. But how? Savingly the thought comes to him that he is not a mortal man to be frozen or crushed; he is not more than a pattern of energy seeking to penetrate some resistance. He must, he will flow in somehow. Hold the thought: he imagines the inflowing of safe, fearless, mindless electrons. Flow in, go.

But as he knows he has started in, human imagery comes back and he is a man plunging his frightened arm, his head, into deep fanged jaws that have swallowed his child. Reach, stretch, get in! And the jaws become a frightful glacial crevasse squeezing him with icy menace, about to crush out his life. Still he persists, thrusts himself forward tremblingly, and the image becomes mixed with another; he is crawling through a perilously frail dark tube, a frightened astronaut squirming through an umbilicus to the haven of some capsule. Get on, crawl, squeeze, go.

He feels totally alone. If anyone is holding some rearward part of him he cannot sense it. Scared to death, he curses at himself for a coward. Damn you, Dann, Go on.

Just as his last resolve is failing, with astounding reorientation he or a part of himself is through. His bewildered senses emerge into a swirl of dark light, of power-filled space in which he can half-see a panorama of stars against which are unidentifiable things. He checks, remembering that he must not thrust through wholly but leave himself stretched back toward whatever help may be there.

“Margaret? Margaret!”

And then the starlit place comes alive and he sees her, or what is left of her. For an instant a child seems to be peering at him, a dim elf with huge eyes. “ Margaret?” Wait—beyond is another, he sees against the stars the beautiful remembered profile, immobile, eyes hooded: goddess of the night. And now another is near him, brighter than all—a familiar white-coated form, with her arms outstretched in tension. The dark hands are brilliantly visible, grasping what seems to be a gigantic busbar. The fingers are clenched, the arms strain to break open the points.

He understands; she or some part of her is trying to change the controls.

“Help,” a ghost whispers.

His being surges in response, his own imaginary hands reach out to close over hers upon the switch. But his dream-fingers have no force, they pass through hers like smoke.

“No use. Not that way.”

Oh God, he doesn’t have the power. He understands; this is real, this is solid matter in the actual world, before which he is no more than a sighing ghost. She alone has that power here. How can he help her? He would give her all his life, but how?

For a moment his senses quest in helpless frustration. Then abruptly he encounters the one thing he knows—a human wound of pain and need. Here! And his arms seem to grip a straining waist, in a rush he knows he can exert his own small gift, can take to himself her pain and fear and send her out his strength.

It is dizzying, transcendent, transsexual—he hugs, tugs recklessly, opening his very life to her need, pressing himself into her, giving himself to convert to the power of her grip. And for an instant he thinks they have succeeded: her visionary arm brightens, the fingers seem to strengthen, the switch yields imperceptibly.

But no—it is not enough. And he can barely hold. They must have more.

“Help! Help us!” he shouts back through his whole being, hoping that someone is still there to respond, unaware of the tremendous vortex of need that he is generating.

And just when he can hold no more, help comes; surging up through him like a violent sharp wave washing through to the nexus where he holds her, to the crucial point where she holds the unknowable. It’s intoxicating, a renewal of life mingled of human and Tyrenni essence intertwined. He guesses dimly that a great chain must be forming behind him, a desperate linkage of life pouring their strengths through him to the brittle point where her power can actually move and break the will of the Destroyer.

The intolerable strain mounts, individual consciousness is lost. All is focussed on those dream-fingers that control real force. Is it too much, will the dream-hold break? What powers of beast or machine is she pulling back, what cosmic circuit is she trying to thwart?

He does not know, but only throws his life into her struggle. He feels himself the apex of a frail chain of tiny lives trying to wrest control of something horrendously alien and vast, as if a living cobweb-strand should try to hold back the take-off of a mighty engine of the stars.

I MUST FOLLOW, I MUST SEARCH…