Up the Walls of the World

Chapter 14

A dream…

“Calm, calm. Don’t be afraid.”

Afraid? Dann is not, he thinks dimly, afraid. He is merely dead.

Deadness will claim him any minute. He waits.

But the delirium is not fading, and under it is a memory of agonizing loss. Unwelcomely, Dann begins to suspect that he exists, is somehow again embodied in… in he does not know what.

“Calm, I’m here. I’ll help you. You’re safe now.”

Is someone really here? Yes… yes. A warm, tentative someone speaking without words, touching without touch. A living presence like an arm pressing, not his body but his mind. A nurse?

“Gently, wake up now. You’re all right. Wake up.”

Perverse, he refuses consciousness. A confusion of memories coming now: being pulled, fighting vast currents. Is he back on that beach of childhood when the lifeguard girl had pulled him out of a rip-tide? She wore a copper bracelet, he remembers. Sissy somebody. Now he is dead and he has been saved again. But not by any Sissy; this time he knows he is on no mortal beach.

“You’re all right really, you’ll be home soon. Don’t be afraid.”

No voice, he understands. Only words coming into his, his head? And the arm is not flesh but a current of all-rightness flowing in. Human questions suddenly flare up in him. “Who’s there? Where am I? What—?” And as he asks, or tries to, he feels a wince, a jumping-away.

“No! Please don’t! I want to help you!” The presence is a receding whisper in his mind.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he stammers effortfully, and is further confused by knowing he is indeed speaking aloud, but not in any earthly voice. Deliberately he opens his eyes, or, rather, succeeds in unclosing something. As he does so he understands finally that the senses he is activating, or focussing, are no organs ever owned or imagined by Doctor Daniel Dann.

—Who now finds what may be himself resting upon nothingness, perceiving an enormous curved and whirling landscape. Beside him towers a great rushing wall gloriously patterned with strange energies and emanating deep musics. Beautiful. And above, far above, is a weird, pale, rooflike arch he feels as potent, while far below, the great typhoon dwindles into the silent dark. A landscape of magical grandeur; even in exhaustion his spirit feels a faint delight.

Another fact comes; he seems to be “seeing” or perceiving in all directions at once, he is at the center of a perceptual globe in which he has only to focus. Extraordinary. Bemused by finding that the dead can feel curiosity, he tries to attend inward, and “sees,” in the midst of a queer streaming energy, a huge mass of enigmatic surfaces or membrances, flickering here and there with vague lights. Can this be… his body?

Dreamily, he notices movement. The great fans or wings are tilting gently, continually readjusting themselves. From beneath come small, jetlike pulsations which he can now vaguely sense. He feels himself at rest yet riding, balancing without effort on moving pressure-gradients, the vast turbulences of this air. To this body, the whirlwind is home.

Understanding can no longer be postponed. He is—is in—a giant alien form like those he now recalls having glimpsed or dreamed of.

Oddly, this fails to frighten him, but only charms him further. It is not generally realized, he thinks hysterically, that what the totally destroyed need is for something interesting to happen… But where is his “nurse,” the friendly stranger?

He scans more carefully. Deep below he senses living energies, like a great crowd; but they are much too far. Nearer to him on the wind-wall are a few isolated presences. Two are quite close, he can “see” them hovering on the wind, surrounded by the odd veils, like Elmo’s fire. Still too far away. He focusses upward—and there it is.

A shape like his own, but smaller, clothed in an auroralike discharge. How he perceives this he doesn’t know; it seems to be his main sense-channel, like seeing a thing he remembers from another life, a Kirlian photograph. As he thinks this he notes absently that the “fire” around himself has suddenly flared up toward the other.

“Look out! Please! Can’t you control yourself at all?”

The words are clear. But the voice—it is an instant before he puzzles out that this real, audible cry was not a voice at all, but a pattern of light flickering on the membranes of the other’s body. And yet his senses “heard” the light as speech. More mystery. Experimentally he wills himself to say, “I’m sorry”—and “hears” his words as a light-ripple on himself.

Incredible. Strangeness beyond strangeness brims up in him, overfloods his dikes. A dream? No, an ur-life; unreal reality. Nothing is left of him, yet here at the end of all he giggles.

“I am a giant squid in a world tornado, apologizing in audible light to another monstrous squid.”

Evidently he has tried to say it aloud but without words for the alien concepts. He hears himself uttering garble mixed with orange laughter.

The laughter at least gets through. The creature above him laughs too, a charming lacy sparkle.

“Hello,” he says tentatively.

“Hello! You feel better. What’s your name? I am Tivonel, a female. Are you a male?”

Male, female? He gazes up at “her,” letting himself slip deeper and deeper into this alien normalcy. He feels, he realizes, quite well; this body has a health, a vigor his own had lost long ago. It comes to him as he gazes that the being above him is indeed a female, in fact, a girl—a nice girl who just happens to be, in some sense, a thirty-meter giant manta-ray or whatever.

He is in no condition to criticize this.

“I’m Dann,” he tells her. “Daniel Dann.” Is the name getting through? “I’m a male, yes.”

“Taneltan? Taneltan!” She laughs again, sparkling disbelief. “Males don’t have three-names. I’ll call you Tanel, it sounds more respectable.” She sobers. “If you really are better, can you control yourself so I can come closer? I want to help you.”

“Control myself? I don’t understand.”

“Hold your field in decently. Look at yourself, you’re all over and inside out, you could even lose some.”

“My… field?”

“Yes. Look at you.”

“You mean that, that energy-stuff?” he tries to say. “Around… me?”

“It’s not around you, it’s you. Your mind, your life. You have to hold it in and arrange it properly. Ahura. Wait—watch me.”

He watches her, and, marveling, sees the energy-halo englobe itself, shrink, spread out in patterns, expand to pseudo-forms, retract through a whirl of permutations and end in a delicately layered toroid around her corporeal body. Is he watching motions or dispositions of the actual mind, some kind of mysterious psychic art?

“I don’t know how to do that,” he says helplessly.

“Well, try. Oh, start by thinking yourself round, like an egg.”

He doesn’t believe in any of this, but is willing to be entertained. Awkwardly, he tries to “think himself round,” and as he does so sees surprisedly that his pale fire-streamers are raggedly lurching inward in a crudely globular form. Good— but no, half of himself has perversely blown right out again. Because he noticed it? Not easy, he perceives, and concentrates again. Roundness… the flare retracts. He’s getting it—Ooops, now his other side has bulged wildly away. He hears her laugh. Roundness… roundness…

“You’re just like a big baby, that’s what Giadoc said.”

“Giadoc?” Still striving for some weird combination of control and alertness, he half-remembers… something.

“You’re in Giadoc’s body. He’s my friend. Don’t be afraid, he’ll come back soon and you’ll be back in yours.”

“Giadoc… did he speak to me, when I, when I, uh, died?”

“He did? Oh good, that means he’s all right. He’ll be back soon. First they have to let the Beam down and raise it again. Look—I think they’re letting down now. Maybe you’ll go right back. Look up, see?”

Forgetting his “field,” he looks up. The great arching of energy above is draining, dwindling down to its enormous perimeter. As it does so, the world around him brightens and strengthens, his own energies seem to sharpen.

“Well, you’re still here,” his new friend Tivonel says briskly. “That means you just have to wait til they raise it again. Now you simply have to control yourself. Do you know you nearly fell out of the Wind? The only reason I could pull you back was that you were sick. I was afraid you’d hit me, like the other one.”

“The other one?”

“The other one who came here in Giadoc’s body. I tried to help it but it hit me with its mind. It knocked me away. Can you all do that?”

“The other one… who came here…” In Dann’s mind a forgotten glass of water slid on a bedstand, a voice wails Margaret into darkness. Did she come here? Pain knifes at him. Stop it, stop it. No more reality.

“Oh, you are hurt!”

“No, no,” be manages to say from a million miles distant, aware of a timbre that his lost human mind calls green, but he knows here is pain. Gone forever in the dark—push it away. Get back in the dream-life, the dream of being a giant alien flying at ease in a world-typhoon, which is a pleasant afternoon. Chatting with a girl alien, feeling strong.

She has come closer. As he sees this, a filament of his mind-cloud seems to whip toward her and she whisks away, crying exasperatedly, “No! That’s what you mustn’t do. It’s very rude, pushing your thoughts into people.”

“What? You mean… if it touched like that, you can read my mind?”

“Well of course.”

“I don’t believe it,” he says wonderingly.

“Well, I’ll show you, but you have to hold perfectly still. Can you hold your field still now?”

“I don’t know. I’ll try.” Watching his awkwardly eddying life energies, he recalls he had once tried to learn a meditation technique. It didn’t help then; maybe it will now. Effortfully he strives to concentrate, to recapture the deep quietude. Shrink consciousness to a point, watch nothing. But he is still aware that an eddy of her field is flowing toward him. Don’t watch. At the tangible nudge in his mind he reacts helplessly.

“Ouch!” She is swirling up into the wind.

“I’m sorry. I did that wrong.”

“It’s all right, you weren’t too bad. Only you’re so much stronger than a baby. Did you get it?”

“Get what?”

“The memory I gave you, silly. Look in your memory. Where are you?”

Where, indeed? Does ur-reality have a name, am I actually somewhere? Where?

—And he realizes he knows. He knows!

“Why, I, I’m on T-Tyree—that’s your world. Tyree.”

“You see!” She curves closer again, mischievous.

“My God,” he tries to say, but it comes out “Great winds!”

“See if you got the rest. Think about Tyree.”

“Tyree… Oh, yes, you’re in trouble. Radiation is—” But this language has no words, he hears himself babbling about burning in the Wind and intolerable loudness of the Sound. The Sound? Sunlight? Of course, they think in other modes. “And wait, yes—you’re trying to escape by sending your minds away somehow—no, that’s wrong—”

“Very good! Very good!” Her laugh is so merrily coral, laced with empathic mockery it lifts Dann’s leaden spirit. Why, this little Tivonel is indeed an attractive one. Bright spirit of the wind.

“But you, your world is in danger. You may die.”

“Maybe.” Undismayed, a brave little alien being who is every instant less alien. And then Dann learns something else.

“Don’t worry. Giadoc will come back and send you home. He won’t commit life-crime, he said so.”

The melting tones are unmistakable; across the light-years he recognizes the colors of love. Love and sharing unto death, she and this Giadoc whose body he has somehow acquired. And will he, Dann, be thrown back to his grey private death, leaving her on a burning world? The memory of the inferno he had glimpsed… So the charming ur-life is tragic after all. Pity… if he believed any of this.

“Please! Hey, please, your field!”

Confused, he perceives that his “mind-field” has eddied strongly toward her, is coalescing into a peculiar surface whose vibrancy suddenly thrills him. An excitement his own old human body had long forgotten, a potent shivering delight—

“Stop that! You don’t know what you’re doing!” She is laughing wildly, her life-field suddenly intensified, recoiling yet linked to his by ever-increasing intensities. Urgency flames up in him, he needs to drive her higher into the wind, to push her away upon the power of his desire. Wild incomprehensible images of wind and energy flood through him, he is about to do he knows not what—but in a rush of flashing jets she shoots aside, and the tension breaks.

Shaken and roiled, it takes him a moment to locate her below him down the wind.

“You—you—!” She splutters unintelligibly. “You almost, I mean, you biassed, in a minute we would have—”

“What? What happened?” But he suspects now. The joy!

“Well!” She planes up nearer. “I don’t know how to explain. Made a repulsion.” She giggles. “Whew! Giadoc is very energic. We call it sex.”

He hangs there astounded, conscious of himself as a monster riding an alien gale who has somehow committed an indelicacy. The etiquette of apocalypse. It was so good.

“We call it sex too,” he tells her slowly. “Only with us the two people touch.”

“How weird.” Her vanes bank gracefully, he notices her beautiful command of the wind. Something else, too; his body seems to know that her position relative to him has changed things. With the wind coming from him to her she is still a charming one, but not dangerously so. Neutralized. Of course; they live in the wind, function evolves to its direction. Mysteries…

“But how do your eggs get exposed?” she is asking curiously.

He is about to enter on new fascinations, but his senses are assaulted by a dreadful scream. Terror! Someone is shrieking intolerably.

Dann peers about, discovers they have drifted closer to the pair of aliens he had noticed before. The large one is uttering the nerve-shattering green wail. It is thrashing about and tumbling, its energies wild. A smaller alien is in pursuit.

“What a shame,” Tivonel says above the uproar. “I thought Avanil had it calm.”

“What is it? What’s happening?”

“I forgot to tell you. That’s one of your people, there in Terenc’s body. You better start Fathering it right away.”

“One of my people?”

All at once the screamer shoots toward him and long streamers of its flaring field lash out. A jolting sbock—his mind is inundated with a kaleidoscope effaces, smells, bulkheads and valves, a foreshortened human penis against blue blankets, a Gatorade bottle—while over everything a face that he remembers, shrieks “RICKY—RICKY—HELP—”

The scene clears, leaving him reeling in twinned realities. The strange body is still before him, blasting out green screams.

“It’s Ron!” Dann exclaims. “It’s Ron from the, the water—’

“You better Father it before is loses field. You can, can’t you? However you do it?”

“RICKY! RICKY, WHERE ARE YOU? HELP ME!”

The pain is intolerable. “I’m a doctor,” Dann tries to say absurdly, moving toward the agonized form with no idea what he can do.

“Ron! You’re all right, calm down! Listen to me, it’s Doctor Dann.”

—BLOOIE!

The next few moments or years exist only as a terror beyond all drug nightmares, beyond anything he has imagined of psychosis—rape—disaster. He is invaded, frantic, rolling in dreadful pounding synchrony of panic, sensing only in flashes that he is howling RICKY—RICKY-TRICKY—is also yelling RON SHUT UP YOU’RE ALL RIGHT I’M DOCTOR DANN—only to be swept under the terrified crashing chaos, reverberating insanity. How long it lasts he never knows, understands only a sudden immense cool relief, like a great scalpel of peace cutting him free. Sanity returns.

As his separate existence strengthens Dann finds his body pumping air. He lets the scene steady into the strange-familiar world around him, is again his new self riding the gentle gales beside a wall of beautiful storm.

“Control yourself, Tanel, it’s all right now.”

The words are warmly golden; his friend Tivonel is hovering nearby.

Before him floats a great disarrayed dark mass, its small energy-field pale and calm. This seems to be the alien body containing Ron. Is he unconscious or dead? Not Dead; jets are pulsing. The smaller alien is helping it keep steady on the wind.

Dann’s gaze turns upward.

Looming above them hovers a huge energic alien form, its vanes half-spread, its mantles and aura a deep, rich glory. It—no, unmistakably he— seems to be surveying them severely. Dann has a momentary memory of his school coach separating furious small boys.

“In the name of the Wind, Father Ustan, thank you.” Tivonel’s light-speech is in a new, formal mode.

“Thanks be that you were nearby, Father,” the other alien adds, in the same mode. Dann senses that it is another female.

“What happened? Is my friend all right?”

“You made a panic vortex,” the great stranger says in grave violet lights. “If I had not separated you in time you would both have been damaged for life. The being you call Ron is drained and sleeping. Avanil here will guard it. But you, Tanel, are you not a Father? Why did you permit this disorder to happen?”

“We, we have no such skills on our world,” Dann says weakly.

The great being, Ustan, flickers a wordless grey sign in which Dann reads skepticism, scornful pity—the equivalent of a raised eyebrow. Majestically, he tilts up into the wind. But the female Avanil calls to him.

“Father Ustan, wait! Don’t you notice the Sound is getting very strong up here? I feel burning, that’s why I started to move Terenc’s body. Look at all the dead life above us, too. I don’t think this level is safe anymore.”

“The Sound doesn’t rise here now,” Tivonel objects.

“Well, something up here is wrong. Look at the Airfall, it’s all dead, too. I think we should go down to where Lomax and Bdello are.”

Dann, “listening,” realizes he has been noticing a rising hiss of light, or sound. It has a wicked feel, like a great subsonic machine-whine running wild.

Big Ustan has paused, spreading internal membranes.

“Avanil is correct,” he announces. “I too sense dangerous energies. By all means, move them down to Chief Hearer’s station to wait. I will take the distraught one.”

“I can take him, Ustan,” Avanil protests.

But Ustan has floated down to Ron’s sleeping body, furling out the membranes under his main vanes. Dann has a glimpse of small, soft-looking flexible limbs. Then Ustan is covering him, swooping away like an eagle with its trailing prey. Next moment his great complex vanes fan out side, tilt up—and he becomes suddenly an abstract shade of flight, falling away from them on an awesome dwindling curve, down—down—

It is so dazzling Dann finds himself pumping air. Next moment the far-flying form has changed again and fetched up floating calmly by the two other presences below.

“That’s Lomax and Bdello,” Tivonel says. “Now you go.”

“Me? Down there? I—” Dann is stammering, aware that his voice has a greenish squeak. His human senses have brushed him with vertigo. “I don’t think—”

“Well, try” Tivonel says severely. “Giadoc was able to move around on your awful world. With no wind. You don’t have to go that fast,” she adds more gently. “Just tell yourself to go down, the body remembers. We’ll help if you need it. Oh, I forgot. This is Avanil. I mean Avan. Avan, meet Tanel. He’s a male so I call him that.”

“Greetings, Tanel.” The other’s tone is like a curt handshake, he is reminded of a girl on a vanished world.

“Hello, Avan,” Aware that he is delaying the awful drop, he lets himself take a last look at the grandeur of these heights. A million Grand Canyons of the wind, he thinks. No, far more beautiful. But that sound, that faint deadly roaring… All in a moment the beauty drops away, he recalls his momentary vision of this world and its raging sun, the terrible exploding shells and angry streamers of a star gone mad. It was blowing up—that’s what he “hears.” Hard radiation. And these people, these real people, are on a planet about to be incinerated. Terrible… His mood is broken by a tangible nudge.

“Let’s go,” says Tivonel.

Down. Okay.

Focussing with all his might on the dots below, Dann lets himself spread something. His vanes adjust, he’s dropping, swooping down While his body takes the air-rush, seeming to steer itself. Faster, intoxicatingly! The dots swirl, are lost and recaptured, the wind is full in him, is his element—it is glorious! The dots have grown to bodies, he realizes he must stop now. Stop! But how? Gales call him!

From nowhere two figures cut in before him, changing the rushing air. His vanes manage to bite the right angle. He slows, has stopped, hearing laughter all around.

Three figures that must be Ustan and the Hearers are above him. He feels a double nudge at his vanes, and finds himself lurching upward, with a ludicrous mental image of his staggering human self supported by two giggling girls.

“Thanks, Avan,” Tivonel is saying. “Whew, wow! Tanel, I thought you were going all the way to Deep.”

“I thought I did rather well.” Dann finds himself chuckling too, all nightmare gone. He hasn’t felt happy and strong like this in years. How great must be this life on the winds of Tyree!

They stop discreetly side-wind of the three big males. Dann stares curiously; from two of them the life-energy is radiating upward in a focussed, almost menacing way. Like high voltage.

“What are Hearers?” he asks.

“Oh, they listen to the Companions and the life beyond the sky. That’s how they do the Beam, you came here on it.” She goes on, something about “life-bands” which Dann finds unintelligible. He sees now that these energies are merged with shafts of others from far out around the Wall. Something to do with their weird psionic technology. They brought me here… What about time, he wonders idly, not really caring. If I went back, would it be centuries ahead? No matter; he is delighted with this new mystery. Astronomers, that’s what they are. Astro-engineers of the mind. This Lomax is something like Mission Control, perhaps.

Avan, or Avanil, has gone to get Ron’s body, and now comes struggling back to them, looking absurdly like a sparrow-hawk trying to tow a goose. When she has him positioned satisfactorily on the wind she turns to Dann, exuding determination.

“Tanel, if you’re a male, you don’t seem to know much about Fathering. How old are you? Haven’t you raised a child yet?”

“Oh Avan, for Wind’s sake,” Tivonel protests.

“It’s all right, I don’t mind,” Dann says. Pain flicks him, but it’s far off; he has died since then. “I’m quite old as a matter of fact. I did have a child.” To his embarrassment his words have changed color.

“Now see what you’ve done, Avan,” Tivonel scolds. “These are people, you don’t know what could be wrong.”

“I’m sorry,” Avan says stubbornly. “But I can’t understand how you could be a Father and be so helpless with that one.”

Dann hesitates, puzzled. Some extra meaning is trying to come through here. Father? “Well, I’m not sure, but you have to understand we don’t have this kind of mind-contact on our world. And our females do most of the child-raising. In fact we call it—” he tries to say mother but only garble comes out. “It really isn’t done by many males at all.”

Before his eyes Avan has lighted up with delighted astoundment.

“The females do the Fathering! Tivonel, did you hear? It had to be, that’s the world we want! Oh, great winds!”

Both females are pulsing excitedly, Dann sees, attention locked on him. But Avan is by far the more excited.

“Why? Is that so strange here?”

“Calm down, Avan,” Tivonel says. “Yes, Tanel, it’s pretty strange. I’ll explain if I get time. But look, they’re starting the Beam now. Giadoc will be back any minute and you’ll be home.”

“The females do the Fathering,” Avan repeats obliviously. “Think what that means. So they’re bigger and stronger, right?”

“Well, no, as a matter of fact—

“Listen, Avan, what does it matter? You better calm down before you lose field.”

But Avan only flashes, “I’ll be back!” and has suddenly whirled away and down. Dann looks after her. From here he can see or sense the crowd quite clearly, hundred of aliens scattered or clustered thickly in the wall of wind, among what seem to be plants. Big ones, little ones—but he sees them now quite differently. People are there, old, young, all sorts—even kids, jetting excitedly from group to group. An emanation comes from them, a tension. Under the excitement, fear.

“More Deepers all the time,” Tivonel comments. “Look at those young Fathers heading up here. That’s Giadoc’s son, Tiavan, that big one. Never mind, watch Lomax. See, the beam is starting up. Giadoc will be here soon and you’ll be far away. Goodbye, Tanel,” she adds warmly.

“You mean I have no choice? I’ll just go snap, like that?”

“Yes. Don’t you want to?”

“I don’t know,” he says unhappily. “I want—I want to understand more about you before I go. At least can’t you explain more, give me a bigger memory like you did before? Yes! Give me a memory! For instance, about Fathering. And what are Deepers, what’s life-crime? What do the Hearers learn?”

“Whew, that’s complicated. I’d have to form it, there isn’t much time.” She scans about nervously.

He sees that the energies above Lomax and his Colleague are thickening, building up and out, towering toward the zenith in a slow, effortful way.

“Please, Tivonel. From your world to mine. You should.”

“Well, I guess they have a long job to get it up and balanced right. And they’re tired. But it would be awful if we got caught in the middle.”

“Please. Look, I’ll stay as limp as Ron over there. Watch.”

Eagerly he tries to collapse all awareness, focussing on the dim sense of air moving in his internal organs. It’s difficult. Suddenly he is distracted by a giggle.

“Excuse me Tanel. That’s very good but you don’t have to do it all over, you’re in what we call Total-Receptive. Never mind. Just don’t jump when you feel me.”

Concentrate, think about nothing. But the thought of being sent back to Earth intrudes chillingly. Is it really true? Don’t think of it, all a dream. He is trying so hard that he scarcely notices the mind-push, reacts late.

“Tanel! You’re terrible.” She is floating nearby, laughing.

“Did I do something awful again?”

“No, you missed me. I think you’re learning. Did you get it? I don’t know where I put it, you were as mushy as a plenya. Think, what’s life-crime?”

“Life-crime…” Suddenly, the words convey a kind of remote abomination to him. Of course, stealing another’s body. “Yes,” he says. “But you know, I don’t quite feel it—it’s so far from our abilities.”

“You better,” she says, suddenly sober. “Look down there, that Father Scomber coming up. And Heagran behind him. Did you get it all about that?”

He looks, and marveling, knows them. The huge energic oncoming form is Father Scomber, leader of the move to flee by life-crime. And the even larger shape behind him, veiled and crusted with majestic age: Father Heagran, the Conscience of Tyree. Incredible! Enlightenment, understanding opens in him like a true dream—the wonders of Deep City, the proud civilization of the air; joys, duties, deeds innumerable, the wild life of the upper High—a world, Tyree, is living in his mind!

Through his preoccupation he notices that several more are struggling up toward him, apparently finding the ascent difficult. And they’re oddly formed.

“Those two, there—wait, Fathers—what’s wrong with their, their fields?” He asks her.

“Oh, winds, did I forget to give you that! Can’t you see their double fields? They’re Fathers with children. In their, well, their pouches. It’s not polite to say that.” She giggles. “You have one, Tanel.”

Her voice has flickered through the lavendar tones he understands as reverence.

“Amazing.” Yes, he can see now the small life-nuclei nestled in their great auroras. Fathering?

“Here comes Avan back with her pal Palarin to hear you. And there goes old Janskelen, she hasn’t forgotten how to ride wind. Some of those Deepers are a mess, they wouldn’t be as scared on your world as I was. Don’t worry, though. They aren’t going. Oh—feel the signal? The Beam is up! Goodbye again, Tanel.”

A shudder has raced through the world.

“Must I go, Tivonel?”

“Yes. But I’ll remember you Tanel. Goodbye, fair winds.”

“Fair winds.” He can barely speak. This wonderful doomed world, the brightness of her spirit. Briefly he as lived in a dream more real than all his miserable life. “I’ll always remember you, Tivonel. I hope, I hope—”

He cannot say it, can only pray that she will not be incinerated under that dreadful sun. The hideous background drone is rising and he thinks he hears, or sees, grey whines of sickness from the vegetation above. All too likely these wonderful bodies have already taken a lethal dose. Don’t think of it. He feels a charming touch of warmth upon his mind, and sees that she has let a thought-tendril eddy gently to him. Just in time he forces his reaction to be still.

Another signal snaps through them all.

“That’s it! Oh, wait a minute—look at Lomax!”

The Chief Hearer and Bdello are forms of static fire, their fields pouring up to the great arc overhead. Lomax’ mantle seems to be flickering in anger. Dann has the impression he is cursing.

“Trouble. Ugh, the Destroyer. Well, they had that before. Wait.”

The Destroyer… an image of huge dark deathliness. But not new to him—a vanishing spark dies again, and he shudders. Push it away.

“It’s fixed now. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.” A thought strikes through his self-absorption. “Will my friend, will Ron go back too?”

“He’ll be all right,” she answers mutedly. “I hope.”

Dann waits, puzzling. Something unclear here, but nothing he can do.

The thrumming energies densen above him, he feels their pull. Any instant now he will feel the nudge that will be Giadoc returning to his body, pushing Dann out. And he will be whirled away through darkness, will awake to find himself in his own human body, Doctor Daniel Dann, the grey man of loss and grief. A new death— Idly, he wonders what this Giadoc will have done as Dann. Will he find himself in some incredibly far future? Or will he awaken in Deerfield’s disturbed ward, under restraint? No matter. Wait.

The sense of tension heightens, brims intolerably. Dann hears from beside him a soft mental murmur. “Giadoc.” He muses on love, young love. And he himself has been briefly young again, in this magnificent alien form. He takes a last exultant grip of the great winds, reveling in his vigor, with the result that he side-slips abruptly. Behave yourself, old Dann… The memory of his inadvertent sexual episode stirs in him deliciously. How bizarre, yet how right. “The egg,” she said. These people must be oviparous. And the males rear their young. Now he thinks about it, he can feel some massive organ underneath. My pouch! Really!… And it’s some kind of political issue here, his new memory half-tells him why Avan had been so excited… But the minutes are passing, nothing has changed. What are they waiting for?

He scans around. Bdello is speaking now, the light-whisper from his mantle faint with effort.

“Someone’s alive!” Tivonel exclaims. “Oh, it’s Terenc. But that means Giadoc’s alive, he’s all right, he’s alive!”

Senior Fathers are closing around the Hearers. Dann has a confused impression of conflict, of commands and countercommands, verbal and telepathic.

“Oh, no,” Tivonel says angrily. “Terenc won’t come back! How nasty!”

But that means that Ron—Dann scans around, locates the still-sleeping form. If this Terenc won’t return, is poor Ron doomed to die here in that? For a moment the scene turns hellish and horror alienae shakes him. But a thought comes to his rescue: This is farther than China. Maybe poor Rick will be free at last.

“I should stay, I should help Ron.”

“You can’t, Tanel.”

True… He notices that a different female is guarding Ron. She has ragged, blistered vanes. “Who’s that?”

“She’s my friend, Iznagel. I had her take care of him after Avanil took off.”

He’d missed the exchange; he is doubtless missing a lot.

“Try to help him, when I’m gone.”

“I will. We’ll take him right down where it’s safer.”

Safer—for how long? Meanwhile the resonating tension is becoming painful; the world seems drained. He wishes the whole sad business over.

But the argument around the Hearers has grown fiercer. Purple blasts from the senior Fathers ride over excited cries. Even Avan and other females are there.

“They’ve found Giodac!” Tivonel bursts out. “Oh, he’s coming, he’s coming! I knew he would!”

Dann braces.

But at that moment the disputants around Lomax draw slightly apart and there is a crimson shout from Scomber. “Better a live criminal than a dead child! Heagran, we are doomed here.”

“No! Take down the Beam, Lomax!” Heagran bellows back, and several seniors echo him. “Take it down. End this!”

“No! Our children must live!”

The uproar is suddenly drowned in a world-tearing scream. A flame-shrieking fireball rips down the sky and buries itself, exploding, in a high sector of the great wind-wall. The sound is unendurable, gales buffet them. Dann feels a blast of burning heat up his vanes. Through the confusion he sees the great shape of Scomber spreading himself above Lomax.

“TYREE IS DOOMED!” he thunders. “FATHERS! SAVE YOUR CHILDREN! COME, MY LIFE WILL BE YOUR BRIDGE!”

His energy-field bursts up brilliantly, entwining that of Lomax, towering up to the arc of the Beam itself.

“NO!” Heagran’s mental roar tears through them. “CRIMINAL, CEASE!” His great field launches itself at Scomber’s.

But rearing up between them are other energies, coming from the Elders and Fathers around. Energies crackle, writhe, lash to and fro. Dann is watching an astral fire-fight, a literal conflict of will against will! It rages in intensity, seeming to suck or damp his own life-force, and then dies back.

To his dismay, Dann sees that Heagran and his allies have been bested; their fields are sinking, leaving Scomber’s triumphant blaze intact. As his mind recovers, it comes to him that he is seeing nothing less than the start of an invasion of Earth. The desperate victors are proposing to steal human bodies, to send human minds here, to die on Tyree.

What can he do?

He can only watch appalled, shuddering to Scomber’s triumphant summons. “FATHERS! COME, SAVE YOUR CHILDREN! USE MY LIFE!”

And they are coming; below Dann a mob of Fathers is starting upward, struggling against the great winds, joined every moment by more. The two young Fathers near Scomber have already launched their life-fields upon his, bearing the nodes that are the lives of their children, leaving their bodies floating darkly behind.

“NO, COLTO! TIAVAN, COME BACK!” Heagran’s mind-command jolts even Dann’s opaque senses. Beside him Tivonel is sobbing wordlessly.

But Dann is transfixed, it is the most amazing spectacle he has ever seen. Those two life-minds striving up to the focus of the Beam—he sees them now as desperate parents racing with their precious burdens up out of a world on fire. Escape, escape! Caught in the deep imperative, he cheers on their mortal struggle, feels triumph as they gain height and flash away. The other Fathers below him are closer now, laboring with their babies toward tbe miraculous bridge of Scomber’s life.

But as they come a small form jets to Scomber’s side.

“Sisters! To a better world!” The cry rings out.

It is the female, Avan. In a moment her small life and another are racing upward along Scomber’s energy-bridge.

“No! Come back!” A deeper female voice cries, and then another node of energy is pursuing them.

“Janskelen!” Tivonel cries out in shock, and then sobs, “Oh, Tiavan, how could you? Giadoc, Giadoc, come back!”

Her words are lost in the wind-rush as the first group of Fathers jet exhaustedly past, expending their last energies to reach Scomber and the promise of escape. From the dark bodies floating around Scomber a thin green screaming is adding itself to the uproar. Confusedly, Dann realizes that this should mean something to him.

But at that instant the roof of the world tears apart in a thunderous blast of lightning, and a storm of energies rains upon them all. Stunned, Dann flounders among random life-jolts, deafened by myriad screams.

“THE DESTROYER! THE DESTROYER HAS BROKEN THE BEAM!”

Slowly his senses clear. He is tumbling slowly by the great Wall, while above them the immaterial power that had been the Beam is shredded, raveling down to nothing. Where Scomber blazed below his defiant mind-bridge only dark bodies drift. It is clear that catastrophe has come. The mob of Fathers mills in fright, barely able to balance in this turbulent air.

“The Beam is down! Giadoc—they’ve got to find him!”

Tivonel is jetting past, heading up for Lomax. Dann follows dazedly. If the Beam, the connection with Earth is gone, is he marooned here to die of radioactivity? He doesn’t really mind; he has, it seems, died several times over already. Another won’t hurt. Maybe he can help Ron.

He becomes aware that his only real emotion, as he jets up through the gales of Tyree, is irritation with this unknown character Giadoc. If he and Tivonel are to perish together, it would be nice if she would forget about Giadoc long enough to remember him. The absurdity of his thought strikes him; he chuckles inwardly. Extraordinary what one does in apocalypse. Extraordinary, too, to think that this Giadoc is somewhere on Earth, walking about in Daniel Dann’s old body. Dann wishes him joy of it, consciously savoring his winged youth and strength. Pity it won’t last. Well, good to have known it… The green screeches coming from below nag at him, but he puts them aside.

They reach Lomax to find him pale and drained but steady. His aide, Bdello, is still feebly righting himself, his life-field in disarray. Dann is reminded of an exhausted medium, or perhaps an inventor crawling out of the wreckage of his latest effort.

Beside them hovers the huge form of Father Heagran. Tivonel halts respectfully.

“Lomax, I have changed my view,” Heagran is saying. “We cannot watch the children die. I cannot. But neither will I commit life-crime upon intelligent beings. Therefore I request you and your Hearers to find a world with only simple life-forms. Animals only, you understand. If you can find one such we will bear the children there. It will not be life as we know it,” he says in deep sadness. “It will be degradation. But perhaps in centuries to come, perhaps something of Tyree will grow again.”

The tragic colors of his voice are echoed on the mantles of the Elders nearby.

“But Heagran,” Lomax protests, “my people are exhausted, in shock. Some are already scorched at the high stations. We cannot raise a Beam. And the accursed Destroyer is blocking half the sky.”

“You must try.”

“Very well. Those of us who can will probe singly, as we used to do.”

“Chief Lomax!” bursts out Tivonel. “You have to rescue Giadoc, you must. You know he’s trying to return.”

The others darken in disapproval, but Lomax says gently, “Giadoc is beyond reach if he is on the alien world, little Tivonel. The Destroyer is between us. If he was on the Beam, he is already lost.”

“He’s trying to get back, I know it!”

“Then it is possible he will sense our probes.” Lomax turns away with finality.

“He’ll find a way,” Tivonel mutters rebelliously.

I’ll come to thee by moonlight, though Hell should bar the way, Dann quotes to himself. Or is he thinking of the poem about the girl who waited in Hell for her false lover? Never mind—the meaning of the terrified shrieks has suddenly got through to him.

“Tivonel! Haven’t more of my people come here! In those bodies, the way Ron and I did? I should go to them, I must help them if I can.”

“Why, the Fathers are fixing them, Tanel. Winds, you don’t think they’d let that go on!”

Dann look-listens; in fact the agonized green has subsided to intermittent squalls coming from the group below them, where Scomber was. Only the body containing Ron is nearby, its mantle murmuring in dreamy light, Iznagel still faithfully guarding it.

“I should go down there to them anyway, Tivonel.”

“Right. Iznagel, you better bring that one further down too. Here, I’ll help.”

She and Iznagel start gliding with Ron’s huge body down the wind. As they go Dann hears Iznagel saying, “It’s like an animal, Tivonel. I think they’re crazy.” Tivonel shushes her, explaining that Dann is one of the “crazy” aliens. “Oh, Tanel, meet Iznagel of the High.”

Dann accepts the introduction absently; he has made out three or four small groups around bodies from which shrill yells are still erupting. Who will these new displaced human minds be? People from Deerfield? Good Lord, what if it’s Major Fearing? Or is the Beam physically random? Could these be members of the French senate, or a group of Mongolians?

The figures are shrouded in plant-life, but he can clearly see a big male hovering over each, his energies blanketing the form beneath. Green cries flash, mind-flares are being pursued, recaptured, somehow molded down to dark. It reminds Dann of firemen converging on stubborn little blazes. Only the big body of Scomber appears to be permanently dark, untenanted. It must be truly dead.

“We can’t go closer, not till they’re drained.”

The idea of electroshock jumps to his mind.

“What do you mean, drained? Are they being hurt, will they be all right?”

“Of course. Drained means drained, like Ustan did you. Resolving all the bad emotions, channeling the energy back. My father used to do it to me a lot when I was a child, I had tantrums. You don’t know anything, do you?”

“Apparently not.”

He watches the nearest group, marveling. Is he actually seeing the direct reconstruction of a human mind, the reformation of a Psyche? What a therapeutic technique! But who are these human minds?

Father Heagran has joined the group; there seems to be still some problem, judging by the uncontrolled screams.

“Oh!” Iznagel cries. “They’re taking the babies out of the Father’s—Oh, how dreadful! I can’t look.”

“They have to,” Tivonel tells her. “Don’t you understand? Those probably aren’t babies. I mean the minds may be grown-up adults. And the Fathers aren’t their Fathers. They have to take them apart.”

But Iznagel only mutters bluely, “It’s indecent,” and furls herself in disapproval. Dann has the impression that she is peeking, like a matron caught at a porno film.

“Will they be all right? I mean, as babies?”

“Oh yes. Those are pretty big kids.”

I should get over there. I’m a—” He tries to say doctor but it comes out “Body-Healer.”

“Not while they’re Fathering, Tanel. Listen, if you’re a Healer, don’t you think it’s getting bad up here? I feel more burning, and it’s like I’d eaten something dead. Shouldn’t they move down?”

“Yes.” What’s the use of saying that he thinks it is much too late. These bodies must have taken a lethal dose already unless their nature is very different. “Yes. You should go down right away.”

“Not me, them. I’m staying by Lomax. Giadoc will come, you’ll see.”

“Then I must stay with you. I have his body.”

“Well… yes.” A warm thought brushes him; he is mollified.

The activity around the nearest bodies is apparently completed. All but one Father move away.

“I’m going to them.”

“I guess it’s all right now. Fair winds, Iznagel.”

The bodies turn out to be small; two females, Dann guesses. What minds lurk there? They are being guarded by a seemingly elderly big male, his vanes noded, his huge life-aura complexly patterned but pale.

“Greetings, Father Omar. This is the alien Tanel, he is a Healer.”

The old being signs a formal response, then says abruptly, “To think that my Janskelen has committed life-crime! It is beyond bearing. After all our years!”

“I’m sure she didn’t mean to go, Father. She was trying to stop them. That Beam pulls you.”

“Nonetheless, she went.”

They survey the bodies. Dann notices that the life-auras seem quiet and lax. Is it possible he is seeing human minds?

“That’s Janskelen,” Tivonel flicks a vane. “And that’s Avan’s friend Palarin. I hope they like your world.”

One of the “minds” is moving.

As assuredly as he can, Dann concentrates on it, saying “Don’t be afraid. I’m a Healer, I’m here like you. Can I help you?”

To his surprise tbe other’s field condenses up sharply, the mantle flickers.

“Ra… Ron… Ron? Ron?”

The light-tone is sleepy, but unmistakable.

“Rick, is that you? Rick! It’s Doctor Dann here, don’t be afraid.”

The field veers sharply toward him, Dann just recalls in time to jerk his attention away. Not another panic!

“Ronnie, are you all right?” The uncertain voice is asking.

“Ron’s all right, Rick. I’m Doctor Dann. Ron is right here, he’ll be awake soon.”

“I know.” Warm color is returning to the words, the life-field is rearranging itself. Almost like a small Tyrenni, Dann thinks. The voice is so absurdly like Rick; was it only hours or an eternity ago that he had heard it tell the yarn about the Japanese time-machine? Incredibilities swamp him.

“I better explain what happened, if I can,” he says.

“I know what’s happened,” the voice says dreamily. “We’re on another world. We’ve been kidnapped by alien telepathic monsters.”

Dann is so taken aback that he can only say feebly, “As a matter of fact… you’re quite right. But don’t worry. They’re friendly, they really are.”

“I know that too,” says the voice of Richard Waxman, drifting in horrendous form upon the far winds of Tyree. Next minute his mind-aura subsides, his body darkens.

“What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”

“He’s just asleep,” Tivonel says briskly. “You always sleep awhile after you’ve been deep-drained. But look here, Tanel. Janskelen has something really wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

The body of the old female seems to be floating easily, adjusting itself automatically on the uprushing air. It takes Dann an instant to recall that he should look at the important thing, the “field.” When he does he sees that the nebulosity wreathing the body seems decidedly smaller and less structured.

“Do you have plenyas on your world?” Tivonel demands.

“What’s a plenya?”

Instead of answering, Tivonel’s mind-field extends and brushes the sleeping one. She recoils.

“Oh, for wind’s sake, No! How awful.”

“What? What’s awful?”

“That’s an animal’s mind, Tanel. Poor old Janskelen has landed in some dumb animal. Oh, how sad.”

Dann considers. In the back of his mind a Labrador’s tail thumps. Good God. Apparently this Beam stayed focussed right on his group. And will Fearing, God knows who from Deerfield, be here too?

“Tanel, do you realize?” Tivonel is asking. “That’s what’ll happen to us if we do what Heagran says. We’ll be animals. Nothing but beasts. I don’t want to live that way, losing everything. I’m going to stay here and die as myself. I know that’s what Giadoc’ll want. We’ll die here together.”

Another far fire-shriek splits the heavens. Milder this time. It’s starting, all right, Dann thinks. As the uproar dies away he says gently.

“If worst comes to worst Tivonel, it looks as if you may have to die here with me.”