Up the Walls of the World

Chapter 23

Dying as he clings to his niche by the Destroyer’s nucleus, losing even the drained mind of Tedyost, Giadoc feels the Tyrenni come.

They come!

A torrent of naked life streams in tumult past him, a planetary jet of escaping lives upborne on the power of the strange Beam. As the dreamlike time stasis holds, up and out of their burning bodies flee young and old, male and female—each helping and being helped, carrying with them in their outrush even the dim lives of Tyree’s animals and plants. Up and up they come into the dark unknown, flinging themselves from their charred shriveling flesh, hoping because there is no other hope. And behind them the raging solar fires loom frozen for a timeless instant, a maw of flame held back from closing on its prey, while the living lightning-bolt pours out. They come, they arrive! All that still lives of Tyree comes whirling by, surging into the Destroyer’s dark holds.

And with the last weakest laggards comes something else: a huge silent presence from the depths of the perishing planet rises with them to the stars. It is the Great Field of Tyree, Giadoc knows faintly, reverently, as he feels it pass. Some of us believed it lived.

With that passing the great Beam fades, winks out and time snaps back. The ravening, held-back jaws of fire close. Giadoc knows that somewhere far away the physical world of Tyree is gone forever, a tumbling cinder in the wastes of space.

But around him in the vast darkness he can sense the surviving lives of Tyree spreading out, separating to a myriad scattered centers as they strive to reshape themselves from the mind-fields that buffeted and permeated them in their whirling flight. The empty spaces of the Destroyer begin to resonate with a small cloud of life-signals.

And the space is no longer as it was, he perceives wonderingly. The Tyrenni have not come as he did to darkness and nonbeing. The level has changed, energized; the strange unliving supports are far stronger now, rich with possibility. He feels even his own failing life being sustained, minutely strengthened; for a time he is being held from death.

Too weak to do more than marvel, he listens to the growing tumult on the life-bands as the Tyrenni come to themselves and begin to stabilize in this strange refuge of space. Exclamations, exhilarations of pain gone and life preserved, confusions of bodilessness, joys as the lost are reunited, calls for the missing, discovery of unknown sensory modes—excitement and bewilderment are all about him, dominated by a few calm transmissions which must be the surviving Elders. Fragments of sense-imagery flare out: they are finding, it seems, that they can recreate remembered reality at will. Near him he can sense a Father comforting his child with a vision of their home in Deep, and three females are clinging together in a memory of the winds of lost Tyree.

Then some discover they are mobile. Fathers move toward calling children, friend flows to friend. Movement, it seems is also much easier now. Soon the whole small throng is in intricate motion, mind questioning mind as each seeks to understand where and what they are. Giadoc catches the signals of a group of females starting to probe out into the vast empty reaches all around.

Suddenly among the calls he hears his own name-sign.

“Giadoc!”

He tries to respond, but he is too feeble, too spent. He sinks back.

Nevertheless it was enough—in a rush she is here, Tivonel, on him with her life-field surging against him like a child’s—a tumultuous greeting mingled with memories of he knows not what, of aliens, of dying and burning, of Heagran, of questions-emotions-joy.

It is all too much, his own held-back memories erupt weakly and he loses hold on consciousness, feels himself draining away into dark.

“Oh no, Giadoc! Don’t die, don’t die!”

She has hold of him mind-to-mind and is opening her own life-energy to his. The ultimate Tyrenni gift pours into him, without restraint or fear. The relief is so keen it is almost pain, but his first feeling is shame, he who had been so strong. Yet he cannot will refusal. Their fields merge and the life-current flows.

“Stop, enough!” He cries to her. But she will not stop. And then he feels a sudden, stronger touch. As he comes back to himself he recognizes it: Eldest Father Heagran is here.

“Stop, stop,” he protests again. And Heagran’s deep thought echoes him. “Enough, young Tivonel. Cease before you injure yourself.”

There is a brief confusion. Heagran seems to be forcibly disengaging Tivonel’s determined aid. “Ahura!”

They come to a semblance of civility, holding light mental contact in the strange now-peopled void.

“What is this place you have called us to?” Heagran’s mental tone is strong; the weird cold energies here must be sustaining him well.

“I think it is a huge animal of space. I believed it was dead; but it changed when I called. That must be its brain.” Giadoc mind-points at the big cryptic complex glimmering nearby. It too seems different now: brighter, differently organized, like a huge angular egg filled with living and nonliving energies intermixed. Its output is almost nulled by the barrier wall.

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?

But as he puzzles, “watching” the dark shapes come again into the great sky-swirl, a faint subliminal unease comes to him, as if something is changing in the real, or unreal, world around him. The sensation is not strong enough to break his concentration, until he notices that the faint blur below the image which is the dreaming mind of Tedyost is no longer still. It has begun to roil restlessly. Presently it flares out weakly, as if seeking contact. Perhaps the dreaming one has waked?

Cautiously Giadoc extends contact, only to find he need not have bothered.

With startling intensity the alien transmits directly at him:

“Help! Mutiny! The Captain needs help!”

The symbols are only half-intelligible. Tedyost subsides to passivity again. But Giadoc has no time to puzzle over this: He has suddenly become aware of what is bothering him: Alarm!

Out beyond them, all through the vast expanse of the Destroyer, the sense of life has lowered. Gradually but perceptibly the sustaining energies are sinking, ebbing, seeping away.

“Heagran! Do you not sense that these energies are beginning to fail? In the periphery, coming closer?”

The old being scans intently. “Yes. I do. So your space-animal is dying after all, young Giadoc. A brave try, but doomed.”

But suddenly into Giadoc’s mind come his experiences on the alien world, the nonliving energy systems he has known.

“No, Heagran. I believe this is something different. I believe that this entity is turning us off. If we could break through and change its power-set, perhaps we are not doomed.”