Up the Walls of the World

Chapter 27

The curious constellation of negative entropy that still calls itself Daniel Dann is no longer on his life-way, albeit his travels are only beginning.

He has no idea what he is, or appears as, physically. Most likely a double-ended strand of life-energy, he thinks; I am wedged in the “gap in the Destroyer’s nucleus wall and part of me is outside. But the passage is no longer menacing and frightful, he is not squeezed by icy dangers. Indeed, he has indulged himself in comfort. In the high energies of this place he has found it easy to fashion a simulacrum of his old familiar body in its armchair, and he lounges like a watchman at her gate.

Here he can monitor all approaches from without or call for help if need be, while his inner gaze stays fixed on that which he most wishes to perceive.

Within is a scene of grandeur. The incandescent beings of space blaze forth in glory. So beautiful, stupendous; by itself it would be almost enough for melancholy eternity. But the magnificence is only background. Limned in starlight, she is remotely there. Her head is turned away; he has only occasional glimpses of her grave, serenely thoughtful profile. His nonexistent heart does not leap when he beholds her; rather, a deep and wordless joy suffuses him. No sadness, no pain is here in the starry night.

But that is not all. All around, on some other dimension of perception, tier upon tier of mysterious controls reach into the shadows. And sometimes another apparition of Margaret comes to ponder and test the great console. In this form she is as he had known her in life, a mortal woman’s lean body in a white coat. Incarnated so, she will sometimes speak to him quite normally, and what passes for his heart does check when he “hears” her voice. Now and again they have even talked at length, as when they walked a vanished woodland. He has told her of the happenings to the other humans, and of beautiful doomed Tyree and its people, and heard her laugh and sigh. But then the great board claims her, and she goes again to her enigmatic tasks; learning, he guesses, the powers of her new estate.

But beyond this is the most precious of all: At certain times the child comes back and gazes curiously at him, or asks him questions, mostly of the stars. He answers as best as he can, explaining what wonders he knows. But his knowledge ends pitifully soon, and then the child laughs and goes off to work a small, earthly keyboard below the inhuman console. Together they puzzle out the answers and marvel at the celestial grandeurs she can summon. These moments are surpassingly dear to him. He surmises that what he sees as a child is some deep, enduring core of Margaret’s human wonder and delight.

Once she asks him, “Why are you such a funny color, Dan’l?”

Thinking to please her, he imagines his skin darker, his features those of a black man with grey hair. The child bursts out giggling and from the shadows comes Margaret’s brief laugh. “Don’t.” He never tries to change himself again.

He understands now, of course: There is no question of “rescuing” Margaret, of freeing her from this power and place. She has gone beyond that, beyond humanity. This is her realm now. She is merged, or merging, with the great entity around them. He is seeing only temporary phantasms or facets of her; her real self is involved beyond his ken.

Once when the familiar Margaret is there he asks her, “Are we in a ship? Is all this a machine?”

Her dark gaze focusses beyond him.

“No.”

He has not cared nor dared to ask her more.

But there have been events from the outside.

At first they are merely isolated moments of contact with Waxman. The double being seems to have stationed himself watchfully nearby, content to exist in his new unity, interested in serving as a kind of news-center for humans and Tyrenni. But soon after what Dann thinks of as the great victory, the warm touch he recogines as Winona comes to speak directly to him.

“Doctor Dann, is Margaret all right in there? I’ve been so worried about her. Could I see her for a moment? I don’t want to bother her, I just want—”

“I understand,” he tells her. And he does, he cannot mistake pure friendship, or whatever odd human quality “worries” about another so gratuitously. “I’ll ask her. It’s difficult. She’s… busy.”

The mild presence withdraws patiently.

When the Earthly incarnation of Margaret comes again into his sight, he asks her. “Can Winona, ah, make contact with you for a few minutes? She was your friend, you know. She’s worried.”

“Winona?” The dark priestess of the computer hesitates remotely. But her mood seems favorable. “Yes. You can let her by.”

Dann has a selfish moment of gladness at her acceptance of his role of guardian of her gates. Cerberus-Dann. He does not know exactly how to “let” Winona in, but moves his imaginary self aside, calling her name. It seems to work. He feels life coming inward.

Shockingly, what materializes at the imaginary door is not Winona—it is the trim lush figure of a dark-haired woman in early middle life, with a brilliant, unlined, eager face. His Earthly memories leap up. Here is the incarnation of young mother, a woman he has seen step laughing from a thousand stationwagons full of kids.

But as he leaps to bar this stranger’s way, she changes. The firm flesh pales and sags, the raven hair goes grey. It is Winona as he knows her, going toward Margaret with both hands held out.

For an instant he flinches, expecting the giggle and rush of words. But she only takes one of the tall figure’s hands in hers, and holds it to her old bosom, peering in wonder at the strangeness all around. For a moment some contact seems to flow, and then Winona releases the hand and turns away.

As she passes Dann there is another shimmer of change; it is the radiant young matron who vanishes out through the immaterial chink.

Dann muses on the dreadful mysteries of time; that which he had seen was really Winona, not the puffy arthritic scarecrow of Deerfield.

And what is he, really? Some earnest figure of a young MD? No; he is ineluctably old. His dead are dead. He is… content.

Outside, Winona has gone away. She understands, Dann knows, however she conceives it. Margaret is not to be worried about.

And something else has happened, he notices. As he resumes his watchman’s pose he senses that the guarded gate of the stronghold seems a little wider now. Less fortified. The Margaret who has her being here will perhaps tolerate contact with life a little more. But she is, Dann realizes, changing. Life is no longer to her what it was. His soul is chilled by foreboding. Will she change beyond recognition, will everything he knows as Margaret disappear into some cloudy matrix of immensity?

He remembers the calm voice saying, Perhaps, in time, I will take counsel with life. But will it be Margaret who does so? He hopes so; he can do no more.

His sad thoughts are interrupted by a merry greeting he knows instantly—his little friend Tivonel. She has been by before, to his delight. But this time she brings Giadoc to speak with him.

“Greetings, Tanel,” comes the strong, sure “voice” of the young Hearer. “Waxman has told us of the great powers your friend wields here.”

“ Yes.” Dann tries to convey a smile; he finds it impossible not to like this mind.

“As you know, my son Tiavan was among those who did that criminal deed to your people. Yet I left him, and the others, in danger. Is it possible that your friend’s power can discover anything of what happened to them, back on your world?”

“I don’t know. I’ll ask. It may take some time.”

But as it happens the incarnation he knows as Margaret comes soon, and he is able to ask.

“I’ll put TOTAL on it,” she says quite humanly. “It stored a lot of telecommunications before we were out of range. Tell me their names.”

Their names? So far, so very far she has drifted away, he thinks. He recites the eight: Winona, the two girls, the twins, Ted, Chris, and Kirk. Only bodies now, housing alien minds; while the real people are out here with him in this uncanny place between the stars.

“I’ll set it to type out anything it finds, in case I’m… not here.”

So normal, so efficient a sweet ghost. She does something to the small console and vanishes away.

The strong compact presence of Giadoc hovers near. Dann asks him again about his stay on Earth, and learns for the first time that the mind he had known as Fearing had ended in the body of the dog. So an elder female, Janskelen, whom he never knew, is the dread Fearing now! The computer won’t search for that name; no matter, it probably wasn’t his real one.

But whatever can have become of them? How did Noah, not to mention the Navy, take the eruption of nine alien minds? Thinking of it all again, Dann’s memories strengthen around him. He questions Giadoc, fascinated by his alien ability to guide himself by reading human thought. It seems unbelievable; how could they manage to make out? What could they do, send and receive messages for the military? Or be persecuted as a menace?

And the mix-up of identities: Kirk with the mind of, in effect, a little girl; Winona housing his Father. Frodo as really the son of the Father who is in little Chris. How to stay together? Can they perhaps marry? And the cosmic joke of the rebel Avanil in Valerie’s body, defiantly claiming the right to rear children. And Ron and Rick, no longer twins but Terenc and Palarin, an alien male and female he never knew. And, poetic justice, the wicked Scomber inheriting the moribund body of Ted Yost.

Funny, Dann reflects, he doesn’t really see Scomber as “wicked.” He can recall so clearly the heart-lifting moment when Scomber offered his life as the pathway to escape from burning Tyree and his own empathy with the young Fathers bearing their children out of the flames.

And has it all turned out so badly for his kidnapped friends? Not so, he thinks. Whatever this ur-life may prove to be, we were rescued from great mortal misery; we knew our hours of joy in the winds of Tyree.

He tries to convey some of this to Giadoc, in their shared Tyrenni-English pidgin. But the proud young alien is hard to persuade; he is too deeply ashamed of what his son has done. Just as Dann thinks he is getting the point across, there is a sense of activity from within. He turns to find the spectral teleprinter at work. What looks absurdly like an ordinary printout is emerging. What has TOTAL intercepted? Dann finds that his dream-hands can take it, his “eyes” can read.

//LAS VEGAS JAN 19 SPECIAL AP. SPIRITUALISTS PULL GAMBLING COUP. A TEAM COMPOSED OF A HOUSEWIFE, A RETIRED ARMY OFFICER AND AN EX-LOCKSMITH BROKE THE BANK AT FIVE MAJOR LAS VEGAS RESORTS OVER THE WEEKEND, PILING UP A POKER TAKE ESTIMATED IN THE MILLIONS. //THE THREE IDENTIFIED THEMSELVES AS PARTNERS IN CATLEDGE ESP CONSULTANTS FIRM. “IT WAS PRIMARILY AN ADVERTISING STUNT,” MRS. EBERHARD, THE HOUSEWIFE, SAID. “WE WANTED TO SHOW WHAT A QUALIFIED ESP CONSULTANT CAN DO,” MAJOR CHARLES SPROUL ADDED. THE THIRD MEMBER, CHRISTOFER COSTAKIS, STATED THAT THEY INTEND TO USE PART OF THE MONEY FOR A NEW HEADQUARTERS AND RESEARCH ESTABLISHMENT. //CATLEDGE ESP CONSULTANTS HAS BEEN IDENTIFIED AS A TIGHTLY KNIT, CLOSE-MOUTHED GROUP OF SEVEN MEMBERS UNDER THE LEADERSHIP OF DR. NOAH CATLEDGE. DR. CATLEDGE, WHO DISCLAIMS ANY MYSTIC ABILITIES, BUILT UP THE TEAM AFTER A LIFETIME IN ESP RESEARCH. “OUR SERVICES ARE AVAILABLE FOR ANY PRIVATE PARTIES WHO MEET OUR FEES,” HE SAID TODAY. “HOWEVER, WE EXPECT TO BE PRIMARILY USEFUL AS CONSULTANTS TO NEGOTIATORS IN BUSINESS AND GOVERNMENT.” THE LAS VEGAS HOTEL MANAGERS ASSOCIATION ADMIT THAT NO ILLEGALITY APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN INVOLVED IN THE WEEKEND ACTION. “WE WERE REALLY WATCHING THESE PEOPLE AS SOON AS THEY STARTED TO ROLL,” ONE MEMBER SAID. “SO FAR AS WE’RE CONCERNED THEY’RE CLEAN.” HOWEVER THE ASSOCIATION STRESSES THAT NO ONE ASSOCIATED WITH THE CATLEDGE FIRM WILL BE ADMITTED TO PLAY IN FUTURE. “THEY’RE AT THE TOP OF OUR S… LIST,” A MANAGER CONCLUDED.// //WILLAMETTE, ILL. JAN 19. TWO UNSEASONAL TORNADOES SWEPT—

As the visionary paper vanishes from his grasp, Dann finds himself laughing so hard that he has difficulty in explaining coherently to Giadoc.

“Your son is all right, they’re doing fine,” he manages to convey at last. But it is some time before he can satisfy enough of the alien’s curiosity about Earthly customs to convince him that old Noah has indeed found a means of arranging a satisfactory life for the Tyrenni fugitives. The fact that only seven are mentioned seems reasonable too; the two “children” are doubtless being kept and cared for at home.

When Giadoc at length departs, Dann chuckles again, remembering Noah’s dream of aliens coming to Earth. Practical as ever, the old man had met his culminant fantasy and meshed it with real life. Well, Dann reflects, hadn’t he really been doing that all along? Getting grants for ESP submarine exercises, for God’s sake. He wishes he could congratulate the old maniac, or at least get a glimpse of what must be his ecstatic state. How had they ever got themselves out of Deerfield? No doubt with Janskelen as Fearing/Sproul it had been pulled off somehow… And will they raise a line of telepathic mutants? Fabulous…

When Margaret returns he tries to explain it to her. But she is already too remote; he senses it is unreal to her. She seems chiefly pleased that the program has produced. Perhaps this is not a drifting-off into supernal realities, he thinks, but an aspect of Margaret’s human mind; her concern with structure, relations. Not content, not people. He is reminded of a math teacher he’d had who refused to plug comprehensible numerical values into his equations on the blackboard. Even the child shows signs of it.

His musings are cut short by Waxman’s signal from outside.

“Doc, we have a problem out here.” The “voice” is startlingiy like Rick’s on the lawn at Deerfield.

“Yes?”

“It’s so dark and quiet, where we are. You know? The others are trying things, they keep each other busy as well as they can. Chris and Giadoc are trying to understand some of the stuff here. The women do some exploring. But it’s bad. It’s a real big nothing. Even those pictures, those announcement things, have faded out. Old Heagran is worried, he thinks we’ll all trip out to dream-worlds like Ted.”

“I see.” And he does, he understands how selfish he has been. He has had access to the stars, to her, while the others have nothing but the twilight world of individual minds.

“I should have realized.” Reluctantly he makes himself say, “Do you want to share with me? Touch me, or whatever?”

“Thanks, Doc. I mean, thanks. But I thought, something simpler. Like, could she relay out a picture? The circuits must be there. If she could hook in monitors we could see where we are. A check on reality.”

“Of course. I’ll ask her. By the way, how is Ted? Is he still—?”

“Yeah. Chris and I work on him now and then. But what is there for him to come out for?”

“I understand. I’ll ask right away.”

When he relays Waxman’s request to the apparition he knows as Margaret, the beautiful face listens with unusual intentness.

“I should have thought of that,” she says quickly, as if in self-reproach. To Dann’s surprise, the remote cloudy profile in the stars has also turned slightly, as though attending. Dream-Margaret goes back into the shadows of the great control room.

Dann is oddly heartened. There seems to be a chord of empathy here, some strand of responsibility to the lives outside her mystery. Perhaps it is a remnant of the Task, the transcendent impulse toward rescue. Is it possible that the human Margaret has learned some compassion toward life from this unhuman entity?

Suddenly she is back again, frowning slightly.

“ Your friends, the aliens… You say they are expert in the transmissions of life?”

“Oh yes. It seems to have been one of their main modes—” He sees that she does not want details.

“Good. I will relay also some small signal-trains that are… difficult for me. Perhaps they can comprehend better.”

He is amazed at her openness, amazed that the goddess would accept life’s cooperation. Perhaps it will be true, what she hinted. Eagerly he tells her, “Giadoc, the one who mind-traveled to other worlds, is the nearest thing we have to an expert on alien life. And he can report in our language.”

She says only, “I will set it up,” and fades away into the cloudy depths.

He has not long to wait. An exuberant communication bursts upon him from outside.

“Man, it’s beautiful. It’s all over, like a million windows!”

Again Dann is jolted by the incongruity of the young voice, the words that could be describing a sports car, used here for transreal marvels. Well, what does he expect, that Ron or Rick should boom like a cinema spook?

“The whole outside of this place is covered, and there’re screens all over, where those recording places were. And listen, we’re getting other kinds of transmissions too. Bdello and his people are really into it. I’m picking up something too, Doc, maybe like music. I can’t describe it. I think we’re going to find new forms of consciousness like we never dreamed of.”

“New forms of consciousness?”

“Yeah. Like whole planets thinking. Everything interconnected, or—I can’t explain but I really dig it. I used to, I don’t know, dream…”

The so-ordinary boy’s voice, chattering about transcendences. For an instant Dann’s old human distrust of mysticism rises. Are these unbodied minds indeed floating into fantasy? But no; he must believe that there is some reality here, if anything here is real.

“Oh, another piece of news for you,” Waxman goes on. “Did I tell you that the Tyrenni have set up a big dream-world of their own, over that way? All the Fathers have the kids in there. We call it Tyree-Two. Giadoc says the soul of Tyree came with us, that makes it a heavy trip. Val and Frodo went to see it. They liked the flying. And Winnie took Kirk to some Father who’s going to raise him for awhile, she knows she was too soft with him.”

“Tyree-Two…” Dann thinks of the strength of Ted’s dream-world. This must be incredible, a structure of joined dreams, a real place.

“ Yes. But Heagran is more worried than ever. He’s coming to talk to you soon.”

“I’ll be here.” Dann tries his first mild joke in life beyond death, in realms between the stars.

But it is Chris who comes next, a new, stronger Chris whose shyness is only a slight abruptness in the contact now.

“We need time here, Doc.”

“Time?” It seems the one thing they have.

“I mean, we need some way of marking real time. It’s weird here with nothing changing. I notice some of those stars pulse regularly. I was thinking, why can’t you tie one into a digital counter that we could read?”

“It isn’t me, Chris. I can’t do anything. I’m only the doorman here.”

“You know what I mean, Doc.”

Yes, Dann knows. Chris means what he has always meant, that there are human dimensions he can’t cope with. But the idea is, as usual, a good one.

“Cepheid variables, I think that’s what you’re seeing. The periods are generally around a week.”

“Yeah. We could spit it into intervals. Then you could keep track of things and plan to do a thing in so many periods, say, instead of this fuzzy stuff.”

“I don’t see why not. I’ll ask.”

“I know what we should call them.” Waxman has evidently been monitoring the interchange. “It would be stupid to have weeks or whatever the Tyrenni had, out here. Let’s call the base period after Chris.”

“Good,” says Dann. But Chris has already broken contact, apparently overcome by Waxman’s proposal.

When the apparition of Margaret comes again, Dann senses that she is amused by the proposal. As she moves away to whatever magical manipulations will put it into effect, an odd dreamy smile comes to her human face.

“Baseline, time zero… TOTAL can compute. It will start from when, when we awoke.”

When “we” awoke. Dann realizes anew that this dream-normalcy conceals a reality he has no access to. But he is not unhappy. Let it just go on.

The new real-time system is duly acclaimed a success. The screens carry it, and from time to time a soft unliving energy-signal resonates through the spaces round them.

On one of these occasions a new voice speaks spontaneously to Waxman: “Ship’s bells!” The lost mariner, Ted, is stirring from his dream.

Dann and Waxman are conferring, trying to compute how long, how surprisingly long, they have really been here, when a sense of something happening within the nucleus makes him break off.

His perception returns inward to find indefinable energies in action. Margaret in her human incarnation is not there, but the elegant remote profile against the stars is very vivid and strong, and the chamber seems to be thrumming with the quick rise of signals just beyond his range.

Then suddenly it is over, the energies subside, the shadowy figure fades and all is as before. And Margaret herself comes back, seated by a different part of the great console.

“What happened? Are you all right?”

Her expression is indrawn, she does not answer for awhile. Then she brushes her forehead in a very human gesture. “I—we—heard a death-scream. Very small, very close; something dying, freezing or burning up. I’m not sure, but I think I took in an alien astronaut. You can find out.”

When Dann turns his attention outside, he finds the others are already aware of what has happened.

“Something came barreling in here screaming blue murder,” Waxman tells him. “Heagran’s friends have gone out to see what they can do. Holy smokes!” The young voice is full of wonder. “Imagine, a real alien! I’m going to see it unless somebody gives me a good picture soon.”

Dann is too bemused to reply. “A real alien”—this from a disembodied double being dwelling in the interior of some leviathan of the starways, dealing in mind-speech with the creatures of another world. But he knows what Waxman means. Not for the first time, Dann reflects on the curious compatibility of these human and Tyrenni minds. They’re healthier, and less individuated than we, he thinks; and they lack our predatory aggressiveness. Our particular group of humans are rather deficient in that way too. Is it possible that empathic intelligence is the same the Galaxy over, that the knowledge of the reality of others’ feelings breeds a certain gentle cast of mind, whether one is in a human body or a great manta-ray of the winds? Or is it something deeper in their contactless, food-rich way of life?

The advent of the alien has generated a flurry of activity. It is decided to let him stay where he first lodged until more is known of him.

“Val’s gone over to try to learn its language,” Waxman reports. “She’s got a gift that way. They think it’s a combined being, a what-you-call hemaphrodite. Sastro sent me a good memory. Even Ted has heard of it.”

“Margaret didn’t do that on her own,” Dann tells him. “I mean, she did it, but it was her plus something. The being, whatever we’re in, seems to have a compulsion to respond to life in distress.”

“We’re in a life-boat,” puts in the dreamy voice Dann recognizes as Ted Yost.

“That’s right,” Waxman agrees. “We all feel something, some kind of urge like that underneath. It’s beautiful.”

Beautiful? Yes. But suddenly it occurs to Dann, what if they involuntarily take on a load of sapient predators? A space-going armada like Ghengis Khan’s hordes, with whom even a Tyrenni Father couldn’t cope? Or a distressed planetful of highly evolved scorpions? What would the gentle souls here do then?

He puts the question to Margaret when she next appears.

“Margaret, you know the people here, we who ride with you, are pretty peaceful types. Empathic, rational. And there’s not many of us. What if you take in some really ferocious characters? Fighters, killers, slavers? We might all be massacred or destroyed in some way.”

The figure in the shadows seems to stir slightly, and the “human” Margaret shakes her head, smiling gently.

“No. You will never be in danger. We—I have learned the value of life. I have you all in my circuits. If there should be hostility provision will be made. We are equipped for that, you know.”

He doesn’t know and he can’t imagine anything beyond, say, bulkheads. But he’s willing to trust it to her.

Oddly, it is the coming of the alien that is reponsible for Dann’s most human contact and the most touching one.

For some time his outward sensors have been aware of a presence nearby, close-held but emanating a hesistant intent and what he recognizes unhappily as pain. Dann puzzles. Can it be Ted, or Chris?

No; Waxman says that Ted has been induced to meet the Tyrenni, and Chris has formed a strong relationship with Giadoc in their curiosities about the unliving energies of this world. Moreover Chris is getting over his shyness about having his mind read. “They’re helping him a lot,” Waxman says. “He may let old Sastro fix his head a touch, so he doesn’t feel so, so, you know. From being like he was on Earth.”

Dann recollects his own slight experience of “having his head fixed.” To have ones fears and inadequacies put to rest—good for Chris. But who is this then nearby? Almost he asks Waxman, but the being’s shyness is so clear. Rather like a private patient waiting to see him again.

Finally comes a tentative mind-touch on his own. “Doc?”

The mystery is solved—it’s Frodo. If he had thought of her at all, he’d imagined her somewhere off happily exploring with Val.

“I’m glad you came by, Frodo. As maybe you can see, I’m stuck here.”

“I never thanked you for helping me back there. What you did, when we were on Tyree.”

Whatever she has come for, this isn’t it. He transmits a genial acknowledgment, while the thing in him that cannot rest in the presence of pain gropes toward her.

“Doc, you always understood—” It’s coming: with wrenching intensity her mind opens to him like a child, and she blurts, “Val doesn’t need me anymore.”

In dim immateriality she grips something that might be his hand; he can feel her struggle, her shame at showing pain. He remembers a long-ago small boy, brought in with a dreadfully smashed kneecap. For a moment he simply hangs on, trying to absorb and master the hurtful transmission, and sends the first thing that comes to his head.

“I don’t believe she doesn’t need you, Frodo. She loves you. Did she say so?”

“NO!—but she keeps doing things with Tivonel and the others, and she’s so busy with that alien. Oh, Doc, it’s horrible. I’m horrible.”

“Why are you horrible, Frodo?”

“Because—because—” The impression of a wailing little figure throwing itself on his bosom is overpowering. “Because she’s happy now! It’s horrible that I can’t take her being happy. She doesn’t need me at all!”

Dann holds her strongly, sharing the sharp grief, waiting for the storm to spend. Trying to understand, he recalls his glimpse of Val’s mind. The secret, sacred enclave of We Two. Now all that has been changed. The hostile world around has vanished and Val has been freed; she is enjoying her freedom in this weird place, like his little friend Tivonel. But this other inhabitant of that private world cannot fly free so easily. She misses horribly the exclusive love and sharing that gave life meaning— How well he knows it.

The sad mind in his nonexistent arms is murmuring. “Sometimes I think I’ll just start moving on till I come to the edge of this thing and go on out into space.”

“No. Would it be fair to Val to lay that guilt on her? Listen. When that idea comes to you I want you to come to me first. Will you promise me that?”

Finally she agrees. The intensity is drained for the moment. But the mournful message comes, “No one needs me here. Hell, I was just a dumb law student. We’ve passed beyond Middle Earth now, haven’t we? Who needs a law student in the Western Isles?”

“I was just a dumb medical doctor, Frodo. We all have to reconvert ourselves somehow.”

Frodo gives the ghost of her old scornful laugh. “You have her.”

Oh God, he knows what she means.

I don’t have Margaret, Frodo. Nobody could ‘have’ her anymore. I get to look at some aspect of her and talk with apart of her now and then. I think she’s happy… That’s all. She’s passed away beyond your Western Isles, farther than any of us.”

Frodo is silent for a moment. “I see… I’m sorry.”

“No need. I do get to see… something of her. Just like you see Val.”

“And that’s got to be enough for us?”

“I’m afraid so.”

The mind touching his sighs, then laughs again. But it’s a better laugh, Dann thinks, not understanding that his “gift” has worked again, but only feeling a new sadness.

“Speaking of law, have you found out what kind of laws that alien has on his world? Or the Tyrenni, for that matter? Look, here’s something you could think of. Why don’t you figure out the ideal code of laws? Then if we get the chance we could write them in fiery letters in the sky of some world.”

She really laughs. “Like the Ten Commandments. Thou shall not crucify green lizards,”

“Something like that.”

“Do you really think we could do things like that some day?”

“I don’t know. We’re in the realm of the impossible already.”

“Yeah.”

They are silent together; a companionable feeling Dann never imagined he would share with the fierce little androgyne.

“Come back and see me, Frodo. We can be depressed together. But if it gets too bad, you know, the Tyrenni can help you with bad memories.”

“I guess so… But I think I’d rather come to you. Thanks, Doc.”

“I’ll be here.”

She leaves, and Dann’s attention strays back inside the nucleus.

It is empty of all save mystery for a long time, until the child comes shyly out and starts to examine something on the small screen. It is a great dim red sun, Dann sees. A red giant. Perhaps she wants to ask him again about the lives of stars. Yes, she has replaced the picture with TOTAL’S Hertzsprung-Russell diagram now, showing the main sequence and the tracks taken by various masses and types of stars. If only he knew more!

But when she turns to him the question is unexpected.

“If we made time run backward, it would shrink again. And if there were people around it, they would be alive again, wouldn’t they, Dan’l?”

Make time run backward?

For a moment he thinks it’s a play-question, and then the fearful significance sinks in. He has found out from Margaret how the great being’s former companions cleared space; they somehow accelerated or reversed the processes of stars until their mass-energy dissipated below a critical point. But this is the first time he comprehends, really grasps that the entity he rides in, the being he knows as partly “Margaret,” has such powers at command; To make lost races live again?

“I suppose so,” he says feebly.

At that moment the grown-up Margaret appears from the shadows and the child goes to her. “There is also alternation,” she says quietly, half to Dann and half as if in reminder to the child. “Events don’t have to repeat exactly.”

Then she and the child melt away, leaving Dann’s head spinning.

Before he can organize his thoughts he is aware of a summons from Waxman outside.

“Father Heagran wants an interview with Margaret, Doc. Can you arrange?”

“I’ll see. It may be awhile.”

When Margaret comes back he tells her. “I think he wants a face-to-face meeting, like you had with Winnie. I believe I could translate. You’ve never really seen a full-fledged Tyrenni Elder, have you? It’s quite something, you might enjoy it. The thing is, they’re big.”

“Yes,” she says matter-of-factly. “I’ll make arrangements.”

Shortly thereafter he feels a change in the opening he guards, and prudently retracts himself. The opening seems to widen, and brighten to a view of Tyree’s wind-torn skies. Hovering there at an indeterminate distance is the great age-splendored form of Heagran himself. Dann wonders how it appears to Margaret. To him the form is both monstrous and beautiful; above all, a personage. The great mantle ripples, speaks in light.

“He addresses you as Gracious Elder,” Dann tells Margaret. “And asks if it is true that you can put his people’s minds down on a suitable world.” As Dann says this he is assailed by a pang of coming loss.

“ We can,” she says, seated quite normally and businesslike at the great console.

“Then it is time,” Dann goes on reluctantly. “Their world of fantasy here grows strong and strange and the, the children do not grow. However they will not commit life-crime on an intelligent race. He asks if you can find a world of advanced animal life where true, ah, self-concept has not developed. The animals’ minds can be merged to make room for the Tyrenni. I think he is saying that the soul or spirit of Tyree is with them, so he is not afraid they will degenerate. He believes that Tyree will live again in another form.”

“A world of advanced animal life.” Margaret’s hand brushes her dark hair as if the most ordinary program request had been put to her. “I think that can be done best if they will help monitor the life-bands to select the right level. Do they have other requirements?”

When Dann translates this the great changes color slightly, as if deep emotions were touched. “That it be a world of wind,” he says. “That we are not condemned to live in the Abyss, remembering flight.”

His emotion evokes echoes; even Margaret’s gaze is lowered for an instant. “I understand… Is there anything more?”

“Your people have told us how many worlds may be filled by fierce eaters of flesh. Our people cannot kill, we cannot cause pain. On our world was only one small fierce animal, the carlu, who served as a lesson for children. Therefore I would ask that our people be sent where there are no savage enemies and they may live at peace.”

“I understand that too.” She smiles. “We will set out systems to search. When we find possible worlds they will be displayed on the screens for you to judge. And I will study how to set you down gently, so that your people will not be frightened. I believe that is within our power.”

“All thanks to you, Gracious Elder-Female.” But the great being does not recede or turn away. Instead he signs almost hesitantly. “Another point.”

“Yes?”

“I and a few others… do not wish to leave you. I am too old to start life anew, and like young Giadoc I find that my soul has been touched by a greater wind. We know that if we stay we will not remain unchanged. Nevertheless we would wish to go with you on your great voyage among the Companions of the sky. May we?”

As Dann translates this his immaterial heart is filled with joy. To know that some of the Tyrenni will be staying! How unbearable to have lost all contact with the wondrous race whose ordeal he has shared, whose physical form is part of his intimate memories.

“You are very welcome,” Margaret is saying. “Your help in understanding the transmissions of life will be of great value here. Is there anything we can do for your comfort?”

“A small thing and perhaps impossible,” Heagran replies. “I know that we travel across immense spaces and that what we call the Companions are limitless in number. In such voyages, is it conceivable that we will ever again approach the new home of my people, to see how they fare?”

“I’m not sure.” Margaret’s brow has the so-human line of preoccupation, Heagren might have been asking her for a tricky computation. “Space, yes, and there is the factor of time. I believe we can mark the world you select, and return to it. But the time-lapse may be many generations of lives on that world.”

“We can ask no more.” The huge old being’s image colors a lilac so beautiful it seems to need no translation, and he vanishes away.

Margaret-the-human-woman remains gazing at the place where Heagran’s form had been.

“A new Task must be found soon,” she says quietly, whether to herself or Dann. “We feel the need. I begin to understand our powers and constraints. But I alone have not the vision to do more than the original program of transporting endangered peoples. After we put his people down on their new world it will be time. “She turns a perfectly normal, purposeful face on Dann. “Ask among the others, my old friend. See what visions they have.”

It could be a young committeewoman asking for ideas. Only the profile in the starry dimensions behind her warns him that the “ideas” will not be of any Earthly mode.

“Yes.”

And he is alone again, his brain whirling. Transporting endangered peoples—using the powers of time to revive lost races—choosing among alternative evolutions for whole planets—perhaps intercepting stellar armadas, or seeking ultimate unknowns—Daniel Dann’s human mind blooms with visions, his long-dead imagination stirs, shedding off rusty sparks.

Reality has already come unhinged, unrooted to sense or time or place. Now it seems it is about to take flight entirely, undergo transmogrification to undreamt-of realms.

And is it possible that he, whose life has all but ended so many times, he who was for so long an automaton of pain and Earthly ignominy, he the utterly inconsequential, randomly selected, unqualified—except for that gift he shrinks to use—is it possible that he will be witness to such wonders? Will he come to accept them? “Today we rejuvenate a sun. Tomorrow we give a species the terrible boon of self-conscious intellect.”

Incredible. Impossible.

But, apparently, slowly about to begin to happen.

And—for how long?-How long will it go on?

With that, the deepest, most dire and secret shudder of all shakes him. Dann allows consciousness at last to the word that has been working its unadmitted ferment in the bottom of his soul: FOREVER.

Immortality?

Yes, or something very like it. At the least, a time measured not in years or lifetimes but astral epochs. Nothing here changes, has changed, apparently will change or run down for millennia. The mysterious cold energies that sustain them have cycled, it appears, for stellar lifetimes. There seems no reason they should not continue to an approximation of eternity.

An eternity of unimaginable projects? Yes—and an eternity too of Waxman’s young voice, of Heagran’s sublimity, of Frodo’s grief and Tivonel’s laugh and Giadoc’s persistent How and Why and What, and all the rest of it. The trivial, ineluctably finite living bases of their unreal lives loom up before him like an endless desert to be traversed on foot, under a sky raining splendor. The close-up limiting frame around the view of infinity.

Can we take it? Will we go mad?

Heagran has said they will all change, he reflects. Perhaps the constant mind-touching will merge them gradually, affect even Margaret. Perhaps we will become like one big multifaceted person, maybe that will be the solution. Or maybe the fused minds will be incompatible. We could become a hydra-headed psychopath.

But Margaret, he thinks; she’s in control of us all, really. She could do something, put us out or freeze us if it came to that. But then she would be alone forever. Hurt strikes the node of nothing that had been his heart. For her sake we must, I must, stay sane. Hang on. Maybe it will be great, a supernally joyous life.

But—eternity? A cold elation and foreboding mingle in his mind.

What have I learned, he wonders. Voyager between worlds, I have been privileged beyond mortal man. I have met an alien race, I have encountered endless unknown things. What great changes has all this wrought in me? What transformations have I suffered to make me worthy of a place in such a drama? To witness, perhaps participate in the fates of worlds? To enjoy something like immortal life? What great contribution will I make to the symbiosis?

Nothing, he reflects wryly. Not one tangible thing.

I have only what I had before, a little specialized knowledge of the workings of bodies we no longer possess. Beyond that, only my old compound of depressive sympathy and skepticism about brave new claims, however appealing. If we actually meet Jehovah or Allah or Vishnu out here I would still take my stand on the second law of thermodynamics.

What in the name of life can make mine worthy of such perpetuation? What do I ever learn but the same old lessons—that people are people, that pain is bad; that good is too often allied with vulnerability and evil with power. That absolutes are absolutely dangerous: Bethink ye, my lords, ye may be mistaken. That one can do ill in the name of doing well, and error buggers up the best laid plans. That even the greatest good of the greatest number is no safeguard—Tyree was burned because it was in the path of the destruction that saved a galaxy.

I don’t know a single distinguished philosophy, he thinks, except perhaps my respect for Bacon’s Great Machine. Or wait—Spinoza, when he changed one word in the ecclesiastical definition of truth. The Church called it the “recognition of necessity.” Spinoza called it the “discovery of necessity,” and for that they persecuted him because it undermined all authority.

But what new great necessities have I discovered, beyond the old necessity of kindness? And, he thinks, I am apt to be slow to discover any in this future which seems all too unconstrained. Some great thinker should be here in my place. Waxman with his boyish fervors about new modes of consciousness is more deserving of this life than I.

I’m not going to be reborn as the embryo of humanity transcendent in the cosmos. I’ll just be me.

As he has been thinking these bleak thoughts beneath the radiant processions of suns within the nucleus, a small presence has come quietly close to him.

It is the child, he sees, seeming younger than usual; that incarnation of Margaret which perhaps holds all her unscarred wonder and delight. Ordinarily they rarely touch. But such is his distress now that his hand goes out unthinkingly and strokes her thin shoulder. She does not move away but turns on him a smile of elfin beauty.

As he looks down into her large eyes his worries fade somewhat. Even his lack of intellectual grandeur seems less important.

Well, he thinks, there is one thing I can do, do always. Even if it comes to eternity, I will still have that. He is almost sure of it, knows it beyond reason.

No matter how long the future stretches or what it holds, he will carry into it his love.