Up the Walls of the World

Chapter 5

Tivonel jets upwind on her way to the Hearers, on her way to Giadoc, savoring the wild morning. Her aura radiates life-zest, her flying body is a perfect expression of wind-mastery as she darts and planes against the eternal gales of Tyree.

Soon she begins to register a slight magnetic gradient along the trail. It’s coming from a long frail strand of gura-plant evidently anchored far upwind. Her new memory tells her that the Station people arranged it as a rustic marker for the trail. Very ingenious. She tacks effortlessly beside it, recalling her Father telling her that it was such natural interface guides that first led her people down to Deep.

How daring they’d been, those old ones! Braving hunger when they ventured below the life-rich food streams, braving darkness and silence. Above all, braving the terror of falling out of the Wind. Many must have fallen, nameless bold ones lost forever in the Abyss. But they persevered. They dared to explore down to the great stable up-welling, and founded the colony that became Old Deep. In that calm, Tyree’s high culture had developed.

Tivonel’s mantle glints in appreciation; her year in the high Wild has made her more reflective. Now she’s actually known the brutish, primitive life from which her people freed themselves. Tbe Lost Ones were reverting fast. She has touched their hideous mind-savagery and experienced the total impermanence of life in the wild Wind, tumbling endlessly through the food-rich streams, gorging, communicating, mating at random; knowing nothing beyond the small chance group which might at any moment be separated forever. We lived in animal chaos while the centuries rolled by unmarked, Tivonel thinks, shuddering. Much as she enjoys the Wild, that view of the real thing had been too much.

A pity the names of the early pioneers aren’t known. They must have been females like herself. The Memory-Keepers of Deep have engrams only of the generations after the Disaster, when the present Deep was reestablished on another updraft safe from abyssal explosions. Twisting and jetting into the great gales, Tivonel muses on history. Perhaps there were many lost colonies before one succeeded. Achievements go like that, look at the efforts to bring the podplants up.

A turbulence in the trail breaks her revery. She scans ahead. The far point of life that must be the Hearers is still barely discernible, almost lost in the soupy plant-life of the winds. The biosphere is still rich down here. As the chiming lights of a raft of sweet-plants rush by Tivonel checks the temptation to dart out and scoop in a snack. Really, my manners. She sets vanes and jets in closer to the gura-lattice, thinking that it will take an effort to get used to civilization. What if she forgets herself and eats somebody’s garden, down in Deep?

But there’s wildness in her heart, and the mission to the Lost Ones has given her a taste for real achievement. Maybe I won’t stay with the food-hunting teams, she thinks. Maybe I’ll volunteer for one of the real exploration trips down to the dangerous ultradeep above wind-bottom. Whew! That would be something real. We females should do things with all our spare time. At least I can argue Ellakil into trying my scheme of using counters to organize the food trade. But I’m not like the Paradomin radicals. I don’t want to try unfemale things like Fathering. After seeing Ober and the rest in action I know I haven’t the Skills. I haven’t the sensitivity, the patience. What female has? Adventure, travel excitement, work is what we like!

But first I want to see Giadoc again. Maybe—maybe—

Suddenly she is aware of a small, weak life-signal straight ahead. It’s coming fast downwind at her. Hello, it’s a child!

The young one comes into range. He’s bowling downstream, shepherding a raft of fat-plants. Must be one of the Station children bringing in supples. Very young, too, his claspers are showing, his tiny life-aura barely extends beyond his mantle. And he’s moaning purple with strain. What’s wrong?

As he nears her she sees his trouble: a small fragment of his life-energy is detached and riding just ahead of him. The child is lunging to catch it up but it veers in toward the magnetic plant. He can’t swerve in after it without losing his flock of plants.

Tivonel grins to herself. The child was experimenting with adult field-detachment, as young ones will. Now he’s in real trouble.

She suppresses her amusement and flashes a formal greeting. Never add to another’s pain, how often her Father has told her. The child flickers a muffled response, bright blue-green with shame at having to pass her in this state.

As he and his erring life-field come abreast of her, Tivonel deftly extrudes a thought-filament, blocks the stray energy and flicks it out at him. Done like a Father!

The child rejoins himself with a jolt, too embarrassed to do more than stammer broken colors. Then he herds his flock out to the fast stream and is gone in a rush.

Tivonel jets on, amused, recalling her own early indiscretions. All youngsters worth their food try to manipulate their fields too early. So boring, waiting for their Fathers’ supervised practice. It’s dangerous; her own Father had to reassemble her once. Every so often a young one mutilates its field that way. Sad. The Healers say the loss of the natural energy-configuration can be regenerated in time. Like most people, Tivonel doesn’t quite believe it. Who can tell what the person would be like if they hadn’t lost field?

Her thoughts go back to Giadoc; in the privacy of the trail she can let her field bias and tingle as it will.

Dear Giadoc! She has thought much of him in the long noisy nights of the Wild. His strangeness, his strong mysterious mind.

Their mating had been a routine first-child one. I was too ignorant to appreciate him truly, she thinks, though I’m older than he. I just saw him as sexually exciting. And a wonderful Father for my first egg. In the years since, of course, she hasn’t seen him at all, save for the annual ceremonies of greeting their child Tiavan.

Now she has come to realize Giadoc was someone special. So unexpectedly tender and underneath it something she can’t define, like a delicious wildness new to her. His son is grown now, his first Fatherhood is over. Will Giadoc have changed too, become still stranger and more exciting?

She jets harder, striving to retain composure by organizing a condensed engram of her year in the Wild. Surely Giadoc will be interested in the Lost Ones and the strange wild life-forms she’s seen.

But oh, those memories of their mating! How strong-sensitive he’d been, a perfect match from the start. The opposing polarity had snapped into being with their first ritual gestures and gone to both their heads. Young fools—they’d actually raced up into the winds above Deep to mate. Giadoc hadn’t even waited to select co-mates.

Up there, alone, the strength of his field amazed her. At first she’d hovered conventionally close upwind of him. And then his amazing power had built up and thrust her physically far out into the wind—had held her there thrillingly helpless while he played with her out of sheer vitality. The repulsion between them was perfect. Every least eddy of her life was countered and teased to resonance, and she knew her own field was doing the same for him. And then came the climax, when he had pushed her unbelievably far away into the wind’s teeth, held her off perilously while the orgasmic current boiled through them both!

Even in her ecstasy she had been terrified as the force of her spasm expelled the precious egg. How far away he was! She could still see it sailing downwind, receiving as it flew the life-giving exposure to Tyree’s energy which would ready it for his fertilization. What if he missed it? Without co-mates it would be lost, they were totally alone!

But he caught it hurtling, pouched it like a master male—and in a rush the sustaining fields, collapsed and they both went tumbling dishevelled down the Winds, laughing for the egg safe in its Father’s pouch. Winds knew how far they blew, guilty and joyous, before they recovered to make their slow way back.

That was when he had done the rare thing, had stayed in partial merger with her, so that she feld a deep sharing of his sensitive Father soul, his mystery. She hadn’t realized how extraordinary it was for a male to do that. They had been so happy, coming home; over and over he told her how good the long exposure-time would be for the egg, how it would make a strong-fielded child. And of course Tiavan was a fine young one, a potential Elder certainly. But Giadoc—

Suddenly Tivonel realizes that she is so shamelessly polarized that the gura-plant is swirling wildly. And the Hearer’s signal ahead has grown much stronger. Ahura! What will Giadoc think of her if she arrives this way?

She damps herself hard, remembering that Giadoc is probably absorbed in his work and hasn’t thought of her at all. And maybe he won’t think her experiences are enough to benefit a second egg. But the Elders believe that the mother’s memories help the egg’s field, and aren’t hers unusual? Well, at any rate she has a formal excuse for the visit; he can’t criticize her asking for news of Tiavan after a year away.

She jets on energetically—and is suddenly struck by weirdness. A ghostly clamor of light invades the natural hush. She checks, disoriented—and finds herself among dim forms. Why, there is Ober… and the others! She’s in the floater with them, going down. What’s happening?

Panicked, she pumps her mantle and the hallucination fades. She is back by the trail. But ahead of her is the blue mantle of the young one she’d met—he is approaching again, his field-fragment bowling ahead. Oh, no! She forces more air through herself to clear her senses—and she’s back in ordinary reality, sailing downwind in disarray.

Not really frightened, she snaps herself back on course. She knows now what has hit her—one of the so-called time-eddies Mornor’s daughter warned her about. They’re strange pockets of hallucination or alternate time, who knows?—not dangerous unless one gets blown while in them. Her father said they started to be noticed in his youth, and only near weird places like the poles.

So she must be getting close. Yes—the signal is much stronger, and the wind-streams are subtly roiling and losing direction. It’s the beginning of the enormous turbulence of the Polar Vortex. Here at the pole the planetary winds circle forever around a great interface, where the Hearers work. Tivonel remembers the conditions from long ago when her Father had taken her to see Near Pole. The Hearers there have a dense wealth of sky-life to study. Tivonel jets energetically through the cross winds, wondering why Giadoc has chosen to come and Hear here at Far Pole where the Companions must be few and faint.

The plant-marker is ending in a great luxuriant tangle, balanced on a standing eddy. The winds are omnidirectional now, it’s the start of the interface zone. Tivonel’s mantle-senses automatically analyze the complex gradients of the pressures around her; she cuts across local wind-loops, steering by the life-signals ahead and above. The point-source has opened out to several separate groups of life-emanations. The Hearers must be spread all over the Wall. It is still silent, a beautiful day, still dark and silent although she has been traveling well into normal night. Untired, alight with anticipation, she sends herself shooting through another huge cloud of plant-life—and emerges at the End of the World.

What a scene!

Forgetting her eagerness, forgetting Giadoc, Tivonel stops and hovers, awe-struck.

It isn’t really the end of the world, of course, but merely the edge of the biosphere in which her people live. It is a place of wonders.

She is in the side of an enormous wind-funnel, a planetary hurricane called the Wall of the World. It is a great curved wall, a tapestry of life-signals and murmuring, shimmering light that spins around the Pole. Ahead of her stretches an empty space, a zone of turbulent updrafts which to her is stable air. Out in the center of the great ampitheater she can perceive the lethal polar Airfall, an immense column of down-pouring winds. It descends eternally from the converging winds high above and falls into the unimaginable deeps of the Abyss below, there to spread out over the unknown dark, and ultimately rise in upwellings like that of Deep. The Airfall is dense dying with life, sighing grey on its fall to dread wind-bottom. Around her, spreading into the empty zone, is a screen of lovely airborne jungles that ride the standing air beside the Wall. It is here that the Hearers work, because of the clear view above.

Tivonel lifts her scan, and is again awestruck. She had expected it to be interesting, but not as impressive as the musical brilliance of Near Pole’s sky, not as dense with life-signals. Now she sees the Companions are indeed fewer, but against their silent background, how individually splendid, how intense! At Near Pole they had been so massed as to seem a close web; she remembers making a childish effort to signal to it with her tiny field. Here she sees how far they are, how they burn alone in the immense reaches of the void.

For the first time she really grasps it. Each Companion is indeed a Sound like Tyree’s own, she is hearing the light-music poured from a million far-off Sounds. And the beacon-points of life with them, how individually clear and strange! Are there worlds up there, worlds like her own, perhaps? Is another Tivonel on some far-off Tyree at this moment scanning wonderingly toward her? Her normally wind-bound soul expands and something of the lure of Giadoc’s work comes clear to her. If only she were not a female, if only she had the strong far-reaching Father’s field!

But perhaps there is no one up there, only mindless plants or animals. She has been told that Tyree is exceptionally favorable for intelligent life with its rich eternal Wind. Perhaps only here could minds develop and look toward other worlds? How lonely…

But her buoyant spirit will not be dashed. How lucky to live at the time when all these mysteries are becoming known! In the old days people believed the Companions were spirits above the Wind, mythical food-beasts, or dead people. Even today, some people down in Deep hold that there are good and bad spirits up here: idiots who’ve never been out of Deep, never sensed the sky except through thick life-clouds. Her Father warned her that such beliefs may grow, now that Deep is becoming so self-sufficient. Tivonel is in no danger of such stupidities, up here where she can receive the blazing music and life-emanations of the sky!

But another life-signal has grown strong and jolts her from her musings. Hearers, quite close above! Tivonel realizes abashedly that her own emanations must be equally clear to them, perhaps impinging on their work. Hurriedly she compacts her awareness, nulling her output as much as possible. How awful if she has already offended Giadoc!

She jets slowly up along the Wall, very cautiously scanning for Giadoc’s distinctive field. She can always recognize that characteristic intensity, so open yet so focused-beyond.

At the end of a line of other fields she detects him—Giadoc, but grown even stronger and more strange! He must be preoccupied, experimenting with something unheard-of. All the Hearer’s emanations are weird, intense but muted. Bursting with curiosity, she pushes through a tangle of vegetable life and hears the lights of his voice. How deep and rich, a true Father! Yet strange, too.

His tone becomes more normal, is answered by other Hearers. They seem to be finished with whatever they are doing. Keeping herself as null as possible, she clears the plants and lets her mantle form his name in a soft rosy light-call. “Giadoc?” No response. She repeats, embroidering with the yellow-green of her own name. “Giadoc? It is Tivonel here.”

To her joy comes an answering deep flash. “Tivonel, Egg-bearer-of-my-child!”

“Do I disturb? I came to see you, dear-Giadoc.”

“Welcome.” In a moment he appears, swooping toward her. How huge he is! Overjoyed, she lets her own field stream at him, her mantle rippling questions.

“Are you well? Have you discovered many marvels? Do you recall—” She checks herself in time and changes it to, “Is Tiavan well? I have been away. I was up in the Wild, we rescued the Lost One’s children.”

“Yes, I heard.” He hovers before her, resplendent. “Tiavan-our-child is well. He has decided to study with Kinto, to become a Memory-Keeper—when his Fatherhood is over, of course. Was your mission successful?”

His signals are in the friendliest mode, but so formal. He can’t have thought of at all, she tells herself, meanwhile shyly proffering her field-engram. “I have prepared a memory for you, dear-Giadoc. I thought you would like to know of our discoveries.”

He hesitates, then signals “Accept with pleasure.” A dense eddy of his mind-field comes out and touches hers.

The contact jolts her deliciously; she has an instant of struggle to keep unformed thought from pouring into the memory. Then she becomes aware that he is passing her a terse account of Tiavan. Loathe to break the exciting contact, she accepts it lingeringly. Just as he separates himself she finds the impudence to let a tiny tickle of polarization tickle his withdrawing field. They snap apart, but he makes no acknowledgment. Instead he only says, deep and Father-like, “Truly praiseworthy, dear-Tivonel. You have learned how to apply your wild energies.”

She doesn’t want a Father. And his field wasn’t really Fatherly at all.

“Thank you for the news of Tiavan,” she signs. How can she get closer to him? Impulsively, she flashes, “Is anything wrong, Giadoc? You seem so reserved. Is it that I intrude?”

“Nothing personal, dear-Tivonel,” he replies, still formal. Then his tone softens. “Much has been happening here. You have been out of touch a long time. There has been news from Near Pole which has affected us all.”

Near Pole! It’s the last thing she wants to hear of. But he sounds so serious, and he has never attracted her more. Groping for a topic to keep him from leaving, she asks, “Is it true that you have actually touched the lives of beings on other worlds? How incredible, Giadoc, how fascinating.”

“You don’t know how incredible,” he answers quietly. “You can have no true concept of the distances. Even I find it hard to, grasp. But yes, we have touched. Some of us have even been able to merge briefly.”

“What did you learn? I was just hoping that other intelligences are out there. Are they like us?”

“Very unlike. Yes, a few are intelligent. But very, very strange.”

His tone has become warmer, more intense. “If only I could try it,” she laughs flirtatiously to remind him of her femaleness, and allows another tiny potential-bias to tease at his field.

But he only signs somberly, “It is dangerous and harsh. Much more painful than your Lost Ones, dear-Tivonel.”

“But you do it for pleasure, for strangeness, don’t you, Giadoc? Perhaps you are a bit of a female at heart!”

“It is interesting.” Suddenly his field changes, his mantle signs in deep red emotion, “I do love what you call strangeness. I love exploring the life beyond my world. It will be my work so long as we all survive.”

To her surpirse, he ends on an archaic light-pattern meaning over-mastering devotion. But this is not what she was hoping for at all.

“How unFatherly,” she almost says—and then something in his tone reaches her. “What do you mean, as long as we survive?”

“The trouble I spoke of. You’ll learn when you go down.” His voice is grave again.

Exasperated, she can only wish that they were in the wind, not in this eddy. If she could move straight upwind of him, that would convey! I’d do it, too, she thinks. But here there is nothing to do but say it.

“Giadoc.” Her aura comes to formal focus, compelling his attention. “I have lived and had valuable experience, don’t you think? It seems to me I am entitled to a second child. An advantaged egg,” she signs explicitly. “I thought—dearest-Giadoc, I have been thinking so much of you. Do you remember us, how beautiful it was?”

“Dearest-Tivonel!” Another wave of emotion sweeps him, his field is intense. But still he does not polarize.

Stunned by his rejection, she flashes at him, “How you’ve changed! How unFatherly you are! So I don’t please you, now.” She turns to go.

“Tivonel, Tivonel!” His tone is so wild and sad it stops her. “Yes,” he says more quietly, “I have changed, I know. It is the effect of outreach, of touching alien lives. But there is more than that. Dearest-Tivonel, listen. I cannot bring a child into this world now.” His tone is white, solemn. “You will learn it for yourself. We are all about to die soon.”

“Die?” Astounded, she opens her field in receptive-mode. But he only signs verbally, “When you understand what has been observed you’ll realize. Our world, Tyree, is about to end.”

“You mean, like the time of the great explosion? But that’s a joke!” Angrily she lets her mantle glitter sarcasm. Everyone knows the old stories of how the end of Deep was falsely foretold. “We’re safe now, you know the forces of the Abyss are far away.”

“This isn’t from the Abyss. Destruction is coming from beyond the sky.”

“You mean another fireball? But—”

“Worse, much worse. Didn’t you listen to any of the news from Near Pole before you left?”

“Oh, something about dead worlds. Agony hits her. Pain! What hideous pain! A searing life-grief is ripping through her field, feeding back anguish, numbing her senses.

Barely able to hold herself in the wind, she contracts her mind desperately, trying to escape. It’s a blast on the life-bands, like a million-fold amplification of the tiny death-cries of the Wild. But so strong, unbearable. With shame she realizes she’s transmitting waves of personal suffering as the shocking pangs sweep through her. She struggles to hold herself null, but she can’t. The torment is building toward some lethal culmination—

Suddenly it slackens. It takes her a moment to understand that Giadoc is shielding her. He has thrown a Father-field around her, holding the terrible signals off as if she was a child.

“Hold on, it will pass.” He transmits courage. Grateful and ashamed, she reorders herself within his sheltering field. The pain is still quite severe, it must be horrible for him. She finds she has let herself merge with him like a baby, and tries tactfully to withdraw. As she does so she feels strange new emotions in herself; he must have let her touch him deeply, an unheard-of intimacy among adults.

Humbly but proudly she detaches herself. The hurt is less now.

“No more need.” She signals intense-thanks.

“It is passing. Be careful, dear-Tivonel.” Slowly he withdraws protection. The pain is still there, but fading, passing from her nerves. They find they have become entangled in a plant-thicket and right themselves.

“What was it, Giadoc? What hurt so?”

“The death-cry of a world,” he tells her solemnly. “The death-cry of a whole world of people like ourselves.”

The deep sadness in his tone affects her; she understands now.

“Here at the Poles we receive them very strongly. Near Pole has been hit by them all this past year, the life-bands there are torn with these cries. World after world is being killed. Some die slowly, some very fast.”

She is still disoriented by horror and wonder. “But they’re so far away.”

“The deaths are coming closer to Tyree all the time, Tivonel. Near Pole says there are now only five living worlds between us and the destroyed zone.”

She tries to grasp it, to recall her lessons. “The Sounds are so crowded above Near Pole, aren’t they? Are they colliding, like people in a storm?”

“No. It’s not natural.” He pauses, gravely expanding his field.

“Something out there is killing worlds. Deliberately murdering them. We don’t know why. Perhaps they are eating them.”

“How hideous… But—how can you know?”

“We have touched them,” he signs, his words tinged with deep green dread. “We have touched the killers. They are alive. A terrible, incomprehensible form of life between the worlds.”

At his words, she finds in herself a fragment of his memory: a terrifying huge dark sentience, unreachable and murderous. That—approaching their own dear Tyree? Her mantel turns pale.

“And one of the beings, whatever they are, has passed this way alone. It is out beyond Far Pole now, destroying. Undoubtedly that was what we felt. It may be preparing to destroy us.”

“Can’t you turn its mind, the way we do animals?”

“No. Iro tried and was injured by the mere contact. It’s inconceivably alien, like touching death.” With an effort, he changes his tone to the gold of affectionate-converse. “Now you understand, dear-Tivonel. I must go back to our work. A committee from Deep is coming up to discuss the situation.”

“Yes.” She signs reverent-appreciation. But then her energetic spirit breaks out in protest. How can she leave him now? How can she go back and occupy herself with some meaningless activity while all is in danger?

“Giadoc! I want to stay here and help you. I’m strong and hardy, I can hunt for you and keep your Hearers supplied. Please, may I stay?”

His great mind-field eddies curiously toward her. “Are you serious, Tivonel? I’d like nothing better than to have your bright spirit near me. Arid it’s true we don’t have the food we need. But this is dangerous and it will go on. To the death, perhaps.”

“I undersatnd,” she signs stubbornly. “But I proved on the mission that I can stand boredom and persevere, even if I’m a female. The Fathers said so. I was useful.”

“That’s true.”

“Please, Giadoc. I feel—I feel very strongly about you. If there’s danger I want to be with you.”

His mantle has taken on deep, melodious ringing hues, his field is intense. She has never thought him so beautiful. Suddenly he flares out, “How I wish we had met again in better times! Yes, dearest-Tivonel, I remember us. Even if I’ve fallen in love with the strangeness of the sky, I remember us. Perhaps I can show you—” He falls silent, and adds quietly, “Yes, then. I’m sure Lomax, our chief, will agree. But—

She is deeply happy. “But what, Giadoc?”

“I fear that what you experience here will dim your brightness forever.”