James Tiptree Jr. Up the Walls of the World

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tired of acting in mystery. She has come through dangers
and blackness to this place of power and now she has some mental desires to
fulfill. Before assenting further, she will know where she is and among what
powers and conditions this strange life is set.
How will she get answers, here?
Deliberately she summons TOTAL to the small strange vein of power in her mind,
and frames a command to data-access, her thoughts sketching and shaping a
program of real-time inputs of fact and space. Am I in a computer? Is this a
dream? Her familiar keyboard glimmers before her;
her fingers go to it and firmly press TOTAL'S keys.
Query this location. Display.
With a great soundless rush the blackness around her vanishes. She is floating
in a universe of jeweled lights.
It worked, she exults. I have power and then all thought is inundated by sheer
magnificence. On every side, above, below, before, beyond, blaze steady fires
of amethyst and topaz and ruby, emerald and diamond and ultramarine drift upon
drift of them, burning against blackness or veiled in filaments and gauzes of
hypnotic allure.
They are, she realizes slowly, stars. The unwinking suns of space. She is
floating amid the glory of the universe, seeing without eyes the
incomprehensible vast unhuman beauty of the void. Her mind which had always
flinched from the hot closeness of human color is enchanted with this infinity
of spectral fires.
But a vague doubt troubles her. Is this real? Someone had told her of the
stars; is all this merely some simulacrum of her dead and dreaming human mind?
How can she test? She selects a beautiful pair of sapphire and yellow suns.
Magnify.
Obediently, they grow, seem to approach and separate, and reveal a dim violet
companion, all filmed in a wispy nebula in which are points of light.
At the same time she becomes aware of a rise in input on one of the unregarded
bands, as if these stars were giving off a train of signals. The impression of
reality is overwhelming. But still she doubts.
She turns to TOTAL'S keyboard, thinking hard. What would unmask a dream? At
length she frames a demand on TOTAL'S memory-banks.
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Specify.
The screen lights. // BETA * CYGNUS // COMMON * NAME *
ALBIREO * DERIVED * FROM * ERROR * IN * INTERPRETATION * OF
* ALMAGEST * 1515 // MAGS * 5.5 * 4.5 // PA * 055 / / SEP * 34.6' / /
SPECTRAL * CLASS * OF* PRIMARY * A5
Her attention goes back to the triple beauties, considering. The names
Beta Cygnis, Albireo, are utterly unknown to her; all these data could not
have come from her human mind. This must be real. Somehow she can call up
earthly information, here between the stars.
How this could be does not trouble her, she is too far from human
considerations; she no longer remembers NASA, nor the flap about
TOTAL'S wiped memory-cores. She merely accepts it as one more aspect of this
wondrous death and feels her soul smile. In due course she may inquire
further; when she is moved to it, she may probe, perhaps, the nature of this
huge cold power whose perceptions she seems to share. Now she is content to
exist at ease, to dream amid marvels.
The odd energy-output of the brilliant triple system she has summoned
presently attracts her curiosity, and she puts another question to TOTAL.
Query. Is life there?
//AFFIRMATIVE// the screen responds. And the peculiar pulse trains seem to
amplify, as if unknown receptors had been tuned to them.
She "listens" uncomprehendingly, amused by this new dimension of experience,
and sensing that some indefinable significance has been evoked. But if this is
"life" she can make nothing of it. I am not concerned with life, she thinks,
and dismisses Beta Cygnis. Compliantly the pulse-trains fade, the splendid
triple system fades back into the jewel-drifts of space.
But in another dimension of her mind, the ghostly center-panel of the great
console still shows its unknown switch: she senses still the faint urgency.
What unimaginable program would it execute? She wonders briefly and again
dismisses it. For the moment she wants nothing more.
Her attention returns to the outer radiance in which she floats, and now she
becomes aware of something new. Motion is here; slow but increasingly
perceptible. Like themes of silent music, the orbital elements of the nearer
stars reveal themselves to her mind. Suns weave hugely about each other,
develop subcomponents of direction, or glide in concert athwart a general
flow. Slowly the motion spreads away to the farthest reaches, until the whole
is in sublime and complex dance.
Delighted, she bends all her thoughts on this new wonder, understanding that
somehow her phantom senses have slowed, or
speeded, to a cosmic scale. Beyond the sheer splendor of the fires of space
she now sees a deeper, causal, magnificence. She can almost sense directly the
interlocking webworks of field forces, the lawfulness of every accidental
configuration. And more: beneath the macro-order, if she cares to look, there
is revealed the play of another lawfulness, that of the acutely small. The
stars are not constant, but changing: they alter in color, shrink or swell or
blaze to slow immense explosions. All this she understands as the expression
of sub-atomic transformations and events. The ultimate minute causalities are
hers too, when she wills to look deep.
Her human mind that since childhood had yearned dimly toward the enchantment
of relation, had groped toward it beneath the veil of number and symbol,
experiences a long slow gasp of immaterial rapture. Here is the beloved naked
to her view.
Time no longer exists. What had been Margaret Omali slips toward irreversible
fusion with something huge and alien whose powers she partially shares. A last
corner of her personality laughs with a child's purity, envisioning a vast
control-room of the stars. Of herself she knows only that she exists in peace
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and exaltation. The grandeur of the universe unfolds as the tapestry of her
understanding. She opens herself entirely to the pure, cold pleasure. The mind
that had been a human woman floats out to lose itself in the justice of the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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