[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
strange helical form. She stretches awareness, tries to copy with her own
smaller life. As she does so, a life-signal resonates around the Wall.
The Hearers are in place.
"Ready?" Giadoc brushes her with a testing thought.
"Yes." She mutes the last excited eddy from her field-form.
"Remember, your first act must be to try to calm the being's fear."
"I will, dear-Giadoc."
"And be brave. The sensations will be very strange. Especially don't panic
when there is no wind."
"No."
She waits, hardly able to breathe for the effort to remain in the correct calm
mode. It's like being a child again, waiting for her Father to help her
stretch her baby mind to distant-touch. But this isn't play, she's waiting to
go with Giadoc to touch the life beyond the sky!
The sky... Incredibly clear and cold the voices of the Companions call to her
from above. Will she really touch them, ride out on the Beam to merge with
unimaginable alien life? A deep excitement wells up almost ungovernably. All
around she can feel the energies of the Hearers' linked fields building,
growing without limit. The World is bursting with tension.
Just as it seems she must fly apart, a second life-signal crackles through
them and she feels her mind gripped, pulled free, thrust out upon forces she
had never dreamed of. Almost she flinches in fear before she lets it take her.
Giadoc and the immense combined power of the ring of Hearers are sucking her
life up to the focus at the heart of the Beam, to send it stretching
out out out to
She yields, launches totally, lets herself dwindle to a filament riding a
storm of power, an energy that looms and blooms upward like a world-bubble.
She is only a thread in an immense thrusting tower of bodiless vitality,
shooting forever outward as it intensifies and narrows from a pinnacle to a
needle, from a needle to a dimensionless thread driving instantaneously to its
goal. And as her life attenuates, recruitment comes a deep life-force as if
she and the Beam were cresting on a planetary power.
For an everlasting instant she feels herself stretched through an infinity of
nothing, an unbodied vector still companioned by a strand of nameless
strength. Then joy, strangeness, glory she feels the goal just ahead!
Yes. In the unknown is something. Life-contact! Without senses she touches,
knows it for a living being. Remember!
She pushes like a baby against the alien life, feeling for the fear she must
deflect. Yes, terror is here at the contact-point. With all her might she
counters it, projecting warm-friendship, and pushes again.
And suddenly physical sensation crashes in upon her. Lights, colors, nameless
perceptions, concrete life-signals! All in one overwhelming instant she is
seeing through alien eyes!
Enchanted, she gulps in comprehension, registering shapes, hues,
sounds, smells, volumes. A world bombards her. She has done it, she has merged
Page 61
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
with an alien mind! She has a body, she can fit her will into its
half-comprehensible brain, live, act!
But before she can do more than gasp through strange organs, a horrible
vertigo strikes her. Where is the Wind? Oh, terror, there is no wind.
She has fallen into the Abyss!
Primal dread tears the frail connection, sweeps her away. Her being ravels
instantaneously back into the void, flees homeward on the Beam in helpless
fear. Next instant she has condensed into herself, Tivonel, adrift in disorder
on the winds of Tyree.
Shame floods her. She has done exactly what Giadoc had warned her of, she has
let herself panic in the strangeness of no wind.
But as she collects herself, her natural spirits revive. She hasn't really
failed the important part. Didn't she merge and possess the body? Next time
she would be able to stay. But where is Giadoc?
There: she finds his silent form, barely outlined in a weird trace of life,
almost like a dead person. But it must be all right; he's still
mind-traveling, his life is in some being on that world they touched. Yes; a
faint tendril of life-energy seems to run upward toward the great matrix of
power arching overhead. The Beam is still holding, the world around her feels
drained and dreamlike. Far below her even the Deepers are awed and darkly
still.
Suddenly Giadoc's body stirs. The thin trace of field roils and abruptly
swells, losing connection of the Beam. But the field is all wrong, it's
chaotic, ragged, shooting out wild eddies. Has something bad happened to
Giadoc?
She jets closer and then recoils as Giadoc's mantle blasts out a green scream
of pain and fear. That can't be Giadoc's voice! and understanding breaks.
This is what they were talking about: an alien mind has come here into
Giadoc's body. This must be one of those strange lives she had touched on that
far-off world. The creature is evidently scared to death. There ought to be a
Father here to help it.
"Be calm, be calm," she signs to it, feeling futile. What can words do for
this disordered creature? But to her relief the blue-green shrieking quiets
somewhat and stammers of other colors appear. It must be trying to speak.
Tivonel moves closer, appalled by the whirling chaos of its mind.
Like an adult baby. A thought-eddy brushes her with incomprehensible
meanings. The lights of the alien speech-patterns steady down. Tivonel can
make out the words "What ? where ?"
"Be calm, you're all right," Tivonel tries to sound Fatherly.
As she speaks the alien field surges at her and the creature apparently
perceives her physically for the first time. A jolt of reciprocal horror
shoots through them both. Next second Tivonel is flung bodily away, hurled
straight out from the wall as if a super sex-field had thrown her.
But we weren't even biassed, she thinks, jetting hard to extricate herself
from cross-currents. The creature hit my body with its mind; it has some weird
power. Fantastic! She can see it awkwardly trying to move now, jetting and
wobbling on its vanes. She better get to it before it hurts
Giadoc's body. Only, what can she do?
Just as she nears the wind-wall a deep silent sigh runs through the world and
the great energy-arch above collapses like a dream. The Beam has been let
down.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]