Look to Windward (23 page)

What looked like a root or cable led from the back of its skull and into the wall. Where the cable entered its head, something like blood had leaked out, soaking its dark, scaly skin. The creature trembled suddenly and let out a low moan.

“The raptor scout's report on the fellow-creature below is not sufficient,” the dirigible behemothaur Yoleus said through 974 Praf. “The captured falficores knew less still; only that there was a recent rumor of food below. Your report might be sufficient.”

Uagen swallowed. “Umm.” He stared at the raptor scout. It had not been tortured or really mistreated, by the locally prevailing standards, but whatever had happened to it didn't look very pleasant. It had been dispatched to reconnoiter the shape that Uagen and 974 Praf had seen when they'd gone after the falling glyph stylo.

The raptor scout had dived into the depths, escorted by the rest of its wing. It had landed on what was apparently another dirigible behemothaur, but one which had been injured or damaged, which had possibly lost its way and probably lost its mind. It had investigated inside a little, then it had rushed as fast as it could back to Yoleus, who had listened to its report and then concluded that the creature was not articulate enough to explain properly what it had seen—the raptor scout had not even been able to determine the identity of the other behemothaur—and so had
decided to look directly into its memories by burrowing in with a direct link between its mind and Yoleus' own—whatever and wherever that was.

There was nothing all that unusual about this, or even anything cruel; the raptor scout was, in a sense, a part of the dirigible behemothaur and would have had no sense of having had interests or even an existence separate from the vast creature; probably it would have been proud that the information it was carrying was of such importance that Yoleus wanted to look at it directly. Nevertheless, to Uagen it still looked like some poor wretch chained to a wall in a torture chamber after the torturer had extracted what he wanted. The creature moaned again.

“Umm. Yes,” Uagen said. “Ah. I would be able to make this report, umm. Verbally, wouldn't I?”.

“Yes,” the dirigible behemothaur said through 974 Praf.

Uagen felt just a little relief.

Then the Interpreter sat back against the wall behind her. She blinked a few times and then said, “Hmm.”

“What?” Uagen said, suddenly aware of a funny taste in his mouth. He was aware that he was fingering the necklace his aunt Silder had given him. He put his hands down by his sides. They were shaking.

“Yes.”

“Yes what?”.

“There would also be … ”.

“What? What?” He was aware that his voice was more of a yelp, now.

“Your glyph tablet.”

“What?”.

“The glyph tablet that belongs to you. If it might be used for the recording of the impressions you have, that would be of use to me.”

“Ha! The tablet! Yes! Yes, of course! Yes!”.

“Then you will go and are so agreed.”

“Oh. Umm. Well, yes, I suppose. That is—”.

“I release the fifth-order Decider of the 11th Foliage Gleaner Troupe which is now Interpreter 974 Praf.” There was a sound like a noisy kiss, and 974 Praf hinged away from her perch on the wall, falling untidily for the first couple of meters before collecting herself in an undignified clatter of wings and looking wildly about as though she had just woken up. 974 Praf hovered in front of Uagen's face, wings beating the smell of something rotten against him. She cleared her throat. “Seven wings of raptor scouts will accompany you,” she told him. “They will take a deep-light signalling pod with them. They await.”

“What, now?”.

“Soon equates to good, later to worse, Uagen Zlepe, scholar. Therefore, immediacy.”

“Umm.”

•   •   •   

They fell en masse, hurtling mob-handed into the dark blue abyss of air. Uagen shivered and looked around. One of the suns had gone out. The other had moved. They were not real suns, of course. They were more like immense spotlights; eyeballs the size of small moons whose annihilatory furnaces switched on and off according to a pattern dictated by their slow dance around the vast world.

Sometimes they glowed just sufficiently to stop themselves from falling further into Oskendari's gravity faint well, sometimes they blazed, bathing the airsphere's nearest volumes in radiance while the pressure of that released light kicked them further up and out, so that they would have escaped the airsphere's pull altogether if they hadn't then swivelled and sent out a pulse of light that sent them falling back in again.

The sun-moons were worth lifetimes of study all on their own, Uagen knew, though probably they were more the province of somebody interested in physics, rather than someone like himself. He turned up the heating in his suit—Yoleus had been persuaded to allow him time to return to his quarters and put on something more in keeping with the role of explorer—but then he started to sweat. He wasn't really cold, he decided, just afraid. He turned the heating down again.

The three wings of raptor scouts fell all around him, their long dark bodies streamlined darts slowly twisting as they aimed their arm-long beaks plummeting down through the thick blue air. Uagen's ankle motors hummed gently, keeping his pace up to that of the sleekly profiled raptor scouts. 974 Praf clung to his back, her body laid along his from nape to rump, her wings wrapped around his chest. She would have held them up if she'd dived separately. Her embrace was tight, and Uagen had already felt himself becoming breathless and had to ask her to slacken her grip to let him breathe.

He had half hoped the other dirigible behemothaur
might have disappeared, but it was suddenly there; an alarmingly extensive area of darker blue deep beneath them. Uagen felt his heart sink, and wondered if the creature clamped to his back could feel his fear.

He tried to decide if he was really ashamed of being afraid, and decided that he was not. Fear was there for a purpose. It was wired into any creature that had not completely turned its back on its evolutionary inheritance and so remade itself in whatever image it coveted. The more sophisticated you became, the less you relied on fear and pain to keep you alive; you could afford to ignore them because you had other means of coping with the consequences if things went badly.

He wondered how imagination fitted in. He had a feeling it ought to. Any organism could learn to avoid experiences of a sort that had earlier resulted in damage and therefore pain, but with real intelligence came a more sophisticated form of anticipation of damage to oneself which pre-empted the injury. There should be a set of glyphs in this, he decided. He would work on them later, assuming he survived.

He looked up. Yoleus was invisible, its vast bulk lost in the scattering haze of air above. All he could see up there was the blob that was the infrared signalling pod and its attendant raptor scouts, falling after the main force as fast as possible. Around him, tearing down toward the vast blue shadow beneath, two hundred sleek blue-black shapes rustled and whistled in the thick, warm air.

It seemed like only moments later that those shapes were all suddenly expanding, stretching out and grabbing
at the atmosphere with their great, dark-ribbed wings. 974 Praf kicked away from his back and fell separately, wings half extended.

Uagen could see detail on the upper surface of the dirigible behemothaur beneath; scars and gouges on the forests of the creature's back and tattered fins a hundred meters tall trailing strips of gauzy material for kilometers behind in the creature's languid slipstream. Some fins were missing altogether, and toward the rear of the enormous shape a huge chunk appeared to have been scooped away, as though bitten out by something even larger.

“Looks pretty chewed up, doesn't it?” Uagen shouted to 974 Praf.

She turned her head slightly toward him, tacking slowly toward him as she said, “The Yoleus believes that such damage is unprecedented in living memory.”

Uagen just nodded, then recalled that dirigible behemothaurs lived for tens of millions of years, at least. That was a fairly long time to be without precedent.

He looked down. The scarred, curved back of the unnamed behemothaur rose up to meet them. There was a lot of activity there now, Uagen saw. The dying creature had been discovered by more than just one diving human-simian and a few falficores.

•   •   •   

It had been like a horrific cross between cancer and civil war. The entire ecosystem that was the dirigible behemothaur Sansemin was tearing itself apart. Now others were joining in.

They had discovered its name through description. 974 Praf had flown around it, recording any distinguishing
marks not altered or obliterated by the destruction taking place, then landed on the little hummock of naked envelope skin high on its back where the raptor scout troupe had established its primary base. The Interpreter had communicated its findings via the giant seed-shaped signalling pod in the center of the hastily established compound. The pod's infrared light had found Yoleus, tens of kilometers above, and then received the reply a little later. According to the library memories Yoleus shared with its kind, the dying behemothaur was called Sansemin.

Sansemin had always been an outsider, a renegade, almost an outlaw. It had disappeared from polite society thousands of years ago and was presumed to be haunting the less hospitable and less fashionable volumes of the airsphere, perhaps alone, possibly in the company of the small number of other misfit behemothaurs known to exist. There had been a few hazy, unconfirmed sightings of the creature over the first several centuries of its self-imposed exile, but nothing for the last few.

Now it had been rediscovered, but it was at war with itself and about to die.

Flocks of falficores surrounded the giant in squabbling clouds, feeding off its foliage and outer skins. Smerines and phuelerids, the largest winged creatures in the airsphere, divided their time between the living flesh of the behemothaur and the swarming clusters of falficores driven to recklessness by the sheer glut of food on offer. The sleekly bulbous bodies of two ogrine disseisors—a rare form of lithe behemothaur only a hundred meters in length and the world's largest predator—swam through the air in tremendous sinuous flicks, dipping to tear
pieces from the body of Sansemin and snapping up handfuls of careless falficores and even the occasional smerine and phuelerid.

Tendon-strutted fragments of behemothaur skin fell into the blueness below like dark sails torn from cyclone-struck clippers; puffs of gas made brief, dispersing vapor clouds in the air as the colossal creature's outer ballonets and gas sacs were ruptured; the torn bodies of falficores, smerines and phuelerids tumbled in bloody cart-wheeling spirals into the abyss, their screams frighteningly close in the compacted depth of air yet nearly drowned out in the vast noise of frenzied feeding going on all about.

The raptor scouts, cloud attackers, envelopian defenders and other creatures which were part of Sansemin's dispersed self and that would normally easily have kept such aggressors at bay were nowhere to be seen. The remains of a few had been discovered where they had fallen and been picked clean by others. The most telling pair of skeletons had been found with their jaws clamped around the other's neck.

Uagen Zlepe stood on the seemingly solid surface of the dirigible behemothaur's vast back, looking out over a landscape of tattered, withered skin foliage being torn apart by falficore flocks. He stood beside the seven-meter-wide bulk of the signaling pod. It was anchored to the envelope's surface by a dozen small hooks made from falficore talons and tended to by a handful of Deciders nearly identical to 974 Praf.

Spread in a circle about them were a hundred of Yoleus' raptor scouts, forming a living defensive barrier which was patrolled from above by another fifty
or sixty of the creatures, flying slow circuits. So far they had repelled all attacks and had not lost any of their number; even one of the ogrine disseisors, obviously intrigued by the activity around the signalling pod, had turned tail when confronted by twenty of the raptor scouts in attack formation and returned instead to the easier pickings on offer all over the dying behemothaur's surface.

Two hundred meters away across Sansemin's back, near the knobbled ridge of a longeron spine, a smerine swooped down, scattering the smaller creatures in a blizzard of piercing cries; it thudded into a giant wound in the behemothaur's skin; Uagen saw the flesh around the tear ripple under impact. The predator flapped its twenty-meter wings and dipped its long head, flaying the exposed tissue.

A gas sac, severed from its supporting structure, wobbled out of the spreading wound and into the air. It began to climb. The smerine looked up but let it go; the falficore flock above attacked it, screeching, until it punctured and jetted slowly off, deflating in a long exhaling scream of gas and scattering enraged falficores behind it.

There was a thud at his feet. Uagen jumped. “Oh, Praf,” he said as the Interpreter stowed its wings. It had gone with a dozen of the raptor scouts to investigate the interior of the behemothaur. “Find anything?” he asked.

974 Praf watched the distant gas sac as it finally fell deflated into the foliage forest near Sansemin's upper fore-fins. “We have found something. Come and look.”

“Inside?” Uagen asked nervously.

“Yes.”

“Is it safe? Umm, in there?”.

974 Praf looked up at him.

“Umm. I mean, umm. The central gas bladders. The hydrogen core. I thought there was a possibility those might, that is, it might. Umm.”

“An explosion is possible,” 974 Praf said in a matter-of-fact manner. “This would be of a catastrophic nature.”

Uagen felt himself gulp. “Catastrophic?”.

“Yes. The dirigible behemothaur Sansemin would be destroyed.”

“Yes. And. Umm. Us?”.