Look to Windward

Dirigible

Uagen Zlepe, scholar, was preparing an infusion of jhagel leaves when 974 Praf suddenly appeared on the window ledge of the small kitchen.

The simian-adapted human and the fifth-order Decider-turned-interpreter had returned to the dirigible behemothaur Yoleus without mishap after retrieving the errant glyph stylo and spotting whatever it was they had spotted all that way below them in the airsphere’s blue, blue depths. 974 Praf had immediately flown off to report to her superior. Uagen had decided to have a snooze after all the excitement. This proved difficult, so he forced himself to sleep with some glanded shush. On waking, after exactly one hour, he had smacked his lips and come to the conclusion that some jhagel tea might be in order.

The circular window of his little kitchen looked out across the sloping forest that was Yoleus’ upper forward surface. The window had a series of gauzy curtains he could fasten over it, but he usually left those gathered to each side. The view had once been wonderful and airy but for the last three years it had been in shadow beneath the looming bulk of Muetenive, Yoleus’ prospective mate. Yoleus’ skin foliage was starting to look shrunken and anaemic in the shade of the other creature. Uagen sighed and began the process of making the infusion.

The jhagel leaves were very precious to him. He had only brought a few kilos from home; he had about a third of that amount left now and he’d been rationing himself to one cup every twenty days to eke out his supply. He should have brought seeds as well, he supposed, but somehow he’d forgotten.

Making the infusion had become something of a ritual for Uagen. Jhagel tea was supposed to be calming, however it had occurred to him that the process of making it was itself quite relaxing. Perhaps when his supply was entirely gone he ought to go through the motions with some placebo mixture — stopping short of actually drinking it — to observe what degree of tranquillity might be induced just by the ceremony of preparation.

Frowning with concentration, he began to transfer some of the steaming pale green infusion into a warmed cup through a deep container which held twenty-three graduated layers of filters, variously chilled to between four and twenty-four degrees below.

Then Interpreter 974 Praf thudded onto his window ledge without warning. Uagen gave a start. Some of the hot liquid splashed over his hand.

“Ow! Umm. Hello, Praf. Umm, yes; ow.”

He put the strainer and the pot down, then placed his hand under cold running water.

The creature hopped through the circular window, keeping its leathery wings tightly folded. In the small scullery, it suddenly seemed very big.

It looked at the puddle of splashed infusion. “A time for dropping,” it observed.

“Eh? Oh, yes,” Uagen said. He looked at his reddened hand. “What can I do for you, Praf?”

“The Yoleus would talk with you.”

This was unusual. “What, now?”

“Immediately.”

“What, face to — umm, well…?”

“Yes.”

Uagen felt just a little frightened. He could do with some calming down. He pointed at the pot simmering on his little cooker. “What about my jhagel tea?”

974 Praf looked at it, then him. “Its presence is not required.”

“Are you sure, Yoleus? Umm. I mean, well…”

“Sufficiently sure. Do you desire a percentage to be expressed?”

“No. No, no need for that, it’s just. This is awfully. I’m not sure that. It’s very.”

“Uagen Zlepe, scholar, you are not finishing your sentences.”

“Amn’t I? Well, I mean.” Uagen felt himself go gulp. “Do you really think I need to go down there?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

“Umm. The. Umm. Whatever it is couldn’t come up here, then?”

“No.”

“And you’re sure?”

“Sufficiently sure. That which it is thought that you would be best to experience is in a situation/setting similar to this.”

“Ah. I see.”

Uagen was standing, a little precariously, on what felt like a particularly wobbly bit of marsh. In fact he was deep inside the body of the dirigible behemothaur Yoleus, within a chamber he had only once ever seen before and had rather hoped he might not have to visit again during his stay.

The place was about the size of a ballroom. It was a hemisphere, with ribs and curves everywhere. Even the floor had curves, low swells and hollows. The walls looked like gigantic folded curtains, gathered into a sphincter shape at the summit. It was unlit and Uagen was having to use his in-built IR sense, which made everything look grey and grainy and even more frightening.

The smell was that of a sewer under an abattoir. Stuck to the wall were dead, living-dead and still living things. One of them — one of the latter category, thankfully — was 974 Praf. Underneath 974 Praf, dwarfing her, were the recently attached and now drained-looking carcasses of two falficores, their wings and talons hanging loosely. Alongside the Interpreter was the even bigger body of a raptor scout.

974 Praf didn’t look too bad; she appeared perched, wings neatly folded, feet drawn up. The creature hanging by her side, whose body was nearly the size of Uagen’s and whose wings were easily fifteen metres from tip to tip, looked limp and — if not dead — near death. Its eyes were half closed, its huge beaked head was slumped across its chest, its wings looked pinned to the in-curving wall of the chamber, and its legs hung slackly.

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 rumour 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 reconnoitre 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 conscious 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 11^th 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 metres 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 round 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 round 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 towards 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 metres tall trailing strips of gauzy material for kilometres behind in the creature’s languid slipstream. Some fins were missing altogether, and towards 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 towards him, tacking slowly towards 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 round 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 centre of the hastily established compound. The pod’s infrared light had found Yoleus, tens of kilometres 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 metres 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 vapour 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-metre-wide bulk of the signalling 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 round 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 metres 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-metre 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?”

“Too.”

“Too?”

“We too would be destroyed.”

“Yes. Well, then.”

“This outcome will grow more likely with delay. Therefore delay is not wise. Expedition is advisable.” 974 Praf shuffled its feet. “Extremely advisable.”

“Praf,” Uagen said, “do we have to do this?”

The creature rocked back on its heel talons and squinted up at him. “Of course. It is duty to the Yoleus.”

“And if I say no?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if I refuse to go inside and look at whatever it is you’ve found?”

“Then our investigations will take longer.”

Uagen stared at the Interpreter. “Longer.”

“Of course.”

“What have you found?”

“We do not know.”

“Then—”

“It is a creature.”

“A creature?”

“Many creatures. All dead but one. Of an unknown type.”

“What sort of unknown type?”

“That is what is unknown.”

“Well, what does it look like?”

“It looks a little like you.”

The creature looked like an alien child’s doll, thrown against a barbed wall and left hanging there. It was long, with a tail that was half its body length. The head was broad, furred and — he thought — striped, though in the darkness, using only his IR sense, he couldn’t tell what colours its pelt might be. The creature’s big, forward-facing eyes were closed. It had a thick neck, broad shoulders, two arms about the size of a large human’s but with very wide, heavy hands which looked more like paws. Only a dirigible behemothaur or one of its acolytes would have imagined it looked much like Uagen Zlepe.

It was one of twenty similar forms strung out along one wall of the chamber. All the others were dead and rotting.

Below the creature’s arms, supported by a second, still wider set of shoulders, rested what at first appeared to be a giant flap of furred skin. Looking closer, Uagen realised this was a limb. A dark pad of toughened skin extended across its end in an 8 shape, and stubby hints of toes or claws dotted the perimeter of the pad. Below the torso, two powerful-looking legs hung from a broad set of hips. A furred mound probably concealed genitals of some sort. The tail was striped. One of the root-cables Uagen had seen attached to the raptor scout in the similar chamber in Yoleus led from the back of the creature’s head and into the ribbed wall behind.

The smell in here was even worse than it had been in Yoleus. The journey had been horrific. Dirigible behemothaurs were riddled with fissures, chambers, cavities and tunnels disposed so that their collection of tributary fauna could carry out their various tasks. Many of these were large enough to admit raptor scouts and it was down one of these that they had journeyed from an entrance behind the behemothaur’s rear dorsal fin complex. The effects of the creature’s own attendant entities turning against it were everywhere. Great gouges and tears had been slashed through the tunnel’s walls, making the curved floor slick with liquid in some places and cloyingly sticky in others; flaps of decaying tissue hung from the ceiling like obscene banners, and rents in the floor could swallow a leg, a wing, or even — certainly in Uagen’s case — a whole body.

Here and there smaller creatures still feasted upon the body of the being they had served; other corpses littered the floor of the winding tunnel, and where the two raptor scouts accompanying 974 Praf and Uagen Zlepe down into the body of the behemothaur could do so without delaying their progress, they swiped out at the parasites and tore them to pieces, leaving them twitching on the floor behind.

Finally they had arrived at the chamber where the behemothaur sought knowledge from its self-kin and guests. A great tremor ran through the cavern just as they entered, making the walls shake and dislodging some of the half-rotted bodies.

Two of the specialist raptor scouts had clawed their way up the wall beside the creature which still appeared to be alive. They were intent on an examination of its head where the cable root disappeared into it. One of the raptor scouts held something small and glittering.

“Do you know the nature of this being?” 974 Praf asked.

Uagen stared up at the creature. “No,” he said. “Well, not properly. It looks vaguely familiar. I might have seen it on screen or something. But I don’t know what it is.”

“It is not of your sort?”

“Well, of course not. Look at it. It’s bigger, it’s got enormous eyes and a totally different sort of head. I mean, umm, I’m not of my sort, not originally, if you know what I mean,” he said, turning to Praf, who blinked up at him. “But the main thing, umm, difference, is that middle bit. That looks like a sort of extra leg and foot. Well, like two that have grown together. Do you see those, ah, ridges? I’ll bet those are the bones of what used to be two separate legs in its forebears, before it evolved into a single limb.”

“It is not known to you?”

“Hmm? Umm, sorry. No.”

“Do you think if it can be made to speak it will be able to be understood in its talking by you?”

“What?”

“It is not dead. It is linked to the mind of the Sansemin but the mind of the Sansemin is dead. But the creature is not dead. If we are able to sever its link to the mind of the Sansemin, which is dead, then it might be able to speak. If this were to happen, would you be able to understand that which it says?”

“Oh. Umm. I doubt it.”

“That is unfortunate.” 974 Praf was silent for a moment. “And yet this means that we would be wise to sever its link soon rather than later, and that is good because then we would be less likely to die when the Sansemin suffers its catastrophic explosion.”

“What?” Uagen yelped. The Interpreter started to repeat itself, talking slightly slower, but he waved both hands at it. “Never mind! Sever its links now; let’s get out quick! I mean, quickly!”

“This will be done,” 974 Praf said. It babbled and clicked at the two raptor scouts clinging to the wall by the side of the alien creature. They turned and jabbered back. There seemed to be a disagreement.

Another tremor shook the whole chamber. The floor under Uagen’s feet quaked. He put his arms out to each side to balance himself and felt his mouth go dry. There was a draught, then a distinct breeze of warm air, scented with a smell he suspected was methane. It took most of the smell of rotting flesh away, but he felt sickened with terror. His skin had gone cold and clammy. “Please let’s go,” he whispered.

The raptor scouts on either side of the hanging creature did something behind its head. It slumped forward and down, then the thing trembled as though shivering and brought its head back up. It worked its jaw, then opened its eyes. They were very large and black.

It looked around, at the raptor scouts on either side, at the rest of the chamber, then at 974 Praf, then at Uagen Zlepe. It made a sound, or set of sounds, but it was no language that Uagen had ever heard before.

“This is not a speech-form which is known to you?” the Interpreter asked. On the barbed wall of living, dying tissue, the alien creature’s eyes went suddenly wide.

“No,” Uagen said. “Doesn’t mean a thing to me, I’m afraid. Umm, look, can we please, please get the hell out of here?”

“You, you there,” gasped the creature on the wall, in accented but recognisable Marain. It was staring at Uagen, who was staring right back. “Help me,” it wheezed.

“Wh-wh-what?” Uagen heard himself say.

“Please,” the creature said. “Culture. Agent.” It swallowed with obvious pain and croaked, “Plot. Assassin. Need. Get word. Please. Help. Urgent. Very. Urgent.”

Uagen tried to speak but could not. There was a smell of something burning in the wind blowing through the chamber.

974 Praf adjusted her footing as another huge tremor shook the chamber and made the floor swell. She looked from Uagen to the creature on the wall and back again. “This speech-form is known to you?” she asked.

Uagen nodded.