Look to Windward

Airsphere

Uagen Zlepe, scholar, hung from the left-side sub-ventral foliage of the dirigible behemothaur Yoleus by his prehensile tail and his left hand. He held a glyph-writing tablet with one foot and wrote inside it with his other hand. His remaining leg hung loose, temporarily surplus to requirements. He wore baggy cerise pantaloons (currently rolled up above the knee) secured with a stout pocket-belt, a short black jacket with a stowed cape, chunky mirror-finish ankle-bracelets, a single-chain necklace with four small, dull stones and a tasselled box hat. His skin was light green, he was about two metres standing straight on his hind legs and a little longer measured from nose to tail.

Around him, beyond the hanging fronds of the behemothaur’s slipstream-ruffled skin foliage, the view faded away to a hazy blue nothing in every direction except up, where the creature’s body filled the sky.

Two of the seven suns were dimly visible, one large and red to right and just above Assumed Horizon, one small and yellow-orange to left about a quarter off directly below. No other mega fauna were visible, though Uagen knew that there was one nearby, just above Yoleus’ top surface. The dirigible behemothaur Muetenive was in heat and had been for the last three standard years. Yoleus had been following the other creature for all that time, diligently cruising after it, always hanging just below and behind, paying court, arguing its case, patiently waiting to reach its own season and insulting, infecting or just ramming out of the way all other potential suitors.

By dirigible behemothaur standards a three-year courtship indicated little more than an infatuation, arguably no more than a passing fancy, but Yoleus seemed committed to the pursuit and it was this attraction that had brought them so low in the Oskendari airsphere over the last fifty standard days; usually such mega fauna preferred to stay higher up where the air was thinner. Down here, where the air was so dense and gelatinous that Uagen Zlepe had noticed his voice sounded different, it took a great deal of a dirigible behemothaur’s energy to control its buoyancy. Muetenive was testing Yoleus’ ardour, and its fitness.

Somewhere above and ahead of the two — perhaps another five or six days at this slow rate of drift — was the gigalithine lenticular entity Buthulne, where the pair might eventually mate, but more likely would not.

It was far from certain that they would even get to the great living continent in the first place. Messenger birds had brought news of a massive convection bubble that was looking likely to well up from the airsphere’s lower reaches in the next few days and which would, if intercepted correctly, provide a rapid and easy ascent to the floating world that was Buthulne; however the timing was tight.

Gossip amongst Muetenive and Yoleus’ assorted populations of slaved organisms, symbiotes, parasites and guests indicated there was a good chance that Muetenive would dawdle for the next two or three days and then make a sudden maximum-speed dash for the air space just above the convection bubble, to see if Yoleus was capable of keeping up. If it was and they both made it, then they would make a splendidly dramatic entrance into Buthulne’s presence, where a huge parliament of thousands of their peers would be able to witness their glorious arrival.

The problem was that over the last few tens of thousands of years Muetenive had proved itself to be something of an incautious gambler when it came to such matters. Often it left such sportive or mating sprints until too late.

So they might not make it to the appropriate region until the bubble had gone, and the two mega fauna and all their crawlers-inside, hangers-on and floaters-about would be left with nothing but turbulence or even — worse still — descending air currents, while the bubble rose upwards in the airsphere.

Even more alarmingly for those committed to Yoleus, given the fabulous, legendary reputation of the gigalithine lenticular entity Buthulne, the messenger birds reckoned it was going to be a particularly big bubble and that Buthulne was in the mood for a change of scenery, and therefore likely to position itself directly above the up-welling air, to ride it to the airsphere’s upper reaches. If that happened it might be years or even decades before they encountered another gigalithine lenticular entity, and centuries — possibly millennia — before Buthulne itself hove into view again.

Yoleus’ Invited Guests’ Quarters consisted of a gourd-shaped growth situated just ahead of the creature’s third dorsal fin complex, not far from its summit. It was inside this structure, which reminded Uagen of a hollowed-out fruit, albeit one fifty metres across, that he had his rooms.

Uagen had stayed there, observing Yoleus, the other mega fauna and the entire ecology of the airsphere, for thirteen years. He was now thinking about drastically altering both his life expectancy and his shape to suit better the scale of the airsphere and the length of its larger inhabitants’ lives.

Uagen had been fairly human-basic for most of the ninety years he’d lived in the Culture. His present simian form — plus the use of some Culture technology, though no field-based science, which the mega fauna had a never entirely specified objection to — had seemed a sensible adaption strategy for the airsphere.

Recently, however, he had started wondering about being altered to resemble something more like a giant bird, and living for, potentially, a very long time indeed, and possibly indefinitely; long enough, for example, to experience the slow evolution of a behemothaur.

If, say, Yoleus and Muetenive did mate, exchanging and merging personalities, what would the two resulting behemothaurs be called? Yoleunive and Mueteleus? How exactly did this offspring-less coupling affect the two protagonists? How would they each change? Was it an equal trade or did one partner dominate the other? Were there ever any offspring? Did behemothaurs ever die of natural causes? Nobody knew. These and a thousand other questions remained unanswered. The mega fauna of the airspheres were scrupulous in keeping their own counsel on such matters, and in all recorded history — or at least all that he’d been able to access through the notoriously immodest data reservoirs of the Culture — the evolution of a behemothaur had never been recorded.

Uagen would give almost anything to be the person who witnessed such a process and came up with those answers, but just the chance of doing so would mean a huge long-term commitment.

He supposed if he was to do any of this he’d have to go back to his home Orbital and talk it over with his professors, mother, relations, friends and so on. They were expecting him back for good in another ten or fifteen years, but he was increasingly certain that he was one of those scholars who devoted their lives to their work, rather than one of those who use a period of intense study to make themselves more rounded beings. He felt no great sense of loss at such a prospect; by original humanoid standards of life-expectancy he had already lived a long, full life by the time he’d decided to become a student in the first place.

The long trip back home, however, did seem slightly daunting. The airsphere Oskendari was not in regular contact with the Culture (or anybody else for that matter) and — the last Uagen had heard — the next Culture ship with a course schedule that brought it anywhere near the system wasn’t due for another two years. There might be other craft calling by before then, but it would take even longer to get home if he had to start out on an alien vessel, assuming they’d take him.

Even taking a Culture ship, there would be at least a year travelling home, say a year once he got there, and then for the return journey… no vessels had even course-scheduled that far ahead when he’d last checked.

He had been offered his own ship, fifteen years earlier, when news had arrived that a dirigible behemothaur had consented to play host to a Culture scholar, but tying up a star craft for a single person who would use it twice in twenty or thirty years had seemed, well, overly profligate, even by Culture standards. Nonetheless, if he was going to stay and possibly never see his friends and family alive again, then he really had no choice about returning. In any event, he needed to think about it.

Yoleus’ Invited Guests’ Quarters had been sited where they were to give the creature’s visitors a pleasant and airy view. With the courtship of Muetenive, and Yoleus’ tactic of following the other creature just below and behind, the quarters had become overshadowed and oppressive. A lot of people had left, and the remaining guests seemed excessively gossipy and nervous to Uagen, who was, in the end, there to study. So he spent less time socialising than he had done, and more time either in his study or roaming the behemothaur’s bulbous surfaces.

He hung from the foliage, working quietly.

Flocks of falficores roamed the spin winds about the two huge creatures; columns and clouds of infinitesimal dark shapes. It was the flight of a falficore flock Uagen was attempting to describe in the glyph-writing tablet.

Writing, of course, was hardly the right word for what Uagen was doing. You did not merely write within a glyph-writing tablet; you reached inside its holo’d space with the digital stylo and carved and shaped and coloured and textured and mixed and balanced and annotated all at once. Glyphs of this sort were solid poetry, fashioned from nothing solid. They were real spells, perfect images, ultimate cross-system intellectualisations.

They had been invented by Minds (or their equivalent) and there was an infamous rumour that they had only been thought up to provide a means of communication that humans (or their equivalent) would be unable ever to understand or produce. People like Uagen had devoted their lives to proving that the Minds were either not as differentially smart as they thought, or that the paranoid cynics had been wrong.

“There, finished,” Uagen said, holding the tablet away from his face and squinting at it. He turned it and inclined his head. He showed the tablet to his companion, the Interpreter 974 Praf, who was hanging from a nearby branch at Uagen’s shoulder.

974 Praf was a fifth-order Decider in the dirigible behemothaur Yoleus’ 11^th Foliage Gleaner Troupe who had been given upgraded autonomous intelligence and the title Interpreter when she’d been assigned to Uagen. She inclined her head at the same angle and stared into the tablet.

“I see nothing.” She spoke in Marain, the Culture’s language.

“You are hanging upside down.”

The creature shook its wings. Her eye pit band looked straight at Uagen. “Does that make a difference?”

“Yes. It’s polarised. Observe.” Uagen turned the tablet straight on to the Interpreter and inverted it.

974 Praf flinched, her wings jerking halfway out and her body hunching as though getting ready to fly. She collected herself and settled back, swaying to and fro. “Oh yes, there they are.”

“I was attempting to use the phenomenon whereby one is looking at a flock of — for example — falficores from a great distance but is unable to see them because of one’s inability to distinguish individual creatures at such a range, whereupon they suddenly coalesce and flock together, gathering into a tighter grouping and becoming suddenly visible as though out of nothing, as a metaphor for the often equally precipitous experience of conceptual comprehension.”

974 Praf turned her head, opened her beak, flicked out her tongue to groom a twisted skin-leaf straight, then looked at him again. “That is done how?”

“Umm. With great skill,” Uagen said, and then gave a delicate, slightly surprised laugh. He stowed the stylo and clicked the tablet to store the glyph.

The stylo must not have been properly stowed, because it clicked out of its housing in the side of the tablet and fell away into the blueness below.

“Oh, damn,” Uagen said, “I knew I should have replaced that lanyard.”

The stylo swiftly became a dot. They both watched it.

974 Praf said, “That is your writing instrument.”

Uagen took hold of his right foot. “Yes.”

“Do you have another?”

Uagen chewed on one of his toenails. “Umm. Not really, no.”

974 Praf tilted her head. “Hmm.”

Uagen scratched his head. “I suppose I’d better go after it.”

“It is your only one.”

Uagen let go with his hand and tail, dropping into the air to follow the instrument. 974 Praf released her claw holds and followed him.

The air was very warm and thick; it roared around Uagen’s ears, buffeting.

“I am reminded,” 974 Praf said as they plummeted together.

“What?” Uagen said. He clipped the writing tablet to his belt, popped a pair of wind-goggles over his already watering eyes and twisted in the air to keep an eye on the stylo, which was almost out of sight. Such styli were small but very dense and also effectively, if unintentionally, quite streamlined. It was falling alarmingly quickly. His clothes fluttered and snapped like a flag in a gale.

Uagen’s tasselled hat flew off; he grabbed at it but it floated away upwards. Above, the cloud-sized bulk of the dirigible behemothaur Yoleus drew slowly away as they fell.

“Shall I get your hat?” 974 Praf shouted over the wind roar.

“No, thank you,” Uagen yelled. “We can retrieve it on the way back up.”

Uagen twisted back round and peered into the blue depths. The stylo was tearing through the air like a crossbow quarrel.

974 Praf drifted closer to Uagen until her beak was close to his right ear and her body feathers were fluttering in the disturbed air just past his shoulder. “As I was saying,” she said.

“Yes?”

“The Yoleus would know more of your conclusions regarding your theory on the effects of gravitational susceptibility influencing the religiosity of a species with particular reference to their eschatological beliefs.”

Uagen was losing sight of the stylo. He glanced round, frowning at 974 Praf. “What, now?”

“I just remembered.”

“Umm, well. Just wait a moment, can’t you…? I mean, this thing’s fairly hurtling away down here.” Uagen fingered a button on his left wrist cuff; his clothes sucked in about him and stopped flapping. He assumed a diving position, placing his hands together and wrapping his tail round his legs. By his side, 974 Praf drew her wings in tighter and also took on a more aerodynamic aspect.

“I cannot see the thing you dropped.”

“I can. Just. I think. Oh, bugger and blast.”

It was getting away from him. The stylo’s air resistance must be just that little less than his, even in a head-down dive. He looked at the Interpreter for a moment. “I think I’ll have to power down to it,” he shouted.

974 Praf seemed to draw herself in, bringing her wings even closer to her body and stretching her neck. She gained very slightly on Uagen, starting to move past him downwards, then relaxed, and drifted back up. “I cannot go any faster.”

“Right, then. I’ll see you in a bit.”

Uagen clicked a couple of buttons on his wrist. Tiny motors in his ankle bracelets swung out and revved up. “Keep clear!” he shouted to the Interpreter. The motors’ propeller blades were expandable, and while he would not need much extra power to increase his rate of fall sufficiently to catch up with the stylo, he had a horror of accidentally mincing one of Yoleus’ most trusted servants.

974 Praf had already angled a few metres away. “I shall attempt to catch your hat and try not to become eaten by falficores.”

“Oh. Right.”

Uagen’s speed through the air increased; the wind howled in his ears and tiny popping, crackling sounds from his ears and skull cavities told him the pressure was increasing. He had lost sight of the stylo just for a moment and now it seemed to be quite gone, swallowed up by the oceanic blue of the apparently infinite sky.

If only he’d kept his eyes on it he was sure he’d still be able to see it now. There was a similarity here, perhaps, with the glyph of the suddenly visible falficores. Something to do with perceptual concentration, with the way that one’s vision pulled meaning from the semi-chaos of the visual field.

Perhaps the stylo had drifted away to one side. Perhaps a well-camouflaged raptor, mistaking it for a meal, had swept in and gobbled it up. Perhaps he would not regain sight of it until — having started out so low — they both hit the in-sloping side of the sphere. He supposed he might see it bounce. How steep was the slope? The airsphere was not really a sphere, indeed neither of its two lobes was a sphere; at a certain level the bottom of the airsphere’s curving sides inverted, dipping under the mass of the detritus neck.

How far away were they from the pole line of the airsphere? He recalled they’d been quite near; by all accounts the gigalithine lenticular entity Buthulne hadn’t strayed far from the pole line for several decades. Perhaps he would have to land on the detritus neck! He peered downwards. No sign of anything solid ahead at all. Besides, he’d been told you’d have to fall for days before you’d even see it. And anyway, if the stylo fell into the rubbish and muck of the neck, he’d never find it. Gracious, there were things down there. He might, as 974 Praf had put it, become eaten.

What if he landed on the detritus neck just as it was about to eject! Then he would surely die. In vacuum! As part of a glorified dung ball! How horrible!

Airspheres migrated round the galaxy, orbiting once every fifty to a hundred million years, depending on how close they were to the centre. They swept up dust and gas on their forward-facing sides, and from their bases, every few hundred thousand years, they passed the waste that their scavenger flora and fauna had not been able to process any further. Droppings the size of small moons issued from globular impossibilities as big as brown dwarfs, leaving a trail of detritus globes scattered through the spiral arms that dated the bizarre worlds’ first appearance in the galaxy to one and a half billion years earlier.

People assumed airspheres must be the work of intelligence, but really nobody — or at least nobody willing to share their thoughts on the matter — had any idea. The mega fauna might know, but — frustratingly for scholars like Uagen Zlepe — creatures like Yoleus were so far, far beyond the term Inscrutable that for all practical purposes the word might as well have been a synonym of Forthright, or A Simple-Hearted Chatterbox.

Uagen wondered how fast he was falling now. Perhaps if he fell too fast he would fly straight into the stylo and impale and kill himself. How delightfully ironic! But painful. He checked his velocity on a little read-out in the corner of one eye-goggle. He was falling at twenty-two metres per second, and this rate of descent was smoothly increasing. He adjusted his speed to a constant twenty.

He turned his attention back to the blue gulf ahead and below, and saw the stylo, wobbling fractionally as it fell as though somebody invisible was doodling a spiral with it. He judged that he was drifting towards the thing at a satisfactory rate. When he was a few metres away he cut his speed still further, until he was catching up with the instrument no quicker than a feather might fall through still air.

Uagen reached out and caught the stylo. He tried to halt his fall the impressive way, the way a person of action might (Uagen, for all his studiousness, was a sucker for action adventures, however implausible), by swinging himself round so that his feet were underneath him and the propeller blades on his ankle bracelets were biting down into the air rushing up towards and past him. In retrospect, he had probably stood a good chance of mutilating himself with his own propellers, but instead he just lost all control and tumbled chaotically through the air, shouting and cursing, trying to keep his tail curled up tight and away from the propellers and letting go of the stylo again.

He spread out his limbs and waited until there was some sort of regularity to his tumble, then twisted back into a dive to regain control, and once more looked about for the stylo. He could see the vaguest hint of Yoleus’ shape, high, high above, and a tiny outline — just close enough to be a shape and not a dot — also above and to one side. This looked like 974 Praf. And there was the stylo; now above him, just stopping tumbling and beginning to settle into its crossbow quarrel attitude. He used his wrist controls to reduce power to the propellers.

The wind roar decreased; the stylo fell gently into his hand. He attached it to the side of the writing tablet, then used his wrist controls to feather and then repitch the motors’ blades. Blood rushed to his head, adding another roaring to that of the wind and making the blue view pulse and darken. His necklace — a gift from his aunt Silder, presented just before he left — slid down under his chin.

He let the propellers free-wheel for a bit, then fed in the power again. He still felt very head-down heavy, but that was the worst he experienced. His headlong plummet became a slow fall, the thick air stopped shaking him and the slipstream became a gentle breeze. Finally he stopped. He thought the better of trying to balance on the ankle bracelet motors. He would activate the cape and let it float him back up.

He hung there, head down, effectively motionless as the ankle motors spun lazily in the thick air.

His eyes narrowed.

There was something down there, something far below, almost but not quite lost in the haze. A shape. A very big shape, filling about the same part of his visual field as his hand would have, held outstretched, and yet still so far away that it was barely visible in the haze. He squinted, looked away and looked back.

There was definitely something there. From the finned airship shape, it looked like another behemothaur, though Yoleus had let it be known that Muetenive had taken them unfashionably, hurtfully, almost unprecedentedly and arguably disgracefully low, and so Uagen thought it very strange to see another of the giant creatures so much deeper still beneath the courting couple. The shape, also, did not look quite right. There were too many fins, and in plan — making the very reasonable assumption that he was looking down on its back — the thing looked asymmetrical. Very unusual. Even alarming.

There was a fluttering noise nearby. “Here is your hat.”

He turned to look at 974 Praf, flapping her wings slowly in the dense air and holding his tasselled box hat in her beak.

“Oh, thank you,” he said, and rammed the hat on tight.

“You have the stylo?”

“Umm. Yes. Yes, I do. Look; down there. Can you see something?”

974 looked down. Eventually she said, “There is a shadow.”

“Yes, there is, isn’t there? Does it look like a behemothaur to you?”

The Interpreter cocked her head. “No.”

“No?”

The Interpreter turned her head the other way. “Yes.”

“Yes?”

“No and yes. Both at once.”

“Ah-ha.” He looked down again. “I wonder what it can be.”

“I wonder too. Shall we return to the Yoleus?”

“Umm. I don’t know. Do you think we ought?”

“Yes. We have fallen a long way. I cannot see the Yoleus.”

“Oh. Oh dear.” He looked up. Sure enough, the creature’s giant shape had disappeared in the haze above. “I see. Or rather, we can’t see. Ha ha.”

“Indeed.”

“Umm. Still, I do wonder what that is down there.”

The shadowy outline beneath appeared to be stationary. Air currents in the haze made it almost disappear for a few moments, so that all that was left was the bias in the eye, making the assumption that it must still be there. And then it was back, distinguishable, but still no more than a shape, a one-shade-deeper blue shadow against the colossal gulf of air below.

“We should return to the Yoleus.”

“Do you think Yoleus will have any idea what it is?”

“Yes.”

“It does look like a behemothaur, doesn’t it?”

“Yes and no. Maybe sick.”

“Sick?”

“Injured.”

“Injured? What can — how can behemothaurs become injured?”

“It is very unusual. We should return to the Yoleus.”

“We could take a closer look,” Uagen said. He wasn’t really sure he wanted to, but he felt he ought to say it. It was interesting, after all. On the other hand, it was a little disturbing, too. As 974 Praf had said, they had lost visual contact with Yoleus. It ought to be easy enough to find it again — Yoleus had not been moving quickly and so simply going straight back up would probably still bring them up almost underneath the creature — but, well, even so.

What if Muetenive decided to make a bolt for the anticipated convection bubble now, rather than in a day or two? Good grief, he and 974 Praf could both be left stranded. Yoleus might not have noticed that they’d gone. If it had realised they were no longer aboard, and then took off after a suddenly frisky Muetenive, it would probably leave some raptor scouts behind to protect them and escort them back. But there was no guarantee that it did know he and 974 Praf were not safely within its foliage.

Uagen looked around for falficores. He didn’t even have a weapon; when he’d refused any sort of bodyguard device the university had insisted he at least take a pistol with him, but he’d never even unpacked the damn thing.

“We should return to the Yoleus.” The Interpreter spoke very quickly, which was as close as she ever got to sounding nervous or disturbed. 974 Praf had probably never been in a position where she couldn’t see the great creature that was her home, host, leader, parent and beloved. She must be afraid, if such beings felt fear.

Uagen was afraid, he could admit that. Not very afraid, but afraid enough to hope that 974 Praf would refuse to accompany him down to the huge shape below. And they would have to go down quite a long way further. He didn’t like to think how many more kilometres.

“We should return to the Yoleus,” she said again.

“You really think so?”

“Yes, we should return to the Yoleus.”

“Oh, I suppose so. All right.” He sighed. “Discretion, and all that. Best let Yoleus decide what to do.”

“We should return to the Yoleus.”

“Yes, yes.” He used the wrist controls to activate the stowed cape. It unfurled, collapsed slowly into a ball, then — even more slowly — began to expand.

“We should return to the Yoleus.”

“We are, Praf. We are. We’re going now.” He could feel himself starting to drift upwards, and a faint pull on his shoulders began to lift him towards the horizontal.

“We should return to the Yoleus.”

“Praf, please. That’s what we’re doing. Don’t keep—”

“We should return to the Yoleus.”

“We are!” He let the power to the bracelet-ankle motors tail off; the ballooning cape, still a perfect black sphere blossoming behind his head, slowly took all his weight and hoisted him upright.

“We should—”

“Praf!”

The propellers cut out and stowed themselves back in his ankle bracelets. He was floating upwards at last. 974 Praf beat her wings a little harder to keep up with him. She looked up at the still enlarging black sphere of the cape.

“Another thing,” she said.

Uagen was staring down, between his boots. Already the vast shape beneath was starting to disappear into the haze. He glanced at the Interpreter. “What?”

“The Yoleus would like to know more of the vacuum dirigibles in your Culture.”

He looked up at the black balloon above his head. The cape produced lift by compressing itself into a ball and then expanding its surface area while leaving a vacuum inside. That vacuum was lifting him by the shoulders, up into the sky.

“What? Oh, well.” He wished he hadn’t mentioned the damn things now. He also wished he’d brought a more complete technical library from the Culture. “I’m hardly an expert. I have been a tourist on them a few times, on my home Orbital.”

“You mentioned pumping vacuum. How is that done?” 974 Praf seemed to be labouring to keep up with him now, flapping her wings as hard as the thickened atmosphere would allow.

Uagen adjusted the dimensions of the cape. His rate of climb tailed off. “Ah, well, as far as I understand it, you keep the vacuum in spheres.”

“Spheres.”

“Very thin-shelled spheres. You keep the spaces between the spheres full of, ah… well; helium or hydrogen, I think, depending on your inclination. Though I don’t think you get a vast amount of extra lift compared to using hydrogen or helium alone; just a few per cent. One of those things that tend to be done because they can be rather than because they need to be.”

“One sees.”

“Then you can pump it. Them. The spheres and the gas.”

“One sees. And what is the manner of this pumping?”

“Umm…” He looked down again, but the great shadowy shape had gone.