The Children of the Sky

from here. As for now, well, he’d seen cesspools in East Home with much the same appearance as the murk below, and the smell was like nothing he had ever experienced, a mix of rot and body odor and exotic plants.

The Sea Breeze moved steadily northwards, not much faster than a pack might walk. The wind and the tether combined to keep them at altitude, sparing them the awful death that had claimed all previous explorers—and incidentally keeping them out of the heat and damp of the tropical jungle. The grass below had taken on its tree form. The trunks might still be below water, but yard by yard, as the balloon drifted north, those trunks became thicker, holding more silt from the Fell. “Most of what we’re seeing now stays above sea level except during storms and the highest tides,” said Remasritlfeer.

More of Chitiratifor’s snouts were visible now. The pack was peering down. “How far still to go?” he said.

“We just have to move a little eastwards.” Remasritlfeer had been watching the ground, and Tycoon’s ships, and the payout of the tether. You could be sure Tycoon was watching back. If Tycoon had stayed back in East Home, they all could have abandoned this foolishness by now. Directly below, he recognized a pattern of trees that he had used on the last few flights; he signalled for the ship to stop the payout and move eastward. The Sea Breeze bounced gently against the limit of the tether. The ground below slid sideways. Remasritlfeer took on the manner of a tour guide: “And now you’ll see the lost city of legend, the Great Choir of the Tropics.” Maybe it was a city. There were hundreds of Tines wherever he looked. As the balloon took them across higher ground, they could see more. Thousands of Tines. More. Perhaps as many as legend claimed. And nowhere was there even one coherent pack, just the simple mindlessness of the vast crowd. The sound … the sound was tolerable. The Sea Breeze was several hundred feet up, too high for mindsound to reach. What Tinish sounds did reach the gondola were in the range of normal Interpack speech. Some of it might be language, but the chords that sounded from thousands of tympana were smeared of any meaning they might have had. It was an eerie dirge of ecstasy.

And it squashed Chitiratifor’s arrogance. Remasritlfeer could feel the gondola shift as the fat sixsome huddled in on himself. There was fascinated horror in his voice: “So many. So close. It … really is a Choir.”

“Yup,” Remasritlfeer said cheerfully, though he had been similarly affected the first few times he’d been here.

“But how do they eat? How can they sleep?” In endless debauchery went unsaid, but Remasritlfeer could almost hear the thought.

“We don’t know the details, but if we go lower—”

“No! Don’t do that!”

Remasritlfeer grinned to himself and continued. “If we go lower you’d see that these creatures look half starved. And yet there are buildings. See?” He made a pointing sound. Indeed, there were mud structures visible, some reduced to worn foundations peeking out from below later structures, and those submerged beneath still later mounds. No coherent pack would ever make such random things, barely recognizable as artificial constructions.

In places, the generations of mud structures were piled five or six deep, a chaotic mixture of midden and pyramid and multistory hovel. There must be holes and crannies within; you could see Tines entering and emerging. Remasritlfeer recognized the neighborhood from previous flights. There were patterns, as if some fragment of conscious planning had worked for a few days and then been swept away by noise or some other plan. In a couple of tendays, all the landmarks would be changed again.

“Another hundred feet will do it,” he said, and signalled to Tycoon’s ship to drop anchor. Actually, navigating the tethered balloon was rarely this precise. Today’s sea breeze was as smooth as fine silk. “Coming up on the Great Trading Plaza.”

There was some shifting around on the passenger platform above him, Chitiratifor screwing up his courage to poke additional snouts over the railing. Then an unbelieving, “You call that a plaza?”

“Well, that’s Tycoon’s term for it.” More objectively, it was an open patch of mud, fifty feet across; Tycoon had a peddler’s talent for using words to redefine reality. For several moments, Remasritlfeer was too busy for chitchat. He reached over the edge of the gondola to cast a mooring line downward. At the same time he shouted a big halloo to the Tines below. Of course, there were always watchers down there, though sometimes they seemed to forget the point of this exercise. Today, the response was almost immediate. Three Tines ran toward the center of the open space. They came from widely different points and were clearly singletons. Only when they got within a few feet of each other was there any sort of coordinated activity. Then they scrambled around clumsily, snapping at the rope that Remasritlfeer dangled down to them. Finally, two stood steady and third scrambled up and got the rope. Then all three got jaws on it and dragged the cord round and round a mud pillar.

Chitiratifor did not seem encouraged by this show of local cooperation. “Now we’re trapped, are we? They could just pull us down.”

“Yup, but they don’t try that so much anymore. When they do, we just drop the rope and fly away home.”

“Oh. Of course.” Chitiratifor said nothing for a moment, but his mindsound was intense. “Well then, let’s proceed. We have a failure to observe, and I want some details for my devastating report to our employers.”

“As you say.” Remasritlfeer was at least as anxious as anyone to dump Tycoon’s Tropical fiasco, but he didn’t feel like agreeing with the likes of this rag-eared thug. “One moment while I prepare the trade.” Remasritlfeer ducked down to the bottom of the gondola, opened the drop door. Their cargo was in a bannerwood kettle hung just below. It didn’t look like any water had slopped over during the balloon’s ascent.

“Are you guys ready?” Remasritlfeer focused his words into the kettle.

“Yessir!” “Righto.” “Let’s go!” … The words coming back were all piled up, the response of dozens—perhaps all—of the creatures in the kettle.

Remasritlfeer ladled a dozen of the wriggling cuttlefish into a trade basket. Their huge eyes looked up at him. Their dozens of tentacles waved at him. In all the jabbering, he did not hear a particle of fear. He stuck a snout down to just above the rippling surface of the basket. The cuttlefish were very crowded in the small space, but that was the least of the problems they would soon face. “Okay, guys. You know the plan.” He ignored the tiny cries of enthusiastic agreement. “You talk to the folk below—”

“Y-ye-yes, yes, y-yes! We ask them for safe landing for you. More trade. Harbor rights. Yes, yes! Yes!” The chords piled up in a tinkling mass, the speech of a dozen little creatures, each with voracious memories, each smarter than any singleton—but so scatterbrained that Remasritlfeer could not decide how smart they really were.

“Okay then!” Remasritlfeer gave up on his attempt at guidance. “Good luck!” He latched the trade basket’s rope to the mooring line and paid out the cord.

“B-b-b-bye, g’bye!” The tinkling of chords came from both the basket and from the crowd in the bannerwood kettle, comrades calling to one another. Way beyond the tiny basket, the muddy space below was still empty of all but a few Tines. That was normally a good sign.

Chitiratifor’s voice came from above: “So why not send down the whole kettle of fish?”

“Tycoon wants to see how this goes, then maybe send down a few more with different instructions.”

Chitiratifor was silent for a moment, perhaps watching the trade basket as it swayed down and down along the mooring line. “Your boss is freaking insane. You know that, don’t you?”

Remasritlfeer made no reply, and Chitiratifor continued, “See, Tycoon is a self-made patchwork. Half of him is a skinflint accountant. But the other half is four mad puppies the accountant picked just for their crazy imaginations. That might be a good idea, if the miser was the dominant half. But this miser is driven by the lunatic four. So do you know the reason he’s mucking around here?”

Remasritlfeer couldn’t resist showing that he understood something of the matter. “Because he counted the snouts?”

“What?—Yes! The accountant in him estimated the number of Tines in the Tropics.”

“It could be more than one hundred million.”

“Right. Then his lunatic four realized that dwarfed any other market in the world!”

“Well,” said Remasritlfeer, “Tycoon is always on the lookout for new markets, the larger the better.” In fact, new markets were Tycoon’s greatest obsession, the driver of almost everything he did.