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
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
