“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 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 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
