appreciative noises.
Quilan ignored him.
He was brushing the dust-bath off one day when a bead of sweat dropped from his face and spotted in the dust like a globule of dirty mercury, rolling into the hollow by his feet. They had mated once in a dust-bath, on their honeymoon. A droplet of her sweet sweat had fallen into the grey fines just so, rolling with a fluid silky grace down the soft indentation they had created.
He was suddenly aware he had made a keening, moaning noise. He looked out at Eweirl in the main body of the gym, hoping he would not have heard, but the white-furred male had taken his plugs and visor off, and was looking at him, grinning.
The privateer rendezvoused with something after five days’ travel. The ship went very quiet and moved oddly, as though it was on solid ground but being slid around from side to side. There were thudding noises, then hisses, then most of the remaining noise of the craft died. Quilan sat in his little cabin and tried accessing the exterior views on his screens; nothing. He tried the navigation information, but that had been closed off too. He had never before lamented the fact that ships had no windows or portholes.
He found Visquile on the ship’s small and elegantly spare bridge, taking a data clip from the craft’s manual controls and slipping it into his robes. The few data screens still live on the bridge winked out.
“Estodien?” Quilan asked.
“Major,” Visquile said. He patted Quilan on the elbow. “We’re hitching a ride.” He held up a hand as Quilan opened his mouth to ask where to. “It’s best if you don’t ask with whom or to where, Major, because I’m not able to tell you.” He smiled. “Just pretend we’re still under way using our own power. That’s easiest. You needn’t worry; we’re very secure in here. Very secure indeed.” He touched midlimb to midlimb. “See you at dinner.”
Another twenty days passed. He became even fitter. He studied ancient histories of the Involveds. Then one day he woke and the ship was suddenly loud about him. He turned on the cabin screen and saw space ahead. The navigation screens were still unavailable, but he looked all about the ship’s exterior views through the different sensors and viewing angles and didn’t recognise anything until he saw a fuzzy Y shape and knew they were somewhere on the outskirts of the galaxy, near the Clouds.
Whatever had brought them here in only twenty days must be much faster than their own ships. He wondered about that.
The privateer craft was held in a bubble of vacuum within a vast blue-green space. A wobbling limb of atmosphere three metres in diameter flowed slowly out to meet with their outer airlock. On the far side of the tube floated something like a small airship.
The air was briefly cold as they walked through, turning gradually warmer as they approached the airship. The atmosphere felt thick. Underneath their feet, the tunnel of air seemed as pliantly firm as wood. He carried his own modest luggage; Eweirl toted two immense kit bags as though they were purses, and Visquile was followed by a civilian drone carrying his bags.
The airship was about forty metres long; a single giant ellipsoid in dark purple, its smooth-looking envelope of skin lined with long yellow strakes of frill which rippled slowly in the warm air like the mantle of a fish. The tube led the three Chelgrians to a small gondola slung underneath the vessel.
The gondola looked like something grown rather than constructed, like the hollowed-out husk of an immense fruit; it appeared to have no windows until they climbed aboard, making the ship tip gently, but gauzy panels let in light and made the smooth interior glow with a pastel-green light. It held them comfortably. The tube of air dissipated behind them as the gondola’s door irised shut.
Eweirl popped his earplugs in and put on his visor, sitting back, seemingly oblivious. Visquile sat with his silvery stave planted between his feet, the round top under his chin, gazing ahead through one of the gauzy windows.
Quilan had only the vaguest idea where he was. He had seen the gigantic, slowly revolving elongated 8- shaped object ahead of them for several hours before they’d rendezvoused. The privateer ship had closed very slowly, seemingly on emergency thrust alone, and the thing—the world, as he was now starting to think of it, having come to a rough estimate of its size—had just kept getting bigger and bigger and rilling more and more of the view ahead, yet without betraying any detail.
Finally one of the body’s lobes had blotted out the view of the other, and it was as though they were approaching an immense planet of glowing blue-green water.
What looked like five small suns were visible revolving with the vast shape, though they seemed too small to be stars. Their positioning implied there would be another two, hidden behind the world. As they got very close, matching rotational speed with the world and coming near enough to see the forming indentation they were heading for, with the tiny purple dot immediately behind it, Quilan saw what looked like layers of clouds, just hinted at, inside.
“What is this place?” Quilan said, not trying to keep the wonder and awe out of his voice.
“They call them airspheres,” Visquile said. He looked warily pleased, and not especially impressed. “This is a rotating twin-lobe example. Its name is the Oskendari airsphere.”
The airship dipped, diving still deeper into the thick air. They passed through one level of thin clouds like islands floating on an invisible sea. The airship wobbled as it went through the layer. Quilan craned his neck to see the clouds, lit from underneath by a sun far beneath them. He experienced a sudden sense of disorientation.
Below, something appearing out of the haze caught his eye; a vast shape just one shade darker than the blueness all around. As the airship approached he saw the immense shadow the shape cast, stretching upwards into the haze. Again, something like vertigo struck him.
He’d been given a visor too. He put it on and magnified the view. The blue shape disappeared in a shimmer of heat; he took the visor off and used his naked eyes.
“A dirigible behemothaur,” Visquile said. Eweirl, suddenly back with them, took off his visor and shifted over to Quilan’s side of the gondola to look, imbalancing the airship for a moment. The shape below looked a little like a flattened and more complicated version of the craft they were in. Smaller shapes, some like other airships, some winged, flew lazily about it.
Quilan watched the smaller features of the creature emerge as they dropped down towards it. The behemothaur’s envelope skin was blue and purple, and it too possessed long lines of pale yellow-green frills which rippled along its length, seemingly propelling it. Giant fins protruded vertically and laterally, topped with long bulbous protrusions, like the wing-tip fuel tanks of ancient aircraft. Across its summit line and along its sides, great scalloped dark-red ridges ran, like three enormous, encasing spines. Other protrusions, bulbs and hummocks covered its top and sides, producing a generally symmetrical effect that only broke down at a more detailed level.
As they drew still closer, Quilan had to press himself against the frame of the little airship’s gondola window to see both ends of the giant below them. The creature must be five kilometres long, perhaps more.
“This is one of their domains,” the Estodien went on. “They have seven or eight others distributed round the outskirts of the galaxy. No one is entirely sure quite how many there are. The behemothaurs are as big as mountains and as old as the hills. They are sentient, allegedly, the remnant of a species or civilisation which Sublimed more than a billion years ago. Though again, only by repute. This one is called the Sansemin. It is in the power of those who are our allies in this matter.”
Quilan looked inquiringly at the older male. Visquile, still hunched over holding his glittering stave, made a shrugging motion.
“You’ll meet them, or their representatives, Major, but you won’t know who they are.”
Quilan nodded, and went back to looking out the window. He considered asking why they had come to this place, but thought the better of it.
“How long will we be here, Estodien?” he asked instead.
“For a while,” Visquile said, smiling. He watched Quilan’s face for a moment, then said, “Perhaps two or three moons, Major. We won’t be alone. There are already Chelgrians here; a group of about twenty monks of the Abremile Order. They inhabit the temple ship
