The Wind Whales of Ishmael v4.0 - rtf

by Farmer, Phillip Jose

  Ishmael wondered how many human beings were alive on the face of this Earth. If they all had such fa­talistic attitudes, they would often encounter situations where it would be easier to give up and let death take over. Was this indeed happening everywhere? Had mankind been so long a voyager in time that he had wearied of the journey? Were the slow red sun and the nearing moon constant reminders that the struggle could end in only one way?

  Or were the societies of the South Pacific sea bot­toms the only ones to have this attitude? Did groups elsewhere have the unceasing drive, the desire to live, that had possessed human beings in Ishmael's day?

  Ishmael looked at Namalee and became angry. It was not right that such a beautiful young woman should be surrendering to death just because of some carved pieces of perfumed ivory.

  He stood up and spoke loudly. The others, squatting, looked up at him expectantly. Consciously or not, he realized, they had prayed that he, the stranger, would not be bound by their customs and laws and would give them that spark they lacked.

  "When you hunt the great wind whale, you are not cowards," Ishmael said. "I know that. No craven gets into a tiny boat and strikes deep into the head of such a monster and then lets that monster drag him so high and so low with death whistling like the wind past his ears every second.

  "And I am sure that when it comes to fighting other men, you are as brave."

  He paused, looked around, noting that the women were looking directly at him but that the men were looking at the floor.

  "But," he said even more loudly, "you need to get your courage from something outside you! You must have your gods if you are to act like men! Your courage is breathed into you from the outside! It does not live within you and breathe on your heart and make it as hot as the coals of those fires!"

  "It is the gods who control this world!" Namalee said. "What can we do without them?"

  Ishmael paused. What indeed could they do? Noth­ing, unless he did something for them first. And he had been so accustomed to the spectator's part, or to a minor role, that he now found it strange and frighten­ing to be the prime mover, the chief actor.

  "What can you do without the gods?" he said. "You can act as if you did have them!" And so he para­phrased the dictum of an old German philosopher who could never have dreamed that his words would live again under an enormous red sun at the end of time.

  "Once your gods did not exist!" he said. "So the people created them! Your own religion says that! I asked Namalee why, if you did this once, you can't do it again, and she said that it was all right in the old days but is no longer permitted! Very well! But your gods are not destroyed! They are only absent! They have been stolen! So what is to prevent you from stealing them back?

  "After all, a god is a god even if he does not dwell in the house of his worshippers! And who knows, it is highly probable that Zoomashmarta allowed this calamity to fall in order to test you. If you find courage in yourselves, and go after Zoomashmarta and take him back, then you have passed the test! But if you sit around a fire and sorrow until your grief kills you, then you have failed!"

  Namalee stood up and said, "What would you have us do?"

  "You need a man to lead you who does not think quite as you do!" Ishmael said. "I will lead you! I will make new weapons, if I can find the materials, weapons such as no men have known for ages! Or if these weapons cannot be made, then we will depend on stealth and cunning! But I will ask a price for leading you."

  "What is that price?" Namalee said.

  "You will make me your Grand Admiral," Ishmael said.

  He did not feel it necessary to add that he wanted to find a home. He had traveled enough and seen too much to desire more travel and more wonders.

  "And you, Namalee, will be my wife," he said.

  The captains and the officers did not know what to say. This was the first time that a stranger had asked to be elected as Grand Admiral. Didn't he know that Grand Admirals were born into the title? Or, if one died without a son, then the new one was chosen from the ranks of the greatest captains?

  And how could he have the effrontery to ask that the daughter of a Grand Admiral be his mate?

  Namalee, however, seemed to be happy, and Ishmael knew that he had guessed correctly. She was attracted to him. She might even be in love with him. It was dif­ficult to say at this stage, since the women of Zalarapamtra were taught to be very self-controlled. But she had not told anyone of his attempts to kiss her or their keeping each other warm at nights. And while this restraint might have been caused by gratitude for his having saved her, he liked to think it was more than that.

  There was silence for a long time. The men had looked at Namalee and had seen that she was not of­fended. Far from it. Then they had looked back at Ishmael and had seen a man strong and unafraid.

  Finally, Daulhamra, the greatest of the captains now that Baramha was dead, rose. He stared around the room and then said, "Zalarapamtra dies unless it gets new blood. It needs this stranger who claims to be the grandson of long-dead ages. Perhaps he has been sent by the gods. If we accept him, then we use the gift of the gods. If we reject him, we deserve to die. I say behold the Grand Admiral!"

  And thus Ishmael, who had never had any such am­bitions, who had been content to be only a fo'cs'le hand, surpassed the dreams of his most ambitious bunk-mates.

  From that time on, it was as if he transmitted courage to them. They no longer walked around with downcast eyes and muttered when they talked or squatted for hours staring silently at the ruins. Now they moved brisk­ly and talked much and loudly and laughed. This would not last long, Ishmael knew, unless he kept them moving with words and example. So he went down to the eternally quaking ground and the shaking jungle to search for ghajashri. This was the plant which burned so furiously and the smoke of which had an odor of stone-oil. Ishmael collected great quantities. In a large chamber of the city, he crushed the vegetation between two millstones the sailors had made under his direction. The pressure squeezed out a dark oily substance which caught fire quickly in the open. When the ghajashri oils were kept in a skin bag, their vapors accumulated. A burning fuse would set a bag of the oil off with a roar, and the oil would splash far and burn fiercely.

  Ishmael set everybody who could be spared to collecting the plant and pressing out and collecting the oil. Since it took enormous quantities of the vegeta­tion to get a small amount of oil, the work was long and hard. Meantime, two more whalers came home, and it was necessary to convince these newcomers that the pale-skinned, pale-eyed stranger was the new Grand Admiral.

  Ishmael had expected that he and Namalee would be married very soon. But he quickly learned that the marriage would take place only after Zoomashmarta and the little gods had been rescued. A Grand Admiral never took his first bride until he had performed some heroic feat. Usually, this was the successful harpooning of ten whales or of twenty sharks in one day or leading a raid on an enemy city or an enemy ship and cap­turing it.

  Ishmael, to prove his ability, would have to do what no man before him had ever done.

  Ishmael then ordered a ship built which would be twice the size of the largest so far. As usual, the Zalarapamtrans did not jump to obey but wanted to know the reasons for his orders.

  "It is true that there is no cause to build larger ships for hunting the whales," he said. "But this ship is a warship. With it I plan to destroy a whole city. Or at least a good part of it. It needs to be built as soon as possible because it will have to start out far ahead of the rest of the fleet. It will be so heavily loaded it will go very slowly."

  The other ships had to have repairs and had to be stocked. And his men had to be trained for the raid into Booragangah. Also, the city had to be kept stocked with food.

  Namalee's sisters and half-sisters insisted that they must accompany the ships on the expedition. Other­wise, they said, the ships would not have good luck.

  Ishmael argued against this. If a ship went down, it took with it an invaluable and irre
placeable asset, a future mother. It was going to take long enough as it was to build the city into a strong and populous com­munity nation again. If any more women were lost, the regrowth of Zalarapamtra might be impossible.

  Reason said that Ishmael was right. Custom said he was wrong. Custom, as usual, won. Not only would one of Namalee's sisters be going for each ship going, but she would be on the flagship.

  Ishmael did not argue any more. He could do just so much with these people. After that, he was wasting his breath and also losing his authority.

  He worked as hard as anybody and harder than most. His hours for sleeping were not as many as he wished. It was difficult at first to sleep during the long day, when he knew that there was light to work by. The original cycle of eight hours of sleep and sixteen of waking still conducted men's lives. The lengthening of day and night had not interfered with that rhythm. These people were born to the practice of sleeping part of the daytime and working part of the nighttime. He found it a practice to which he, accus­tomed to strange hours of on-watch and off-watch, soon became adjusted.

  The time came when the great ship was built and loaded with supplies and the cargo of fire-oil bombs. The ten men who were to crew it said goodbye and the mammoth vessel, the Woobarangu, lifted slowly, its sails spread, its goal the city of Booragangah thou­sands of miles to the northwest.

  Four of the whaling vessels followed it five days later, that is, twenty of the days of Earth when its sun was white-hot. Ishmael commanded the Roolanga, the flagship. They were headed for a group of mountains which Ishmael thought had once been the Hawaiian Is­lands, though he could not be sure. In all the millions of years, possibly a billion or more, islands must have sunk and new ones risen and in turn been eroded to nothing and other islands taken their place. And all this long before the oceans dried up.

  Sailing at an average of ten knots ground speed, the fleet could have reached its destination in about two hundred hours or two days and nights. But Ish­mael had ordered that supplies be very short, since he wanted to use all the space he could for bombs and weapons. Thus, it was necessary on the second day to hunt whales to add to the food supply. And they were held up again when they caught up with the giant Woobarangu. They trimmed their sails to keep pace with it. When they were several hundred miles outside Booragangah, they began to circle, waiting until another long night began.

  At the same time, they kept a sharp watch for enemy sails, since whaling ships could be coming from any direction this close to the city.

  The giant red disk finally dropped, its weak rays turning the distant top of the mountain that was their goal to a purplish point.

  The captain of the other ships had boarded Ishmael's for the last conference. Once more, he made sure that each understood his part. Then they drank a toast in shahamchiz and departed. They looked pale but deter­mined. The existence of their nation depended upon them, and their nation could not afford to lose even one of them, no matter if all the gods were restored. Moreover, if they were taken alive, they would suffer horrible torture. The enemy knew how to drag out agony and put off the end of it as the sun knew how to drag out the light.

  As if stuck in the throat of night, the sun hung on the horizon. Then it was swallowed and in a moonless night the ships ceased circling and beat to the wind toward the distant spire. After an hour the top of the moon rose leprously above the east horizon and quick­ly flooded the dark with a bright illumination. It shone dully on the sails, which had been dyed black, and on the hull, also black. A second deck had been added to the bridge. This projected above the top of the hull and increased wind resistance, but it couldn't be helped. The captain and the steersmen had to see where they were going.

  At an estimated hundred miles from Booragangah, all except the flagship began to circle upward. They would rise as high as they could, their crews breathing from wooden flasks of compressed air which Ishmael had de­signed. They would then sail to a point above their destination and begin circling again. After an hour, as regulated by the sand clocks Ishmael had made, they would descend. They would do this slowly until they saw the signal, after which they would release gas swift­ly. The great Woobarangu would discharge its gas even more swiftly.

  The Roolanga continued straight ahead, steadily de­scending. When it was about twenty feet above the tops of the shivering vegetation, it leveled out. Long be­fore the other ships had reached the top of their spiral, it was sliding along quietly and slowly into the wind, its sails furled, its lower mast drawn up. Grappling hooks dragged through the jungle, making more noise than Ishmael cared for. But eventually the hooks caught, and men swarmed down the lines and secured them to plants.

  They were at the foot of the towering mountain, be­low the huge shelf on the top of which the city of the enemy rested. Above them small sentinel boats circled, and behind them ships nosed this way and that, look­ing for attackers or spies. But these had not been high enough or low enough.

  Ishmael had put on his dark clothes and blacked his face. A moment later, Namalee, similarly dressed and darkened, joined him. Ishmael gave his final instruc­tions to Pavashtri, the first mate, who would be in com­mand while Ishmael was gone. Then he and the girl went down a ladder to the main walkway and along it to a whaling boat port. There were six others who would go with them in the boat, since this had been built especially large. It strained against its moorings, the bladders having been fed earlier until they had made enough gas for a swift rising. The crew climbed aboard and strapped themselves in. Each wore in a sheath a long sharp knife made of a bamboo-like plant. Their short spears and short stout bows and quivers of arrows were in leather cases on the bottom of the boat. The bows were something that Ishmael had had to force on the Zalarapamtrans. They knew about them but despised them for some reason lost in their past. Men did not use them, they said. Ishmael had replied that in his time -- stretching time a little but for a good cause -- bows were very manly indeed. The point was that they were deadly and the pathetically tiny party invading Booragangah needed all the firepower it could get. Ishmael knew this was true because the gods had said so.

  By this time, Ishmael was not above telling them that he knew what their gods wanted of them. He acted as if he were receiving divine commands by thought transmission, and the others began to act as if he were. Perhaps they did so because they wanted to believe that their gods had not entirely deserted them.

  There were no lights permitted aboard, of course, so the signal to release all six boats simultaneously was passed by yanking on a system of lines rigged for the occasion through the ship.

  The lines restraining the boats were slashed, and sailors shoved the boats out before they would rise and get stuck in the hull. The side of a boat bumped against the upper part of the wide port as it shot up. A sailor was feeding the amorphous mostly-mouth beasts at the necks of the bladder, and these were manufacturing the gas to increase the buoyancy even as the boat ascended.

  The moon had passed below the western horizon be­fore the Roolanga had entered the final fifty miles of her journey. The immense shelf above placed the small boats in shadow. The front of the mountain, a vertical cliff here, went by at a distance of several hundred yards. The boats, their sails folded and the masts and arms shipped and folded, rose at the mercy of the wind. This was slight at this point, so the boats drifted about half a mile before they were just below the overhang. Karkri, in charge of maneuvering, began to let the gas out. The other boats also slowed their ascent. The men in charge were born to the air. Almost without thinking, they estimated to an inch the amount of buoyancy to lose. The top of the fat oval ring that formed the outer part of the boat bumped against the stone. The people in it were stretched out flat on their faces, but even so outcrops scraped against the backs of some. Then the crews turned over on their backs and propelled the boat slowly outward by reaching up and grabbing the rough stone and pushing.

  It was slow and laborious work, since the shelf pro­jected for a half mile from where t
hey had first struck it. And they could not go swiftly if they had wished to. It was a matter of pulling and hoping the scraping of the hull against the rough stone would not abrade through the skin. The skin was tough but very thin for the sake of lightness.

  Above the hard breathings of the crew Ishmael heard a hissing from the boat behind and to the right of them. Ishmael told the others to stop, and the boat slid to a halt, pressing against the rock bottom. To see what was going on, it was necessary to push against the rock to lower the boat. Ishmael squirmed around while everybody else pushed. The boat to the right was about six feet away and was only a dim shape in the blackness.

  Vargajampa, the third mate, said softly, "Joognaja! There is a shaft in the rocks here!"

  "What size?" Ishmael called back. He hoped that there was no one listening at the upper end of the shaft.

  "Just large enough! There is a grille of wood in the opening, however!"

  Ishmael gave the order, and his crew began working the boat toward the other, while that one moved away.

  He had had two plans for entering the city. One was to come up from under and slip over the edge and then enter from above. The second plan was to come up from beneath through one of the ventilation shafts, if one could be found in the dark and if it was large enough to admit a man.

  Namalee had told him that, as far as she knew, no one had ever penetrated into an enemy's city in this manner. In fact, though raids had been made at night, they were always either sudden massive onslaughts or a few ships sailing in, destroying, looting and then getting away as swiftly as possible. No one had ever carried out such a plan as Ishmael's or even suggested it.

  Despite this, however, the possibility of such was recognized. That explained why the shafts were screened and sometimes guarded.

  When the boat was centered under the shaft, Ish­mael gripped the latticework of wood set into it and pulled. The grille failed to yield. By probing through the spaces between the bars with a slender stick, he determined that a rope was secured with hard wooden pegs to each corner on the inside of the screen. The other end of the ropes must be secured to the inside of a grille set in the top end of the shaft. It was possible that a pull on this grille would drag the other down and set off an alarm mechanism.