by John Varley
far away they could see only a little of him. He was a solid blue- gray curtain being drawn across their view. Then Cirocco spot- ted the eye. Calvin whistled again, and the eye swiveled aimlessly, eventually finding them. Calvin looked back over his shoulder.
"He don't see so good," he explained. "Then I'm for staying out of his way. Like in the next county." "That wouldn't he far enough," Gaby said, awed. "His ass
would be in the next county." The nose disappeared and Whistlestop continued to glide past. And glide past. And glide, and glide, and glide. There seemed to he no end to him.
"Where's he going?" Cirocco asked. "It takes him a while to stop," Calvin explained. "He'll get squared away pretty soon."
Cirocco and Gaby finally joined Calvin at the edge so they could see the whole operation.
Whistlestop the blimp was a full kilometer from stem to stem. All he needed to look like a bigger-than-life-size replica of the German airship Hindenberg was a swastika painted on his tall.
No, Cirocco decided, that was not quite true. She was an air- ship enthusiast, had been active in the NASA project to build one almost as big as Whistlestop. While working with the project engineers, she had come to know the design of the LZ-129 quite well.
The shape was the same: an elongated cigar, blunt at the nose, tapering to a point at the stem. There was even some sort of gondola slung beneath, though farther back than in the Hindenberg. The color was wron& and the texture of the skin. No bracing structure was visible; Whistlestop was smooth, like the old Goodyear blimps, and now that she could see him in the light he shone with a mother-of-pearl iridescence and a hint of oiliness over the basic blue-gray.
And Hindenberg had not had hair. Whistlestop did, along a transverse ventral ridge, growing thicker and longer amidships, thinning out to a sparse blue down toward the ends. A clutch of delicate tendrils humg beneath the central nodule, or gondola, or whatever it was.
Then there were the eyes, and the tail fins. Cirocco saw one side-looking eye, and thought there were probably more. Instead of four flight surfaces at the tail Whistlestop had only three: two horizontal ones and one rudder. Cirocco could see them flexing as the monstrous thing struggled to turn its nose toward them, at the same time backing up half its length. The fins were thin and transparent, like the wings of a man-powered O'Neil flyer, and supple as a jellyfish.
"You ... uh, you talk to this thing?,, she asked Calvin. "Pretty well." He was smiling at the blimp, happier than Cirocco had ever seen him.
"It's an easy language to learn, then?"
He frowned. "No, I don't think you could say that."
"You've been here-how long? Seven days?"
"I tell you, I know how to talk to it. I know a lot about it."
"Then how did you learn it?"
The question obviously troubled him'. "I woke up knowing it."
"Say again?"
"I just know it. When I first saw him, I knew all about him. When he talked, I understood. As simple as that."
It was far from that simple, Cirocco was sure. But he obviously did not want to be pressed on the question.
It took the better part of an hour for Whistlestop to position himself, then to nose in carefully until he nearly touched the side of the cliff. During the operation, Gaby and Cirocco moved well back. They felt better when they saw its mouth. It was a meter-wide slash, ridiculously tiny for a creature of Whistlestop's size, set twenty meters below the forward eye. There was a separate orifice below the mouth: a sphincter muscle that dou- bled as a pressure-relief valve and whistle.
A long, rigid object protruded from the mouth and extended to
the ground.
"C'mon," Calvin said, beckoning to them. "Let's get aboard." Neither Gaby nor Cirocco could think of a line to go with
that. They just stared at him. He looked exasperated for a mo- ment, then smiled again.
"I guess it's hard for you to believe, but it's true. I do know a lot about these things. I've already been for a ride. He's perfectly
willing; he's going our way anyhow. And it's safe. He only cats plants, and very little of that. He can't cat too much, or held sink." He put a foot on the long gangplank and walked toward the entrance.
"What's that thing you're standing on?" Gaby asked. "I guess you could call it his tongue."
Gaby started to laugh, but it had a hollow sound, and died in a cough. "Isn't that all just a bit too ... I mean, Jesus, Calvini There you stand on the damn thing's tongue, asking me to walk into his mouth, dammit. I suppose at the end of ... shall we call it the throat? At the end of the throat is something that's not really a stomach but just serves the same purpose. And those juices that start flowing over us, you'll have a nice, glib explanation for that, too!"
"Hey, Gaby, I promise you, it's as safe as-"
"No, thank you!" Gaby shouted. "I may be Mama Plauget's dumbest daughter, but nobody ever said I didn't have the sense to stay out of some fuckin, monster's mouth. Jesus! Do you know what you're asking? I've already been eaten alive once on this trip. I'm not going to let it happen again."
She was screaming by now, shaking, and her face was red. Ci- rocw agreed with everything Gaby said, on an emotional level. She stepped onto the tongue, anyway. It was warm, but dry. She turned, and held out her hand.
"Come on, shipmate. I believe him."
Gaby stopped shaking and looked stunned. "You wouldn't leave me here?"
"Of course not. You're coming with us. We have to get down there with Bill and August. Come on, where's the courage I know you have?"
"That's not fair," Gaby whined. "I'm not a coward. You just can't ask me to do that. "
"I am asking you. The only way to deal with your fear is to face it. Come on in."
Gaby hesitated a long time, then squared her shoulders and marched up as if going to her execution.
"I'll do it for you," she said, "because I love you. I have to be with you, wherever you go, even if it means we die together."
Calvin lookedat Gaby strangely, but said nothing. They went
into the mouth, found themselves in a narrow, translucent tube with a thin floor over even thinner air. It was a long walk.
Amidships was the large pouch she had seen from the outside. It was thick, clear material, a hundred meters long by thirty wide, and the bottom was covered in pulverized wood and leaves. There were small animals inside with them: several smilers, a selection of smaller species, and thousands of tiny smooth-skinned creatures smaller than shrews. Like the other animals they had seen in Themis, these paid no attention to them.
They could see out on all sides, and found they were already some distance from the cliff face.
"If this place isn't Whistiestop's stomach, what is it?" Cirocco asked.
Calvin looked puzzled. "I never said it wasn't his stomach. This is his food we're standingon."
Gaby moaned and tried to nm 'back the way she had come in. Cirocco grabbed her and held her down. She looked up at Calvin.
"It's all right," he said. "He can only digest with the help of these little animals. He.cats their end product. His digestive juices can't hurt you any more than weak tea."
"You hear that, Gaby?" Cirocco whispered in her ear. 'We're going to be all right. Calm down, honey."
"I h-hear. Don't be mad at me. I'm frightened." "I know. Come on, stand up and look out. That'll take your mind off it." She helped her up, and they wallowed over to the clear stomach wall. It was like walking on a trampoline. Gaby pressed her nose and hands to it and spent the rest,of the trip sobbing and staring fixedly into space. Cirocco left her alone, and went to Calvin.
"You've got to be more careful of her," she said, quietly. "The time in the darkness has affected her more than us." She narrowed her eyes and searched his face. "Except I don't really know about you."
"I'm all right," he said. "But I don't want to talk about my life before my re-birth. That's over."
"Funny. Gaby said pretty much the same thing. I can't see it that way."<
br />
Calvin shrugged, plainly not interested in what either of them thought.
"All right. I'd appreciate it if you told me what you know. I don't care how you learned it if you don't want to tell me."
Calvin thought it over, and nodded. "I can't teach you their language quickly. It's mostly tone and duration, and I can only speak a pidgen version based on the lower tones I can hear.
"They come in all sizes from about ten meters to slightly larg- er than Whistlestop. They often travel in schools; this one has some smaller attendants which you didn't see because they stayed on his other side. There's some of them now. "
He pointed out the window, where a flight of six twenty- meter blimps jostled for position. They looked like ponderous fish. Cirocco could hear shrill whistles.
"They're friendly, and quite intelligent. They don't have any natural enemies. They generate hydrogren from their food and keep it under a slight pressure. They carry water for ballast, drop it when they want to rise, valve off hydrogen when they want to go down. Their skin is tough, but if it gets tom they usually die.
"They're not very maneuverable. They don'thave much fine control, and it takes them a long time to get moving. A fire can trap them sometimes. If they can't get away, they go up like a bomb."
"What about all these creatures in here?" Cirocco asked. 'Do they need all of them to digest their food?"
"No, just the little yellow ones. Those things can't eat anything but what a blimp prepares for them. You won't find them anywhere but in a blimp's stomach. The rest of these critters are like us. Hitchhikers or passengers."
"I don't get it. Why does the blimp do it?', "It's symbiosis, combined with the intelligence to make his own choices and do as he pleases. His race gets along with other races in here, the Titanides in particular. He does them favors, and they return it by-"
"Titanides?" He snffled uncertainly, and spread his hands. "It's a word I substitute for a whistle he uses. I only get a hazy idea of what they're like because I can't do too well with complex descriptions. I gather they're six-legged, and they're all females. I call them Titanides because that's the name in Greek mythology for female Titans. I've been naming other things, too."
"Such as?"
"The regions and the rivers and the mountain ranges. I named the land areas after the Titans."
"What ... oh, yeah, I remember now." Calvin had studied mythology as a hobby. "Who were the Titans, again?"
"The sons and daughters of Uranus and Gaea. Gaea appeared from Chaos. She gave birth to Uranus, made him her equal, and they produced the Titans, six men and six women. I named the days and nights here after them, since there's six days and six nights."
"If you named all the nights after women, I'm going to think up names of my own."
He smiled. "No such thing. It's pretty much at random. Look back there at the frozen ocean. That seemed like it ought to be Oceanus, so that's what I called it. The country we're over now is Hyperion, and that night over there in front of us, with the mountains and the irregular sea, is Rhea. When you face Rhea from Hyperion, north is to your left and south is to your right. After that, going around the circles haven't seen most of these, you understand, but I know they're there-I call them Crius, which you can just see, then around the bend are Phoebe, Tethys, Thea, Metis, Dione, lapetus, Cronus, and Mnemosyne. You can see Mnernosyne on the other side of Oceanus, behind us. It looks like a desert."
Cirocco tried to string them all together in her head. "I'll never remember all that."
"The only ones that matter right now are Oceanus, Hyperion, and Rhea. Actually, not all the names are Titans. One Titan is Themis, and I thought that would he confusing. And, well... ." He looked away, with a sheepish grin. "I just couldn't recall the names of two Titans. I used Metis, which is wisdom, and Dione."
Cirocco did not really care. The names were handy, and in their own way, systematic. "Let me guess about the rivers. More mythology?"
"Yeah. I picked the nine largest rivers in Hyperion-which
has got a hell of a lot of them, as you can see-and named them after- the Muses. Down south over there is Urania, Calliope, Terpsichore, and Euterpe, with Polyhymnia in the twilight zone and feeding into Rhea. And over here on the north slope, starting at the cast-is Melpomene. Closer to us are Thalia and Erato, which look like they make a system. And the one you came down is a feeder of the Clio, which is just about below us now."
Cirocco looked down and saw a blue ribbon winding through dense green forest, followed it back to the cliff face behind them, and gasped.
"So that Is where the river went," she said.
It arched from the cliff face, nearly half a kilometer below where they had been standing, looking solid and hard as metal for fifty meters before it began to break up. It fragmented rapidly from that point, reaching the ground as mist.
There were a dozen more plumes of water issuing from the cliff, none so close or spectacular, each with its attendant rain- bow. Froin her vantage point, the rainbows were lined up like croquet wickets. It was breathtaking, almost too beautiful to he real.
"I'd like to have the post card concession for this place," she said. Calvin laughed.
"You sell film for the camera, and I'll sell tickets to the rides. What do you think of this one?"
Cirocco glanced back at Gaby, still frozen to the window. "Reactions seem mixed. I like it okay. What's the name for
the big river? That one that all the others join?"
. "Ophion. The great serpent of the north wind. If you'll look closely, you can see that it comes out of a small lake back there at the twilight zone between Mnemosyne and Occanus. That lake must have a source, and I suspect it's Ophion flowing underground through the desert, but we can't see where it goes under. Other than that, it flows without a break, into seas and out of them on the other side."
Cirocco traced the convoluted path and could see that Calvin was right. "I think a geographer would tell you that it's not the same river going into a sea as it is coming out," she said. "But I know all the rules were made for Earth rivers. Okay, so we'll call it a circular river."
"That's where Bill and August are," Calvin said, pointing. "About halfway down the Clio, where that third tributary - "
"Bill and August. We were supposed to try and contact them. With all that commotion about getting on the blimp---"
"I borrowed your radio. They're up, and waiting for us. You can call them now, if you like."
Cirocco got her helmet ring and radio from Gaby. "Bill, can you hear me? This is Cirocco."
"Uh ... yeah, yeah! I hear you. How are you doing?"
"About as well as you'd expect, riding in the stomach of a blimp. What about you? Did you come through it all right? No injuries?"
"No, I'm fine. Listen, I wish ... I wish I could say how good it feels to hear your voice."
She felt a tear on her cheek, and brushed it away.
"It's good to hear you, Bill. When you fell out that window- oh, damn! You wouldn't remember that, would you."
"There's a lot of things I don't remember," he said. "We can straighten it all out later."
"I'm dying to see you. Do you have any hair?"
"It's growing in all over my body. We'd better let all this wait. We've got lots to talk about, me and you and Calvin and..."
"Gaby," she prompted, after what seemed like a very long pause.
"Gaby," he said, without much conviction. "You see I'm a bit confused about some things. But it shouldn't be a problem."
"Are you sure you're all right?" She felt cold suddenly, and rubbed her forearms briskly.
"Sure thing. When will you he here?"
Cirocco asked Calvin, who whistled a short tune. He was answered by another tune from somewhere overhead.
"Blimps don't have much idea of time," he said. "I'd say three or four hours."
"Is that any way to run an airline?"
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cirocco chose the front end of the gondola-it didn't
help any- thing to think of it as a stomach-to be by herself. Gaby was still petrified and Calvin was not much fun to talk to once he'd said everything he knew about Whistlestop. He wouldn't discuss the things Cirocco wanted to know.
A handrail would have been nice. The gondola wall was clear as glass right down to her feet, and would have been clear there too but for the carpet of half-digested leaves and branches. It made for a dizzying view.
.They were passing over thick jungle, much like the country higher up on the clffi. The land was dotted with lakes. The river Clio--broad, yellow, and sluggish-wound through it all: a rope of water thrown to the ground to coil where it wished. ,
She was astonished at the clarity of the air. There were clouds over Rhea that built to thunderheads on the north shore of the sea, but she could see over them. She could see to the limits of the curve of Themis in both directions.
A school of big blimps hovered at various heights around the suspension cable nearest Whistlestop. She couldn't tell what they were doing there, but thought they might he feeding. The cable was massive enough that trees could very well grow on it.
Looking straight down, she could see the huge shadow Whistlestop cast. The lower they went, the larger the shadow became. After four hours it was tremendous, and they were still above the treetops. Cirocco wondered how Whistiestop pro- posed to set them on the ground. There was no clear area remotely large enough to accommodate him.
She was startled to see two figwes standing at a bend in the river, on the west shore, waving at her. She waved back, unsure if she could be seen.
"So how do we get down?" she asked Calvin.
He grimaced. "I didn't think you'd like this, so I didn't bring it up. No sense in having you worry. We parachute."
Cirocco did not react, and he seemed relieved.
"It's a cinch, really. Nothing to it. Safe as can be."
"Uh-huh. Calvin, I love parachuting. I think it's loads of fun. But I like to inspect and pack my own chute. I like to know who made it, and if it's a good one." She looked around her. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but I didn't see you carrying any aboard."
