by John Varley
“Was that Cirocco?” Nova asked.
“Yes. She wanted to know where we are.”
“Is there anything wrong?”
“She did not say so. She wishes to know if you would accompany her on a short journey.”
“Accompany…where’s she going?”
“She did not say.”
Nova jumped to her feet.
“I don’t care. Great Mother! Tell her yes! Tell her I’ll be there—”
“She will pick you up,” Virginal said, and sang once more to the seed.
***
Cirocco arrived in a few minutes, flying an almost invisible Dragonfly One. The little craft was quick and spritely as a hummingbird. Cirocco landed it on a flat patch of ground ten meters long, stopping with the nose almost touching a house-sized boulder. She got out, picked the airplane up, and had it turned around by the time Nova and Virginal joined her.
“Hail, hinddaughter of Munyekera,” Cirocco greeted Virginal formally, then looked at Nova, smiled with one side of her mouth, and touched two fingers to her eyebrow. “How you doing, Nova?”
“Hail, Captain,” Virginal sang. It was the only fragment of Titanide song Nova could recognize. She said nothing. As usual, when first seeing Cirocco, her mouth was too dry for speech.
The Wizard, Nova thought. None of this Captain business for her. Wizard summed it up nicely.
Cirocco looked good in clothes. Nova had had few chances to see her that way. She wore black pants and blouse, and a broad-brimmed black hat. She was heavier than when Nova had first met her. Somehow, the clothes emphasized it. Even in this, Cirocco could not do things like a normal woman would. She had added flesh all over her body, but particularly in her breasts. It had to do with the mysterious expeditions into the forest. Three times now she and Robin had gone, returning each time more youthful, healthier, and, in Cirocco’s case, heavier. It made her even more beautiful.
“I have this little expedition I have to make,” Cirocco said, seeming a bit uncomfortable. “It’s really not necessary that you go along, I could do it myself. But it’s not very dangerous and I thought you might be interested.”
Nova felt faint. Ask me to walk on broken glass, my darling. Ask me to tear my heart out and give it to you. Ask me to swim around the world, to outrun a Titanide, to wrestle a zombie. Ask me any of these things and I will do them gladly, or die in the attempt, for you. So now you ask me if I might be interested in going somewhere with you…
Trying to sound casual, she made a why-not shrug and said, “Sure, Cirocco.”
“Good.” Cirocco opened the door of the plane, and Nova saw the single seat had been taken out. The interior had been stripped. “It’ll be cramped, but I wanted to take the smallest plane we have. I don’t think it’ll be too bad, but you’ll practically be in my lap.”
I’ll find a way to endure it, Nova thought.
The plane was empty except for two tightly furled para-wings in the back. Cirocco handed one to Nova, and they both strapped them on.
“This will involve some jumping,” Cirocco explained, and lowered herself into the cockpit. She squirmed over as far as she could go, and Nova wedged herself in. There was an awkward business with elbows for a moment, then they found the positions to sit.
“You think you can get us out of here?” Cirocco said.
“I believe so.”
“Remember we’re pretty heavy.”
Nova was already roughing it out on the computer. Wouldn’t it be just great to flub it, and have Cirocco take over to save both their necks? She put it out of her mind.
She sealed the door, looked around to see Virginal standing a safe distance away. She waved, and the Titanide waved back.
“Clear!” she shouted, feeling foolish. But in aviation, rules were for everybody, every time, as Conal had made clear in humiliating terms the day of her first lesson—backed up by Cirocco’s cold glare.
She went over it mentally, then took a deep breath and pushed the throttle in. The plane leaped forward, came to the edge of the flat area…and started to sink slightly. Nova worked the controls, goosed the tiny engine, and generally came close to a nervous breakdown as, over a very long ten seconds, the plane seemed determined to crash into some treetops.
They skimmed over, and Nova risked a glance at Cirocco. The Wizard had not even been watching the trees. She was looking through the transparent roof, searching for something. Nova felt oddly proud. Cirocco had assumed Nova could do it. She also felt a little deflated. An approving “well done” would have gone down very well. Then she realized the compliment was implied in the confidence.
“Take it up to thirty kilometers and bear to the northeast,” Cirocco said.
“Any particular heading?”
“I can’t be more precise, since I don’t know just where he is.”
“He?”
“Whistlestop. He’s somewhere over western Iapetus.”
A blimp! Nova felt a surge of excitement, then bewilderment. From what she knew of blimps, they would not appreciate an approach by a jet airplane.
“Does it matter how fast I climb?”
“Fuel-wise, we’ve got a big margin. You might as well scoot right along.”
Nova calculated a rate of climb that was swift, without being profligate, doing it manually instead of just turning the whole thing over to the computer because she wanted the practice on emergency procedure. Cirocco watched, and said nothing.
“Do they usually cruise this high?” Nova asked, when they leveled out at the desired altitude. Cirocco was looking out and down.
“Very seldom. I want to be sure we get above him. Why don’t you look out that side and see if you can spot him? It shouldn’t be too hard. He’s not much bigger than the State of Pennsylvania.”
***
That was an exaggeration, but Nova was disappointed when they did locate him. She had seen several blimps from a distance—they never came too close to the ground in Dione—but Whistlestop didn’t look all that big.
Then she noticed the numbers on the radar screen and realized that instead of being two or three kilometers away, he was twenty-five kilometers below them.
“Shut off the radar,” Cirocco commanded. “It hurts his ears.” Nova did as instructed, watched Cirocco checking her pack and her equipment belt and the attachments of her para-wing, so she did the same.
“Here’s the plan. You program this crate to fly back to the cave by the Junction. Be sure it never gets closer than twenty kilometers to Whistlestop. After that, it’s best for it to fly right down on the deck, two or three hundred meters.” She looked at Nova. “Aren’t you going to ask me why?”
“I didn’t think I should.”
“Relax, honey. We’re not under military discipline here. The reason I want to fly low is I keep waiting for more buzz bombs to show up. They haven’t yet, but one of these days they will. I don’t want to lose this plane when it can’t defend itself.”
“That makes sense.” She glanced nervously at the sky. Until that moment she had not thought of buzz bombs. She still remembered Conal’s magnificent flying during the attack, and knew he had saved her life. She doubted her ability to handle a plane nearly so well.
So she started on the auto-pilot program while Cirocco waited calmly. Soon she was bogged down. She shook her head, and erased an impossible result.
“I don’t know if I can handle all that,” she admitted. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. Here’s what you’re doing wrong.” Her fingers flew over the keys, pausing only long enough to be sure Nova had seen and understood. “One of the most important things you can learn is when to admit you need to learn more.”
Nova glanced at her, saw that Cirocco was smiling.
“Where would we both be right now,” Cirocco said, “if you hadn’t known you were up to a very hairy take-off situation?” For a fraction of a second her smile became a grin, then she was looking at the computer again. And Nova knew that, once again, the
Wizard had been far ahead of her. She would have sworn that Cirocco had not been paying attention to the take-off, and had not noticed her nervousness.
“Okay,” Cirocco went on, locking the program in. “You get out first. Go ahead and deploy as soon as you’re clear of the plane, then follow me. If you see any buzz bombs, cut your lines and free-fall as far as you dare. There’s a spare wing in that pack. Any questions?”
Nova had a dozen, but only asked one.
“Do you think we’ll see buzz bombs?”
“No. But I can’t rule it out.”
They opened the door and Nova stepped out into the air. She got herself oriented, and pulled the rip cord. There was the familiar fluttering snap of the fabric, the singing of the lines, and she was tugged sharply. She glanced up….
For a horrible second she thought the para-wing had ripped loose. She had expected a colorful, traditional canopy. Instead, there was a thing of spiderwebs and air, almost invisible.
Well, it made sense. They would be hard to see.
She located Cirocco, who had both hands in the shrouds, swinging around to her right and losing altitude. With a few tugs on her own lines Nova fell in behind her. Follow me, the Wizard had said. Anywhere, Nova thought.
For several minutes Nova spent her time scanning the clear skies for the tell-tale contrails of buzz bombs. Twice she sighted their own abandoned jet. The first time it scared her; by the second she was already bored. She followed Cirocco sedately, on as fine a day for soaring as she had ever seen.
Then Cirocco began to gyrate wildly, swinging back and forth at the end of her lines. Nova was not worried at first, but the longer it went on the more she began to wonder what was wrong. She did not get alarmed until Cirocco went into a steep downward plunge. She had to work hard to follow her, and no sooner was she in her dive than Cirocco pulled up, and up, and up…and almost over. A loop was difficult to do with a para-wing. The Wizard had not quite managed it. But she still couldn’t figure out what the trouble was, until she heard the sound of laughter.
“I thought you were going to follow me,” Cirocco shouted, and laughed again. “I thought you were All-Coven Girl Champeen, or something.”
Oh, yeah?
Nova hauled on her lines with both hands and swept so close in front of Cirocco she could hear her startled gasp. Downward she plunged, faster and faster, swinging from side to side and building momentum until, with a hard jerk, she swooped up and around and poised for a moment, upside-down, the wing collapsing beneath her. She tumbled, expertly avoiding entanglement with the loose lines, was jerked to a stop amid the sharp cracking sound of the wing catching air, and came out in a glide, neat and sweet as ever it had been done in competition. She could see, in memory, the string of 10’s flashing on the judges’ scoreboards.
Cirocco eased in beside her, just far enough away to keep their wings out of trouble, and regarded her with a sour look which she couldn’t maintain. She burst out laughing again.
“I yield to the better woman,” Cirocco said. “You gave me a fright there, young lady.”
“You scared me,” Nova protested.
“Yeah, I guess I would have. So I probably shouldn’t have done it.”
“I didn’t mind.”
“Nova, I know I seem like a very cold, very sour old bitch. Lately I can’t afford much time to have fun. And I know I’m six times your age, and I know you’ve heard the tragic story of my life…but you know what? Adding it all up, the good and the bad, I’ve had a great time. The last thirty years have been hard, and they’re about to get harder. But I wouldn’t have liked any other life. The awful thing is…well, like now. When I want to cut up, it just seems out of character. That saddens me.”
The last thirty years, Nova thought.
***
It was a long glide. They amused themselves with some more tricks, though nothing as extreme as the loops. And all the time, Whistlestop continued to grow larger beneath them.
Almost a century ago, when Cirocco and her crew had first seen him, Whistlestop had been just over one kilometer from nose to tail. The Hindenburg, the largest airship ever built on Earth, had been slightly less than a quarter the size of Whistlestop.
Since then, he had grown considerably.
Now he was two kilometers long. With the proportionate increase in his other dimensions, he was eight times as large as he had been. He contained half a billion cubic feet of hydrogen.
“Nobody knows why he grew so much,” Cirocco told Nova as they made ready for landing on the broad back. “Blimps don’t usually grow so quickly. I know he’s about sixty thousand years old. His contemporaries only seem to grow a few inches every year. I know that Old Scout, who is at least twenty thousand years older than Whistlestop, is only about a kilometer and a half long.”
There was more, and Nova listened to it all, but mere words could never do justice to Whistlestop. He had to be seen to be believed. She had thought making a landing on the back of a blimp would be a hazardous thing. It was going to be about as difficult as a mosquito landing on an elephant.
She touched down lightly, ran a few steps as she expertly reefed her chute, and was about to pull it in for folding when Cirocco touched her shoulder.
“Cut it loose,” she said. “We’ll get down another way.”
“I don’t have a knife,” Nova said.
Cirocco looked surprised, then shook her head.
“I’m getting senile, I guess,” she said, looking Nova up and down. Nova couldn’t figure out what the problem was. Cirocco severed Nova’s lines with a white-bladed knife. When she got a close look at it, Nova realized it was made of sharpened bone, intricately carved in the Titanide manner.
“You wearing anything under those clothes?” Cirocco asked.
“Just cotton shorts,” Nova said.
“It’s metal I’m looking for. It’s not only impolite but extremely dangerous to take anything metal onto a blimp. Anything that can spark.”
There were metal grommets on Nova’s bootlaces, but after a close look Cirocco pronounced them acceptable. Nova was relieved; they had been a gift from Virginal.
Then Cirocco knelt and started feeling the tough hide of the blimp. Nova followed her. She knew she should be asking questions, but, despite the glimpse of a fun-loving Wizard she had had on the way down, her predominant reaction to Cirocco was awe, and her response was obedience.
She looked around. It might as well have been a flat, silvery saucer. She knew it curved downward, but she could have walked a long distance in any direction before it became a problem.
At last Cirocco seemed to have found her spot. She pressed the point of the bone knife to the blimp’s skin and made a small hole. Nova watched her hold her hand over the puncture. She heard a hissing sound that soon subsided. Cirocco seemed satisfied, and, to Nova’s amazement, she used the knife to make a large X in the blimp’s hide. She pushed the flaps down into the hole, and the two of them looked into the incision.
It led down into blackness. On all sides of the narrow chimney the walls bulged inward, restrained by what looked like fishnet. Nova realized they were gasbags, and Cirocco had located a space between them.
“What if you’d punctured the bag?” Nova asked.
“Whistlestop has over a thousand gasbags. Three hundred of them could be holed at once and he’d still be okay. And if my first puncture had hit a bag, it would have healed in about ten seconds.” She lowered her legs into the hole, found a footing, and grinned up at Nova.
“You follow me, okay?”
“He doesn’t mind?”
“This hole will heal in five minutes. He won’t even notice it, I promise.”
Nova was dubious, but it had no effect on her willingness to follow. As soon as the Wizard’s head was gone she stepped down, slipped, then grabbed onto some of the netting around her.
“Push the flaps back up,” Cirocco called out, from below. “That’ll make it heal faster.”
Nova did as she was
told, and it got darker inside the blimp.
“Now, just climb down. You’ll see some things, but don’t worry about them. There’s nothing in here that can hurt you.”
***
They descended a long time. At first it seemed utterly dark, then Nova’s eyes adjusted and she could see a little.
It was easier to hold with her fingers, but it was tiring. From time to time her feet would find a larger cable she could perch on, but usually there was just the fine netting. Only the low gravity saved her.
After ten minutes there was a light below her. She stopped, and saw Cirocco taking a small, glowing orange globe from her pack. She handed it to Nova, and tied another around one of her wrists. It was a kind of bioluminescence, and it was sufficient to see by.
It was better at first. She could see where to put her hands and feet. Then, oddly, it began to make her feel more claustrophobic. It was like a nightmare where the walls were closing in on you, but it was real. The walls did bulge.
Then she thought about what she was doing. The things she grabbed and held were not ropes, not nets; they were the living muscles of a gargantuan being. She could feel them moving when she pulled on them. They were dry, thank the Great Mother and all her little demons, but it was still creepy.
They went by side passages. Some were no wider than her arm, but a few were big enough to walk in. Far away in the larger ones she could see eyes glittering.
“Cherubim,” Cirocco said, after the first sighting. “They’re the same relation to Angels as monkeys are to us. They nest in the greater blimps.”
There were other denizens of the sky leviathan. Little things like mice kept skittering over her feet, and once Cirocco paused while something bigger scuttled out of her way. Nova never saw it, and didn’t mind that at all.
“You’re sure he doesn’t mind us in here?” she asked, at one point.
“The more the merrier,” Cirocco said. “If he didn’t want us here we’d know it by now. All he has to do is seal this passage and flood it with hydrogen. Don’t sweat it, Nova. Blimps have their own internal ecology. There’s a hundred animals that can’t live anywhere else. And they take on transient passengers all the time.”
