by John Varley
“How did you know this was the place to wait?” Gaby asked.
“I didn’t know, for sure.”
“Well,” Cirocco said. She slapped her palms on her legs, and then laughed. “Well. Fancy that. Just when we’d about given up hope of finding anybody else, we stumble over you. It’s too good to be true. Isn’t it, Gaby?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah, it’s great.”
“It’s good to see you folks, too. I’ve been listening to you for five days now. It’s nice to hear a familiar voice.”
“Has it really been that long?”
Calvin tapped a device on his wrist. It was a digital watch.
“It’s still keeping perfect time,” he said. “When we get back, I’m going to write a letter to the manufacturer.”
“I’d thank the maker of the watchband,” Gaby said. “Yours is steel and mine was leather.”
Calvin shrugged. “I remember it. It cost more than I made in a month, as an intern.”
“It still seems like too much time. We only slept three times.”
“I know. Bill and August are having the same trouble judging time.”
Cirocco looked up.
“Bill and August are alive?”
“Yeah, I’ve been listening to them. They’re down there, on the bottom. I can point to the place. Bill has his whole radio, like you two. August only had a receiver. Bill picked out some landmarks and started talking about how we could find him. He sat still for two days, and August found him pretty quick. Now they call out regular. But August only asks for April, and she cries a lot.”
“Jesus,” Cirocco breathed. “I guess she would. You don’t have any idea where April is, or Gene?”
“I thought I heard Gene once. Crying, like Gaby said.”
Cirocco thought it over, and frowned.
“Why didn’t Bill hear us, then? He’d be listening in, too.”
“It must have been line-of-sight problems,” Calvin said. “The cliff was cutting you off. I was the only one who could listen to both groups, but I couldn’t do anything about it.”
“Then he’d hear us now, if—”
“Don’t get excited. They’re asleep now, and they won’t hear you. Those earphones are like a gnat buzzing. They ought to wake up in five or six hours.” He looked from one of them to the other, “The smart thing for you folks is to get some sleep, too. You’ve been walking for twenty-five hours.”
This time, Cirocco had no trouble believing him. She knew she was existing on the excitement of the moment; her eyelids were drooping. But she couldn’t give in yet.
“What about yourself, Calvin? Have you had any trouble?”
He raised one eyebrow. “Trouble?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
He seemed to draw in on himself.
“I’m not talking about that. Not ever.”
She was inclined not to push it. He seemed peaceful, as if he had come to terms with something.
Gaby stood up and stretched, yawning hugely.
“I’m for the sack,” she said. “Where do you want to stretch out, Rocky?”
Calvin stood up, too. “I’ve got a place I’ve been working on,” he said. “It’s up here in this tree. You two can use it, and I’ll stay up and listen for Bill.”
It was a bird’s nest woven from twigs and vines. Calvin had lined it with a feathery substance. There was plenty of room, but Gaby chose to get close, as they had been doing before. Cirocco wondered if she ought to call a halt to it, but decided it didn’t matter.
“Rocky?”
“What is it?”
“I want you to be careful around him.”
Cirocco came back from the edge of sleep.
“Mummph? Calvin?”
“Something’s happened to him.”
Cirocco looked at Gaby with one bloodshot eye. “Go to sleep, Gaby, okay?” She reached around and patted her leg.
“Just watch out,” Gaby muttered.
If only there was some sign to mark the morning, Cirocco thought, yawning. It would make getting up a lot easier. Something like a rooster, or the sun’s rays coming in at a different slant.
Gaby was still asleep beside her. She disentangled herself and stood on the broad tree limb.
Calvin was not around. Breakfast was within arm’s reach: purple fruit the size of a pineapple. She picked one and ate it, rind and all. She began to climb.
It was easier than it looked. She went up almost as fast as she could have climbed a ladder. There were definitely things to be said for one-quarter gee, and the tree was ideal for climbing, better than anything she had seen since she was eight years old. The knobby bark provided handholds where limbs were scarce. She picked up a few scratches to add to her collection, but it was a price she was willing to pay.
She felt happy for the first time since her arrival in Themis. She didn’t count the meeting with Gaby and Calvin, because those had been so emotional they had verged on hysteria. This was just feeling good.
“Hell, it’s been longer than that,” she muttered. She had never been a gloomy person. There had been some good times aboard Ringmaster, but little out-and-out fun. Trying to recall the last time she had felt this good, she decided it was the party when she learned she had her command after seven years of trying. She grinned at the memory; it had been a very good party.
But she soon put all thought from her mind and let her soul flow into the endeavor itself. She was aware of every muscle, every inch of skin. There was an astonishing amount of freedom in climbing a tree with no clothes on. Her nudity, until now, had been a nuisance and a danger. Now she loved it. She felt the rough texture of the tree under her toes, and the supple flex in the tree limbs. She wanted to yodel like Tarzan.
As she approached the top, she heard a sound that had not been there before. It was a repeated crunching, coming from a point she couldn’t see through the yellow-green leaves, in front of her and a few meters down.
Proceeding more cautiously, she eased herself onto a horizontal limb and sidled toward the open air.
There was a blue-gray wall in front of her. She had no idea what it might be. The crunching came again, louder, slightly above her. A tuft of broken branches moved in front of her and out of sight. Then, with no warning, the eye appeared.
“Wow!” she yelped, before she could get her mouth shut. Without quite recalling how she got to be there she was three meters back, bouncing with the motion of the tree and staring transfixed at the monstrous eye. It was as wide as her outstretched arms, glistening with moisture, and astonishingly human.
It blinked.
A thin membrane contracted from all sides, like a camera aperture, then snapped open again, literally quick as a wink.
She broke all records getting down, not feeling it when she scraped her knee, yelling all the way. Gaby was awake. She had a thighbone in her hand, and looked ready to use it.
“Down, down!” Cirocco yelled. “There’s something up there. It could use this tree for a toothpick.” She levitated the last eight meters, hit the ground on all fours, and was on her way down the hill when she collided with Calvin.
“Didn’t you hear me? We’ve got to get out of here. There’s this thing—”
“I know, I know,” he soothed, putting out his hands, palms toward her. “I know all about it, and it’s nothing to worry about. I didn’t have time to tell you before you went to sleep.”
Cirocco felt deflated, but far from soothed. It was terrible to have that much nervous energy and nothing to do with it. Her feet wanted to run. Instead, she blew up at him.
“Well shit, Calvin! You didn’t have time to tell me about a thing like that? What is it, and what do you know about it?”
“That’s our way off this cliff,” he said. “His name is—” he pursed his lips and whistled three clear notes with a warble at the end, “—but I see that’s awkward to use mixed with English. I call him Whistlestop.”
“You call him ‘Whistlestop,’” Cirocco
repeated, numbly.
“That’s right. He’s a blimp.”
“A blimp.”
He looked at her oddly and she gritted her teeth.
“He looks more like a dirigible, but he’s not, because he doesn’t have a rigid skeleton. I’ll call him and you can see for yourself.” He put two fingers to his lips and whistled a long, complex tune with odd musical intervals.
“He’s calling him,” Cirocco said.
“So I heard,” Gaby said. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, But my hair’s going to come back in gray.”
There was an answering series of trills from above, then nothing happened for several minutes. They waited.
Whistlestop bulged into view from the left. He was 300 or 400 meters from the cliff face, traveling parallel to it, and even that far away they could see only a little of him. He was a solid blue-gray curtain being drawn across their view. Then Cirocco spotted 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 be 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 be 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 stern. All he needed to look like a bigger-than-life-size replica of the German airship Hindenberg was a swastika painted on his tail.
No, Cirocco decided, that was not quite true. She was an airship 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-I29 quite well.
The shape was the same: an elongated cigar, blunt at the nose, tapering to a point at the stern. There was even some sort of gondola slung beneath, though farther back than in the Hindenberg. The color was wrong, 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 hung 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 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 doubled 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 moment, 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 eats plants, and very little of that. He can’t eat too much, or he’d 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, Calvin! 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. Cirocco 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 longtime, 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 looked at 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 Whistlestop’s stomach, what is it?” Cirocco asked.
Calvin looked puzzled.
“I never said it wasn’t his stomach. This is his food we’re standing on.”
Gaby moaned and tried to run 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 eats their end product. His digestive juices can’t hurt 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.”
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 larger 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 hydrogen 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 torn they usually die.
