‘Yes.’
‘Oh.’
‘I.Jmm. The. Umm. Whatever it is couldn’t come up here, then?’
‘No.’
‘And you’re sure?’
‘Sufficiently sure. That which it is thought that you would be best to experience is in a situation/setting similar to this.’
‘Ah. I see.’
Uagen was standing, a little precariously, on what felt like a particularly wobbly bit of marsh. In fact he was deep inside the body of the dirigible behemothaur Yoleus, within a chamber he had only once ever seen before and had rather hoped he might not have to visit again during his stay.
The place was about the size of a ballroom. It was a hemi- sphere, with ribs and curves everywhere. Even the floor had curves, low swells and hollows. The walls looked like gigantic folded curtains, gathered into a sphincter shape at the summit. It was unlit and Uagen was having to use his in-built IR sense, which made everything look grey and grainy and even more frightening.
The smell was that of a sewer under an abattoir. Stuck to the wall were dead, living-dead and still living things. One of them – one of the latter category, thankfully – was 974 Praf. Underneath 974 Praf, dwarfing her, were the recently attached and now drained-looking carcasses of two falficores, their wings and talons hanging loosely. Alongside the Interpreter was the even bigger body of a raptor scout.
974 Praf didn’t look too bad; she appeared perched, wings neatly folded, feet drawn up. The creature hanging by her side, whose body was nearly the size of Uagen’s and whose wings were easily fifteen metres from tip to tip, looked limp and – if not dead – near death. Its eyes were half closed, its huge beaked head was slumped across its chest, its wings looked pinned to the in-curving wall of the chamber, and its legs hung slackly.
What looked like a root or cable led from the back of its skull and into the wall. Where the cable entered its head, something like blood had leaked out, soaking its dark, scaly skin. The creature trembled suddenly and let out a low moan.
‘The raptor scout’s report on the fellow-creature below is not sufficient,’ the dirigible behemothaur Yoleus said through 974 Praf. ‘The captured falficores knew less still; only that there was a recent rumour of food below. Your report might be sufficient.’ Uagen swallowed. ‘Umm.’ He stared at the raptor scout. It had not been tortured or really mistreated, by the locally prevailing standards, but whatever had happened to it didn’t look very pleasant. It had been dispatched to reconnoitre the shape that Uagen and 974 Praf had seen when they’d gone after the falling glyph stylo.
The raptor scout had dived into the depths, escorted by the rest of its wing. It had landed on what was apparently another dirigible behemothaur, but one which had been injured or damaged, which had possibly lost its way and piobably lost its mind. It had investigated inside a little, then it had rushed as fast as it could back to Yoleus, who had listened to its report and then concluded that the creature was not articulate enough to explain properly what it had seen – the raptor scout had not even been able to determine the identity of the other behemothaur – and so had decided to look directly into its memories by burrowing in with a direct link between its mind and Yoleus’ own – whatever and wherever that was.
There was nothing all that unusual about this, or even anything cruel; the raptor scout was, in a sense, a part of the dirigible behemothaur and would have had no sense of having had interests or even an existence separate from the vast creature; probably it would have been proud that the information it was carrying was of such importance that Yoleus wanted to look at it directly. Nevertheless, to Uagen it still looked like some poor wretch chained to a wall in a torture chamber after the torturer had extracted what he wanted. The creature moaned again.
‘Umm. Yes,’ Uagen said. ‘Ah. I would be able to make this report, umm. Verbally, wouldn’t I?’
‘Yes,’ the dirigible behemothaur said through 974 Praf.
Uagen felt just a little relief.
Then the Interpreter sat back against the wall behind her. She blinked a few times and then said, ‘Hmm.’
‘What?’ Uagen said, suddenly aware of a funny taste in his mouth. He was aware that he was fingering the necklace his aunt Silder had given him. He put his hands down by his sides. They were shaking.
‘Yes.’
‘Yes what?’
‘There would also be
‘What? What?’ He was aware that his voice was more of a yelp, now.
‘Your glyph tablet.’
‘What?’
‘The glyph tablet that belongs to you. If it might be used for the recording of the impressions you have, that would be of use to me.
‘Ha! The tablet! Yes! Yes, of course! Yes!’
‘Then you will go and are so agreed.’
‘Oh. Umm. Well, yes, I suppose. That is-’
‘I release the fifth-order Decider of the 11th Foliage Gleaner Troupe which is now Interpreter 974 Praf.’ There was a sound like a noisy kiss, and 974 Praf hinged away from her perch on the wall, falling untidily for the first couple of metres before collecting herself in an undignified clatter of wings and looking wildly about as though she had just woken up. 974 Praf hovered in front of Uagen’s face, wings beating the smell of something rotten against him. She cleared her throat. ‘Seven wings of raptor scouts will accompany you,’ she told him. ‘They will take a deep-light signalling pod with them. They await.’
‘What, now?’
‘Soon equates to good, later to worse, Uagen Zlepe, scholar. Therefore, immediacy.’
‘Umm.’
They fell en masse, hurtling mob-handed into the dark blue abyss of air. Uagen shivered and looked around. One of the suns had gone out. The other had moved. They were not real suns, of course. They were more like immense spotlights; eyeballs the size of small moons whose annihilatory furnaces switched on and off according to a pattern dictated by their slow dance round the vast world.
Sometimes they glowed just sufficiently to stop themselves from falling further into Oskendari’s gravity faint well, some- times they blazed, bathing the airsphere’s nearest volumes in radiance while the pressure of that released light kicked them fur- ther up and out, so that they would have escaped the airsphere’s pull altogether if they hadn’t then swivelled and sent out a pulse of light that sent them falling back in again.
The sun-moons were worth lifetimes of study all on their own, Uagen knew, though probably they were more the province of somebody interested in physics, rather than someone like himself. He turned up the heating in his suit – Yoleus had been persuaded to allow him time to return to his quarters and put on something more in keeping with the role of explorer – but then he started to sweat. He wasn’t really cold, he decided, just afraid. He turned the heating down again.
The three wings of raptor scouts fell all around him, their long dark bodies streamlined darts slowly twisting as they aimed their arm-long beaks plummeting down through the thick blue air. Uagen’s ankle motors hummed gently, keeping his pace up to that of the sleekly profiled raptor scouts. 974 Praf clung to his back, her body laid along his from nape to rump, her wings wrapped round his chest. She would have held them up if she’d dived separately. Her embrace was tight, and Uagen had already felt himself becoming breathless and had to ask her to slacken her grip to let him breathe.
He had half hoped the other dirigible behemothaur might have disappeared, but it was suddenly there; an alarmingly extensive area of darker blue deep beneath them. Uagen felt his heart sink, and wondered if the creature clamped to his back could feel his fear.
He tried to decide if he was really ashamed of being afraid, and decided that he was not. Fear was there for a purpose. It was wired into any creature that had not completely turned its back on its evolutionary inheritance and so remade itself in whatever image it coveted. The more sophisticated you became, the less you relied on fear and pain to keep you alive; you could afford to ignore them because you had other means of coping with the consequences if things went badly.
He wondered how imagination fitted in. He had a feeling it ought to. Any organism could learn to avoid experiences of a sort that had earlier resulted in damage and therefore pain, but with real intelligence came a more sophisticated form of anticipation of damage to oneself which pre-empted the injury. There should be a set of glyphs in this, he decided. He would work on them later, assuming he survived.
He looked up. Yoleus was invisible, its vast bulk lost in the scattering haze of air above. All he could see up there was the blob that was the infrared signalling pod and its attendant raptor scouts, falling after the main force as fast as possible. Around him, tearing down towards the vast blue shadow beneath, two hundred sleek blue-black shapes rustled and whistled in the thick, warm air.