Finally one of the body’s lobes had blotted out the view of the other, and it was~as though they were approaching an immense planet of glowing blue-green water.
What looked like five small suns were visible revolving with the vast shape, though they seemed too small to be stars. Their positioning implied there would be another two, hidden behind the world. As they got very close, matching rotational speed with the world and coming near enough to see the forming indentation they were heading for, with the tiny purple dot immediately behind it, Quilan saw what looked like la ers of clouds, just hinted at, inside. y
‘What is this place?’ Quilan said, not trying to keep the wonder and awe out of his voice.
‘They call them airspheres,’ Visquile said. He looked warily pleased, and not especially impressed. ‘This is a rotating twin- lobe example. Its name is the Oskendari airsphere.’
The airship dipped, diving still deeper into the thick air. They passed through one level of thin clouds like islands floating on an invisible sea. The airship wobbled as it went through the layer. Quilan craned his neck to see the clouds, lit from underneath by a sun far beneath them. He experienced a sudden sense of disorientation
Below, something appearing out of the haze caught his eye; a vast shape just one shade darker than the blueness all around. As the airship approached he saw the immense shadow the shape cast, stretching upwards into the haze. Again, something like vertigo struck him.
He’d been given a visor too. He put it on and magnified the view. The blue shape disappeared in a shimmer of heat; he took the visor off and used his naked eyes.
‘A dirigible behemothaur,’ Visquile said. Eweirl, suddenly back with them, took off his visor and shifted over to Quilan’s side of the gondola to look, imbalancing the airship for a moment. The shape below looked a little like a flattened and more complicated version of the craft they were in. Smaller shapes, some like other airships, some winged, flew lazily about it.
Quilan watched the smaller features of the creature emerge as they dropped down towards it. The behemothaur’s envelope skin was blue and purple, and it too possessed long lines of pale yellow-green frills which rippled along its length, seemingly propelling it. Giant fins protruded vertically and laterally, topped with long bulbous protrusions, like the wing-tip fuel tanks of ancient aircraft. Across its summit line and along its sides, great scalloped dark-red ridges ran, like three enormous, encasing spines. Other protrusions, bulbs and hummocks covered its top and sides, producing a generally symmetrical effect that only broke down at a more detailed level.
As they drew still closer, Quilan had to press himself against the frame of the little airship’s gondola window to see both ends of the giant below them. The creature must be five kilometres long, perhaps more.
‘This is one of their domains,’ the Estodien went on. ‘They have seven or eight others distributed round the outskirts of the galaxy. No one is entirely sure quite how many there are. The behemothaurs are as big as mountains and as old as the hills. They are sentient, allegedly, the remnant of a species or civilisation which Sublimed more than a billion years ago. Though again, only by repute. This one is called the Sansemin. It is in the power of those who are our allies in this matter.’
Quilan looked inquiringly at the older male. Visquile, still hunched over holding his glittering stave, made a shrugging motion.
‘You’ll meet them, or their representatives, Major, but you won’t know who they are.’
Quilan nodded, and went back to looking out the window. He considered asking why they had come to this place, but thought the better of it.
‘How long will we be here, Estodien?’ he asked instead.
‘For a while,’ Visquile said, smiling. He watched Quilan’s face for a moment, then said, ‘Perhaps two or three moons, Major. We won’t be alone. There are already Chelgrians here; a group of about twenty monks of the Abremile Order. They inhabit the temple ship Soulhaven, which is inside the creature. Well, most of it is. As I understand it only the fuselage and life support units of the temple ship are actually present. The vessel had to leave its drive units behind, somewhere outside, in space.’ He waved one hand. ‘The behemothaurs are sensitive to force-field technologies, we’re told.’
The superior of the temple ship was tall and elegant and dressed in a graceful interpretation of the order’s simple robes. He met them on a broad landing platform at the rear of what looked like a giant, gnarled, hollowed-out fruit stuck onto the behemothaur’s skin. They stepped from the airship.
‘Estodien Visquile.’
‘Estodien Quetter.’ Visquile made the introductions.
Quetter bowed fractionally to Eweirl and Quilan. ‘This way, he said, indicating a cleft in the behemothaur’s skin.
Eighty metres along a gently sloping tunnel floored with something like soft wood they came to a giant ribbed chamber whose atmosphere was oppressively humid and suffused with a vaguely charnel smell. The temple ship Soulhaven was a dark cylinder ninety metres in length and thirty across, taking up about half of the damp, warm chamber. It appeared to be tethered by vines to the chamber’s walls, and what looked like creepers had grown over much of its hull.
Quilan had, over the years of his soldiering, become used to encountering makeshift camps, temporary command posts, recently requisitioned command HQs and so on. Some part of him took in the feel of the place – the extemporised organisa- tion, the mix of clutter and orderliness – and decided that the Sou/haven had been here for about a month.
A pair of large drones, each the shape of two fat cones set base to base, floated up to them in the dimness, humming gently. Visquile and Quetter both bowed. The two floating machines tipped briefly towards them. ‘You are Quilan,’ said one. He could not tell which. ‘Yes,’ he said. Both machines floated very close to him. He felt the fur round his face stand on end, and smelled something he could not identify. A breeze blew round his feet.
QUILAN MISSION GREAT SERVICE HERE TO PRE- PARE TEST LATER TO DIE AFRAID?
He was aware that he had flinched backwards and had almost taken a step away. There had been no sound, just the words ringing in his head. Was he being spoken to by the gone- before?
AFRAID? the voice said in his head once more.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not afraid, not of death.’
CORRECT DEATH NOTHING.
The two machines withdrew to where they had hovered before.
WELCOME ALL. SOON PREPARE.
Quilan sensed both Visquile and Eweirl rock back as if caught in a sudden gust of wind, though the other Estodien, Quetter, did not budge. The two machines made the tipping motion again. Apparently they were dismissed; they returned down the tunnel to the outside.
Their own quarters were, mercifully, here on the exterior of the giant creature, in the giant hollowed-out bulb they had landed near. The air was still cloyingly humid and thick, but if it smelled of anything it smelled of vegetation and so seemed fresh in comparison to the chamber where the Soulhaven rested.
Their luggage had already been off-loaded. Once they had settled, they were taken on a tour of the behemothaur’s exterior by the same small airship they’d arrived on. Anur, a gangly, awkward-looking young male who was the Soulhaven’s most junior monk, escorted them, explaining something of airspheres’ legendary history and hypothesised ecology.
‘We think there are thousands of the behemothaurs,’ he said as they slid under the bulging belly of the creature, beneath hanging jungles of skin foliage. ‘And almost a hundred megalithine and gigalithine globular entities. They’re even bigger; the biggest are the size of small continents. People are even less sure whether they’re sentient or not. We shouldn’t see any of those or the other behemothaurs because we’re so low in the lobe. They pretty well never descend this far. Buoyancy problems.’
‘How does the Sansemin manage to stay down here?’ Quilan asked.
The young monk looked at Visquile before answering. ‘It’s been modified,’ he said. He pointed up at a dozen or so dangling pods large enough to contain two full-grown Chelgrians. ‘Here you can see some of the subsidiary fauna being grown. These will become raptor scouts when they bud and hatch.’
Quilan and the two Estodiens sat with bowed heads in the innermost recessional space of the Soulhaven, a nearly spheri- cal cavity only a few metres in diameter and surrounded by two-metre-thick walls made from substrates holding millions of departed Chelgrian souls. The three males were arranged in a triangle facing inwards, fur-naked.
It was the evening of the day they had arrived, by the time the Soulhaven kept. To Quilan it felt like the middle of the night. Outside, it would be the same eternal but ever changing day as it had been for a billion and a half years or more.