Uagen took hold of his right foot. ‘Yes.’
‘Do you have another?’
Uagen chewed on one of his toenails. ‘Umm. Not really, no.
974 Praf tilted her head. ‘Hmm.’
Uagen scratched his head. ‘I suppose I’d better go after it.’
‘It is your only one.’
Uagen let go with his hand and tail, dropping into the air to follow the instrument. 974 Praf released her claw holds and followed him.
The air was very warm and thick; it roared around Uagen’s ears, buffeting.
‘I am reminded,’ 974 Praf said as they plummeted together. ‘What?’ Uagen said. He clipped the writing tablet to his belt, popped a pair of wind-goggles over his already watering eyes and twisted in the air to keep an eye on the stylo, which was almost out of sight. Such styli were small but very dense and also effectively, if unintentionally, quite streamlined. It was falling alarmingly quickly. His clothes fluttered and snapped like a flag in a gale.
Uagen’s tasselled hat flew off; he grabbed at it but it floated away upwards. Above, the cloud-sized bulk of the dirigible behemothaur Yoleus drew slowly away as they fell.
‘Shall I get your hat?’ 974 Praf shouted over the wind roar. ‘No, thank you,’ Uagen yelled. ‘We can retrieve it on the way back up.’
Uagen twisted back round and peered into the blue depths. The stylo was tearing through the air like a crossbow quarrel.
974 Praf drifted closer to Uagen until her beak was close to his right ear and her body feathers were fluttering in the disturbed air just past his shoulder. ‘As I was saying,’ she said.
‘Yes?’
‘The Yoleus would know more of your conclusions regarding your theory on the effects of gravitational susceptibility influenc- ing the religiosity of a species with particular reference to their eschatological beliefs.’
Uagen was losing sight of the stylo. He glanced round, frowning at 974 Praf. ‘What, now?’
‘I just remembered.’
‘Umm, well. Just wait a moment, can’t you … ? I mean, this thing’s fairly hurtling away down here.’ Uagen fingered a button on his left wrist cuff; his clothes sucked in about him and stopped flapping. He assumed a diving position, placing his hands together and wrapping his tail round his legs. By his side, 974 Praf drew her wings in tighter and also took on a more aerodynamic aspect.
‘I cannot see the thing you dropped.’
‘I can. Just. I think. Oh, bugger and blast.’
It was getting away from him. The stylo’s air resistance must be just that little less than his, even in a head-down dive. He looked at the Interpreter for a moment. ‘I think I’ll have to power down to it,’ he shouted.
974 Praf seemed to draw herself in, bringing her wings even closer to her body and stretching her neck. She gained very slightly on Uagen, starting to move past him downwards, then relaxed, and drifted back up. ‘I cannot go any faster.’
‘Right, then. I’ll see you in a bit.’
Uagen clicked a couple of buttons on his wrist. Tiny motors in his ankle bracelets swung out and revved up. ‘Keep clear!’ he shouted to the Interpreter. The motors’ propeller blades were expandable, and while he would not need much extra power to increase his rate of fall sufficiently to catch up with the stylo, he had a horror of accidentally mincing one of Yoleus’ most trusted servants.
974 Praf had already angled a few metres away. ‘I shall attempt to catch your hat and try not to become eaten by falficores.’
‘Oh. Right.’
Uagen’s speed through the air increased; the wind howled in his ears and tiny popping, crackling sounds from his ears and skull cavities told him the pressure was increasing. He had lost sight of the stylo just for a moment and now it seemed to be quite gone, swallowed up by the oceanic blue of the apparently infinite sky.
If only he’d kept his eyes on it he was sure he’d still be able to see it now. There was a similarity here, perhaps, with the glyph of the suddenly visible falficores. Something to do with perceptual concentration, with the way that one’s vision pulled meaning from the semi-chaos of the visual field.
Perhaps the stylo had drifted away to one side. Perhaps a well-camouflaged raptor, mistaking it for a meal, had swept in and gobbled it up. Perhaps he would not regain sight of it until — having started out so low — they both hit the in-sloping side of the sphere. He supposed he might see it bounce. How steep was the slope? The airsphere was not really a sphere, indeed neither of its two lobes was a sphere; at a certain level the bottom of the airsphere’s curving sides inverted, dipping under the mass of the detritus neck.
How far away were they from the pole line, of the airsphere? He recalled they’d been quite near; by all accounts the gigalithine lenticular entity Buthulne hadn’t strayed far from the pole line for several decades. Perhaps he would have to land on the detritus neck! He peered downwards. No sign of anything solid ahead at all. Besides, he’d been told you’d have to fall for days before you’d even see it. And anyway, if the stylo fell into the rubbish and muck of the neck, he’d never find it. Gracious, there were things down there. He might, as 974 Praf had put it, become eaten.
What if he landed on the detritus neck just as it was about to eject! Then he would surely die. In vacuum! As part of a glorified dung ball! How horrible!
Airspheres migrated round the galaxy, orbiting once every fifty to a hundred million years, depending on how close they were to the centre. They swept up dust and gas on their forward-facing sides, and from their bases, every few hundred thousand years, they passed the waste that their scavenger flora and fauna had not been able to process any further. Droppings the size of small moons issued from globular impos- sibilities as big as brown dwarfs, leaving a trail of detritus globes scattered through the spiral arms that dated the bizarre worlds’ first appearance in the galaxy to one and a half billion years earlier.
People assumed airspheres must be the work of intelligence, but really nobody — or at least nobody willing to share their thoughts on the matter — had any idea. The mega fauna might know, but — frustratingly for scholars like Uagen Zlepe — crea- tures like Yoleus were so far, far beyond the term Inscrutable that for all practical purposes the word might as well have been a synonym of Forthright, or A Simple-Hearted Chatterbox.
Uagen wondered how fast he was falling now. Perhaps if he fell too fast he would fly straight into the stylo and impale and kill himself. How delightfully ironic! But painful. He checked his velocity on a little read-out in the corner of one eye-goggle. He was falling at twenty-two metres per second, and this rate of descent was smoothly increasing. He adjusted his speed to a constant twenty.
He turned his attention back to the blue gulf ahead and below, and saw the stylo, wobbling fractionally as it fell as though somebody invisible was doodling a spiral with it. He judged that he was drifting towards the thing at a satisfactory rate. When he was a few metres away he cut his speed still further, until he was catching up with the instrument no quicker than a feather might fall through still air.
Uagen reached out and caught the stylo. He tried to halt his fall the impressive way, the way a person of action might (Uagen, for all his studiousness, was a sucker for action adventures, however implausible), by swinging himself round so that his feet were underneath him and the propeller blades on his ankle bracelets were biting down into the air rushing up towards and past him. In retrospect, he had probably stood a good change of mutilating himself with his own propellers, but instead he just lost all control and tumbled chaotically through the air, shouting and cursing, trying to keep his tail curled up tight and away from the propellers and letting go of the stylo again.
He spread out his limbs and waited until there was some sort of regularity to his tumble, then twisted back into a dive to regain control, and once more looked about for the stylo. He could see the vaguest hint of Yoleus’ shape, high, high above, and a tiny outline — just close enough to be a shape and not a dot — also above and to one side. This looked like 974 Praf. And there was the stylo; now above him, just stopping tumbling and beginning to settle into its crossbow quarrel attitude. He used his wrist controls to reduce power to the propellers.
The wind roar decreased; the stylo fell gently into his hand. He attached it to the side of the writing tablet, then used his wrist controls to feather and then repitch the motors’ blades. Blood rushed to his head, adding another roaring to that of the wind and making the blue view pulse and darken. His necklace — a gift from his aunt Silder, presented just before he left — slid down under his chin.