Demon (GAIA) (35 page)

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.”

At last they came to a broader passage, and Cirocco stepped into it. About twenty meters in diameter it seemed to stretch to infinity in either direction.

“Central Park,” Cirocco said. And indeed, there were tree-like organisms growing from the walls, pale and skeletal. They shrank from the light. Cirocco pointed forward. “Come on. It’s only about a mile.”

It was an odd mile. They were on top of a gasbag and the netting was much thicker, almost solid beneath their feet. And they bounced. It was like walking on a sea of pillows.

After a long time the corridor widened and there was light. They came into a vast, shapeless room. The floor sloped down to a transparent membrane cross-hatched with thin cables, bulging out from the internal pressure. It was cool in here, just as it had been everywhere inside the blimp.

“The B-24 Lounge,” Cirocco said, and started scanning the piles of colorful cloth. Nova moved forward, almost to the giant window. She realized she was in the nose of the creature, and slightly on the
underside. It was the view a bombardier would have had in an old military plane, and it was magnificent. Far below, the ground crawled by in a slow and stately parade that had been going on for sixty thousand years.

Her foot hit something solid in a pile of cloth. She looked down, and gasped. It was a human foot: brown, withered, attached to a scrawny leg. The toes wiggled. She looked up and saw the face of an old, old man, completely bald, brown as mahogany, showing strong white teeth in a satisfied smile.

“My name is Calvin, dear,” the old man said. “And you’re the prettiest thing I’ve seen in a long time.”

***

She never did get to see much of Calvin. He moved around, but was always so swaddled in windings of cloth that only his head was visible.

“Only real problem with this life,” he said at one point, “…only real problem’s staying warm. Old Whistlestop, he likes to go where it’s cold. So how’s August doing, Rocky?”

Cirocco explained that August had been dead for a long, long time. Nova watched him, and wasn’t sure the old man understood it. He then went on to ask about others, all of them dead. Each time he shook his head sadly. Only once did Cirocco seem upset, and that was when he asked her about Gaby.

“She’s…she’s fine, Calvin. She’s doing just fine.”

“That’s real nice.”

Which was crazy, since Nova knew all about Gaby.

She finally realized Calvin was almost as old as Cirocco. He looked every year of it. And yet, he seemed spry enough, and quite happy and alert. It was only the business of inquiring about the dead that hinted of senility.

He bumbled around the chilly cave, rummaging in straw baskets, coming up with wooden bowls and bone knives and a cutting board. Cirocco sat next to Nova and spoke quietly to her.

“He’s not crazy, Nova. I don’t think he understands death. And I don’t think he has any conception of time. He’s lived up here for ninety-five years, and he’s the happiest man I ever knew.”

“Here it is!” Calvin crowed, coming up with a large wooden container. He came back to the flat surface where Cirocco and Nova were sitting cross-legged, and where he had already assembled bowls of salad and raw vegetables, and a huge jug of something he called mead.

“Just getting good,” he said, then glanced at Nova. “Better bundle up some, girl. Get cozy.”

Nova had been getting chilled, but was suspicious of the piles of rags. She had noticed some of the little blind, hairless mice crawling out of one pile. But the fabric didn’t smell dirty.

“The blimp exudes this stuff,” Cirocco said, pulling folds around her. “It makes good cold-weather gear. Go ahead, it’s clean. Everything in here is clean.”

“Always is, in a blimp,” Calvin chuckled. He was using a wooden spoon to ladle thick and chunky soup into bowls. “Try this…Nova you said your name was? Nice name, I like that name. New and bright, and you look shiny as can be. This is my special gazpacho. Made from only the finest grown-in-Gaea ingredients.” He chuckled again as he handed Nova a bowl. “Used to, I’d come down once a year for a hot meal. Then I realized it’d been a while since I’d done it, and I hadn’t missed it any.”

“I think you came down twice, you old fool,” Cirocco said. Calvin had a good laugh at that.

“Oh, now, Rocky. That can’t be right. Can it?” He looked thoughtful for a moment, started to count on his fingers, but got lost quickly. Nova was trying not to laugh because she thought he’d be offended. He was quite nice, if befuddled.

“Now don’t you be afraid of that, honey,” he told her. “You treat it with respect, though. I don’t much care for heating my food, but I don’t mind it
hot
, if you catch my meaning.”

Nova did not, unfortunately. She sniffed, and liked the smell, so she took a big spoonful. It was based on tomato and celery and was good and spicy and cold. She took another mouthful…and then the first one hit her. She swallowed, gasped, and felt the stuff searing her nasal passages and burning behind her eyeballs. She lunged for the glass of mead and swallowed a whole beaker. It went down well.
It had a honey taste.

Even the gazpacho was good, if taken in cautious sips. They all sat together and ate, and it was a fine meal, if a little noisy. All the raw vegetables crunched. They sounded like rabbits. Nova suspected she’d miss having meat after a while, but Calvin did well with his vegetarian, heatless cuisine.

And the mead was
terrific.
Not only did it cool down the spicier foods, it made her feel warm, loose, and nicely fuzzy around the edges.

***

“Time to wake up, Nova.”

“Wha…” She sat up quickly. Her head was hurting and she had a hard time focusing on Cirocco. “What time is it?”

“It’s a few hours later.” Cirocco smiled at her. “My dear, I think you got a wee bit drunk.”

“I
did
?” She was about to tell Cirocco it was the first time, then realized it would make her sound like a child, so she laughed. Then she thought she was going to be sick, but the feeling passed. “Well, what do we do now?”

“That’s it,” Cirocco said. “We’ll get you sobered up a little, then we go back to the Junction. I’m ready to move.”

The Titanides had labored eight revs to produce the feast. There was a whole roasted smiler, and eels and fish cooked, jellied, stuffed back into their skins, and suspended artfully in clear savory aspic. The fruit course was a towering edifice shaped like a Christmas tree, bulging with a hundred varieties of Gaean berries, melons, pomes, and citrines, garnished by leaves of spun green sugar and glowing internally from a myriad glowbes. There were ten pâtés, seven kinds of bread, three soup tureens, rickety pagodas of smiler ribs, clever pastries with crusts thin as soap bubbles…the mind reeled. Cirocco had not seen such a spread since the last Purple Carnival, twenty years ago.

There was enough food for a hundred humans or twenty Titanides. With just nine people to eat it all.

Cirocco took a little of this and a little of that, and sat back, chewing slowly, watching her companions. It was a shame, really, that she was not hungrier. Everything tasted very good.

She knew she was the luckiest of women. Long, long ago, when she might have worried about her weight, it had never been necessary. She could eat as much as she wanted and never put on a gram. Since becoming Wizard her mass had been as low as forty kilograms—after a sixty-day fast—and as high as seventy-five. It was largely a matter of conscious choice. Her body had no fixed metabolic set point.

Just now she was at the high end of that range. Three visits to the fountain of youth in less than a kilorev was an unprecedented frequency. She had an even layer of fat all over her body, and her breasts, buttocks, and thighs had become voluptuous. She smiled inwardly, remembering how the tall and gangly, slat-thin fifteen-year-old Cirocco Jones would have killed for breasts like this. The tredecenial
Cirocco found them a minor but necessary nuisance. They would come in handy in the grueling days ahead. Eventually they would be consumed.

In the meantime, Conal was acting even more awe-struck than usual.

He was sitting to her left, having a good time. Robin sat next to him. They kept offering things to each other. Since no one could eat much of any one thing, it made sense to point out a special delicacy, but Cirocco suspected it was more than that with these two. She thought if the meal had been stale C-rations, they would still be giggling like kids.

I ought to be shocked, Cirocco thought.

She had a feeling it would end badly, that it probably should not have even started. Then she chided herself. That was the safe view. If you looked at life that way, your regrets for things undone and untried would forge an endless chain to rattle in your later years. She silently saluted their courage and wished them well.