Titan

No, Cirocco decided, that was not quite true. She was an air- ship 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-129 quite well.

The shape was the same: an elongated cigar, blunt at the nose, tapering to a point at the stem. There was even some sort of gondola slung beneath, though farther back than in the Hindenberg. The color was wron& 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, thi

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 that 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 dou- bled 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 mo- ment, 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 cats plants, and very little of that. He can't cat too much, or held 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, Calvini 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. Ci- rocw 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 stu

"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 long time, 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 lookedat Gaby strangely, but said nothing. They went

into the mouth, found themselves in a narrow, translucent tube with a thin floor over even thi

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-ski

They could see out on all sides, and found they were already some distance from the cliff face.

"If this place isn't Whistiestop's stomach, what is it?" Cirocco asked.

Calvin looked puzzled. "I never said it wasn't his stomach. This is his food we're standingon."

Gaby moaned and tried to nm '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.cats their end product. His digestive juices can't hurt you 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."

"Fu

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 larg- er 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 hydrogren 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 tom they usually die.

"They're not very maneuverable. They don'thave much fine control, and it takes them a long time to get moving. A fire can trap them sometimes. If they can't get away, they go up like a bomb."

"What about all these creatures in here?" Cirocco asked. 'Do they need all of them to digest their food?"

"No, just the little yellow ones. Those things can't eat anything but what a blimp prepares for them. You won't find them anywhere but in a blimp's stomach. The rest of these critters are like us. Hitchhikers or passengers."

"I don't get it. Why does the blimp do it?', "It's symbiosis, combined with the intelligence to make his own choices and do as he pleases. His race gets along with other races in here, the Titanides in particular. He does them favors, and they return it by-"

"Titanides?" He snffled uncertainly, and spread his hands. "It's a word I substitute for a whistle he uses. I only get a hazy idea of what they're like because I can't do too well with complex descriptions. I gather they're six-legged, and they're all females. I call them Titanides because that's the name in Greek mythology for female Titans. I've been naming other things, too."

"Such as?"

"The regions and the rivers and the mountain ranges. I named the land areas after the Titans."

"What ... oh, yeah, I remember now." Calvin had studied mythology as a hobby. "Who were the Titans, again?"

"The sons and daughters of Uranus and Gaea. Gaea appeared from Chaos. She gave birth to Uranus, made him her equal, and they produced the Titans, six men and six women. I named the days and nights here after them, since there's six days and six nights."

"If you named all the nights after women, I'm going to think up names of my own."

He smiled. "No such thing. It's pretty much at random. Look back there at the frozen ocean. That seemed like it ought to be Oceanus, so that's what I called it. The country we're over now is Hyperion, and that night over there in front of us, with the mountains and the irregular sea, is Rhea. When you face Rhea from Hyperion, north is to your left and south is to your right. After that, going around the circles haven't seen most of these, you understand, but I know they're there-I call them Crius, which you can just see, then around the bend are Phoebe, Tethys, Thea, Metis, Dione, lapetus, Cronus, and Mnemosyne. You can see Mnernosyne on the other side of Oceanus, behind us. It looks like a desert."