The Wind Whales of Ishmael

Ishmael went up the tentacle as if he were climbing a line on the Pequod.

His weight pulled it downward hard against the trees.

A dart struck the tentacle just above his head.

The beast was turning its tentacles inward and shooting at him but striking itself.

Ishmael released his hold, fell back about five feet, and crashed into a plant leaning at a forty-five degree angle from the ground. It bent under him until it snapped, and he fell the rest of the way.

The monster abruptly soared, then settled, wobbling, and grabbed a number of plants and pulled itself away.

Ishmael rolled as far as he could, got to his feet, and ran forward until he was stopped by a net of creepers. He bounced back, fell, got up, and ran around the creepers.

He stopped to look behind him.

A huge mass was settling like a cloud upon the tops of the plants. It seemed to lose its outline and to melt over and down into the jungle.

Ishmael could not clearly see the underside of the shivaradoo, but he could detect no movement of the tentacles.

Suddenly, a long torpedo-shape with an enormous head and teeth gleaming whitely in the moonlight shot out of the night.

It bit once at one of the humps on the back of the sagging pancake creature, and the hump exploded. The air shark, scenting death, had come in swiftly. Another appeared behind the first and anchored itself by biting into the loose skin of the destroyed hump. It also rotated its wing-fins to eliminate the pressure of the wind on them.

Ishmael wondered if the poison which had killed the shivaradoo was strong enough to spread through the body and also kill the air sharks.

He had no time to watch for such a development. He turned around swiftly at a noise behind him. It had sounded as if a large body was trying to move stealthily through the jungle. He got down on his knees and waited with the stone knife. Then he heard a deep and familiar breathing, and he said, softly, "Namalee."

"I could not allow you to sacrifice yourself," she said. "I wanted to help, so... oh!"

She had seen the shivaradoo, draped over the tree-tops like a cloth.

He told her what had happened, and she took his hand and kissed it.

"Zalarapamtra and Zoomashmarta will thank you," she said.

"I could have used their help a moment ago."

They continued walking, skirting the dead beast, which was now being torn at by half a dozen sharks. They walked for hour and then lay down again to sleep. Though very tired, Ishmael kept waking up because of the cold. The end of the night was on them, and the temperature, he estimated, was down to about forty above zero, Fahrenheit.

He tore off a huge leaf and climbed into Namalee's hammock-leaf, wrapped his arms around her, and covered himself and her with the leaf. She did not object, though she did turn her back to him. He went to sleep at once and dreamed of that first night in the Spouter-I

They continued north, sleeping four times, catching the twin-noses and cockroaches, which tasted much like crabs, and several other animals, including a flying snake. This was one of the few beasts of the air which lacked a gas bladder. Some of its ribs had developed into great wings which it was able to flap up and down in crude imitation of a bird's wings. Another night passed with its perils, and another sun arose.

"How long before we reach your city?" Ishmael said.

"I do not know," she said. "By ship, it would take us, I calculate, about twenty days. Perhaps it will take us five times that long."

"About four hundred of the days of my world," he said. He did not groan, because time was not such a precious currency to a whaler. But he would have preferred to ride. It was heavy and exasperating labor to force a path through this dense complex. He envied the beasts that sailed with such seeming effortlessness through the clouds.

At noon of that day, they saw another of the many immense clouds of billions of tiny red animals, each borne by its umbrella-shaped head. And there were the leviathans that followed and fed upon the air brit. And there was a great ship of the air. Namalee stood up, dropping the white meat of the insect she had caught only an hour before. She stood silent for a long time after an initial gasp. Then she smiled.

"It is from Zalarapamtra!"

The ship looked like a huge, rather elongated cigar beneath which hung a very thin mast and yardarms and sails and on both sides of which, at right angles to the hull, were two masts and sails. The sails, fore-and-aft rigged, were so thin that the dark-blue sky could be seen through them. At the stern were horizontal and vertical rudders.

"It's not as flat as it looks from here," she said in answer to his question. "If you could see it closer up, you would see that in profile it is twelve men high." The ship was following a pod of about thirty leviathans, which, spreading out their double pair of dragon- shaped wings, veined with red and black and green and purple, their tremendous cylindrical bodies and huge heads gleaming silver, were driving through the clouds of air brit.

"How...?" Ishmael said, and she put a hand on his arm.

"Watch," she said.

The ship had a full spread of sails. It was traveling swiftly but not swiftly enough to catch up with the whales. Then a smaller object, followed a moment later by another, put out from the big ship.

These were needle-shaped, and the crew lay down in them, Namalee told him, standing only when there was work to be done. The extra rounding on the nose contained a larger bladder than elsewhere. This was necessary because the harpooner stood there when the time came to strike and because the harpoon and its long line were stored there.

He watched as masts were extended above and below the whaleboat and out to both sides. Then the transparent sails were unfurled, and the boat began to speed toward the red cloud.

"How do they manage to drop and furl the sails without going out on the arms?"

"It's done from on board," she said. "The arrangement was invented, so it is said, by Zalarapamtra, but I think that it was used a long time before he was born."

A whaling boat sped on the trail of a leviathan that seemed to be unaware of it. It passed through stratum after stratum of redness, the density of population of the animalcules varying from time to time. It came even with the great beast, and passed on the other side of the red cloud, so that Ishmael could not see it. Ishmael turned to watch the passing creatures and then he saw the leviathan in the rear of the pod suddenly rise. A silvery sheet fell from it, the ballast of water which it stored in a bladder for two reasons: one, to draw upon when its body needed it; two, for emergencies, when it loosed it to gain levitation swiftly.

"It can float for a long time in air in which men would strangle in a short time," Namalee said. "And sometimes a whale is great enough to drag a boat up there, and then the harpooner must cut the line before he becomes too confused to know what he is doing."

The beast had by then taken the boat so high that both were lost in the dark blue. The brit-cloud was northeast of the two watchers on the ground and within half an hour would be touching the horizon. But the ship itself had turned away from the brit and was ru