The Wind Whales of Ishmael

by Philip José Farmer

  Usually the whale ended the dive and began rising with plenty of room to spare for the boats swinging behind it. Say, twenty feet or so. Yes, it was scary. Even the oldest hand became frightened when this happened, unless you were talking of Old Bharanhi.

  Old Bharanhi was the Paul Bunyan of the sailors of the air, and he was never frightened. He had lived long ago, when men were giants, and...

  With an explosion, the giant wing-sails snapped out from the beast's side, where they had been tightly folded. The starboard wing narrowly missed striking the harpoon line. The whale checked its speed, and the boat gained on it. There was nothing for Karkri to do. To have tried to haul in even more line would have meant being caught in the middle of a turn, and the unlocked spindle would run out the whole length of line. The length of the arc the boat would then describe as the whale turned upward would be deadly.

  Ishmael understood now why that first boat had crashed. The crew had not been able to haul up the boat to the animal as closely as they wished.

  Koojai, behind him, shrieked something. Perhaps it was a prayer, though it was considered bad form to say anything beyond what duty required, and then the forward part of the boat was snapped upward with a force that drove Ishmael's thighs against the strap and sent a pain shooting across his back.

  The sea charged them and then suddenly sprang aside. They were in the sky; then they were swinging back toward the sea.

  On the second swing, Ishmael saw why Koojai had cried out. The other whale, also coming up out of the dive, was heading for them.

  Apparently it saw that they were going to collide, for it rotated its wings to present a fully resistant surface to the air. It slowed and dipped, but not quite enough. Its head struck the other whale just back of its head, and the skin and the fragile bone of Ishmael's whale crumpled under the impact.

  The head also rammed into the line, jerking the boat and snapping the line.

  Ishmael was catapulted forward, saw the plum-colored skin expand out before him, hit it head-first, went through it like an arrow, struck a number of things -- organs and bones, probably -was turned on his back, while still falling, and went through the skin on the other side or the underpart. He could never be sure. He was half-conscious and half-aware that he was falling. The two behemoths were blurs above him; another and smaller blur might have been one of the boats.

  He did not remember striking the water, and that he did awake testified that he had fallen in feet-first and straight up. He was choking with the saltiness in his throat and nose, and he was fighting to get his head above the surface.

  Then his head cleared the heavy liquid, and a hundred yards away he saw something he never expected to see again, though he would never forget it. The black coffin floated on top of the water as if it were on the Styx and carrying Queequeg slowly, dawdling with the certainty that time did not count now, toward the other shore.

  A shadow flashed by. Beyond the coffin-canoe, by several hundred yards, the two whales, one entangled in the entrails of the other, crashed.

  The coffin lifted with the first wave, rolled, turned and headed toward him.

  He looked for the two boats and their crews. One boat was lying bent in half on the surface about a hundred yards away. Its flatness showed that the gas bladders had been broken, but one mast, minus a boom, projected drunkenly.

  He counted three heads of swimmers and several still floaters.

  Above, while tacking, two boats were sinking toward them.

  The coffin rushed bow-first at him. He reached up and gripped the carvings, as he had done after the sinking of the Pequod, and hauled himself onto it. The odor of pitch was still strong. After all, it had not been long, in terms of the days of his life, since the carpenter had nailed shut the lid and caulked the seams.

  It was evident that he had not dived. And even if, for instance, he had suffered a heart attack, he was not going to sink. He would have floated.

  Something had pulled him under. After a few minutes, Ishmael knew that it was keeping the man under. Up until then, Ishmael had taken it for granted that the seas were empty of life. He still could not believe that any fish existed in this poisonously salty element. The predator must be an air-breather.

  Ishmael shouted at the other men, telling them what had happened. They began to pull themselves toward the shore, and he began to paddle the coffin-buoy. As he did so, he felt a tingling in the hands, born of his fear that something would tear off a hand as it dipped into the water.

  But no such thing happened, and the other swimmers reached the shore unhurt. They helped Ishmael pull the buoy up on the quaking shore and then they gazed out over the sea. The bodies of the floaters had disappeared. Whatever it was that had seized the swimmer had also disposed of the corpses. Ishmael asked the sailors if they knew what prowled under the heavy sullen surfaces, and they replied that they knew nothing of the dead seas. They had never seen, or heard of, any life in them. But then they were inhabitants of the air, and they entered the dead seas only by accident.

  "But leave by permission of an unseen host," Ishmael said, shivering.

  The two air boats drifted in, sails furled, undermasts folded, and threw out lines which the men grabbed. They pulled the boats down and climbed aboard. Ishmael, looking back down at Queequeg's coffin, longed for it because it was his only link to home, the planet orbiting about the sun of dead Time. It also might be the only key to return, since, if a man could go ahead of time in Time, why not backtrack in Time? And it could be that the mysterious schematics carved on the lid of the coffin were in some as-yet-incomprehensible manner keys to be twisted against the tumblers of Time.

  On board the ship, he requested permission to be admitted to the captain. There he asked that a boat be sent back to pick up the coffin. At first Captain Baramha was outraged at the expenditure of time and energy if this were done. But Namalee overruled his denial, and Baramha accepted her ruling without apparent resentment. This was because she said that the coffin was a religious matter, and in religion she had the final word. Ishmael did not follow her reasoning, unless she thought that the coffin was his god, but he did not ask her to clarify. He was content to have the deed; the explanation could wait.

  Two boats went down, and the coffin was taken aboard and lashed down, one half supported on one boat and the other half on the second boat. The two crafts had been tied together for greater buoyancy and each had only two crewmen. Then the double-craft arose slowly, the mouth-creatures of the bladders eating triple portions of food to generate gas. Eventually, while the captain strode back and forth on his bridge, his lips moving soundlessly, the boats were drawn into the ports of the ship. The coffin was tied down in the center of gravity of the ship, and the boatmen went to work to help cut up and store the two whales that had been killed.

  Later the boats went out again, this time drawing pieces of meat behind them on bladders. When the air sharks came in for passes at the bait, they were harpooned. Those not killed at once followed the same rising and diving tactics as the whales, but they lacked the gas-generating capabilities or the weight of the leviathans.

  After a dozen sharks were killed, the ship resumed sailing. But it still lacked enough meat, so the first time it encountered another cloud of atmospheric brit, it hunted again. It was not until near the end of the long day that there was enough meat aboard to supply them until they reached Zalarapamtra.

  The last whale killed gave up to the cutting butchers a prize that would have been the cause of a great celebration at any other time.

  It was a round ivory-hard substance two feet in diameter, alternately striated with red, blue and black. It exuded a powerful perfume that caused drunkenness in those who came near. This was the same perfume that the little god of the ship, Ishnuvakardi, exuded.

  The ball was found in one of the smaller stomachs of the whale, the creature having many stomachs distributed along the bony framework of the tail. Namalee said that a certain small creature of the air, a vrishwanka,
was sometimes swallowed by a whale. It passed through the entrails that climbed around the skeleton of the tail until it was either eliminated or caught in a blind corner of a sac. If the latter happened, the digestive system of the whale secreted a substance around the vrishwanka just as an oyster did around a grain of sand.

  Namalee, during one of their many talks during the long, long journey back, told him of how the gods of Zalarapamtra were found and "born," as she called the process of carving.

  She also told him of how, when old whales died, their flesh fed their own bladders, and they rose upward where the sky became totally black in the daytime and there was little air. The mighty corpses drifted with the high winds eastward and then began to sink as, one after the other, the bladders burst from corruption. And somewhere at the foot of the insurmountable mountains to the east (which Ishmael knew were the once submarine slopes of continents) was a place where the dead whales ended up. There was a tangle of bones almost as high as the cliffs, since the beasts had been drifting there since time began. And there, of course, was an immense treasure of vrishkaw, of perfume-exuding unborn gods.

  The city that found the ancient burial grounds of the wind whales would be the richest in the world and hence the most powerful.

  And also the drunkenest, Ishmael thought. He envisioned a city thronged with such gods, the citizens reeling during waking hours, falling soddenly into bed, rising as intoxicated as when they went to bed.

  Many a ship from many a city had put out with the sole purpose of locating the burial ground, Namalee said. But it was near the eastern cliffs that the Purple Beasts of the Stinging Death were most numerous.

  "How do you know that?" Ishmael said.

  "Because none of the ships that look for the burial ground ever come back," she said. "Obviously they were caught by a Purple Beast."

  He raised his eyebrows and smiled.

  She said, "What are you thinking?"

  "That, strange as you and your people are to my way of thinking, you are still much like me and my people. The essential human has not changed. Whether that is good or not, I cannot say. Indeed, I cannot say that there is any good or evil beyond what each person thinks is beneficial or not to himself. When I think of the billions upon billions, the trillions upon trillions, who have lived and struggled for or against evil, which has been called many names but always wears a skull, then I wonder."

  What the white whale had been to Ahab, time was to Ishmael.

  The red sun finally went down, and the slowly chilling night came. Days and nights followed, though not swiftly. Ishmael learned everything there was to learn about sailing and navigating a ship of the air and also much about building one. He was a forecastle hand, yet he sometimes ate with the captain and Namalee. That he was clearly of a different race, of a totally unknown race, and that he claimed to be the son of a different sun and a different world, raised him above class distinctions.

  There was also the possibility that they thought him insane, though quite capable in many respects. They delighted to hear him talk of his own world, but they could not comprehend much of what he said. When they heard him say that the very air through which they sailed, so many thousands of feet above the ground, had once been filled with water, and that this water was filled with life unlike that which they knew, they could not believe him.

  Equally incredible was his insistence that the earth he had known shook only now and then and quite briefly.

  As the Roolanga neared Zalarapamtra, its crew became silent. The sailors talked, but only in very low tones, and they said little most of the time. They seemed lost in themselves, as if they were searching in their own minds for what they would do if they indeed did find their native country desolated. They went frequently into the chapel, as Ishmael called it, where Namalee was spending most of her waking and many of her sleeping hours. The box was off the little god all the time now, and Ishmael could not go by the open room without feeling his senses stumble.

  Namalee sat on the floor, facing the god, with her body leaning forward almost parallel to the floor and her head bent almost touching the floor. Her long black hair was thrown forward so that it spread out like a cloud of incense.

  Then the top of a mountain leaned out over the northwest horizon, and the captain called everybody to his post. They sailed all that day and into the night and when the red sun reluctantly came up again, they were overshadowed by the colossus. Dead ahead was a tremendous shelf of stone, and on the stone was the city of Zalarapamtra.

  A cry arose from the ship.

  The shelf was a jumble of rocks and debris.

  Ishmael had asked Namalee how men could live in stone chambers that shook and trembled and threatened to come down on their heads every instant.

  The answer was that few lived in the stone chambers. These were used for storage, for retreat from storms or enemies, and as places of worship they constituted the lower half of the city. The upper part was, in essence, a floating city. It consisted of two levels of hundreds of houses and larger buildings attached together and buoyed by thousands of great gas-bladders. The floating residential half was anchored at many places to the surface of the shelf, and passage between the floating city and the stone city was by means of ladders or flexible stairways.

  All of this had been destroyed. Something had broken the bladders and exploded and burned the upper levels. Their charred and shattered remains were strewn and piled over the stone part. And this had been blasted open at many places to expose the chambers beneath. Piles of fragmented rock lay everywhere.

  The Roolanga sailed back and forth before the tremendous shelf and several times over it before the captain decided to bring it into a dock. This was a sunken place carved into the lip of the shelf. The ship floated in with sails furled and the masts shipped. Sailors leaped off of the vessel as it slid into the rectangular depression, and they seized lines thrown them by those on the ship. The lines were run through carved stone rings projecting from the walls of the dock, looped through and then tightened. The ship slowed down even more and came to rest with the tip of its bow only a few inches from the rear wall of the dock. More gas was released from the great bladders, and the ship settled down until its keel almost touched the floor of the pier.

  Half of the crew of thirty stayed aboard; the other half went into the ruins.

  The shelf had its roots in an immense canyon, a slash in the body of the mountain. This rose so high that its top was a thread of dark blue. The massive shelf projected out into the air for perhaps half a mile, so that a shaft sunk through it would have ended in air and a view of the detritus-strewn slope beneath. Ishmael wondered that men would build on a ledge that was doomed to break off from the never-ending vibrations. But Namalee said that even if the stone did fall, it would snap off the anchors when it fell, and the two floating levels would remain in the air. That was the theory at least.

  Water was provided most of the year by a spring at the base of the innermost wall of the canyon and the rest of the year by pods harvested from the vegetation at the foot of the mountain.

  Ishmael thanked her for the information. He then asked her why she had been delegated to lead this party, when it would have been wiser to leave the only woman survivor, as far as anyone knew, on board. She replied that the members of the family of the Grand Admiral had many privileges which lesser beings did not have. To pay for these, they also had more obligations. Until a male member of her family was found, she was the leader and she must be at the head of any perilous undertaking.

  They climbed piles of stone and burned wood, skirted deep jagged holes and sometimes leaped over the holes. The blasts had ripped off the floor at many places, exposing the chambers beneath. These were partially filled with stone rubble or with the remains of the upper city.

  Nowhere was there even a single bone.

  "The Beast eats everything, flesh, bones, everything," Namalee said. "It settles down over the city after it has ruined it, and its stinging tentacles probe
into every place and sting those who still live. And it drags out the dead into its mouth. When it has eaten everything, it sleeps. And then it floats off, looking for other prey.

  "It has destroyed three cities during my lifetime: Avastshi, Prakhamarshri, and Manvrikaspa. It comes, and it kills, and it leaves few alive behind."

  "But it does leave some?" Ishmael said.

  He noted great streaks of some dirty white substance and wondered if the Beast left a slime.

  "Avastshi and Manvrikaspa were emptied of all life," she said. "A woman and two of her babies escaped in Prakhamashri because the entrance to the chamber in which she was hiding was blocked by rubble."

  "And did these cities come to life again when the whaling ships returned?" Ishmael said.

  "Only Prakhamashri thrives today," she said. "Whalers of the other two also returned with their daughters of the Grand Admiral. But they were few and one thing and another happened, and presently there were no women alive. So the surviving men boarded their ships and floated away with sails furled while they sniffed in the odors of the little gods and the great god, which they carried in the flagship. Then they hurled the gods overboard into the salty sea and jumped after them and the ships drifted on until they sank against the land."

  A national suttee, Ishmael told himself. If all the states have such customs, it is remarkable that mankind has survived this long. And I get the impression that there is not much of humanity walking around under this red sun.

  The party proceeded slowly toward the canyon while the rocks under their feet quivered. There was nothing but devastation around them and a silence broken only thinly by them. Then they heard a cry, and a moment later a head appeared from a hole in the rock near the mouth of the canyon. Another head popped out, then two more. One woman, one man and two girl children had escaped the Purple Beast of the Stinging Death.