The Wind Whales of Ishmael

by Philip José Farmer

  They had also escaped the men of Booragangah, who had come after the Beast had left.

  They had returned to the deepest chamber and there the man had swung shut an immense door of stone which he had worked hard for years to shape. They had lived on water and food stored there for just such an emergency. But they had been lucky to get to the room, because the onslaught of the Beast had been unexpected and terrible and seemingly on all points at once.

  "And then, almost immediately after it left, the ships of the Booragangah came," the man said. "It was still night, so I slipped out and hid in the rubble and listened. Men of Zalarapamtra! Namalee, daughter of the Grand Admiral! The men of Booragangah boasted that they had lured the Beast here! Their ships had sighted one headed toward their city. Perhaps it would have attacked them and perhaps it would have missed them. One never knows about the kahamwoodoo. It floats along as if it were a cloud, and it does not seem to care to do anything but float most of the time. But sometimes it changes its course and heads for a city, and that city is doomed.

  "But the Booragangah whalers caught whales and fed them to the kahamwoodoo, losing two ships that got too close, though. The kahamwoodoo finally turned after them..."

  "How?" Ishmael said. "I thought the Beast had no wing-sails."

  "By a series of small controlled explosions," Namalee said. "It shoots out fire and smoke with much noise from holes in its bodies. The thing that makes the noise and smoke is also the thing it drops on the cities to blow them apart."

  "A beast that shoots gunpowder and drops bombs?" Ishmael said. He used the English words for gunpowder and bombs, since these did not exist in Namalee's language.

  "The men of Booragangah said that their Grand Admiral, who was in charge of their great whaling fleet, conceived the idea. His name is Shamvashra. Remember that, citizens of Zalarapamtra! Shamvashra! He is the fiend of the upper air who has destroyed our city!"

  Ishmael thought that Shamvashra was only doing what they would have done if they had thought of it, but he said nothing.

  "It was necessary, they said, to work harder than they ever had in their lives. They had to keep on slaying whales and launching them toward the Beast. And they lost a ship with all men aboard while they were hunting food for the Beast when one was struck by two whales diving through the brit with the boats attached to them. But the men said that the ships they had lost made a price worth paying, because they had lured the Beast to Zalarapamtra. They said that they might try to do the same with other Beasts for all of their enemies, and then they would fear no other cities, because there would be none.

  "Other men said that that would be bad. What if they met a Beast that could not be lured away and it destroyed Booragangah? That would be the end of man.

  "But most seemed to be happy about what they had done. So they took our great god, Zoomashmarta, and all the lesser gods, put them aboard their ships and sailed away."

  At these words, a cry went up from the sailors and from Namalee; they wept and some gashed themselves.

  "No gods!" Namalee cried. "Zalarapamtra is without gods! They are prisoners of Booragangah!"

  "We are lost!" a sailor shouted.

  The man who was telling the story said, "I heard them say that they would be coming back some day and making sure that we did not build a new great city. They would surprise the people who returned on the ships and would slay them or carry them off as slaves. And this place would know only the air sharks, sweeping above the ruins and eyeing them in vain for life on which to feed."

  "We will be powerless without our gods!" another man said.

  They found no other survivors. On returning to the ship, the crew spread the news. The captain, informed by Namalee, turned gray and cut himself so deeply in his grief that he came close to dying of loss of blood.

  Until they landed, they had all believed that, horrible as the situation was, they would flourish again. After all, they had their gods. Though these might permit disaster to fall upon Zalarapamtra, they would not permit their worshippers to die out. Who then would the gods have to worship them?

  They had not considered, of course, that Avastshi and Manvrikaspa had had their gods, and these had permitted their worshippers to die to the last one.

  They were a gloomy crew and, what was worse, hopeless. Gloom derived from despair is something that hope can overcome, but hope can only come if something occurs to make things seem not hopeless. Even the arrival in the next three days of five whaling ships did not reassure them. If anything, the addition of more people seemed to add to the despair. The city was almost as silent as when it had held but four people in hiding.

  Six more days passed. There was more activity then, since it was necessary to put to air and hunt for food. Captain Baramha died from infection of his wounds and a lack of desire to live. His ship took him out high above the dead seas and, after a short ceremony, his naked body was slid overboard from a plank.

  "You still have the gods of the ships," Ishmael said. "Why can't...?"

  "They have power only over the ship," she said. "They are very little gods. No, we must have the gods of the city and the greatest god, Zoomashmarta."

  "Otherwise you just all give up and die, is that it?" Ishmael said.

  They did not reply, and it was evident from their faces that that was exactly what they would do. They were sitting around a number of fires in an underground chamber which had been repaired. The fires were small and comparatively smokeless. Ventilation was provided by holes in the ceiling, and light by giant fireflies in cages. The room quivered with the earth tide.

  Ishmael wondered how many human beings were alive on the face of this Earth. If they all had such fatalistic attitudes, they would often encounter situations where it would be easier to give up and let death take over. Was this indeed happening everywhere? Had mankind been so long a voyager in time that he had wearied of the journey? Were the slow red sun and the nearing moon constant reminders that the struggle could end in only one way?

  Or were the societies of the South Pacific sea bottoms the only ones to have this attitude? Did groups elsewhere have the unceasing drive, the desire to live, that had possessed human beings in Ishmael's day?

  Ishmael looked at Namalee and became angry. It was not right that such a beautiful young woman should be surrendering to death just because of some carved pieces of perfumed ivory.

  He stood up and spoke loudly. The others, squatting, looked up at him expectantly. Consciously or not, he realized, they had prayed that he, the stranger, would not be bound by their customs and laws and would give them that spark they lacked.

  "When you hunt the great wind whale, you are not cowards," Ishmael said. "I know that. No craven gets into a tiny boat and strikes deep into the head of such a monster and then lets that monster drag him so high and so low with death whistling like the wind past his ears every second.

  "And I am sure that when it comes to fighting other men, you are as brave."

  He paused, looked around, noting that the women were looking directly at him but that the men were looking at the floor.

  "But," he said even more loudly, "you need to get your courage from something outside you! You must have your gods if you are to act like men! Your courage is breathed into you from the outside! It does not live within you and breathe on your heart and make it as hot as the coals of those fires!"

  "It is the gods who control this world!" Namalee said. "What can we do without them?"

  Ishmael paused. What indeed could they do? Nothing, unless he did something for them first. And he had been so accustomed to the spectator's part, or to a minor role, that he now found it strange and frightening to be the prime mover, the chief actor.

  "What can you do without the gods?" he said. "You can act as if you did have them!" And so he paraphrased the dictum of an old German philosopher who could never have dreamed that his words would live again under an enormous red sun at the end of time.

  "Once your gods did not exist!" he said.
"So the people created them! Your own religion says that! I asked Namalee why, if you did this once, you can't do it again, and she said that it was all right in the old days but is no longer permitted! Very well! But your gods are not destroyed! They are only absent! They have been stolen! So what is to prevent you from stealing them back?

  "After all, a god is a god even if he does not dwell in the house of his worshippers! And who knows, it is highly probable that Zoomashmarta allowed this calamity to fall in order to test you. If you find courage in yourselves, and go after Zoomashmarta and take him back, then you have passed the test! But if you sit around a fire and sorrow until your grief kills you, then you have failed!"

  Namalee stood up and said, "What would you have us do?"

  "You need a man to lead you who does not think quite as you do!" Ishmael said. "I will lead you! I will make new weapons, if I can find the materials, weapons such as no men have known for ages! Or if these weapons cannot be made, then we will depend on stealth and cunning! But I will ask a price for leading you."

  "What is that price?" Namalee said.

  "You will make me your Grand Admiral," Ishmael said.

  He did not feel it necessary to add that he wanted to find a home. He had traveled enough and seen too much to desire more travel and more wonders.

  "And you, Namalee, will be my wife," he said. The captains and the officers did not know what to say. This was the first time that a stranger had asked to be elected as Grand Admiral. Didn't he know that Grand Admirals were born into the title? Or, if one died without a son, then the new one was chosen from the ranks of the greatest captains?

  Namalee, however, seemed to be happy, and Ishmael knew that he had guessed correctly. She was attracted to him. She might even be in love with him. It was difficult to say at this stage, since the women of Zalarapamtra were taught to be very self-controlled. But she had not told anyone of his attempts to kiss her or their keeping each other warm at nights. And while this restraint might have been caused by gratitude for his having saved her, he liked to think it was more than that.

  There was silence for a long time. The men had looked at Namalee and had seen that she was not offended. Far from it. Then they had looked back at Ishmael and had seen a man strong and unafraid.

  Finally, Daulhamra, the greatest of the captains now that Baramha was dead, rose. He stared around the room and then said, "Zalarapamtra dies unless it gets new blood. It needs this stranger who claims to be the grandson of long-dead ages. Perhaps he has been sent by the gods. If we accept him, then we use the gift of the gods. If we reject him, we deserve to die. I say behold the Grand Admiral!"

  And thus Ishmael, who had never had any such ambitions, who had been content to be only a fo'cs'le hand, surpassed the dreams of his most ambitious bunk-mates.

  From that time on, it was as if he transmitted courage to them. They no longer walked around with downcast eyes and muttered when they talked or squatted for hours staring silently at the ruins. Now they moved briskly and talked much and loudly and laughed. This would not last long, Ishmael knew, unless he kept them moving with words and example. So he went down to the eternally quaking ground and the shaking jungle to search for ghajashri. This was the plant which burned so furiously and the smoke of which had an odor of stone-oil. Ishmael collected great quantities. In a large chamber of the city, he crushed the vegetation between two millstones the sailors had made under his direction. The pressure squeezed out a dark oily substance which caught fire quickly in the open. When the ghajashri oils were kept in a skin bag, their vapors accumulated. A burning fuse would set a bag of the oil off with a roar, and the oil would splash far and burn fiercely.

  Ishmael set everybody who could be spared to collecting the plant and pressing out and collecting the oil. Since it took enormous quantities of the vegetation to get a small amount of oil, the work was long and hard. Meantime, two more whalers came home, and it was necessary to convince these newcomers that the pale-skinned, pale-eyed stranger was the new Grand Admiral.

  Ishmael had expected that he and Namalee would be married very soon. But he quickly learned that the marriage would take place only after Zoomashmarta and the little gods had been rescued. A Grand Admiral never took his first bride until he had performed some heroic feat. Usually, this was the successful harpooning of ten whales or of twenty sharks in one day or leading a raid on an enemy city or an enemy ship and capturing it.

  Ishmael, to prove his ability, would have to do what no man before him had ever done.

  Ishmael then ordered a ship built which would be twice the size of the largest so far. As usual, the Zalarapamtrans did not jump to obey but wanted to know the reasons for his orders.

  "It is true that there is no cause to build larger ships for hunting the whales," he said. "But this ship is a warship. With it I plan to destroy a whole city. Or at least a good part of it. It needs to be built as soon as possible because it will have to start out far ahead of the rest of the fleet. It will be so heavily loaded it will go very slowly."

  The other ships had to have repairs and had to be stocked. And his men had to be trained for the raid into Booragangah. Also, the city had to be kept stocked with food.

  Namalee's sisters and half-sisters insisted that they must accompany the ships on the expedition. Otherwise, they said, the ships would not have good luck.

  Ishmael argued against this. If a ship went down, it took with it an invaluable and irreplaceable asset, a future mother. It was going to take long enough as it was to build the city into a strong and populous community nation again. If any more women were lost, the regrowth of Zalarapamtra might be impossible.

  Ishmael did not argue any more. He could do just so much with these people. After that, he was wasting his breath and also losing his authority.

  He worked as hard as anybody and harder than most. His hours for sleeping were not as many as he wished. It was difficult at first to sleep during the long day, when he knew that there was light to work by. The original cycle of eight hours of sleep and sixteen of waking still conducted men's lives. The lengthening of day and night had not interfered with that rhythm. These people were born to the practice of sleeping part of the daytime and working part of the nighttime. He found it a practice to which he, accustomed to strange hours of on-watch and off-watch, soon became adjusted.

  The time came when the great ship was built and loaded with supplies and the cargo of fire-oil bombs. The ten men who were to crew it said goodbye and the mammoth vessel, the Woobarangu, lifted slowly, its sails spread, its goal the city of Booragangah thousands of miles to the northwest.

  Four of the whaling vessels followed it five days later, that is, twenty of the days of Earth when its sun was white-hot. Ishmael commanded the Roolanga, the flagship. They were headed for a group of mountains which Ishmael thought had once been the Hawaiian Islands, though he could not be sure. In all the millions of years, possibly a billion or more, islands must have sunk and new ones risen and in turn been eroded to nothing and other islands taken their place. And all this long before the oceans dried up.

  Sailing at an average of ten knots ground speed, the fleet could have reached its destination in about two hundred hours or two days and nights. But Ishmael had ordered that supplies be very short, since he wanted to use all the space he could for bombs and weapons. Thus, it was necessary on the second day to hunt whales to add to the food supply. And they were held up again when they caught up with the giant Woobarangu. They trimmed their sails to keep pace with it. When they were several hundred miles outside Booragangah, they began to circle, waiting until another long night began.

  At the same time, they kept a sharp watch for enemy sails, since whaling ships could be coming from any direction this close to the city.

  The giant red disk finally dropped, its weak rays turning the distant top of the mountain that was their goal to a purplish point.

  The captain of the other ships had boarded Ishmael's for the last conference. Once more, he made
sure that each understood his part. Then they drank a toast in shahamchiz and departed. They looked pale but determined. The existence of their nation depended upon them, and their nation could not afford to lose even one of them, no matter if all the gods were restored. Moreover, if they were taken alive, they would suffer horrible torture. The enemy knew how to drag out agony and put off the end of it as the sun knew how to drag out the light.

  As if stuck in the throat of night, the sun hung on the horizon. Then it was swallowed and in a moonless night the ships ceased circling and beat to the wind toward the distant spire. After an hour the top of the moon rose leprously above the east horizon and quickly flooded the dark with a bright illumination. It shone dully on the sails, which had been dyed black, and on the hull, also black. A second deck had been added to the bridge. This projected above the top of the hull and increased wind resistance, but it couldn't be helped. The captain and the steersmen had to see where they were going.

  At an estimated hundred miles from Booragangah, all except the flagship began to circle upward. They would rise as high as they could, their crews breathing from wooden flasks of compressed air which Ishmael had designed. They would then sail to a point above their destination and begin circling again. After an hour, as regulated by the sand clocks Ishmael had made, they would descend. They would do this slowly until they saw the signal, after which they would release gas swiftly. The great Woobarangu would discharge its gas even more swiftly.

  The Roolanga continued straight ahead, steadily descending. When it was about twenty feet above the tops of the shivering vegetation, it leveled out. Long before the other ships had reached the top of their spiral, it was sliding along quietly and slowly into the wind, its sails furled, its lower mast drawn up. Grappling hooks dragged through the jungle, making more noise than Ishmael cared for. But eventually the hooks caught, and men swarmed down the lines and secured them to plants.

  Ishmael had put on his dark clothes and blacked his face. A moment later, Namalee, similarly dressed and darkened, joined him. Ishmael gave his final instructions to Pavashtri, the first mate, who would be in command while Ishmael was gone. Then he and the girl went down a ladder to the main walkway and along it to a whaling boat port. There were six others who would go with them in the boat, since this had been built especially large. It strained against its moorings, the bladders having been fed earlier until they had made enough gas for a swift rising. The crew climbed aboard and strapped themselves in. Each wore in a sheath a long sharp knife made of a bamboo-like plant. Their short spears and short stout bows and quivers of arrows were in leather cases on the bottom of the boat. The bows were something that Ishmael had had to force on the Zalarapamtrans. They knew about them but despised them for some reason lost in their past. Men did not use them, they said. Ishmael had replied that in his time -- stretching time a little but for a good cause -- bows were very manly indeed. The point was that they were deadly and the pathetically tiny party invading Booragangah needed all the firepower it could get. Ishmael knew this was true because the gods had said so.