The Wind Whales of Ishmael

by Philip José Farmer

  However, since the air was thinner there, they began to lose speed. They had counted on encountering a stream of air with more velocity than that on a lower altitude, but this time the stream failed to appear. So the Booragangahns dropped back to an altitude about two hundred feet above the Zalarapamtrans.

  The first mate commented that they would be overtaken before the next sun arose. "I am planning on that," Ishmael said. "In fact, I have been thinking about deliberately allowing them to catch up with us. But if we were to reduce sail, we would make them suspicious and so cautious. My plans call for them to approach boldly and confidently. They outnumber us so much they must think that we stand little chance against them."

  Poonjakee's prediction was not quite accurate, but it was close enough. The Booragangahns did not catch up with them before the night was ended. An hour after the red sun came up, their lead ship was over the rear ship of the Zalarapamtrans. By then Ishmael had transmitted orders that all his ships should reduce sail so they could sail in side by side. The maneuver was executed swiftly enough, but the line was more ragged than he wished.

  A moment after the ships had gotten into the formation ordered, and just after the enemy flagship was above its chosen antagonist, Ishmael got word of a new development.

  The sailor who reported was scared. Not because of the impending battle, however, but because of what he saw dead ahead.

  Ishmael turned and saw the vast purplish mass floating many miles ahead.

  "That is the Purple Beast of the Stinging Death?" he said. "You are sure?"

  "That is it," Namalee said, speaking for the sailor. She too was wide-eyed and pale-skinned.

  That the enemy had also seen it was evident. The flagship abandoned its position above the other ship and retreated, reducing sail to do so.

  "It is probably the Beast that killed my people," Namalee said.

  She was guessing, but the creature could well be the same one. They were extremely rare, fortunately for humankind, and they did not move swiftly, if the lore of the Zalarapamtrans could be trusted. They often descended to the ground and fed on the creatures there. This one may have been doing so recently, because it was only about six thousand feet high, though rising.

  Ishmael stood for a long time in thought. Poonjakee paced back and forth, looking sidewise at Ishmael and undoubtedly wondering why he did not order a change of course.

  "The Booragangahns lured the Beast to Zalarapamtra," Ishmael said. "They were playing a very dangerous game, since the Beast, despite its immense size and weight, can be swift. It can propel itself by means of explosions, you say?"

  "Yes, Joognaja," Poonjakee said. "Moreover, the kahamwoodoo can modify parts of its body to act as sails. It is as if it had a thousand and a thousand sails. And if it gets close enough to a ship, its tendrils shoot out and catch onto the ship, and it pulls the ship to it and then the tendrils seize the crew, and..."

  "You must not continue to think about what it can do to us," Ishmael said. "You must concentrate on what we can do to it."

  Ishmael gave no order to change course. Neither Poonjakee nor Namalee dared question him on this, though they were eager to hear what he had in mind. Ishmael watched the enemy fleet, which had dropped behind and veered away. Now all sails were being let out, and the ships were once more running free. Evidently their admiral had decided that the Zalarapamtrans were going to skirt as closely as possible to the Beast. In that manner, the Zalarapamtrans hoped to scare off their pursuers. But the Booraganganhs were not going to be scared off, though they were, doubtless, scared. Their grandmothers had frightened them with stories of the Beast when they were little children, and they had seen what the Beast could do when it settled over Zalarapamtra. Moreover, whaling ships had run across the Beast, and the few survivors had vividly described the results.

  An hour passed. By then the creature looked like a floating island. It was a rough disk with a diameter of at least a mile and a half and a thickness of three hundred feet. It had no eyes or ears or mouths that Ishmael could see, but Namalee assured him that he would see the mouths soon enough. The body was purplish and the tentacles -- most of them coiled now -- were blood-red. The tentacles were on top and bottom of the thing. Its shape kept changing with depressions forming here and there and billowing at other places.

  He looked back. By then the Zalarapamtrans must have been close to panic, wondering how closely he planned to sail before turning. They must also have been speculating that he hoped to turn in time to escape the Beast but to bring the pursuers into grave danger.

  Ishmael gave no orders, not even to hold the ships steady. Their original order would stand until he countermanded it.

  It was evident by then that if the ships did not shift course, they would sail above the Beast at a height of two hundred feet. And at the rate at which the Beast was climbing, it would be able to seize their ships long before the ships got to the other end. Even if the vessels increased their gas, they could not gain altitude as swiftly as the Beast. Nor was their admiral giving orders to feed the bladder-animals.

  Namalee and Poonjakee were sweating, though the air was cold. The steersmen, also pale and wet, were biting their lips. None of them, as Ishmael knew, lacked courage. But this situation was something they had never experienced, and all their infant-born terrors were crawling out on the surface of their nerves, scratching and rasping.

  Ishmael himself was far from being easy. This creature was indeed a kraken of the atmosphere but far more fearsome and deadly. It generated in him a feeling that something dark and unnatural had come from the evil areas of his own mind. It was a nightmare that had no right to exist in the flesh. Awakening should dissolve it, just as an evil dream evaporates when its generator awakens.

  But this, despite its unnaturalness to Ishmael, was a natural being in a nightmare world. It was what the End of Time should spawn.

  Ishmael remembered Ahab's words about a "six-inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale." Was he not trusting too much to the weapons he carried in these ships, weapons which might not have the devastating effect he had hoped for on this strange and largely unknown creature? If he, Ishmael, was wrong, then he had led all those who trusted him into death.

  He looked back. The Booragangahns had quartered, probably with the intention of eventually beating to the wind.

  Then Ishmael jumped, as did everybody on the bridge and, undoubtedly, every soul in the fleet.

  A series of loud explosions broke loose from the monster. Flesh peeled back to reveal large round holes and the edges of some hard black substance, all looking very much like cannons. They spouted smoke and flame and noise, and the Beast moved swiftly to starboard. Then more smoke and noise, this time from the rear of the Beast, and it moved swiftly ahead into the wind.

  Both fleets were above the center of the monster.

  The purplish mass rose with sickening velocity as more explosions came. Ishmael could not see the smoke or flame from these because they came from the underside of the Beast. They were being used, like rockets, to propel the Beast upward.

  Ishmael had not expected such demonic speed. The Beast was so huge and billowing that it had looked murderous but unwieldy. Now he saw why ships that ventured too closely, accidentally or otherwise, were so often lost. And he knew then that the Booragangahns, when luring the Beast to their enemies, must have paid a heavy price.

  He rapped out his order and Poonjakee relayed it. Signals flashed; the sailors recovered their startled nerves and obeyed. The hatches in the bottom of the hull were opened, and the business of lighting the fuses and dropping the bombs through the hatches was begun.

  The blood-red tentacles, however, were uncoiling. Their lower parts were lumpy, which meant, Ishmael supposed, that they were encased here and there with small gas bladders. This enabled the lower parts to unreel to at least fifty feet. The remaining portions were still coiled, waiting for the moment when they could snap out like whips.

  Ishmael saw the black
bombs with their red fuse-tips and pale gray smoke fall toward the billowing mass. The first landed on a patch of purplish skin near the base of a tentacle. It burned and then went off with a small bang. When the smoke had cleared, a large hole was revealed. There were great empty spaces inside the Beast crisscrossed by fragile lines of flesh or tissue. One egg-shaped end of a bladder protruded beyond a flap of skin.

  The second bomb to burst was a firebomb. Its flaming oil spread out over the skin, burned it away and dropped into the interior. The interconnecting tissues and dark veins and arteries -- or so Ishmael classified them -- burned away. A bladder abruptly caught fire. And then the bladder exploded, and smoke and flames enveloped that part of the Beast directly below them.

  Ishmael had not known what type of gas the Beast generated in its bladder until that moment. No one knew; everybody had taken it for granted that the gas was nonflammable, as it was in the bladders of the ships.

  Ishmael was not as happy at the discovery as he should have been, because the first of the tentacles had reached the ship. They gripped the masts and arms of the lower mast and went in through the open port where several boats were kept, and shortly thereafter other tentacles followed. These writhed around the area, found no sailors -- they had all retreated before the tentacles got near the ship -- and wrapped themselves around beams, girders, catwalks and masts.

  The vessel was pulled downward as more tentacles gripped it. Smoke from the burning Beast poured into the open parts of the Roolanga and quickly filled it. The sailors, coughing, eyes streaming, fell at their posts, though some stumbled up ladders to the higher levels.

  The bombardiers continued to light fuses and throw out the bombs. These exploded and sent oil spraying everywhere, some of it actually touching the ship. But the fire burned away only the skin it touched and then was extinguished.

  Suddenly the ship rose. Its breakaway was so violent that many were thrown to the deck, and some with precarious holds on kdders or catwalks were thrown through the air and out through the thin skin of the hull or through the open spaces.

  The fires had burned away the bases of the tentacles gripping the Roolanga.

  The unloading of half of its bombs had lightened the ship considerably. It kept on rising until it had cleared the smoke. Ishmael saw that his other vessels had dropped many of their bombs, too. The Beast was burning in a hundred places; even as he watched, he saw another gas bladder explode with a violence that lifted the ship above it. The explosion also tore loose the tentacles that had gripped the lower mast, and that ship rose.

  The Booragangahn fleet was enwrapped in tentacles. Each ship had been pulled downward until it was half-enfolded in billowing flesh. The lower masts had pierced the body of the Beast, but evidently this did not perturb it. Its tentacles were in every opening of every vessel, and several vessels were broken open when the Beast discharged some of its "cannons." Other tentacles poured into the shattered hulls.

  Ishmael transmitted more orders to his fleet. Those that had gotten away were to descend and help their trapped fellows. His own ship tacked and discharged gas at the same time, sliding about fifty feet above one of their vessels, the Mowkurree, which had not been able to pull loose. More bombs were dropped, some of which exploded so close to the ship they tore apart beams and walkways or started fires on the skin. But the Mowkurree was released. Its fore lifted up first, the tentacles sliding off and then collapsing from it, and then the aft lifted, and the ship was free.

  More great bladders exploded. A Booragangahn ship was released when an explosion blew up a part of the Beast immediately by the ship. It rose at an angle and then rolled over on its side. Its starboard masts had been broken off by the blast, and the weight of the port masts was tilting it. Little figures fell onto the Beast fifty feet below. Some sailors had lost their holds when the vessel rolled.

  Ishmael did not waste any bombs on the crippled ship. It was out of the action. Though it could still probably put out boats, these would be filled with men eager to get away from this area, not to board enemy craft. Namalee cried out, and Ishmael turned. She was staring at one of their ships, which had passed too low over a series of exploding bladders. One of the flaming cells had been cast upward and had struck the lower part of the ship. Fire spread quickly, since the bladder seemed to cling to the hull. One of the ship's bladders was burned away, and the ship fell aft end first into the inferno below. One boat escaped, only to be caught by two tentacles. These pulled downward; the boat tilted, turned upside down, and several men who had not had time to strap themselves in fell out. But they died only a minute ahead of their fellows. The boat was pulled down into the smoke and not seen thereafter.

  "The Beast is dying!" Namalee said. She looked at Ishmael. "You did it! You did what none except Zalarapamtra has ever been able to do! You are a god!"

  "I am a man," he said. "Others will be slaying their Beasts, once they know how to make firebombs."

  "The Beast is not dead yet!" Poonjakee said hoarsely.

  He pointed downward and they saw scores of pieces of the Beast flying up through the smoke. They were borne by small bladders and carried a dozen tentacles each.

  The Beast, dying, had broken itself up into many parts, capable of independent action. They extended parts of their skin to form sails and crude rudders, and they came as one toward the Roolanga. These, perhaps, were the smaller animals supposed to accompany the Beast.

  Ishmael gave orders that the archers should shoot at the bladders of the creatures. The spearmen should cast their spears. And then he waited with his spear.

  Three of the creatures grabbed the end of the starboard yardarms and hauled themselves along them until they reached the hull. There, finding no entrances unguarded, they made their own. Flaps of skin opened on the sides to reveal lipless mouths with thousands of sharp triangular teeth. These bit at the skin of the hull until they tore open the tough but thin material. Then the purplish, pulsing, billowing bodies elongated, and their tentacles reached through the openings, gripping beams and catwalks, and they pulled themselves through.

  Sailors met them, were seized by the tentacles, cut the tentacles, were gripped again, hauled yelling to the mouths, and their heads or arms were bitten off.

  But others rammed their weapons into the mouths or punctured the bladders, which expelled the gas swiftly. Other sailors ran up with torches, which Ishmael had ordered lit, and thrust into the tentacles. These were burned away or writhed away, and the torches were stuck into the mouths of the creatures.

  Abruptly the three were gone. They had pulled themselves back out and dropped off, acting as if they still had full gas bladders. Their tentacles writhing, they fell down into the smoke still pouring out from the huge dead mass of the Beast.

  Other independent pieces of the Beast had attacked the Roolanga at other points. But these, though they had taken their toll, had been killed or repulsed. And the other Zalarapamtran ships had also gotten rid of their boarders.

  Ishmael said to Poonjakee, "We will pick up the Booragangahns in the boats, if they will surrender. We will spare their lives and take them back to Booragangah."

  "Are you sick?" Namalee cried. "Has the hideousness of the Beast overcome your senses? You would have us give mercy to those killers and return them unharmed to their people? So they can thrive and grow strong again and then come to Zalarapamtra one day and murder us all again?"

  "I have been thinking for a long time, since the chase was long, and there was much time to think," Ishmael said. "The people of Zalarapamtra are very few. And though the people of Booragangah outnumber them, they are very few too. It will take generations to build their population back to where it was. Both people will be subject to raids, perhaps to extermination, by other peoples. Both will be unprotected when the whaling vessels put out to the air, since most of the male population will have to go out.

  "It is unheard of!" Namalee and Poonjakee cried with one voice.

  "Ah, but I am a new voice!" Ishmael said. "
And I have said several things you have never heard of! And I will be saying more unheard-of things!"

  "But the gods!" Namalee said. "What will Zoomashmarta say? How could he endure to share equally with Kashmangai?"

  Ishmael smiled and said, "They are sharing equal quarters and the same fate now in the belly of the stone beast. Indeed, the stone beast may be the greatest of the gods, since he carries two great ones in his body.

  "It was this swallowing of the two that gave me the idea of combining the two peoples. Let Zalarapamtran and Booragangahn live together, in peace, with a united front against enemies. Let them worship Zoomashmarta and Kashmangai together. Perhaps the stone beast will be a god higher than they, I do not know what its name is, but the Booragangahns must have one for it. Or, if not, let us give it a name. The gods have always had names which men have given them."

  All except Time, Ishmael thought. There have been gods of time, but no name for Time itself. And he thought of that fierce and old man with the ivory leg and the lightning streak down his face and body. Old Ahab, whose doomed pursuit of the white beast with the wrinkled forehead and the crooked jaw had been more than just a desire for vengeance against a dumb animal.

  "All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event -- in the living act, the undoubted deed -- there, some unknown but still unreasoning thing puts forth the moldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!"

  What the white whale had been to Ahab, he told himself again, time was to Ishmael.

  And the six-inch blade striking to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale was man's mind striving to comprehend the nature of time and timelessness. It could not be done. It ended with the defeat of the quester, as Ahab's quest had ended. Man could only live as well as he could with the greatest beast, Time, and then go into timelessness, still wondering, still uncomprehending.