The Wind Whales of Ishmael Read online

  The great russet-and-mushroom-colored cloud-creature swept overhead, harried and eaten alive -- if it was alive -- by the multitude of air sharks. Then it was gone to the east, blown toward the line of purple mountains far away.

  Ishmael did not know why the first cloud-creature had been undisturbed by the scarlet check-winged predators and the second attracted so many. But he was glad that they had been absent when he had been born into this world.

  He lay on his back while the coffin-canoe lifted and lowered with the quakes passing through the heavy waters. After a while, he saw another vast cloud, but this was pale red, and its outlines changed shape and area so swiftly that he doubted it was anything but a peculiar cloud. And why not peculiar? Was not everything in this world bound to be peculiar, except himself? And from the viewpoint of this world, was he also peculiar?

  When it passed over him, a tentacle, or a pseudo-pod -- it was too blunt and shapeless to be a tentacle -- put out from the cloud toward the earth. The sun shone through it so that it looked more like a beam of dust motes than a living thing.

  A few pieces of the pseudopod drifted by him and separated into tiny objects. They did not come close enough for a detailed examination by him. But against the dark blue sky the red things looked many-angled in the lower part. The upper part was umbrella-shaped and doubtless acted as a parachute.

  Other creatures followed the vast red cloud as bats follow a cloud of insects or as whales follow a cloud of brit, the tiny creatures that compose the bedrock of all sea life and are swallowed and strained out of sea water by the mighty right whales.

  Indeed, that analogy was not exaggerated. The monstrous things that spread their fin-sails and plowed into the red cloud, their giant mouths wide open, must be the right whales of the air of this world.

  They were too high for Ishmael to have described them with particularity. But they were enormous, far larger than the sperm whale. Their bodies were shaped like cigars, and the heads, like the sharks', were so large they were almost a second body. The ends of their tails supported horizontal and vertical fin-rudders.

  The wind took cloud and cloud-eaters out of his sight.

  The sun descended, but so slowly that he feared this world would come to an end before its sun Now he was sweating, and his throat and lips were dry. The air seemed to lack moisture, though it was directly above the sea. And the shore was still so distant that he could not see it. He could only float or assist the natural drift with his hands. He began to paddle, but this increased his rate of sweating and, after a while, he was panting. He lay face-down with his chin on the edge of the coffin, and then he turned over. Another great red shape-shifting cloud was far overhead with its attendant leviathans of the atmosphere.

  He began paddling again. After about fifteen minutes he saw land ahead, and this renewed his strength. But hours passed, with the sun seemingly determined to ride forever in the daytime sky. He slept again and when he awoke the west was definitely a coast with vegetation. Also, his lungs were turning to dust and his tongue to stone.

  Despite his weakness, he began paddling again. If he did not get to the shore soon he would end up dead on top of the coffin instead of inside it, where he would properly belong.

  The shoreline remained as far away as ever. Or so it seemed to him. Everything in this world, except for the creatures of the wind, crept painfully and maddeningly. Time itself, as he had thought once when on the Pequod, now held long breaths with keen suspense.

  But even this world of the gigantic red sun could only delay time for so long. The last of the sea waves deposited the fore-end of the coffin upon the shore.

  Ishmael slipped off the coffin onto his knees, up to his groin in the thick water, and felt himself rise and then subside with the swell of the sea-bottom. And, when he staggered onto the land and pulled the coffin-canoe the rest of the way out of the water, he felt the ground quake under him. The shimmying made him sick.

  He closed his eyes while he picked up one end of the coffin and dragged it into the jungle.

  After a while, knowing that the earth was not going to quit trembling and quit waxing and waning, he opened his eyes.

  It took a long time to get used to the earth being a bowlful of jelly and to the palsied plants.

  Creepers were everywhere on the ground and in the air. These varied in size from those as thick as his wrist to those large enough for him to have stood within if they had been hollow. Out of them sprang hard, fibrous, dark brown or pale red or light yellow stems. These sometimes grew up to twenty feet high. Some were bare poles, but out of the side of others grew horizontal branches and tremendous leaves big enough to be hammocks. They kept themselves from sagging by putting out at their free ends tendrils that snagged neighboring stems and then grew around and around them. In fact, every plant seemed to depend upon its neighbors for support.

  There were also a variety of hairy pods, dark red, pale green, oyster white, and varying from the size of his fist to that of his head.

  He could find no water, though he described a spiral through the jungle and then returned to the seaside. The ground under the creepers was as hard and dry as that of the Sahara Desert.

  He studied the plants, wondering where they got their moisture, since they had no roots into the earth. After a while it occurred to him that the bare stems rising into the air might be the roots. These could gather whatever moisture was in the atmosphere. But where did the vegetation get its food?

  While he was pondering that, he heard a chirruping sound. Then two pairs of long fuzzy antennae slid out from behind a leaf, and a globular head with two huge lidless eyes followed. From the feelers and the head, he had expected the rest of the body to be insectlike. But it was bipedal, and the neck, chest and two hands were definitely mammalian, monkey-shaped and covered with a pinkish fuzz beneath which was a pale red skin. The legs and feet were bearlike.

  The animal was two feet high and, in the light of the red sun, its two insectlike pincers were revealed as outwardly curved double noses. The lips underneath were quite human; the teeth were those of a carnivore. After it had emptied the pod, it squatted immobile so long that Ishmael thought it had gone to sleep. The lidless eyes became dull, and a film crept over them. Ishmael, feeling it safe to approach, discovered that the film was a semiopaque liquid, not a lid. He also saw that a thin, pale green creeper had lifted itself and moved up the beast's back and entered its jugular vein. The creeper became a dull red.

  After a while, the creeper delicately and slowly removed its tip, reddened with blood, from the vein. It withdrew snakishly down the creature's back and slid into a hole in the stem out of which it had come.

  The eyes of the beast lost the milky film, it chirruped feebly and then it stirred. Becoming aware that Ishmael was standing so close, it ran into the jungle. But it had not moved as swiftly as before.

  Ishmael had been about to imitate the creature and stick his finger into a dark spot in a pod and drink from it. But now he feared to do so. Was there something in the water that temporarily paralyzed the drinker? And did a creeper come out and tap the drinker's vein every time? Was this a strange symbiosis, sinister to him but only natural in its ecology?

  There was, of course, nothing to prevent him from tearing off a pod and running into the sea, where a creeper could not get at him while he drank.

  But what if the water contained some drug which would paralyze more than his body? What if it were a sort of lotos, which would so influence him that he would return to the jungle and invite the bloodsucker to feast on him?

  While he stood in indecision and his body ached for the water so available yet so remote, he saw a number of creepers slide out from many holes in stems. They converged on the pod, covered it, exuded a greenish slime which cut through the shell of the pod, and presently each creeper withdrew with a section of shell held in a coil at its end.

  No wonder the earth was so bare. The plants ate of their own substance. No doubt they also ate anything else tha
t was dead. And the food they needed over and above their own detritus was provided by blood.

  Acting quickly, so that he would not get to thinking too much of the possible consequences, he tore a pod loose. He turned and ran until he was standing in the sea up to his thighs. He tilted the pod above his head and let the water run out into his mouth. The liquid was cool and sweet but there was not enough. There was nothing else to do but return and break off another pod.

  As he started back, he saw a shadow flash by him, and he spun around and looked upward.

  In the distance was still another great red cloud with its devouring attendants, the wind whales.

  But the shadow had come from something much nearer. An air shark had sped over him at about thirty feet from the ground, and behind it were three more.

  The first two had made a surveillance pass, but the last two in line had decided that it was safe to attack him.

  They dived toward him, the wing-fins changing their angle, and their great mouths open.

  He waited until the first was within six feet. It was then only a foot above the water, and it was hissing.

  That mouth looked as if it could not miss biting off his head, which must be what it planned to do. It surely could not snatch him into the air, and if it landed it would be at a disadvantage in the water. Or would it?

  Ishmael went completely under, his eyes and mouth closed and his fingers pinching his nose. He counted to ten and emerged just as the lower tail-fin of the last air shark trailed by him, dragging in the The beasts had lifted slightly and were sailing close-hauled to the wind. They cut at an angle away from him out over the lake for a quarter of a mile. Then they turned and sailed at an angle toward the west, and then turned again, their wings rotated to catch the wind in full.

  Ishmael tore off a pod and punched a hole with his finger and drank. The excitement and danger had made him forget his caution, and that, he thought a minute later, was his undoing.

  The first time he had drunk, he had not felt the paralysis he'd expected. He had been braced to step forward so that if he became so paralyzed he fell, he would fall with his face out of water. He had felt nothing. But this might have been because he was so much larger than the double-nosed beast; much more of the narcotic in the water would be needed. Also, the excitement from the sharks may have counteracted the effect he should have felt.

  But two drinks in such rapid succession did their work. He immediately felt numbed and could not move. He could see, though through a twilight, and he could feel the creeper slithering up his back and a dull pain when the sharp end penetrated his jugular.

  The air sharks swept over him, having spotted his head projecting above the vegetation. He had made a mistake by picking this place to drink when he could have chosen one with much higher and much more dense plants.

  However, the beasts were necessarily cautious. They came close the first time but did not try anything. Doubtless they were trying to estimate the chances of ! getting caught in the vegetation if they tried for a bite.

  He did not fully understand how they operated. Bladder gas made them buoyant, he was sure of that. And it seemed to him that they could not lose much altitude without discharging gas. That might be the hissing noise which had come from the first shark.

  To gain any altitude, they would have to use the same tactics as gliding birds. And if they were to stay aloft they would have to generate more gas. To do this, they would have to use something in their bodies. Fuel was necessary, and to get fuel, they had to eat. That much should be certain, if anything in this world was certain.

  Theorizing was fine, in its place. What he needed was to act, and he could not move.

  It seemed a long time before the sharks appeared again far to the windward and turned onto the final leg of their maneuver. The heat had built up; the vegetation cut down most of the wind. He was sweating, and the first insect he had seen scuttled out on a branch a foot away.

  It was the representative of an ancient and successful line, a breed that had learned to live with and off man. It even put out to sea with man and was much more successful at its parasitism than the rat.

  It was a cockroach, at least nine inches long.

  It crept out cautiously, its antennae wiggling, and presently it was on his shoulder. Its familiarity showed that it was acquainted with the paralyzing effects of the pod-water.

  He could not feel its legs on his skin, but he could feel a dull pain on the lobe of his right ear.

  He should have drowned with the crew of the Pequod.

  There was a rustle -- his hearing wasn't dulled -- and he was staring at a face that had appeared from behind a mass of leaves.

  The face was as brown-skinned as that of a Tahitian maiden. The eyes were extraordinarily, almost inhumanly, large, and were a bright green. The features were beautiful.

  The language she spoke, however, was none that he had ever heard, and he had heard most of the world's languages.

  She stepped forward and batted at the cockroach, which sprang onto a branch and disappeared.

  At the same time, he felt the end of the creeper withdrawing.

  He had expected her to pull the creeper out, since she had rescued him from the insect. She, however, went after the huge thing with a stick and in a minute returned holding it by several of its legs. Ishmael had forgotten, though only for a moment, that the sharks were swooping at him. Now he tried to open his mouth to shout a warning. Perhaps she could push him over so that the plants would keep them off him. Or she could...

  The girl must have sensed that he was warning her. His eyes were rolling in terror. She stood up and turned and looked up just as the first shadow fell. She screamed and jumped back, bumping into him and toppling him over backward. His head struck something. He awoke to feel the earth, as always, trembling beneath him and rising and falling as if there were a tiny tide sweeping through it. That might not be so farfetched, he mused. Actually, on the earth he had known, the ground did rise and fall, pulled by the moon and the sun. But it was such a small phenomenon that man never noticed it.

  Here, where the moon and the sun were so enormous, earthtides were detected even by the most insensitive.

  He felt sick at his stomach. Either the sucking of his blood had been accompanied by an injection of some poison or he would have to reaccustom himself to the quivering of the land.

  He tried to sit up and found that his hands and feet were tied.

  The girl was gone.

  Apparently she was not as friendly as she had first appeared. She had not seemed anxious about him then because she knew he was unable to hurt her.

  He did not blame her, since he was a stranger and she would have been a fool to have approached him without caution. Perhaps she would not have been a fool, though, if she lived in a world where human beings were friends and murder and war were unknown.

  That she had bound him showed that she did not live in such a utopia.

  He sighed. It was too much to expect of any world that human beings should all love and trust each other. As on Earth, so here. So every place, probably. Fortunately, Ishmael did not have to be in a Utopia or seeking one to be at ease.

  He was not at ease now, of course. But he felt relieved and even optimistic. He was not the only human being in this world, and once he learned the girl's language, he would get answers to some of his questions.

  Ishmael smiled at her as she expertly butchered a double-nosed monkey-bear beast. While she worked, he inspected her closely. She wore a large white comb of some ivory-like substance in her hair, which was as long and free and black as any maiden's of Typee. Her ears were pierced to hold thin rings of some jet-black stony material in each of which was set a large dark green stone. This stone bore in its interior a bright red object that looked like a spider.

  Around her neck was a ruff of short feathers of many colors, and around her waist was a thin, semitransparent belt of tanned leather. On the lower end of the belt were bone hooks which supported a kilt
that ended just above the knees and was of the same material as the belt. Her sandals, of a thick dark brown leather, encased feet with four toes, the little toe having been exiled by edict of Evolution.

  Her figure was slim. Her face was definitely triangular. The forehead was high and wide. The enormous luminous green eyes were shadowed by eyebrows excessively thick and black but arched by nature. The lashes were tiny spears. The cheekbones were high and broad but still less wide than the forehead. The lower jaw angled inward, ending in a chin which he would have expected to be pointed but which was rounded. It was the chin that saved her from ugliness and carried her off to beauty. The mouth was full and pleasant, even when she began to bite off pieces of the animal's fat.

  Ishmael, having seen many savages who ate raw meat, and having himself indulged, was not repulsed. And when she offered him a large piece of meat, he accepted with thanks and a smile.

  Both ate until their stomachs were packed rightly. The girl found a stone and cracked open the animal's skull and dug out the brains and ate this. Ishmael might have accepted her offer to this, if he had been starving. But he shook his head and said, "No, thanks." The girl tore off six pods and punched two and drained one into Ishmael's mouth. During this procedure, the creepers ignored them. He supposed that this was because they had been given meat and blood and so had spared the giver. Nevertheless, the water numbed both him and the girl for about fifteen minutes. During this time, if any predator had appeared, it could have had them with no more effort than it took to leisurely gnaw away upon them.

  When he was free of his paralysis, Ishmael tried with rolling his eyes and squirming his body to indicate that she should untie him. She frowned, very prettily, he thought, and sat for a while considering his desires. Then she arose and, smiling, cut the intertwined grasses with which she had bound him. He arose slowly, rubbing his hands and then bending over to rub his feet. She backed away, the knife in her hand, but after a minute decided that she must go all the way or not at all. She put the knife into a scabbard of leather on her belt and turned her back to him.