They had good thermals in the roiled air near the edge so they arrived at the outer mixture zone early in the afternoon. Instead of casting about for the best crossing place Teacher called them all together.
“We will rest and feed here for a few days before we cross,” Teacher told them as they assembled in loose pod formation. “Eat as much as you can and gather your strength. This will probably be the last break on our journey.”
“Foolishness,” Simon vibrated half-out-loud from his place next to Teacher. “Skyfall comes. Foolisshneess… buzzzhmmm.”
Ensign didn’t know if Simon meant to be heard or not, but the whole pod had heard.
“A calculated risk,” Teacher said with a ripple of his trailing edge. “We sacrifice distance to gain strength. Dangerous, but less dangerous than trying to cross the belt in our present condition.”
“Skyfall comes,” Simon repeated.
“And when it comes conditions may be too disturbed for good feeding,” Teacher replied. “So we must feed now.” He swept over all of them. “We have had a hard trip, harder than I imagined. Now rest and gain strength.”
“How long will we stay here?” asked The Geek.
Teacher rippled a shrug. “As little time as we can. So feed well.”
For the next three days the members of the Bach Choir grazed in the rich plankton of the mixture zone. The swirling updrafts and downdrafts produced an especially heavy bloom, sharp with strange, rich flavors. There was so much the pod was able to stay well above the cloud tops, away from the lurking sharks. And all day and all night, feeding and resting, they learned more songs.
For three wonderful days they basked in the Sun and gorged themselves on the zone’s bounty. Ensign grew stronger and his hydrogen cells grew tight with fresh gas. The pod’s mood lightened as they left the rigors of the trip behind them and the perils of the trip to come receded into the future.
But Simon mumbled and fretted and fidgeted. Each night they could see the sparks of skyfall-to-come growing larger in the sky. In spite of the rest and food Ensign was glad when Teacher called them into traveling formation at the fourth dawn.
In the glare of full sunrise they headed north again, dodging through the swirling currents where belt met zone. The storms Killer had predicted were absent, but it was tricky going nonetheless.
“It may take us all day to pass through the boundary between this zone and the next belt,” Teacher told them at midday. “We can generally handle the cross-currents but we have to watch out for the downdrafts.”
“And now you’re going to ask for a volunteer to fly ahead,” Yearling interrupted, “the strongest among us.”
Teacher swept Yearling with a disapproving burst of sound. “Each of us will take a turn seeking downdrafts. For no more than a day-tenth at a time. I will take the first turn.” He swiveled toward Yearling, “And you will be next!”
Ensign and the others plodded on in a loose gaggle behind their leader. There was a little plankton in the jumbled eddies of the inner band edge. Without the steady updrafts of the mixture zone the fields were small but a traveler with keen senses could partially replenish himself. He felt a bit smug and toyed with composing a song teaching the technique.
Ensign felt the first tentative gusts and swirls of winds toward the west, and marveled that he was actually about to cross one of the boundaries of his world. Not many of the High Folk ventured across more than one band, but some had and their songs were the stuff of legend. Would he become a legend? For that matter, would he even survive? As a singer Ensign knew the two were not mutually exclusive.
“Your turn, Ensign,” Teacher called out. Ensign pulled ahead of the loose formation as Melody dropped back, wingtips sagging slightly from fatigue.
He barely had time to get in front of the group when he ran head-on into a powerful downdraft and dropped several wing spans before he could even react. He called for the group to detour and started the long, hard climb back to a safe altitude.
It was a sign of things to come. There was nothing but downdraft after downdraft. The songs he had learned in the Zone didn’t help him much in a place where the air currents tended down instead of up. As a result he blundered from one downdraft to another, wishing all the while for one of those despised childrens’ songs to help him.
The first downdraft wasn’t so bad, or the second or the fourth, but by the tenth or twentieth, flying became grueling work and his body ached with the effort. He looked at the Sun and found he’d been leading for only half a day-tenth. He signaled and once again strained upward with lull beats of his wingtips.
Gradually they moved through the turbulent inner mixture region and out into the outer region on the other side. The winds calmed and steadied but the downdrafts came closer and closer together until they seemed never to end. The day blended into a haze of sudden drops and tedious climbs. At the very end of the day, when the Sun had been heating the clouds for the maximum time, he found a weak updraft, one the entire pod could relax in. Almost no plankton, of course, but he was happy for the chance to rest his wings.
They rested for a while until the updraft dissipated in the cooling atmosphere and flew on in the night. No point in traveling only by day in a place where there were no thermals to speak of.
As two moons rose in evening twilight the pod struggled north. The atmosphere calmed considerably away from the band edge and the sudden downdrafts decreased. But the general flow of air was still down, gentle but relentless. They had to keep flying to hold their altitude.
Simon flew close to Ensign as they labored along. “Tomorrow,” the old one mumbled, “Come tomorrow. Never anything like it. MZZZ. Basssssh.”
“Excuse me?”
The ancient observer gestured up in the dim light, “See that? It has a tail!”
Ensign looked at the now-familiar objects in the sky. The smaller one remained a bright dot, bigger than the night before, but the larger, closer one had changed.
Now the brilliant spark appeared surrounded by a hazy circle of cloud, streaming away from the Sun in a wispy line. “What does it mean?” Simon turned to him, “Tomorrow—just before sunrise—the world will change. That,” he bobbed a wingtip skyward, “will hit us.”
Ensign went rigid with alarm. “You mean it will fall on us?”
The oldster gestured sharply. “Not on us. But it will fall. And then the one behind it and the one behind it. One by one they will all fall.”
Ensign flew on to wait for dawn. Occasionally he looked up at the strange glowing object and finally decided it was moving Eastward. Simon was right. It would not fall on them.
At first light, Teacher pulled the Bach Choir close together. “We should be close to the boundary of the South Tropical Zone by nightfall. As we cross we can feed in the updrafts. but we will not stop again. From now we must press on day and night as long as our strength lasts.”
“Are we sure the Red Spot isn’t near?”
Teacher bobbed reassuringly. “It is on the other side of the planet. High Folk have lived in that zone for millennia. They track it carefully.”
“One less thing to worry about, anyway,” The Geek muttered on a low frequency. Ensign didn’t know if he was supposed to hear it or not.
All through the day they pushed on. It was still slow, exhausting work, excruciating for the leader but bad for all of them. Fortunately all of Bach Choir was young and strong. Ensign realized that no regular pod could cross a belt at anything like their speed. He wondered how the Old One could endure.
The Sun wheeled in the sky and set in a mass of fiery clouds. Still the group flew north, seeking the respite and dubious safety of the zone boundary. As the night wore on, Ensign kept looking to the west. He was not the only one.