"Didn't you hear me? We've got to get out of here. There's this thing-.-"
"I know, I know," he soothed, putting out his hands, palms toward her. "I know all about it, and it's nothing to worry about. I didn't have time to tell you before you went to sleep."
Cirocco felt deflated, but far from soothed. it was terrible to have that much nervous energy and nothing to do with it. Her feet wanted to run. instead, she blew up at him.
"Well shit, Calvin! You didn't have time to tell me about a thing like that? What is it, and what do you know about it?"
"That's our way off this cliff," he said. "His name is--" he pursed his lips and whistled three clear notes with a warble at the end, "- but I see that's awkward to use mixed with English. I call him Whistlestop."
"You call him Whistlestop, " Cirocco repeated, numbly.
"That's right. He's a blimp."
"A blimp."
He looked at her oddly and she gritted her teeth.
"He looks more like a dirigible, but he's not, because he doesn't have a rigid skeleton. I'll call him and you can see for yourself." He put two fingers to his lips and whistled a long, complex tune with odd musical intervals.
"He's calling him," Cirocco said.
"So I heard," Gaby said. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah. But my hair's going to come back in gray."
There was an answering series of trills from above, then noth- ing happened for several minutes. They waited.
Whistlestop bulged into view from the left. He was 300 or 400 meters from the cliff face, traveling parallel to it, and even that
far away they could see only a little of him. He was a solid blue- gray curtain being drawn across their view. Then Cirocco spot- ted the eye. Calvin whistled again, and the eye swiveled aimlessly, eventually finding them. Calvin looked back over his shoulder.
"He don't see so good," he explained. "Then I'm for staying out of his way. Like in the next county." "That wouldn't he far enough," Gaby said, awed. "His ass
would be in the next county." The nose disappeared and Whistlestop continued to glide past. And glide past. And glide, and glide, and glide. There seemed to he no end to him.
"Where's he going?" Cirocco asked. "It takes him a while to stop," Calvin explained. "He'll get squared away pretty soon."
Cirocco and Gaby finally joined Calvin at the edge so they could see the whole operation.
Whistlestop the blimp was a full kilometer from stem to stem. All he needed to look like a bigger-than-life-size replica of the German airship Hindenberg was a swastika painted on his tall.
No, Cirocco decided, that was not quite true. She was an air- ship enthusiast, had been active in the NASA project to build one almost as big as Whistlestop. While working with the project engineers, she had come to know the design of the LZ-129 quite well.
The shape was the same: an elongated cigar, blunt at the nose, tapering to a point at the stem. There was even some sort of gondola slung beneath, though farther back than in the Hindenberg. The color was wron& and the texture of the skin. No bracing structure was visible; Whistlestop was smooth, like the old Goodyear blimps, and now that she could see him in the light he shone with a mother-of-pearl iridescence and a hint of oiliness over the basic blue-gray.
And Hindenberg had not had hair. Whistlestop did, along a transverse ventral ridge, growing thicker and longer amidships, thinning out to a sparse blue down toward the ends. A clutch of delicate tendrils humg beneath the central nodule, or gondola, or whatever it was.
Then there were the eyes, and the tail fins. Cirocco saw one side-looking eye, and thought there were probably more. Instead of four flight surfaces at the tail Whistlestop had only three: two horizontal ones and one rudder. Cirocco could see them flexing as the monstrous thing struggled to turn its nose toward them, at the same time backing up half its length. The fins were thin and transparent, like the wings of a man-powered O'Neil flyer, and supple as a jellyfish.
"You ... uh, you talk to this thing?,, she asked Calvin. "Pretty well." He was smiling at the blimp, happier than Cirocco had ever seen him.
"It's an easy language to learn, then?"
He frowned. "No, I don't think you could say that."
"You've been here-how long? Seven days?"
"I tell you, I know how to talk to it. I know a lot about it."
"Then how did you learn it?"
The question obviously troubled him'. "I woke up knowing it."
"Say again?"
"I just know it. When I first saw him, I knew all about him. When he talked, I understood. As simple as that."
It was far from that simple, Cirocco was sure. But he obviously did not want to be pressed on the question.
It took the better part of an hour for Whistlestop to position himself, then to nose in carefully until he nearly touched the side of the cliff. During the operation, Gaby and Cirocco moved well back. They felt better when they saw its mouth. It was a meter-wide slash, ridiculously tiny for a creature of Whistlestop's size, set twenty meters below the forward eye. There was a separate orifice below the mouth: a sphincter muscle that dou- bled as a pressure-relief valve and whistle.
A long, rigid object protruded from the mouth and extended to
the ground.
"C'mon," Calvin said, beckoning to them. "Let's get aboard." Neither Gaby nor Cirocco could think of a line to go with
that. They just stared at him. He looked exasperated for a mo- ment, then smiled again.
"I guess it's hard for you to believe, but it's true. I do know a lot about these things. I've already been for a ride. He's perfectly
willing; he's going our way anyhow. And it's safe. He only cats plants, and very little of that. He can't cat too much, or held sink." He put a foot on the long gangplank and walked toward the entrance.
"What's that thing you're standing on?" Gaby asked. "I guess you could call it his tongue."
Gaby started to laugh, but it had a hollow sound, and died in a cough. "Isn't that all just a bit too ... I mean, Jesus, Calvini There you stand on the damn thing's tongue, asking me to walk into his mouth, dammit. I suppose at the end of ... shall we call it the throat? At the end of the throat is something that's not really a stomach but just serves the same purpose. And those juices that start flowing over us, you'll have a nice, glib explanation for that, too!"
"Hey, Gaby, I promise you, it's as safe as-"
"No, thank you!" Gaby shouted. "I may be Mama Plauget's dumbest daughter, but nobody ever said I didn't have the sense to stay out of some fuckin, monster's mouth. Jesus! Do you know what you're asking? I've already been eaten alive once on this trip. I'm not going to let it happen again."
She was screaming by now, shaking, and her face was red. Ci- rocw agreed with everything Gaby said, on an emotional level. She stepped onto the tongue, anyway. It was warm, but dry. She turned, and held out her hand.
"Come on, shipmate. I believe him."
Gaby stopped shaking and looked stunned. "You wouldn't leave me here?"
"Of course not. You're coming with us. We have to get down there with Bill and August. Come on, where's the courage I know you have?"
"That's not fair," Gaby whined. "I'm not a coward. You just can't ask me to do that. "
"I am asking you. The only way to deal with your fear is to face it. Come on in."
Gaby hesitated a long time, then squared her shoulders and marched up as if going to her execution.
"I'll do it for you," she said, "because I love you. I have to be with you, wherever you go, even if it means we die together."
Calvin lookedat Gaby strangely, but said nothing. They went
into the mouth, found themselves in a narrow, translucent tube with a thin floor over even thinner air. It was a long walk.
Amidships was the large pouch she had seen from the outside. It was thick, clear material, a hundred meters long by thirty wide, and the bottom was covered in pulverized wood and leaves. There were small animals inside with them: several smilers, a selection of smaller species, and thousands of tiny smooth-skinned creatures smaller than shrews. Like the other animals they had seen in Themis, these paid no attention to them.
They could see out on all sides, and found they were already some distance from the cliff face.
"If this place isn't Whistiestop's stomach, what is it?" Cirocco asked.
Calvin looked puzzled. "I never said it wasn't his stomach. This is his food we're standingon."