Gaby moaned and tried to nm 'back the way she had come in. Cirocco grabbed her and held her down. She looked up at Calvin.
"It's all right," he said. "He can only digest with the help of these little animals. He.cats their end product. His digestive juices can't hurt you any more than weak tea."
"You hear that, Gaby?" Cirocco whispered in her ear. 'We're going to be all right. Calm down, honey."
"I h-hear. Don't be mad at me. I'm frightened." "I know. Come on, stand up and look out. That'll take your mind off it." She helped her up, and they wallowed over to the clear stomach wall. It was like walking on a trampoline. Gaby pressed her nose and hands to it and spent the rest,of the trip sobbing and staring fixedly into space. Cirocco left her alone, and went to Calvin.
"You've got to be more careful of her," she said, quietly. "The time in the darkness has affected her more than us." She narrowed her eyes and searched his face. "Except I don't really know about you."
"I'm all right," he said. "But I don't want to talk about my life before my re-birth. That's over."
"Funny. Gaby said pretty much the same thing. I can't see it that way."
Calvin shrugged, plainly not interested in what either of them thought.
"All right. I'd appreciate it if you told me what you know. I don't care how you learned it if you don't want to tell me."
Calvin thought it over, and nodded. "I can't teach you their language quickly. It's mostly tone and duration, and I can only speak a pidgen version based on the lower tones I can hear.
"They come in all sizes from about ten meters to slightly larg- er than Whistlestop. They often travel in schools; this one has some smaller attendants which you didn't see because they stayed on his other side. There's some of them now. "
He pointed out the window, where a flight of six twenty- meter blimps jostled for position. They looked like ponderous fish. Cirocco could hear shrill whistles.
"They're friendly, and quite intelligent. They don't have any natural enemies. They generate hydrogren from their food and keep it under a slight pressure. They carry water for ballast, drop it when they want to rise, valve off hydrogen when they want to go down. Their skin is tough, but if it gets tom they usually die.
"They're not very maneuverable. They don'thave much fine control, and it takes them a long time to get moving. A fire can trap them sometimes. If they can't get away, they go up like a bomb."
"What about all these creatures in here?" Cirocco asked. 'Do they need all of them to digest their food?"
"No, just the little yellow ones. Those things can't eat anything but what a blimp prepares for them. You won't find them anywhere but in a blimp's stomach. The rest of these critters are like us. Hitchhikers or passengers."
"I don't get it. Why does the blimp do it?', "It's symbiosis, combined with the intelligence to make his own choices and do as he pleases. His race gets along with other races in here, the Titanides in particular. He does them favors, and they return it by-"
"Titanides?" He snffled uncertainly, and spread his hands. "It's a word I substitute for a whistle he uses. I only get a hazy idea of what they're like because I can't do too well with complex descriptions. I gather they're six-legged, and they're all females. I call them Titanides because that's the name in Greek mythology for female Titans. I've been naming other things, too."
"Such as?"
"The regions and the rivers and the mountain ranges. I named the land areas after the Titans."
"What ... oh, yeah, I remember now." Calvin had studied mythology as a hobby. "Who were the Titans, again?"
"The sons and daughters of Uranus and Gaea. Gaea appeared from Chaos. She gave birth to Uranus, made him her equal, and they produced the Titans, six men and six women. I named the days and nights here after them, since there's six days and six nights."
"If you named all the nights after women, I'm going to think up names of my own."
He smiled. "No such thing. It's pretty much at random. Look back there at the frozen ocean. That seemed like it ought to be Oceanus, so that's what I called it. The country we're over now is Hyperion, and that night over there in front of us, with the mountains and the irregular sea, is Rhea. When you face Rhea from Hyperion, north is to your left and south is to your right. After that, going around the circles haven't seen most of these, you understand, but I know they're there-I call them Crius, which you can just see, then around the bend are Phoebe, Tethys, Thea, Metis, Dione, lapetus, Cronus, and Mnemosyne. You can see Mnernosyne on the other side of Oceanus, behind us. It looks like a desert."
Cirocco tried to string them all together in her head. "I'll never remember all that."
"The only ones that matter right now are Oceanus, Hyperion, and Rhea. Actually, not all the names are Titans. One Titan is Themis, and I thought that would he confusing. And, well... ." He looked away, with a sheepish grin. "I just couldn't recall the names of two Titans. I used Metis, which is wisdom, and Dione."
Cirocco did not really care. The names were handy, and in their own way, systematic. "Let me guess about the rivers. More mythology?"
"Yeah. I picked the nine largest rivers in Hyperion-which
has got a hell of a lot of them, as you can see-and named them after- the Muses. Down south over there is Urania, Calliope, Terpsichore, and Euterpe, with Polyhymnia in the twilight zone and feeding into Rhea. And over here on the north slope, starting at the cast-is Melpomene. Closer to us are Thalia and Erato, which look like they make a system. And the one you came down is a feeder of the Clio, which is just about below us now."
Cirocco looked down and saw a blue ribbon winding through dense green forest, followed it back to the cliff face behind them, and gasped.
"So that Is where the river went," she said.
It arched from the cliff face, nearly half a kilometer below where they had been standing, looking solid and hard as metal for fifty meters before it began to break up. It fragmented rapidly from that point, reaching the ground as mist.
There were a dozen more plumes of water issuing from the cliff, none so close or spectacular, each with its attendant rain- bow. Froin her vantage point, the rainbows were lined up like croquet wickets. It was breathtaking, almost too beautiful to he real.
"I'd like to have the post card concession for this place," she said. Calvin laughed.
"You sell film for the camera, and I'll sell tickets to the rides. What do you think of this one?"
Cirocco glanced back at Gaby, still frozen to the window. "Reactions seem mixed. I like it okay. What's the name for
the big river? That one that all the others join?"
. "Ophion. The great serpent of the north wind. If you'll look closely, you can see that it comes out of a small lake back there at the twilight zone between Mnemosyne and Occanus. That lake must have a source, and I suspect it's Ophion flowing underground through the desert, but we can't see where it goes under. Other than that, it flows without a break, into seas and out of them on the other side."
Cirocco traced the convoluted path and could see that Calvin was right. "I think a geographer would tell you that it's not the same river going into a sea as it is coming out," she said. "But I know all the rules were made for Earth rivers. Okay, so we'll call it a circular river."
"That's where Bill and August are," Calvin said, pointing. "About halfway down the Clio, where that third tributary - "
"Bill and August. We were supposed to try and contact them. With all that commotion about getting on the blimp---"
"I borrowed your radio. They're up, and waiting for us. You can call them now, if you like."
Cirocco got her helmet ring and radio from Gaby. "Bill, can you hear me? This is Cirocco."
"Uh ... yeah, yeah! I hear you. How are you doing?"
"About as well as you'd expect, riding in the stomach of a blimp. What about you? Did you come through it all right? No injuries?"
"No, I'm fine. Listen, I wish ... I wish I could say how good it feels to hear your voice."
She felt a tear on her cheek, and brushed it away.
"It's good to hear you, Bill. When you fell out that window- oh, damn! You wouldn't remember that, would you."
"There's a lot of things I don't remember," he said. "We can straighten it all out later."
"I'm dying to see you. Do you have any hair?"