Evolution

The parent worked a spur of bone in her wrist that changed the shape of the wings’ membrane: like air brakes, this enabled her to slow without stalling. She came to a halt a meter above the ledge, and dropped onto her hind legs. She stowed her delicate wing membranes, folded her flight fingers across her back, and walked forward, her knees bent outward and her elbows bent.

Second was dropped. He clattered against bare rock. He glimpsed the adult azhdarchid flap away. He scrabbled at the rock, but it was too hard to burrow into.

And little monsters closed in on him, blue-black in the comet light. Fed by their parents’ proteinaceous offerings of fish and meat, the chicks were growing quickly. But their wings were still undeveloped, and their bodies and heads were relatively large. They looked like miniature dinosaurs.

The first beak nipped at Second’s hind leg, almost playfully. The scent of his own blood evoked sudden memories of the burrow. He experienced a kind of regret. He bared his teeth. The ravenous chicks closed around him. It was over in a heartbeat, his warm body torn apart.

But now something moved, far above the mother azhdarchid. She twisted her sketch of a head to peer upwards. In these tall Cretaceous skies, fueled by the oxygen-rich air, a pyramid of predators had erected itself, with all the savagery of its landbound analogues. But when she saw the vast sprawled shadow, skimming over the comet-bright sky above the lowest of the clouds, she knew she was in no danger.

It was only an air whale.

The largest flying animal ever discovered by humans was a type of azhdarchid christened Quetzalcoatlus. Its wingspan of fifteen meters was four times that of the largest birds, condors; it had looked like a light airplane.

But the greatest pterosaur of all was an order of magnitude larger again.

The air whale’s tremendous, delicate wings were one hundred meters across. His bones were little more than sketches, strut-filled and hollow, astonishingly light. His mouth was vast, a translucent cavern. His main danger was overheating in the unfiltered sunlight of the high air, but his body had a number of mechanisms to compensate, including the capacity to vary the flow of blood in his tremendous wings, and air sacs placed in his body that enabled his internal organs to lose heat.

He lived his life in that thin, high layer of air called the stratosphere, higher than the mountains, above most of the clouds. But even this far from the ground there was life: a thin ethereal plankton of insects and spiders, windblown. Sometimes mating swarms of midges, or even locusts, could be blown up into this lofty realm. This was the whale’s thin bounty, which he scooped endlessly into his vast mouth.

Far below, if he had chosen to look, the air whale might have glimpsed the little drama of Second, the azhdarchid chicks, and the pterosaur. But from up here such remote events were of little interest. When he looked down over his airy domain, the whale could see the curve of the Earth: the fat blue band of thicker air that marked the horizon, and the glimmering of the sea in the light of the comet. The sky above faded to violet at the zenith. He was so high that there was too little air to scatter the light effectively; despite the brightness of the comet, he could see stars.

The air whale was capable of circumnavigating the globe, following the stratospheric winds and seeking updrafts, without once touching the ground. His kind made up a thin population — the aerial plankton could sustain no more — but they were scattered all over the planet. Three or four times in his life he had mated, summoned to the planet’s highest mountain peaks by innate timing mechanisms triggered by the motion of the sun. Mating was perfunctory and uninteresting; such huge, delicate creatures couldn’t afford the displays and courtship rituals of more terrestrial species. Nevertheless ancient instincts did sometimes come to the fore. There could be fights, often savage, almost always lethal, and when that happened, huge flimsy bodies would rain out of the skies, to baffle ground-based scavengers.

The whale was the end product of a brutal evolutionary competition, mostly aimed at removing weight; everything that had been surplus to requirements had, over the generations, been selected out or shriveled to insignificance. And, since nothing ever happened up here in the cool stratosphere, those diminished organs included the whale’s brain. The whale was at once the most spectacular but among the most stupid of his great family; his brain, though a fine control center for his elaborate flight systems, was little more than an organic adding machine. So the magnificent astronaut’s eye view before him meant nothing.