The Children of the Sky

The Sea Breeze moved steadily northwards, not much faster than a pack might walk. The wind and the tether combined to keep them at altitude, sparing them the awful death that had claimed all previous explorers—and incidentally keeping them out of the heat and damp of the tropical jungle. The grass below had taken on its tree form. The trunks might still be below water, but yard by yard, as the balloon drifted north, those trunks became thicker, holding more silt from the Fell. “Most of what we’re seeing now stays above sea level except during storms and the highest tides,” said Remasritlfeer.

More of Chitiratifor’s snouts were visible now. The pack was peering down. “How far still to go?” he said.

“We just have to move a little eastwards.” Remasritlfeer had been watching the ground, and Tycoon’s ships, and the payout of the tether. You could be sure Tycoon was watching back. If Tycoon had stayed back in East Home, they all could have abandoned this foolishness by now. Directly below, he recognized a pattern of trees that he had used on the last few flights; he signalled for the ship to stop the payout and move eastward. The Sea Breeze bounced gently against the limit of the tether. The ground below slid sideways. Remasritlfeer took on the manner of a tour guide: “And now you’ll see the lost city of legend, the Great Choir of the Tropics.” Maybe it was a city. There were hundreds of Tines wherever he looked. As the balloon took them across higher ground, they could see more. Thousands of Tines. More. Perhaps as many as legend claimed. And nowhere was there even one coherent pack, just the simple mindlessness of the vast crowd. The sound … the sound was tolerable. The Sea Breeze was several hundred feet up, too high for mindsound to reach. What Tinish sounds did reach the gondola were in the range of normal Interpack speech. Some of it might be language, but the chords that sounded from thousands of tympana were smeared of any meaning they might have had. It was an eerie dirge of ecstasy.

And it squashed Chitiratifor’s arrogance. Remasritlfeer could feel the gondola shift as the fat sixsome huddled in on himself. There was fascinated horror in his voice: “So many. So close. It … really is a Choir.”

“Yup,” Remasritlfeer said cheerfully, though he had been similarly affected the first few times he’d been here.

“But how do they eat? How can they sleep?” In endless debauchery went unsaid, but Remasritlfeer could almost hear the thought.

“We don’t know the details, but if we go lower—”

“No! Don’t do that!”

Remasritlfeer grinned to himself and continued. “If we go lower you’d see that these creatures look half starved. And yet there are buildings. See?” He made a pointing sound. Indeed, there were mud structures visible, some reduced to worn foundations peeking out from below later structures, and those submerged beneath still later mounds. No coherent pack would ever make such random things, barely recognizable as artificial constructions.

In places, the generations of mud structures were piled five or six deep, a chaotic mixture of midden and pyramid and multistory hovel. There must be holes and crannies within; you could see Tines entering and emerging. Remasritlfeer recognized the neighborhood from previous flights. There were patterns, as if some fragment of conscious planning had worked for a few days and then been swept away by noise or some other plan. In a couple of tendays, all the landmarks would be changed again.

“Another hundred feet will do it,” he said, and signalled to Tycoon’s ship to drop anchor. Actually, navigating the tethered balloon was rarely this precise. Today’s sea breeze was as smooth as fine silk. “Coming up on the Great Trading Plaza.”

There was some shifting around on the passenger platform above him, Chitiratifor screwing up his courage to poke additional snouts over the railing. Then an unbelieving, “You call that a plaza?”

“Well, that’s Tycoon’s term for it.” More objectively, it was an open patch of mud, fifty feet across; Tycoon had a peddler’s talent for using words to redefine reality. For several moments, Remasritlfeer was too busy for chitchat. He reached over the edge of the gondola to cast a mooring line downward. At the same time he shouted a big halloo to the Tines below. Of course, there were always watchers down there, though sometimes they seemed to forget the point of this exercise. Today, the response was almost immediate. Three Tines ran toward the center of the open space. They came from widely different points and were clearly singletons. Only when they got within a few feet of each other was there any sort of coordinated activity. Then they scrambled around clumsily, snapping at the rope that Remasritlfeer dangled down to them. Finally, two stood steady and third scrambled up and got the rope. Then all three got jaws on it and dragged the cord round and round a mud pillar.