Until now.

The fall was stopped. Now the kayak hung under a delta-shaped parasail, supported by a dozen nylon-10 risers that rose from strategic positions along the upper hull. The boat and I were still descending, but in a gradual swoop now rather than a headlong fall. I looked up-the memory cloth was clear enough to see through-but the farcaster ring was too far behind me and hidden by clouds. The winds and air currents were carrying me away from the farcaster.

I suppose that I should have been grateful to my friends, the girl and the android, for somehow foreseeing this and preparing the kayak appropriately, but my first thought was an overwhelming G.o.dd.a.m.n you! G.o.dd.a.m.n you! This was too much. Being dropped into a world of clouds and air, with no ground, was too d.a.m.ned much. If Aenea had known that I was being 'cast here, why didn't she... This was too much. Being dropped into a world of clouds and air, with no ground, was too d.a.m.ned much. If Aenea had known that I was being 'cast here, why didn't she...

No ground? I leaned over the edge of the kayak and looked below. Perhaps the plan was for me to float gently down to some unseen surface. I leaned over the edge of the kayak and looked below. Perhaps the plan was for me to float gently down to some unseen surface.

No. There were kilometers of empty air beneath me, and below that, the lower layers were purple and black, a darkness relieved only by fierce slashes of lightning. The pressure down there must be terrible. Which brought up another point: if this was a Jovian world-Whirl or Jupiter or one of the others-how was it that I was breathing oxygen? As far as I knew, all of the gas giants that humanity had encountered were made up of unfriendly gases-methane, ammonia, helium, carbon monoxide, phosphine, hydrogen cyanide, other nasties, with trace amounts of water. I had never heard of a gas giant with breathable oxygen-nitrogen mix, but I was breathing. The air was thinner here than on the other worlds I had traveled through, and it stank a bit of ammonia, but I was definitely breathing air. Then it must not be a gas giant. Where the h.e.l.l was I?

I lifted my wrist and spoke to the comlog, "Where the h.e.l.l am I?"

There was a hesitation and for a moment I thought the thing had been broken on Vitus-Gray-Balia.n.u.s B. Then it spoke in the ship's supercilious voice, "Unknown, M. Endymion. I have some data, but it is incomplete."

"Tell me."

There followed a rapid-fire listing of temperatures in Kelvin, atmospheric pressure in millibars, estimated mean density in grams per centimeter cubed, probable escape velocity in kilometers per second, and perceived magnetic field in gauss, followed by a long list of atmospheric gases and element ratios.

"Escape velocity of fifty-four point two klicks per second," I said. "That's gas-giant territory, isn't it?"

"Most a.s.suredly," said the ship's voice. "Jovian baseline is fifty-nine point five kilometers per second."

"But the atmosphere isn't like a gas giant's?" I could see the stratoc.u.mulus ahead of me building, like a nature holo run at accelerated speeds. The towering cloud must have reached ten klicks above me, its base disappearing in the purple depths below. Lightning flickered at its base. The sunlight on its far side seemed rich and low: evening light.

"The atmosphere is unlike anything in my records," said the comlog. "Carbon monoxide, ethane, acetylene, and other hydrocarbons violating Solmev equilibrium values can be easily explained by Jovian-style molecular kinetic energy and solar radiation breaking down methane, and the presence of carbon monoxide is a standard result of methane and water vapor mixing at deep layers where the temperature exceeds twelve hundred degrees Kelvin, but the oxygen and nitrogen levels..."

"Yes?" I prompted.

"Indicate life," said the comlog.

I turned completely around, inspecting the clouds and sky as if something were sneaking up on me. "Life on the surface?" I said.

"Doubtful," came the flat voice. "If this world follows Jovian-Whirl norms, the pressure at the so-called surface would be under seventy million Old Earth atmospheres with a temperature of some twenty-five thousand degrees Kelvin."

"How high are we?" I said.

"Uncertain," said the instrument, "but with the current atmospheric pressure of point seven six Old Earth standard, on a standard Jovian world I would estimate that we were above the troposphere and tropopause, actually in the lower reaches of the stratosphere."

"Wouldn't it be colder that high? That's almost outer s.p.a.ce."

"Not on a gas giant," said the comlog in its insufferable professorial voice. "The greenhouse effect creates a thermal inversion layer, heating layers of the stratosphere to almost human-optimum temperatures. Although the difference of a few thousand meters may show p.r.o.nounced temperature increases or drops."

"A few thousand meters," I said softly. "How much air is above and below us?"

"Unknown," said the comlog again, "but extrapolation would suggest that equatorial radius from the center of this world to its upper atmosphere would be approximately seventy thousand kilometers with this oxygen-nitrogen-carbon-dioxide layer extending for some three to eight thousand kilometers approximately two thirds of the distance from the planet's hypothetical center."

"A three- to eight-thousand-klick layer," I repeated stupidly. "Some fifty thousand klicks above the surface..."

"Approximately," said the comlog, "although it should be noted that at near-core pressures, molecular hydrogen becomes a metal..."

"Yeah," I said. "That's enough for now." I felt like I was going to be sick over the side of the kayak.

"I should point out the anomaly that the interesting coloration in the nearby stratoc.u.mulus suggests the presence of ammonium monosulfide or polysulfides, although at apotropospheric alt.i.tudes, one would a.s.sume only the presence of ammonia cirrus clouds with true water clouds not forming until depths reach some ten standard atmospheres because of..."

"Enough," I said.

"I only point this out because of the interesting atmospheric paradox involving..."

"Shut up," I said.

IT GOT COLD AFTER THE SUN WENT DOWN. THE SUNSET itself I shall remember until I die.

High, high above me, glimpses of what might be blue sky had darkened to a Hyperion-like deep lapis and then deepened further to dark purple. The clouds all around me grew brighter as the sky far above and the depths far below both grew darker. I say clouds, but the generic term is laughably unequal to conveying the power and grandeur of what I watched. I grew up in a nomadic-shepherd caravan on the treeless moors between Hyperion's Great South Sea and the Pinion Plateau: I know clouds.

Far above me, feathered cirrus and rippled cirroc.u.mulus caught the twilight in a pastel riot of soft pinks, rose glows, violet tinges, and golden backlighting. It was as if I were in a temple with a high, rosy ceiling supported by thousands of irregular columns and pillars. The columns and pillars were towering mountains of c.u.mulus and c.u.mulonimbus, their anvil-shaped bases disappearing in the darkening depths hundreds or thousands of kilometers below my floating kayak, their rounded summits billowing high into the halo-tinged cirrostratus hundreds or thousands of kilometers above me. Each column of cloud caught the low, rich light pa.s.sing through openings in the cloud many thousands of klicks to the west, and the light seemed to ignite the clouds as if their surfaces were made of wildly flammable material.

"Monosulfide or polysulfides," the comlog had said: well, whatever const.i.tuted these tawny c.u.mulus in the diffuse daylight, sunset set them afire with rust-red light, brilliant crimson streaks, b.l.o.o.d.y tractus streaming away from the main cloud ma.s.ses like crimson pennants, rose-colored fibranas weaving together the cirrus ceiling like muscle strands under the flesh of a living body, billowing ma.s.ses of c.u.mulus so white that they made me blink as if s...o...b..inded, golden, striated cirroform spilling out from the boiling c.u.mulonimbus towers like ma.s.ses of blond hair blowing back from pale, upturned faces. The light deepened, richened, became so intense that it brought tears to my eyes, and then it became even more brilliant. Great, nearly horizontal shafts of G.o.dlight burned between the columns, illuminating some here, casting others into shadow there, pa.s.sing through ice clouds and bands of vertical rain on their way, spilling hundreds of simple rainbows and a thousand multiple rainbows. Then shadows moved up from the bruise-black depths, shading more and more of the still-writhing billows of c.u.mulus and nimbus, finally climbing into the high cirrus and pond-rippled altoc.u.mulus, but at first the shadows brought not grayness or darkness, but an infinite palette of subtleties: gleaming gold dimming to bronze, pure white becoming cream and then dimming to sepia and shade, crimson with the boldness of spilled blood slowly darkening to the rust-red of dried blood, then fading to an autumnal tawny russet. The hull of my kayak lost its glint and the parasail above me quit catching the light as this vertical terminator moved past and above me. Slowly these shadows crept higher-it must have taken at least thirty minutes, although I was too absorbed in watching to check my comlog-and when they reached the cirrus ceiling, it was as if someone had dimmed all the lights in the temple.

It was one h.e.l.l of a sunset.

I remember blinking then, overwhelmed by the interplay of light and cloud shadow and the oddly disturbing kinetic restlessness of all those broiling cloud ma.s.ses, ready to rest my eyes while true darkness fell and to gather my thoughts. And that is when the lightning and aurora began playing.

There had been no aurora borealis on Hyperion-or if there had been, I had never seen it. But I had seen an example of Old Earth's northern lights on a peninsula that had once been the Scandinavian Republic while on my round-the-world dropship tour of that planet: they had been shimmering and gooseflesh-producing, rippling and dancing along the northern horizon like the filmy gown of a ghost dancer.

This world's aurora held none of that subtlety. Bands of light, solid striations of light-as discrete and discernible as the keys of a vertical piano--began dancing high in the sky in the direction I thought of as south. Other curtains of green, gold, red, and cobalt began shimmering against the dark world of air beneath me. These grew longer, broader, taller, stretching to meet and blend with other curtains of leaping electrons. It was as if the planet were cutting paper dolls out of shimmering light. Within minutes, every part of the sky was alive and dancing with vertical, slanted, and near-horizontal ribbons of banded color. The cloud towers became visible again, billows and pennants reflecting the strobe of thousands of these cold lights. I could almost hear the hiss and rasp of solar particles being driven along the terrifying lines of magnetic force banding this giant world.

I could could hear them: crashes, rumbles, snappings, loud pops, long chains of cracking sounds. I swiveled in my little c.o.c.kpit and leaned over the hull to look straight down. The lightning and thunder had begun. hear them: crashes, rumbles, snappings, loud pops, long chains of cracking sounds. I swiveled in my little c.o.c.kpit and leaned over the hull to look straight down. The lightning and thunder had begun.

I had seen enough lightning storms as a child on the moors. On Old Earth, Aenea, A. Bettik, and I regularly used to sit outside her shelter in the evening and watch the great electrical storms move over the mountains to the north. Nothing had prepared me for this.

The depths, as I had called them, had been little more than a dark floor so far below me as to be laughable, a broiling promise of terrible pressures and more terrible heat. But now those depths were alive with light, leaping with lightning storms that moved from one visible horizon to the rest like a chain of nuclear bombs going off. I could imagine entire hemispheres of cities being destroyed in one of those rumbling chain reactions of light. I gripped the side of the kayak and rea.s.sured myself that the storms were hundreds of klicks below me.

The lightning moved up the towers of c.u.mulonimbus. Flashes of internal white light vied with the shimmers of colored light from the connecting auroras. The thunder-noise was subsonic, then sonic, subtly terrifying at first, then not subtle, but even more terrifying. The kayak and its parasail bucked and rocked in sudden downdrafts and elevator-quick lifts of thermals. I gripped the sides with mad strength and wished to G.o.d that I were on any other world but this.

Then the lightning discharges began flashing from cloud tower to cloud tower.

The comlog and my own reasoning had evaluated the scale of this place-an atmosphere tens of thousands of klicks deep, a horizon so far away that I could have dropped scores of Old Earths or Hyperions between me and the sunset-but the lightning bolts finally convinced me that this was a world made for giants and G.o.ds, not for humankind.

The electrical discharges were wider than the Mississippi and longer than the Amazon. I had seen those rivers and I could see these bolts. I knew knew.

I hunkered down in my little c.o.c.kpit as if that would help me when one of these bolts caught my little flying kayak. The hairs on my forearms were standing straight up and I realized that the crawling sensation I felt on my neck and scalp was precisely that-the hair on my head was writhing like a nest of snakes. The comlog was flashing overload alarms on its diskey plate. It was probably shouting at me as well, but I could not have heard a laser cannon firing ten centimeters from my ear in that maelstrom. The parasail rippled and tore at the risers as heated air and imploding vacuums battered us. At one point, riding the wake of a bolt that blinded me, the kayak swung above horizontal, higher than the parasail. I was sure that the risers were going to collapse, the kayak and I were going to fall into the parasail shroud, and we would fall for minutes-hours-until pressure and heat ended my screaming.

The kayak rocked back, then back again, then continued swinging like a maddened pendulum-but under under the sail. the sail.

In addition to the storm of lightning beneath me, in addition to the rising chain of explosions in every tower of c.u.mulus, in addition to the searing bolts that now laced the towers like a web of firing neurons in a brain gone berserk, bundles of ball lightning and chain lightning suddenly began breaking loose from the clouds and floating in the dark s.p.a.ces where my kayak flew.

I watched one of these rippling, surging spheres of electricity drift not a hundred meters beneath me: it was the size of a small, round asteroid-an electric moonlet. The noise it made was beyond description, but memories surged unbidden of being caught in a forest fire in the Aquila fens, of the tornado that skipped over our caravan on the moors when I was five years old, of plasma grenades detonating against the great blue glacier on the Claw Iceshelf. No combination of these memories could match the energy violence tumbling along beneath the kayak like some runaway boulder made of blue and gold light.

The storm lasted more than eight hours. Darkness lasted another eight. I survived the first. I slept through the last. When I awoke, shaken and thirsty, filled with dreams of light and noise, still partially deafened, badly needing to urinate and worried about falling out of the c.o.c.kpit while I knelt to do so, I saw that morning light was painting the opposite side of the cloud pillars that had replaced the temple columns from the night before. Sunrise was simpler than sunset: the brilliant white and gold crawled down from the cirrus ceiling, along the roiling sides of the c.u.mulus and nimbus, down to my layer where I sat shaking from the cold. My skin and clothes and hair were wet. Sometime during that night's bedlam, it had rained on me and rained hard.

I got to my knees on the padded floor of the hull, held tight to the c.o.c.kpit rim with my left hand, made sure that the kayak's swaying had steadied somewhat, and attended to business. The thin, gold stream glinted in morning light as it dropped into infinity. The depths were black, purple, and inscrutable once again. My lower back hurt and I remembered the kidney stone nightmare of the previous few days. That seemed like another life to me now, long ago and far away. Well Well, I thought, if there's another tiny stone being pa.s.sed, I'm not going to catch it today if there's another tiny stone being pa.s.sed, I'm not going to catch it today.

I was b.u.t.toning up and settling back into the c.o.c.kpit, trying to stretch my aching legs without actually falling out, thinking about the impossibility of finding another farcaster ring anywhere in this endless sky after that night of being blown off course-as if I had ever had had a course-when I suddenly realized that I was not alone. a course-when I suddenly realized that I was not alone.

Living things were rising from the depths and circling around me.

AT FIRST I SAW ONLY ONE CREATURE AND HAD NO scale with which to judge the size of the visitor. The thing could have been a few centimeters across and only meters from my floating kayak, or many kilometers across and far, far away. Then the organism swam between a distant cloud pillar and a more distant c.u.mulus tower, and I realized that kilometers was a more reasonable guess of size. As it came closer, I saw the myriad of smaller forms accompanying it through the morning sky.

Before I attempt to describe the things, I have to say that little in the history of humankind's expansion in this arm of the galaxy had prepared us to describe large alien organisms. On the hundreds of worlds explored and colonized during and after the Hegira, most of the indigenous life discovered had been plants and a few very simple organisms, such as the radiant gossamers on Hyperion. The few large, evolved animal forms-the Lantern Mouths on Mare Infinitus, say, or the zeplins of Whirl-tended to be hunted to extinction. The more common result was a world filled with a few indigenous life-forms and a myriad of human-adapted species. Humanity had terraformed all these worlds, bringing its bacteria and earthworms and fish and birds and land animals in raw DNA form, defrosting embryos in the early seedships, building birthing factories in the later expansions. The result had been much as on Hyperion-vital indigenous plants such as the tesla trees and chauna and weirwood and some surviving local insects coexisting with thriving Old Earth transplants and biotailored adapts such as triaspen, everblues, oak trees, mallards, sharks, hummingbirds, and deer. We were not used to alien animals.

And these were definitely alien animals rising to meet me.

The largest one reminded me of the cuttlefish-again, one of Old Earth's adapts-that thrived in the warm shallows of the Great South Sea on Hyperion. This creature was squidlike but almost transparent, its internal organs quite visible, although I admit that it was difficult to determine its exterior from its interior as it pulsed and throbbed and changed shape from second to second, almost like a starship morphing for battle. The thing had no head as such, not even a flattened, squidlike extension that might be considered a head, but I could make out a variety of tentacles, although fronds or filaments might be better words for the constantly swaying, retracting, extending, and quivering appendages. But these filaments were inside the pale, clear body as much as outside, and I was not sure if the creature's movement through the clear air was a result of the swimming motion of the filaments or because of gases expelled as the giant cuttlefish expanded and contracted.

As far as I could recall from old books and Grandam's explanations, the zeplins on Whirl were much simpler in appearance-blimp-shaped gasbags, mere medusalike cells to hold their mix of hydrogen and methane, storing and metabolizing helium in their crude liftsacs, giant jellyfish floating in the hydrogen-ammonia-methane atmosphere of Whirl. As best I could remember, the zeplins ate a sort of atmospheric phytoplankton that floated in the noxious atmosphere like so much airborne manna. There were no predators on Whirl...until humans arrived in their floating bathyscaphes to harvest the rarer gases.

As the cuttlefish creature grew closer, I saw the complexity of its innards: pale, pulsing outlines of organs and intestine-looking coils and what might be feeding filaments and tubes that might be for reproduction or elimination, and there were some appendages that might be s.e.x organs, or perhaps eyes. And all the while it folded in on itself, retracted its curling filaments, then pulsed forward, tentacles extended fully, like a squid swimming through clear water. It was five or six hundred meters long.

I began to notice the other things. Around the cuttlefish swarmed hundreds or thousands of golden, disc-shaped creatures, ranging in size from tiny ones perhaps as large as my hand to others larger than the heavy river mantas used to pull barges on Hyperion's rivers. These things were also nearly transparent, although their insides were clouded by a sort of greenish glow that might have been an inert gas excited to luminescence by the animal's own bio-electrical field. These things swarmed around the cuttlefish, at times appearing to be swallowed or absorbed by some orifice or another, only to reappear outside again. I could not swear that I saw the cuttlefish eating eating any of the swarming discs, but at one point I thought that I could see a cloud of the green-glowing things moving along the inside of the cuttlefish's gut like ghostly platelets in a clear vein. any of the swarming discs, but at one point I thought that I could see a cloud of the green-glowing things moving along the inside of the cuttlefish's gut like ghostly platelets in a clear vein.

The monster and its cloud of companions floated closer, rising until the sunlight pa.s.sed through its body on its way to light my kayak and parasail. I revised its size upward-it must be at least a klick long and a third that in width when it expanded to its widest. The living discs floated to each side of me now. I could see that they were spinning as well as curling like mantas.

I tugged out the flechette pistol Alem had given me and clicked off its safety. If the monster attacked, I would fire half the magazine of slivers into its pale side, hoping that it was as thin as it was transparent. Maybe there was a chance that I could spill whatever lift gases allowed it to float in this band of oxygen atmosphere.

At that moment, the thing's hydralike filaments flashed out in all directions, some missing my parasail by mere meters, and I realized that I could never kill or sink the monster before it destroyed my sail with one thrash of one tentacle. I waited, half expecting to be pulled into the cuttlefish's maw-if it had a maw-at any second.

Nothing happened. My kayak floated in the direction I thought of as westward, the parasail rising on thermals and descending on colder downdrafts, the clouds towering around me, and the cuttlefish and its companions-I thought of them as parasites for no good reason-stood off a few hundred meters to the "north" and a hundred meters or so above me. I wondered if the thing was following me out of curiosity or hunger. I wondered if the green platelets drifting around me might attack at any moment.

Capable of doing nothing else, I laid the useless flechette pistol on my lap, nibbled on the last of my biscuits from my pack, and sipped from my water bottle. I had less than another day's supply of water. I cursed myself for not trying to catch rainwater during the night's terrible storm, although I had no idea if this world's water was potable.

The long morning grew into a long afternoon. Several times the drifting parasail took me into a cloud tower and I raised my face to the dripping fog, licking droplets from my lips and chin. The water tasted like water. Each time I emerged from the fog, I expected the cuttlefish to have departed, but each time it remained on station to my right and above me. Once, just after the halo that was the sun above had pa.s.sed the zenith, the kayak was blown into a particularly rough patch of climbing cloud, and the parasail almost folded in the violent updraft. But it stabilized itself and when I emerged from the cloud that time, I was some kilometers higher. The air was thinner and colder. The cuttlefish had followed me up.

Perhaps it's not hungry yet. Perhaps it feeds after dark. I rea.s.sured myself with a series of these thoughts.

I kept scanning the empty sky between clouds for another farcaster ring, but none appeared. It seemed folly to expect to find one-the air currents blew me generally westward but the vagaries of the jet stream sent me klicks north and south. How could I thread such a small needle after a day and night and day of blowing around like this? It did not seem likely. But still I searched the sky.

In midafternoon I realized that there were other living things visible far below to the south. More cuttlefish moving about the base of an immense cloud tower, the sunlight piercing the depths enough to illuminate their clear bodies against the black of the broiling depths beneath them. There must be scores-no, hundreds-of the pulsing, swimming things along the base of that one cloud. I was too far away to make out the platelet parasites around them, but a sense of diffused light there-like dust floating-suggested their presence by the thousands or millions. I wondered if the monsters usually kept to the lower atmospheric levels and this one-still keeping pace with me within feeding-filament range-had ventured up out of curiosity.

My muscles were cramping. I pulled myself out of the c.o.c.kpit and tried stretching along the top of the kayak's hull, hanging on to the parasail risers to keep my balance. It was dangerous, but I had to stretch. I lay on my back and pedaled an imaginary bicycle with my raised legs. I did push-ups, clinging to the rim of the c.o.c.kpit for balance. When I had worked most of the cramps out, I crawled back into the c.o.c.kpit and half dozed.

Perhaps it is odd to admit, but my mind wandered all that afternoon, even while the alien cuttlefish swam alongside within swallowing range and alien platelet creatures danced and hovered within meters of the kayak and parasail. The human mind gets used to strangeness very quickly if it does not exhibit interesting behavior.

I began thinking about the past few days and the past months and the past years. I thought of Aenea-of leaving her behind-and of all the other people I had left behind: A. Bettik and the others at Taliesin West, the old poet on Hyperion, Dem Loa and Dem Ria and their family on Vitus-Gray-Balia.n.u.s B, Father Glaucus in the frozen air tunnels of Sol Draconi Septem, Cuchiat and Chiaku and Cuchtu and Chichticu and the other Chitchatuk on that same world-Aenea had been sure that Father Glaucus and our Chitchatuk friends had been murdered after we left that world, although she had never explained how she could know that-and I thought about others I had left behind, working my way back to my last sight of Grandam and the Clan members waving as I left for Home Guard service many years ago. And always my thoughts returned to leaving Aenea.

I've left too many people. And let too many people do my work and fighting for me. From now on I will fight for myself If I ever find the girl again, I will stay with Aenea forever. The resolution burned like anger through me, fueled by the hopelessness of finding another farcaster ring in this endless cloud-scape.

YOU KNOW.

THE ONE WHO TEACHES.

SHE HAS TOUCHED.

YOU (!?!?).

The words were not carried by sound nor heard by my ears. Rather, they were like blows to the inside of my skull. I literally reeled, gripping the sides of the kayak to keep from falling out.

HAVE YOU.

BEEN TOUCHED/CHANGED.

LEARNING.

TO HEAR/SEE/WALK.

FROM.

THE ONE WHO.

TEACHES (????).

Every word was a migraine blow. Each struck with the force of brain hemorrhage. The words were shouted inside my skull in my own voice. Perhaps I was going mad.

Wiping away tears, I peered at the giant cuttlefish and its swarm of green-platelet parasites. The larger organism pulsed, contracted, extended coiling filaments, and swam through the chilly air. I could not believe that these words were coming from that creature. It was too biological. And I did not believe in telepathy. I looked at the swarming discs, but their behavior showed no more sense of higher consciousness than dust motes in a shaft of light-less than the synchronized shifting of a school of fish or the flocking of bats. Feeling foolish, I shouted, "Who are you? Who is speaking?"

I squinted in preparation for the blast of words against my brain, but there was no response from the giant organism or its companions.

"Who spoke?" I shouted into a rising wind. There was no answering sound except for the slap of the risers against the canvas of the parasail.

The kayak slewed to the right, righted itself, and slewed again. I swiveled to my left, half expecting to see another cuttlefish monster attacking me, but instead saw something infinitely more malevolent approaching.

While I had been focusing on the alien creature to the north, a billowing, black c.u.mulus had all but surrounded me to the south. Wind-tattered streamers of black whirled out from the heat-driven storm cloud and roiled under me like ebony rivers. I could see lightning flashing in the depths below and surging spheres of ball lightning being spit from the black column of storm. Closer, much closer, hanging from the river of black cloud flowing above me, curled a dozen or more tornadoes, their funnel clouds striking toward me like scorpion tails. Each funnel was the size of the cuttlefish monster or larger-vertical kilometers of whirling madness-and each was sp.a.w.ning its own cl.u.s.ter of smaller tornadoes. There was no way that my flimsy parasail could withstand even a close miss by one of these vortexes-and there was no way that the funnels were going to miss me.

I stood up in the pitching, rolling c.o.c.kpit, holding my place in the boat only by grasping a riser with my left hand. With my right hand I made a fist, raised it, and shook it toward the tornadoes, toward the roiling storm beyond them, and toward the invisible sky beyond. "Well, G.o.dd.a.m.n you then!" I shouted. My words were lost in the wind howl. My vest flapped around me. A gust nearly blew me into the maelstrom. Leaning far out over the hull of the kayak, bracing myself into the wind like a ski jumper I had seen once on the Iceshelf caught in a moment of mad, poised balance before the inevitable descent, I shook my fist again and screamed, "Do your worst, G.o.dd.a.m.n you. I defy you G.o.ds!"

As if in answer, one of the tornado funnels came sidewinding closer, the lowest tip of its whirling cone stabbing downward as if seeking a hard surface to destroy. It missed me by a distance of hundreds of meters, but the vacuum of its pa.s.sing whirled the kayak and parasail around like a toy boat in a draining bathtub. Relieved of the opposition of the wind, I fell forward onto the slippery kayak hull and would have slid into oblivion if my scrabbling hands had not found a riser to grip. My feet were fully out of the c.o.c.kpit at that moment.

There was a hailstorm traveling with the pa.s.sing funnel. Ice pellets-some the size of my fist-smashed through the parasail, pounded the kayak with a noise like flechette clouds slamming home, and hit me in the leg, shoulder, and lower back. The pain almost made me release my grip. That mattered little, I realized as I clung to the pitching, dipping kayak, because the sail had been torn in a hundred places. Only its canopy had saved me from being shot to bits by the hail, but now the delta-shaped foil had been riddled. It lost lift as suddenly as it had first gained it and the kayak pitched forward toward the darkness so many thousands of klicks below. Tornadoes filled the sky around me. I gripped the now-useless riser where it entered the battered hull and hung on, determined to complete that one act-hanging on-until the boat, furled sail, and I were all crushed by pressure or shredded by the winds. I realized that I was screaming again, but the sound was different in my ears-almost gleeful.

I had fallen less than a kilometer, the kayak and me gaining speed far beyond Hyperion's or Old Earth's terminal velocity, when the cuttlefish-forgotten behind and above me-made its lunge. It must have moved with blinding speed, propelling itself through the air like a squid jetting after its prey. The first I knew that it was hungry and determined not to lose its dinner was when the long feeding tendrils surged around me like so many huge tentacles coiling and probing and wrapping.

If the thing had tugged me to an immediate stop at the speeds the boat and I were falling, both kayak and I would have been snapped into small pieces. But the cuttlefish fell with us, surrounding the boat, sail, risers, and me with the smallest of its tendrils-each still two to five meters thick-and then it braked itself against the fall, jetting ammonia-smelling gases like a dropship on final approach. Then it began ascending again, up toward the storm where tornadoes still raged and the central stratoc.u.mulus rotated with its own black intensity. Only half-conscious, I realized that the cuttlefish was flying into that roiling cloud even as it reeled the bashed kayak and me toward an opening in its immense transparent body.

Well, I thought groggily, I've found its mouth I've found its mouth.

Risers and shreds of parasail lay around me and over me like an oversized shroud. The kayak seemed to be draped in drab bunting as the cuttlefish pulled us in closer. I tried to turn, thought of crawling back toward the c.o.c.kpit and finding the flechette gun, of cutting my way out of the thing.

The flechette gun was gone, of course, shaken out of the c.o.c.kpit in all the violent tumbling and the fall. Also gone were the c.o.c.kpit cushions and my backpack with the clothes, food, water, and flashlight laser. Everything was gone.