A balloon with a face
A sky-whale is a living airship ten kilometres long: a balloon with a skin, not an animal with gas in it.
Five times as long as it is deep. Both great fins carried out like a glider's wings; the town a tenth of the back at most.
Gas and bone
Almost all of a whale is hydrogen, held in long horizontal tiers of gas cells under a skin stretched taut. Its weight hangs underneath as a keel of bone grown with iron the animal makes itself, iron that cannot rust because it already is rust. That keel is how a whale feels the roads and leans on them.
It eats the glow
A wide mouth held closed on a long straight seam grazes the charged, glowing air, and the seam leaks a faint emerald light. Bright in bright years, fading in dim ones: the Flotilla read a whale's mouth the way a farmer reads a sky.
A hundred and fifty gods
About a hundred and fifty whales, every one in the lit world, migrating along the roads once a cycle: outward toward the rim in bright years, home to the middle sky under the Hole in dim ones.
They hang in layers by age, the biggest and oldest highest and the calves lowest. They never enter the dark, where there is no glow, nothing to eat and no road.
One word for a stillbirth and a fall
Birth
Calves are born in the air. The mother fills her calf with gas through a cord and lets go only when it floats on its own. A calf let go too soon falls, and the Flotilla have one word for a stillbirth and a dead whale's fall. Where they breed is the Flotilla's one secret, and the one place they would start a war to keep.
Death
A starving whale burns its fat to remake the gas it leaks. When the fat is gone the gas goes, and it sinks, slowly, through the storm into the Floor. It does not land.
The Abyssal catch it from their bladder-craft, bleed it until it hangs, moor it to the foot of a range and take it apart over weeks. When the bare skeleton is cut loose it drops into the deep, and the ground rings, heard across the whole Floor. The Abyssal have a word for it that just means "the sound."
You cannot whisper to a mountain
Resonators guide the herd with great crescent horns of carved whale bone, a metre and a half and more from mouthpiece to bell, in notes so low a whale hears them through its skeleton. The temple's threshold horn is the same idea grown to a building.
A Flotilla child learns the horn before she learns to walk. Once a dimming, at the rite of the horn, a class of children takes it up together under the open sky, and the gods answer, seam after seam across the night.
Markets on a spine, temples on a rib
Five to ten thousand people on a patch of the flat back, built entirely from what grows on the whale: houses hollowed from sky-barnacles ten metres high, towers in the coiled shells of giant sky-snails, covered lanes of fused worm-tube, halls carved into old colony bases, sailcloth awnings. No timber, and no metal.
The sailcloth is how the town drinks: it catches the night mist as the whale swims through it. At the top of the Chorus quarter stands the Horn-Temple, and on its outer wall sixty metres of the Mural, the world's own account of itself in ink.
The fire-law
The Flotilla light oil lamps on the back of an animal full of hydrogen, which burns with a flame you cannot see. Every Flotilla child can say the five parts.
- A fire has a keeper. No flame is left burning with nobody beside it. A fire found unkept is the one crime the Chorus does not argue about.
- No fire on bare hide. Every hearth and lamp stands on chalk, shell or bone, never on the whale itself.
- No fire at the edge. The vents run under the deck's edge, so towns sit on the spine ridge.
- Every roof has a hole. A closed roof is a sealed pot.
- Slack ground is closed ground. Hide that goes soft over a leaking cell is roped off, and no flame comes within a street of it.
The Flotilla do not kill a whale for oil. Ever.
The taboo that stands beside the fire-law