“Ah.”

The tadfish mouth was still open. Quert ducked and ran directly into the mouth. This looked to Cliff like a very bad idea. He slowed as they approached the ruby red lip of the mouth and saw the floor of the mouth was a hardened cartilage, lime green and ribbed. He tromped in, boots rapping on the cartilage. A musky smell seemed to wrap around his face. He edged down a narrow passage to the left, dimly lit by amber phosphors in the fleshy walls. The walls pulsed with heat and he emerged into a long room devoted to the view out a transparent wall in the tadfish side. The humans were there but no Sil. As he crossed the room, he felt a surge and the tadfish took off, angling over the zigzags. It turned to bask in the wind and accelerated. Everyone caught their balance, bracing against the softly resistant, fleshy walls. Below he saw Kahalla figures running vainly toward some tow lines that had held the tadfish in place. They retracted, and a Kahalla raised a tube weapon toward the humans looking down. It sighted—then lowered the weapon and shook its arms in frustration.

Irma said, “The Sil stole this thing.”

They all laughed a bit in appreciation, relieved, and Quert came into the room. In its staccato manner, it confirmed that the Sil had kept track of when the tadfish would set down on its regular route and had rushed to get there just in time to seize the tadfish when the flight crews changed shift. “Good timing,” Terry said, and Quert gave a hand-pass that meant assent.

Cliff did not remark that the Sil had not bothered to tell the humans what was up. Quert didn’t like debating policy; indeed, the Sil did not share the human appetite for endless talk and at times made fun of it.

“So now we’ll ‘hide in the sky’ as you said.” Aybe scowled. “From what?”

“Folk trace us. Saw at Ice Minds. Kahalla alert them.”

They were rising fast above the spreading plain. The atmosphere became supersaturated, the air suddenly full of mist. Cliff looked out along the axis of his shadow and there it was forming, a huge round luminous rainbow. The circular rainbow popped into the halo air. It formed near the top of a mountain, aslant from the constant star hanging at his back. He could see five separate colors; the red was intense. Slowly the mist dissolved and the spectral promise faded away. Yet it moved him with its beauty and its quick demise.

The tadfish walls popped and creaked. Irma said, “What’s that?” They rose faster. The fins outside beat in synchronous rhythm, and they heard a heavy thudding through the walls. “Is that its heart?”

Aybe looked out the transparent wall. “Maybe the body is expanding. It must be making more hydrogen from water, filling itself out.”

Cliff put his head against the oddly warm transparent window and only then noticed a separate transparent bulge farther along the curving skin. It promised a better viewing angle. But the wall nearby had no opening. He saw no way to reach that bulge but ran his hands along the wall and felt a crease in the warm flesh. He pried at it, and with a rasping purr a sheet came free along a seam. A pressure seal, apparently. He peeled it back and saw a narrow footway lit by blue phosphors. A few steps took him to the transparent blister. From here he could see farther around the curve of the great flying balloon, and the stately ranks of flapping translucent fins.

The view now was majestic and vast. The deep Bowl atmosphere fell off slowly with height, so a living balloon with a fishlike shape could rise a long way before the slackening pressure outside made it bulge. He looked down through many kilometers at the clouds flowing over the low mountains that only a short while ago, while they were running, had loomed in the distance. Refracted glows of the jet and star danced and coiled in deep clouds. Except for the slow thump of the tadfish heart, he felt as though he were hanging in air, seeing the Bowl as did the great birds he had seen far up the towering sky.

He turned to rejoin the others and saw to his side another pressure seal. He felt it for a seam. Then Irma came into the cramped blister. “What’s going on?”

“Look, we’re just passengers, can’t do anything but wait. Let’s see how this thing works. Might be useful up ahead.”

Irma twisted her mouth in a skeptical curve. “I could use a rest.”

“The more we know, the better.”

Irma leaned against the warm wall and gazed out on the spectacular view. “Um, maybe. Me, I’ve got strangeness overload. Every day there’s more to digest. And on the run, too.”

He smiled. “We’re in the belly of a beast already. Let’s not get digested.”

She shrugged. “These passages are claustrophobic. Let’s leave Aybe and Terry back there—Quert’s brought some gloppy food for them and they’re wolfing it down. Tastes like a chicken-flavored milk shake. Hard bits in it, too, tasted like bitter snails. I can wait.”

They went through the narrow tunnels along the tadfish’s streamlined form. It had a torpedo shape, and the occasional viewing blister was flanked by big slabs of sinewy brown muscle. These flexed as it propelled forward and Cliff sniffed; their close, moist air took on a sweaty, salty tinge.

“Fishoids, torpedo-shaped predators,” Irma said when they looked out a blister and saw a swarm of long tubular birds flocking below. They swerved and scooped in the air, catching something that vented from the tadfish. “Feeding on waste?” Irma asked.

“One species’ waste is another’s food,” Cliff said.

Around the long curve of the tadfish body came big gliding shapes in convoy, more like manta rays than like birds. They were flying in a V formation and had slick, matted gray skins. Diving and banking in concert through the thick air, big eyes intent on the feeding tubular birds. Their shapes, Cliff saw, reflected the demands of curvature, flow, and tension as they lazily slid down the air. Meaty triangular wings led back to rudderlike fins and a long spike at the tail. Cliff pointed. “The killing instrument.” A pair of eyes protruded in knobs at either side of their wedgelike heads, above the long slit mouth. Another pair of bigger, yellow eyes sat close together and peered forward. The flying tubes moved with stately grace through the glassy air. Fleshy, oarlike appendages flanked the heads, as the manta snapped up the smaller tubular birds. Through the window, Cliff and Irma could hear cries and shrieks as the pillage cut through the flock.

It was a strange sight and over in a moment. The mantas dove under the tadfish, while a few survivors scattered in frantic haste. Irma put an arm around Cliff’s waist and he felt a rush of contentment. In all this strangeness, the small comforts mattered most. They stood that way awhile, until warm air drew their attention to an inward-leading passage. He was trying to analyze all they were seeing, but the dimly lit passage drew them onward. Squishing sounds came from ahead. They worked along a throbbing wall and came upon a translucent interior layer, where they could see dark bones working in a sheath. Low murmurs and hums came through the transparent wall, and they could see gray fluids running down the bulky flesh everywhere. Lubricants?

“This is its internal skeleton?” Cliff wondered. The sliding parallel bones worked through thick green collars, coiling like a flexible spring. But their attention focused on two moving stick-figure creatures that seemingly tended this living machinery. They were about a meter tall, with six limbs that moved quickly, clambering everywhere, adjusting the mechanical supports of the bony spine. These creatures used their flexing limbs as either arms or legs, depending on where they scampered over the big moving apparatus. Irma pointed—they had long, two-petaled tails that folded to protect sexual organs that occasionally came into view as they worked. They seemed like slender, pink skeletons, with brains carried in a bump between the pair of limbs at the top of the spinal cord. Three eyes worked on stalks, making an equilateral triangle around a broad red slit of a mouth.