Titan (GAIA) (21 page)

Now she had her adventure. She was floating down a river in a cockleshell boat inside the most
titanic structure ever seen by a human eye, and a man who loved her was dying.

East Hyperion was a land of gently rolling hills and long stretches of plains, dotted with wind-blown trees like an African savanna. Ophion grew narrower and began to rush along, at the same time becoming mysteriously cooler.

They drifted for five or six kilometers at the mercy of the river, past low cliffs that dropped abruptly at the water’s edge.
Titanic
was unsteerable when she moved fast. Cirocco watched for a widening in the river and a place to land.

She saw it, and they spent two hours fighting the current with poles and paddles to bring the boat to the rocky shore. Both of them were on their last reserves of strength. More ominously, there was no food in the boat and East Hyperion did not look fertile.

They dragged
Titanic
up the shore, feet sliding over rocks tumbled smooth by the water, until they were sure it was out of danger. Bill was not aware of the movement. He had not spoken in a long time.

Cirocco sat up with Bill while Gaby fell into a death-like sleep. She kept herself awake by exploring the area within a hundred meters of the campsite.

There was a low bank twenty meters from the river’s edge. She scrambled to the top.

East Hyperion looked like a great place for a farmer. Wide stretches of the land looked like a yellow Kansas wheat field. That illusion was spoiled by other areas that were rust red, and still others of a pale blue mixed with orange. It all rippled in the wind like tall grass. Dark shadows drifted by, some of the clouds so low they formed fogbands in the creek beds, even in sunlight.

To the east, hills marched to the twilight zone of west Rhea, gradually gaining a green coloring that must have been forest, then losing it in the darkness to become stark rocky mountains. In the west the land flattened out, with the shallow lakes and bogs of the mudfish marsh glittering as they caught the sunlight. Beyond that was the darker green of the tropical forest, and higher up the curve were more plains that vanished into the twilight of Oceanus, with its frozen sea.

Scanning the distant hills, she saw a group of animals: black dots against the yellow background. Perhaps two or three of the dots were larger than the others.

She was about to return to the tent when she heard the music. It was so faint and distant that she realized she had been hearing it for some time without recognizing it for what it was. There would be a rapid cluster of tones, then a sustained note, wrenchingly sweet and clear. It spoke of quiet places and an ease she thought she might never see again, and was as familiar as a song heard in the cradle.

She found herself crying quietly, being as still as she could, willing the wind to be still with her. But the song was gone.

The Titanide found them while they were taking down the tent prior to moving Bill. It stood on the top of the bluff where Cirocco had been the day before. Cirocco waited for it to make the first move, but it seemed to have the same idea.

The most obvious word for the thing was centaur. It had a lower part shaped like a horse, and an upper half so human it was frightening. Cirocco was not quite sure she believed in it.

It was not as Disney had envisioned centaurs, nor did it have much to do with the classical Greek model. It had a lot of hair, yet its dominant feature was pale naked skin. There were great multi-colored
cascades of hair on the head and tail, on the lower parts of all four legs, and on the creature’s forearms. Oddest of all, there was hair between the two front legs, in the place where a decent horse—which Cirocco’s mind kept trying to see—had nothing but smooth hide. It carried a shepherd’s crook, and but for a few small ornaments, wore no clothing.

Cirocco was sure this was one of the Titanides Calvin had mentioned, though he had made a mistake in translation. It—
she
, Calvin had said they were all female—she was not six-legged, but six-limbed.

Cirocco took a step forward, and the Titanide put a hand to her mouth, then held it out in a quick gesture.

“Look out!” she called. “Please be cautious.”

For a split second Cirocco wondered what the Titanide was talking about, but that was quickly buried in astonishment. The Titanide had not spoken English, Russian, or French, which until that moment had been the only languages Cirocco knew.

“What’s the …” She stopped, clearing her throat. Some of the words were pitched quite high. “What’s the matter? Are we in danger?” Questions were hard, requiring a complex appoggiatura.

“I perceived you to be,” the Titanide sang. “I felt you must surely fall. But you must know what is right for your own kind.”

Gaby was looking at Cirocco strangely.

“What the hell’s going on?” she asked.

“I can understand her,” Cirocco said, not wanting to get into it any deeper. “She told us to be careful.”

“Careful of …
how
?”

“How did Calvin understand the blimp? Something’s been messing with our minds, honey. It’s coming in handy right now, so shut up.” She hurried on before other questions could be voiced, because she knew none of the answers.

“Are you the people of the marshes?” the Titanide asked. “Or do you come from the frozen sea?”

“Neither,” Cirocco trilled. “We have traveled through the marsh on our way to the … to the sea of evil, but one of us is hurt. We mean you no harm.”

“You will do me little harm if you go to the sea of evil, for you will be dead. You are too large to be angels who have lost their wings, and too fair for creatures of the sea. I confess I have not seen your like before.”

“We … could you join us on the beach? My song is weak; the wind does not lift it.”

“I’ll be there in two shakes of your tail.”

“Rocky!” Gaby hissed. “Look out, she’s going to come down!” She moved in front of Cirocco and stood with her glass sword held ready.

“I
know
she is,” Cirocco said, grappling with Gaby’s sword arm. “I asked her to. Put that away before she gets the wrong idea, and stay back. I’ll yell if there’s trouble.”

The Titanide came down the cliff forelegs-first, her arms out for balance. She danced nimbly, riding the small avalanche she had created, then she was trotting toward them. Her feet made a familiar clopping sound on the rocks.

She was thirty centimeters taller than Cirocco, who found herself taking a step backward as the Titanide drew closer. Seldom in her life had she met a taller woman, but this female creature would have towered over anyone but a professional basketball player. Seen close, she was more alien than ever, precisely because parts of her were so human.

A series of red, orange, and blue stripes that Cirocco had thought were natural markings turned out
to be paint. They were arranged in patterns, confined mostly to her face and chest. Four chevron stripes adorned her belly, just above where her navel would have been if she had possessed one.

Her face was wide enough to make the broad nose and mouth look appropriate. Her eyes were huge, with a lot of space between them. The irises were brilliant yellow, with radial streaks of green surrounding wide pupils.

The eyes were so astonishing that Cirocco almost failed to notice the most non-human feature of her face. She had thought they were an odd kind of flower tucked behind each ear, but they turned out to be the ears themselves. The pointed tips reached over the crown of her head.

“I am called C Sharp …” she sang. It was a series of musical notes in the key of C Sharp.

“What did she say?” Gaby whispered.

“She said her name was …” She sang the name, and the Titanide’s ears perked up.

“I can’t call her that,” Gaby protested.

“Call her C Sharp. Will you shut up and let me do the talking?” She turned back to the Titanide.

“My name is Cirocco, or Captain Jones,” she sang. “This is my friend, Gaby.”

The ears drooped to her shoulders, and Cirocco nearly laughed. Her expression had not changed, but the ears had spoken volumes.

“Just ‘sheer-ah-ko-or-cap-ten-jonz’?” she changed in an imitation of Cirocco’s monotone. When she sighed her nostrils flared with the force of it, but her chest did not move. “It is a long name, but not a windy one, begging your pardon. Do you folk feel no joy, to name yourselves so dourly?”

“Our names are chosen for us,” Cirocco sang, feeling unaccountably embarrassed. It was a dull moniker to give the Titanide after she had handed Cirocco such a sprightly air. “Our speech is not as yours, nor our pipes so deep.”

C Sharp laughed, and it was an entirely human laugh. “You speak with the voice of a thin reed, indeed, but I like you. I would take you home to my hindmother for a feast, if you were agreeable.”

“We would accept your invitation, but one of us is badly injured. We need help.”

“Which of you is it?” she sang, ears flapping in consternation.

“It is neither of us, but another. He has broken the bone in one of his legs.” She noted in passing that the Titanide language included pronoun constructions for male and female. Song fragments meaning male-mother and female-mother and even less likely concepts flitted through her head.

“A bone in his leg,” C Sharp sang, her ears doing a complicated semaphore. “Unless I miss my guess, this is quite serious for folk such as you, who cannot spare one. I will call the healer at once.” She raised her staff and sang briefly into a small green lump at the end.

Gaby’s eyes widened.

“They have radio? Rocky, tell me what’s going on.”

“She said she’d call a doctor. And that I have a dull name.”

“Bill could use the doctor, but he ain’t gonna be a member of the AMA.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” she hissed, angry. “Bill’s looking very bad, dammit. Even if this doctor has nothing but horse pills and ju-ju, it won’t hurt for him to take a look.”

“Was that your speech?” C Sharp asked. “Or are you in respiratory distress?”

“It’s the way we talk. I—”

“Please forgive me. My hindmother says I must learn tact. I am merely—” she sang the number twenty-seven and a time word that Cirocco could not convert, “—and have much to be taught beyond womb knowledge.”

“I understand,” sang Cirocco, who did not. “We must be strange to you. You certainly are to us.”

“Am I?” The key of her song betrayed that it was a new thought to C Sharp.

“To one who has never seen your kind.”

“It must be as you say. But if you have never seen a Titanide, from whence do you come in the great wheel of the world?”

Cirocco had been puzzled by the way her mind translated C Sharp’s song. It was when she heard the notes “whence” that she realized, by calling to mind alternate interpretations of the two-note word, that C Sharp was speaking in polite, formal modality, using the microtone flattening of pitch reserved for the young speaking to elders. She switched to the chromatic tone rows of instructional mode.

“Not from the wheel at all. Beyond the walls of the world is a bigger place that you can’t see—”

“Oh! You’re from
Earth
!”

She had not said Earth, any more than she had called herself a Titanide. But the impact of the word for the third planet from the sun surprised Cirocco as much as if she had. C Sharp went on, her attitude and posture having shifted with her switch—following Cirocco’s lead—to teaching speech. She became animated, and if her ears had been the tiniest bit wider she would have flapped into the air.

“I’m confused,” she sang. “I thought Earth was a fable for the young, spun out around campfires. And I thought Earth beings to be like Titanides.”

Cirocco’s newly tuned ear strained at the last word, wondering if it should be translated as people. As in “we people, you barbarians.” But the chauvinistic overtones were not there. She spoke of her species as one among many in Gaea.

“We are the first to come,” Cirocco sang. “I’m surprised you know of us, as we knew nothing of you until this moment.”

“You don’t sing of our great deeds, as we sing of yours?”

“I’m afraid not.”

C Sharp glanced over her shoulder. Another Titanide stood atop the bluff now. She looked much like C Sharp, but with a disturbing difference.