Titan (GAIA) (22 page)

“That’s B Flat …” she sang, then, looking guilty, shifted back to formal mode.

“Before his arrival, there is a question I would ask that has been burning my soul since first I saw you.”

“You don’t have to treat me as an elder,” Cirocco sang. “You might be older than I am.”

“Oh, no. I am three by the reckoning of Earth. What I wish to know, hoping the inquiry is not an impudent one, is how you stand for so very long without toppling over?”

When the other Titanide joined them, the disturbing difference Cirocco noted earlier was abundantly clear, and even more disturbing. Between the front legs, where C Sharp had a patch of hair, B Flat had a completely human penis.

“Holy God,” Gaby whispered, nudging Cirocco’s elbow.

“Will you be quiet?” Cirocco said. “This makes me very nervous.”

“You, nervous? What about me? I can’t understand a note you’re singing. But it’s pretty, Rocky. You sing real nice.”

Other than the male genitals in front, B Flat was almost identical to C Sharp. Both had high, conical breasts and hairless, pale skin. Their faces were both vaguely feminine, wide-mouthed and beardless. B Flat had more paint on his body, more flowers in his hair. Aside from that and the penis the two would have been hard to tell apart.

One end of a wooden flute protruded from a fold of skin at the level of his missing navel. Apparently it was a pouch.

B Flat stepped forward and extended his hand. Cirocco stepped back and B Flat moved swiftly, putting a hand on each of her shoulders. She was frightened for only a moment, then realized he shared C Sharp’s apprehension. He had thought she was falling backwards, and meant only to steady her.

“I’m fine,” she sang, nervously. “I can stand on my own.” His hands were large, but perfectly human. It felt very strange to be touching him. Seeing an impossible creature was quite different from feeling its body heat. It brought home forcefully the fact that she was making humanity’s first contact with an intelligent alien. He smelled of cinnamon and apples.

“The healer will arrive soon.” He sang the song of equals with her, though scored in a formal mode. “In the meantime, have you eaten?”

“We would offer you food ourselves,” Cirocco sang, “but in truth, we have run out of provisions.”

“And my fore-sister offered you none?” B Flat gave C Sharp a reproving look, and she hung her head. “She is curious and impulsive, but not thoughtful. Please forgive her.” The words he used to describe his relationship to C Sharp were complex. Cirocco had the vocabulary, but not all the referrents.

“She has been most kind.”

“Her hindmother will be pleased to hear it. Will you join us? I do not know what manner of food you prefer, but if we have anything to your liking, it is yours.”

He reached into his pouch—a leather one strapped around his waist, not the one that was part of his body—and came up with something large and reddish-brown, like a smoked ham. He handled it like a turkey drumstick. The Titanides sat, folding their legs neatly and easily, so Cirocco and Gaby sat, too, an operation the Titanides watched with frank interest.

The joint of meat was passed around. C Sharp brought out several dozen green apples. The Titanides simply put them into their mouths whole. There was a crunch, and they were gone.

Gaby was frowning at the fruit. She raised an eyebrow as Cirocco took a bite of one. It tasted like a
green apple. It was white and juicy inside, and had small brown seeds.

“Maybe we’ll figure all this out later,” Cirocco said.

“I wouldn’t mind a few answers right
now
,” Gaby retorted. “Nobody’s going to believe we sat around eating goddam green pippin
apples
with flesh-colored
centaurs
.”

C Sharp laughed. “The one named Ga-
bee
sings a rousing song.”

“Is she talking to me?”

“She likes your song.”

Gaby smiled sheepishly. “It was nothing like the Wagner that’s been coming from your direction. How do you understand them? What about the way they look? I’ve heard of parallel evolution, but from
the waist up
? Humanoids I could believe. I was ready for anything from big blobs of jello to giant spiders. But they look
too
much like us.”

“Yet most of them look nothing like us.”

“Right!” Gaby said, shouting again. “But look at that face. Take away the donkey ears. The mouth is wide and the eyes are big and the nose looks like he got hit in the face with a shovel, but it’s in the range of what you can find on Earth. Look lower, if you dare.” She shuddered. “Look
only
at that, and I defy you to tell me it’s not a human penis.”

“Ask her if we can join in,” B Flat sang, heartily. “We don’t know the words, but can improvise an accompaniment.”

Cirocco sang that she had to speak to her friend a little longer, and would translate later. He nodded, but followed the conversation attentively.

“Gaby, please don’t shout at me.”

“I’m sorry.” She looked at her lap and made an effort to calm down. “I like things to make sense. A human penis on an alien creature doesn’t. Did you see their hands? They have fingerprints, I saw them. The FBI would file them with no questions asked.”

“I saw that.”

“If you could tell me how you talk to them …”

Cirocco spread her hands. “I don’t know. It’s as if the language was always in my mind. Singing is harder than listening, but only because my throat’s not up to it. It scared me at first, but now it doesn’t. I trust them.”

“Just like Calvin trusts the blimps.”

“It’s clear that something toyed with us while we were asleep. Somebody gave me the language—I don’t know how or why—and that somebody gave me something else. It’s a feeling that the purpose behind the gift was not evil. And the more I talk to the Titanides, the more I like them.”

“Calvin said pretty much the same things about the goddam blimps,” Gaby said darkly. “You nearly arrested him.”

“I think I understand him a little better now.”

The Titanide healer—a female whose name was also in the key of B Flat—entered their tent and spent some time examining Bill’s leg under Cirocco’s watchful eye. The edges of the wound were yellow and blue-black. Fluid bubbled out when the healer pressed around it.

The healer was aware of Cirocco’s concern. She twisted her human torso and rummaged in a leather satchel held to her equine back by a cinch strap, came up with a clear round flask filled with brown fluid.

“A strong disinfectant,” she sang, and waited.

“What is his condition, healer?”

“Very grave. Without treatment, he will be with Gaea in a few tens of revolutions.” Cirocco translated it that way at first, but there had been one word used for the time period. Applying metric prefixes, she thought of it as a decarev. One revolution of Gaea took nearly one hour.

The meaning of “be with Gaea” was clear, though she did not use the word
Gaea
. She referred at once to her world, to the Goddess who was the world, and to the concept of returning to the soil. There was no connotation of immortality.

“Perhaps you would prefer to await the arrival of a healer of your own kind,” the Titanide sang.

“Bill may never see him.”

“This is so. My remedies should remove the infestations of small parasites. I don’t know if they will inhibit the workings of his metabolism. I could not promise you, for instance, that my treatment would not harm the pump which propels his vital fluids, as I don’t know where this pump is located in your kind.”

“It’s right here,” Cirocco sang, thumping her chest.

The Titanide’s ears jumped up and down. She pressed one ear to Bill’s chest.

“No fooling,” she sang. “Well, Gaea is wise, and says not why she spins.”

Cirocco was in an agony of indecision. The concepts of metabolism and of germs were not things a witch doctor would know about. Those words had translated exactly that way. Yet even the healer was aware that her medicine might harm a human body.

But Calvin was gone, and Bill was dying.

“Pray, what are these used for?” the healer sang. She was holding Bill’s foot. Her fingers gently bent the toes.

“Uh, they’re …” she groped, but could not find the words for atrophied evolutionary vestiges. There was a word for evolution, but not as applied to living things. “They’re useful in keeping one’s balance, but not indispensible. They are oversights, or imperfections of design.”

“Ah,” the healer crooned. “Gaea makes mistakes, it is well known. Take, for instance, the one with whom I was first hindsexed, many myriarevs ago.” Cirocco wanted to translate the object of the last sentence as “my husband,” but that didn’t fit; it could as easily have been “my wife,” though that was off the mark, too. There was not an English equivalent, she realized, then remembered her problem.

“Do what you can for my friend,” she sang. “I commend him into your hands.”

The healer nodded, and got to work.

She first bathed the wound with the brown liquid. She packed it with a yellow jelly and put a large leaf next to the skin, “to lure out the small eaters of his flesh.” Cirocco’s hopes rose and fell as she watched. She didn’t care for the leaf, nor for the reference to luring. It looked too primitive. But when the healer dressed the wound, she used bandages taken from sealed packets that she said had been “cleansed of parasites.”

As she worked, she examined Bill’s body with great interest, sometimes humming a little ditty of astonishment.

“Now who would have thought of that … ? … a muscle
here
? Attached
so
? Like walking on broken feet … no, I don’t believe it.” She described Gaea variously as wise, endlessly inventive, needlessly elaborate, and a silly fool. She also observed that Gaea enjoyed the occasional joke as well as the next deity—this while staring in astonishment at Bill’s buttocks.

Cirocco was covered in sweat when the healer was through. At least she had not produced rattles or voodoo dolls, nor drawn magical marks in the sand. When she had tied the last knot in the bandages, she
began to sing a song of healing. Cirocco couldn’t see that it would hurt anything.

The healer bent over Bill and put her arms around and under him, lifted him gently from the waist and held him close to her body. She placed his head on her shoulder and bent her own head down until her lips were close to his ear. She rocked back and forth, crooning a lullaby without words.

Bill gradually stopped shivering. Color began to return to his face, which became more peaceful than it had been since the injury.

In a few minutes, Cirocco would have sworn he was smiling.

Cirocco found she had some preconceptions that had to be discarded.

The first was the most obvious. When B Flat arrived and looked much like C Sharp except for his sexual organs, she had assumed Titanides were going to be hard to tell apart.

The group that showed up in response to C Sharp’s call looked like escapees from a merry-go-round.

The healer had emerald green head and tail hair. The rest of her body was covered in thick, snow-white fur. There was another hairy one: a strawberry blonde with a dappling of violet. There was a brown and white pinto, and one without any hair at all except on his tail. His skin was pale blue.

The last of the group looked naked but was not; she had the pelt of a horse not only on the part of her where it would have looked reasonable, but on her human upper-half, too. She was zebra-striped in bright yellow and searing orange, and had lavender head and tail hair. Looking away from her did no good; the image burned itself into the retina.

Not satisfied with the carnival atmosphere, the Titanides painted their bare skins and stained patches of their hair. They wore necklaces and bracelets, stuck baubles in holes pierced through noses and ears, tied chains of brass links and colored stones or ropes of flowers around their legs. Each had a musical instrument slung over the shoulder or protruding from the pouch, made of wood or animal horn or seashell or brass.

The second preconception—which was actually the first, since Calvin had told them about it—was that Titanides were all female. A tactful question to the healer brought a straightforward answer and an awesome demonstration. The Titanides each had three sex organs.

She knew about the frontal, human-sized male or female genitalia. These determined the pronoun gender for reasons that must have made sense to a Titanide.

In addition, each had a large vaginal opening under the tail, just like a female horse.

It was the one in the middle that shocked Gaby and Cirocco. In the soft belly between the healer’s hind legs was a thick, fleshy sheath, and out of it came a penis that was human in every detail but for the fact that it was as long and thick as Cirocco’s arm.

Cirocco had thought herself sophisticated. She had seen many naked men, and it had been years since any of them had anything new to show her. She liked men and she liked intercourse, but that thing made her think about becoming a nun. Her strong reaction disturbed her. She knew it was the same feeling Gaby had expressed, that of being more upset by close parallels than by something utterly alien.