Titan (GAIA) (23 page)

The third thing Cirocco had to re-think was triggered by the realization that, though she knew the language and could now use the nouns for each of the Titanide sex organs, she had not known of the rear ones until told about them. She still did not know why there were three, and could not find the knowledge in her mind.

What she had were word lists and grammatical rules of composition. It worked well for nouns; she had only to think of an object to know the word. It began to fail with some of the verbs. Running and
jumping and swimming and breathing were clear enough. Verbs for things Titanides did and humans didn’t were not so neat.

Where the system fell apart was in describing familial relationships, codes of behavior, mores, and a host of other things where Titanides and humans shared little common ground. These concepts became null notes in the Titanide songs. She sometimes translated them to herself or to Gaby with complex hyphenates such as she-who-is-my-hindmother’s-frontal-ortho-sibling, or the sense-of-righteous-loathing-for-angels. These phrases were each one word in Titanide song.

It came down to the fact that an alien thought in her head was still an alien thought. She could not deal with it until it was explained to her; she had no referrents.

The last complication caused by the arrival of the healer’s group was in the matter of names: There were too many names in the same key signatures, so her original system fell apart. Gaby couldn’t sing them, so Cirocco had to find English words to use.

She had started off in a musical vein, and decided to continue it. The first one they met she now dubbed C-Sharp Hornpipe because the name sounded like a sailor’s hornpipe. B Flat became B Flat Banjo. The healer was B Lullaby, the strawberry blonde was G-minor Valse, the pinto B Clarino, and the blue Titanide now bore the name of G Foxtrot. She called the yellow and orange zebra D-minor Hurdy-gurdy.

Gaby promptly dropped the key signatures, as someone who was always being called Rocky should have known she would.

The ambulance was a long wooden wagon with four rubber-tired wheels, pulled by two Titanides in loose harness. It had a pneumatic suspension and friction brakes operated by the team of pullers. The wood was bright yellow, like new pine, milled wondrously smooth and fitted together with no nails.

Cirocco and Gaby put Bill on a huge bed in the center of the wagon and climbed in after him, along with Lullaby, the Titanide healer. She took her station at his bedside, legs folded beneath her, singing to him and wiping his brow with a wet cloth. The other Titanides walked alongside, except for Hornpipe and Banjo, who remained behind with their flocks. They had around 200 animals the size of cows, each with four legs and a thin, supple neck three meters long. The necks had digging claws and puckered mouths at the end. They fed by forcing their mouths into the ground and sucking milk from the backs of sludgeworms. They had one eye at the base of the neck. With their heads in the ground they could still see what was happening above.

Gaby looked at one with a faintly scandalized expression on her face, reluctant to admit that such a thing could exist.

“‘Gaea has her good days and her bad days,’” she concluded, quoting a Titanide aphorism Cirocco had translated. “She must have come off a nine-day binge when she thought
that
one up. What about those radios, Rocky? Can we get a look at them?”

“I’ll see.” She sang to Clarino, the pinto, asking if they might look at his speakerplant, then stopped as soon as she had the word out.

“They don’t build them,” she said. “They grow them.”

“Why didn’t you say so before?”

“Because I just now realized it. Bear with me, Gaby. The word for them means ‘the seed of the plant that carries song.’ Take a look.”

The item strapped to the end of Clarino’s staff was an oblong yellow seed, smooth and featureless
but for a soft brown spot.

“It listens here,” Clarino sang, indicating the spot. “Do not touch it, as it will go deaf. It sings your song to its mother, and if she is pleased she sings it to the world.”

“I fear I do not entirely understand.”

Clarino pointed over Gaby’s shoulder. “There is one who still has her children.”

He trotted to a clump of bushes growing in a hollow. A bellshaped growth emerged from the ground beside each bush. Grasping the bell, he wrenched a plant free and carried it, roots and all, back to the wagon.

“One sings to the seeds,” he explained. He took his brass horn from his shoulder and played several bars of a dance in five-four time. “Bend your ears now …” He stopped, embarrassed. “That is, do what your kind does to enhance your hearing.”

After half a minute, they heard the horn notes, reedy as an old Edison cylinder, but quite distinct. Clarino sang a harmonic, which was quickly repeated. There was a pause, then the two themes were played simultaneously.

“She hears my song and likes it, you see?” Clarino sang, with a big smile on his face.

“Like the request line of a radio station,” Gaby said. “What if the disc jockey doesn’t want to play that song?”

Cirocco translated Gaby’s question as best she could.

“It takes practice to sing pleasingly,” Clarino acknowledged. “But they are of good faith. The mother can speak more swiftly than four feet can fly.”

Cirocco translated but Clarino interrupted her.

“The seeds are also useful in building the eyes that see in darkness,” he sang. “With them we scan the well of wind for the approach of angels.”

“That sounded like radar,” Cirocco said.

Gaby eyed her dubiously. “You going to believe everything these over-educated polo ponies tell you?”

“You tell me how those seeds work if it isn’t electronically. Would you prefer mental telepathy?”

“Magic might be easier to swallow.”

“Call it magic, then. I think there’s crystals and circuits in those seeds. And if you can grow an organic radio, why not radar?”

“Maybe radio. Only because I’ve seen it with my own eyes,
not
because I want to have anything to do with it. But not radar.”

The Titanide radar installation was under a tent in the front of the ambulance. It would have baffled Rube Goldberg. There were nuts and leaves attached to a pot of soil with thick coppervines leading into it. Lullaby said the soil contained a worm which generated “essence of power.” There was a rack of radio seeds connected with snarls of needle-tipped vines, apparently inserted with some precision since each seed had a tight cluster of oozing pinpricks around the spot where contact had finally been made. There were other things, all of a vegetable nature, including a leaf that glowed when struck by a beam of light from yet another plant.

“It’s easy to read,” Lullaby sang, cheerfully. “This dot of false fire represents the sky giant you see over there, toward Rhea.” She indicated a spot on the screen with her finger. “See how it loses life … there! Now it shines brightly, but shifted.”

Cirocco began a translation, but Gaby interrupted her.

“I know how radar works,” she grumbled. “The whole set-up offends me.”

“We have little need of it now,” Clarino assured them. “This is not the season for angels. They come when Gaea breathes from the east, and torment us until she sucks them back to her breast.”

Cirocco wondered if she heard that right; did she sing “sucks them
at
her breast”? She didn’t pursue it because Bill groaned and opened his eyes.

“Hello,” Lullaby sang. “So glad you could come back.”

Bill yelped, then screamed when he put pressure on his leg.

Cirocco put herself between Bill and Lullaby. He saw her, and sighed in relief.

“
Very
bad dream, Rocky,” he said.

She rubbed his forehead. “It wasn’t all a dream, probably.”

“Huh? Oh, you mean the centaurs. No, I remember when the white one was rocking me and singing.”

“Well, how are you feeling, then?”

“Weak. My leg doesn’t hurt so bad. Is that a good sign, or is it dead?”

“I think you’re getting better.”

“What about … uh, you know. Gangrene.” He looked away from her.

“I don’t think so. It looked a lot better after the healer treated you.”

“Healer? The centaur?”

“It was all there was left to do,” Cirocco said, doubts overwhelming her again. “Calvin hasn’t arrived. I watched her, and she seemed to know what she was doing.”

She thought he had gone back to sleep. After a long time his eyes opened and he smiled faintly.

“It’s not a decision I’d have wanted to make.”

“It was terrible, Bill. She said you were dying, and I believed her. It was either do nothing until Calvin got here—and I don’t know what
he
could do without any medicine—and
she
said she could kill the germs, which made sense because—”

He touched her knee. His hand was cold, but steady.

“You did the right thing,” he said. “Watch me. I’m going to be walking in another week.”

It was late afternoon—always, monotonously, late afternoon—and someone was shaking her shoulder. She blinked rapidly.

“Your friends have arrived,” Foxtrot sang.

“It was the sky giant we saw earlier,” Lullaby added. “They were aboard all the time.”

“Friends?”

“Yes, your healer, and two others.”

“Two …” She got to her feet. “Those others. Do you have news of them? One is known to me. Is the second like her, or male like my friend Bill?”

The healer frowned. “Your pronouns confuse me. I frankly do not know which of you is male and which female, since you hide behind strips of cloth.”

“Bill’s male, me and Gaby are female. I’ll explain it to you later, but which one is on the sky giant?”

Lullaby shrugged. “The giant did not say. He is as bemused as I.”

Whistlestop hovered over the column of Titanides and the wagon, which had halted to wait for the
drop. A chute blossomed with a tiny black figure on the end of it. Calvin, no doubt about it.

While he drifted down another chute appeared, and Cirocco strained to see who it might be. The figure looked too big, somehow. Then a third chute opened, and a fourth.

There were a dozen parachutes in the air before she spotted Gene. The rest, incredibly, were Titanides.

“Hey, it’s Gene!” Gaby yelled. She was standing a short distance away with Foxtrot and Clarino. Cirocco had stayed with the wagon. “I wonder if April is—”

“
Angels!
Angels attacking! Form up!”

The voice was a screech: a Titanide voice that had lost all its music, choked with hate. Cirocco was dumbfounded to see Lullaby hunched over the radar set, shouting orders. Her face was contorted, all thought of Bill forgotten.

“What’s going on?” she began, then ducked as Lullaby vaulted over her.

“Get down, two-legs! Stay out of this.”

Cirocco looked up, and the sky was filled with wings.

They were dropping around the sides of the blimp, wings tucked to gain speed, attacking the falling Titanides who hung helplessly from their shrouds. There were dozens of them.

She was thrown to the floor of the wagon when it jerked forward to the sound of snapping harness leather. She just missed falling out the open tailgate, struggled to her hands and knees in time to see Gaby leap and catch the sides of the wagon with her hands. Cirocco helped her in.