Titan (GAIA)

by John Varley

  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.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Gaby held a bronze sword Cirocco had not seen before.

  “Watch out!” Bill was tossed from his bed. Cirocco crawled to him and tried to get him back in, but the wagon kept crashing over rocks and crevices.

  “Stop this thing, goddam it!” Cirocco yelled, then sang it in Titanide: It made no difference. The two hitched in front were heading for the battle and nothing would stop them. One held a sword which she brandished above her, shrieking like a demon.

  Cirocco slapped one of them on the rump and almost lost her scalp as the sword flashed at her. Keeping her head low, she looked down at the knots hitching the Titanides to the wagon.

  “Gaby, give me that thing, quick.” The sword came through the air hilt-first and landed at her feet. She hacked at the leather harnesses. One came free, then the other.

  The Titanides did not notice the loss. They quickly outdistanced the wagon, which then slammed to a halt against a boulder.

  “What was that all—”

  “I don’t know. All anyone told me is to stay low. Give me a hand with Bill, will you?”

  He was awake, and did not seem to be hurt. He watched the sky as they put him back on the pallet.

  “Holy Christ!” he said, just loud enough to be heard over the screech of the Titanides. “They’re getting murdered up there.”

  Cirocco looked up in time to see one of the flying creatures slash three parachute shrouds above one of the descending Titanides. The chute folded. With sickening speed the Titanide vanished behind a low hill to the west.

  “Those are angels?” Bill wondered.

  To Titanides, they were angels of death. Human in shape, with feathered wings that measured seven meters from tip to tip, the angels turned the peaceful air over Hyperion into a slaughterhouse. All the parachutes were soon cleared from the sky.

  The battle went on behind the hill, out of their sight. Titanides screeched like fingernails on a blackboard, and high above was an eerie wail that had to be the angels.

  “Behind you,” Gaby warned. Cirocco turned quickly.

  An angel approached silently from the east. It skimmed the ground, great wings motionless, growing larger with impossible speed. She saw the sword in its left hand, the human face twisted with bloodlust, tears streaking from the corners of the eyes, the muscles knotting in the arm as it brought the sword back …

  It passed over them, beating its wings to rise over the low hill. The tips touched the ground and stirred gouts of dust.

  “Missed me,” Gaby said.

  “Sit down,” Cirocco told her. “You make a great target standing up like that. And it did not miss you. It changed its mind at the last moment; I saw it stop the swing.”

  “Why did it do that?” She crouched beside Cirocco and scanned the horizon.

  “I don’t know. Most likely because you don’t have four legs. But the next one might not be so observant.”

  They watched another angel approach from a slightly different angle. It sliced through the air, legs together, some kind of tail surface extending behind its feet, arms at its sides, wings twitching just enough to maintain speed. In grace and economy of motion, Cirocco had never seen its equal.

  They saw another build speed by flying straight at the ground. It pulled out at the last possible instant, kissing the ground until it vanished over the brow of the hill. Any crop duster in the world would have been hollow-eyed and white-faced.

  “They’re very good,” Gaby whispered.

  “I wouldn’t want to get in a dogfight with them,” Cirocco agreed. “They’d fly the pants off me.”

  A chilly wind blew up from the east, raising dust from the dry ground.

  Then the Titanides came charging around the hill, followed by a flock of angels. Cirocco recognized Lullaby and Clarino and Foxtrot. Clarino’s left foreleg was red with blood. The Titanides carried wooden lances tipped with brass, and bronze swords.

  They were no longer giving voice to their battle song, but the frenzy was still in their eyes. Steam puffed from their nostrils and the ones with bare skin glistened. They thundered by, then wheeled to face the angels.

  “They’re using the wagon for cover!” Gaby shouted. “We’re going to be caught in the middle. Get off, quick!”

  “What about Bill?” Cirocco yelled.

  Gaby’s eyes locked with hers for an instant. She seemed about to speak, then growled something unintelligible and took her sword from Cirocco. With a lot more courage than common sense, she stood at the back of the wagon and faced the oncoming angels. Once again, all Cirocco could see was her back as she stood between her love and approaching danger.

  The angels ignored her.

  She stood with her sword ready, but they went around the sides of the wagon to reach the Titanides who were making a stand behind it.

  The noise was beyond belief. The wail of the angels mixed with the shriek of the Titanides while scores of giant wings tore the air.

  A monstrous shape loomed out of the dust cloud, a nightmare painted in shades of brown and black, wings moving like shadows come to life. It was blind, sword and lance jabbing aimlessly as the angel tried to get its bearings in the miasma. It seemed no larger than a child of ten. Dark blood ran from a wound in its side.

  It was above them when it hurled its lance. The brass tip passed through the sleeve of Gaby’s robe and bit into the floor of the wagon, twanging like a bowstring. Then the angel was past them, and a wooden spear was growing from its neck. It fell, and Cirocco could see nothing more.

  As quickly as the battle had come to them, it was gone.
The wailing took on a different note and the angels rose, dwindled, became nothing but flapping shapes high in the air, headed east.

  There was a commotion on the ground beside the wagon. The three Titanides were trampling the body of the fallen angel. It was hard to tell that the body had ever looked human. Cirocco looked away, sickened by the blood and the murderous rage on the faces of the Titanides.

  “What do you think made them go away?” Gaby asked. “Just a couple more minutes and they’d have wrapped it up.”

  “They must know something we don’t,” Cirocco said.

  Bill was looking to the west.

  “There,” he said, pointing. “Somebody’s coming.”

  Cirocco saw two familiar figures. It was Hornpipe and Banjo, the shepherds, approaching at full gallop.

  Gaby laughed, bitterly. “You’ll have to show me something better than that. One of those kids is only three years old, Rocky said.”

  “There,” Bill said again, pointing the other way.

  Over the hill came a wave of Titanides, like a motley cavalry.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It was six days after the angel attack, the sixty-first day of their emergence in Gaea. Cirocco was prone on a low table with her feet in improvised stirrups. Calvin was down there somewhere, but she refused to watch him. Lullaby, the white-haired Titanide healer, watched and sang as the operation progressed. Her songs were soothing, but nothing helped a great deal.

  “The cervix is dilated,” Calvin said.

  “I’d just as soon not hear about it.”

  “Sorry.” He straightened briefly, and Cirocco saw his eyes and forehead above the surgical mask. He was sweating profusely. Lullaby wiped it away and his eyes showed his gratitude. “Can you move that lamp closer?”

  Gaby positioned the flickering lamp. It threw huge shadows of her legs onto the walls. Cirocco heard the metallic click of instruments taken from the sterilizing bath, then felt the curette rattle through the speculum.

  Calvin had wanted stainless steel instruments, but the Titanides could not make them. He and Lullaby had worked with the best artisans until he had brass tools he felt he could use.