Titan

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 Titanides 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 cars had spoken volumes.

"Just 'sheer-ah-ko-or-cap-ten-jonz'? " she chanted 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, cars 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 cars doing a complicated semaphore. "Unless I miss my guess, this is quite serious for folk such as you, who ca

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 go

"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. "

"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 car 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 yourself "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.

"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?"