by John Varley
"And there are among you individuals with life burning so brightly within them that we are dazzled by your brilliance. The best of you are better than the best of us. We know that and accept it. None of you is so nice as we are, but we have realized that niceness isn't everything. We have much to offer the human species. So far it has shown only the mildest interest, but we remain hopeful. But we would learn from you, too. We have tried long to absorb your fire by getting to know you. And since, in Gaea, Lysenko was right, we are now trying to breed you into us. That's why we learn English."
Chris had never heard her speak so long on anything, or so forcefully. He had thought he knew everything about her, and now he wondered why, since he was not normally such a fool as to think he could know everything about anyone. He knew, and had even mentioned to Valiha, that her manner of speech had gradually improved from the time he first met her. Now her vocabulary often left him far behind. When she needed to, she could express herself in his native language ten times better than Chris. This did not bother him; he knew she had revealed more of herself as she came to trust him more, and that was as it should be. But something else disturbed him.
"I don't want to sound harsh, but I have to ask this. Is that what that business with the egg was all about? Lysenkoism?"
"I don't want to sound harsh either, but I will not lie to you. Yes, that entered into it. But I would never have done it with you without something much stronger. I speak of love, which so far as I know is the only emotion identical in humans and Titanides."
"Cirocco didn't think so."
"She is wrong. I realize that, commonly, love is bonded with jealousy and covetousness and territoriality in humans, and it never is in Titanides. That does not make the emotion different. It is simply that few humans experience love uncolored by these other things. You must take my word for that; it is one of the things I mentioned that we do better than humans. Humans have written and sung for thousands of years on the nature of love and never succeeded in defining it to anyone's satisfaction. Love is no mystery to us. We understand it thoroughly. It is in song-and its close friend poetry-that humans have come closest to it. That is one of the things we could teach humans."
Chris wanted to believe that but was still disturbed by something he could not quite bring into the open. She had explained how she could tolerate his spells of violence. Maybe it was just that, deep down, he could not believe it.
"Chris, would you come touch me?" she asked. "I feel I have upset you, and I don't like that feeling."
She must have seen his hesitation because tears started in her eyes. They sat only a meter apart, yet he felt a gulf had opened between them. It frightened him because only a short time ago he had felt very close to her.
"I'm terribly afraid," Valiha said. "I'm afraid that in the end, we will be too alien to each other. You will never understand me, and I will never understand you. And you must! I must!" She stopped and made herself slow down. "Let me try again. I will never give up.
"I said the best of you are better than us.
"I tell you that any of us can see it. Serpent will see it immediately, newborn, when he looks at you. I can see it, and I could not describe it if I had read a thousand dictionaries. When one of those better humans appears, we can tell it. But if I brought a group of them together, you would be at a loss to say what they had in common. It is no one quality, and it is not even always the same qualities. Many of them are brave, and others are cowards. Some are shy, and others brash. Many are intelligent, but others are far from geniuses. Many are outwardly exuberant; they taste life better; they burn with a brighter fire than we have ever seen. Others, to human senses, are quite subdued, as you are at times, but to our eyes the light shines through. We don't know precisely what it is, but we want some of it if we can have it without the urge to self-destruction that is the bane of your species. Perhaps even then, because its warmth is so glorious.
"We have a song for it. It is-" She sang it, then rushed on in English, as if she felt time were against her and she would once again fail to reach him. "In translation, that is, roughly, 'Those-who-might-one-day-sing,' or, more literally, 'Those-who-can-understand-Titanides.' If they want to. The word grows unwieldy, I fear.
"Cirocco is such a human. You have not felt one-hundredth of her heat. Gaby was one. Robin is. A handful of people back in Titantown. The settlement we passed in Crius. And you. If you were not, I could no more love you than a stone, and I love you fabulously."
That was a funny way to put it, Chris thought. And: what a coincidence that all four of us possessed this elusive quality. And again: it's such a shame, because she's a great person, but how do I tell her ...?
But that was all swept away by a feeling Chris was later to describe as like a drowning man's having his life pass before him all in an instant, or possibly the flash of genius that is so often spoken of-with a corollary that read "How have I been an idiot for so long"-and, in the end, might best be expressed as the sudden realization that he loved her fabulously, too.
She saw the flash of his emotion-if he had wanted proof of her propositions, that would have been it, but he didn't need it-and while he was trying to think of something more intelligent to say than "I love you, too," she kissed him.
"I told you you loved me," she said, and he nodded, wondering if he would ever stop grinning.
Knowing the processes of Titanide birth was not the same thing as understanding the linked minds of the mother and child. Nor did Chris comprehend the nature of that link. He pestered her with questions about it, and determined that, yes, she could ask Serpent a question and he could answer it, and no, Serpent could not tell her if he knew how to speak English.
"He thinks in pictures and song," she explained. "The song is not translatable except emotionally; in a sense Titanide song never is, and that's why no human has been able to compile a dictionary of Titanide. I hear and see what he thinks."
"Then how did you ask him what he wanted to be named?"
"I pictured the instruments it was feasible to make down here and played them in my mind. When his awareness indicated delight, I knew he was Serpent."
"Does he know about me?"
"He knows you very well. He doesn't know your name. He will ask that quite soon after birth. He is aware that I love you."
"He knows that I'm human?"
"He knows it very well."
"What does he think about that? Will it be a problem?"
Valiha smiled at him. "He will be born without prejudice. From that point, it is up to you."
She was lying on her side in a comfortable spot Chris had prepared. The birth was close, and Valiha was serene, delighted, in no pain. Chris knew he was acting as badly as any first-time father outside the delivery room and could not help it.
"I guess I still don't understand a lot of things," he admitted. "Will he come out, sit up, and start offering his opinions on the price of coffee in Crius, or will there be a goo-goo and ga-ga stage?"
Valiha laughed, paused for a moment while the muscles of her belly worked like a hand squeezing a water balloon, and took a sip of water.
"He will be weak and confused," she said. "He will see much and say nothing. He is not truly intelligent at this point. It is as if his thinking pathways have been packed in grease for shipment, needing to be cleansed upon arrival before use. But then..." She paused, listening to something Chris could not hear, then smiled.
"You'll have to let that wait," she said. "He is almost here, and there is a ritual I must perform, passed down through my chord for generations."
"Sure, go ahead," he said hastily.
"Please indulge me," she said. "I could do it with beauty in my own song, but since he will speak English, I've decided to break with tradition and sing it in that language ... also because you are here. But I'm not sure of my ability to make it beautiful in English, so my prose might sound awkward in-"
"Don't apologize to me, for God's sake," he said, waving his hands. "Get on wit
h it. There may not be time."
"Very well. The first part is set, and I merely quote. I add my own words at the end." She licked her lips and looked into space.
"'Yellow as the Sky Are the Madrigals.'" She began to sing.
"'In the beginning was God, and God was the wheel, and the wheel was Gaea.
And Gaea took from her body a lump of flesh and made of it the first Titanides and gave them to know that Gaea was God.
The Titanides did not dispute her.
They spoke to Gaea, saying, "What would you have us do?"
And Gaea replied, "Have no other Gods but me.
Be fruitful and multiply, but be aware that space is limited.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Know that when you die, you return to dust.
And do not come to me with your problems. I will not help you."
And thus the Titanides received the burden of free will.
" 'Among the first was one called Sarangi of the Yellow Skin.
He went with many others to the great tree and saw that it was good.
In time he was to found the Madrigal Chord.
He looked out upon the world and knew that life tasted sweet, yet one day he would die.
This thought was a sad one, but he remembered what Gaea had said and wondered if he could live on.
He loved Dambak, Violone, and Waldhorn. The four of them sang the Sharped Mixolydian Quartet, and Sarangi became the hindmother of Piccolo. Dambak was the forefather, Violone the foremother, and Waldhorn the hindfather.'"
The song went on in that vein for some time. Chris listened more to the music than the words because the lists of names had little meaning for him. Descent was traced exclusively through the hind-mother, though the other parents were always mentioned.
Chris could not have traced his parentage back through ten generations as Valiha proceeded to do, yet he knew his forebears went back through thousands or millions of generations to apes or Adam and Eve. With Valiha, ten generations was the entire story. Serpent would be the eleventh. It brought home more forcefully than anything he had heard just what it was to be a Titanide, a member of a race that knew it was created. While he did not know how accurate the opening words of her song were, they could be literally true. The Titanides had been created around the year 1935. Even an oral tradition could cope with that time span, and the Titanides were meticulous record keepers.
But the song was more than just a list of her hindmothers and the ensembles they had used to produce the next generation. She sang songs of each, sometimes lapsing into the purity of Titanide, more often staying in English. She listed the brave and good things they had done but did not omit failings. He heard tales of suffering from the years of the Titanide-Angel War. Then the Wizard arrived, and the songs, more often than not, mentioned the stratagems employed to attract her attention to proposals at Carnival.
"'... and Tabla was favored of the Wizard.
Singing the Aeolian Solo, she gave birth to Valiha, of whom little has thus far been sung and who will leave the singing of her song to future generations.
Valiha loved Hichiriki, born by the Phrygian Quartet in another branch of the Madrigal Chord, and Cymbal, a Lydian Trio from the Prelude Chord.
They quickened the life of Serpent (Double-flatted Mixolydian Trio) Madrigal, who will sing his own song'"
She stopped, cleared her throat, and looked down at her hands.
"I told you it would be rough. Perhaps Serpent will do better, when his time comes. Though the song flows like a river in Titanide, in English-"
"You did him proud," Chris said. "This isn't the best beginning, though, is it?" He waved his hand at the darkness and the barren rocks. "You should have had Hichiriki and Cymbal and all your friends gathered around."
"Yes." She thought about it. "I should have asked you to sing."
"You'd have soon regretted it."
She laughed. "Hum, then. Chris, he's here."
He certainly was. A glistening shape was moving slowly but inexorably. Chris felt the powerful urge to do something: boil water, call a doctor, comfort her, ease his passage ... anything. But if his entrance into the world had been any quicker, he would have squirted across the ground like a pinched watermelon seed. Valiha had her head pillowed on her arm and was chuckling softly. If a doctor was needed, it was for Chris, not Valiha.
"Are you sure there isn't anything I should do?"
"Trust me." She laughed. "Now. You can pick him up-being careful not to step on the umbilicus, which he will need a little longer. Carry him to me. Lift him with both arms beneath his belly. His trunk will fall forward, so don't let him hit his head, but do not be alarmed by it."
She had already told him all that, but it was well she repeated it. He did not feel competent to pick his nose at the moment, much less handle a newborn Titanide. But he went, knelt, and looked at him.
"He's not breathing!"
"Don't be alarmed by that either. He will breathe when he's ready. Bring him to me."
Serpent was a shapeless puddle of sticks and moist skin. For a moment Chris literally could not make head or tail of him; then it all sprang into focus, and he saw a sweet-faced little girl-child with matted pink hair pasted to her sleeping face. No, not a child ... she had fully formed breasts. And not a girl either. That was merely the trick all Titanides played on all humans, which was to seem female no matter what their actual sex. The forepenis was there between his front legs, complete with pink pubic hair.
He was going to be gentle, do it gingerly. After a few tries, he gave that up and put his back into it. Serpent massed nearly as much as Chris. He was a slippery bundle, but there was not a drop of blood on him. He looked like a starving urchin, with matchstick legs longer than Chris's own. He was narrow-hipped and had a short body and long trunk, which promptly fell forward loosely when Chris lifted him. As Chris carefully payed out the loops of umbilical cord while bringing him around to his mother, Serpent stirred, and one of his hind legs kicked Chris in the shin. It was not too painful, but then he began a fitful struggle. Valiha sang something, and he calmed instantly.
Chris handed him to Valiha, who arranged him in front of her and held his upper body against her own. His head lolled. Chris noticed that it was as Valiha had said it would be: the umbilical did not attach under his belly but vanished into his anterior vagina, just as the other end still trailed from Valiha.
He had not known what to expect. He had seen young Titanides but none as young as this. Would he be able to love it? So far, he thought Serpent looked... he would not go so far as to say ugly. Funny-looking was the best he could come up with. But then he had always thought newborn humans were funny-looking, at best, and they were bloody into the bargain. He hated the squeamishness he felt-it did not mesh well with Valiha's description of him as a lusty, life-loving human, and that had been the nicest thing anyone had said about him in a long time-but he still felt it. Serpent most closely resembled an undernourished fourteen-year-old girl who had just been fished out of the bottom of a lake. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation seemed called for.
Serpent wheezed loudly, coughed once, and began to breathe. He did it noisily for a few breaths, then found the rhythm. Shortly afterward he opened his eyes and was looking right at Chris. Either the sight was too much for him, or he was not seeing anything too well; he blinked and burrowed his face between his mother's breasts.
"He'll probably be cranky for a while," Valiha said.
"I would be, too."
"What do you think of him?"
Here we go, Chris thought. "He's beautiful, Valiha."
She frowned and looked at Serpent again, as if wondering if she had missed something.
"You can't be serious. Your use of English is better than that."
Feeling as if he were jumping off the deep end, Chris cleared his throat and said, "He's funny-looking."
"That's the word. He'll get a lot better rather quickly, though. He has a lot of promi
se. Did you see his eyes?"
They busied themselves cleaning up. Valiha combed his hair and Chris washed and dried him. And Valiha had been right: he did improve. His skin was warm and soft when dry, quickly banishing the picture of a drowned ragamuffin. The umbilical cord soon withered, and he was on his own. It would be a long time before he stopped looking skinny, but there was no longer the suggestion of starvation. Rather, as his muscles toned, he looked supple and glowing with health. It was not long before he held his torso erect unaided. He watched them with glittering brown eyes as they fussed over his young body, but he did not say a word. Valiha was watching him, too. She was as excited as Chris had ever seen her.
"I wish I could explain this to you, Chris," she said. "This is the most wonderful... I remember it so well. Suddenly to be aware, to feel yourself awakening from a state of simple desires and to feel a larger world taking shape around you, full of other creatures. And the growing urge to talk, almost like the building of an orgasm. The first formation of the idea that it is possible to communicate with others. He has the words, you see, but without experience to give them substance they are still mysteries. He will be full of questions, but he will seldom ask you what something is. He will see a rock and think, So that is a rock! He will pick it up and think, So this is picking up a rock! He will be asking many questions of himself, providing his own answers, and the sensation of discovery is so glorious that a Titanide's most common fantasy is of rebirth, the desire to live it over. But there will be plenty of questions for us. Sadly, a lot of them will be the unanswerable ones, but that is the burden of life. We must do our best with them and try at all times to be kind. I hope you will be patient and let him develop his own armor of fatalism at his own pace with no prompting from us because it can be a-"
"I will, Valiha, I promise. I'm sure I'll be watching you for quite a while to get hints on what you want, and I'll stay in the background as much as possible. But the big question on my mind is still the crazy experiment of yours, whether or not he will be able to-"