"Sing to her then of light," Gaby sang. "You're the persuader; you're supposed to know how to handle these creatures."
"Perhaps a hymn to fire ..." the Titanide mused.
"I don't care what you sing," Gaby shouted, in English. "Just get the damn stupid thing to blow." She turned away, fuming.
The bomb was lashed to the trunk of the Titan tree. It had been placed there, at considerable risk, by angels who flew into the pump during the diastolic cycle, when there was air above the inrushing waters. Gaby wished she had an army surplus satchel charge to give the angels. What she had sent instead was a contraption made of Gaean fruits and vegetables. The explosive was a bundle of touchy nitroroots. The detonator was a plant that produced sparks, and another with a magnesium core, wedded to a brain obtained by laboriously scraping plant matter from an IC leaf to expose the silicon chip with its microscopic circuitry. The chip was programmed to listen to a radio seed, the most fickle plant in Gaea. They were radio transceivers that sent messages only if they were phrased beautifully, that functioned only if the things they heard were worth repeating.
Titanides were masters of song. Their whole language was song; music was as important to them as food. They saw nothing odd about the system. Gaby, who sang poorly and had never interested a seed in anything she sang, hated the things. She wished for a match and a couple kilometers of waterproof, high-velocity prima-cord. Above her, the blimps kept the lines taut, but they would not last much longer. They did not have stamina. Kilo for kilo, they were among the weakest creatures in Gaea.
Four Titanides had gathered around the transmitter, singing complicated counterpoint. Every few bars they slipped in the five note sequence the detonator brain was listening for. At some point the seed was mollified and began to sing. There was a muffled explosion that made Aglaia shiver, then a gout of black smoke from the top of her intake valve. The straining lines slackened.
Gaby stood on her toes, afraid to discover that the blast had merely broken the cables. Splinters that were themselves as large as pine trees began to spew from the opening. Then there was a cheer from the Titanides behind her as the bole of the Titan tree appeared, wallowing like a harpooned whale.
"Make sure it's five or ten kilometers from the intake when you stake it down," Gaby sang to Clavier, the Titanide delegated to handle the mop-up. "It will take awhile for all that water to be pumped out, but if you take the trunk to the waterline now, it will be high and dry in a few revs."
"Sure thing, Chief," Clavier sang.
Gaby stood watching her crew take care of the equipment borrowed from Titantown while Psaltery went to get Gaby's personal luggage. She had worked with most of these Titanides before, on other jobs. They knew what they were doing. It was possible they did not need her at all, but she doubted any of them would have tackled it except under divine orders. For one thing, they did not have Gaby's contacts with the blimps.
But Gaby had not been ordered to do anything. All her work was performed under contract and paid in advance. In a world where every being had a prescribed place she defined her own.
She turned at the sound of hoofbeats. Psaltery was returning with her belongings. There was not much; the things Gaby needed or valued enough to carry at all times could be stuffed into a small hiker's backpack. The things she most valued were her freedom and her friends. Psaltery (Sharped Lydian Trio) Fanfare was one of the best of the latter. He and Gaby had traveled together for ten years.
"Chief, your phone was ringing."
The ears of the other Titanides perked up, and even Psaltery, who was used to it, seemed subdued. He handed Gaby a radio seed identical to all the others. The difference was that this one connected to Gaea.
Gaby took the seed and withdrew from the group. Standing alone in a small grove of trees, she spoke softly for a time. The Titanides were not eager to hear what Gaea had to say-news of the doings of Gods is seldom good news-but they could not help noticing that Gaby stood quietly for a time when the conversation was obviously over.
"Are you up to a trip to the Melody Shop?" she asked Psaltery.
"Sure. We in a hurry?"
"Not really. Nobody's seen Rocky for almost a kilorev. Her Nibs wants us to check in and let her know it's almost Carnival time."
Psaltery frowned.
"Did Gaea say what the problem might be?"
Gaby sighed. "Yeah. We're supposed to try to sober her up."
10 The Melody Shop
Titanides were terribly overpowered. Of all the beings in Gaea, they alone seemed improperly designed for their habitat. Blimps were precisely as they must be to live where and how they did. Everything about them was as functional as their fear of flame. Angels were so close to impossible they had left Gaea no room for her customary playfulness. It had been necessary for her to design them to tolerances of grams and subordinate everything to their eight-meter wingspans and the muscles needed to power them.
The Titanide was obviously a plains animal. Why then was it necessary to make it able to climb trees? Their lower bodies were equine-though cloven-hoofed-and in the light gravity of Gaea they could have done quite well with legs slimmer than any thoroughbred's. Instead, Gaea had given them the quarters of a Percheron, the fetlocks of a Clydesdale. Their backs, withers, and hips were broad with muscle.
It turned out, however, that Titanides, alone of Gaea's creatures, could withstand the gravity of Earth. They became Gaea's ambassadors to humanity. Considering that the race of Titanides was less than two centuries old, it became obvious that their strength was no accident. Gaea had been planning ahead.
There was an unexpected dividend for the humans living in Gaea. A Titanide's walking gait had none of the jouncing associated with Terran horses. They could move like clouds in the low gravity, their bodies maintained at a constant height by light touches of their hooves. The ride was so smooth, in fact, that Gaby had no trouble sleeping. She reclined on Psaltery's back with one leg hanging over each side.
While she slept, Psaltery climbed the winding trail into the Asteria Mountains.
He was a handsome creature of the naked-skin type, colored like milk chocolate. He had a thick mane of orange hair that grew not only from his scalp but down his neck and over a lot of his human back, worn in a series of long braids, like the hair of his tail. As with all his species, his human face and torso appeared to be those of a female. He was beardless and had large, wide-set eyes with sweeping lashes. His breasts were large and conical. But between his front legs was a penis that looked all too human for many Terrans. He had another, much larger one between his hind legs, and under his lovely orange tail was a vagina, but to a Titanide it was the frontal organs that made the difference. Psaltery was male.
The trail he followed through the woods was tangled with vines and new growth, but occasionally it was possible to see that once it had been wide enough for a wagon to pass. In some of the clearings broken patches of asphalt could be seen. It was part of the Circum-Gaea Highway, built more than sixty years ago. Gaby had had a hand in its construction. To Psaltery, it had always been there: useless, seldom-traveled, slowly crumbling.
He reached the top of the Aglaian plateau, the Lower Mists. Soon he was out of them and trotting beside the Aglaian Lake with Thalia in the distance, thirstily sucking the waters. He climbed to the Middle Mists, to Euphrosyne and the Upper Mists. Ophion became a river once more, briefly, before entering the double-pump system that lifted it to the Midnight Sea.
Psaltery turned north before reaching the last pumps and followed a small mountain stream. He forded it in white water and began to climb. He was in Rhea now and had been for quite some time, but the boundaries in Gaea were not well-defined. The journey had started in the middle of the twilight zone between Hyperion and Rhea, that hazy area between the perpetual weak daylight of the one and the eternal moonlit night of the other. He had been proceeding into night. Somewhere on the middle slopes of the Asterias he reached it. The Rhean night presented no visibility problems; Titanide night vision was good, and this close to the boundary there was still much light reflected from the plains of Hyperion curving up behind them. He ascended the steep mountainside along a narrow but well-defined path. In a series of alpine switchbacks he made his way through two passes and into the deep valleys on the other side. The Rhean mountains were sheer and rocky, with slopes averaging seventy degrees. There were no more tall trees, but the land was upholstered in lichens thick and smooth as the felt on a pool table. Dotted over that were broad-leafed shrubs the roots of which scrabbled into the living rock, sending out taproots that could be as long as half a kilometer before they reached the nourishing body of Gaea-the mountains' real bones.