Titan (GAIA) by Varley John

Author:Varley, John [Varley, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781101623275
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 1987-04-14T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

Cirocco found she had some preconceptions that had to be discarded.

The first was the most obvious. When B Flat arrived and looked much like C Sharp except for his sexual organs, she had assumed Titanides were going to be hard to tell apart.

The group that showed up in response to C Sharp’s call looked like escapees from a merry-go-round.

The healer had emerald green head and tail hair. The rest of her body was covered in thick, snow-white fur. There was another hairy one: a strawberry blonde with a dappling of violet. There was a brown and white pinto, and one without any hair at all except on his tail. His skin was pale blue.

The last of the group looked naked but was not; she had the pelt of a horse not only on the part of her where it would have looked reasonable, but on her human upper-half, too. She was zebra-striped in bright yellow and searing orange, and had lavender head and tail hair. Looking away from her did no good; the image burned itself into the retina.

Not satisfied with the carnival atmosphere, the Titanides painted their bare skins and stained patches of their hair. They wore necklaces and bracelets, stuck baubles in holes pierced through noses and ears, tied chains of brass links and colored stones or ropes of flowers around their legs. Each had a musical instrument slung over the shoulder or protruding from the pouch, made of wood or animal horn or seashell or brass.

The second preconception—which was actually the first, since Calvin had told them about it—was that Titanides were all female. A tactful question to the healer brought a straightforward answer and an awesome demonstration. The Titanides each had three sex organs.

She knew about the frontal, human-sized male or female genitalia. These determined the pronoun gender for reasons that must have made sense to a Titanide.

In addition, each had a large vaginal opening under the tail, just like a female horse.

It was the one in the middle that shocked Gaby and Cirocco. In the soft belly between the healer’s hind legs was a thick, fleshy sheath, and out of it came a penis that was human in every detail but for the fact that it was as long and thick as Cirocco’s arm.

Cirocco had thought herself sophisticated. She had seen many naked men, and it had been years since any of them had anything new to show her. She liked men and she liked intercourse, but that thing made her think about becoming a nun. Her strong reaction disturbed her. She knew it was the same feeling Gaby had expressed, that of being more upset by close parallels than by something utterly alien.

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.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.