#gaea trilogy

[douglasowen]

Gaea Trilogy

Gaea Trilogy – Old SciFi Reread

I reread the Gaea Trilogy, an old scifi read years back. Back in the 80’s I read the series and enjoyed it. Now, thirty years later, I have reread the series and found something out that disturbs me – all the errors and changes.

Fist off, John Varley did a good job in imagining this series. There is something about old scifi that just makes your insides warm.…

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[temporal-index]

"What makes you think I'm a visitor? I was born in this system, just like you. My home is Rhea. On Iapetus my daughter is at this moment approaching maturity. There is a family of Titans circling Uranus. They make up the invisible rings. They're smaller than I; I'm the largest Titan in this neighborhood. "Iapetus?" Gaby said. "One of the reasons we–" "Rest easy; I shall explain, and save you a trip. "We cannot travel between the stars. We can't move at all except for minor orbital adjustment. "I release eggs from my rim, where they already have a respectable velocity because of my rotation. I aim them as best I can but over these distances hitting the target is problematic, since the eggs have no guidance once launched. "When they fall on a suitable world – Iapetus is perfect: no air, rocky, plenty of sunlight, not too large and not too small – they take root. In 50,000 years the infant Titan is ready to be born. At that stage, she has covered an entire hemisphere of the birthing body. That's how Iapetus looked seventy-five years ago; one side was significantly brighter than the other. "The Titan infant then contracts until she is a thick band that encircles the world from pole to pole. That is what Iapetus has become. My daughter has delved deep. She has reached to the core to find the elements she needs for viability. I'm afraid that Iapetus had been quite looted by now; my grandmother, and her mother before her, all used that one moon. "My daughter is engaged in synthesizing the fuels she will need to break free of Iapetus. That should happen in five or six years. When she is ready – and not a day before, because once born she will contain all the mass she will ever have – she will blast herself into space. It's likely that Iapetus will be split in the process, like the one that eventually became the Rings. Then–" "You're saying Titans are responsible for the Rings?" Gaby asked. "Didn't I just state it?" Gaea looked a bit annoyed, but was quite absorbed in her story. "That was quite long ago, and you can't hold me responsible. At any rate, once free my daughter will kill her present rotation and begin to spin as I do. The part of her that will become her hub is presently touching the surface of Iapetus. In space, this will contract, pulling the spokes out behind it. She will spin faster, stabilizing, filling herself with air, begin moving mountains inside her to prepare for the creatures that will... well, you get the picture. I ramble when talking of my daughter, like any parent, I suppose."

John Varley, Titan (1979)

[temporal-index]

Nothing had ever made Cirocco feel smaller. Not O'Neil One, not the stars in space, not the floor of Gaea herself. She could see everything, and her sense of perspective failed utterly. It was impossible to detect the curvature of the walls. Like an upended horizon, they stretched away from her until suddenly they began to wrap around, making the space look more semi-circular than round. Everything was bathed in a pale green luminescence. The source of the light was four vertical rows of windows which sent beams slanting down to cross each other in the empty center. Not quite empty. Running straight as a ruler through the central space were three vertical cables wound together like a braid, and drifting in and out of the light beams were odd, cylindrical clouds that twisted slowly as they watched. Cirocco recalled thinking of the dark, narrow spaces beneath the cable as a cathedral. Gaea had exhausted her store of superlatives, but she knew that had only been an abandoned chapel. This was the cathedral. I thought I'd seen it all by now," Gaby said, quietly, pointing up at the wall behind them. "But a vertical jungle?" There was no other way to describe it. Clinging to the walls, reaching outward and branching up, the inside of the spoke was crusted with more of the ubiquitous trees. They dwindled, becoming at some indeterminate distance just a smooth carpet of green. Beyond that was the gray roof. "Would you say that's 300 kilometers up?" Gaby squinted, then made a grid with her fingers and calculated with some system of her own. "It covers the right number of degrees."

John Varley,Titan (1979)

[temporal-index]

"We'd better stick together," she said. There seemed good reason for caution. While none of the surfaces were completely reflective, the place had a lot in common with the mirror houses at carnivals. They could see through the walls to rooms on all sides of them, which also had glass walls leading to more rooms. "How do we get out, once we're in?" Gaby asked. Cirocco pointed down. "Follow our footprints." "Ah. How silly of me." Gaby bent down and looked at the fine powder coating the floor. There were larger, flat sheets scattered through it. "Ground glass," she said. "Don't fall down." Gene shook his head. "I thought so at first, too, but it's not glass. It's thin as a soap bubble, and it won't hold an edge." He picked a wall and pressed it gently with the palm of his hand. It shattered with a soft tinkling sound. He caught one of the pieces that drifted down around him and crushed it in his hand. "How many of those walls could you break before the second floor falls on us?" Gaby asked, pointing at the room above them. "A lot, I think. Look, this place is a maze, but it wasn't originally. We walk through some of the walls because something broke them already. But this was a stack of cubes, with no way in or out of any of them. Gaby and Cirocco looked at each other. "Like the building we looked at under the cable," Cirocco said, for both of them. She described it to Gene. "Who makes buildings with rooms you can't get in or out of?" Gaby asked. "The chambered nautilus does," Gene said. "Say again?" "The nautilus. It makes its shell a spiral. When the shell gets too small, it moves up and seals off part of the shell in back. You cut them in half, they're very pretty. It sounds a lot like the building you saw; little rooms on the bottom, big ones on top." Cirocco frowned. "But all these rooms look about the same size." Gene shook his head. "The difference isn't great. This room is a little taller than the one over there. There'll be smaller rooms somewhere else. These things built sideways." The picture that emerged of the creatures that built the glass castle was of something that worked like sea coral. The colony abandoned houses as they outgrew them, building on the remains. Parts of the castle towered ten levels or more. Structural strength came not from the tissue-thin walls but from the interstices that made up the edges. They were like clear lucite bars, thick as Cirocco's wrist, very hard and strong. If all the walls of the castle had been broken out, the outline would have still remained, like the steel underpinnings of a skyscraper. "Whoever built it wasn't the last to use it," Gaby suggested. "Somebody moved in and made a lot of modifications, unless these creatures were considerably more sophisticated than what we decided. But either way, everybody's long gone."

John Varley, Titan (1979)

[temporal-index]

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 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."

John Varley, Titan (1979)

[temporal-index]

"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 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 dance in five-four time. "Bend your ears now..." He stopped, embarrassed. "That is, do what your kind does to enhance 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 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."

John Varley, Titan (1979)

[temporal-index]

"Was that your speech?" C Sharp asked, "Or are you in respiratory distress?" "It's the way we talk. I–" "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 flattering 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 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 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 ear 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 yours?" "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 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 falling over?"

John Varley, Titan (1979)

[temporal-index]

It grew dark as they worked their way in – dark, and much quiter than it had been in their weeks on the river. There was a far-away howling like wind through long abandoned hallways, and far above, the tinkling of wind chimes. They heard their own footsteps, and the sound of each others' breathing. The sense of being in a cathedral was impossible to escape. Cirocco had seen a place like it before, among the giant sequoias of California. It was greener there and not as quiet, but the stillness and the feeling of being lost among vast indifferent beings was the same. If she saw a cobweb, she knew she would not stop running until she saw daylight. They began to notice hanging shapes above them, like torn tapestries. They were motionless in the dead air, insubstantial shapes in the shadows far overhead. Fine dust drifted around them, eddied by the slightest breeze. Gaby touched Cirocco's arm, lightly. She jumped, then looked up where Gaby was pointing. something clung to the side of one of the strands, fifty meters above the top of the sandhill. She thought it was sitting on a ledge, then wondered if it might be a growth of some kind. "Like a barnacle," Bill said. "Or a colony of them." Gaby whispered, then coughed nervously and repeated herself. Cirocco knew how she felt; it seemed like they ought to be whispering. Cirocco shook her head. "I'm reminded of the cliff dwellings in Arizona." In a few moments they spotted more of them, most far higher and less distinct than the one Gaby had found. Were they dwellings, or parasites? There was no way to tell. Cirocco took a last look around and thought she saw something in the distance, right on the edge of total darkness. It was a building. Shortly after she realized that, she knew it was a ruin. Fine sand was heaped around it. It was almost refreshing to find something built on the human scale. The building was the size of some of the smallest pueblos of Colorado, and in fact looked a bit like them. There were three layers of hexagonal chambers with no apparent doorways. Each layer was made of rooms slightly larger than the ones below. She moved closer and touched one wall. It was cool stone, cut and dressed and finished together without mortar, in the Incan fashion. Looking closer, she saw there were actually five layers of chambers, but the two lowest were much smaller than the three she had seen from a distance, and made from smaller stones. Brushing away the sand at the base of the wall, she found a sixth layer, then a seventh, each tinier than the one above. ... They circled the structure and found a place where it had crumbled. Massive stones from the top had crushed most of the smaller ones below. There was one chamber intact but for a missing wall. They saw no interior doors, and no place to enter the structure from outside. "Why build a place with no doors?"

John Varley, Titan (1979)