Sponde thought of the sunrise. Not because he may have seen his last (which he hadn’t), nor even because he was homesick (which he was). No, Sponde thought of the sunrise because he was watching his gargantuan coworker slowly lift herself up out of the discarded rubble of the ruined escape pod.
Felicia Titan was one of those rare anatomical marvels more often found in too-clever literature than reality: as wide as she was tall (and considerably taller than Sponde), her cauliflower ears and corn-kernel teeth contrasted greatly with her wombat nose and an enormous pair of vibrant blue eyes, which seemed to deliberately mislead an observer into conjecturing that she was sensitive, virtuous, and wise. Each of these conclusions was more erroneous than the last, no matter what order you put them in. The fact that this made no sense was perfectly in-keeping with Titan’s personality and life in general.
The rising sun of Titan’s prodigious sphere of a body was heralded, not by a crowing cockerel, but rather by flatulence of such prodigious length and gravity, that a wiser man might have declared this a rare occasion of the herald outshining the master. Sponde, however, was not a wise man.
Sponde was a small and thin fellow, soft all over and a little feminine in appearance. He sought to occlude this softness by dressing, speaking, and acting in manners crude, boorish, and an octave or so lower than was natural for him. These desperate overcompensations served to make him despised by his superiors (of which there were many), disrespected by his subordinates (of which there were few), and beloved by Titan (of which there was one, but that one tended to occupy the majority of his social calendar).
So it was that, as the bruised buttocks of Cecil Sponde sat upon the ground, he could honestly say that no one could have been happier to see (and hear, and soon enough smell) evidence of Titan’s health.
Not being known for his articulacy, Sponde instead declared, “All right, Tits?”
Slowly rolling onto her side, then onto her stomach, then back onto her side, then somehow giving the back a miss and rolling all the way to her other side, then nearly up onto her head, then finally onto her Olympian glutei, Titan no longer resembled the sun so much as a dislodged boulder. In time, however, she gained purchase on the ground and examined herself.
Each laborer was clad in an escape suit: a functional cliché of orange nylon, multitudinous pockets, and a classic fishbowl helmet. Each laborer periodically fogged their fishbowl, providing further evidence of their vivacity.
Titan shifted her neck about in improbable positions, rendered all the more improbable by her girth. She eventually came to examine her surroundings. Having been met with Sponde’s underwhelming elocution, and seeing no reason to improve upon it, she pondered aloud, “Bit wintery, isn’t it?”
As understatements went, it was accomplished. It looked very much as though they were sitting atop a frozen ocean. Everywhere she looked, Titan spied smooth ridges of surf and wave: glittering navy and shimmering emerald, more blues than a mono-polar depressive, and every so often hints of brilliant white foam. It all looked flash-frozen, yet ancient and irrevocable. This was all to the good as far as she was concerned, as there was not even a hint of land to be found in any direction. Everything shown, everything glistened, and everything twinkled a billion stars in one, lighting the chilly seascape with a faint, undeniably romantic glow.
Titan glanced briefly at the escape pod. With the possible exception of her churning belly, the former vessel was decidedly the least solid thing to be found. The formerly spherical vehicle was cracked open like an egg, lying in two jagged halves, a mangled leather chair peaking out of either like a pair of twisted, gawky hatchlings.
“Chairs look all right,” Sponde conjectured, ever the optimist. It was at that point that, defying all odds and reason, sparks randomly flew out of each of the pod’s halves, miraculously managing to set both of the flame-retardant chairs afire. Neither Sponde nor Titan was educated enough to appreciate how truly unlikely this event was, being overwhelmed as they were by the loss of their ad-hoc beds. Not wishing to let this sudden source of light and heat dampen his mood, Sponde conjectured further, “Guess supper’s taken care of then.”
In earlier and crueler days of the Earth’s history, those condemned to die by hanging upon the scaffold could take solace only in their brief opportunity to look down on all those who surrounded them, to sneer briefly from their altitude upon those who presumed themselves wiser and more moral. It was a similar gimlet glare that Titan now fixed upon her subordinate-by-virtue-of-inferior-shouting-power. “Sponde, my boy,” she patiently began, with all the wisdom of her thirty-four years glowering over his mere twenty-nine, “Have you ever eaten a chair?”
The soft waif’s normally beady eyes widened a bit as he took a redundant stroll down memory lane. “Nope.”
Titan jiggled her jowls with a tiny nod. “Would you care to eat a chair now?”
At this, Sponde’s eyes narrowed, and Titan briefly wondered if they might roll up into his head as the boy struggled with recursive thought, presumably for the first time in his life. “Well…” he floundered briefly, before settling on, “nope!”
“Well then,” she countered with all the patience of a badger in a beehive, “How says you hurry along and grab our dinner-packs before they burn up, hm?” Grumbling like a boulder, exhausted from her brief supervisory labor and petulantly spiteful of the chilly de-facto floor, Titan relaxed onto her back and stared up at the sky, disturbed only by the sounds of Sponde’s shuffling, rifling, and frequent winces of pain as the fire blithely conspired to murder the blithely unconcerned idiot. Her eyes glazed over as she stared upward.
The sky was a rainbow writ large. Deep violets and rich crimsons swam leisurely with forest greens, golden yellows, and even electric blues. Dotting them all throughout were the piercing glitter of the stars, which seemed to shimmer and dance in the refracting and re-refracting light of the unstable atmosphere.
Titan considered this moon Europa in all her divine majesty, and voiced her approval with a torrential belch. “She’s pretty enough,” she concluded through her gaseous expectorations. “I wouldn’t mind a home like this.”
“It’s freezing!” Sponde both objected and whined, oblivious to the fact that he himself was perilously close to being cooked alive.
Titan’s viscous blue eyes contracted slightly as she continued to examine the sky. “Well natch, it could do with some central heating, but we Titans have been outdoors folk for generations. I could make good use of all this wide open space. Build a palace, I should think, get some servants and a fireplace. Real good. Well.”
The dancing light of the nearby flames were suddenly obscured be a wiry, thoroughly irritating frame. Standing with all the nervous hope of a cadet who has just fallen off his horse, Sponde presented the blackened dinner packs. Inadvertently, he was also presenting an ignited and slowly smoldering right sleeve.
Titan considered warning Sponde, or at least considered considering it, then snatched the dinner packs away from him. She fumbled with the cellophane sealing for several seconds before overpowering it, popping open the plastic container, and freeing a single tannish nugget that resembled (at least to some extent) chicken. She was presently transporting said nugget to her lips when she realized that a glass fishbowl stood between salvation and herself. “Well, butts,” she muttered.
“I wonder if it’s safe to breathe?”
“Your arm’s on fire, Sponde.”
“Heh?”
“… Never mind.”
A look somewhere between bemused and contaminative sat upon Titan’s face as she stared at the nugget. Fuzzy in her peripheral vision, Sponde could be seen (and heard) dancing furiously about, trying to extinguish the flames in every manner conceivable except those manners taught at him in basic safety classes. At length, the waif collapsed and played dead, incidentally smothering the fire beneath his insubstantial body.
Conserving her energy, Titan allowed her eyes to float over toward Sponde’s inert form. Beneath that skeletal frame was an arm, and upon that arm was a sleeve that very likely had a hole in it. The issue of breathability, and subsequently the issue of eating a nugget of processed chicken, would be resolved the instant her junior partner elected to roll over. The significance of the recently extinguished fire having eluded them both, she instead waited and eyed the boy’s inert frame.
Titan watch.
Sponde remained still.
Titan glared, narrowed her eyes, and attempted to roll the boy over using only her mind. If she did possess any latent psychic manipulative powers, they were choosing to remain latent.
Sponde remained still.
At length, Titan condescended to use a more pedestrian form of manipulation. “Spon!” she barked, “Roll over!”
Sponde moaned.
“That’s moaning,” she admonished, “not rolling. Roll, boy, roll.”
Finally, with all the motivation of a rusty drawbridge, Sponde rolled over. His sleeve was singed, and there was very clearly a smattering of holes burnt into it.
That settled it then. Titan would wait one more minute, and if Sponde (the proverbial canary in the coal mine) was still alive, she would deem it safe to remove her fishbowl and eat.
Suddenly, a distracted and wide-eyed look washed over Sponde’s beady-eyed face.
“Take deep breaths,” Titan advised.
Sponde waved his hands at her as though shooing a fly, his attention still far-off.
Titan’s red face purpled with indignation. “Do you wave your fingers at me, boy?”
Sponde shushed her. Sponde had never shushed her. “Do you… do you hear something?”
“I hear a whining, overgrown infant of limited longevity, growing exponentially more limited by the second.”
Titan had quite a mastery of words, when motivated.
In the silence that followed her useless threat, however, she could indeed hear a hum, a thrum, a musical quality in the air. Like a reed or a flute, it seemed to glide down from the wind above, wending where it might, enticing them to follow.
“It’s so… so… nice.” Sponde had quite a paucity of words, motivated or no.
At least a minute had passed, and the boy appeared thoroughly un-asphyxiated. Throwing caution into the wind, or more accurately into her gurgling stomach, Titan unscrewed her fishbowl helm. It was a sloppy business, the greasy nugget still held firmly between her thumb and index finger, but she managed to remove the helmet soon enough and place the succulent gristle safely in her mouth.
She made a face.
“What do you think that sound is?”
Titan chewed. It was work. “Maybe someone. Maybe someone with food.”
Having heard it spoken, this seemed perfectly feasible to Sponde. He nodded bodily. “Sure, sure. Could be. Maybe we should find out!”
Titan shrugged. She was not looking forward to standing up. Then, she withdrew a second nugget of processed poultry and examined it. “We should,” she conceded. “We should.”
A mere five minutes later, the unlikely pair was trundling off into the unknown, their moods considerably warmer than their environment. Sponde railed off a delightful old sailors’ catch, until Titan thumped him in the head. They trudged on silently.