Titanian n.

[F]ar off in space the Titanians clustered about their visiray screens, watching, in almost unbelieving amazement, the supernatural being who labored in that reeking inferno of heat and poisonous vapor—who labored almost naked and entirely unprotected, refreshing himself from time to time with drafts of molten water!

Sometimes he rather regretted the time two earth-years before when he had taught this particular product of Titan’s Whispering Forest to sing. [...] At least, he wasn’t lonely. Basso, the singing plant, was company for one thing, and so were its weird subintelligent, singing contemporaries in the Whispering Forest outside. Then there was Snakehips, a true Titanian, actually an upright mass of quivering, darting gristle—entirely invertebrate—pretty intelligent so far as he went.

Dak [...] was from the Saturnian moon, Titan, and his race had a peculiar physical construction. Bull Smeed didn’t believe the short, slim Titanian could play center until he tried to lift him and discovered that he weighed close to three hundred pounds, considerably denser than he looked.

The Oberonian soldiers were chasing back and forth too. They were coming out with their bundles of ice darts and stuff. No guns, they couldn’t handle them. I’d have to take on any human but if that rocket had unloaded a bunch of Titanians from its ice-box, they might have a fight on their hands too.

When Jack judged they’d gone far enough to be safe, he called a halt. They cut toward the spaceport then, at the habitual loping five-meter stride that is the walk of the Titanian. Once Jack tripped on an unseen obstacle, but on Titan a fall hardly decreases your speed at all.

‘It’s been a strange homecoming for you, my son,’ said his Father, speaking in Titanian. ‘I hope you can forgive us.’

Wives, Schilling thought. More of a problem than an asset. The economic aspects of our fives should never have been melded hopelessly with the sexual; it makes things too complex. Blame that on the Titanians and their desire to solve our difficulties with one neat solution covering all. What they've actually done is gotten us entangled even more thoroughly. Pete hadn’t said any more about Carol.

But to the younger Titanians, it was an exciting time which they would remember all their lives. On a small world where everyone knew everybody else, half a thousand fascinating strangers had arrived, full of tales, many of them quite true, about the wonders of Earth. Here were men and women, barely into their twenties, who had seen forests and prairies and oceans of liquid water, who had strolled unprotected under an open sky beneath a sun whose heat could actually be felt...

They were creatures bioformed from Terran koalas. But their modifications were more than those required to adapt them to the environment of Titan. Sure, they had respiratory and digestive functions switched like all Titanians: they breathed their food and ate their oxygen.

Kimber was dark-haired, with a wide face that had inherited the best traits of several of her mixed-race ancestors. Like most Titanians, she was well above average in height. Titan had largely been settled by people from Luna, to whom Saturn’s gravity had seemed oppressive. Although fifty percent larger than Earth’s moon, Titan had a lower density that gave it a nearly identical gravity field. And as humanity had learned early in the twenty-first century, people who lived under low gees tended to grow tall.

‘The Earth’s not going to recover and we can’t survive forever at Moonbase. The Saturn system’s our best bet, otherwise we’re spread too thin. Even Mars...’ She said, ‘The odds are against us, no matter what.’ I nodded. ‘So we come here, obliterate the Titanians, and then die out anyway, erasing their future as well as ours.’

‘I’d give anything to meet these guys,’ Melissa said. ‘We were so close. If we’d gotten here a couple of months earlier, we’d be exploring side-by-side with a genuine Titanian.’ ‘We’d be wondering how to get him to Earth is what we’d be doing,’ Will said. ‘As it is, he’s at least safe. And now that we know there’s life on Titan, we’ll be sending a mission there as fast as we can build the ship. He’s the lucky one; he’s got a decent chance of getting home alive.’

Titania was but one moon. But what was troubling was not that it might succeed but that it had happened at all. The System had also sent to her the surveillance footage on account of her rank in the intelligence branch. Ida let it play and watched as a crowd of people, native Titanians from the look of them, advanced on a System building ringed with System military. There was no sound to the footage, and Ida watched their mouths move noiselessly, their faces twisted in rage without voice.