The Sirens of Titan

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr

  Unk never shaved on Mercury. When his hair and beard got so long as to be a bother, he would hack away wads of thatch with a butcherknife.

  Boaz shaved every day. Boaz gave himself a haircut twice an Earthling week with a barber kit from the space ship.

  Boaz, twelve years younger than Unk, had never felt better in his life. He had gained weight in the caves of Mercury—and serenity, too.

  Boaz’s home vault was furnished with a cot, a table, two chairs, a punching bag, a mirror, dumbbells, a tape recorder, and a library of recorded music on tape consisting of eleven hundred compositions.

  Boaz’s home vault had a door on it, a round boulder with which he could plug the vault’s mouth. The door was necessary, since Boaz was God Almighty to the harmoniums. They could locate him by his heartbeat.

  Had he slept with his door open, he would have awakened to find himself pinned down by hundreds of thousands of his admirers. They would have let him up only when his heart stopped beating.

  Boaz, like Unk, was naked. But he still had shoes. His genuine leather shoes had held up gorgeously. True—Unk had walked fifty miles to every mile walked by Boaz, but Boaz’s shoes had not merely held up. They looked as good as new.

  Boaz wiped, waxed, and shined them regularly.

  He was shining them now.

  The door of his vault was blocked by the boulder. Only four favored harmoniums were inside with him. Two were wrapped about his upper arms. One was stuck to his thigh. The fourth, an immature harmonium only three inches long, clung to the inside of his left wrist, feeding on Boaz’s pulse.

  When Boaz found a harmonium he loved more than all the rest, that was what he did—let the creature feed on his pulse.

  “You like that?” he said in his thoughts to the lucky harmonium. “Ain’t that nice?”

  He had never felt better physically, had never felt better mentally, had never felt better spiritually. He was glad he and Unk had separated, because Unk liked to twist things around to where it seemed that anybody who was happy was dumb or crazy.

  “What makes a man be like that?” Boaz asked the little harmonium in his thoughts. “What’s he think he’s gaining compared to what he’s throwing away? No wonder he looks sick.”

  Boaz shook his head. “I kept trying to interest him in you fellers, and he just got madder. Never helps to get mad.

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” said Boaz in his thoughts, “and I’m probably not smart enough to understand if somebody was to explain it to me. All I know is we’re being tested somehow, by somebody or some thing a whole lot smarter than us, and all I can do is be friendly and keep calm and try and have a nice time till it’s over.”

  Boaz nodded. “That’s my philosophy, friends,” he said to the harmoniums stuck to him. “And if I’m not mistaken, that’s yours, too. I reckon that’s how come we hit it off so good.”

  The genuine leather toe of the shoe that Boaz was shining glowed like a ruby.

  “Men—awww now, men, men, men,” said Boaz to himself, staring into the ruby. When he shined his shoes, he imagined that he could see many things in the rubies of the toes.

  Right now, Boaz was looking into a ruby and seeing Unk strangling poor old Stony Stevenson at the stone stake on the iron parade ground back on Mars. The horrible image wasn’t a random recollection. It was dead center in Boaz’s relationship with Unk.

  “Don’t truth me,” said Boaz in his thoughts, “and I won’t truth you.” It was a plea he had made several times to Unk.

  Boaz had invented the plea, and its meaning was this: Unk was to stop telling Boaz truths about the harmoniums, because Boaz loved the harmoniums, and because Boaz was nice enough not to bring up truths that would make Unk unhappy.

  Unk didn’t know that he had strangled his friend Stony Stevenson. Unk thought Stony was still marvelously alive somewhere in the Universe. Unk was living on dreams of a reunion with Stony.

  Boaz was nice enough to withhold the truth from Unk, no matter how great the provocation had been to club Unk between the eyes with it.

  The horrible image in the ruby dissolved.

  “Yes, Lord,” said Boaz in his thoughts.

  The adult harmonium on Boaz’s upper left arm stirred.

  “You asking old Boaz for a concert?” Boaz asked the creature in his thoughts. “That what you trying to say? You trying to say, ‘Ol’ Boaz, I don’t want to sound ungrateful, on account of I know it’s a great honor to get to be right here close to your heart. Only I keep thinking about all my friends outside, and I keep wishing they could have something good, too.’ That what you trying to say?” said Boaz in his thoughts. “You trying to say, ‘Please, Papa Boaz—put on a concert for all the poor friends outside’? That what you trying to say?”

  Boaz smiled. “You don’t have to flatter me,” he said to the harmonium.

  The small harmonium on his wrist doubled up, extended itself again. “What you trying to tell me?” he asked it. “You trying to say ‘Uncle Boaz—your pulse is just too rich for a little tad like me. Uncle Boaz—please just play some nice, sweet, easy music to eat’? That what you trying to say?”

  Boaz turned his attention to the harmonium on his right arm. The creature had not moved. “Ain’t you the quiet one, though?” Boaz asked the creature in his thoughts. “Don’t say much, but thinking all the time. I guess you’re thinking old Boaz is pretty mean not just letting the music play all the time, huh?”

  The harmonium on his left arm stirred again. “What’s that you say?” said Boaz in his thoughts. He cocked his head, pretended to listen, though no sounds could travel through the vacuum in which he lived. “You say, ‘Please, King Boaz, play us the 1812 Overture’?” Boaz looked shocked, then stern. “Just because something feels better than anything else,” he said in his thoughts, “that don’t mean it’s good for you.”

  Scholars whose field is the Martian War often exclaim over the queer unevenness of Rumfoord’s war preparations. In some areas, his plans were horribly flimsy. The shoes he issued his ordinary troops, for instance, were almost a satire on the temporariness of the Jerry-built society of Mars—on a society whose whole purpose was to destroy itself in uniting the peoples of Earth.

  In the music libraries Rumfoord personally selected for the company mother ships, however, one sees a great cultural nest egg—a nest egg prepared as though for a monumental civilization that was going to endure for a thousand Earthling years. It is said that Rumfoord spent more time on the useless music libraries than he did on artillery and field sanitation combined.

  As an anonymous wit has it: “The Army of Mars arrived with three hundred hours of continuous music, and didn’t last long enough to hear The Minute Waltz to the end.”

  The explanation of the bizarre emphasis on the music carried by the Martian mother ships is simple: Rumfoord was crazy about good music—a craze, incidentally, that struck him only after he had been spread through time and space by the chrono-synclastic infundibulum.

  The harmoniums in the caves of Mercury were crazy about good music, too. They had been feeding on one sustained note in the song of Mercury for centuries. When Boaz gave them their first taste of music, which happened to be Le Sacre du Printemps, some of the creatures actually died in ecstasy.

  A dead harmonium is shriveled and orange in the yellow light of the Mercurial caves. A dead harmonium looks like a dried apricot.

  On that first occasion, which hadn’t been planned as a concert for the harmoniums, the tape recorder had been on the floor of the space ship. The creatures who had actually died in ecstasy had been in direct contact with the metal hull of the ship.

  Now, two and a half years later, Boaz demonstrated the proper way to stage a concert for the creatures so as not to kill them.

  Boaz left his home vault, carrying the tape recorder and the musical selections for the concert with him. In the corridor outside were two aluminum ironing boards. These had fiber pads on their feet. The ironing boards were six feet apart, and sp
anning them was a stretcher made of aluminum poles and lichen-fiber canvas.

  Boaz placed the tape recorder in the middle of the stretcher. The purpose of the engine resulting was to dilute and dilute and dilute the vibrations from the tape recorder. The vibrations, before they reached the stone floor, had to struggle through the dead canvas of the stretcher, down the stretcher handles, through the ironing boards, and finally through the fiber pads on the feet of the ironing boards.

  The dilution was a safety measure. It guaranteed that no harmonium would get a lethal overdose of music.

  Boaz now put the tape in the recorder and turned the recorder on. Throughout the concert, he would stand guard by the apparatus. His duty was to see that no creature crept too close to the apparatus. His duty, when a creature crept too close, was to peel the creature from the wall or floor, scold it, and paste it up again a hundred yards or more away.

  “If you ain’t got no more sense than that,” he would say in his thoughts to the foolhardy harmonium, “you’re going to wind up out here in left field ever’ time. Think it over.”

  Actually, a creature placed a hundred yards from the tape recorder still got plenty of music to eat.

  The walls of the caves were so extraordinarily conductive, in fact, that harmoniums on cave walls miles away got whiffs of Boaz’s concerts through the stone.

  Unk, who had been following the tracks deeper and deeper into the caves, could tell from the way the harmoniums were behaving that Boaz was staging a concert. He had reached a warm level where the harmoniums were thick. Their regular pattern of alternating yellow and aquamarine diamonds was breaking up—was degenerating into jagged clumps, pinwheels, and lightning bolts. The music was making them do it.

  Unk laid his pack down, then laid himself down to rest.

  Unk dreamed about colors other than yellow and aquamarine.

  Then he dreamed that his good friend Stony Stevenson was waiting for him around the next bend. His mind became lively with the things he and Stony would say when they met. Unk’s mind still had no face to go with the name of Stony Stevenson, but that didn’t matter much.

  “What a pair,” Unk said to himself. By that he meant that he and Stony, working together, would be invincible.

  “I tell you,” Unk said to himself with satisfaction, “that is one pair they want to keep apart at all costs. If old Stony and old Unk ever get together again, they better watch out. When old Stony and old Unk get together, anything can happen, and it usually does.”

  Old Unk chuckled.

  The people who were supposedly afraid of Unk’s and Stony’s getting together were the people in the big, beautiful buildings up above. Unk’s imagination had done a lot in three years with the glimpses he’d had of the supposed buildings—of what were in fact solid, dead, dumb-cold crystals. Unk’s imagination was now certain that the masters of all creation lived in those buildings. They were Unk’s and Boaz’s and maybe Stony’s jailers. They were experimenting with Unk and Boaz in the caves. They wrote the messages in harmoniums. The harmoniums didn’t have anything to do with the messages.

  Unk knew all those things for sure.

  Unk knew a lot of other things for sure. He even knew how the buildings up above were furnished. The furniture didn’t have any legs on it. It just floated in air, suspended by magnetism.

  And the people never worked at all, and they never worried about a thing.

  Unk hated them.

  He hated the harmoniums, too. He peeled a harmonium from the wall and tore it in two. It shriveled at once—turned orange.

  Unk flipped the two-piece corpse at the ceiling. And, looking up at the ceiling, he saw a new message written there. The message was disintegrating, because of the music. But it was still legible.

  The message told Unk in five words how to escape surely, easily, and swiftly from the caves. He was bound to admit, when given the solution to the puzzle that he had failed to solve in three years, that the puzzle was simple and fair.

  Unk scuttled down through the caves until he came upon Boaz’s concert for the harmoniums. Unk was wild and bug-eyed with big news. He could not speak in a vacuum, so he hauled Boaz to the space ship.

  There, in the inert atmosphere of the cabin, Unk told Boaz of the message that meant escape from the caves.

  It was now Boaz’s turn to react numbly. Boaz had thrilled to the slightest illusion of intelligence on the part of the harmoniums—but now, having heard the news that he was about to be freed from his prison, Boaz was strangely reserved.

  “That—that explains that other message,” said Boaz softly.

  “What other message?” asked Unk.

  Boaz held up his hands to represent a message that had appeared on the wall outside his home four Earthling days before. “Said, ‘BOAZ, DON’T GO!’” said Boaz. He looked down self-consciously. “‘WE LOVE YOU, BOAZ.’ That’s what it said.”

  Boaz dropped his hands to his side, turned away as though turning away from unbearable beauty. “I saw that,” he said, “and I had to smile. I looked at them sweet, gentle fellers on the wall there, and I says to myself, ‘Boys—how’s old Boaz ever going to go anywhere? Old Boaz, he going to be stuck here for quite some time yet!’”

  “It’s a trap!” said Unk.

  “It’s a what?” said Boaz.

  “A trap!” said Unk. “A trick to keep us here!”

  The comic book called Tweety and Sylvester was open on the table before Boaz. Boaz didn’t answer Unk right away. He leafed through the ragged book instead. “I expect,” he said at last.

  Unk thought about the crazy appeal in the name of love. He did something he hadn’t done for a long time. He laughed. He thought it was an hysterical ending for the nightmare—that the brainless membranes on the walls should speak of love.

  Boaz suddenly grabbed Unk, rattled poor Unk’s dry bones. “I’d appreciate it, Unk,” said Boaz tautly, “if you’d just let me think whatever I’m going to think about that message about how they love me. I mean—” he said, “you know—” he said, “it don’t necessarily have to make sense to you. I mean—” he said, “you know—” he said, “there ain’t really any call for you to say anything about it, one way or the other. I mean,” he said, “you know—” he said, “these animals ain’t necessarily your dish. You don’t necessarily have to like ’em, or understand ’em, or say anything about ’em. I mean—” said Boaz, “you know—” said Boaz, “the message wasn’t addressed to you. It’s me they said they loved. That lets you out.”

  He let Unk go, turned attention to the comic book again. His broad, brown, slab-muscled back amazed Unk. Living apart from Boaz, Unk had flattered himself into thinking he was a physical match for Boaz. He saw now what a pathetic delusion this had been.

  The muscles in Boaz’s back slid over one another in slow patterns that were counterpoint to the quick movements of his page-turning fingers. “You know so much about traps and things,” said Boaz. “How you know there ain’t some worse trap waiting for us if we go flying out of here?”

  Before Unk could answer him, Boaz remembered that he had left the tape recorder playing and unguarded.

  “Ain’t nobody watching out for ’em at all!” he cried. He left Unk, ran to rescue the harmoniums.

  While Boaz was gone, Unk made plans for turning the space ship upside down. That was the solution to the puzzle of how to get out. That was what the harmoniums on the ceiling had said:

  UNK, TURN SHIP UPSIDE DOWN.

  The theory of turning the space ship over was sound, of course. The ship’s sensing equipment was on its bottom. When turned over, the ship would be able to apply the same easy grace and intelligence to getting out of the caves that it had used in getting into them.

  Thanks to a power winch and the feeble tug of gravity in the caves of Mercury, Unk had the ship turned over by the time Boaz got back. All that remained to be done for the trip out was to press the on button. The upside-down ship would then blunder against the cave floor, give up, re
treat from the floor under the impression that the floor was a ceiling.

  It would go up the system of chimneys under the impression that it was going down. And it would inevitably find the way out, under the impression that it was seeking the deepest possible hole.

  The hole it would eventually find itself in would be the bottomless, sideless pit of space eternal.

  Boaz came into the upside-down ship, his arms loaded with dead harmoniums. He was carrying four quarts or more of the seeming dried apricots. Inevitably he dropped some. And, in stooping to pick them up reverently, he dropped more.

  Tears were streaming down his face.

  “You see?” said Boaz. He was raging heartbrokenly against himself. “You see, Unk?” he said. “See what happens when somebody just runs off and forgets?”

  Boaz shook his head. “This ain’t all of ’em,” he said. “This ain’t near all of ’em.” He found an empty carton that had once contained candy bars. He put the harmonium corpses into that.

  He straightened up, his hands on his hips. Just as Unk had been amazed by Boaz’s physical condition, so was Unk now amazed by Boaz’s dignity.

  Boaz, when he straightened up, was a wise, decent, weeping, brown Hercules.

  Unk, by comparison, felt scrawny, rootless, and sore-headed.

  “You want to do the dividing, Unk?” said Boaz.

  “Dividing?” said Unk.

  “Goofballs, food, soda pop, candy,” said Boaz.

  “Divide it all?” said Unk. “My God—there’s enough of everything for five hundred years.” There had never been any talk of dividing things before. There had been no shortage, and no threat of a shortage of anything.

  “Half for you to take with you, and half to leave here with me,” said Boaz.

  “Leave with you?” said Unk incredulously. “You’re—you’re coming with me, aren’t you?”

  Boaz held up his big right hand, and it was a tender gesture for silence, a gesture made by a thoroughly great human being. “Don’t truth me, Unk,” said Boaz, “and I won’t truth you.” He brushed away his tears with a fist.