The Sirens of Titan

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr

  There had been no love-making during the voyage. Neither Constant nor Beatrice had been interested. Martian veterans never were.

  Inevitably, the long voyage had drawn Constant closer to his mate and child—closer than they had been on the gilded system of catwalks, ramps, ladders, pulpits, steps and stages in Newport. But the only love in the family unit was still the love between young Chrono and Beatrice. Other than the love between mother and son there was only politeness, glum compassion, and suppressed indignation at having been forced to be a family at all.

  “Oh, my—” said Constant, “life is funny when you stop to think of it.”

  Young Chrono did not smile when his father said life was funny.

  Young Chrono was the member of the family least in a position to think life was funny. Beatrice and Constant, after all, could laugh bitterly at the wild incidents they had survived. But young Chrono couldn’t laugh with them, because he himself was a wild incident.

  Small wonder that young Chrono’s chief treasures were a good-luck piece and a switchblade knife.

  Young Chrono now drew his switchblade knife, flicked open the blade nonchalantly. His eyes narrowed. He was preparing to kill, if killing should become necessary. He was looking in the direction of a gilded rowboat that had put out from the palace on the island.

  It was being rowed by a tangerine-colored creature. The oarsman was, of course, Salo. He was bringing the boat in order to transport the family back to the palace. Salo was a bad oarsman, never having rowed before. He grasped the oars with his suction-cup feet.

  He had one advantage over human oarsmen, in that he had an eye in the back of his head.

  Young Chrono flashed light into Old Salo’s eye, flashed it with his bright knife blade.

  Salo’s back eye blinked.

  Flashing the light into the eye was not a piece of skylarking on Chrono’s part. It was a piece of jungle cunning, a piece of cunning calculated to make almost any sort of sighted creature uneasy. It was one of a thousand pieces of jungle cunning that young Chrono and his mother had learned in their year together in the Amazon Rain Forest.

  Beatrice’s brown hand closed on a rock. “Worry him again,” she said softly to Chrono.

  Young Chrono again flashed the light in Old Salo’s eye.

  “His body looks like the only soft part,” said Beatrice, without moving her lips. “If you can’t get his body, try for an eye.”

  Chrono nodded.

  Constant was chilled, seeing what an efficient unit of self-defense his mate and son made together. Constant was not included in their plans. They had no need of him.

  “What should I do?” whispered Constant.

  “Sh!” said Beatrice sharply.

  Salo beached his gilded craft He made it fast with a clumsy landlubber’s knot to the wrist of a statue by the water. The statue was of a nude woman playing a slide trombone. It was entitled, enigmatically, Evelyn and Her Magic Violin.

  Salo was too jangled by sorrow to care for his own safety—to understand, even, that he might be frightening to someone. He stood for a moment on a block of seasoned Titanic peat near his landing. His grieving feet sucked at the damp stone. He pried loose his feet with a tremendous effort.

  On he came, the flashes from Chrono’s knife dazzling him.

  “Please—” he said.

  A rock flew out of the knife’s dazzle.

  Salo ducked.

  A hand seized his bony throat, threw him down.

  Young Chrono now stood astride Old Salo, his knife point pricking Salo’s chest. Beatrice knelt by Salo’s head, a rock poised to smash his head to bits.

  “Go on—kill me,” said Salo raspingly. “You’d be doing me a favor. I wish I were dead. I wish to God I’d never been assembled and started up in the first place. Kill me, put me out of my misery, and then go see him. He’s asking for you.”

  “Who is?” said Beatrice.

  “Your poor husband—my former friend, Winston Niles Rumfoord,” said Salo.

  “Where is he?” said Beatrice.

  “In that palace on the island,” said Salo. “He’s dying—all alone, except for his faithful dog. He’s asking for you—” said Salo, “asking for all of you. And he says he never wants to lay his eyes on me again.”

  Malachi Constant watched the lead-colored lips kiss thin air soundlessly. The tongue behind the lips clicked infinitesimally. The lips suddenly drew back, baring the perfect teeth of Winston Niles Rumfoord.

  Constant was himself showing his teeth, preparing to gnash them appropriately at the sight of this man who had done him so much harm. He did not gnash them. For one thing, no one was looking—no one would see him do it and understand. For another thing, Constant found himself destitute of hate.

  His preparations for gnashing his teeth decayed into a yokel gape—the gape of a yokel in the presence of a spectacularly mortal disease.

  Winston Niles Rumfoord was lying, fully materialized, on his back on his lavender contour chair by the pool. His eyes were directed at the sky, unblinkingly and seemingly sightless. One fine hand dangled over the side of the chair, its limp fingers laced in the choke chain of Kazak, the hound of space.

  The chain was empty.

  An explosion on the Sun had separated man and dog. A Universe schemed in mercy would have kept man and dog together.

  The Universe inhabited by Winston Niles Rumfoord and his dog was not schemed in mercy. Kazak had been sent ahead of his master on the great mission to nowhere and nothing.

  Kazak had left howling in a puff of ozone and sick light, in a hum like swarming bees.

  Rumfoord let the empty choke chain slip from his fingers. The chain expressed deadness, made a formless sound and a formless heap, was a soulless slave of gravity, born with a broken spine.

  Rumfoord’s lead-colored lips moved. “Hello, Beatrice—wife,” he said sepulchrally.

  “Hello, Space Wanderer,” he said. He made his voice affectionate this time. “Gallant of you to come, Space Wanderer—to take one more chance with me.

  “Hello, illustrious young bearer of the illustrious name of Chrono,” said Rumfoord. “Hail, oh German batball star—hail, him of the good-luck piece.”

  The three to whom he spoke stood just inside the wall. The pool was between them and Rumfoord.

  Old Salo, who had not been granted his wish to die, grieved in the stern of the gilded rowboat that was beached outside the wall.

  “I am not dying,” said Rumfoord. “I am merely taking my leave of the Solar System. And I am not even doing that. In the grand, in the timeless, in the chrono-synclastic infundibulated way of looking at things, I shall always be here. I shall always be wherever I’ve been.

  “I’m honeymooning with you still, Beatrice,” he said. “I’m talking to you still in a little room under the stairway in Newport, Mr. Constant. Yes—and playing peek-a-boo in the caves of Mercury with you and Boaz. And Chrono—” he said, “I’m watching you still as you play German batball so well on the iron playground of Mars.”

  He groaned. It was a tiny groan—and so sad.

  The sweet, mild air of Titan carried the tiny groan away.

  “Whatever we’ve said, friends, we’re saying still-such as it was, such as it is, such as it will be,” said Rumfoord.

  The tiny groan came again.

  Rumfoord watched it leave as though it were a smoke ring.

  “There is something you should know about life in the Solar System,” he said. “Being chrono-synclastic infundibulated, I’ve known about it all along. It is, none the less, such a sickening thing that I’ve thought about it as little as possible.

  “The sickening thing is this:

  “Everything that every Earthling has ever done has been warped by creatures on a planet one-hundred-and-fifty thousand light years away. The name of the planet is Tralfamadore.

  “How the Tralfamadorians controlled us, I don’t know. But I know to what end they controlled us. They controlled us in such a way as to make u
s deliver a replacement part to a Tralfamadorian messenger who was grounded right here on Titan.”

  Rumfoord pointed a finger at young Chrono. “You, young man—” he said. “You have it in your pocket. In your pocket is the culmination of all Earthling history. In your pocket is the mysterious something that every Earthling was trying so desperately, so earnestly, so gropingly, so exhaustingly to produce and deliver.”

  A fizzing twig of electricity grew from the tip of Rumfoord’s accusing finger.

  “The thing you call your good-luck piece,” said Rumfoord, “is the replacement part for which the Tralfamadorian messenger has been waiting so long!

  “The messenger,” said Rumfoord, “is the tangerine-colored creature who now cowers outside the walls. His name is Salo. I had hoped that the messenger would give mankind a glimpse of the message he was carrying, since mankind was giving him such a nice boost on his way. Unfortunately, he is under orders to show the message to no one. He is a machine, and, as a machine, he has no choice but to regard orders as orders.

  “I asked him politely to show me the message,” said Rumfoord. “He desperately refused.”

  The fizzing twig of electricity on Rumfoord’s finger grew, forming a spiral around Rumfoord. Rumfoord considered the spiral with sad contempt, “I think perhaps this is it,” he said of the spiral.

  It was indeed. The spiral telescoped slightly, making a curtsey. And then it began to revolve around Rumfoord, spinning a continuous cocoon of green light.

  It barely whispered as it spun.

  “All I can say,” said Rumfoord from the cocoon, “is that I have tried my best to do good for my native Earth while serving the irresistible wishes of Tralfamadore.

  “Perhaps, now that the part has been delivered to the Tralfamadorian messenger, Tralfamadore will leave the Solar System alone. Perhaps Earthlings will now be free to develop and follow their own inclinations, as they have not been free to do for thousands of years.” He sneezed. “The wonder is that Earthlings have been able to make as much sense as they have,” he said.

  The green cocoon left the ground, hovered over the dome. “Remember me as a gentleman of Newport, Earth, and the Solar System,” said Rumfoord. He sounded serene again, at peace with himself, and at least equal to any creature that he might encounter anywhere.

  “In a punctual way of speaking,” came Rumfoord’s glottal tenor from the cocoon, “good-by.”

  The cocoon and Rumfoord disappeared with a pft.

  Rumfoord and his dog were never seen again.

  Old Salo came bounding into the courtyard just as Rumfoord and his cocoon disappeared.

  The little Tralfamadorian was wild. He had torn the message from its band around his throat with a suction-cup foot. One foot was still a suction cup, and in it was the message.

  He looked up at the place where the cocoon had hovered. “Skip!” he cried into the sky. “Skip! The message! I’ll tell you the message! The message! Skiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip!”

  His head did a somersault in its gimbals. “Gone,” he said emptily. He whispered, “Gone.

  “Machine?” said Salo. He was speaking haltingly, as much to himself as to Constant, Beatrice and Chrono. “A machine I am, and so are my people,” he said. “I was designed and manufactured, and no expense, no skill, was spared in making me dependable, efficient, predictable, and durable. I was the best machine my people could make.

  “How good a machine have I proved to be?” asked Salo.

  “Dependable?” he said. “I was depended upon to keep my message sealed until I reached my destination, and now I’ve torn it open.

  “Efficient?” he said. “Having lost my best friend in the Universe, it now costs me more energy to step over a dead leaf than it once cost me to bound over Mount Rumfoord.

  “Predictable?” he said. “After watching human beings for two hundred thousand Earthling years, I have become as skittish and sentimental as the silliest Earthling schoolgirl.

  “Durable?” he said darkly. “We shall see what we shall see.”

  He laid the message he had been carrying so long on Rumfoord’s empty, lavender contour chair.

  “There it is—friend,” he said to his memory of Rumfoord, “and much consolation may it give you, Skip. Much pain it cost your old friend Salo. In order to give it to you—even too late—your old friend Salo had to make war against the core of his being, against the very nature of being a machine.

  “You asked the impossible of a machine,” said Salo, “and the machine complied.

  “The machine is no longer a machine,” said Salo. “The machine’s contacts are corroded, his bearings fouled, his circuits shorted, and his gears stripped. His mind buzzes and pops like the mind of an Earthling—fizzes and overheats with thoughts of love, honor, dignity, rights, accomplishment, integrity, independence—”

  Old Salo picked up the message again from Rumfoord’s contour chair. It was written on a thin square of aluminum. The message was a single dot.

  “Would you like to know how I have been used, how my life has been wasted?” he said. “Would you like to know what the message is that I have been carrying for almost half a million Earthling years—the message I am supposed to carry for eighteen million more years?”

  He held out the square of aluminum in a cupped foot.

  “A dot,” he said.

  “A single dot,” he said.

  “The meaning of a dot in Tralfamadorian,” said Old Salo, “is—

  “Greetings.”

  The little machine from Tralfamadore, having delivered this message to himself, to Constant, to Beatrice, and to Chrono over a distance of one hundred and fifty thousand light years, bounded abruptly out of the courtyard and onto the beach outside.

  He killed himself out there. He took himself apart and threw his parts in all directions.

  Chrono went out on the beach alone, wandered thoughtfully among Salo’s parts. Chrono had always known that his good-luck piece had extraordinary powers and extraordinary meanings.

  And he had always suspected that some superior creature would eventually come to claim the good-luck piece as his own. It was in the nature of truly effective good-luck pieces that human beings never really owned them.

  They simply took care of them, had the benefit of them, until the real owners, the. superior owners, came along.

  Chrono did not have a sense of futility and disorder.

  Everything seemed in apple-pie order to him.

  And the boy himself participated fitly in that perfect order.

  He took his good-luck piece from his pocket, dropped it without regret to the sand, dropped it among Salo’s scattered parts.

  Sooner or later, Chrono believed, the magical forces of the Universe would put everything back together again.

  They always did.

  epilogue

  REUNION WITH STONY

  “You are tired, so very tired, Space Wanderer, Malachi, Unk. Stare at the faintest star, Earthling, and think how heavy your limbs are growing.”

  —SALO

  There isn’t much more to tell.

  Malachi Constant grew to be an old man on Titan.

  Beatrice Rumfoord grew to be an old woman on Titan.

  They died peacefully, died within twenty-four hours of each other. They died in their seventy-fourth years.

  Only the Titanic bluebirds know for sure what happened, finally, to Chrono, their son.

  When Malachi Constant turned seventy-four years old, he was crusty, sweet, and bandy-legged. He was totally bald, and went naked most of the time, wearing nothing but a neatly-trimmed, white vandyke beard.

  He lived in Salo’s grounded space ship, had been living there for thirty years.

  Constant had not tried to fly the space ship. He hadn’t dared to touch a single control. The controls of Salo’s ship were far more complex than those of a Martian ship. Salo’s dash panel offered Constant two hundred and seventy-three knobs, switches, and buttons, each with a Tralfamadorian inscripti
on or calibration. The controls were anything but a hunch-player’s delight in a Universe composed of one-trillionth part matter to one decillion parts black velvet futility.

  Constant had tinkered with the ship only to the extent of finding out gingerly if, as Rumfoord had said, Chrono’s good-luck piece really would serve as a part of the power plant.

  Superficially, at any rate, the good-luck piece would. There was an access door to the ship’s power plant that had plainly leaked smoke at one time. Constant opened it, found a sooty compartment within. And under the soot were smudged bearings and cams that related to nothing.

  Constant was able to slip the holes in Chrono’s good-luck piece onto those bearings and between the cams. The good-luck piece conformed to close tolerances and surrounding clearances in a way that would have pleased a Swiss machinist.

  Constant had many hobbies that helped him to pass the balmy time in the salubrious clime of Titan.

  His most interesting hobby was puttering around with Salo, the dismantled Tralfamadorian messenger. Constant spent thousands of hours trying to get Salo back together and going again.

  So far, he had had no luck.

  When Constant first undertook the reconstruction of the little Tralfamadorian, it had been with the express hope that Salo would then agree to fly young Chrono back to Earth.

  Constant wasn’t eager to fly back to Earth, and neither was his mate Beatrice. But Constant and Beatrice had agreed that their son, with most of his life ahead of him, should live that life with busy and jolly contemporaries on Earth.

  By the time Constant was seventy-four, however, getting young Chrono back to Earth was no longer a pressing problem. Young Chrono was no longer particularly young. He was forty-two. And he had made such a thorough and specialized adjustment on Titan that it would have been cruel in the extreme to send him anywhere else.

  At the age of seventeen, young Chrono had run away from his palatial home to join the Titanic bluebirds, the most admirable creatures on Titan. Chrono now lived among their nests by the Kazak pools. He wore their feathers and sat on their eggs and shared their food and spoke their language.

  Constant never saw Chrono. Sometimes, late at night, he would hear Chrono’s cries. Constant did not answer the cries. The cries were for nothing and nobody on Titan.