The Sirens of Titan

by Kurt Vonnegut

  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, retreat 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.

  Unk had never been able to brush aside the plea about truthing. It frightened him. Some part of his mind warned him that Boaz was not bluffing, that Boaz really knew a truth about Unk that could tear him to pieces.

  Unk opened his mouth and closed it again.

  "You come and tell me the big news," said Boaz. "'Boaz--' you say, 'we're going to be free!' And I get all excited, and I drop everthing I'm doin', and I get set to be free.

  "And I keep saying it over to myself about how I'm going to be free," said Boaz, "and then I try to think what that's going to be like, and all I can see is people. They push me this way, then they push me that--and nothing pleases 'em, and they get madder and madder, on account of nothing makes 'em happy. And they holler at me on account of I ain't made 'em happy, and we all push and pull some more.

  "And then, all of a sudden," said Boaz, "I remember all the crazy little animals I been making so happy so easy with music. And I go find thousands of 'em lying around dead, on account of Boaz forgot all about 'em, he was so excited about being free. And ever' one of them lost lives I could have saved, if I'd have just kept my mind on what I was doing.

  "And then I say to myself," said Boaz, "'I ain't never been nothing good to people, and people never been nothing good to me. So what I want to be free in crowds of people for?'

  "And then I knew what I was going to say to you, Unk, when I got back here," said Boaz.

  Boaz now said it:

  "I found me a place where I can do good without doing any harm, and I can see I'm doing good, and them I'm doing good for know I'm doing it, and they love me, Unk, as best they can. I found me a home.

  "And when I die down here some day," said Boaz, "I'm going to be able to say to myself, 'Boaz--you made millions of lives worth living. Ain't nobody ever spread more joy. You ain't got an enemy in the Universe." Boaz became for himself the affectionate Mama and Papa he'd never had. "'You go to sleep now,'" he said to himself, imagining himself on a stone deathbed in the caves. "'You're a good boy, Boaz,'" he said. "'Good night.'"

  chapter ten

  AN AGE OF MIRACLES

  "O Lord Most High, Creator of the Cosmos, Spinner of Galaxies, Soul of Electromagnetic Waves, Inhaler and Exhaler of Inconceivable Volumes of Vacuum, Spitter of Fire and Rock, Trifler with Millennia--what could we do for Thee that Thou couldst not do for Thyself one octillion times better? Nothing. What could we do or say that could possibly interest Thee? Nothing. Oh, Mankind, rejoice in the apathy of our Creator, for it makes us free and truthful and dignified at last No longer can a fool like Malachi Constant point to a ridiculous accident of good luck and say, 'Somebody up there likes me.' And no longer can a tyrant say, 'God wants this or that to happen, and anybody who doesn't help this or that to happen is against God.' O Lord Most High, what a glorious weapon is Thy Apathy, for we have unsheathed it, have thrust and slashed mightily with it, and the claptrap that has so often enslaved us or driven us into the madhouse lies slain!"

  --THE REVEREND C. HORNER REDWINE

  It was a Tuesday afternoon. It was springtime in the northern hemisphere of Earth.

  Earth was green and watery. The air of earth was good to breathe, as fattening as cream.

  The purity of the rains that fell on Earth could be tasted. The taste of purity was daintily tart.

  Earth was warm.

  The surface of Earth heaved and seethed in fecund restlessness. Earth was most fertile where the most death was.

  The daintily tart rain fell on a green place where there was a great deal of death. It fell on a New World country churchyard. The churchyard was in West Barnstable, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, U.S.A. The churchyard was full, the spaces between its naturally dead chinked tight by the bodies of the honored war dead. Martians and Earthlings lay side by side.

  There was not a country in the world that did not have graveyards with Earthlings and Martians buried side by side. There was not a country in the world that had not fought a battle in the war of all Earth against the invaders from Mars.

  All was forgiven.

  All living things were brothers, and all dead things were even more so.

  The church, which squatted among the headstones like a wet mother dodo, had been at various times Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Unitarian, and Universal Apocalyptic. It was now the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.

  A seeming wild man stood in the churchyard, wondering at the creamery air, at the green, at the wet. He was almost naked, and his blue-black beard and his hair were tangled and long and shot with gray. The only garment he wore was a clinking breechclout made of wrenches and copper wire.

  The garment covered his shame.

  The rain ran down his coarse cheeks. He tipped back his head to drink it. He rested his hand on a headstone, more for the feel than the support of it. He was used to the feel of stones--was deathly used to the feel of rough, dry stones. But stones that were wet, stones that were mossy, stones that were squared and written on by men--he hadn't felt stones like that for a long, long time.

  Pro patria said the stone he touched.

  The man was Unk.

  He was home from Mars and Mercury. His space ship had landed itself in a wood next to the churchyard. He was filled with the heedless, tender violence of a man who has had his lifetime cruelly wasted.

  Unk was forty-three years old.

  He had every reason to wither and die.

  All that kept him going was a wish that was more mechanical than emotional. He wished to be reunited with Bee, his mate, with Chrono, his son, and with Stony Stevenson, his best and only friend.

  The Reverend C. Horner Redwine stood in the pulpit of his church that rainy Tuesday afternoon. There was no one else in the church. Redwine had climbed up to the pulpit in order simply to be as happy as possible. He was not. being as happy as possible under adverse circumstances. He was being as happy as possible under extraordinarily happy circumstances--for he was a much loved minister of a religion that not only promised but delivered miracles.

  His church, the Barnstable First Church of God the Utterly Indifferent, had a subtitle: The Church of the Weary Space Wanderer. The subtitle was justified by this prophecy: That a lone straggler from the Army of Mars would arrive at Redwine's church some day.

  The church was ready for the miracle. There was a hand-forged iron spike driven into the rugged oak post behind the pulpit. The post carried the mighty beam that was the roof tree. And on the nail was hung a coathanger encrusted with semiprecious stones. And on the coathanger hung a suit of clothes in a transparent plastic bag.

  The prophecy was that the weary Space Wanderer would
be naked, that the suit of clothes would fit him like a glove. The suit was of such a design as to fit no one but the right man well. It was one piece, lemon-yellow, rubberized, closed by a zipper, and ideally skin-tight.

  The garment was not in the mode of the day. It was a special creation to add glamour to the miracle.

  Stitched into the back and front of the garment were orange question marks a foot high. These signified that the Space Wanderer would not know who he was.

  No one would know who he was until Winston Niles Rumfoord, the head of all churches of God the Utterly Indifferent, gave the world the Space Wanderer's name.

  The signal, should the Space Wanderer arrive, was for Redwine to ring the church bell madly.

  When the bell was rung madly, the parishioners were to feel ecstasy, to drop whatever they were doing, to laugh, to weep, to come.

  The West Barnstable Volunteer Fire Department was so dominated by members of Redwine's church that the fire engine itself was going to arrive as the only vehicle remotely glorious enough for the Space Wanderer.

  The screams of the fire alarm on top of the firehouse were to be added to the bedlam joy of the bell. One scream from the alarm meant a grass or woods fire. Two screams meant a house fire. Three screams meant a rescue. Ten screams would mean that the Space Wanderer had arrived.

  Water seeped in around an ill-fitting window sash. Water crept under a loose shingle in the roof, dropped through a crack and hung in glittering beads from a rafter over Redwine's head. The good rain wet the old Paul Revere bell in the steeple, trickled down the bell rope, soaked the wooden doll tied to the end of the bell rope, dripped from the feet of the doll, made a puddle on the steeple's flagstone floor.

  The doll had a religious significance. It represented a repellent way of life that was no more. It was called a Malachi. No home or place of business of a member of Redwine's faith was without a Malachi hanging somewhere.

  There was only one proper way to hang a Malachi. That was by the neck. There was only one proper knot to use, and that was a hangman's knot.

  And the rain dripped from the feet of Redwine's Malachi at the end of the bell rope--

  The cold goblin spring of the crocuses was past.

  The frail and chilly fairy spring of the daffodils was past.