The Sirens of Titan

by Kurt Vonnegut

  The authorities complained bitterly that the boy's big trouble was his mother. His mother loved him just the way he was.

  "Only eight more minutes to get your Malachi, folks," said Bee. "Hurry, hurry, hurry."

  Bee's upper front teeth were gold, and her skin, like the skin of her son, was the color of golden oak.

  Bee had lost her upper front teeth when the space ship in which she and Chrono had ridden from Mars crash-landed in the Gumbo region of the Amazon Rain Forest. She and Chrono had been the only survivors of the crash, and had wandered through the jungles for a year.

  The color of Bee's and Chrono's skins was permanent, since it stemmed from a modification of their livers. Their livers had been modified by a three-month diet consisting of water and the roots of the salpa-salpa or Amazonian blue poplar. The diet had been a part of Bee's and Chrono's initiation into the Gumbo tribe.

  During the initiation, mother and son had been staked at the ends of tethers in the middle of the village, with Chrono representing the Sun and Bee representing the Moon, as the Sun and the Moon were understood by the Gumbo people.

  As a result of their experiences, Bee and Chrono were closer than most mothers and sons.

  They had been rescued at last by a helicopter. Winston Niles Rumfoord had sent the helicopter to just the right place at just the right time.

  Winston Niles Rumfoord had given Bee and Chrono the lucrative Malachi concession outside the Alice-in-Wonderland door. He had also paid Bee's dental bill, and had suggested that her false front teeth be gold.

  The man who had the booth next to Bee's was Harry Brackman. He had been Unk's platoon sergeant back on Mars. Brackman was portly and balding now. He had a cork leg and a stainless steel right hand. He had lost the leg and hand in the Battle of Boca Raton. He was the only survivor of the battle--and, if he hadn't been so horribly wounded, he would certainly have been lynched along with the other survivors of his platoon.

  Brackman sold plastic models of the fountain inside the wall. The models were a foot high. The models had spring-driven pumps in their bases. The pumps pumped water from the big bowl at the bottom to the tiny bowls at the top. Then the tiny bowls spilled into the slightly larger bowls below and...

  Brackman had three of them going at once on the counter before him. "Just like the one inside, folks," he said. "And you can take one of these home with you. Put it in the picture window, so all your neighbors'll know you've been to Newport. Put it in the middle of the kitchen table for the kids' parties, and fill it with pink lemonade."

  "How much?" said a rube.

  "Seventeen dollars," said Brackman.

  "Wow!" said the rube.

  "It's a sacred shrine, cousin," said Brackman, looking at the rube levelly. "Isn't a toy." He reached under the counter, brought out a model of a Martian space ship. "You want a toy? Here's a toy. Forty-nine cents. I only make two cents on it."

  The rube made a show of being a judicious shopper. He compared the toy with the real article it was supposed to represent. The real article was a Martian space ship on top of a column ninety-eight feet tall. The column and space ship were inside the walls of the Rumfoord estate--in the corner of the estate where the tennis courts had once been.

  Rumfoord had yet to explain the purpose of the space ship, whose supporting column had been built with the pennies of school children from all over the world. The ship was kept in constant readiness. What was reputedly the longest free-standing ladder in history leaned against the column, led giddily to the door of the ship.

  In the fuel cartridge of the space ship was the very last trace of the Martian war effort's supply of the Universal Will to Become.

  "Uh huh," said the rube. He put the model back on the counter. "If you don't mind, I'll shop around a little more." So far, the only thing he had bought was a Robin Hood hat with a picture of Rumfoord on one side and a picture of a sailboat on the other, and with his own name stitched on the feather. His name, according to the feather, was Delbert. "Thanks just the same," said Delbert. "I'll probably be back."

  "Sure you will, Delbert," said Brackman.

  "How did you know my name was Delbert?" said Delbert, pleased and suspicious.

  "You think Winston Niles Rumfoord is the only man around here with supernatural powers?" said Brackman.

  A jet of steam went up inside the walls. An instant later, the voice of the great steam whistle rolled over the booths--mighty, mournful, and triumphant. It was the signal that Rumfoord and his dog would materialize in five minutes.

  It was the signal for the concessionaires to stop their irreverent bawling of brummagem wares, to close their shutters.

  The shutters were banged shut at once.

  The effect of the closing inside the booths was to turn the line of concessions into a twilit tunnel.

  The isolation of the concessionaires in the tunnel had an extra dimension of spookiness, since the tunnel contained only survivors from Mars. Rumfoord had insisted on that--that Martians were to have first choice of the concessions at Newport. It was his way of saying, "Thanks."

  There weren't many survivors--only fifty-eight in the United States, only three hundred and sixteen in the entire World.

  Of the fifty-eight in the United States, twenty-one were concessionaires in Newport.

  "Here we go again, kiddies," somebody said, far, far, far down the line. It was the voice of the blind man who sold the Robin Hood hats with a picture of Rumfoord on one side and a picture of a sailboat on the other.

  Sergeant Brackman laid his folded arms on the half-partition between his booth and Bee's. He winked at young Chrono, who was lying on an unopened case of Malachis.

  "Go to hell, eh, kid?" said Brackman to Chrono.

  "Go to hell," Chrono agreed. He was cleaning his nails with the strangely bent, drilled and nicked piece of metal that had been his good-luck piece on Mars. It was still his good-luck piece on Earth.

  The good-luck piece had probably saved Chrono's and Bee's lives in the jungle. The Gumbo tribesmen had recognized the piece of metal as an object of tremendous power. Their respect for it had led them to initiate rather than eat its owners.

  Brackman laughed affectionately. "Yessir--there's a Martian for you," he said. "Won't even get off his case of Malachis for a look at the Space Wanderer."

  Chrono was not alone in his apathy about the Space Wanderer. It was the proud and impudent custom of all the concessionaires to stay away from ceremonies--to stay in the twilit tunnel of their booths until Rumfoord and his dog had come and gone.

  It wasn't that the concessionaires had real contempt for Rumfoord's religion. Actually, most of them thought the new religion was probably a pretty good thing. What they were dramatizing when they stayed in their shuttered booths was that they, as Martian veterans, had already done more than enough to put the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent on its feet.

  They were dramatizing the fact of their having been all used up.

  Rumfoord encouraged them in this pose--spoke of them fondly as his "...soldier saints outside the little door. Their apathy," Rumfoord once said, "is a great wound they suffered that we might be more lively, more sensitive, and more free."

  The temptation of the Martian concessionaires to take a peek at the Space Wanderer was great. There were loudspeakers on the walls of the Rumfoord estate, and every word spoken by Rumfoord inside blatted in the ears of anyone within a quarter of a mile. The words had spoken again and again of the glorious moment of truth that would come when the Space Wanderer came.

  It was a big moment true believers titillated themselves about--the big moment wherein true believers were going to find their beliefs amplified, clarified, and vivified by a factor of ten.

  Now the moment had arrived.

  The fire engine that had carried the Space Wanderer down from the Church of the Space Wanderer on Cape Cod was clanging and shrieking outside the booths.

  The trolls in the twilight of the booths refused to peek.

  The c
annon roared within the walls.

  Rumfoord and his dog, then, had materialized--and the Space Wanderer was passing in through the Alice-in-Wonderland door.

  "Probably some broken-down actor he hired from New York," said Brackman.

  This got no response from anyone, not even from Chrono, who fancied himself the chief cynic of the booths. Brackman didn't take his own suggestion seriously--that the Space Wanderer was a fraud. The concessionaires knew all too well about Rumfoord's penchant for realism. When Rumfoord staged a passion play, he used nothing but real people in real hells.

  Let it be emphasized here that, passionately fond as Rumfoord was of great spectacles, he never gave in to the temptation to declare himself God or something a whole lot like God.

  His worst enemies admit that. Dr. Maurice Rosenau, in his Pan-Galactic Humbug or. Three Billion Dupes says:

  Winston Niles Rumfoord, the interstellar Pharisee, Tartufe, and Cagliostro, has taken pains to declare that he is not God Almighty, that he is not a close relative of God Almighty, and that he has received no plain instructions from God Almighty. To these words of the Master of Newport we can say Amen! And may we add that Rumfoord is so far from being a relative or agent of God Almighty as to make all communication with God Almighty Himself impossible so long as Rumfoord is around!

  Ordinarily, talk by the Martian veterans in the shuttered booths was sprightly--bristling with entertaining irreverence and tips on selling trashy religious articles to boobs.

  Now, with Rumfoord and the Space Wanderer about to meet, the concessionaires found it very hard not to be interested.

  Sergeant Brackman's good hand went up to the crown of his head. It was the characteristic gesture of a Martian veteran. He was touching the area over his antenna, over the antenna that had once done all his important thinking for him. He missed the signals.

  "Bring the Space Wanderer here!" blatted Rumfoord's voice from the Gabriel horns on the walls.

  "Maybe--maybe we should go," said Brackman to Bee.

  "What?" murmured Bee. She was standing with her back to the closed shutters. Her eyes were shut. Her head was down. She looked cold.

  She always shivered when a materialization was taking place.

  Chrono was rubbing his good-luck piece slowly with the ball of his thumb, watching a halo of mist on the cold metal, a halo around the thumb.

  "The hell with 'em--eh, Chrono?" said Brackman.

  The man who sold twittering mechanical birds swung his wares overhead listlessly. A farm wife had stabbed him with a pitchfork in the Battle of Toddington, England, had left him for dead.

  The International Committee for the Identification and Rehabilitation of Martians had, with the help of fingerprints, identified the bird man as Bernard K. Winslow, an itinerant chicken sexer, who had disappeared from the alcoholic ward of a London hospital.

  "Thanks very much for the information," Winslow had told the committee. "Now I don't have that lost feeling any more."

  Sergeant Brackman had been identified by the Committee as Private Francis J. Thompson, who had disappeared in the dead of night while walking a lonely guard post around a motor pool in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, U.S.A.

  The committee had been baffled by Bee. She had no fingerprints on record. The Committee believed her to be either Florence White, a plain and friendless girl who had disappeared from a steam laundry in Cohoes, New York, or Darlene Simpkins, a plain and friendless girl who had last been seen accepting a ride with a swarthy stranger in Brownsville, Texas.

  And down the line of booths from Brackman and Chrono and Bee were Martian husks who had been identified as Myron S. Watson, an alcoholic, who had disappeared from his post as a wash room attendant at Newark Airport... as Charlene Heller, assistant dietitian of the cafeteria of Stivers High School in Dayton, Ohio... as Krishna Garu, a typesetter still wanted, technically, on charges of bigamy, pandering, and nonsupport in Calcutta, India... as Kurt Schneider, also an alcoholic, manager of a failing travel agency in Bremen, Germany.

  "The mighty Rumfoord--" said Bee.

  "Pardon me?" said Brackman.

  "He snatched us out of our lives," said Bee. "He put us to sleep. He cleaned out our minds the way you clean the seeds out of a jack-o'-lantern. He wired us like robots, trained us, aimed us--burned us out in a good cause." She shrugged.

  "Could we have done any better if he'd left us in charge of our own lives?" said Bee. "Would we have become any more--or any less? I guess I'm glad he used me. I guess he had a lot better ideas about what to do with me than Florence White or Darlene Simpkins or whoever I was.

  "But I hate him all the same," said Bee.

  "That's your privilege," said Brackman. "He said that was the privilege of every Martian."

  "There's one consolation," said Bee. "We're all used up. We'll never be of any use to him again."

  "Welcome, Space Wanderer," blatted Rumfoord's oleomargarine tenor from the Gabriel horns on the wall. "How meet it is that you should come to us on the bright red pumper of a volunteer fire department. I can think of no more stirring symbol of man's humanity to man than a fire engine. Tell me, Space Wanderer, do you see anything here--anything that makes you think you may have been here before?"

  The Space Wanderer murmured something unintelligible.

  "Louder, please," said Rumfoord.

  "The fountain--I remember that fountain," said the Space Wanderer gropingly. "Only--only--"

  "Only?" said Rumfoord.

  "It was dry then--whenever that was. It's so wet now," said the Space Wanderer.

  A microphone near the fountain was now tuned into the public address system, so that the actual babble, spatter and potch of the fountain could underline the Space Wanderer's words.

  "Anything else familiar, oh, Space Wanderer?" said Rumfoord.

  "Yes," said the Space Wanderer shyly. "You."

  "I am familiar?" said Rumfoord archly. "You mean there's a possibility that I played some small part in your life before?"

  "I remember you on Mars," said the Space Wanderer. "You were the man with the dog--just before we took off."

  "What happened after you took off?" said Rumfoord.

  "Something went wrong," said the Space Wanderer. He sounded apologetic, as though the series of misfortunes were somehow his own fault. "A lot of things went wrong."

  "Have you ever considered the possibility," said Rumfoord, "that everything went absolutely right?"

  "No," said the Space Wanderer simply. The idea did not startle him, could not startle him--since the idea proposed was so far beyond the range of his jerry-built philosophy.

  "Would you recognize your mate and child?" said Rumfoord.

  "I--I don't know," said the Space Wanderer.

  "Bring me the woman and the boy who sell Malachis outside the little iron door," said Rumfoord. "Bring Bee and Chrono."

  The Space Wanderer and Winston Niles Rumfoord and Kazak were on a scaffold before the mansion. The scaffold was at eye-level for the standing crowd. The scaffold before the mansion was a portion of a continuous system of catwalks, ramps, ladders, pulpits, steps, and stages that reached into every corner of the estate.

  The system made possible the free and showy circulation of Rumfoord around the grounds, unimpeded by crowds. It meant, too, that Rumfoord could offer a glimpse of himself to every person on the grounds.

  The system was not suspended magnetically, though it looked like a miracle of levitation. The seeming miracle was achieved by means of a cunning use of paint. The underpinnings were painted a flat black, while the superstructures were painted flashing gold.

  Television cameras and microphones on booms could follow the system anywhere.

  For night materializations, the superstructures of the system were outlined in flesh-colored electric lamps.

  The Space Wanderer was only the thirty-first person to be invited to join Rumfoord on the elevated system.

  An assistant had now been dispatched to the Malachi booth outside to bring in t
he thirty-second and thirty-third persons to share the eminence.

  Rumfoord did not look well. His color was bad. And, although he smiled as always, his teeth seemed to be gnashing behind the smile. His complacent glee had become a caricature, betraying the fact that all was not well by any means.

  But on and on the famous smile went. The magnificently snobbish crowd-pleaser held his big dog Kazak by a choke chain. The chain was twisted so as to nip warningly into the dog's throat. The warning was necessary, since the dog plainly did not like the Space Wanderer.

  The smile faltered for an instant, reminding the crowd of what a load Rumfoord carried for them-warning the crowd that he might not be able to carry it forever.

  Rumfoord carried in his palm a microphone and transmitter the size of a penny. When he did not want his voice carried to the crowd, he simply smothered the penny in his fist.

  The penny was smothered in his fist now--and he was addressing bits of irony to the Space Wanderer that would have bewildered the crowd, had the crowd been able to hear them.

  "This is certainly your day, isn't it?" said Rumfoord. "A perfect love feast from the instant you arrived. The crowd simply adores you. Do you adore crowds?"

  The joyful shocks of the day had reduced the Space Wanderer to a childish condition--a condition wherein irony and even sarcasm were lost on him. He had been the captive of many things in his troubled times. He was now a captive of a crowd that thought he was a marvel. "They've certainly been wonderful," he said, in reply to Rumfoord's last question. "They've been grand."

  "Oh--they're a grand bunch," said Rumfoord. "No mistake about that. I've been racking my brains for the right word to describe them, and you've brought it to me from outer space. Grand is what they are." Rumfoord's mind was plainly elsewhere. He wasn't much interested in the Space Wanderer as a person--hardly looked at him. Neither did he seem very excited about the approach of the Space Wanderer's wife and child.

  "Where are they, where are they?" said Rumfoord to an assistant below. "Let's get on with it. Let's get it over with."

  The Space Wanderer was finding his adventures so satisfying and stimulating, so splendidly staged, that he was shy about asking questions--was afraid that asking questions might make him seem ungrateful.