The Sirens of Titan

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

  Salo recalled the subject of conversation only with effort. When he did recall it, it upset him more than ever. The worst possible thing had happened. Not only had Rmnfoord found out, seemingly, about the influence of Tralfamadore on Earthling affairs, which would have offended him quite enough - but Rumfoord also regarded himself, seemingly, as one of the principal victims of that influence.

  Salo had had an uneasy suspicion from time to time that Rumfoord was under the influence of Tralfamadore, but he'd pushed the thought out of his mind, since there was nothing he could do about it. He hadn't even discussed it, because to discuss it with Rumfoord would surely have ruined their beautiful friendship at once. Very lamely, Salo explored the possibility that Rumfoord did not know as much as he seemed to know. "Skip - " he said.

  "Please!" said Rumfoord.

  "Mr. Rumfoord - " said Salo, "you think I somehow used you?"

  "Not you," said Rumfoord. "Your fellow machines back on your precious Tralfamadore."

  "Um," said Salo. "You - you think you - you've been used, Skip?"

  "Tralfamadore," said Rumfoord bitterly, "reached into the Solar System, picked me up, and used me like a handy-dandy potato peeler!"

  "If you could see this in the future," said Salo miserably, "why didn't you mention it before?"

  "Nobody likes to think he's being used," said Rumfoord. "He'll put off admitting it to himself until the last possible instant.", He smiled crookedly. "It may surprise you to- learn that I take a certain pride, no matter how foolishly mistaken that pride may be, in making my own decisions for my own reasons."

  "I'm not surprised," said Salo.

  "Oh?" said Rumfoord unpleasantly. "I should have thought it was too subtle an attitude for a machine to grasp."

  This, surely, was the low point in their relationship. Salo was a machine, since he had been designed and manufactured. He didn't conceal the fact. But Rumfoord had never used the fact as an insult before. He had definitely used the fact as an insult now. Through a thin veil of noblesse oblige, Rumfoord let Salo know that to be a machine was to be insensitive, was to be unimaginative, was to be vulgar, was to be purposeful without a shred of conscience.

  Salo was pathetically vulnerable to this accusation. It was a tribute to the spiritual intimacy he and Rumfoord had once shared that Rumfoord knew so well bow to hurt him.

  Salo closed two of his three eyes again, watched the soaring Titanic bluebirds again. The birds were as big as Earthling eagles.

  Salo wished he were a Titanic bluebird.

  The space ship carrying Malachi Constant, Beatrice Rumfoord, and their son Chrono sailed low over the palace, landed on the shore of the Winston Sea.

  "I give you my word of honor," said Salo, "I didn't know you were being used, and I haven't the slightest idea what you - "

  "Machine," said Rumfoord nastily.

  "Tell me what you've been used for - please?" said Salo. "My word of honor - I don't have the foggiest - "

  "Machine!" said Rumfoord.

  "If you think so badly of me, Skip - Winston - Mr. Rumfoord - " said Salo, "after all I've done and tried to do in the name of friendship alone, there's certainly nothing I can say or do now to change your mind."

  "Precisely what a machine would say," said Rumfoord.

  "It's what a machine did say," said Salo humbly. He inflated his feet to the size of German batballs, preparing to walk out of Rumfoord's palace and onto the waters of the Winston Sea - never to return. Only when his feet were fully inflated did he catch the challenge in what Rumfoord had said. There was a clear implication that there was something Old Salo could still do to make things right again.

  Even if he was a machine, Salo was sensitive enough to know that to ask what that something was would be to grovel. He steeled himself. In the name of friendship, he was going to grovel.

  "Skip - " he said, "tell me what to do. Anything - anything at all."

  "In a very short time," said Rumfoord, "an explosion is going to blow the terminal of my spiral clear off the Sun, clear out of the Solar System."

  "No!" cried Salo. "Skip! Skip!"

  "No, no - no pity, please," said Rumfoord, stepping back, afraid of being touched. "It's a very good thing, really. I'll be seeing a lot of new things, a lot of new creatures." He tried to smile. "One gets tired, you know, being caught up in the monotonous clockwork of the Solar System." He laughed harshly. "After all," he said, "it isn't as though I were dying or something. Everything that ever was always will be, and everything that ever will be always was." He shook his head quickly, and cast away a tear he hadn't known was on his eyelid.

  "Comforting as that chrono-synclastic infundibulated thought is," he said, "I should still like to know just what the main point of this Solar System episode has been."

  "You - you've summed it up far better than anyone else could - in your Pocket History of Mars," said Salo.

  "The Pocket History of Mars," said Rumfoord, "makes no mention of the fact that I have been powerfully influenced by forces emanating from the planet Tralfamadore." He gritted his teeth.

  "Before my dog and I go crackling off through space like buggywhips in the hands of a lunatic," said Rumfoord, "I should very much like to know what the message you are carrying is."

  "I - I don't know," said Salo. "It's sealed. I have orders - "

  "Against all orders from Tralfamadore," said Winston Niles Rumfoord, "against all your instincts as a machine, but in the name of our friendship, Salo, I want you to open the message and read it to me now."

  Malachi Constant, Beatrice Rumfoord, and young Chrono, their savage son, picnicked sulkily in the shade of a Titanic daisy by the Winston Sea. Each member of the family had a statue against which to lean.

  Bearded Malachi Constant, playboy of the Solar System, still wore his bright yellow suit with the orange question marks. It was the only suit he had.

  Constant leaned against a statue of St. Francis of Assisi. St. Francis was trying to befriend two hostile and terrifyingly huge birds, apparently bald eagles. Constant was unable to identify the birds properly as Titanic bluebirds, since he hadn't seen a Titanic bluebird yet. He had arrived on Titan only an hour before.

  Beatrice, looking like a gypsy queen, smoldered at the foot of a statue of a young physical student. At first glance, the laboratory-gowned scientist seemed to be a perfect servant of nothing but truth. At first glance, one was convinced that nothing but truth could please him as he beamed at his test tube. At first glance, one thought that he was as much above the beastly concerns of mankind as the harmoniums in the caves of Mercury. There, at first glance, was a young man without vanity, without lust - and one accepted at its face value the title Salo had engraved on the statue, Discovery of Atomic Power.

  And then one perceived that the young truth-seeker had a shocking erection.

  Beatrice hadn't perceived this yet.

  Young Chrono, dark and dangerous like his mother, was already committing his first act of vandalism - or was trying to. Chrono was trying to inscribe a dirty Earthling word on the base of the statue against which he had been leaning. He was attempting the job with a sharp corner of his good luck piece.

  The seasoned Titanic peat, almost as hard as diamonds, did the cutting instead, rounding off the corner's point.

  The statue on which Chrono was working was of a family group - a Neanderthal man, his mate, and their baby. It was a deeply-moving piece. The squat, shaggy, hopeful creatures were so ugly they were beautiful.

  Their importance and universality was not spoiled by the satiric title Salo had given the piece. He gave frightful titles to all his statues, as though to proclaim desperately that he did not take himself seriously as an artist, not for an instant. The title he gave to the Neanderthal family derived from the fact that the baby was being shown a human foot roasting on a crude spit.

  The title was This Little Piggy.

  "No matter what happens, no matter what beautiful or sad or happy or frightening thing happens," Malachi Constan
t told his family there on Titan, "I'm damned if I'll respond. The minute it looks like something or somebody wants me to act in some special way, I will freeze." He glanced up at the rings of Saturn, curled his lip. "Isn't that just too beautiful for words?" He spat on the ground.

  "If anybody ever expects to use me again in some tremendous scheme of his," said Constant, "be is in for one big disappointment. He will be a lot better off trying to get a rise out of one of these statues."

  He spat again.

  "As far as I'm concerned," said Constant, "the Universe is a junk yard, with everything in it overpriced. I am through poking around in the junk heaps, looking for bargains. Every so-called bargain," said Constant, "has been connected by fine wires to a dynamite bouquet." He spat again.

  "I resign," said Constant.

  "I withdraw," said Constant.

  "I quit," said Constant.

  Constant's little family agreed without enthusiasm. Constant's brave speech was stale stuff. He had delivered it many times during the seventeen-month voyage from Earth to Titan - and it was, after all, a routine philosophy for all Martian veterans.

  Constant wasn't really speaking to his family anyway. He was speaking loudly, so his voice would carry some distance into the forest of statuary and over the Winston Sea. He was making a policy statement for the benefit of Rumfoord or anybody else who might be lurking near by.

  "We have taken part for the last time," said Constant loudly, "in experiments and fights and festivals we don't like or understand!"

  "'Understand - '" came an echo from the wall of a palace on an island two-hundred yards offshore. The palace was, of course, Dun Roamin, Rumfoord's Taj Mahal. Constant wasn't surprised to see the palace out there. He had seen it when he disembarked from his space ship, had seen it shining out there like St. Augustine's City of God.

  "What happens next?" Constant asked the echo. "All the statues come to life?"

  "'Life!" said the echo.

  "It's an echo," said Beatrice.

  "I know it's an echo," said Constant.

  "I didn't know if you knew it was an echo or not," said Beatrice She was distant and polite. She had been extremely decent to Constant, blaming him for nothing, expecting nothing from him. A less aristocratic woman might have put him through hell, blam. ing him for everything and demanding miracles.

  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 be 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 siezed 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 wail.

  "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.