Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - The Sirens of Titan

Unk withdrew the rod and patch, slipped his thumb under the open breech, caught the sunlight on his oily thumbnail. The thumbnail sent the sunlight up the bore. Unk put his eye to the muzzle and was thrilled by perfect beauty. He could have stared happily at the immaculate spiral of the rifling for hours, dreaming of the happy land whose round gate he saw at the other end of the bore. The pink under his oily thumbnail at the far end of the barrel made that far end seem a rosy paradise indeed. Some day he was going to crawl down the barrel to that paradise.

It would be warm there - and there would be only one moon, Unk thought, and the moon would be fat, stately, and slow. Something else about the pink paradise at the end of the barrel came to Unk, and Unk was puzzled by the clarity of the vision. There were three beautiful women in that paradise, and Unk knew exactly what they looked like! One was white, one was gold, and one was brown. The golden girl was smoking a cigarette in Unk's vision. Unk was further surprised to find that he even knew what kind of cigarette the golden girl was smoking.

It was a MoonMist Cigarette.

"Sell MoonMist," Unk said out loud. It felt good to say that - felt authoritative, shrewd.

"Huh?" said a young colored soldier, cleaning his rifle next to Unk. "What's that you say, Unk?" he said. He was twenty-three years old. His name was stitched in yellow on a black patch over his left breast pocket.

Boaz was his name.

If suspicions had been permitted in the Army of Mars, Boaz would have been a person to suspect. His rank was only Private, First Class, but his uniform, though regulation lichen green, was made of far finer stuff, and was much better tailored than the uniform of anyone around him - including the uniform of Sergeant Brackman.

Everyone else's uniform was coarse, scratchy - held together by clumsy stitches of thick thread. And everyone else's uniform looked good only when the wearer stood at attention. In any other position, an ordinary soldier found that his uniform tended to bunch and crackle, as though made of paper.

Boaz's uniform followed his every movement with silken grace. The stitches were numerous and tiny. And most puzzling of all: Boaz's shoes had a deep, rich, ruby luster - a luster that other soldiers could not achieve no matter how much they might polish their shoes. Unlike the shoes of anyone else in the company area, the shoes of Boaz were genuine leather from Earth.

"You say sell something, Unk?" said Boaz.

"Dump MoonMist. Get rid of it," murmured Unk. The words made no sense to him. He had let them out simply because they had wanted out so badly. "Sell," he said.

Boaz smiled - ruefully amused. "Sell it, eh?" he said. "O.K., Unk - we sell it." He raised an eyebrow. "What we gonna sell, Unk?" There was something particularly bright and piercing about the pupils of his eyes.

Unk found this yellow brightness, this sharpness of Boaz's eyes disquieting - increasingly so, as Boaz continued to stare. Unk looked away, looked by chance into the eyes of some of his other squadmates - found their eyes to be uniformly dull. Even the eyes of Sergeant Brackman were dull.

Boaz's eyes continued to bite into Unk. Unk felt compelled to meet their gaze again. The pupils were seeming diamonds.

"You don't remember me, Unk?" said Boaz.

The question alarmed Unk. For some reason, it was important that he not remember Boaz. He was grateful that he really didn't remember him.

"Boaz, Unk," said the colored man. "I'm Boaz."

Unk nodded. "How do you do?" he said.

"Oh - I don't do what you'd call real bad," said Boaz. He shook his head. "You don't remember nothing about me, Unk?"

"No," said Unk. His memory was nagging him a little now - telling him that he might remember something about Boaz, if he tried as hard as he could. He shushed his memory. "Sorry - " said Unk. "My mind's a blank."

"You and me - we're buddies," said Boaz. "Boaz and Unk."

"Um," said Unk.

"You remember what the buddy system is, Unk?" said Boaz.

"No," said Unk.

"Ever' man in ever' squad," said Boaz, "he got a buddy. Buddies share the same foxhole, stick right close to each other in attacks, cover each other. One buddy get in trouble in hand-to-hand, other buddy come up and help, slip a knife in."

"Um," said Unk.

"Funny," said Boaz, "what a man'll forget in the hospital and what he'll still remember, no matter what they do. You and me - we trained as buddies for a whole year, and you done forgot that. And then you say that thing 'bout cigarettes. What kind cigarettes, Unk?"

"I - I forget," said Unk.

"Try and remember now," said Boaz. "You had it once." He frowned and squinted, as though trying to help Unk remember. "I think it's so interesting what a man can remember after he's been to the hospital. Try and remember everything you can."

There was a certain effeminacy about Boaz - in the nature of a cunning bully's chucking a sissy under the chin, talking baby-talk to him.

But Boaz liked Unk - that was in his manner, too.

Unk had the eerie feeling that he and Boaz were the only real people in the stone building - that the rest were glass-eyed robots, and not very well-made robots at that. Sergeant Brackman, supposedly in command, seemed no more alert, no more responsible, no more in command than a bag of wet feathers.

"Let's hear all you can remember, Unk," wheedled Boaz. "Old buddy - " he said, "just remember all you can."

Before Unk could remember anything, the head pain that had made him get on with the execution hurt him again. The pain did not stop, however, with the warning nip. While Boaz watched expressionlessly, the pain in Unk's head became a whanging, flashing thing.

Unk stood, dropped his rifle, clawed at his head, reeled, screamed, fainted.

When Unk came to on the barrack floor, his buddy Boaz was daubing Unk's temples with a cold washrag.

Unk's squadmates stood in a circle around Unk and Boaz. The faces of the squadmates were unsurprised, unsympathetic. Their attitude was that Unk had done something stupid and unsoldierly, and so deserved what he got.

They looked as though Unk had done something as militarily stupid as silhouetting himself against the sky or cleaning a loaded weapon, as sneezing on patrol or contracting and not reporting a venereal disease, as refusing a direct order or sleeping through reveille, as being drunk on guard or drawing to an inside straight, as keeping a book or a live hand grenade in his footlocker, as asking who had started the Army anyway and why . . .

Boaz was the only one who looked sorry about what had happened to Unk. "It was all my fault, Unk," he said.

Sergeant Brackman now pushed through the circle, stood over Unk and Boaz. "Wha'd he do, Boaz?" said Brackman.

"I was kidding him, Sergeant," said Boaz earnestly. "I told him to try an' remember back as far as he could. I never dreamed he'd go and do it."

"Oughta have more sense than to kid a man just back from the hospital," said Brackman gruffly.

"Oh, I know it - I know it," said Boaz, full of remorse. "My buddy - " he said. "God damn me!"

"Unk," said Brackman, "didn't they tell you about remembering at the hospital?"

Unk shook his head vaguely. "Maybe," he said. "They told me a lot."

"That's the worst thing you can do, Unk - remembering back," said Brackman. "That's what they put you in the hospital for in the first place - on account of you remembered too much." He made cups of his stubby hands, held in them the heart-breaking problem Unk had been. "Holy smokes," he said, "you were remembering so much, Unk, you weren't worth a nickel as a soldier."

Unk sat up, laid his hand on his breast, found that the front of his blouse was wet with tears. He thought of explaining to Brackman that he hadn't really tried to remember back, that he'd known instinctively that that was a bad thing to do - but that the pain had hit him anyway. He didn't tell Brackman that for fear that the pain would come again.