Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - The Sirens of Titan

The explanation of the bizarre emphasis on the music carried by the Martian mother ships is simple: Rumfoord was crazy about good music - a craze, incidentally, that struck him only after be had been spread through time and space by the chrono-synclastic infundibulum.

The harmoniums in the caves of Mercury were crazy about good music, too. They had been feeding on one sustained note in the song of Mercury for centuries. When Boaz gave them their first taste of music, which happened to be Le Sacré du Printemps, some of the creatures actually died in ecstasy.

A dead harmonium is shriveled and orange in the yellow light of the Mercurial caves. A dead harmonium looks like a dried apricot.

On that first occasion, which hadn't been planned as a concert for the harmoniums, the tape recorder had been on the floor of the space ship. The creatures who had actually died in ecstasy had been in direct contact with the metal hull of the ship.

Now, two and a half years later, Boaz demonstrated the proper way to stage a concert for the creatures so as not to kill them.

Boaz left his home vault, carrying the tape recorder and the musical selections for the concert with him, In the corridor outside were two aluminum ironing boards. These had fiber pads on their feet. The ironing boards were six feet apart, and spanning them was a stretcher made of aluminum poles and lichen-fiber canvas.

Boaz placed the tape recorder in the middle of the stretcher. The purpose of the engine resulting was to dilute and dilute and dilute the vibrations from the tare recorder. The vibrations, before they reached the stone floor, had to struggle through the dead canvas of the stretcher, down the stretcher handles, through the ironing boards, and finally through the fiber pads on the feet of the ironing boards.

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."