Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - The Sirens of Titan

"If it's really so important to you, at this stage of our relationship, to feel superior to me in some way," he said to Constant pleasantly, "think of this: You can reproduce and I cannot."

He now turned his broad back to Constant, led the way through a series of very grand chambers.

He paused in one, insisted that Constant admire a huge oil painting of a little girl holding the reins of a pure white pony. The little girl wore a white bonnet, a white, starched dress, white gloves, white socks, and white shoes.

She was the cleanest, most frozen little girl that Malachi Constant had ever seen. There was a strange expression on her face, and Constant decided that she was worried about getting the least bit dirty.

"Nice picture," said Constant.

"Wouldn't it be too bad if she fell into a mud puddle?" said Rumfoord.

Constant smiled uncertainly.

"My wife as a child," said Rumfoord abruptly, and he led the way out of the room.

He led the way down a back corridot and into a tiny room hardly larger than a big broom closet: It was ten feet long, six feet wide, and had a ceiling, like the rest of the rooms in the mansion, twenty feet high. The room was like a chimney. There were two wing chairs in it.

"An architectural accident - " said Rumfoord, closing the door and looking up at the ceiling.

"Pardon me?" said Constant.

"This room," said Rumfoord. With a limp right hand, he made the magical sign for spiral staircase. "It was one of the few things in life I ever really wanted with all my heart when I was a boy - this little room."

He nodded at shelves that ran six feet up the window wall. The shelves were beautifully made. Over the shelves was a driftwood plank that had written on it in blue paint: SKIP'S MUSEUM.

Skip's Museum was a museum of mortal remains - of endoskeletons and exoskeletons - of shells, coral, bone, cartilage, and chiton - of dottles and orts and residua of souls long gone. Most of the specimens were those that a child - presumably Skip - could find easily on the beaches and in the woods of Newport. Some were obviously expensive presents to a child extraordinarily interested in the science of biology.

Chief among these presents was the complete skeleton of an adult human male.

There was also the empty suit of armor of an armadillo, a stuffed dodo, and the long spiral tusk of a narwhal, playfully labeled by Skip, Unicorn Horn.

"Who is Skip?" said Constant.

"I am Skip," said Rumfoord. "Was."

"I didn't know," said Constant.

"Just in the family, of course," said Rumfoord.

"Um," said Constant.

Rumfoord sat down in one of the wing chairs, motioned Constant to the other.

"Angels can't either, you know," said Rumfoord.

"Can't what?" said Constant.

"Reproduce," said Rumfoord. He offered Constant a cigarette, took one himself, and placed it in a long, bone cigarette holder. "I'm sorry my wife was too indisposed to come downstairs - to meet you," he said. "It isn't you she's avoiding - it's me."

"You?" said Constant.

"That's correct," said Rumfoord. "She hasn't seen me since my first materialization." He chuckled ruefully. "Once was enough."

"I - I'm sorry," said Constant. "I don't understand."

"She didn't like my fortunetelling," said Rumfoord. "She found it very upsetting, what little I told her about her future. She doesn't care to hear more." He sat back in his wing chair, inhaled deeply. "I tell you, Mr. Constant," he said genially, "it's a thankless job, telling people it's a hard, hard Universe they're in."

"She said you'd told her to invite me," said Constant

"She got the message from the butler," said Rumfoord. "I dared her to invite you, or she wouldn't have done it. You might keep that in mind: the only way to get her to do anything is to tell her she hasn't got the courage to do it. Of course, it isn't an infallible technique. I could send her a message now, telling her that she doesn't have the courage to face the future, and she would send me back a message saying I was right."

"You - you really can see into the future?" said Constant. The skin of his face tightened, felt parched. His palms perspired.

"In a punctual way of speaking - yes," said Rumfoord. "When I ran my space ship into the chrono-synclastic infundibulum, it came to me in a flash that everything that ever has been always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been." He chuckled again. "Knowing that rather takes the glamour out of fortunetelling - makes it the simplest, most obvious thing imaginable."

"You told your wife everything that was going to happen to her?" said Constant. This was a glancing question. Constant had no interest in what was going to happen to Rumfoord's wife. He was ravenous for news of himself. In asking about Rumfoord's wife, he was being coy.

"Well - not everything," said Rumfoord. "She wouldn't let me tell her everything. What little I did tell her quite spoiled her appetite for more."

"I - I see," said Constant, not seeing at all.

"Yes," said Rumfoord genially, "I told her that you and she were to be married on Mars." He shrugged. "Not married exactly - " he said, "but bred by the Martians - like farm animals."

Winston Niles Rumfoord was a member of the one true American class. The class was a true one because its limits had been clearly defined for at least two centuries - clearly defined for anyone with an eye for definitions. From Rumfoord's small class had come a tenth of America's presidents, a quarter of its explorers, a third of its Eastern Seaboard governors, a half of its full-time ornithologists, three-quarters of its great yachtsmen, and virtually all of its underwriters of the deficits of grand opera. It was a class singularly free of quacks, with the notable exception of political quacks. The political quackery was a means of gaining office - and was never carried into private life. Once in office, members of the class became, almost without exception, magnificently responsible.

If Rumfoord accused the Martians of breeding people as though people were no better than farm animals, he was accusing the Martians of doing no more than his own class had done. The strength of his class depended to some extent on sound money management - but depended to a much larger extent on marriages based cynically on the sorts of children likely to be produced.

Healthy, charming, wise children were the desiderata.

The most competent, if humorless, analysis of Rumfoord's class is, beyond question, Waltham Kittredge's The American Philosopher Kings. It was Kittredge who proved that the dass was in fact a family, with its loose ends neatly turned back into a hard core of consanguinity through the agency of cousin marriages. Rumfoord and his wife, for instance, were third cousins, and detested each other.

And when Rumfoord's class was diagramed by Kittredge, it resembled nothing so much as the hard, ball-like knot known as a monkey's fist.

Waltham Kittredge often floundered in his The American Philosopher Kings, trying to translate the atmosphere of Rumfoord's class into words. Like the college professor he was, Kittredge groped only for big words, and, finding no apt ones, he coined a lot of untranslatable new ones.

Of all Kittredge's jargon, only one term has ever found its way into conversation. The term is un-neurotic courage.

It was that sort of courage, of course, that carried Winston Niles Rumfoord out into space. It was pure courage - not only pure of lusts for fame and money, but pure of any drives that smack of the misfit or screwball.

There are, incidentally, two strong, common words that would have served handsomely, one or the other, in place of all of Kittredge's jargon. The words are style and gallantry.

When Rumfoord became the first person to own a private space ship, paying fifty-eight million dollars out of his own pocket for it - that was style.