Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - The Sirens of Titan

"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 Constant 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."