Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - The Sirens of Titan

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.