Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut [100]
Everything seemed in apple-pie order to him.
And the boy himself participated fitly in that perfect order.
He took his good-luck piece from his pocket, dropped it without regret to the sand, dropped it among Salo’s scattered parts.
Sooner or later, Chrono believed, the magical forces of the Universe would put everything back together again.
They always did.
EPILOGUE: REUNION WITH STONY
"You are tired, so very tired, Space Wanderer, Malachi, Unk. Stare at the faintest star, Earthling, and think how heavy your limbs are growing."
—SALO
THERE ISN’T MUCH more to tell.
Malachi Constant grew to be an old man on Titan.
Beatrice Rumfoord grew to be an old woman on Titan.
They died peacefully, died within twenty-four hours of each other. They died in their seventy-fourth years.
Only the Titanic bluebirds know for sure what happened, finally, to Chrono, their son.
When Malachi Constant turned seventy-four years old, he was crusty, sweet, and bandy-legged. He was totally bald, and went naked most of the time, wearing nothing but a neatly-trimmed, white vandyke beard.
He lived in Salo’s grounded space ship, had been living there for thirty years.
Constant had not tried to fly the space ship. He hadn’t dared to touch a single control. The controls of Salo’s ship were far more complex than those of a Martian ship. Salo’s dash panel offered Constant two hundred and seventy-three knobs, switches, and buttons, each with a Tralfamadorian inscription or calibration. The controls were anything but a hunch-player’s delight in a Universe composed of one-trillionth part matter to one decillion parts black velvet futility.
Constant had tinkered with the ship only to the extent of finding out gingerly if, as Rumfoord had said, Chrono’s good-luck piece really would serve as a part of the power plant.
Superficially, at any rate, the good-luck piece would. There was an access door to the ship’s power plant that had plainly leaked smoke at one time. Constant opened it, found a sooty compartment within. And under the soot were smudged bearings and cams that related to nothing.
Constant was able to slip the holes in Chrono’s good-luck piece onto those bearings and between the cams. The good-luck piece conformed to close tolerances and surrounding clearances in a way that would have pleased a Swiss machinist.
Constant had many hobbies that helped him to pass the balmy time in the salubrious clime of Titan.
His most interesting hobby was puttering around with Salo, the dismantled Tralfamadorian messenger. Constant spent thousands of hours trying to get Salo back together and going again.
So far, he had had no luck.
When Constant first undertook the reconstruction of the little Tralfamadorian, it had been with the express hope that Salo would then agree to fly young Chrono back to Earth.
Constant wasn’t eager to fly back to Earth, and neither was his mate Beatrice. But Constant and Beatrice had agreed that their son, with most of his life ahead of him, should live that life with busy and jolly contemporaries on Earth.
By the time Constant was seventy-four, however, getting young Chrono back to Earth was no longer a pressing problem. Young Chrono was no longer particularly young. He was forty-two. And he had made such a thorough and specialized adjustment on Titan that it would have been cruel in the extreme to send him anywhere else.
At the age of seventeen, young Chrono had run away from his palatial home to join the Titanic bluebirds, the most admirable creatures on Titan. Chrono now lived among their nests by the Kazak Pools. He wore their feathers and sat on their eggs and shared their food and spoke their language.
Constant never saw Chrono. Sometimes, late at night, he would hear Chrono’s cries. Constant did not answer the cries. The cries were for nothing and nobody on Titan.
They were for Phoebe, a passing moon.
Sometimes, when Constant was out gathering Titanic strawberries or the speckled, two-pound eggs of the Titanic plover, he would come upon a little shrine made of sticks and stones