Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut [67]
Boaz turned his attention to the harmonium on his right arm. The creature had not moved. "Ain’t you the quiet one, though?" Boaz asked the creature in his thoughts. "Don’t say much, but thinking all the time. I guess you’re thinking old Boaz is pretty mean not just letting the music play all the time, huh?"
The harmonium on his left arm stirred again. "What’s that you say?" said Boaz in his thoughts. He cocked his head, pretended to listen, though no sounds could travel through the vacuum in which he lived. "You say, ’Please, King Boaz, play us the 1812 Overture’?" Boaz looked shocked, then stern. "Just because something feels better than anything else," he said in his thoughts, "that don’t mean it’s good for you."
Scholars whose field is the Martian War often exclaim over the queer unevenness of Rumfoord’s war preparations. In some areas, his plans were horribly flimsy. The shoes he issued his ordinary troops, for instance, were almost a satire on the temporariness of the jerry-built society of Mars—on a society whose whole purpose was to destroy itself in uniting the peoples of Earth.
In the music libraries Rumfoord personally selected for the company mother ships, however, one sees a great cultural nest egg—a nest egg prepared as though for a monumental civilization that was going to endure for a thousand Earthling years. It is said that Rumfoord spent more time on the useless music libraries than he did on artillery and field sanitation combined.
As an anonymous wit has it: "The Army of Mars arrived with three hundred hours of continuous music, and didn’t last long enough to hear The Minute Waltz to the end."
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 he 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 Sacre 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 tape 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