Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut [90]
It was a marvelous way to get things done in places far, far away from Tralfamadore. It was easily the fastest way.
But it wasn’t cheap.
Old Salo was not equipped himself to communicate and get things done in this way, even over short distances. The apparatus and the quantities of Universal Will to Become used in the process were colossal, and they demanded the services of thousands of technicians.
And even the heavily-powered, heavily-manned, heavily-built apparatus of Tralfamadore was not particularly accurate. Old Salo had watched many communications failures on Earth. Civilizations would start to bloom on Earth, and the participants would start to build tremendous structures that were obviously to be messages in Tralfamadorian — and then the civilizations would poop out without having finished the messages.
Old Salo had seen this happen hundreds of times.
Old Salo had told his friend Rumfoord a lot of interesting things about the civilization of Tralfamadore, but he had never told Rumfoord about the messages and the techniques of their delivery.
All that he had told Rumfoord was that he had sent home a distress message, and that he expected a replacement part to come any day now. Old Salo’s mind was so different from Rumfoord’s that Rumfoord couldn’t read Salo’s mind.
Salo was grateful for that barrier between their thoughts, because he was mortally afraid of what Rumfoord might say if he found out that Salo’s people had so much to do with gumming up the history of Earth. Even though Rumfoord was chrono-synclastic infundibulated, and might be expected to take a larger view of things, Salo had found Rumfoord to be, still, a surprisingly parochial Earthling at heart.
Old Salo didn’t want Rumfoord to find out what the Tralfamadorians were doing to Earth, because he was sure that Rumfoord would be offended—that Rumfoord would turn against Salo and all Tralfamadorians. Salo didn’t think he could stand that, because he loved Winston Niles Rumfoord.
There was nothing offensive in this love. That is to say, it wasn’t homosexual. It couldn’t be, since Salo had no sex.
He was a machine, like all Tralfamadorians.
He was held together by cotter pins, hose clamps, nuts, bolts, and magnets. Salo’s tangerine-colored skin, which was so expressive when he was emotionally disturbed, could be put on or taken off like an Earthling wind-breaker. A magnetic zipper held it shut.
The Tralfamadorians, according to Salo, manufactured each other. No one knew for certain how the first machine had come into being.
The legend was this:
Once upon a time on Tralfamadore there were creatures who weren’t anything like machines. They weren’t dependable. They weren’t efficient. They weren’t predictable. They weren’t durable. And these poor creatures were obsessed by the idea that everything that existed had to have a purpose, and that some purposes were higher than others.
These creatures spent most of their time trying to find out what their purpose was. And every time they found out what seemed to be a purpose of themselves, the purpose seemed so low that the creatures were filled with disgust and shame.
And, rather than serve such a low purpose, the creatures would make a machine to serve it. This left the creatures free to serve higher purposes. But whenever they found a higher purpose, the purpose still wasn’t high enough.
So machines were made to serve higher purposes, too.
And the machines did everything so expertly that they were finally given the job of finding out what the highest purpose of the creatures could be.
The machines reported in all honesty that the creatures