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 hunchplayer’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 in a clearing. Chrono made hundreds of these shrines.
The elements in the shrines were always the same One large stone was at the center, representing Saturn. A wooden hoop made of a green twig was placed around it — to represent Saturn’s rings. And beyond the rings were small stones to represent the nine moons, The largest of these satellite stones was Titan. And there was always the feather of a Titanic bluebird under it.
The marks on the ground made it clear that young Chrono, no longer so young, spent hours moving the elements of the system about.
When old Malachi Constant found one of his strange son’s shrines in a state of neglect, he would tidy it up as best he could. Constant would weed it and rake it, and make a new twig ring for the stone that was Saturn. He would put a fresh bluebird feather under the stone that was Titan.