Tidying up the shrines was as close, spiritually, as Constant could get to his son.
He respected what his son was trying to do with religion.
And sometimes, when Constant gazed at a refurbished shrine, he moved the elements of his own life about experimentally — but he did it in his head. At such times he was likely to reflect in melancholy on two things in particular — his murder of Stony Stevenson, his best and only friend, and his winning, so late in life, the love of Beatrice Rumfoord.
Constant never found out whether Chrono knew who tidied up the shrines. Chrono may have thought his god or gods were doing it.
It was all so sad. But it was all so beautiful, too.
Beatrice Rumfoord lived alone in Rumfoord’s Taj Mahal. Her contacts with Chrono were far more harrowing than Constant’s. At unpredictable intervals, Chrono would swim out to the palace, dress himself from Rumfoord’s wardrobe, announce that it was his mother’s birthday, and spend the day in indolent, sullen, reasonably civilized discourse.
At the end of such a day, Chrono would rage at the clothes and his mother and civilization. He would tear off the clothes, scream like a bluebird, and dive into the Winston Sea.
When Beatrice had suffered through one of these birthday parties, she would thrust an oar into the sand of the beach that faced the nearest shore, and she would fly a white sheet from it.
It was a signal for Malachi Constant, begging him please to come at once, to help her calm down.
And when Constant arrived in response to the signal of distress, Beatrice always comforted herself with the same words.
“At least,” she would say, “he isn’t a mama’s boy. And at least he had the greatness of soul to join the noblest, most beautiful creatures in sight.”
The white sheet, the signal of distress, was flying now.
Malachi Constant put out from shore in a dugout canoe. The gilded rowboat that had come with the palace had long since been sunk by dry rot.
Constant was wearing an old blue wool bathrobe that had once belonged to Rumfoord. He had found it in the palace, had taken it when his Space Wanderer’s suit wore out. It was his only garment, and he wore it only when he went calling on Beatrice.
Constant had in the dugout canoe with him six plovers’ eggs, two quarts of wild Titanic strawberries, a three-gallon peat crock of fermented daisy milk, a bushel of daisy seeds, eight books he had borrowed from the forty-thousand-volume library in the palace, and a home-made broom and a home-made shovel.
Constant was self-sufficient. He raised or gathered or made everything he needed. This satisfied him enormously.
Beatrice was not dependent on Constant. Rumfoord had stocked the Taj Mahal lavishly with Earthling food and Earthling liquor. Beatrice had plenty to eat and drink, and always would have.
Constant was bringing native foods to Beatrice because he was so proud of his skills as a woodsman and husbandman. He liked to show off his skills as a provider.
It was a compulsion.
Constant had his broom and shovel along in the dugout canoe because Beatrice’s palace was always a broom-and-shovel mess. Beatrice did no cleaning, so Constant got rid of the worst of the refuse whenever he paid her a visit.
Beatrice Rumfoord was a springy, one-eyed, goldtoothed, brown old lady — as lean and tough as a chair slat. But the class of the damaged and roughly-used old lady showed through.
To anyone with a sense of poetry, mortality, and wonder, Malachi Constant’s proud, high-cheekboned mate was as handsome as a human being could be.
She was probably a little crazy. On a moon with only two other people on it, she was writing a book called The True Purpose of Life in the Solar System. It was a refutation of Rumfoord’s notion that the purpose of human life in the Solar System was to get a grounded messenger from Tralfamadore on his way again.
Beatrice began the book after her son left her to join the bluebirds. The manuscript so far, written in longhand, occupied thirty-eight cubic feet inside the Taj Mahal.