“Predictable?” he said. “After watching human beings for two hundred thousand Earthling years, I have become as skittish and sentimental as the silliest Earthling schoolgirl.
“Durable?” he said darkly. “We shall see what we shall see.”
He laid the message he had been carrying so long on Rumfoord’s empty, lavender contour chair.
“There it is – friend,” he said to his memory of Rumfoord, “and much consolation may it give you, Skip. Much pain it cost your old friend Salo. In order to give it to you – even too late – your old friend Salo had to make war against the core of his being, against the very nature of being a machine.
“You asked the impossible of a machine,” said Salo, “and the machine complied.
“The machine is no longer a machine,” said Salo. “The machine’s contacts are corroded, his bearings fouled, his circuits shorted, and his gears stripped. His mind buzzes and pops like the mind of an Earthling – fizzes and overheats with thoughts of love, honor, dignity, rights, accomplishment, integrity, independence – “
Old Salo picked up the message again from Rumfoord’s contour chair. It was written on a thin square of aluminum. The message was a single dot.
“Would you like to know how I have been used, how my life has been wasted?” he said. “Would you like to know what the message is that I have been carrying for almost half a million Earthling years – the message I am supposed to carry for eighteen million more years?”
He held out the square of aluminum in a cupped foot.
“A dot,” he said.
“A single dot,” he said.
“The meaning of a dot in Tralfamadorian,” said Old Salo, “is –
“Greetings.”
The little machine from Tralfamadore, having delivered this message to himself, to Constant, to Beatrice, and to Chrono over a distance of one hundred and fifty thousand light years, bounded abruptly out of the courtyard and onto the beach outside.
He killed himself out there. He took himself apart and threw his parts in all directions.
Chrono went out on the beach alone, wandered thoughtfully among Salo’s parts. Chrono had always known that his goodluck piece had extraordinary powers and extraordinary meanings.
And he had always suspected that some superior creature would eventually come to claim the goodluck piece as his own. It was in the nature of truly effective goodluck pieces that human beings never really owned them.
They simply took care of them, had the benefit of them, until the real owners, the superior owners, came along.
Chrono did not have a sense of futility and disorder.
Everything seemed in apple-pie order to him.
And the boy himself participated fitly in that perfect order.
He took his goodluck 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 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 goodluck piece really would serve as a part of the power plant.
Superficially, at any rate, the goodluck 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 goodluck piece onto those bearings and between the cams. The goodluck 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.
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.