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.
Every time Constant visited her, she read aloud her latest additions to the manuscript.
She was reading out loud now, sitting in Rumfoord’s old contour chair while Constant puttered about the courtyard. She was wearing a pink and white chenille bedspread that had come with the palace. Worked into the tufts of the bedspread was the message, God does not care.
It had been Rumfoord’s own personal bedspread.
On and on Beatrice read, spinning arguments against the importance of the forces of Tralfamadore.
Constant did not listen attentively. He simply enjoyed Beatrice’s voice, which was strong and triumphant. He was down in a manhole by the pool, turning a valve that would drain the water out. The water of the pool had been turned into something like cream of pea soup by Titanic algae. Every time Constant visited Beatrice he fought a losing battle against the prolific green murk.
“‘I would be the last to deny,’” said Beatrice, reading her own work out loud, “‘that the forces of Tralfamadore have had something to do with the affairs of Earth. However, those persons who have served the interests of Tralfamadore have served them in such highly personalized ways that Tralfamadore can be said to have had practically nothing to do with the case.’”
Constant, down in the manhole, put his ear to the valve be had opened. From the sound of it, the water was draining slowly.
Constant swore. One of the vital pieces of information that had disappeared with Rumfoord and died with Salo was how they had managed, in their time, to keep the pool so crystal clean. Ever since Constant had taken over maintenance of the pool, the algae had been building up. The pool’s bottoms and sides were lined with a blanket of viscid slime, and the three statues in the middle, the three Sirens of Titan, were under a mucilaginous hump.
Constant knew of the significance of the three sirens in his life. He had read about it – both in the Pocket History of Mars and The Winston Niles Rumfoord Authorized Revised Bible. The three great beauties didn’t mean so much to him now, really, except to remind him that sex had once bothered him.
Constant climbed out of the manhole. “Drains slower every time,” he said to Beatrice. “I don’t guess I can put off digging up the pipes much longer.”
“That so?” said Beatrice, looking up from her writing.
“That’s so,” said Constant.
“Well – you do whatever needs to be done,” said Beatrice.
“That’s the story of my life,” said Constant.
“I just had an idea that ought to go in the book,” said Beatrice, “if I can just keep it from getting away.”
“I’ll hit it with a shovel, if it comes this way,” said Constant.
“Don’t say anything for a minute,” said Beatrice. “Just let me get it straight in my head.” She stood, and went into the entry of the palace to escape the distractions of Constant and the rings of Saturn.
She looked long at a large oil painting hanging on the entry wall. It was the only painting in the palace. Constant had had it brought all the way from Newport.
It was a painting of an immaculate little girl in white, holding the reins of a white pony all her own.
Beatrice knew who the little girl was. The painting was labeled with a brass plate that said, Beatrice Rumfoord as a Young Girl.
It was quite a contrast – between the little girl in white and the old lady looking at her.
Beatrice suddenly turned her back on the painting, walked out into the courtyard again. The idea she wanted to add to her book was straight in her mind now.
“The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody,” she said, “would be to not be used for anything by anybody.”
The thought relaxed her. She lay-down on Rumfoord’s old contour chair, looked up at the appallingly beautiful rings of Saturn – at Rumfoord’s Rainbow.
“Thank you for using me,” she said to Constant, “even though I didn’t want to be used by anybody.”
“You’re welcome,” said Constant.
He began to sweep the courtyard. The litter he was sweeping was a mixture of sand, which had blown in from the outside, daisy-seed hulls, Earthling peanut hulls, empty cans of boned chicken, and discarded wads of manuscript paper. Beatrice subsisted mostly on daisy seeds, peanuts, and boned chicken because she didn’t have to cook them, because she didn’t even have to interrupt her writing in order to eat them.
She could eat with one hand and write with the other – and, more than anything else in life, she wanted to get everything written down.
With his sweeping half done, Constant paused to see how the pool was draining.
It was draining slowly. The slimy green hump that covered the three Sirens of Titan was just breaking the descending surface.
Constant leaned over the open manhole, listened to the water sounds.
He heard the music of the pipes. And he heard something else, too.
He heard the absence of a familiar and a beloved sound.
His mate Beatrice wasn’t breathing any more.
Malachi Constant buried his mate in Titanic peat on the shore of the Winston Sea. She was buried where there were no statues.
Malachi Constant said good-by to her when the sky was filled with Titanic bluebirds. There must have been ten thousand, at least, of the great and noble birds.
They made night of day, made the air quake with their beating wings.
Not one bird cried out.
And in that night in the midst of day, Chrono, the son of Beatrice and Malachi, appeared on a knoll overlooking the new grave. He wore a feather cape which he flapped like wings.
He was gorgeous and strong.
“Thank you, Mother and Father,” he shouted, “for the gift of life. Good-by!”
He was gone, and the birds went with him.
Old Malachi Constant went back to the palace with a heart as heavy as a cannonball. What drew him back to that sad place was a wish to leave it in good order.
Sooner or later, someone else would come.
The palace should be neat and clean and ready for them. The palace should speak well of the former tenant.