Old Salo came bounding into the courtyard just as Rumfoord and his coc.o.o.n disappeared.

The little Tralfamadorian was wild. He had torn the message from its band around his throat with a suction-cup foot. One foot was still a suction cup, and in it was the message.

He looked up at the place where the coc.o.o.n had hovered. "Skip!" he cried into the sky. "Skip! The message! I'll tell you the message! The message! Skiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip!" The message! Skiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip!"

His head did a somersault in its gimbals. "Gone," he said emptily. He whispered, "Gone.

"Machine?" said Salo. He was speaking haltingly, as much to himself as to Constant, Beatrice and Chrono. "A machine I am, and so are my people," he said. "I was designed and manufactured, and no expense, no skill, was spared in making me dependable, efficient, predictable, and durable. I was the best machine my people could make.

"How good a machine have I proved to be?" asked Salo.

"Dependable?" he said. "I was depended upon to keep my message sealed until I reached my destination, and now I've torn it open. he said. "I was depended upon to keep my message sealed until I reached my destination, and now I've torn it open.

"Efficient?" he said. "Having lost my best friend in the Universe, it now costs me more energy to step over a dead leaf than it once cost me to bound over Mount Rumfoord. he said. "Having lost my best friend in the Universe, it now costs me more energy to step over a dead leaf than it once cost me to bound over Mount Rumfoord.

"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. 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 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 good-luck piece had extraordinary powers and extraordinary meanings.

And he had always suspected that some superior creature would eventually come to claim the good-luck piece as his own. It was in the nature of truly effective good-luck 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 partic.i.p.ated fitly in that perfect order.

He took his good-luck 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, s.p.a.ce Wanderer, Malachi, Unk. Stare at the faintest star, Earthling, and think how heavy your limbs are growing."

- Salo Salo There isn't much more to tell.

Malachi Constant grew to be an old man on t.i.tan. Beatrice Rumfoord grew to be an old woman on t.i.tan.

They died peacefully, died within twenty-four hours of each other. They died in their seventy-fourth years.

Only the t.i.tanic bluebirds know for sure what happened, finally, to Chrono, their son.

When Malachi Constant turned seventy-four years old, he was crusty, sweet, and bundy-legged. He was totally bald, and went naked most of the time, wearing nothing but a neatly-trimmed, white vand.y.k.e beard.

He lived in Salo's grounded s.p.a.ce ship, had been living there for thirty years.

Constant had not tried to fly the s.p.a.ce 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 k.n.o.bs, switches, and b.u.t.tons, 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 pa.s.s the balmy time in the salubrious clime of t.i.tan.

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 t.i.tan 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 t.i.tanic bluebirds, the most admirable creatures on t.i.tan. 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 n.o.body on t.i.tan.

They were for Phoebe, a pa.s.sing moon.

Sometimes, when Constant was out gathering t.i.tanic strawberries or the speckled, two-pounds eggs of the t.i.tanic 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 t.i.tan. And there was always the feather of a t.i.tanic 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 t.i.tan.

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 G.o.d or G.o.ds 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 n.o.blest, most beautiful creatures in sight."

The white sheet, the signal of distress, was flying now.

Malachi Constant put out from sh.o.r.e 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 s.p.a.ce 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 t.i.tanic 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, gold-toothed, brown old lady- as lean and tough as a chair slat. But the cla.s.s 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 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 ma.n.u.script 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 ma.n.u.script.

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, G.o.d does not care G.o.d 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 t.i.tanic 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 he 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 t.i.tan, 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 Pocket History of Mars and and The Winston Niles Rumfoord Authorized Revised Bible 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 s.e.x 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.