Kurt Vonnegut - The Sirens of Titan

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THE SIRENS OF TITAN

"Tell me one good thing you ever did In your Iife." - Winston Niles

Rumfoord

In the beginning, God became the Heaven and the Earth.... And

God said, 'Let Me be light,' and He was light. — The Winston

N/les Rumfoord Authorized Revised Bible

For a delicious tea snack, try young harmoniums rolled into tubes

and filled with Venusian cottage cheese. — The Beatrice

Rumfoord Galactic Cookbook

In terms of their souls, the martyrs of Mars died not when they

attacked Earth but when they were recruited for the Martian war

machine. — The Winston Niles Rumfoord Pocket History of Mars

I found me a place where I can do good without doing any harm.

— Boaz in Sarah Home Canby's Unk and Boaz in the Caves of

Mercury

"I am at a loss to understand why German batball is not an event,

possibly a key event, in the Olympic Games." — Winston Niles

Rumfoord

"There is no reason why good can not triumph as often as evil.

The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are

such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the

lines of the Mafia." — Winston Niles Rumfoord

"In a punctual way of speaking, good-bye." —Winston Niles

Rumfoord

The Sirens of

Titan

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Victor Gollancz Edition published 1962

Coronet edition 1967

Second impression 1972

Third impression 1973

Fourth impression 1974

Fifth impression 1975

The characters and situations in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to

any real person or actual happening

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise,

be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in

any form of binding or cover other than that in which this is published and without a

similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Printed and bound in Great Britain for

Coronet Books, Hodder and Stoughton,

St. Paul's House, Warwick Lane,

London, EC4P4AH

By Hazell Watson & Viney Ltd

Aylesbury, Bucks

ISBN 0 340 02876 9

"Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty-three

thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in

Hercules — and still there are some misfits who insist that

there is no such thing as progress."

RANSOM K. FERN

DEDICATION

For Alex Vonnegut, Special Agent,

with love —

All persons, places, and events in this book are real.

Certain speeches and thoughts are necessarily

constructions by the author. No names have been changed

to protect the innocent, since God Almighty protects the

innocent as a matter of Heavenly routine.

CHAPTER ONE

BETWEEN TIMID AND TIMBUKTU

"I guess somebody up there likes me."

— MALACHI CONSTANT

Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself.

But mankind wasn't always so lucky. Less than a century ago men and women did not have

easy access to the puzzle boxes within them.

They could not name even one of the fifty-three portals to the soul.

Gimcrack religions were big business. Mankind, ignorant of the truths that lie within every

human being, looked outward — pushed ever outward. What mankind hoped to learn in its

outward push was who was actually in charge of all creation, and what all creation was all about.

Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out

into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end.

It flung them like stones.

These unhappy agents found what had already been found in abundance on Earth — a

nightmare of meaninglessness without end. The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were

three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.

Outwardness lost, at last, its imagined attractions.

Only inwardness remained to be explored.

Only the human soul remained terra incognita.

This was the beginning of goodness and wisdom.

What were people like in olden times, with their souls as yet unexplored?

The following is a true story from the Nightmare Ages, falling roughly, give or take a few

years, between the Second World War and the Third Great Depression.

There was a crowd.

The crowd had gathered because there was to be a materialization. A man and his dog were

going to materialize, were going to appear out of thin air — wispily at first, becoming, finally, as

substantial as any man and dog alive.

The crowd wasn't going to get to see the materialization. The materialization was strictly a

private affair on private property, and the crowd was emphatically not invited to feast its eyes.

The materialization was going to take place, like a modern, civilized hanging, within high,

blank, guarded walls. And the crowd outside the walls was very much like a crowd outside the

walls at a hanging.

The crowd knew it wasn't going to see anything, yet its members found pleasure in being near,

in staring at the blank walls and imagining what was happening inside. The mysteries of the

materialization, like the mysteries of a hanging, were enhanced by the wall; were made

pornographic by the magic lantern slides of morbid imaginations — magic lantern slides

projected by the crowd on the blank stone walls.

The town was Newport, Rhode Island, U.S.A., Earth, Solar System, Milky Way. The walls

were those of the Rumfoord estate.

Ten minutes before the materialization was to take place, agents of the police spread the rumor

that the materialization had happened prematurely, had happened outside the walls, and that the

man and his dog could be seen plain as day two blocks away. The crowd galloped away to see

the miracle at the intersection.

The crowd was crazy about miracles.

At the tail end of the crowd was a woman who weighed three hundred pounds. She had a

goiter, a caramel apple, and a gray little six-year-old girl. She had the little girl by the hand and

was jerking her this way and that, like a ball on the end of a rubber band. "Wanda June," she

said, "if you don't start acting right, I'm never going to take you to a materialization again."

The materializations had been happening for nine years, once every fifty-nine days. The most

learned and trustworthy men in the world had begged heartbrokenly for the privilege of seeing a

materialization. No matter how the great men worded their requests, they were turned down cold.

The refusal was always the same, handwritten by Mrs. Rumfoord's social secretary.

Mrs. Winston Niles Rumfoord asks me to inform you that she is unable to extend the invitation

you request. She is sure you will understand her feeling in the matter: that the phenomenon you

wish to observe is a tragic family affair, hardly a fit subject for the scrutiny of outsiders, no

matter how nobly motivated their curiosities.

Mrs. Rumfoord and her staff answered none of the tens of thousands of questions that were

put to them about the materializations. Mrs. Rumfoord felt that she owed the world very little

indeed in the way of information. She discharged that incalculably small obligation by issuing a

report twenty-four hours after each materialization. Her report never exceeded one hundred

words. It was posted by her butler in a glass case bolted to the wall next to the one entrance to

the estate.

The one entrance to the estate was an Alice-in-Wonderland door in the west wall. The door

was only four-and-a-half feet high. It was made of iron and held shut by a great Yale lock.

The wide gates of the estate were bricked in.

The reports that appeared in the glass case by the iron door were uniformly bleak and peevish.

They contained information that only served to sadden any. one with a shred of curiosity. They

told the exact time at which Mrs. Rumfoord's husband Winston and his dog Kazak materialized,

and the exact time at which they dematerialized. The states of health of the man and his dog were

invariably appraised as good. The reports implied that Mrs. Rumfoord's husband could see the

past and the future clearly, but they neglected to give examples of sights in either direction.

Now the crowd had been decoyed away from the estate to permit the untroubled arrival of a

rented limousine at the small iron door in the west wall. A slender man in the clothes of an

Edwardian dandy got out of the limousine and showed a paper to the policeman guarding the

door. He was disguised by dark glasses and a false beard.

The policeman nodded, and the man unlocked the door himself with a key from his pocket. He

ducked inside, and slammed the door behind himself with a clang.

The limousine drew away.

Beware of the dog! said a sign over the small iron door. The fires of the summer sunset

flickered among the razors and needles of broken glass set in concrete on the top of the wall.

The man who had let himself in was the first person ever invited by Mrs. Rumfoord to a

materialization. He was not a great scientist. He was not even well educated. He had been thrown

out of the University of Virginia in the middle of his freshman year. He was Malachi Constant of

Hollywood, California, the richest American — and a notorious rakehell.

Beware of the dog! the sign outside the small iron door had said. But inside the wall there was

only a dog's skeleton. It wore a cruelly spiked collar that was chained to the wall. It was the

skeleton of a very large dog — a mastiff. Its long teeth meshed. Its skull and jaws formed a

cunningly articulated, harmless working model of a flesh-ripping machine. The jaws closed so

— clack. Here had been the bright eyes, there the keen ears, there the suspicious nostrils, there

the carnivore's brain. Ropes of muscle had hooked here and here, had brought the teeth together

in flesh so — clack.

The skeleton was symbolic — a prop, a conversation piece installed by a woman who spoke to

almost no one. No dog had died at its post there by the wall. Mrs. Rumfoord had bought the

bones from a veterinarian, had had them bleached and varnished and wired together. The

skeleton was one of Mrs. Rumfoord's many bitter and obscure comments on the nasty tricks time

and her husband had played on her.

Mrs. Winston Niles Rumfoord had seventeen million dollars. Mrs. Winston Niles Rumfoord

had the highest social position attainable in the United States of America. Mrs. Winston Niles

Rumfoord was healthy and handsome, and talented, too.

Her talent was as a poetess. She had published anonymously a slim volume of poems called

Between Timid and Timbuktu. It had been reasonably well received.

The title derived from the fact that all the words between timid and Timbuktu in very small

dictionaries relate to time.

But, well-endowed as Mrs. Rumfoord was, she still did troubled things like chaining a dog's

skeleton to the wall, like having the gates of the estate bricked up, like letting the famous formal

gardens turn into New England jungle.

The moral: Money, position, health, handsomeness, and talent aren't everything.

Malachi Constant, the richest American, locked the Alice-in-Wonderland door behind him. He

hung his dark glasses and false beard on the ivy of the wall. He passed the dog's skeleton briskly,

looking at his solar-powered watch as he did so. In seven minutes, a live mastiff named Kazak

would materialize and roam the grounds.

"Kazak bites," Mrs. Rumfoord had said in her invitation, "so please be punctual."

Constant smiled at that — the warning to be punctual. To be punctual meant to exist as a

point, meant that as well as to arrive somewhere on time. Constant existed as a point — could

not imagine what it would, be like to exist in any other way.

That was one of the things he was going to find out — what it was like to exist in any other

way. Mrs. Rumford's husband existed in another way.

Winston Niles Rumfoord had run his private space ship right into the heart of an uncharted

chrono-synclastic infundibulum two days out of Mars. Only his dog had been along. Now

Winston Niles Rumfoord and his dog Kazak existed as wave phenomena — apparently pulsing

in a distorted spiral with its origin in the Sun and its terminal in Betelgeuse.

The earth was about to intercept that spiral.

Almost any brief explanation of chrono-synclastic infundibula is certain to be offensive to

specialists in the field. Be that as it may, the best brief explanation is probably that of Dr. Cyril

Hall, which appears in the fourteenth edition of A Child's Cyclopedia of Wonders and Things to

Do. The article is here reproduced in full, with gradous permission from the publishers:

CHRONO-SYNCLASTIC INFUNDIBULA — Just imagine that your Daddy is the smartest man

who ever lived on Earth, and he knows everything there is to find out, and he is exactly right

about everything, and he can prove he is right about everything. Now imagine another little child

on some nice world a million light years away, and that little child's Daddy is the smartest man

who ever lived on that nice world so far away. And he is just as smart and just as right as your

Daddy is. Both Daddies are smart, and both Daddies are right.

Only if they ever met each other they would get into a terrible argument, because they

wouldn't agree on anything. Now, you can say that your Daddy is right and the other little child's

Daddy is wrong, but the Universe is an awfully big place. There is room enough for an awful lot

of people to be right about things and still not agree.

The reason both Daddies can be right and still get into terrible fights is because there are so

many different ways of being right. There are places in the Universe, though, where each Daddy

could finally catch on to what the other Daddy was talking about. These places are where all the

different kinds of truths fit together as nicely as the parts in your Daddy's solar watch. We call

these places chrono-synclastic infundibula.

The Solar System seems to be full of chrono-synclastic infundibula. There is one great big one

we are sure of that likes to stay between Earth and Mars. We know about that one because an

Earth man and his Earth dog ran right into it.

You might think it would be nice to go to a chrono-synclastic infundibulum and see all the

different ways to be absolutely right, but it is a very dangerous thing to do. The poor man and his

poor dog are scattered far and wide, not just through space, but through time, too.

Chrono (kroh-no) means time. Synclastic (sin-class-tick) means curved toward the same side

in all directions, like the skin of an orange. Infundibulum (in-fun-dib-u-lum) is what the ancient

Romans like Julius Caesar and Nero called a funnel. If you don't know what a funnel is, get

Mommy to show you one.

The key to the Alice-in-Wonderland door had come with the invitation. Malachi Constant

slipped the key into his fur-lined trouser pocket and followed the one path that opened before

him. He walked in deep shadow, but the flat rays of the sunset filled the treetops with a Maxfield

Parrish light.

Constant made small motions with his invitation as he proceeded, expecting to be challenged

at every turn. The invitation's ink was violet. Mrs. Rumfoord was only thirty-four, but she wrote

like an old woman — in a kinky, barbed hand. She plainly detested Constant, whom she had

never met. The spirit of the invitation was reluctant, to say the least, as though written on a soiled

handkerchief.

"During my husband's last materialization," she had said in the invitation, "he insisted that you

be present for the next. I was unable to dissuade him from this, despite the many obvious

drawbacks. He insists that he knows you well, having met you on Titan, which, I am given to

understand, is a moon of the planet Saturn."

There was hardly a sentence in the invitation that did not contain the verb insist. Mrs.

Rumfoord's husband had insisted on her doing something very much against her own judgment,

and she in turn was insisting that Malachi Constant behave, as best he could, like the gentleman

he was not.

Malachi Constant had never been to Titan. He had never, so far as he knew, been outside the

gaseous envelope of his native planet, the Earth. Apparently he was about to learn otherwise.

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摘要：

THESIRENSOFTITAN"TellmeonegoodthingyoueverdidInyourIife."-WinstonNilesRumfoordInthebeginning,GodbecametheHeavenandtheEarth....AndGodsaid,'LetMebelight,'andHewaslight.—TheWinstonN/lesRumfoordAuthorizedRevisedBibleForadeliciousteasnack,tryyoungharmoniumsrolledintotubesandfilledwithVenusiancottagechees...

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