Billy made a noise like a small, rusty hinge. He had just emptied his seminal vesicles into Valencia, had contributed his share of the Green Beret According to the Tralfamadorians, of course, the Green Beret would have seven parents in all.
Now he rolled off his huge wife, whose rapt expression did not change when he departed. He lay with the buttons of his spine along the edge of the mattress, folded his hands behind his head. He was rich now. He had been rewarded for marrying a girl nobody in his right mind would have married. His father-in-law had given him a new Buick Roadmaster, an all-electric home, and had made him manager of his most prosperous office, his Ilium office, where Billy could expect to make at least thirty thousand dollars a year. That was good. His father had been only a barber.
As his mother said, "The Pilgrims are coming up in the world,'
The honeymoon was taking place in the bittersweet mysteries of Indian summer in New England. The lovers' apartment had one romantic wall which was all French doors. They opened onto a balcony and the oily harbor beyond.
A green and orange dragger, black in the night, grumbled and drummed past their balcony, not thirty feet from their wedding bed. It was going to sea with only its running lights on. Its empty holds were resonant, made the song of the engines rich and loud. The wharf began to sing the same song, and then the honeymooners' headboard sang, too. And it continued to sing long after the dragger was gone.
'Thank you,' said Valencia at last. The headboard was singing a mosquito song.
'You're welcome.'
'It was nice.'
'I'm glad.'
Then she began to cry.
'What's the matter?'
'I'm so happy.'
'Good.'
'I never thought anybody would marry me.'
'Um,' said Billy Pilgrim.
I'm going to lose weight for you,' she said.
'What?'
'I'm going to go on a diet. I'm going to become beautiful for you.'
'I like you just the way you are.'
'Do you really?'
'Really,' said Billy Pilgrim. He had already seen a lot of their marriage, thanks to time-travel, knew that it was going to be at least bearable all the way.
A great motor yacht named the Scheherezade now slid past the marriage bed. The song its engines sang was a very low organ note. All her lights were on.
Two beautiful people, a young man and a young woman in evening clothes, were at the rail hi the stem, loving each other and their dreams and the wake. They were honeymooning, too. They were Lance Rumfoord., of Newport, Rhode Island, and his bride,, the former Cynthia Landry., who had been a childhood sweetheart of John F. Kennedy in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.
There was a slight coincidence here. Billy Pilgrim would later share a hospital room with Rumfoord's uncle, Professor Bertram Copeland Rumfoord of Harvard, official Historian of the United States Air Force.
When the beautiful people were past, Valencia questioned her funny-looking husband about war. It was a simple-minded thing for a female Earthling to do, to associate sex and glamor with war.
'Do you ever think about the war?' she said, laying a hand on his thigh.
'Sometimes,' said Billy Pilgrim.
'I look at you sometimes,' said Valencia, 'and I get a funny feeling that you're full of secrets.'
'I'm not,' said Billy. This was a lie, of course. He hadn't told anybody about all the time traveling he'd done, about Tralfamadore and so on.
'You must have secrets about the war. Or, not secrets, I guess, but things you don't want to talk about.'
'No.'
'I'm proud you were a soldier. Do you know that?'
'Good.'
'Was it awful?'
'Sometimes.' A crazy thought now occurred to Billy. The truth of it startled him. It would make a good epitaph for Billy Pilgrim-and for me, too.
'Would you talk about the war now, if I wanted you to?' said Valencia. In a tiny cavity in her great body she was assembling the materials for a Green Beret.
'It would sound like a dream,', said Billy. 'Other people's dreams aren't very interesting usually.'
'I heard you tell Father one time about a German firing squad.' She was referring to the execution of poor old Edgar Derby.
'Um.'
'You had to bury him? '
'Yes.'
Did he see you with your shovels before he was shot?'
'Yes.'
'Did he say anything?'