Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut
That is such a much nicer arrangement for everyone.
People still kill fish, though, and, in times of fish shortages, they will still eat boobies, who still aren't afraid of them.
I could stay here another million years, and that still wouldn't be time enough, I'm sure, for the boobies to realize that people are dangerous. Yes, and as I've already said, they still dance and dance at mating time.
The people had quite a feast on the Bahia de Darwin that night. They ate on the sun deck, and the deck itself was the serving platter, and the Captain was the chef. There were roasted land iguanas stuffed with crabmeat and minced finches. There were roasted boobies stuffed with their own eggs and basted with melted penguin fat. It was perfectly delicious. Everybody was happy again.
And at first light the next morning, the Captain and Mary went ashore again, and took the Kanka-bono girls along. The girls could finally understand something which was going on. They all killed and killed, and hauled corpses and hauled corpses, until the ship's freezer contained, in addition to James Wait, enough birds and iguanas and eggs to last for a month, if necessary. Now they had not only plenty of fuel and water, but no end of food, and good food, too, as well.
Next the Captain would start the engines. He would head the ship due east at maximum velocity. There was no way he could miss South America or Central America or North America, the Captain told Mary, his sense of humor returning, "... unless we are unlucky enough to pass through the Panama Canal. But if we do go through the canal, I can virtually guarantee you that we will be in Europe or Africa by and by."
So he laughed, and she laughed. Everything was going to be all right after all. But then the engines wouldn't start.
9
BY THE TIME the Bahia de Darwin slid beneath the dead calm ocean, which was in September of 1996, everybody but the Captain was calling her by a nickname given to her by Mary, which was "the Walloping Window Blind."
This disparaging title was taken from a song Mary learned from Mandarax, which went like this:
A capital ship for an ocean trip
Was the Walloping Window Blind.
No gale that blew dismayed her crew
Or troubled the captain's mind.
The man at the wheel was taught to feel
Contempt for the wildest blow,
And it often appeared, when the weather had cleared
That he'd been in his bunk below.
--CHARLES CARRYL (1842-1920)
Hisako Hiroguchi and her furry daughter Akiko and Selena MacIntosh all called her "the Walloping Window Blind," and so did the Kanka-bono women, who loved the sound of the words without understanding them. And when the Kanka-bono women bore children, which they hadn't done yet, they would teach their young that they themselves had come from the mainland on a magic ship, since vanished, called "the Walloping Window Blind."
Akiko, who was fluent in Kanka-bono as well as English and Japanese, and who was the only non-Kanka-bono who could converse with the Kanka-bonos, would never find a satisfactory way to translate this into Kanka-bono: "the Walloping Window Blind."
The Kanka-bonos could no more understand it and its comical intent than could a modern person, if I were to whisper in his or her ear as he or she basked on a white sandy beach by a blue lagoon: "the Walloping Window Blind."
It was soon after the Walloping Window Blind went to the bottom that Mary began her artificial insemination program. She was then sixty-one. She was the sole sexual partner of the Captain, who was sixty-six, and whose sexual drive was no longer all that compelling. And he was determined not to reproduce, since he felt that there was still a good chance that he could pass on Huntington's chorea. Also, he was a racist, and so not at all drawn to Hisako or her furry daughter, and least of all to the Indian women who would ultimately bear his children.
Remember: These people were expecting to be rescued at any time, and had no way of knowing that they were the last hope for the human race. So that they engaged in sexual activities simply to pass some of the time pleasantly, to relieve an itch, or to make themselves sleepy, or what you will. So far as anybody knew, reproducing would actually be irresponsible, since Santa Rosalia was no place to raise children, and children would also place strains on the food supply.
Mary felt this as strongly as anyone before the Walloping Window Blind joined the Ecuadorian fleet of submarines: that it would be a tragedy if a child were born.
Her soul continued to feel that, but her big brain began to wonder, idly, so as not to spook her, if the sperm which the Captain squirted into her about twice a month could be transferred to a fertile woman somehow--with, hey presto, a resulting pregnancy. Akiko, who was only ten then, wasn't yet ovulating. But the Kanka-bono women, who ranged in age from fifteen to nineteen, surely were.
Mary's big brain told her what she had so often told her students: that there was no harm, and possibly a lot of good, in people's playing with all sorts of ideas in their heads, no matter how supposedly impossible or impractical or downright crazy they seemed to be. She reassured herself there on Santa Rosalia, as she had reassured the adolescents of Ilium, that mental games played with even the trashiest ideas had led to many of the most significant scientific insights of what she, a million years ago, called "modern times."
She consulted Mandarax about curiosity.
Quoth Mandarax:
Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind.
--SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709-1784)
What Mandarax didn't tell her, and what her big brain certainly wasn't going to tell her, was that, if she came up with an idea for a novel experiment which had a chance of working, her big brain would make her life a hell until she had actually performed that experiment.
That, in my opinion, was the most diabolical aspect of those old-time big brains: They would tell their owners, in effect, "Here is a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but we would never do it, of course. It's just fun to think about."
And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it--have slaves fight each other to the death in the Colosseum, or burn people alive in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular, or build factories whose only purpose was to kill people in industrial quantities, or to blow up whole cities, and on and on.
Somewhere in Mandarax there should have been, but was not, a warning to this effect: "In this era of big brains, anything which can be done will be done--so hunker down."
The closest Mandarax came to saying anything like that was a quotation from Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881):
Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended in Action alone.
Mary's doubts about whether a woman could be impregnated by another one on a desert island without any technical assistance led to her taking action. In a trancelike state, she found herself visiting the camp of the Kanka-bono women on the other side of the crater, having brought Akiko along as an interpreter.
And now I catch myself remembering my father when he was still alive, when he was still an ink-stained wretch in Cohoes. He was always hoping to sell something to the movies, so that he wouldn't have to take odd jobs, and we could get a cook and cleaning lady.
But no matter how much he might yearn for a movie sale, the crucial scenes in every one of his stories and books were events which nobody in his right mind would ever want to put into a movie--not if he wanted the movie to be popular.
So now I myself am telling a story whose crucial scene could never have been included in a popular movie of a million years ago. In it Mary Hepburn, as though hypnotized, dips her right index finger into herself and then into an eighteen-year-old Kanka-bono woman, making her pregnant.
Mary would later think of a joke she might make about the rash, inexplicable, irresponsible, plain crazy liberties she had taken with the bodies of not just one but all of the Kanka-bono teenagers. She was no longer on speaking terms, though, with the colonist who would have understood the joke, who was the Captain,
"If only I had thought of doing this when I was still teaching at Ilium High School, I would be in a cozy New York State prison for women instead of on godforsaken Santa Rosalia now."
10
WHEN THE SHIP WENT DOWN, it took the bones of James Wait with it, all mixed up on the floor of the meat locker with the bones of reptiles and birds of a sort which are still around today. Only bones like Wait's are unclothed with flesh today.
He was some kind of male ape, evidently--who walked upright, and had an extraordinarily big brain whose purpose, one can guess, was to control his hands, which were cunningly articulated. He may have domesticated fire. He may have used tools.
He may have had a vocabulary of a dozen words or more.
When the ship went down, the Captain had the only beard on the island. One year after that, his son Kamikaze would be born. Thirteen years after that, the island would have its second beard, the beard of Kamikaze.
Quoth Mandarax:
There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said: "It is just as I feared! Two owls and a hen,
Four larks and a wren
Have all built their nests in my beard."
--EDWARD LEAR (1812-1888)
By the time the ship went down, when the colony was ten years old, the Captain had become a very boring person, without enough to think about, without enough to do. He spent much of his time in the neighborhood of the island's only water supply, which was a spring at the base of the crater. When people came to get water, he would receive them as though he were the kindly and knowledgeable master of the spring, its assistant and conservator. He would tell even the Kanka-bonos, who never understood a word he said, how the spring was that day--characterizing its dribbling from a crack in a rock as being "... very nervous today," or "... very cheerful today," or "... very lazy today," or whatever.
The dribbling was in fact quite steady, and had been for thousands of years before the colonists got there, and remains so, although people no longer have to depend on it, to the present day. Here was how it worked, and it didn't take a graduate of the United States Naval Academy to understand its mysteries: The crater was an enormous bowl which caught rainwater, which it hid from the sunshine beneath a very thick layer of volcanic debris. There was a slow leak in the bowl, which was the spring.
There was no way in which the Captain, with so much time on his hands, might have improved the spring. The water already dribbled most satisfactorily from a crack in a lava boulder, and was already caught in a natural basin ten centimeters below. That basin was and still is about the size of the washbasin in the lavatory off the main saloon of the Walloping Window Blind. If emptied, that basin, with or without encouragement from the Captain, would in twenty-three minutes and eleven seconds, as timed by Mandarax, be brimming full again.
How would I describe the declining years of the Captain? I would have to say that he felt quietly desperate. But he surely needn't have been marooned on Santa Rosalia in order to feel that way.
Quoth Mandarax:
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
--HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817-1862)
And why was quiet desperation such a widespread malady back then, and especially among men? Yet again I trot onstage the only real villain in my story: the oversize human brain.
Nobody leads a life of quiet desperation nowadays. The mass of men was quietly desperate a million years ago because the infernal computers inside their skulls were incapable of restraint or idleness; were forever demanding more challenging problems which life could not provide.
*
I have now described almost all of the events and circumstances crucial, in my opinion, to the miraculous survival of humankind to the present day. I remember them as though they were queerly shaped keys to many locked doors, the final door opening on perfect happiness.
One of those keys, surely, was the absence of tools on Santa Rosalia, save for feeble combinations of bones and twigs and rocks and fish guts--and bird guts.
If the Captain had had any decent tools, crowbars and picks and shovels and so on, he surely would have found a way, in the name of science and progress, to clog the spring, or to cause it to vomit the entire contents of the crater in only a week or two.
As for the balance the colonists established between themselves and their food supply: I have to say that that, too, was based on luck rather than intelligence.
Nature chose to be generous, so there was enough to eat. The birds on the other islands were having good years, and so sent emigrants from overpopulated rookeries to Santa Rosalia to take over the nests of those eaten by the people. There was no such natural replacement scheme for the marine iguanas, who were not long-distance swimmers. But the repulsiveness of those scrofulous reptiles and the contents of their intestines inspired people to use them for nourishment only during dire shortages of almost any other sort of food.
The most satisfactory food, everybody agreed, was an egg cooked for hours on a nice flat rock in the sunshine. There was no fire on Santa Rosalia. After that came a fish stolen from a bird. After that came a bird itself. After that came the green pulp from inside a marine iguana.
Nature, in fact, was so bountiful that there was a reserve supply of food, of which the colonists were aware, but to which they never had to turn. There were seals and sea lions of all ages, none of them suspicious or ferocious, save for the males at mating time, lolling everywhere, making goo-goo eyes at passing human beings. They were edible as hell.
It just might have been fatal that the colonists killed off all the land iguanas almost immediately--but it turned out not to have been a disaster. It could have mattered a lot. It just happened that it didn't matter much at all. There have never been great land tortoises on Santa Rosalia, or the colonists probably would have exterminated them as well. But that wouldn't have mattered either.
Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, particularly in Africa, people were dying by the millions because they were unlucky. It hadn't rained for years and years. It used to rain a lot there, but now it looked as though it might never rain again.
At least the Africans had stopped reproducing. That much was good. That was some help. That meant that there was that much more of nothing to be spread around.
*
The Captain did not realize that any of the Kanka-bono women were pregnant until a month before the first one of them gave birth--gave birth, as it happened, to the first human male native to the island, who came to be known by the nickname the furry Akiko gave him, expressing her delight in his maleness, which was "Kamikaze," Japanese for "sacred wind."
The original colonists never became a family which included everyone. Subsequent generations, though, after the last of the old people died, would become a family which included everyone. It had a common language and a common religion and some common jokes and songs and dances and so on, almost everything Kanka-bono. And Kamikaze, when it was his turn to be an old, old man, became something the Captain had never been, which was a venerated patriarch. And Akiko became a venerated matriarch.
It went very fast--that formation from such random genetic materials of a perfectly cohesive human family. That was so nice to see. It almost made me love people just as they were back then, big brains and all.
11
THE CAPTAIN found out that a Kanka-bono woman was pregnant only very late in the game because nobody was about to tell him, certainly, but also because the Kanka-bono women hated him so much, mainly on racist grounds, that he hardly ever saw one. They came to his side of the crater for water only late at night, when he was usually sound asleep, just so they could avoid him. They would go on hating him that much right up to the end of his life, even though he was the father of all the children they loved so much.
But a month before Kamikaze was born, the Captain could not sleep on his and Mary's feather bed. His big brain made him itch and squir
This was an engineering project, incidentally, about as modest as the construction of the Great Pyramid of Khufu or the Panama Canal.
So the Captain got out of bed and went for a walk in the middle of the night. The moon was full and directly overhead. When he came to the spring, there were the six Kanka-bonos, patting the top of the water in the brimming basin as though it were a friendly animal, and sprinkling each other and so on. They were having so much fun, and they were especially happy because they were all going to have babies soon.
They stopped having fun as soon as they saw the Captain. They thought he was evil. But the Captain was also dismayed--because he was naked. He hadn't expected to run into anybody. He had not bothered to put on his iguana-skin breechclout. So now, after ten years on Santa Rosalia, the Kanka-bonos were getting their first look at his genitalia. They had to laugh, and then they couldn't stop laughing.
The Captain retreated to his dwelling, where Mary was fast asleep. He dismissed the laughter as simple-minded. He thought, too, that one of the women had a tumor or a parasite or an infection in her belly, and that, despite her merriment, she would probably die quite soon.
He mentioned this swelling to Mary the next morning, and she gave him a very strange smile.