Galápagos

by Kurt Vonnegut

  So she said that. She expected, and in fact hoped, that the two promises would be so bizarre, perhaps having to do with suing the government, that there would be no possibility of her keeping either one. But she was not to be so lucky.

  The first promise was that she do her best to get married again as soon as possible, and not waste time in moping and feeling sorry for herself.

  The second was that she go to Guayaquil in November and take "the Nature Cruise of the Century" for both of them.

  "My spirit will be with you every inch of the way," he said. And he died.

  So here she was in Guayaquil, suspecting that she had a brain tumor herself. Her brain had her in the closet now, removing the garment bag from the red evening dress, which she called her "Jackie dress." She had given it that nickname because one of her fellow passengers was supposed to be Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Mary wanted to look nice for her.

  But there in the closet, Mary knew that the widow Onassis surely wasn't going to be crazy enough to come to Guayaquil--not with soldiers patrolling the streets and on rooftops, and digging foxholes and machine-gun pits in the parks.

  While slipping the bag off the dress, she dislodged the dress from its hanger, and it fell to the floor. It made a red puddle there.

  She did not pick it up, since she believed that she had no more use for earthly things. But she was not yet ready for a star before her name. She would in fact live for thirty more years. She would, moreover, employ certain vital materials on the planet in such a way as to make her, without question, the most important experimenter in the history of the human race.

  11

  IF MARY HEPBURN had been in a mood to eavesdrop instead of kill herself, she might have put an ear to the back of her closet and heard susurruses next door. She had no idea who her neighbors were on either side, since there hadn't been any other guests when she arrived the night before, and she hadn't been out of her room since then.

  But the makers of the susurruses were *Zenji Hiroguchi, the computer genius, and his pregnant wife Hisako, the teacher of ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging.

  Her neighbors on the other side were Selena MacIntosh, the blind, teenage daughter of *Andrew MacIntosh, and Kazakh, her seeing-eye dog, also a female. Mary had heard no barking, because Kazakh never barked.

  Kazakh never barked or played with other dogs or investigated interesting smells or noises or chased animals which had been the natural prey of her ancestors because, when she was a puppy, big-brained human beings had showed her hate and withheld food whenever she did any of those things. They let her know from the first that that was the kind of planet she was on: that natural canine activities were against the law--all of them.

  They removed her sex organs so that she would never be distracted by sexual urgencies. And I was about to say that the cast of my story would soon boil down to just one male and a lot of females, including a female dog. But Kazakh wasn't really a female anymore, thanks to surgery. Like Mary Hepburn, she was out of the evolutionary game. She wasn't going to leave her genes to anyone.

  Beyond Selena and Kazakh's room, with an open connecting door, lay the quarters of Selena's lusty father, the financier and adventurer Andrew MacIntosh. He was a widower. He and the widow Mary Hepburn might have got along quite nicely, since they were such ardent outdoors people. But they would never meet. As I have already said, Andrew MacIntosh and *Zenji Hiroguchi would be dead before the sun went down.

  James Wait, incidentally, had been given a room all alone on the second floor as far as possible from the other guests. His big brain was congratulating him on seeming harmless and ordinary, but it was wrong about that. The hotel manager had spotted Wait as a crook of some kind.

  This hotel manager, whose name was *Siegfried von Kleist, was a lugubrious, middle-aged member of the old and generally prosperous German community in Ecuador. His two paternal uncles in Quito owned the hotel and the Bahia de Darwin, too, and they had put him in charge of the hotel for only two weeks, a period drawing to a close now, to oversee the reception of the passengers for "the Nature Cruise of the Century." He was generally an idler, having inherited considerable money, but had been shamed by his uncles into, so to speak, "pulling his own weight" in this particular family enterprise.

  He was unmarried and had never reproduced, and so was insignificant from an evolutionary point of view. He might also have been considered as a marriage possibility for Mary Hepburn. But he, too, was doomed. *Siegfried von Kleist would survive the sunset, but three hours after that he would be drowned by a tidal wave.

  It was now four o'clock in the afternoon. This native Ecuadorian Hun, with his watery blue eyes and drooping moustache, actually looked as though he expected to die that evening, but he could no more foretell the future than I could. Both of us felt that afternoon that the planet was wobbling on its axis, and that anything could happen next.

  *Zenji Hiroguchi and *Andrew MacIntosh, incidentally, would die of gunshot wounds.

  *Siegfried von Kleist is not important to my story, but his only sibling, his brother Adolf, three years his senior and also a bachelor, surely is. Adolf von Kleist, the Captain of the Bahia de Darwin, would in fact become the ancestor of every human being on the face of the earth today.

  With the help of Mary Hepburn, he would become a latter-day Adam, so to speak. The biology teacher from Ilium, however, since she had ceased ovulating, would not, could not, become his Eve. So she had to be more like a god instead.

  And this supremely important brother of the insignificant hotel manager was at that moment arriving at Guayaquil International Airport on a nearly empty transport plane from New York City, where he had been doing publicity for "the Nature Cruise of the Century."

  If Mary had listened in on the Hiroguchis through her closet wall, she wouldn't have understood what was troubling them, since their susurruses were in Japanese, the only language in which they were fluent. *Zenji knew a little English and Russian. Hisako knew a little Chinese. Neither one knew any Spanish or Quechuan or German or Portuguese, the commonest languages in Ecuador.

  They, too, it turned out, were bitter about what their supposedly wonderful brains had done to them. They felt especially foolish about having allowed themselves to be delivered into such a nightmare, since *Zenji was widely regarded as being one of the smartest men in the world. And it was his fault, not hers, that they had in effect become prisoners of the dynamic *Andrew MacIntosh.

  Here is how that happened: *MacIntosh had visited Japan with his blind daughter and her dog about a year before, and had met Zenji, and had seen the wonderful work he was doing as a salaried employee for Matsumoto. Technologically speaking, Zenji, although only twenty-nine, had become a grandfather. He had earlier sired a pocket computer capable of translating many spoken languages instantaneously, and he had named it "Gokubi." And then, at the time of the MacIntoshes' visit to Japan, *Zenji had come up with a pilot model for a new generation of simultaneous voice translators, and he had named it "Mandarax."

  So *Andrew MacIntosh, whose investment banking firm raised money for businesses and itself by the sale of stocks and bonds, took young Zenji aside and told him that he was an idiot to be on salary, that MacIntosh could help him form a corporation of his own which would make him almost instantly a billionaire in dollars or a trillionaire in yen.

  So *Zenji said that he would like time to think about it.

  This exploratory conversation took place in a Tokyo sushi restaurant. Sushi was raw fish wrapped around cold rice, a popular dish a million years ago. Little did anybody dream back then that everybody would be eating practically nothing but raw fish in the sweet by-and-by.

  The florid, boisterous American entrepreneur and the reserved, relatively doll-like Japanese inventor communicated through Gokubi, since neither spoke the other's language at all well. There were then thousands upon thousands of Gokubis in use all over the world. The two men could not use Mandarax, since the only working model of Mandarax was unde
r heavy guard in *Zenji's office back at Matsumoto. So *Zenji's big brain began to play with the idea of becoming as rich as the richest man in his country, who was the Emperor of Japan.

  A few months later, in the following January, the same January during which Mary and Roy Hepburn thought they had so much to be grateful for, *Zenji got a letter from *MacIntosh asking him a full ten months in advance to be his guest on his estate outside of Merida, Yucatan, in Mexico, and then on the maiden voyage of an Ecuadorian luxury ship called the Bahia de Darwin, in whose financing he had had a hand.

  *MacIntosh had said in the letter in English, which had to be translated for *Zenji: Let us take this opportunity to get to really know each other.

  What he meant to get from *Zenji, probably in Yucatan, or surely during "the Nature Cruise of the Century," was Zenji's signature on an agreement to head a new corporation, whose stock MacIntosh would merchandise.

  Like James Wait, *MacIntosh was a fisherman of sorts. He hoped to catch investors, using for bait not a price tag on his shirt but a Japanese computer genius.

  And now it appears to me that the tale I have to tell, spanning a million years, doesn't change all that much from beginning to end. In the beginning, as in the end, I find myself speaking of human beings, regardless of their brain size, as fisherfolk.

  So it was November now, and the Hiroguchis were in Guayaquil. On the advice of *MacIntosh, *Zenji had lied to his employers about where he was going. He had led them to believe that he was exhausted by the creation of Mandarax, and that he and Hisako wished to have two months all by themselves, far from any reminders of work, and incommunicado. He put his piece of misinformation into their big brains: he had chartered schooner with crew, whose name he did not wish to reveal, sailing from a Mexican port whose name he did not wish to reveal, for a cruise through the islands of the Caribbean.

  And, although the passenger list for "the Nature Cruise of the Century" had been widely publicized, *Zenji's employers never learned that their most productive employee and his wife were also expected to be aboard. Like James Wait, they were traveling under false identities.

  And, again like James Wait, they had evanesced!

  Anybody looking for them would not be able to find them anywhere. Any big-brained search for them wouldn't even start on the correct continent.

  12

  THERE IN THEIR HOTEL ROOM next to Mary Hepburn's, the Hiroguchis were susurruing away about Andrew MacIntosh's being an actual maniac. This was an exaggeration. MacIntosh was surely wild and greedy and inconsiderate, but not insane. Most of what his big brain believed to be going on was actually going on. When he flew Selena and Kazakh and the Hiroguchis from Merida to Guayaquil in his private Learjet, with himself at the controls, he had known that the city would be under martial law, or something close to it, and that the stores would all be closed, and that there would be increasingly hungry people milling around, and that the Bahia de Darwin would not sail as scheduled, probably, and so on.

  The communications facilities in his Yucatecan mansion had kept him absolutely up to date on what was going on in Ecuador or anyplace else he might have reason to care about. At the same time he had kept the Hiroguchis, but not his blind daughter, in the dark, so to speak, about what was likely awaiting them.

  His true purpose in coming to Guayaquil, which, again, he had revealed to his daughter but not to the Hiroguchis, was to buy as many Ecuadorian assets as possible at rock-bottom prices, including, perhaps, even the El Dorado and the Bahia de Darwin--and gold mines and oil fields, and on and on. He was moreover going to bond *Zenji Hiroguchi to himself forever by sharing these business opportunities with him, to lend him money so that he, too, could become a major property owner in Ecuador.

  *MacIntosh had told the Hiroguchis to stay in their room at the El Dorado--because he would soon be bringing wonderful news for them. He had been on the telephone all afternoon, calling Ecuadorian financiers and banks, and the news he expected to bring was about all the properties he and the Hiroguchis could call their own in a day or two.

  And then he was going to say: "And to hell with 'the Nature Cruise of the Century'!"

  The Hiroguchis could no longer conceive of any good news for themselves which could be delivered by Andrew MacIntosh. They honestly believed him to be a madman, which misconception, ironically, had been impressed upon them by Zenji's own creation, which was Mandarax. There were now ten such instruments in the world, nine back in Tokyo, and one which *Zenji had brought along for the cruise. Mandarax, unlike Gokubi, was not only a translator, but also could diagnose with respectable accuracy one thousand of the most common diseases which attacked Homo sapiens, including twelve varieties of nervous breakdown.

  What Mandarax did in the medical field was simplicity itself, actually. Mandarax was programed to do what real doctors did, which was to ask a series of questions, each answer suggesting the next question, such as: "How is your appetite?" and then, "Do your bowels move regularly?" and, perhaps, "What did the stool look like?" and so on.

  In Yucatan, the Hiroguchis had followed such a daisy chain of questions and answers, describing for Mandarax the behavior of *Andrew MacIntosh. Mandarax had at last displayed these words in Japanese on the screen, which was about the size of a playing card: Pathological personality.

  Unfortunately for the Hiroguchis, but not for Mandarax, which couldn't feel anything or care about anything, the computer was not programed to explain that this was a rather mild affliction compared to most, and that those who had it were rarely hospitalized, that they were, in fact, among the happiest people on the planet--and that their behavior merely caused pain to those around them, and almost never to themselves. A real doctor might have gone on to say that millions of people walking the streets every day fell into a gray area, where it was difficult to say with any degree of certainty whether or not their personalities were pathological.

  But the Hiroguchis were ignorant of medical matters, and so responded to the diagnosis as though it were a dread disease. So, one way or another, they wanted to get away from *Andrew MacIntosh, and then all the way back to Tokyo. But they remained dependent on him, as much as they wished they weren't. They had learned from the mournful-looking hotel manager, speaking to him through Mandarax, that all commercial flights out of Guayaquil had been canceled, and that none of the companies with planes for charter seemed to be answering their phones.

  So that left the petrified Hiroguchis with only two possible ways of egress from Guayaquil: either on *MacIntosh's Learjet, or aboard the Bahia de Darwin, if, as was becoming harder and harder to believe, it would really sail next day.

  13

  *ZENJI HIROGUCHI begat Gokubi one million and five years ago, and then, one million years ago, this young genius begat Mandarax. Yes, and at the time of his begetting of Mandarax, his wife was about to give birth to his first human child.

  There had been concern about the genes the mother, Hisako, might have passed on to her fetus, since her own mother had been exposed to radiation when the United States of America dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. So a sample of Hisako's amniotic fluid was tested back in Tokyo for clues that the child might be abnormal. That fluid, incidentally, would be identical in salinity with that of the ocean into which the Bahia de Darwin would disappear.

  The tests declared the fetus normal.

  They also gave away the secret of its sex. It would come into the world as a little girl, yet another female in this tale.

  The tests were incapable of detecting minor defects in the fetus, such as that it might be as tone deaf as Mary Hepburn, which it wasn't--or that it might be covered with a fine, silky pelt like a fur seal's, which would actually turn out to be the case.

  The only human being *Zenji Hiroguchi would ever beget was a darling but furry daughter he would never see.

  She would be born on Santa Rosalia, at the northernmost extremity of the Galapagos Islands. Her name would be Akiko.

  When Akiko became an adult on Sant
a Rosalia, she would be very much like her mother on the inside, but in a different sort of skin. The evolutionary sequence from Gokubi to Mandarax, by contrast, was a radical improvement in the contents of a package, but with few perceptible changes in the wrapper. Akiko was protected from sunburn, and from the chilly water when she swam, and the abrasiveness of lava when she chose to sit or lie down--whereas her mother's bare skin was wholly defenseless against these ordinary hazards of island life. But Gokubi and Mandarax, as different as they were inside, inhabited nearly identical shells of high-impact black plastic, twelve centimeters high, eight wide, and two thick.

  Any fool could tell Akiko from Hisako, but only an expert could tell Gokubi from Mandarax.

  *

  Gokubi and Mandarax both had pressure-sensitive buttons on their backs, set flush with their cases, by means of which a person might communicate with whatever it was that had been put inside. On the face of each was an identical screen on which images could be caused to appear, and which also functioned as a solar cell, charging tiny batteries which, again, were exactly the same in Gokubi and Mandarax.

  Each had a microphone the size of a pinhead at the upper right-hand corner of its screen. It was by means of this that Gokubi or Mandarax heard spoken language, and then, in accordance with instructions from its buttons, translated them into words on its screen.

  An operator of either instrument had to be as quick and graceful with his hands as a magician, if a bilingual conversation was to flow at all naturally. If I were an English-speaking person talking to a Portuguese, say, I would have to hold the instrument somewhere near the mouth of the Portuguese, but with the screen close enough to my eyes for me to read the written translation into English of what he was saying. And then I would have to flip it over quickly, so that the instrument could hear me, and so he could read from the screen what I was saying.