Galápagos

by Kurt Vonnegut

  With the same degree of conviction, he had earlier given his daughter an entirely different explanation of why they were going to the islands on the Bahia de Darwin instead of the Omoo. The Hiroguchis might feel trapped on the Omoo, with nobody but the MacIntoshes to talk to. They might panic under such circumstances, and *Zenji might refuse to negotiate anymore, and ask to be put ashore at the nearest port so that he and his wife could fly back home.

  Like so many other pathological personalities in positions of power a million years ago, he might do almost anything on impulse, feeling nothing much. The logical explanations for his actions, invented at leisure, always came afterwards.

  And let that sort of behavior back in the era of the big brains be taken as a capsule history of the war I had the honor to fight in, which was the Vietnam War.

  19

  LIKE MOST PATHOLOGICAL PERSONALITIES, *Andrew MacIntosh never cared much whether what he said was true or not--and so he was tremendously persuasive. And he so moved the widow Onassis and Rudolf Nureyev that they asked Bobby King for more information about "the Nature Cruise of the Century," which he sent to them on the following morning by special messenger.

  As luck would have it, there was going to be a documentary about the lives of blue-footed boobies on the islands shown on educational television that evening, so King enclosed notes saying that they might want to watch it. These birds would later become crucial to the survival of the little human colony on Santa Rosalia. If those birds hadn't been so stupid, so incapable of learning that human beings were dangerous, the first settlers would almost certainly have starved to death.

  The high point of that program, like the high point of Mary Hepburn's lectures on the islands at Ilium High School, was film footage of the courtship dance of the blue-footed boobies. The dance went like this:

  There were these two fairly large sea birds standing around on the lava. They were about the size of flightless cormorants, and had the same long, snaky necks and fish-spear beaks. But they had not given up on aviation, and so had big, strong wings. Their legs and webbed feet were bright, rubbery blue. They caught fish by crashing down on them from the sky.

  Fish! Fish! Fish!

  They looked alike, although one was a male and the other was a female. They seemed to be on separate errands, and not interested in each other in the least--although there wasn't much business for either one of them to do on the lava, since they didn't eat bugs or seeds. They weren't looking for nesting materials, since it was much too early in the game for that.

  The male stopped doing what he was so busy doing, which was nothing. He caught sight of the female. He looked away from her, and then back again, standing still and making no sound. They both had voices, but at no point in the dance would either make a sound.

  She looked this way and that, and then her gaze met his accidentally. They were then five meters apart or more.

  When Mary showed the film of the dance at the high school, she used to say at this point, as though she were speaking for the female: "What on Earth could this strange person want with me? Really! How bizarre!"

  The male raised one bright blue foot. He spread it in air like a paper fan.

  Mary Hepburn, again in the persona of the female, used to say, "What is that supposed to be? A Wonder of the World? Does he think that's the only blue foot in the islands?"

  The male put that foot down and raised the other one, bringing himself one pace closer to the female. Then he showed her the first one again, and then the second one again, looking her straight in the eye.

  Mary would say for her, "I'm getting out of here." But the female didn't get out of there. She seemed glued to the lava as the male showed her one foot and then the other one, coming closer all the time.

  And then the female raised one of her blue feet, and Mary used to say, "You think you've got such beautiful feet? Take a look at this, if you want to see a beautiful foot. Yes, and I've got another one, too."

  The female put down one foot and raised the other one, bringing herself one pace closer to the male.

  Mary used to shut up then. There would be no more anthropomorphic jokes. It was up to the birds now to carry the show. Advancing toward each other in the same grave and stately manner, neither bird speeding up or slowing down, they were at last breast to breast and toe to toe.

  At Ilium High School, the students did not expect to see the birds copulate. The film was so famous, since Mary had shown it in the auditorium in early May, as an educational celebration of springtime, for years and years, that everybody knew that they would not get to see the birds copulate.

  What those birds did on camera, though, was supremely erotic all the same. Already breast to breast and toe to toe, they made their sinuous necks as erect as flagpoles. They tilted their heads back as far as they would go. They pressed their long throats and the undersides of their jaws together. They formed a tower, the two of them--a single structure, pointed on top and resting on four blue feet.

  Thus was a marriage solemnized.

  There were no witnesses, no other boobies to celebrate what a nice couple they were or how well they had danced. In the film Mary Hepburn used to show at the high school, which was the same film Bobby King thought Mrs. Onassis and Rudolf Nureyev might enjoy watching on educational television, the only witnesses were the big-brained members of the camera crew.

  The name of the film was Sky-Pointing, the same name big-brained scientists gave to the moment when the beaks of both birds were pointed in the direction exactly opposite to the pull of gravity.

  And Mrs. Onassis was so moved by this film that she had her secretary call Bobby King the next morning, to inquire if it was too late to reserve two outside staterooms on the main deck of the Bahia de Darwin for "the Nature Cruise of the Century."

  20

  MARY HEPBURN used to give her students extra credit if they would write a little poem or essay about the courtship dance. Something like half of them would turn something in, and about half who did thought the dance was proof that animals worshiped God. The rest of the responses were all over the place. One student turned in a poem which Mary would remember to her dying day, and which she taught to Mandarax. The student was named Noble Claggett, and he would be killed in the war in Vietnam--but there his poem would be inside of Mandarax, along with bits by some of the greatest writers who ever lived. It went like this:

  Of course I love you,

  So let's have a kid

  Who will say exactly

  What its parents did;

  "Of course I love you,

  So let's have a kid

  Who will say exactly

  What its parents did; 'Of course I love you,

  So let's have a kid

  Who will say exactly

  What its parents did--'"

  Et cetera.

  -NOBLE CLAGGETT

  (1947-1966)

  Some students would ask permission to write about some other Galapagos Islands creature, and Mary, being such a good teacher, would of course answer, "Yes." And the favorite alternates were those teasers and robbers of the boobies, the great frigate birds. These James Waits of the bird world survived on fish which boobies caught, and got their nesting materials from nests which boobies built. A certain sort of student found this hilarious, and such a student was almost invariably male.

  And a unique physical feature of male great frigate birds was also bound to attract the attention of immature human males concerned with erectile performances of their own sex organs. Each male great frigate bird at mating time tried to attract the attention of females by inflating a bright red balloon at the base of his throat. At mating time, a typical rookery when viewed from the air resembled an enormous party for human children, at which every child had received a red balloon. The island would in fact be paved with male great frigate birds with their heads tilted back, their qualifications as husbands inflated by their lungs to the bursting point--while, overhead, the females wheeled.

  One
by one the females would drop from the sky, having chosen this or that red balloon.

  After Mary Hepburn showed her film about the great frigate birds, and the windowshades in the classroom were raised and the lights turned back on, some student, again almost invariably a male, was sure to ask, sometimes clinically, sometimes as a comedian, sometimes bitterly, hating and fearing women: "Do the females always try to pick the biggest ones?"

  So Mary was ready with a reply as consistent, word by word, as any quotation known by Mandarax: "To answer that, we would have to interview female great frigate birds, and no one has done that yet, so far as I know. Some people have devoted their lives to studying them, though, and it is their opinion that the females are in fact choosing the red balloons which mark the best nesting sites. That makes sense in terms of survival, you see.

  "And that brings us back to the really deep mystery of the blue-footed boobies' courtship dance, which seems to have absolutely no connection with the elements of booby survival, with nesting or fish. What does it have to do with, then? Dare we call it 'religion'? Or, if we lack that sort of courage, might we at least call it 'art'?

  "Your comments, please."

  *

  The courtship dance of the blue-footed boobies, which Mrs. Onassis suddenly wanted to see so much in person, has not changed one iota in a million years. Neither have these birds learned to be afraid of anything. Neither have they shown the slightest inclination to give up on aviation and become submarines.

  As for the meaning of the courtship dance of the blue-footed boobies: The birds are huge molecules with bright blue feet and have no choice in the matter. By their very nature, they have to dance exactly like that.

  Human beings used to be molecules which could do many, many different sorts of dances, or decline to dance at all--as they pleased. My mother could do the waltz, the tango, the rumba, the Charleston, the Lindy hop, the jitterbug, the Watusi, and the twist. Father refused to do any dances, as was his privilege.

  21

  WHEN MRS. ONASSIS said she wanted to go on "the Nature Cruise of the Century," then everybody wanted to go, and Roy and Mary Hepburn were almost entirely forgotten, with their pitiful little cabin below the waterline. By the end of March, King was able to release a passenger list headed by Mrs. Onassis, and followed by names almost as glamorous as hers--Dr. Henry Kissinger, Mick Jagger, Paloma Picasso, William F. Buckley, Jr., and of course Andrew MacIntosh, and Rudolf Nureyev and Walter Cronkite, and on and on. Zenji Hiroguchi, traveling under the name Zenji Kenzaburo, was said in the release to be a world famous expert in animal diseases, so as to make him seem more or less in scale with all the other passengers.

  Two names were left off the list as a matter of delicacy, so as not to raise the embarrassing question of who they were, exactly, since they were really nobody at all. They were Roy and Mary Hepburn, with their pitiful little cabin below the waterline.

  But then this slightly bobtailed list became the official list. So when Ecuatoriana Airlines in May sent a telegram to everybody on the list, notifying them that there would be a special overnight flight for any of them who happened to be in New York City on the evening before the Bahia de Darwin was to sail, Mary Hepburn was not among those notified. Limousines would pick them up anywhere in the city, and take them to the airport. Each seat on the plane could be converted into a bed, and the tourist seats had been replaced with cabaret tables and a dance floor, where a company from the Ecuadorian Ballet Folklorico would perform characteristic dances of various Indian tribes, including the fire dance of the elusive Kanka-bonos. Gourmet meals would be served, along with wines worthy of the greatest restaurants in France. All this would be free of charge, but Roy and Mary Hepburn never heard about it.

  Yes, and they never got a letter that everybody else got in June--from Dr. Jose Sepulveda de la Madrid, the president of Ecuador, inviting them to a state breakfast in their honor at the Hotel El Dorado, followed by a parade in which they would ride in horse-drawn carriages decked with flowers--from the hotel to the waterfront, where they would board the ship.

  Nor did Mary get a telegram King sent to everybody else on the first of November, which acknowledged that storm clouds on the economic horizon were indeed worrisome. The economy of Ecuador, however, remained sound, so that there was no reason to believe that the Bahia de Darwin would not sail as planned. What the letter didn't say, although King knew it, was that the passenger list had been cut approximately in half by cancellations from virtually every country represented there but Japan and the United States. So that almost everybody still intent on going would be on that special flight from New York City.

  And now King's secretary came into his office to tell him that she had just heard on the radio that the State Department had just advised American citizens not to travel in Ecuador at the present time.

  So that was that for what King considered the finest piece of work he had ever done. Without knowing anything about naval architecture, he had made a ship more attractive by persuading its owners not to call it, as they were about to do, the Antonio Jose de Sucre, but the Bahia de Darwin. He had transformed what was to have been a routine, two-week trip out to the islands and back into the nature cruise of the century. How had he worked such a miracle? By never calling it anything but "the Nature Cruise of the Century."

  If, as now seemed certain to King, the Bahia de Darwin would not set out on "the Nature Cruise of the Century" at noon the next day, certain side effects of his campaign would endure. He had taught people a lot of natural history with his publicity releases about the wonders which Mrs. Onassis and Dr. Kissinger and Mick Jagger and so on would see. He had created two new celebrities: Robert Pepin, the chef King had declared to be "the greatest chef in France" after hiring him to run the galley for the maiden voyage, and Captain Adolf von Kleist, the captain of the Bahia de Darwin, who, with his big nose and air of hiding some unspeakable personal tragedy from the world, had turned out to be on television talk shows a first-rate comedian.

  King had in his files a transcript of the Captain's performance on The Tonight Show, starring Johnny Carson. On that show, as on all the others, the Captain was dazzling in the gold-and-white uniform he was entitled to wear as an admiral in the Ecuadorian Naval Reserve. The transcript went like this:

  CARSON: "Von Kleist" doesn't sound like a very South American name somehow.

  CAPTAIN: It's Inca--one of the commonest Inca names, in fact, like "Smith" or "Jones" in English. You read the accounts of the Spanish explorers who destroyed the Inca Empire because it was so un-Christian--

  CARSON: Yes--?

  CAPTAIN: I assume you've read them.

  CARSON: They're on my bedside table--along with Ecstasy and Me, the autobiography of Hedy Lamarr.

  CAPTAIN: Then you know that one out of every three Indians they burned for heresy was named von Kleist.

  CARSON: How big is the Ecuadorian navy?

  CAPTAIN: Four submarines. They are always underwater. They never come up.

  CARSON: Never come up?

  CAPTAIN: Not for years and years.

  CARSON: But they keep in touch by radio?

  CAPTAIN: No. They maintain radio silence. It's their own idea. We would be glad to hear from them, but they prefer to maintain radio silence.

  CARSON: Why have they stayed underwater so long?

  CAPTAIN: You will have to ask them about that. Ecuador is a democracy, you know. Even those of us in the Navy have very wide latitude in what we can or cannot do.

  CARSON: Some people think Hitler might still be alive--and living in South America. Do you think there's any chance of that?

  CAPTAIN: I know there are persons in Ecuador who would love to have him for dinner.

  CARSON: Nazi sympathizers.

  CAPTAIN: I don't know about that. It's possible, I suppose.

  CARSON: If they would be glad to have Hitler for dinner--

  CAPTAIN: Then they must be cannibals. I was thinking of the Kanka-bonos. They are glad to
have almost anybody for dinner. They are--what is the English word? It's on the tip of my tongue.

  CARSON: I think I'll pass on this one.

  CAPTAIN: They are--they are--the Kanka-bonos are--

  CARSON: Take your time.

  CAPTAIN: Aha! They are "apolitical." That's the word. Apolitical is what the Kanka-bonos are.

  CARSON: But they are citizens of Ecuador?

  CAPTAIN: Yes. Of course. I told you it was a democracy. One cannibal, one vote.

  CARSON: There is a question which several ladies have asked me to ask you, and maybe it is too personal--

  CAPTAIN: Why a man of my beauty and charm should never have tasted the joys of marriage?

  CARSON: I've had some experience in these matters myself--as you may or may not know.

  CAPTAIN: It would not be fair to the woman.

  CARSON: Now things are getting too personal. Let's talk about blue-footed boobies. Maybe now is the time to show the film you brought.

  CAPTAIN: No, no. I'm perfectly willing to discuss my failure to plight a troth. It would not be fair of me to marry a woman, since at any time I might be given command of a submarine.

  CARSON: And you would have to go under, and never come up again.

  CAPTAIN: That is the tradition.

  King sighed massively. The passenger list was on his desktop, with about half the names crossed off--Mexicans and Argentinians and Italians and Filipinos, and so on, foolish enough to have kept their fortunes in their own national currencies. The names remaining, save for the six persons already in Guayaquil, were all in the New York City area, easily reached by telephone.

  "I guess we have some telephoning to do," King said to his secretary.

  She offered to do the calling. He said, "No." It was not a duty he felt free to delegate. He had persuaded all these celebrities to take part in the cruise, had wooed the most potent newsmakers among them as a lover might. Now he was going to have to give them the bad news personally, as a responsible lover should. At least he wouldn't have much trouble finding most of them. There were forty-two of them, counting mates or companions who were nonentities, but they had organized themselves into a few dinner parties, duly reported in gossip columns that day, in order to pass pleasantly the hours remaining until limousines came to cushion and muffle them away to Kennedy International Airport--for Ecuatoriana's special ten o'clock flight to Guayaquil.