Galápagos

by Kurt Vonnegut

The Peruvian Air Force would soon do its bit, as well, but not until six o'clock that evening, after *Andrew MacIntosh and *Zenji Hiroguchi were dead--at which time Peru would declare war on Ecuador. Peru had been bankrupt for fourteen days longer than Ecuador, so that hunger was that much more advanced there. Ground soldiers were going home, and taking their weapons with them. Only the small Peruvian Air Force was still reliable, and the military junta was keeping it that way by giving its members the best of whatever food was still around.

  One thing which made the Air Force such a high morale unit was that its equipment, bought on credit and delivered before the bankruptcy, was so up to date. It had eight new French fighter-bombers and each of these planes, moreover, was equipped with an American air-to-ground missile with a Japanese brain which could home in on radar signals, or on heat from an engine, depending on instructions from the pilot. The pilot was in turn being instructed by computers on the ground and in his cockpit. The warhead of each missile carried a new Israeli explosive which was capable of creating one fifth as much devastation as the atomic bomb the United States dropped on the mother of Hisako Hiroguchi during World War Two. This new explosive was regarded as a great boon to big-brained military scientists. As long as they killed people with conventional rather than nuclear weapons, they were praised as humanitarian statesmen. As long as they did not use nuclear weapons, it appeared, nobody was going to give the right name to all the killing that had been going on since the end of the Second World War, which was surely "World War Three."

  The Peruvian junta gave this as its official reason for going to war: that the Galapagos Islands were rightfully Peru's, and that Peru was going to get them back again.

  Nobody today is nearly smart enough to make the sorts of weapons even the poorest nations had a million years ago. Yes, and they were being used all the time. During my entire lifetime, there wasn't a day when, somewhere on the planet, there weren't at least three wars going on.

  And the Law of Natural Selection was powerless to respond to such new technologies. No female of any species, unless, maybe, she was a rhinoceros, could expect to give birth to a baby who was fireproof, bombproof, or bulletproof.

  The best that the Law of Natural Selection could come up with in my time was somebody who wasn't afraid of anything, even though there was so much to fear. I knew a few people like that in Vietnam--to the extent that such people were knowable. And such a person was *Andrew MacIntosh.

  27

  SELENA MACINTOSH would never know for certain that her father was dead until she was reunited with him at the far end of the blue tunnel into the Afterlife. All she could be sure of was that he had departed her room at the El Dorado, and exchanged some words with *Zenji Hiroguchi out in the corridor. Then the two went down together in the elevator. After that, she would never again receive news about either one of them.

  Here is the story on her blindness, by the way: She had retinitis pigmentosa, caused by a defective gene inherited on the female side. She had got it from her mother, who could see perfectly well, and who had concealed from her husband the certainty that this was a gene she carried.

  This was another disease with which Mandarax was familiar, since it was one of the top one thousand serious diseases of Homo sapiens. Mandarax, when asked about it by Mary on Santa Rosalia, would pronounce Selena's case a severe one, since she was blind at birth. It was more usual for retinitis pigmentosa, said Mandarax, son of Gokubi, to let its hosts and hostesses see the world clearly for as long as thirty years sometimes. Mandarax confirmed, too, what Selena herself had told Mary: that if she had a baby, there was a fifty-fifty chance that it would be blind. And if that baby was a female, whether it went blind or not, and that baby grew up and reproduced, there would be a fifty-fifty chance that its child would be blind.

  It is amazing that two such relatively rare hereditary defects, retinitis pigmentosa and Huntington's chorea, should have been causes for worry to the first human settlers of Santa Rosalia, since the settlers numbered only ten.

  As I have already said, the Captain luckily turned out not to be a carrier. Selena was surely a carrier. If she had reproduced, though, I think humankind would still be free of retinitis pigmentosa now--thanks to the Law of Natural Selection, and sharks and killer whales.

  Here is how her father and *Zenji Hiroguchi died, incidentally, while she and her dog Kazakh listened to the noise of the crowd outside: They were shot in their heads from behind, so they never knew what hit them. And the soldier who shot them is another person who should be credited with having done a little something whose effects are still visible after a million years. I am not talking about the shootings. I am talking about his breaking into the back door of a shuttered souvenir shop which faced the El Dorado.

  If he had not burglarized that shop, there would almost certainly be no human beings on the face of the earth today. I mean it. Everybody alive today should thank God that this soldier was insane.

  His name was Private Geraldo Delgado, and he had deserted his unit, taking his first-aid kit and canteen and trenchknife, automatic assault rifle and two grenades and several clips of ammunition and so on with him. He was only eighteen years old, and was a paranoid schizophrenic. He should never have been issued live ammunition.

  His big brain was telling him all sorts of things that were not true--that he was the greatest dancer in the world, that he was the son of Frank Sinatra, that people envious of his dancing ability were attempting to destroy his brains with little radios, and on and on.

  Delgado, facing starvation like so many other people in Guayaquil, thought his big problem was enemies with little radios. And when he broke in through the back door of what was plainly a defunct souvenir shop, it wasn't a souvenir shop to him. To him it was the headquarters of the Ecuadorian Ballet Folklorico, and he was now going to get his chance to prove that he really was the greatest dancer in the world.

  There are still plenty of hallucinators today, people who respond passionately to all sorts of things which aren't really going on. This could be a legacy from the Kanka-bonos. But people like that can't get hold of weapons now, and they're easy to swim away from. Even if they found a grenade or a machine gun or a knife or whatever left over from olden times, how could they ever make use of it with just their flippers and their mouths?

  When I was a child in Cohoes, my mother took me to see the circus in Albany one time, although we could not afford it and Father did not approve of circuses. And there were trained seals and sea lions there who could balance balls on their noses and blow horns and clap their flippers on cue and so on.

  But they could never have loaded and cocked a machine gun, or pulled the pin on a hand grenade and thrown it any distance with any accuracy.

  As to how a person as crazy as Delgado got into the army in the first place: He looked all right and he acted all right when he talked to the recruiting officer, just as I did when I enlisted in the United States Marines. And Delgado was taken in during the previous summer, about the time Roy Hepburn died, for short-term service specifically associated with "the Nature Cruise of the Century." His unit was to be a spit-and-polish drill team which was to strut its stuff before Mrs. Onassis and the rest of them. They were going to have assault rifles and steel helmets and all that, but surely not live ammunition.

  And Delgado was a wonderful marcher and polisher of brass buttons and shiner of shoes. But then Ecuador was convulsed by this economic crisis, and live ammunition was passed out to the soldiery.

  He was a harrowing example of quick evolution, but then so was any soldier. When I was through with Marine boot camp, and I was sent to Vietnam and issued live ammunition, I bore almost no resemblance to the feckless animal I had been in civilian life. And I did worse things than Delgado.

  Now, then: The store that Delgado broke into was in a block of locked business establishments facing the El Dorado. The soldiers who had strung barbed wire around the hotel considered the stores as part of their barrier. So that when Delgado b
roke open the back door of one, and then unlocked its front door just a hair and peeked out, he had made a hole in the barrier, through which somebody else might pass. This breach was his contribution to the future of humankind, since very important people would pass through it in a very short while, and reach the hotel.

  When Delgado looked out through the crack in the door, he saw two of his enemies. One of them was flourishing a little radio which could scramble his brains--or so he thought. This wasn't a radio. It was Mandarax, and the two supposed enemies were Zenji Hiroguchi and Andrew MacIntosh. They were walking briskly along the inside of the barricade, as they were entitled to do, since they were guests at the hotel.

  Hiroguchi was still boiling mad, and MacIntosh was joshing him about taking life too seriously. They went right past the store where Delgado was lurking. So Delgado stepped out through the front door and shot them both in what he believed to be self-defense.

  So I don't have to put stars in front of the names of Zenji Hiroguchi and Andrew MacIntosh anymore. I only did that to remind readers that they were the two of the six guests at the El Dorado who would be dead before the sun went down.

  They were dead now, and the sun was going down on a world where so many people believed, a million years ago, that only the fit survived.

  Delgado, the survivor, disappeared into the store again, and headed for the back door, where he expected to find more enemies to outsurvive.

  But there were only six little brown beggar children out there--all girls. When this horrifying military freak leapt out at the little girls with all his killing equipment, they were too hungry and too resigned to death to run away. They opened their mouths instead--and rolled their brown eyes, and patted their stomachs, and pointed down their gullets to show how hungry they were.

  Children all over the world were doing that back then, and not just in that one back alley in Ecuador.

  So Delgado just kept going, and he was never caught and punished or hospitalized or whatever. He was just one more soldier in a city teeming with soldiers, and nobody had gotten a good look at his face, which, in the shadow of his steel helmet, wasn't all that different from anybody else's face anyway. And, like the great survivor he was, he would rape a woman the next day and become the father of one of the last ten million children or so to be born on the South American mainland.

  After he was gone, the six little girls went into the shop, seeking food or anything which might be traded for food. These were orphans from the Ecuadorian rain forest across the mountains to the east--from far, far away. Their parents had all been killed by insecticides sprayed from the air, and a bush pilot had brought them to Guayaquil, where they had become children of the streets.

  These children were predominantly Indian, but had Negro ancestors as well--African slaves who had escaped into the rain forest long ago.

  These were Kanka-bonos. They would grow to womanhood on Santa Rosalia, where, along with Hisako Hiroguchi, they would become the mothers of all modern humankind.

  *

  Before they could get to Santa Rosalia, though, they would first have to reach the hotel. And the soldiers and the barricades would surely have stopped them from getting there, if Private Geraldo Delgado had not opened up that pathway through the store.

  28

  THESE CHILDREN would become six Eves to Captain von Kleist's Adam on Santa Rosalia, and they wouldn't have been in Guayaquil if it weren't for a young Ecuadorian bush pilot named Eduardo Ximenez. During the previous summer, on the day after Roy Hepburn was buried, in fact, Ximenez was flying his own four-passenger amphibious plane over the rain forest, near the headwaters of the Tiputini River, which flowed to the Atlantic rather than the Pacific Ocean. He had just delivered a French anthropologist and his survival equipment to a point downstream, on the border of Peru, where the Frenchman planned to begin a search for the elusive Kanka-bonos.

  Ximenez was headed next for Guayaquil, five hundred kilometers away and across two high and rugged mountain barriers. In Guayaquil, he was to pick up two Argentinian millionaire sportsmen, and take them to the landing field on the Galapagos island of Baltra, where they had chartered a deep-sea fishing boat and crew. They would not be going after just any sort of fish, either. They hoped to hook great white sharks, the same creatures who, thirty-one years later, would swallow Mary Hepburn and Captain von Kleist and Mandarax.

  Ximenez saw from the air these letters trampled in the mud of the riverbank: SOS. He landed on the water and then made his plane waddle ashore like a duck.

  He was greeted by an eighty-year-old Roman Catholic priest from Ireland named Father Bernard Fitzgerald, who had lived with the Kanka-bonos for half a century. With him were the six little girls, the last of the Kanka-bonos. He and they had trampled the letters in the riverbank.

  Father Fitzgerald, incidentally, had a great-grandfather in common with John F. Kennedy, the first husband of Mrs. Onassis and the thirty-fifth president of the United States. If he had mated with an Indian, which he never did, everybody now alive might claim to be an Irish blue blood--not that anybody today claims to be much of anything.

  After only about nine months of life, people even forget who their mothers were.

  The girls had been at choir practice with Father Fitzgerald when everybody else in the tribe got sprayed. Some of the victims were still dying, so the old priest was going to stay with them. He wanted Ximenez, though, to take the girls someplace where somebody could look after them.

  So in only five hours those girls were flown from the Stone Age to the Electronics Age, from the freshwater swamps of the jungle to the brackish marshes of Guayaquil. They spoke only Kanka-bono, which only a few dying relatives in the jungle and, as things would turn out, one dirty old white man in Guayaquil could understand.

  Ximenez was from Quito, and had no place of his own where he could put up the girls in Guayaquil. He himself hired a room at the Hotel El Dorado, the same room which would later be occupied by Selena MacIntosh and her dog. On the advice of police he took the girls to an orphanage next door to the cathedral downtown, where nuns gladly accepted responsibility for them. There was still plenty of food for everyone.

  Ximenez then went to the hotel, and he told the story to the bartender there, who was Jesus Ortiz, the same man who would later disconnect all the telephones from the outside world.

  So Ximenez was one aviator who had quite a lot to do with the future of humanity. And another one was an American named Paul W. Tibbets. It was Tibbets who had dropped an atomic bomb on Hisako Hiroguchi's mother during World War Two. People would probably be as furry as they are today, even if Tibbets hadn't dropped the bomb. But they certainly got furrier faster because of him.

  The orphanage put out a call for anybody who could speak Kanka-bono, to serve as an interpreter. An old drunk and petty thief appeared, a purebred white man who, amazingly, was a grandfather of the lightest of the girls. When a youngster, he had gone prospecting for valuable minerals in the rain forest, and had lived with the Kanka-bonos for three years. He had welcomed Father Fitzgerald to the tribe when the priest first arrived from Ireland.

  His name was Domingo Quezeda, and he was from excellent stock. His father had been head of the Philosophy Department of the Central University in Quito. If they were so inclined, then, people today might claim to be descended from a long line of aristocratic Spanish intellectuals.

  When I was a little boy in Cohoes, and could detect nothing in the life of our little family about which I could be proud, my mother told me that I had the blood of French noblemen flowing in my veins. I would probably be living in a chateau on a vast estate over there, she said, if it hadn't been for the French Revolution. That was on her side of the family. I was also somehow related through her, she went on, to Carter Braxton, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. I should hold my head up high, she said, because of the blood flowing in my veins.

  I thought that was pretty good. So then I disturbed my father at his typewriter, and
asked him what my heritage was from his side of the family. I didn't know then what sperm was, and so wouldn't understand his answer for several years. "My boy," he said, "you are descended from a long line of determined, resourceful, microscopic tadpoles--champions every one."

  Old Quezeda, stinking like a battlefield, told the girls that they could trust only him, which was easy enough for them to believe, since he was the grandfather of one and the only person who would converse with them. They had to believe everything he said. They were without the means to be skeptical, since their new environment had nothing in common with the rain forest. They had many truths they were prepared to defend stubbornly and proudly, but none of them applied to anything they had so far seen in Guayaquil, except for one, a classically fatal belief in urban areas a million years ago: Relatives would never want to hurt them. Quezeda in fact wished to expose them to terrible dangers as thieves and beggars, and, as soon as was remotely possible, as prostitutes. He would do this in order to feed his big brain's thirst for self-esteem and alcohol. He was at last going to be a man of wealth and importance.

  He took the girls on walks around the city, showing them, as far as the nuns at the orphanage were aware, the parks and the cathedral and the museums and so on. He was in fact teaching them what was hateful about tourists, and where to find them and how to fool them, and where they were most likely to keep their valuables. And they played the game of spotting policemen before policemen spotted them, and memorizing good hiding places in the downtown area, should any enemy try to catch them.

  It was "just pretend" for the girls' first week in the city. But then Grandfather Domingo Quezeda and the girls, as far as the nuns and the police were concerned, vanished entirely. That vile old ancestor of all humanity had moved the girls into an empty shed by the water-front--a shed, as it happened, belonging to one of the two older cruise ships with which the Bahia de Darwin was meant to compete. The shed was empty because tourism had declined to the point where the old ship was out of business.