Galápagos
Page 21
Would the pelts of modern people have made nice fur coats for their ancestors in olden times? I don't see why not.
Does it trouble me to write so insubstantially, with air on air? Well--my words will be as enduring as anything my father wrote, or Shakespeare wrote, or Beethoven wrote, or Darwin wrote. It turns out that they all wrote with air on air, and I now pluck this thought of Darwin's from the balmy atmosphere:
Progress has been much more general than retrogression.
'Tis true, 'tis true.
When my tale began, it appeared that the earthling part of the clockwork of the universe was in terrible danger, since many of its parts, which is to say people, no longer fit in anywhere, and were damaging all the parts around them as well as themselves. I would have said back then that the damage was beyond repair.
Not so!
Thanks to certain modifications in the design of human beings, I see no reason why the earthling part of the clockwork can't go on ticking forever the way it is ticking now.
If some sort of supernatural beings, or flying-saucer people, those darlings of my father, brought humanity into harmony with itself and the rest of Nature, I did not catch them doing it. I am prepared to swear under oath that the Law of Natural Selection did the repair job without outside assistance of any kind.
It was the best fisherfolk who survived in the greatest numbers in the watery environment of the Galapagos Archipelago. Those with hands and feet most like flippers were the best swimmers. Prognathous jaws were better at catching and holding fish than hands could ever be. And any fisherperson, spending more and more time underwater, could surely catch more fish if he or she were more streamlined, more bulletlike--had a smaller skull.
So my story is told, except for the tacking on of a few not very important details I failed to cover elsewhere. I tack them on in no particular order, since I now must write in haste. Father and the blue tunnel will be coming for me at any time.
Do people still know that they are going to die sooner or later? No. Fortunately, in my humble opinion, they have forgotten that.
Did I myself reproduce when I was still alive? I got a high school girl pregnant by accident in Santa Fe shortly before I joined the United States Marines. Her father was the principal of her high school, and she and I didn't even like each other very much. We were just fooling around, as young people were bound to do. She had an abortion, for which her father paid. We never even found out if it would have been a daughter or a son.
That certainly taught me a lesson. After that, I always made sure that I or my partner was employing a birth-control device. I never married.
And I have to laugh now, thinking of what a loss of dignity and beauty it would be if a modern person were, before making love, to equip himself or herself with a typical birth-control device of a million years ago. Imagine, moreover, their having to do that with flippers instead of hands!
Have natural rafts of vegetable matter from anywhere here in my time, with or without passengers? No. Have mainland species of any sort reached these islands since the Bahia de Darwin was run aground? No.
Then again, I've only been here for a million years--no time at all, really.
How did I get from Vietnam to Sweden?
After I shot the old woman who had killed my best friend and worst enemy with a hand grenade, and what was left of our platoon burned her village to the ground, I was hospitalized for what was called "nervous exhaustion." I was given tender, loving care. I was also visited by officers who impressed on me how important it was that I not tell anyone what had happened in the village. Only then did I learn that our platoon had killed fifty-nine villagers of all ages. Somebody had counted them afterwards.
While on a pass from the hospital, I contracted syphilis from a Saigon prostitute while drunk and also high on marijuana. But the first lesion of that disease, another one unknown in the present day, did not appear until I reached Bangkok, Thailand, where I was sent with many others for so-called "Rest and Recreation." This was a euphemism understood by one and all to mean more whores and drugs and alcohol. Prostitution was then a major earner of foreign currency in Thailand, second only to rice.
After that came rubber.
After that came teak.
After that came tin.
I did not want the Marine Corps to know that I had syphilis. If they found out about it, they would dock my pay during the time I was under treatment. The treatment period, moreover, would be tacked on to the year I was supposed to serve in Vietnam.
So I sought the services of a private physician in Bangkok. A fellow Marine there recommended a young Swedish doctor who treated cases like mine, who was doing research at the University of Medical Sciences there.
During my first visit, he questioned me about the war. I found myself telling him about what our platoon had done to the village and villagers. He wanted to know what I had felt, and I replied that the most terrible part of the experience to me was that I hadn't felt much of anything.
"Did you cry afterwards, or have trouble sleeping?" he said.
"No, sir," I said. "In fact, I was hospitalized because all I wanted to do was sleep."
I hadn't come close to crying. Whatever else I was, I wasn't a weeping Willy, a bleeding heart. And I wasn't much for crying even before the Marine Corps made a man out of me. I hadn't even cried when my redheaded, left-handed mother had walked out on Father and me.
But then that Swede found something to say which made me cry like a baby--at last, at last. He was as surprised as I was when I cried and cried.
Here is what he said: "I notice your name is Trout. Is there any chance that you are related to the wonderful science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout?"
This doctor was the only person I ever met outside of Cohoes, New York, who had heard of my father.
I had to come all the way to Bangkok, Thailand, to learn that in the eyes of one person, anyway, my desperately scribbling father had not lived in vain.
The doctor made me cry so much that I had to be sedated. When I woke up on a cot in his office an hour later, he was watching me. We were all alone.
"Feel better now?" he said.
"No," I said. "Or maybe. It's hard to tell."
"I've been thinking about your case while you slept," he said. "There is one very strong medicine I could prescribe, but I leave it up to you whether or not you want to try it. You should be fully aware of its side effects."
I thought he was talking about how resistant syphilis organisms had become to antibiotics, thanks to the Law of Natural Selection. My big brain was wrong again.
He said he had friends who could arrange to get me from Bangkok to Sweden, if I wanted to seek political asylum there.
"But I can't speak Swedish," I said.
"You'll learn," he said. "You'll learn, you'll learn."
Galapagos is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright (c) 1985 by Kurt Vonnegut
www.vonnegut.com
All rights reserved.
DIAL PRESS and DIAL PRESS TRADE PAPERBACKS are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Delacorte Press/Seymour
Lawrence, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of
Random House, Inc., in 1985.
eISBN: 978-0-44033908-3
www.dialpress.com
987654321
The Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Trust came into existence after
the death of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and is committed to
the continued protection of his works.
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