Look at the Birdie

by Kurt Vonnegut

  “Sparks—Ellen Sparks.”

  I was invited to the wedding, but I’d have sooner attended a public beheading. I sent a sterling silver pickle fork and my regrets.

  To my amazement, Ellen joined me at lunch on the day following the wedding. She was alone, lugging a huge parcel.

  “What are you doing here on this day of days?” I said.

  “Honeymooning.” Cheerfully, she ordered a sandwich.

  “Uh-huh. And the groom?”

  “Honeymooning in his studio.”

  “I see.” I didn’t, but we had reached a point where it would have been indelicate for me to probe further.

  “I’ve put in my two hours today,” she volunteered. “And hung up one dress in his closet.”

  “And tomorrow?”

  “Two and a half hours, and add a pair of shoes.”

  “Little drops of water, Little grains of sand,” I recited, “Make the mighty ocean, And the beauteous land.” I pointed to the parcel. “Is that part of your trousseau?”

  She smiled. “In a way. It’s a garbage can lid for beside the bed.”

  THE PETRIFIED ANTS

  I

  “This is quite a hole you have here,” said Josef Broznik enthusiastically, gripping the guard rail and peering into the echoing blackness below. He was panting from the long climb up the mountain slope, and his bald head glistened with perspiration.

  “A remarkable hole,” said Josef’s twenty-five-year-old brother, Peter, his long, big-jointed frame uncomfortable in fog-dampened clothes. He searched his thoughts for a more profound comment, but found nothing. It was a perfectly amazing hole—no question about it. The officious mine supervisor, Borgorov, had said it had been sunk a half mile deep on the site of a radioactive mineral water spring. Borgorov’s enthusiasm for the hole didn’t seem in the least diminished by the fact that it had produced no uranium worth mining.

  Peter studied Borgorov with interest. He seemed a pompous ass of a young man, yet his name merited fear and respect whenever it was mentioned in a gathering of miners. It was said, not without awe, that he was the favorite third cousin of Stalin himself, and that he was merely serving an apprenticeship for much bigger things.

  Peter and his brother, Russia’s leading myrmecologists, had been summoned from the University of Dnipropetrovsk to see the hole—or, rather, to see the fossils that had come out of it. Myrmecology, they had explained to the hundred-odd guards who had stopped them on their way into the area, was that branch of science devoted to the study of ants. Apparently, the hole had struck a rich vein of petrified ants.

  Peter nudged a rock the size of his head and rolled it into the hole. He shrugged and walked away from it, whistling tunelessly. He was remembering again the humiliation of a month ago, when he had been forced to apologize publicly for his paper on Raptiformica sanguinea, the warlike, slave-raiding ants found under hedges. Peter had presented it to the world as a masterpiece of scholarship and scientific method, only to be rewarded by a stinging rebuke from Moscow. Men who couldn’t tell Raptiformica sanguinea from centipedes had branded him an ideological backslider with dangerous tendencies toward Western decadence. Peter clenched and unclenched his fists, angry, frustrated. In effect, he had had to apologize because the ants he had studied would not behave the way the top Communist scientific brass wanted them to.

  “Properly led,” said Borgorov, “people can accomplish anything they set their minds to. This hole was completed within a month from the time orders came down from Moscow. Someone very high dreamed we would find uranium on this very spot,” he added mysteriously.

  “You will be decorated,” said Peter absently, testing a point on the barbed wire around the opening. His reputation had preceded him into the area, he supposed. At any rate, Borgorov avoided his eyes, and addressed his remarks always to Josef—Josef the rock, the dependable, the ideologically impeccable. It was Josef who had advised against publishing the controversial paper, Josef who had written his apology. Now, Josef was loudly comparing the hole to the Pyramids, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and the Colossus of Rhodes.

  Borgorov rambled on tiresomely, Josef agreed warmly, and Peter allowed his gaze and thoughts to wander over the strange new countryside. Beneath his feet were the Erzge-birge—the Ore Mountains, dividing Russian-occupied Germany from Czechoslovakia. Gray rivers of men streamed to and from pits and caverns gouged in the green mountain slopes—a dirty, red-eyed horde burrowing for uranium …

  “When would you like to see the fossil ants we found?” said Borgorov, cutting into his thoughts. “They’re locked up now, but we can get at them anytime tomorrow. I’ve got them all arranged in the order of the levels we found them in.”

  “Well,” said Josef, “the best part of the day was used up getting cleared to come up here, so we couldn’t get much done until tomorrow morning anyway.”

  “And yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, sitting on a hard bench, waiting for clearance,” said Peter wearily. Instantly he realized that he had said something wrong again. Borgorov’s black eyebrows were raised, and Josef was glaring. He had absentmindedly violated one of Josef’s basic maxims—“Never complain in public about anything.” Peter sighed. On the battlefield he had proved a thousand times that he was a fiercely patriotic Russian. Yet, he now found his countrymen eager to read into his every word and gesture the symptoms of treason. He looked at Josef unhappily, and saw in his eyes the same old message: Grin and agree with everything.

  “The security measures are marvelous,” said Peter, grinning. “It’s remarkable that they were able to clear us in only three days, when you realize how thorough a job they do.” He snapped his fingers. “Efficiency.”

  “How far down did you find the fossils?” said Josef briskly, changing the subject.

  Borgorov’s eyebrows were still arched. Plainly, Peter had only succeeded in making himself even more suspicious. “We hit them going through the lower part of the limestone, before we came to the sandstone and granite,” he said flatly, addressing himself to Josef.

  “Middle Mesozoic period, probably,” said Josef. “We were hoping you’d found fossil ants deeper than that.” He held up his hands. “Don’t get us wrong. We’re delighted that you found these ants, it’s only that middle Mesozoic ants aren’t as interesting as something earlier would be.”

  “Nobody’s ever seen a fossil ant from an earlier period,” said Peter, trying halfheartedly to get back into things. Borgorov ignored him.

  “Mesozoic ants are just about indistinguishable from modern ants,” said Josef, surreptitiously signaling for Peter to keep his mouth shut. “They lived in big colonies, were specialized as soldiers and workers and all that. My myrmecologist would give his right arm to know how ants lived before they formed colonies—how they got to be the way they are now. That would be something.”

  “Another first for Russia,” said Peter. Again no response. He stared moodily at a pair of live ants who pulled tirelessly and in opposite directions at the legs of an expiring dung beetle.

  “Have you seen the ants we found?” said Borgorov defensively. He waved a small tin box under Josef’s nose. He popped off the lid with his thumbnail. “Is this old stuff, eh?”

  “Good heavens,” murmured Josef. He took the box tenderly, held it at arm’s length so that Peter could see the ant embedded in the chip of limestone.

  The thrill of discovery shattered Peter’s depression. “An inch long! Look at that noble head, Josef! I never thought I would see the day when I would say an ant was handsome. Maybe it’s the big mandibles that make ants homely.” He pointed to where the pincers ordinarily were. “This one has almost none, Josef. It is a pre-Mesozoic ant!”

  Borgorov assumed a heroic stance, his feet apart, his thick arms folded. He beamed. This wonder had come out of his hole.

  “Look, look,” said Peter excitedly. “What is that splinter next to him?” He took a magnifying glass from his breast pocket and squinted through the lens. He swa
llowed. “Josef,” he said hoarsely, “you look and tell me what you see.”

  Josef shrugged. “Some interesting little parasite maybe, or a plant, perhaps.” He moved the chip up under the magnifying glass. “Maybe a crystal or—” He turned pale. Trembling, he passed the glass and fossil to Borgorov. “Comrade, you tell us what you see.”

  “I see,” said Borgorov, screwing up his face in florid, panting concentration. He cleared his throat and began afresh. “I see what looks like a fat stick.”

  “Look closer,” said Peter and Josef together.

  “Well, come to think of it,” said Borgorov, “it does look something like a—for goodness sake—like a—” He left the sentence unfinished, and looked up at Josef perplexedly.

  “Like a bass fiddle, Comrade?” said Josef.

  “Like a bass fiddle,” said Borgorov, awed…

  II

  A drunken, bad-tempered card game was in progress at the far end of the miners’ barracks where Peter and Josef were quartered. A thunderstorm boomed and slashed outside. The brother myrmecologists sat facing each other on their bunks, passing their amazing fossil back and forth and speculating as to what Borgorov would bring from the storage shed in the morning.

  Peter probed his mattress with his hand—straw, a thin layer of straw stuffed into a dirty white bag and laid on planks. Peter breathed through his mouth to avoid drawing the room’s dense stench through his long, sensitive nose. “Could it be a child’s toy bass fiddle that got washed into that layer with the ant somehow?” he said. “You know this place was once a toy factory.”

  “Did you ever hear of a toy bass fiddle, let alone one that size? It’d take the greatest jeweler in the world to turn out a job like that. And Borgorov swears there wasn’t any way for it to get down that deep—not in the past million years, anyway.”

  “Which leaves us one conclusion,” said Peter.

  “One.” Josef sponged his forehead with a huge red handkerchief.

  “Something could be worse than this pigpen?” said Peter. Josef kicked him savagely as a few heads raised up from the card games across the room. “Pigpen,” laughed a small man as he threw his cards down and walked to his cot. He dug beneath his mattress and produced a bottle of cognac. “Drink, Comrade?”

  “Peter!” said Josef firmly. “We left some of our things in the village. We’d better get them right away.”

  Gloomily, Peter followed his brother out into the thunderstorm. The moment they were outside, Josef seized him by the arm and steered him into the slim shelter of the eaves. “Peter, my boy, Peter—when are you going to grow up?” He sighed heavily, implored with upturned palms. “When? That man is from the police.” He ran his stubby fingers over the polished surface where hair had once been.

  “Well, it is a pigpen,” said Peter stubbornly.

  Josef threw up his hands with exasperation. “Of course it is. But you don’t have to tell the police you think so.” He laid his hand on Peter’s shoulder. “Since your reprimand, anything you say can get you into terrible trouble. It can get us both into terrible trouble.” He shuddered. “Terrible.”

  Lightning blazed across the countryside. In the dazzling instant, Peter saw that the slopes still seethed with the digging horde. “Perhaps I should give up speaking altogether, Josef.”

  “I ask only that you think out what you say. For your own good, Peter. Please, just stop and think.”

  “Everything you’ve called me down for saying has been the truth. The paper I had to apologize for was the truth.” Peter waited for a rolling barrage of thunder to subside. “I mustn’t speak the truth?”

  Josef peered apprehensively around the corner, squinted into the darkness beneath the eaves. “You mustn’t speak certain kinds of truth,” he whispered, “not if you want to go on living.” He dug his hands deep in his pockets, hunched his shoulders. “Give in a little, Peter. Learn to overlook certain things. It’s the only way.”

  Together, without exchanging another word, the brothers returned to the glare and suffocation of the barracks, their feet making sucking noises in their drenched shoes and socks.

  “Too bad all our things are locked up until morning, Peter,” said Josef loudly.

  Peter hung his coat on a nail to dry, dropped heavily on his hard bunk, and pulled his shoes off. His movements were clumsy, his nerves dulled by a vast aching sensation of pity, of loss. Just as the lightning had revealed for a split second the gray men and gouged mountainsides—so had this talk suddenly revealed in a merciless flash the naked, frightened soul of his brother. Now Peter saw Josef as a frail figure in a whirlpool, clinging desperately to a raft of compromises. Peter looked down at his unsteady hands. “It’s the only way,” Josef had said, and Josef was right.

  Josef pulled a thin blanket over his head to screen out the light. Peter tried to lose himself in contemplation of the fossil ant again. Involuntarily, his powerful fingers clamped down on the white chip. The chip and priceless ant snapped in two. Ruefully, Peter examined the faces of the break, hoping to glue them together again. On one of the faces he saw a tiny gray spot, possibly a mineral deposit. Idly, he focused his magnifying glass on it.

  “Josef!”

  Sleepily, Josef pushed the blanket away from his face. “Yes, Peter?”

  “Josef, look.”

  Josef stared through the lens for fully a minute without speaking. When he spoke, his tone was high, uneven. “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry or wind my watch.”

  “It looks like what I think it looks like?”

  Josef nodded. “A book, Peter—a book.”

  III

  Josef and Peter yawned again and again, and shivered in the cold twilight of the mountain dawn. Neither had slept, but their bloodshot eyes were quick and bright-looking, impatient, excited. Borgorov teetered back and forth on his thick boot soles, berating a soldier who was fumbling with the lock on a long toolshed.

  “Did you sleep well in your quarters?” Borgorov asked Josef solicitously.

  “Perfectly. It was like sleeping on a cloud,” said Josef.

  “I slept like a rock,” said Peter brightly.

  “Oh?” said Borgorov quizzically. “Then you don’t think it was a pigpen after all, eh?” He didn’t smile when he said it.

  The door swung open, and two nondescript German laborers began dragging boxes of broken limestone from the shed. Each box, Peter saw, was marked with a number, and the laborers arranged them in order along a line Borgorov scratched in the dirt with his iron-shod heel.

  “There,” said Borgorov. “That’s the lot.” He pointed with a blunt finger. “One, two, and three. Number one is from the deepest layer—just inside the limestone—and the rest were above it in the order of their numbers.” He dusted his hands and sighed with satisfaction, as though he himself had moved the boxes. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll leave you to work.” He snapped his fingers, and the soldier marched the two Germans down the mountainside. Borgorov followed, hopping twice to get in step.

  Feverishly, Peter and Josef dug into box number one, the one containing the oldest fossils, piling rock fragments on the ground. Each built a white cairn, sat beside it, tailor-fashion, and happily began to sort. The dismal talk of the night before, Peter’s fall from political grace, the damp cold, the breakfast of tepid barley mush and cold tea—all were forgotten. For the moment, their consciousnesses were reduced to the lowest common denominator of scientists everywhere—overwhelming curiosity, blind and deaf to everything but the facts that could satisfy it.

  Some sort of catastrophe had apparently caught the big, pincerless ants in their life routine, leaving them to be locked in rock just as they were until Borgorov’s diggers broke into their tomb millions of years later. Josef and Peter now stared incredulously at evidence that ants had once lived as individuals—individuals with a culture to rival that of the cocky new masters of Earth, men.

  “Any luck?” asked Peter.

  “I’ve found several more of our handsome,
big ants,” replied Josef. “They don’t seem to be very sociable. They’re always by themselves. The largest group is three. Have you broken any rocks open?”

  “No, I’ve just been examining the surfaces.” Peter rolled over a rock the size of a good watermelon, and scanned its underside with his magnifying glass. “Well, wait, here’s something, maybe.” He ran his finger over a dome-shaped projection of a hue slightly different than that of the stone. He tapped around it gently with a hammer, painstakingly jarring chips loose. The whole dome emerged at last, bigger than his fist, free and clean—windows, doors, chimney, and all. “Josef,” said Peter. His voice cracked several times before he could finish the sentence. “Josef—they lived in houses.” He stood, with the rock cradled in his arms, an unconscious act of reverence.

  Josef now peered over Peter’s shoulder, breathing down his neck. “A lovely house.”

  “Better than ours,” said Peter.

  “Peter!” warned Josef. He looked around apprehensively.

  The hideous present burst upon Peter again. His arms went limp with renewed anxiety and disgust. The rock crashed down on the others. The dome-shaped house, its interior solid with limestone deposits, shattered into a dozen wedges.

  Again the brothers’ irresistible curiosities took command. They sank to their knees to pick over the fragments. The more durable contents of the house had been locked in rock for eons, only now to meet air and sunlight. The perishable furnishings had left their impressions.

  “Books—dozens of them,” said Peter, turning a fragment this way and that to count the now-familiar rectangular specks.

  “And here’s a painting. I swear it is!” cried Josef.

  “They’d discovered the wheel! Look at this wagon, Josef!” A fit of triumphant laughing burst from Peter. “Josef,” he gasped, “do you realize that we have made the most sensational discovery in history? Ants once had a culture as rich and brilliant as ours. Music! Painting! Literature! Think of it!”