"Vonnegut, Kurt - Galapagos" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

10



How many Galбpagos Islands were there a million years ago? There were thirteen big ones, seventeen small ones, and three hundred and eighteen tiny ones, some nothing more than rocks rising only a meter or two above the surface of the ocean.
There are now fourteen big ones, seven small ones, and three hundred and twenty-six tiny ones. Quite a lot of volcanic activity still goes on. I make a joke: The gods are still angry.
And the northernmost of the islands, so all alone, so far from the rest, is still Santa Rosalia.

o

Yes, and a million years ago, on August 3, 1986, a man named *Roy Hepburn was on his deathbed in his right little, tight little home in Ilium, New York. There at the very end, what he lamented most was that he and his wife Mary had never had children. He could not urge his wife to try to have children by someone else after he was gone, since she had ceased to ovulate.
"We Hepburns are extinct as the dodoes now," he said, and he rambled on with the names of many other creatures which had become fruitless, leafless twigs on the tree of evolution. "The Irish elk," he said. "The ivory-billed woodpecker," he said. "_Tyrannosaurus rex_," he said, and on and on. Right up to the end, though, his dry sense of humor would pop up unexpectedly. He made two jocular additions to the lugubrious roll call, both of which were indeed without progeny. "Smallpox," he said, and then, "George Washington."

o

Right to the end, he believed with all his heart that his own government had done him in with radiation. He said to Mary, and to the doctor and the nurse who were there because the end could surely come at any moment now: "If only it had been just God Almighty who was mad at me!"
Mary took that to be his curtain line. He certainly looked dead after that.
But then, after ten seconds, his blue lips moved again. Mary leaned close to hear his words. She would be glad for the rest of her life that she had not missed them.
"I'll tell you what the human soul is, Mary," he whispered, his eyes closed. "Animals don't have one. It's the part of you that knows when your brain isn't working right. I always knew, Mary. There wasn't anything I could do about it, but I always knew."
And then he scared the wits out of Mary and everybody in the room by sitting up straight, his eyes open wide and fiery. "Get the Bible!" he commanded, in a voice which could be heard throughout the house.
This was the only time anything to do with formal religion was mentioned during the whole of his illness. He and Mary were no churchgoers; or prayers in even dire circumstances, but they did have a Bible somewhere. Mary wasn't quite sure where.
"Get the Bible!" he said again. "Woman, get the Bible!" He had never called her "woman" before.
So Mary went to look for it. She found it in the spare bedroom, along with Darwin's _The Voyage of the Beagle_ and _A Tale of Two Cities_, by Charles Dickens.
*Roy sat up, and he called Mary "woman" again. "Woman --" he commanded, "put your hand on the Bible and repeat after me: 'I, Mary Hepburn, hereby make two solemn promises to my beloved husband on his deathbed.'"
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.

o

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.