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

11



If Mary Hepburn had been in a mood to eavesdrop instead of kill herself, she might have put an ear to the back of her closet and heard susurruses next door. She had no idea who her neighbors were on either side, since there hadn't been any other guests when she arrived the night before, and she hadn't been out of her room since then.
But the makers of the susurruses were *Zenji Hiroguchi, the computer genius, and his pregnant wife Hisako, the teacher of ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging.
Her neighbors on the other side were Selena MacIntosh, the blind, teenage daughter of *Andrew MacIntosh, and Kazakh, her seeing-eye dog, also a female. Mary had heard no barking, because Kazakh never barked.
Kazakh never barked or played with other dogs or investigated interesting smells or noises or chased animals which had been the natural prey of her ancestors because, when she was a puppy, big-brained human beings had showed her hate and withheld food whenever she did any of those things. They let her know from the first that that was the kind of planet she was on: that natural canine activities were against the law -- all of them.
They removed her sex organs so that she would never be distracted by sexual urgencies. And I was about to say that the cast of my story would soon boil down to just one male and a lot of females, including a female dog. But Kazakh wasn't really a female anymore, thanks to surgery. Like Mary Hepburn, she was out of the evolutionary game. She wasn't going to leave her genes to anyone.

o

Beyond Selena and Kazakh's room, with an open connecting door, lay the quarters of Selena's lusty father, the financier and adventurer *Andrew MacIntosh. He was a widower. He and the widow Mary Hepburn might have got along quite nicely, since they were such ardent outdoors people. But they would never meet. As I have already said, *Andrew MacIntosh and *Zenji Hiroguchi would be dead before the sun went down.
James Wait, incidentally, had been given a room all alone on the second floor as far as possible from the other guests. His big brain was congratulating him on seeming harmless and ordinary, but it was wrong about that. The hotel manager had spotted Wait as a crook of some kind.

o

This hotel manager, whose name was *Siegfried von Kleist, was a lugubrious, middle-aged member of the old and generally prosperous German community in Ecuador. His two paternal uncles in Quito owned the hotel and the _Bahнa de Darwin_, too, and they had put him in charge of the hotel for only two weeks, a period drawing to a close now, to oversee the reception of the passengers for "the Nature Cruise of the Century." He was generally an idler, having inherited considerable money, but had been shamed by his uncles into, so to speak, "pulling his own weight" in this particular family enterprise.
He was unmarried and had never reproduced, and so was insignificant from an evolutionary point of view. He might also have been considered as a marriage possibility for Mary Hepburn. But he, too, was doomed. *Siegfried von Kleist would survive the sunset, but three hours after that he would be drowned by a tidal wave.
It was now four o'clock in the afternoon. This native Ecuadorian Hun, with his watery blue eyes and drooping moustache, actually looked as though he expected to die that evening, but he could no more foretell the future than I could. Both of us felt that afternoon that the planet was wobbling on its axis, and that anything could happen next.
*Zenji Hiroguchi and *Andrew MacIntosh, incidentally, would die of gunshot wounds.

o

*Siegfried von Kleist is not important to my story, but his only sibling, his brother Adolf, three years his senior and also a bachelor, surely is. Adolf von Kleist, the Captain of the _Bahнa de Darwin_, would in fact become the ancestor of every human being on the face of the earth today.
With the help of Mary Hepburn, he would become a latter-day Adam, so to speak. The biology teacher from Ilium, however, since she had ceased ovulating, would not, could not, become his Eve. So she had to be more like a god instead.
And this supremely important brother of the insignificant hotel manager was at that moment arriving at Guayaquil International Airport on a nearly empty transport plane from New York City, where he had been doing publicity for "the Nature Cruise of the Century."

o

If Mary had listened in on the Hiroguchis through her closet wall, she wouldn't have understood what was troubling them, since their susurruses were in Japanese, the only language in which they were fluent. *Zenji knew a little English and Russian. Hisako knew a little Chinese. Neither one knew any Spanish or Quechuan or German or Portuguese, the commonest languages in Ecuador.
They, too, it turned out, were bitter about what their supposedly wonderful brains had done to them. They felt especially foolish about having allowed themselves to be delivered into such a nightmare, since *Zenji was widely regarded as being one of the smartest men in the world. And it was his fault, not hers, that they had in effect become prisoners of the dynamic *Andrew MacIntosh.
Here is how that happened: *MacIntosh had visited Japan with his blind daughter and her dog about a year before, and had met *Zenji, and had seen the wonderful work he was doing as a salaried employee for Matsumoto. Technologically speaking, *Zenji, although only twenty-nine, had become a grandfather. He had earlier sired a pocket computer capable of translating many spoken languages instantaneously, and he had named it "Gokubi." And then, at the time of the MacIntosh's visit to Japan, *Zenji had come up with a pilot model for a new generation of simultaneous voice translators, and he had named it "Mandarax."
So *Andrew MacIntosh, whose investment banking firm raised money for businesses and itself by the sale of stocks and bonds, took young *Zenji aside and told him that he was an idiot to be on salary, that *MacIntosh could help him form a corporation of his own which would make him almost instantly a billionaire in dollars or a trillionaire in yen.
So *Zenji said that he would like time to think about it.
This exploratory conversation took place in a Tokyo sushi restaurant. Sushi was raw fish wrapped around cold rice, a popular dish a million years ago. Little did anybody dream back then that everybody would be eating practically nothing but raw fish in the sweet by-and-by.
The florid, boisterous American entrepreneur and the reserved, relatively doll-like Japanese inventor communicated through Gokubi, since neither spoke the other's language at all well. There were then thousands upon thousands of Gokubis in use all over the world. The two men could not use Mandarax, since the only working model of Mandarax was under heavy guard in *Zenji's office back at Matsumoto. So *Zenji's big brain began to play with the idea of becoming as rich as the richest man in his country, who was the Emperor of Japan.
A few months later, in the following January, the same January during which Mary and Roy Hepburn thought they had so much to be grateful for, *Zenji got a letter from *MacIntosh asking him a full ten months in advance to be his guest on his estate outside of Mйrida, Yucatбn, in Mexico, and then on the maiden voyage of an Ecuadorian luxury ship called the _Bahнa de Darwin_, in whose financing he had had a hand.
*MacIntosh had said in the letter in English, which had to be translated for *Zenji: _Let us take this opportunity to get to really know each other_.

o

What he meant to get from *Zenji, probably in Yucatбn, or surely during "the Nature Cruise of the Century," was *Zenji's signature on an agreement to head a new corporation, whose stock *MacIntosh would merchandize.
Like James Wait, *MacIntosh was a fisherman of sorts. He hoped to catch investors, using for bait not a price tag on his shirt but a Japanese computer genius.
And now it appears to me that the tale I have to tell, spanning a million years, doesn't change all that much from beginning to end. In the beginning, as in the end, I find myself speaking of human beings, regardless of their brain size, as fisherfolk.

o