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

*Zenji Hiroguchi begat Gokubi one million and five years ago, and then, one million years ago, this young genius begat Mandarax. Yes, and at the time of his begetting of Mandarax, his wife was about to give birth to his first human child.
There had been concern about the genes the mother, Hisako, might have passed on to her fetus, since her own mother had been exposed to radiation when the United States of America dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. So a sample of Hisako's amniotic fluid was tested back in Tokyo for clues that the child might be abnormal. That fluid, incidentally, would be identical in salinity with that of the ocean into which the _Bahнa de Darwin_ would disappear.
The tests declared the fetus normal.
They also gave away the secret of its sex. It would come into the world as a little girl, yet another female in this tale.

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The tests were incapable of detecting minor defects in the fetus, such as that it might be as tone deaf as Mary Hepburn, which it wasn't -- or that it might be covered with a fine, silky pelt like a fur seal's, which would actually turn out to be the case.
The only human being *Zenji Hiroguchi would ever beget was a darling but furry daughter he would never see.
She would be born on Santa Rosalia, at the northernmost extremity of the Galбpagos Islands. Her name would be Akiko.

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When Akiko became an adult on Santa Rosalia, she would be very much like her mother on the inside, but in a different sort of skin. The evolutionary sequence from Gokubi to Mandarax, by contrast, was a radical improvement in the contents of a package, but with few perceptible changes in the wrapper. Akiko was protected from sunburn, and from the chilly water when she swam, and the abrasiveness of lava when she chose to sit or lie down -- whereas her mother's bare skin was wholly defenseless against these ordinary hazards of island life. But Gokubi and Mandarax, as different as they were inside, inhabited nearly identical shells of high-impact black plastic, twelve centimeters high, eight wide, and two thick.
Any fool could tell Akiko from Hisako, but only an expert could tell Gokubi from Mandarax.

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Gokubi and Mandarax both had pressure-sensitive buttons on their backs, set flush with their cases, by means of which a person might communicate with whatever it was that had been put inside. On the face of each was an identical screen on which images could be caused to appear, and which also functioned as a solar cell, charging tiny batteries which, again, were exactly the same in Gokubi and Mandarax.
Each had a microphone the size of a pinhead at the upper right-hand comer of its screen. It was by means of this that Gokubi or Mandarax heard spoken language, and then, in accordance with instructions from its buttons, translated them into words on its screen.
An operator of either instrument had to be as quick and graceful with his hands as a magician, if a bilingual conversation was to flow at all naturally. If I were an English-speaking person talking to a Portuguese, say, I would have to hold the instrument somewhere near the mouth of the Portuguese, but with the screen close enough to my eyes for me to read the written translation into English of what he was saying. And then I would have to flip it over quickly, so that the instrument could hear me, and so he could read from the screen what I was saying.
No person living today has hands clever enough or a brain big enough to operate a Gokubi or a Mandarax. Nobody can thread a needle, either -- or play the piano, or pick his or her nose, as the case may be.

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Gokubi could translate among only ten languages. Mandarax could translate among a thousand. Gokubi had to be told what language it was hearing. Mandarax could identify every one of the thousand languages after hearing only a few words, and begin to translate those words into the operator's language without being told.
Both were highly accurate clocks and perpetual calendars. The clock of *Zenji Hiroguchi's Mandarax lost only eighty-two seconds between the time he checked into the Hotel El Dorado and, thirty-one years later, when Mary Hepburn and the instrument were eaten by a great white shark.
Gokubi would have kept track of time just as accurately, but in all other respects Mandarax left its father far behind. Not only could Mandarax traffic in one hundred times more languages than its progenitor and correctly diagnose more diseases than the majority of physicians of that time. It could also name on command important events which happened in any given year. If you punched out on its back _1802_, for example, the year of Charles Darwin's birth, Mandarax would tell you that Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo were also born then, and that Beethoven completed his Second Symphony, and that France suppressed a Negro rebellion in Santo Domingo, and that Gottfried Treveranus coined the term _biology_, and that the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act became law in Britain, and on and on. That was also the year in which Napoleon became President of the Italian Republic.
Mandarax knew the rules, too, for two hundred games, and could recite the basic principles laid down by masters for fifty different arts and crafts. It could moreover recall on command any one of twenty thousand popular quotations from literature. So that, if you punched out on its back the word _Sunset_, for example, these lofty sentiments would appear on its screen:


_Sunset and evening star,_
_And one clear call for me!_
_And may there be no moaning of the bar,_
_When I put out to sea._
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
(1809-1892)

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*Zenji Hiroguchi's Mandarax was about to be marooned for thirty-one years on Santa Rosalia, along with his pregnant wife and Mary Hepburn and the blind Selena MacIntosh and Captain Adolf von Kleist, and six other people, all females. But under those particular circumstances, Mandarax wasn't really much help.
The uselessness of all its knowledge would so anger the Captain that he threatened to throw it into the ocean. On the last day of his life, when he was eighty-six and Mary was eighty-one, he would actually carry out that threat. As the new Adam, it might be said, his final act was to cast the Apple of Knowledge into the deep blue sea.

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Under the circumstances peculiar to Santa Rosalia, the medical advice of Mandarax was bound to sound like mockery. When Hisako Hiroguchi entered a deep depression which was to last until her death, to last for nearly twenty years, Mandarax recommended new hobbies, new friends, a change of scene and perhaps profession, and lithium. When the kidneys of Selena MacIntosh began to fail when she was only thirty-eight, Mandarax suggested that a compatible donor for a transplant be located as soon as possible. Hisako's furry daughter Akiko, when Akiko was six, came down with pneumonia, apparently caught from a fur seal who was her best friend, and Mandarax recommended antibiotics. Hisako and the blind Selena were then living together and raising Akiko together, almost like husband and wife.
And when Mandarax was asked to come up with quotations from world literature which could be used in a celebration of some event on the slag heap of Santa Rosalia, the instrument almost always came up with clunkers. Here were its thoughts when Akiko gave birth, at the age of twenty-four, to her own furry daughter and the first member of the second generation of human beings to be born on the island:


_If I were hanged on the highest hill,_