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

There would be many births but no formal marriages to celebrate during the first forty-one years of the colony on Santa Rosalia, from which all humanity is now descended. There were surely pairings off from the very first. Hisako and Selena paired off for the rest of their lives. The Captain and Mary Hepburn paired off for the first ten years -- until she did something which he considered absolutely unforgivable, which was to make unauthorized use of his sperm. And the six other females, while living together as a family, also formed pairs within an already very intimate sisterhood.
When the first Santa Rosalia marriage was performed by Kamikaze and Akiko in the year 2027, all of the original colonists had long since vanished into the sinuous blue tunnel which leads into the Afterlife, and Mandarax was studded with barnacles on the floor of the South Pacific. If Mandarax were still around, it would have had mostly unpleasant things to say about matrimony, such as:


_Marriage: a community consisting of a master, a_
_mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two._
Ambrose Bierce (1842-?)


and


_Marriage from love, like vinegar from wine --_
_A sad, sour, sober beverage -- by time_
_Is sharpen'd from its high celestial flavour,_
_Down to a very homely household savour_.
Lord Byron (1788-1824)


and so on.
The last human marriage in the Galбpagos Islands, and thus the last one on Earth, was performed on Fernandina Island in the year 23,011. Nobody today has any idea what a marriage is. I have to say that Mandarax's cynicism about the institution back in its heyday was largely justified. My own parents made each other miserable by getting married, and Mary Hepburn, when she was an old lady on Santa Rosalia, once told the furry Akiko that she and Roy had been, quite possibly, the only happily married couple in all of Ilium.
What made marriage so difficult back then was yet again that instigator of so many other sorts of heartbreak: the oversize brain. That cumbersome computer could hold so many contradictory opinions on so many different subjects all at once, and switch from one opinion or subject to another one so quickly, that a discussion between a husband and wife under stress could end up like a fight between blindfolded people wearing roller skates.
The Hiroguchis, for example, whose susurrations Mary had heard through the back of her closet, were then changing their opinions of themselves and each other, and of love and sex and work and the world and so on, with lightning speed.
In one second, Hisako would think that her husband was very stupid, and that she was going to have to rescue herself and her female fetus. But then in the next second she would think that he was as brilliant as everybody said he was, and that she could just stop worrying, that he would get them out of this mess very easily and soon.
In one second *Zenji was inwardly cursing her for her helplessness, for being such a dead weight, and in the next he was vowing in his head to die, if necessary, for this goddess and her unborn daughter.
Of what possible use was such emotional volatility, not to say craziness, in the heads of animals who were supposed to stay together long enough, at least, to raise a human child, which took about fourteen years or so?

o

*Zenji found himself saying in the midst of a silence, "Something else is bothering you." He meant that something more personal than the general mess they were in was burning her up, and had been burning her up for quite some time.
"No," she said. That was another thing about those big brains: They found it easy to do what Mandarax could never do, which was lie and lie.
"Something's been bothering you for the past week," he said. "Why don't you just spit it out? Tell me what it is."
"Nothing," she said. Who would want to spend fourteen years with a computer like that, when you could never be sure whether it was telling the truth or not?
They were conversing in Japanese, and not in the idiomatic American English of a million years ago, which I have employed throughout this story. *Zenji, incidentally, was toying nervously with Mandarax, passing it from one hand to the other, and had unintentionally set it so that it was translating anything either one of them said into Navaho.

o

"Well -- if you must know --" said Hisako at last, "back in Yucatбn I was playing with Mandarax one afternoon on the _Omoo_," which was *MacIntosh's one-hundred-meter yacht. "You were diving for sunken treasure." This was something *MacIntosh actually had *Zenji doing, although *Zenji could scarcely swim: scuba-diving down forty meters to a Spanish galleon, and bringing up broken dishes and cannonballs. *MacIntosh also had his blind daughter Selena diving, her right wrist attached to his right ankle by a three-meter nylon cord.
"I accidentally found out something Mandarax could do which you somehow forgot to tell me Mandarax could do," Hisako went on. "Do you want to guess what it was?"
"No, I do not," he said. It was his turn to lie.
"Mandarax," she said, "turns out to be a very good teacher of the art of flower arranging." That was what she had been so proud of being, of course. But her self-respect had been severely crippled by the discovery that a little black box could not only teach what she taught, but could do so in a thousand different tongues.
"I was going to tell you. I meant to tell you," he said. This was another lie, and her learning that Mandarax knew ikebana was as improbable as her guessing the combination to a bank vault. She had been very reluctant to learn how to work Mandarax, and would remain so until she died.
But, by golly if she hadn't fiddled with the buttons there on the _Omoo_ until, suddenly, Mandarax was telling her that the most beautiful flower arrangements had one, two, or at the most three, elements. In arrangements of three elements, said Mandarax, all three might be the same, or two of the three might be the same, but all three should never be different. Mandarax told her the ideal ratios between the altitudes of the elements in arrangements of more than one element, and between the elements and the diameters and altitudes of their vases or bowls -- or sometimes baskets.
Ikebana turned out to be as easily codified as the practice of modern medicine.

o

*Zenji Hiroguchi had not himself taught Mandarax ikebana or anything else it knew. He had left that to underlings. The underling who taught Mandarax ikebana had simply taken a tape recorder to Hisako's famous ikebana class, and then boiled things down.