Galápagos Page 13
And sometimes when I was in the Marines, or later in Sweden, somebody would wake me up to tell me to stop talking in my sleep. I would have no recollection of what I might have said. I would have to ask what I had been talking about, and it was always news to me. What could most of that blah-blah-blahing have been, both night and day, but the spilling of useless, uncalled-for signals from our preposterously huge and active brains?
There was no shutting them down! Whether we had anything for them to do or not, they ran all the time! And were they ever loud! Oh, God, were they ever loud.
When I was still alive, there were these portable radios and tape-players some young people carried with them wherever they went in cities in the United States, playing music at a volume capable of drowning out a thunderstorm. These were called "ghetto blasters." It wasn't enough, a million years ago, that we already had ghetto blasters inside our heads!
Even at this late date, I am still full of rage at a natural order which would have permitted the evolution of something as distracting and irrelevant and disruptive as those great big brains of a million years ago. If they had told the truth, then I could see some point in everybody's having one. But these things lied all the time! Look at how *James Wait was lying to Mary Hepburn!
And now *Siegfried von Kleist returned to the cocktail lounge, having witnessed the shooting of Zenji Hiroguchi and Andrew MacIntosh. If his big brain had been a truth machine, he might have given Mary and *Wait information to which they were surely entitled, and which might have been very useful to them, in case they wished to survive: that he was in the first stages of a mental crack-up, that two hotel guests had just been shot, that the crowd outside couldn't be held back much longer, that the hotel was out of touch with the rest of the world, and so on.
But no. He maintained a placid exterior. He did not wish his remaining four guests to panic. As a result, they would never find out what became of Zenji Hiroguchi and Andrew MacIntosh. For that matter, they would never hear the news, which would be announced in about an hour, that Peru had declared war on Ecuador, and neither would the Captain. When Peruvian rockets hit targets in the Guayaquil area, they would believe the Captain when he said what his big brain honestly believed to be the truth, not that it felt any compunction to tell the truth: that they were being showered by meteorites.
And, as long as there was anybody on Santa Rosalia curious as to why his or her ancestors had come there--and that sort of curiosity would finally peter out only after about three thousand years--that was the story: They were driven off the mainland by a shower of meteorites.
Quoth Mandarax:
Happy is the nation without a history.
--CESARE BONESANA, MARCHESE DI BECCARIA
(1738--1794)
So, in a perfectly calm tone of voice, *Siegfried, the Captain's brother, asked *Wait to go upstairs, and to ask Selena MacIntosh and Hisako Hiroguchi to come down, and to help them with their luggage. "Be careful not to alarm them," he said. "Let them know that everything is perfectly all right. Just to be safe, I am going to take you all out to the airport." Guayaquil International Airport, incidentally, would be the first target to be devastated by Peruvian rocketry.
He handed Mandarax to *Wait, so that Wait would be able to communicate with Hisako. He had recovered the instrument from beside the body of Zenji. Both bodies had been moved out of sight--into the burglarized souvenir shop. Siegfried himself had covered them with souvenir bedspreads, which bore the same portrait of Charles Darwin which hung behind the bar.
So Siegfried von Kleist shepherded Mary Hepburn and Hisako Hiroguchi and James Wait and Selena MacIntosh and *Kazakh out to a gaily decorated bus parked in front of the hotel. This bus was to have carried musicians and dancers out to the airport--to regale the celebrities from New York. The six Kanka-bono girls came right along with them, and I have put a star in front of the dog's name because she would soon be killed and eaten by those children. It was no time to be a dog.
Selena wanted to know where her father was, and Hisako wanted to know where her husband was. *Siegfried said that they had gone ahead to the airport. His plan was to somehow get them on a plane, whether a commercial flight or a charter flight or a military flight, which would get them safely out of Ecuador. The truth about Andrew MacIntosh and Zenji Hiroguchi would be the last thing they heard from him before the plane took off--at which time they might still survive, no matter how frenzied with grief they became.
As a sop to Mary, he agreed to take the six girls along. He could make no sense of their language, even with the help of Mandarax. The best Mandarax could do was to identify one word in twenty, maybe, as being closely related to Quechuan, the lingua franca of the Inca Empire. Here and there Mandarax thought it might have heard a little Arabic, too, the lingua franca of the African slave trade so long ago.
Now, there is a big-brain idea I haven't heard much about lately: human slavery. How could you ever hold somebody in bondage with nothing but your flippers and your mouth?
32
JUST AS EVERYBODY got nicely settled in the bus in front of the El Dorado, the news came over several radios in the crowd that "the Nature Cruise of the Century" had been canceled. That meant to the crowd, and to the soldiers, too, who were just civilians in soldier suits, that the food in the hotel now belonged to everyone. Take it from somebody who has been around for a million years: When you get right down to it, food is practically the whole story every time.
Quoth Mandarax:
First comes fodder, then comes morality.
--BERTOLT BRECHT (1898-1956)
So there was a rush for the hotel's entrances which momentarily engulfed the bus, although the bus and the people in it were of no interest to the food rioters. They banged on the sides of the bus, however, and yelled--agonized by the realization that others were already inside the hotel, and that there would be no food left for them.
It was certainly very frightening to be on the bus. It might be turned over. It might be set on fire. Rocks might be thrown, making shrapnel of window glass. The place for survivors to be was on the floor in the aisle. Hisako Hiroguchi performed her first intimate act with blind Selena, instructing her with her hands and murmured Japanese to kneel in the aisle with her head down. Then Hisako knelt beside her and *Kazakh, and put her arm across her back.
How tenderly Hisako and Selena would care for each other during the coming years! What a beautiful and sweet-natured child they would rear! How I admired them!
Yes, and *James Wait found himself posing yet again as a protector of children. He was sheltering with his own body the terrified Kanka-bono girls in the aisle. He had meant only to save himself, if he could, but Mary Hepburn had grabbed both his hands and pulled him toward her so that they formed a living fort. If there was to be flying glass, it would bite into them and not into the little girls.
Quoth Mandarax:
Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
--ST. JOHN (4 B.C.?-30?)
It was while Wait was in this position that his heart began to fibrillate--which is to say that its fibers began to twitch in an uncoordinated manner, so that the march of the blood in his circulatory system was no longer orderly. Here heredity was operating again. He had no way of knowing this, but Wait's father and mother, who were also father and daughter, were both then dead of heart attacks which had struck when they were in their early forties.
It was a lucky thing for humanity that Wait did not live long enough to take part in the Santa Rosalia mating games. Then again, it might not have made all that much difference if people today had inherited his time-bomb heart, since nobody would have lived long enough for the bomb to go off anyway. Anybody Wait's age today would be a regular Methuselah.
Down at the waterfront, meanwhile, another mob, another fibrillating organ in the social system of Ecuador, was stripping the Bahia de Darwin not only of its food, but of its television sets and telephones and radar and sonar and radios and l
ight bulbs and compasses and toilet paper and carpeting and soap and pots and pans and charts and mattresses and outboard motors and inflatable landing craft, and on and on. These survivors would even try to steal the winch which lowered or raised the anchors, but succeeded only in damaging it beyond repair.
At least they left the lifeboats--but bereft of their emergency food supplies.
And Captain von Kleist, in fear of his life, had been driven up into the crow's nest, clad only in his underwear.
The crowd at the El Dorado swept past the bus like a tidal wave--leaving it high and dry, so to speak. It was free to go where it pleased. There was nobody much around, except for a few people lying down here and there, injured or killed in the rush.
So *Siegfried von Kleist, heroically suppressing the spasms and ignoring the hallucinations symptomatic of Huntington's chorea, took his place in the driver's seat. He thought it best that his ten passengers stay in the aisle where they were--invisible from the outside, and calming one another with body heat.
He started the engine, and saw that he had a full tank of gasoline. He turned on the air conditioning. He announced in English, the only language he had in common with any of his passengers, that it would be very cool inside in a minute or two. This was a promise he could keep.
It was twilight outside now, so he turned on his parking lights.
It was at about that time that Peru declared war on Ecuador. Two of Peru's fighter bombers were then over Ecuadorian territories, one with its rocket tuned to the radar signals coming from Guayaquil International Airport, and the other with its rocket tuned to radar signals coming from the naval base on the Galapagos Island of Baltra, lair of a sail training ship, six Coast Guard ships, two oceangoing tugs, a patrol submarine, a dry dock, and, high and dry in the dry dock, a destroyer. The destroyer was the largest ship in the Ecuadorian Navy, save for one--the Bahia de Darwin.
Quoth Mandarax:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.
--CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1870)
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I SOMETIMES SPECULATE as to what humanity might have become if the first settlers on Santa Rosalia had been the original passenger list and crew for "the Nature Cruise of the Century"--Captain von Kleist, surely, and Hisako Hiroguchi and Selena MacIntosh and Mary Hepburn, and, instead of the Kanka-bono girls, the sailors and officers and Jacqueline Onassis and Dr. Henry Kissinger and Rudolf Nureyev and Mick Jagger and Paloma Picasso and Walter Cronkite and Bobby King and Robert Pepin, "the greatest chef in France," and, of course, Andrew MacIntosh and Zenji Hiroguchi, and on and on.
The island could have supported that many individuals--just barely. There would have been some struggles, some fights, I guess--some killings, even, if food or water ran short. And I suppose some of them would have imagined that Nature or something was very pleased if they emerged victorious. But their survival wouldn't have amounted to a hill of beans, as far as evolution was concerned, if they didn't reproduce, and most of the women on the passenger list were past child-bearing age, and so not worth fighting for.
During the first thirteen years on Santa Rosalia, before Akiko reached puberty, in fact, the only fertile women would have been Selena, who was blind, and Hisako Hiroguchi, who had already given birth to a baby all covered with fur, and three others who were normal. And probably all of them would have been impregnated by victors, even against their will. But in the long run, I don't think it would have made much difference which males did the impregnating, Mick Jagger or Dr. Henry Kissinger or the Captain or the cabin boy. Humanity would still be pretty much what it is today.
In the long run, the survivors would still have been not the most ferocious strugglers but the most efficient fisherfolk. That's how things work in the islands here.
There were live Maine lobsters who also came within a hair of having their survival skills tested by the Galapagos Archipelago. Before the Bahia de Darwin was looted, there were two hundred of them in aerated tanks of saltwater in the hold.
The waters around Santa Rosalia were surely cold enough for them, but perhaps too deep. There was this about them, at any rate: They were like human beings in that they could eat almost anything, if they had to.
And Captain von Kleist, when he was an old, old man, remembered those lobsters in their tanks. The older he became, the more vivid were his recollections of events of the long ago. And after supper one night, he amused Akiko, the furry daughter of Hisako Hiroguchi, with a science-fiction fantasy whose premise was that the Maine lobsters had made it to the islands, and that a million years had passed, as they have indeed passed now--and that lobsters had become the dominant species on the planet, and had built cities and theaters and hospitals and public transportation and so on. He had lobsters playing violins and solving murders and performing microsurgery and subscribing to book clubs and so on.
The moral of the story was that the lobsters were doing exactly what human beings had done, which was to make a mess of everything. They all wished that they could just be ordinary lobsters, particularly since there were no longer human beings around who wanted to boil them alive.
That was all they had had to complain about in the first place: being boiled alive. Now, just because they hadn't wanted to be boiled alive anymore, they had to support symphony orchestras, and on and on. The viewpoint character in the Captain's story was the underpaid second chair French horn player in the Lobsterville Symphony Orchestra who had just lost his wife to a professional ice hockey player.
When he made up that story, he had no idea that humanity elsewhere was on the verge of extinction, and that other life forms were facing less and less opposition, in case they had a tendency to become dominant. The Captain would never hear about that, and neither would anybody else on Santa Rosalia. And I am speaking only of the dominance of large life forms over other large life forms. Truth be told, the planet's most victorious organisms have always been microscopic. In all the encounters between Davids and Goliaths, was there ever a time when a Goliath won?
On the level of the big creatures, then, the visible strugglers, lobsters were surely poor candidates for becoming as elaborately constructive and destructive as humankind. If the Captain had told his mordant fable about octopi instead of lobsters, though, it might not have been quite so ridiculous. Back then, as now, those squishy creatures had highly developed brains, whose basic function was to control their versatile arms. Their situation, one might think, wasn't all that different from that of human beings, with hands to control. Presumably, their brains could do other things with their arms and brains than catch fish.
But I have yet to see an octopus, or any sort of animal, for that matter, which wasn't entirely content to pass its time on earth as a food gatherer, to shun the experiments with unlimited greed and ambition performed by humankind.
As for human beings making a comeback, of starting to use tools and build houses and play musical instruments and so on again: They would have to do it with their beaks this time. Their arms have become flippers in which the hand bones are almost entirely imprisoned and immobilized. Each flipper is studded with five purely ornamental nubbins, attractive to members of the opposite sex at mating time. These are in fact the tips of four suppressed fingers and a thumb. Those parts of people's brains which used to control their hands, moreover, simply don't exist anymore, and human skulls are now much more streamlined on that account. The more streamlined the skull, the more successful the fisher person.
If people can swim as fast and far as fur seals now, what is to prevent their swimming all the way back to the mainland, whence their ancestors came? Answer: nothing.
Plenty have tried it or will tr
y it during periods of fish shortages or overpopulation. But the bacterium which eats human eggs is always there to greet them.
So much for exploration.
Then again, it is so peaceful here, why would anybody want to live on the mainland? Every island has become an ideal place to raise children, with waving coconut palms and broad white beaches--and limpid blue lagoons.
And all the people are so innocent and relaxed now, all because evolution took their hands away.
Quoth Mandarax:
In works of labour, or of skill,
I would be busy, too;
For Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do.
--ISAAC WATTS (1674-1748)
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THERE WAS THIS PERUVIAN PILOT a million years ago, a young lieutenant colonel who had his fighter-bomber skipping from wisp to wisp of finely divided matter at the very edge of the planet's atmosphere. His name was Guillermo Reyes, and he was able to survive at such an altitude because his suit and helmet were inflated with an artificial atmosphere. People used to be so marvelous, making impossible dreams they made come true.
Colonel Reyes had had an inconclusive discussion with a fellow airman one time as to whether anything felt better than sexual intercourse. He was in contact on his radio now with that same comrade, who was back at the air base in Peru, and who was to tell him when Peru was officially at war with Ecuador.
Colonel Reyes had already activated the brain of the tremendous self-propelled weapon slung underneath his airplane. That was its first taste of life, but already it was madly in love with the radar dish atop the control tower at Guayaquil International Airport, a legitimate military target, since Ecuador kept ten of its own warplanes there. This amazing radar lover under the colonel's plane was like the great land tortoises of the Galapagos Islands to this extent: It had all the nourishment it needed inside its shell.