Galápagos Page 5

  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.

  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)

  *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.

  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,

  Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!

  I know whose love would follow me still,

  Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!

  --RUDYARD KIPLING (1865-1936)

  and

  In the dark womb where I began

  My mother's life made me a man.

  Through all the months of human birth

  Her beauty fed my common earth.

  I cannot see, nor breathe, nor stir,

  But through the death of some of her.

  --JOHN MASEFIELD (1878-1967)

  and

  Lord, who ordainest for mankind

  Benignant toils and tender cares!

  We thank Thee for the ties that bind

  The mother to the child she bears.

  --WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

  (1794-1878)

  and

  Honor thy father and thy mother; that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

  --THE BIBLE

  The father of Akiko's daughter was the oldest of the Captain's children, Kamikaze, only thirteen years old.

  14

  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 Galapagos 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?

  *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.

  "Well--if you must know--" said Hisako at last, "back in Yucatan 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.

  *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.

  *Zenji said to Hisako that he had had Mandarax learn ikebana as a pleasant surprise for Mrs. Onassis, to whom he intended to present the instrument on the final night of "the Nature Cruise of the Century." "I did it for her," he said, "because she is supposed to be such a lover of beauty."

  This happened to be the truth, but Hisako did not believe him. That was how bad things had become back in 1986. Nobody believed anybody anymore, since there was so much lying going on.

  "Oh, yes," said Hisako, "I am sure you did it for Mrs. Onassis, and to honor your wife as well. You have placed me among the immortals." She was talking about the heavy thinkers Mandarax could quote.

  She turned really mean now, and wanted to diminish his accomplishments as much as he, in her opinion, had diminished her own. "I must be awfully stupid," she said, a statement Mandarax faithfully translated into written Navaho. "It has taken me an unforgivably long time to realize how much malice there is, how much contempt for others there is, in what you do."

  "You, *Doctor Hiroguchi," she went on, "think that everybody but yourself is just taking up space on this planet, and we make too much noise and waste valuable natural resources and have too many children and leave garbage around. So it would be a much nicer place if the few stupid services we are able to perform for the likes of you were taken over by machinery. That wonderful Mandarax you're scratching your ear with now: what is that but an excuse for a mean-spirited egomaniac never to pay or even thank any human being with a knowledge of languages or mathematics or history or medicine or literature or ikebana or anything?"

  I have already given my own opinion as to the cause for the craze back then for having machines do everything that human beings did--and I mean everything. I just want to add that my father, who was a science-fiction writer, once wrote a novel about a man whom everybody laughed at because he was building sports robots. He created a golf robot who could make a hole in one every time, and a basketball robot who could hit the basket every time, and a tennis robot who served an ace every time, and so on.

  At first, people couldn't see any use for robots like that, and the inventor's wife walked out on him, the way Father's wife, incidentally, had walked out on him--and his children tried to put him into a nuthouse. But then he let advertisers know that his robots would also endorse automobiles or beer or razors or wristwatches or perfume or whatever. He made a fortune, according to my father, because so many sports enthusiasts wanted to be exactly like those robots.

  Don't ask me why.

  15

  *ANDREW MACINTOSH, meanwhile, was in his blind daughter's room, waiting for the telephone to ring--to bring him the good news which he would then share with the Hiroguchis. He was fluent in Spanish, and he had been on the telephone all afternoon with his offices on the island of Manhattan and with frightened Ecuadorian financiers and officials. He was doing business in his daughter's room because he wanted her to hear what he was doing. These two were very close. Selena had never known a mother, since her mother had died while giving birth to her.

  I think of Selena now, with her meaningless green eyes, as an experiment by Nature--since her blindness was inherited and she could pass it on. She was eighteen there in Guayaquil, with her best reproductive years ahead of her. She would be only twenty-eight when Mary Hepburn asked her if she would like to take part in her unauthorized experiments on Santa Rosalia with the Captain's sperm. Selena would refuse. But if she had found any advantages in blindness, she could have passed them on.

  Little did young Selena know in Guayaquil, as she listened to her sociopathic father wheel and deal on the telephone, that her destiny was to pair off with Hisako Hiroguchi, two rooms away, and to raise a furry baby.

  In Guayaquil she was paired off with her father, who apparently owned the planet they were on, and who could do whatever he pleased whenever he pleased, and wherever he pleased. Her big brain told her that she was going to get through life safely and amusingly inside a sort of electromagnetic bubble created by her father's indomitable personality, which would continue to protect her even after he died--even after it came to be his turn to enter the blue tunnel into the Afterlife.

  Before I forget: On Santa Rosalia, Selena's blindness gave her one advantage over all the other colonists which was a great joy to her, but which, nonetheless, was not worth passing on to yet another generation:

  More than anybody else on the island, Selena enjoyed the feel of little Akiko's fur.

  *Andrew MacIntosh had told the top financial people in Ecuador that he was prepared to transfer instantly to any designated fiduciary in Ecuador fifty million American dollars, still as good as gold. Most of the supposed wealth held by American banks a
t that point had become so wholly imaginary, so weightless and impalpable, that any amount of it could be transferred instantly to Ecuador, or anyplace else capable of receiving a written message by wire or radio.

  *MacIntosh was waiting to hear from Quito what properties Ecuadorians would be willing to put into the names of himself, his daughter, and the Hiroguchis, also instantly, in exchange for such a sum.

  It wasn't even going to be his own money. He had arranged to borrow it, whatever it was, from the Chase Manhattan Bank. They found it somewhere, whatever it was, to loan to him.

  Yes, and if the deal went through, Ecuador could wire or radio pieces of the mirage to fertile countries and get real food in return.

  And the people would eat up all the food, gobble, gobble, yum, yum, and it would become nothing but excrement and memories. What then for little Ecuador?

  *MacIntosh's call was supposed to come at five-thirty on the dot. He had half an hour more to wait and he ordered two rare filet mignons with all the trimmings from room service. There were still plenty of good things to eat at the El Dorado, hoarded for arriving passengers for "the Nature Cruise of the Century," and especially for Mrs. Onassis. Soldiers at that moment were stringing barbed wire at a distance of one block in every direction around the hotel--to protect the food.

  The same thing was happening at the waterfront. Barbed wire was being strung around the Bahia de Darwin, which, as everyone in Guayaquil knew, had been provisioned to serve three gourmet meals a day, no two alike, for fourteen days--to one hundred passengers. A person looking at the beautiful ship, and capable of doing a little arithmetic, might have had this thought: "I am so hungry, and my wife and children are so hungry, and my mother and father are so hungry--and there are forty-two hundred delicious meals in there."

  The man who brought the two filet mignon suppers to Selena's room had made such calculations, and carried in his big brain an inventory of the good things to eat in the hotel's larder as well. He himself wasn't hungry yet, since the hotel staff was still being fed. His family, a small one by Ecuadorian standards, consisting of a pregnant wife, her mother, his father, and an orphaned nephew he was raising, were also well enough fed so far. Like all the other employees, he had been stealing food from the hotel for his family.