Galápagos Read online

  This was Jesus Ortiz, the young Inca bartender who had recently been serving James Wait downstairs. He had been pressed into service as a room waiter by *Siegfried von Kleist, the manager, who himself had taken over as bartender. The hotel was suddenly short-handed. The two regular room-service waiters seemed to have disappeared. That might be all right, that they had disappeared, since no large volume of room service had been expected. They might be asleep somewhere.

  So Ortiz had those two steaks for his big brain to think about in the kitchen, and then in the elevator, and then in the corridor outside Selena's room. The hotel's employees were not eating and stealing food that good. They were generally proud of that. They were still saving the best for what they spoke of as "Senora Kennedy," actually Mrs. Onassis, which was their collective term for all the famous and rich and powerful people who were still supposed to be coming.

  Ortiz's brain was so big that it could show him movies in his head which starred him and his dependents as millionaires. And this man, little more than a boy, was so innocent that he believed the dream could come true, since he had no bad habits and was willing to work so hard, if only he could get some hints on succeeding in life from people who were already millionaires.

  He had tried, without much satisfaction, to get some advice on living well from James Wait downstairs, who, while so laughably unprepossessing, had a wallet stuffed, as Ortiz had observed respectfully, with credit cards and American twenty-dollar bills.

  He thought this about the steaks, too, as he knocked on Selena's door: The people inside there deserved them, and that he would deserve them, too, once he had become a millionaire. And this was a highly intelligent and enterprising young man. Working in Guayaquil hotels since he was ten years old, he had become fluent in six languages, which was more than half as many languages as Gokubi knew, and six times as many languages as James Wait or Mary Hepburn knew, and three times as many languages as the Hiroguchis knew, and two times as many languages as the MacIntoshes knew. He was also a good cook and baker, and had taken a course in accounting and another in business law in night school.

  So his inclination was to like whatever he saw and heard as Selena let him into the room. He already knew her green eyes were blind. Otherwise, he would have been fooled. She did not act or look as though she were blind. She was so beautiful. His big brain had him fall in love with her.

  *Andrew MacIntosh was standing at the floor-to-ceiling window wall, looking out over the marsh and slums at the Bahia de Darwin, which he expected to be his, or perhaps Selena's, or perhaps the Hiroguchis', before the sun went down. The person who was going to call him at five-thirty, the head of an emergency consortium of financiers in Quito, high in the clouds, was Gottfried von Kleist, chairman of the board of the largest bank of Ecuador, an uncle of the manager of the El Dorado and the captain of the Bahia de Darwin, and co-owner with his elder brother Wilhelm of the ship and the hotel.

  Turning to look at Ortiz, who had just come in with the filet mignons, *MacIntosh was rehearsing in his head the first thing he was going to say to Gottfried von Kleist in Spanish: "Before you tell me the rest of the good news, dear colleague, give me your word of honor that I am gazing at my own ship in the distance, from the top floor of my own hotel."

  *MacIntosh was barefoot and wearing nothing but a pair of khaki shorts whose fly was unbuttoned and under which he wore no underwear, so that his penis was no more a secret than the pendulum on a grandfather clock.

  Yes, and I pause to marvel now at how little interested this man was in reproduction, in being a huge success biologically--despite his exhibitionistic sexuality and his mania for claiming as his own property as many of the planet's life-support systems as possible. The most famous amassers of survival schemes back then typically had very few children. There were exceptions, of course. Those who did reproduce a lot, though, and who might be thought to want so much property for the comfort of their descendants, commonly made psychological cripples of their own children. Their heirs were more often than not zombies, easily fleeced by men and women as greedy as the person who had left them much too much of everything a human animal could ever want or need.

  *Andrew MacIntosh didn't even care if he himself lived or died--as evidenced by his enthusiasms for skydiving and the racing of high-performance motor vehicles and so on.

  So I have to say that human brains back then had become such copious and irresponsible generators of suggestions as to what might be done with life, that they made acting for the benefit of future generations seem one of many arbitrary games which might be played by narrow enthusiasts--like poker or polo or the bond market, or the writing of science-fiction novels.

  More and more people back then, and not just *Andrew MacIntosh, had found ensuring the survival of the human race a total bore.

  It was a lot more fun, so to speak, to hit and hit a tennis ball.

  The seeing-eye dog Kazakh sat by the baggage rack at the foot of Selena's king-size bed. Kazakh was a female German shepherd. She was at ease, and free to be herself, since she was not at the moment wearing her harness and handle. And her small brain, cued by the smell of meat, made her look up at Ortiz with her big brown eyes most hopefully, and to wag her tail.

  Dogs back then were far superior to people when it came to distinguishing between different odors. Thanks to Darwin's Law of Natural Selection, all human beings now have senses of smell as acute as Kazakh's. And they have surpassed dogs in one respect: They can smell things underwater.

  Dogs still can't even swim underwater, although they have had a million years in which to learn. They goof around as much as ever. They can't even catch fish yet. And I would have to say that the whole rest of the animal world has done strikingly little to improve its survival tactics in all that time, except for humankind.

  16

  WHAT *ANDREW MACINTOSH now said to Jesus Ortiz was so offensive, and, in view of the hunger pangs spreading throughout Ecuador, so dangerous, that his big brain really must have been sick in some serious way--if giving a damn what happened next was a sign of mental health. The outrageous insult he was about to offer to this friendly and good-hearted waiter, moreover, was not deliberate.

  This was a boxy man of medium stature, his head a box set atop a larger one, and with very thick arms and legs. He was as lusty and able an outdoorsman as Mary Hepburn's husband Roy had been, but eager to take terrifying chances, too, which Roy had never been. *MacIntosh had teeth so big and white perfect, and he gave Ortiz such a good look, Ortiz was reminded of keys on a grand piano.

  *MacIntosh said to him in Spanish, "Uncover the steaks and put them both on the floor for the dog, and then get out of here."

  Speaking of teeth: There have never been dentists on Santa Rosalia or any of the other human colonies in the Galapagos Islands. As would have been the case a million years ago, a typical colonist can expect to be edentate by the time he or she is thirty years old, having suffered many skull-cracking toothaches on the way. And this is more than a blow to mere vanity, surely, since teeth set in living gums are now people's only tools.

  Really. Except for their teeth, people now have no tools at all.

  Mary Hepburn and the Captain had good teeth when they arrived on Santa Rosalia, although they were both well over thirty, thanks to regular visits to dentists, who drilled out rot and drained abscesses and so on. But they were toothless when they died. Selena MacIntosh was so young when she died in a suicide pact with Hisako Hiroguchi that she still had a lot of her teeth, but by no means all of them. Hisako was completely toothless then.

  And if I were criticizing human bodies as they were a million years ago, the kind of body I had, as though they were machines somebody intended to put on the market, I would have two main points to make--one of which I have surely made by now in my story: "The brain is much too big to be practical." The other would be: "Something is always going wrong with our teeth. They don't last anything like a lifetime, usually. What chain of events in evolution should we
thank for our mouthfuls of rotting crockery?"

  It would be nice to say that the Law of Natural Selection, which has done people so many favors in such a short time, had taken care of the tooth problem, too. In a way it has, but its solution has been draconian. It hasn't made teeth more durable. It has simply cut the average human life span down to about thirty years.

  Now back to Guayaquil, and *Andrew MacIntosh's telling Jesus Ortiz to put the filet mignons on the floor:

  "I beg your pardon, sir?" said Ortiz in English.

  "Put them both in front of the dog," said *MacIntosh.

  So Ortiz did that, his big brain in total confusion, revising entirely Ortiz's opinion of himself, humanity, the past and future, and the nature of the universe.

  Before Ortiz had time to straighten up from serving the dog, *MacIntosh said yet again, "Get out of here."

  It pains me even now, even a million years later, to write about such human misbehavior.

  A million years later, I feel like apologizing for the human race. That's all I can say.

  If Selena was Nature's experiment with blindness, then her father was Nature's experiment with heartlessness. Yes, and Jesus Ortiz was Nature's experiment with admiration for the rich, and I was Nature's experiment with insatiable voyeurism, and my father was Nature's experiment with cynicism, and my mother was Nature's experiment with optimism, and the Captain of the Bahia de Darwin was Nature's experiment with ill-founded self-confidence, and James Wait was Nature's experiment with purposeless greed, and Hisako Hiroguchi was Nature's experiment with depression, and Akiko was Nature's experiment with furriness, and on and on.

  I am reminded of one of my father's novels, The Era of Hopeful Monsters. It was about a planet where the humanoids ignored their most serious survival problems until the last possible moment. And then, with all the forests being killed and all the lakes being poisoned by acid rain, and all the groundwater made unpotable by industrial wastes and so on, the humanoids found themselves the parents of children with wings or antlers or fins, with a hundred eyes, with no eyes, with huge brains, with no brains, and on and on. These were Nature's experiments with creatures which might, as a matter of luck, be better planetary citizens than the humanoids. Most died, or had to be shot, or whatever, but a few were really quite promising, and they intermarried and had young like themselves.

  I will now call my own lifetime a million years ago "the Era of Hopeful Monsters," with most of the monsters novel in terms of personality rather than body type. And there are no such experiments, either with bodies or personalities, going on at the present time.

  *

  Big brains back then were not only capable of being cruel for the sake of cruelty. They could also feel all sorts of pain to which lower animals were entirely insensitive. No other sort of animal on earth could feel, as Jesus Ortiz felt as he descended in the elevator to the lobby, that he had been mangled by what *MacIntosh had said to him. He could not even be sure that there was enough of himself left to make living worthwhile.

  And his brain was so complicated that he was seeing all sorts of pictures inside his skull which no lower animal could ever see, all as imaginary, as purely matters of human opinion, as the fifty million dollars *Andrew MacIntosh was prepared to transfer instantly from Manhattan to Ecuador when the right words came over the telephone. He saw a picture of Senora Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, which was indistinguishable from pictures he had seen of the Virgin Mary. Ortiz was a Roman Catholic. Everybody in Ecuador was a Roman Catholic. The von Kleists were all Roman Catholics. Even the cannibals in the Ecuadorian rain forest, the elusive Kanka-bonos, were Roman Catholics.

  This Senora Kennedy was beautiful and sad and pure and kind and all powerful. In the mind of Ortiz, though, she also presided over a host of minor deities, who were also going to take part in "the Nature Cruise of the Century," which included the six guests already at the hotel. Ortiz had expected nothing but goodness from any of them, and felt, as had most Ecuadorians until hunger started to set in, that their coming to Ecuador would be a glorious moment in their nation's history, and that every conceivable luxury should be lavished on them.

  But now the truth about one of these supposedly wonderful visitors, *Andrew MacIntosh, had polluted Ortiz's mental picture not only of all the other minor deities, but of Senora Kennedy herself.

  So that head-and-shoulders portrait grew fangs like a vampire, and the skin dropped off the face, but the hair stayed on. It was a grinning skull now, wishing nothing but pestilence and death for little Ecuador.

  It was a scary picture, and Ortiz could not make it go away. He thought that he might be able to ditch it in the heat outside, so he crossed the lobby, heedless of Siegfried von Kleist's calls from the bar. Von Kleist was asking him what was the matter, where was he going, and so on. Ortiz was the hotel's best employee, the most loyal and resourceful and uniformly cheerful one, and *von Kleist really needed him.

  Here is why the hotel manager had no children, incidentally, although he was heterosexual and his sperm looked fine under a microscope and so on: There was a fifty-fifty chance that he was a carrier of an inherited and incurable disease of the brain, unknown in the present day, called Huntington's chorea. Back then, Huntington's chorea was one of the thousand most common diseases which Mandarax could diagnose.

  It is a matter of pure, gambling-casino luck that there are no carriers of Huntington's chorea today. It was the same dumb luck which had made *Siegfried von Kleist a possible carrier back then. His father had learned that he was a carrier only in middle life, after he had reproduced twice.

  And that meant, of course, that *Siegfried's taller and older and more glamorous brother, Adolf, the captain of the Bahia de Darwin, might also be a carrier. So *Siegfried, who was about to die without issue, and Adolf, who would eventually become the common sire of the entire human race, had both, for admirably unselfish reasons, declined to engage in biologically significant copulation a million years ago.

  *Siegfried and Adolf kept it a secret that they might have this defect in their genes. That secrecy spared them personal embarrassment, surely--but it protected all their relatives, too. If it had been generally known that the brothers might transmit Huntington's chorea to their offspring, all the von Kleists would likely have found it difficult to make good marriages, even though there was no chance that they, too, were carriers.

  The thing was: The disease, if they had it, had come to the brothers through their paternal grandmother, who was the second wife of their paternal grandfather, and who had only one child--their father, the Ecuadorian sculptor and architect, Sebastian von Kleist.

  How bad a defect was it? Well--it was certainly a lot worse than having a child all covered with fur.

  In fact, of all the horrible diseases known to Mandarax, Huntington's chorea may have been the worst. It was surely the most treacherous, the nastiest, of all surprises. It usually lay in ambush, and undetectable by any known test, until the wretch who had inherited it was well into his or her adult years. The father of the brothers, for example, led an unclouded and productive life until he was fifty-four--at which time he began to dance involuntarily, and to see things which weren't there. And then he killed his wife, a fact which was hushed up. The murder was reported to the police, and so treated by them, as a household accident.

  So these two brothers had been expecting to go crazy at any moment, to start dancing and hallucinating, for twenty-five years now. Each one had a fifty-fifty chance of doing that. If either one went crazy, that would be proof that he could pass on the defect to yet another generation. If either one became an old, old man without going crazy, that would be proof that he was not a carrier, nor would any of his descendants be carriers, either. It would turn out that he might have reproduced with impunity.

  *

  As things turned out, the flip of a coin, the Captain was not a carrier, but his brother was. At least poor *Siegfried wasn't going to suffer long. He started going crazy when he had only a f
ew more hours to live--on the afternoon of Thursday, November 27, 1986. There he was, standing in back of the bar at the El Dorado, with James Wait seated before him and the portrait of Charles Darwin at his back. He had just seen his most trustworthy employee, Jesus Ortiz, go out the front door, terribly upset about something.

  And then *Siegfried's big brain had him swoon into madness for a moment, and then back to sanity again.

  At that early stage of the disease, the only stage the unlucky brother would know, it was still possible for his soul to recognize that his brain had become dangerous, and to help him maintain a semblance of mental health through sheer willpower. So he kept a straight face and tried to return to business as usual by putting a question to Wait.

  "What do you do for a living, Mr. Flemming?" he inquired.

  When *Siegfried spoke these words, they came back to him hellishly, as though he were shouting into an empty steel barrel at the top of his lungs. He had become extremely sensitive to noises.

  And Wait's reply, although spoken softly, was also an ear splitter. "I used to be an engineer," said Wait, "but I lost interest in that and in everything, to tell the truth, after my wife died. I guess you'd call me a survivor now."

  So Jesus Ortiz left the hotel after having been so hideously insulted by *Andrew MacIntosh. He intended to walk all over the neighborhood until he had calmed down some. But he soon discovered that barbed wire and soldiers had turned the area around the hotel into a cordon sanitaire. The necessity for such a barrier was also evident. Crowds of people of all ages on the other side of the wire looked at him as soulfully as had Kazakh, the seeing-eye dog, hoping against hope that he might have food for them.