Vonnegut, Kurt – Cat’s Cradle

I wasn’t half so curious about the living, probably because I sensed accurately that I would first have to contemplate a lot of dead. I saw no columns of smoke from possible campfires; but they would have been hard to see against an horizon of worms.

One thing did catch my eye: a lavender corona about the queer plug that was the peak on the hump of Mount McCabe. It seemed to be calling me, and I had a silly, cinematic notion of climbing that peak with Mona. But what would it mean?

We were walking into the wrinkles now at the foot of Mount McCabe. And Mona, as though aimlessly, left my side, left the road, and climbed one of the wrinkles. I followed.

I joined her at the top of the ridge. She was looking down raptly into a broad, natural bowl. She was not crying.

She might well have cried.

In that bowl were thousands upon thousands of dead. On the lips of each decedent was the blue-white frost of ice-nine.

Since the corpses were not scattered or tumbled about, it was clear that they had been assembled since the withdrawal of the frightful winds. And, since each corpse had its finger in or near its mouth, I understood that each person had delivered himself to this melancholy place and then poisoned himself with ice-nine.

There were men, women,, and children, too, many in the attitudes of boko-maru. All faced the center of the bowl, as though they were spectators in an amphitheater.

Mona and I looked at the focus of all those frosted eyes, looked at the center of the bowl. There was a round clearing there, a place in which one orator might have stood.

Mona and I approached the clearing gingerly, avoiding the morbid statuary. We found a boulder in it. And under the boulder was a penciled note which said:

To whom it may concern: These people around you are almost all of the survivors on San Lorenzo of the winds that followed the freezing of the sea. These people made a captive of the spurious holy man named Bokonon. They brought him here, placed him at their center, and commanded him to tell them exactly what God Almighty was up to and what they should now do. The mountebank told them that God was surely trying to kill them, possible because He was through with them, and that they should have the good manners to die. This, as you can see, they did.

The note was signed by Bokonon.

I Am Slow to Answer 121

“What a cynic!” I gasped. I looked up from the note and gazed around the death-filled bowl. “Is he here somewhere?”

“I do not see him,” said Mona mildly. She wasn’t depressed or angry. In fact, she seemed to verge on laughter. “He always said he would never take his own advice, because he knew it was worthless.”

“He’d better be here!” I said bitterly. “Think of the gall of the man, advising all these people to kill themselves!”

Now Mona did laugh. I had never heard her laugh. Her laugh was startlingly deep and raw.

“This strikes you as funny?”

She raised her arms lazily. “It’s all so simple, that’s all. It solves so much for so many, so simply.”

And she went strolling up among the petrified thousands, still laughing. She paused about midway up the slope and faced me. She called down to me, “Would you wish any of these alive again, if you could? Answer me quickly.

“Not quick enough with your answer,” she called playfully, after half a minute had passed. And, still laughing a little, she touched her finger to the ground, straightened up, and touched the finger to her lips and died.

Did I weep? They say I did. H. Lowe Crosby and his Hazel and little Newton Hoenikker came upon me as I stumbled down the road. They were in Bolivar’s one taxicab, which had been spared by the storm. They tell me I was crying. Hazel cried, too, cried for joy that I was alive.

They coaxed me into the cab.

Hazel put her arm around me. “You’re with your mom, now. Don’t you worry about a thing.”

I let my mind go blank. I closed my eyes. It was with deep, idiotic relief that I leaned on that fleshy, humid, barn-yard fool.

The Swiss Family Robinson 122

They took me to what was left of Franklin Hoenikker’s house at the head of the waterfall. What remained was the cave under the waterfall, which had become a sort of igloo under a translucent, blue-white dome of ice-nine.

The m�nage consisted of Frank, little Newt, and the Crosbys. They had survived in a dungeon in the palace, one far shallower and more unpleasant than the oubliette. They had moved out the moment the winds had abated, while Mona and I had stayed underground for another three days.

As it happened, they had found the miraculous taxicab waiting for them under the arch of the palace gate. They had found a can of white paint, and on the front doors of the cab Frank had painted white stars, and on the roof he had painted the letters of a granfalloon: U.S.A.

“And you left the paint under the arch,” I said.

“How did you know?” asked Crosby.

“Somebody else came along and wrote a poem.”

I did not inquire at once as to how Angela Hoenikker Conners and Philip and Julian Castle had met their ends, for I would have had to speak at once about Mona. I wasn’t ready to do that yet.

I particularly didn’t want to discuss the death of Mona since, as we rode along in the taxi, the Crosbys and little Newt seemed so inappropriately gay.

Hazel gave me a clue to the gaiety. “Wait until you see how we live. We’ve got all kinds of good things to eat. Whenever we want water, we just build a campfire and melt some. The Swiss Family Robinson—that’s what we call ourselves.”

Of Mice and Men 123

A curious six months followed—the six months in which I wrote this book. Hazel spoke accurately when she called our little society the Swiss Family Robinson, for we had survived a storm, were isolated, and then the living became very easy indeed. It was not without a certain Walt Disney charm.

No plants or animals survived, it’s true. But ice-nine preserved pigs and cows and little deer and windrows of birds and berries until we were ready to thaw and cook them. Moreover, there were tons of canned goods to be had for the grubbing in the ruins of Bolivar. And we seemed to be the only people left on San Lorenzo.

Food was no problem, and neither were clothing or shelter, for the weather was uniformly dry and dead and hot. Our health was monotonously good. Apparently all the germs were dead, too—or napping.

Our adjustment became so satisfactory, so complacent, that no one marveled or protested when Hazel said, “One good thing anyway, no mosquitoes.”

She was sitting on a three-legged stool in the clearing where Frank’s house had stood. She was sewing strips of red, white, and blue cloth together. Like Betsy Ross, she was making an American flag. No one was unkind enough to point out to her that the red was really a peach, that the blue was nearly a Kelly green, and that the fifty stars she had cut out were six-pointed stars of David rather than five-pointed American stars.

Her husband, who had always been a pretty good cook, now simmered a stew in an iron pot over a wood fire nearby. He did all our cooking for us; he loved to cook.

“Looks good, smells good,” I commented.

He winked. “Don’t shoot the cook. He’s doing the best he can.”

In the background of this cozy conversation were the nagging dah-dah-dahs and dit-dit-dits of an automatic SOS transmitter Frank had made. It called for help both night and day.

“Save our soullllls,” Hazel intoned, singing along with the transmitter as she sewed, “save our soulllllls.”

“How’s the writing going?” Hazel asked me.

“Fine, Mom, just fine.”

“When you going to show us some of it?”

“When it’s ready, Mom, when it’s ready.”

“A lot of famous writers were Hoosiers.”

“I know.”

“You’ll be one of a long, long line.” She smiled hopefully. “Is it a funny book?”

“I hope so, Mom.”

“I like a good laugh.”

“I know you do.”

“Each person here had some specialty, something to give the rest. You write books that make us laugh, and Frank goes science things, and little Newt—he paints pictures for us all, and I sew, and Lowie cooks.”

“‘Many hands make much work light.’ Old Chinese proverb.”

“They were smart in a lot of ways, those Chinese were.”

“Yes, let’s ketp their memory alive.”

“I wish now I’d studied them more.”

“Well, it was hard to do, even under ideal conditions.”

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