She was a ghost ship, out of sight of land and carrying the genes of her captain and seven of her ten passengers westward on an adventure which has lasted one million years so far.
I was the ghost of a ghost ship. I am the son of a big-brained science fiction writer, whose name was Kilgore Trout.
I was a deserter from the United States Marines.
I was given political asylum and then citizenship in Sweden, where I became a welder in a shipyard in Malmo. I was painlessly decapitated one day by a falling sheet of steel while working inside the hull of the Bahia de Darwin, at which time I refused to set foot in the blue tunnel leading into the Afterlife.
It has always been within my power to materialize, but I have done that only once, very early in the game--for a few wet and blustery moments during the storm my ship encountered in the North Atlantic during her voyage from Malmo to Guayaquil. I appeared in the crow's nest, and one Swedish member of the skeleton crew saw me up there. He had been drinking. My decapitated body was facing the stern, and my arms were upraised. In my hands I was holding my severed head as though it were a basketball.
So I was invisible as I stood next to Captain Adolf von Kleist on the bridge of the Bahia de Darwin as we awaited the end of our first night at sea after our hasty departure from Guayaquil. He had been awake all night, and was sober now, but had a terrible headache, which he had described to Mary Hepburn as "... a golden screw between my eyes."
He had other souvenirs of the previous evening's humiliating debauch--contusions and abrasions from the several falls he had taken while trying to get up on the roof of the bus. He would never have gotten that drunk if he had realized that he was going to be saddled with any responsibilities. He had already explained that to Mary, who had been up all night, too--nursing *James Wait on the sun deck, abaft of the officers' cabins.
*Wait had been put up there, with Mary's rolled-up blouse for a pillow, because the rest of the ship was so dark. At least there was starlight up there after the moon went down. The plan was to move him into a cabin when the sun came up, so he would not fry to death on the bare steel plates.
Everybody else was on the boat deck below. Selena MacIntosh was in the main saloon, using her dog for a pillow, and so were the six Kanka-bono girls. They were using each other for pillows. Hisako was in the head off the main saloon, and had fallen asleep while wedged between the toilet and the washbasin.
Mandarax, which Mary had turned over to the Captain, was in a drawer on the bridge. This was the only drawer on the whole ship with anything in it. It was slightly ajar, so that Mandarax had overheard and translated much of what had been said during the night. Thanks to a random setting, it translated everything into Kirghiz, including the Captain's plan of action, which went like this: They would go straight to the Galapagos island of Baltra, where there were docking facilities and an airfield and a small hospital. There was a powerful radio station there, so they would learn for certain what the two explosions had been, and how the rest of the world might be faring, in case a widespread shower of meteorites had taken place, or, as Mary had suggested, World War Three had begun.
Yes, and this plan might as well have been translated into Kirghiz, or some other language that practically nobody understood, because they were on a course which was going to cause them to miss the Galapagos Islands entirely.
His ignorance alone might have been enough to carry the ship far off course. But he compounded his mistakes during the first night, before he was sober, by changing course again and again in order to steer for the probable impact points in the ocean of shooting stars. His big brain, remember, had him believing that a meteorite shower was going on. Every time he saw a shooting star, he expected it to hit the ocean and cause a tidal wave.
So he would steer for it in order to receive the wave on the ship's sharp bow. When the sun came up, he could have been, thanks to his big brain, simply anywhere, and headed for simply anywhere.
Mary Hepburn, meanwhile, somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, next to *James Wait, was doing something people don't have brains enough to do anymore. She was reliving the past. She was a virgin again. She was in a sleeping bag. She was being awakened in the faintest light of dawn, by the call of a whippoorwill. She was camping in an Indiana state park--a living museum, a patch of what the area used to be before Europeans decreed that no plant or animal would be tolerated which was not tamed and edible by humankind. When young Mary stuck her head out of her cocoon, out of her sleeping bag, she saw rotting logs and an undammed stream. She lay on an aromatic mulch of eons of death and discard. There was plenty to eat if you were a microorganism or could digest leaves, but there was no hearty breakfast there for a human being of a million and thirty years ago.
It was early June. It was balmy.
The bird call was coming from a thicket of briars and sumac fifty paces away. She was glad for this alarm clock, for it had been her intention when she went to sleep to awake this early, and to think of her sleeping bag as a cocoon, and to emerge from it sinuously and voluptuously, as she was now doing, a vivacious adult.
What joy!
What satisfaction!
It was perfect, for the girlfriend she had brought with her slept on and on.
So she stole across the springy woodland floor to the thicket to see this fellow early bird. What she saw instead was a tall, skinny, earnest young man in a sailor suit. And it was he who was whistling the piercing call of a whippoorwill. This was Roy, her future husband.
She was annoyed and disoriented. The sailor suit so far inland was a particularly bizarre detail. She felt intruded upon, and that perhaps she should be frightened as well. But if this very strange person was going to come after her, he would have to get through a tangle of briars first. She had slept in her clothes, so she was fully dressed save for her stocking feet.
He had heard her coming. He had amazingly sharp ears. So did his father. It was a family trait. And he spoke first. "Hello," he said.
"Hello," she said. She would say later that she thought she was the only person in the garden of Eden, and then she came upon this creature in a sailor suit who was acting as though he already owned everything. And Roy would counter that she was the one, in fact, who acted as though she owned everything.
"What are you doing here?" she said.
"I didn't think people were supposed to sleep in this part of the park," he said. He was right about that, and Mary knew it. She and her friend were in violation of the rules of the living museum. They were in an area where only lower animals were supposed to be at night.
"You're a sailor?" she said.
And he said that, yes, he was--or had been until very recently. He had just been discharged from the Navy, and was hitchhiking around the country before going home, and found people were much more inclined to pick him up if he wore his uniform.
It would make no sense today for somebody to ask, as Mary asked Roy, "What are you doing here?" The reasons for being anywhere today are so invariably simple and obvious. Nobody has a tale as tangled as Roy's to tell: that he took his discharge in San Francisco, and cashed in his ticket, and bought a sleeping bag and hitchhiked to the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone National Park and some other places he had always wanted to see. He was especially fascinated by birds, and could talk to them in their own languages.
So he heard on a car radio that a pair of ivory-billed woodpeckers, a species believed to have been long extinct, had been sighted in this little state park in Indiana. He headed straight for there. The story would turn out to be a hoax. These big, beautiful inhabitants of primeval forests really were extinct, since human beings had destroyed all their natural habitats. No longer was there enough rotten wood and peace and quiet for them.
"They needed lots of peace and quiet," said Roy, "and so do I, and so do you, I guess, and I'm sorry if I disturbed you. I wasn't doing anything a bird wouldn't do."
Some automatic device clicked in her big brain, and her knees felt weak, and there was a
chilly feeling in her stomach. She was in love with this man.
They don't make memories like that anymore.
2
*JAMES WAIT interrupted Mary Hepburn's reverie with these words: "I love you so much. Please marry me. I'm so lonesome. I'm so scared."
"You save your strength, Mr. Flemming," she said. He had been proposing marriage intermittently all through the night.
"Give me your hand," he said.
"Every time I do, you won't give it back," she said.
"I promise I'll give it back," he said.
So she gave him her hand, and he gripped it feebly. He wasn't having any visions of the future or the past. He was little more than a fibrillating heart, just as Hisako Hiroguchi, wedged between the vibrating toilet and washbasin below, was little more than a fetus and a womb.
Hisako had nothing to live for but her unborn child, she thought.
People still hiccup as they always have, and they still find it very funny when somebody farts. And they still try to comfort those who are sick with soothing tones of voice. Mary's tone when she kept *James Wait company on the ship is a tone often heard today. With or without words, that tone conveys what a sick person wants to hear now, and what *Wait wanted to hear a million years ago.
Mary said things like this to *Wait in so many words, but her tone alone would have delivered the same messages: "We love you. You are not alone. Everything is going to be all right," and so on.
No comforter today, of course, has led a love life as complicated as Mary Hepburn's, and no sufferer today has led a love life as complicated as *James Wait's. Any human love story of today would have for its crisis the simplest of questions: whether the persons involved were in heat or not. Men and women now become helplessly interested in each other and the nubbins on their flippers and so on only twice a year--or, in times of fish shortages, only once a year. So much depends on fish.
Mary Hepburn and *James Wait could have their common sense wrecked by love, given the right set of circumstances, at almost any time.
There on the sun deck, just before the sun came up, *Wait was genuinely in love with Mary and Mary was genuinely in love with him--or, rather, with what he claimed to be. All through the night, she had called him "Mr. Flemming," and he had not asked her to call him by his first name. Why? Because he could not remember what his first name was supposed to be.
"I'll make you very rich," said *Wait.
"There, there," said Mary. "Now, now."
"Compound interest," he said.
"You save your strength, Mr. Flemming," she said.
"Please marry me," he said.
"We'll talk about that when we get to Baltra," she said. She had given him Baltra as something to live for. She had cooed and murmured to him all through the night about all the good things which were awaiting them on Baltra, as though it were a sort of paradise. There would be saints and angels to greet them on the dock there, with every kind of food and medicine.
He knew he was dying. "You'll be a very rich widow," he said.
"Let's not have any talk like that now," she said.
As for all the wealth she was going to inherit technically, since she really was going to marry him and then become his widow: The biggest-brained detectives in the world couldn't have begun to find a minor fraction of it. In community after community, he had created a prudent citizen who didn't exist, whose wealth was increasing steadily, even though the planet itself was growing ever poorer, and whose safety was guaranteed by the governments of the United States or Canada. His savings account in Guadalajara, Mexico, which was in pesos, had been wiped out by then.
If his wealth had continued to grow at the rate it was growing then, the *James Wait estate would now encompass the whole universe--galaxies, black holes, comets, clouds of asteroids and meteors and the Captain's meteorites and interstellar matter of every sort--simply everything.
Yes, and if the human population had continued to grow at the rate it was growing then, it would now outweigh the *James Wait estate, which is to say simply everything.
What impossible dreams of increase human beings used to have only yesterday, only a million years ago!
3
*WAIT HAD REPRODUCED, incidentally. Not only had he sent that antiques dealer down the blue tunnel into the Afterlife so long ago, he had also made possible the birth of an heir. By Darwinian standards, as both a murderer and a sire, he had done quite well, one would have to say.
He became a sire when he was only sixteen years old, the sexual prime of a human male a million years ago:
He was still in Midland City, Ohio, and it was a hot July afternoon, and he was mowing the lawn of a fabulously well-to-do automobile dealer and owner of local fast-food restaurants named Dwayne Hoover, who had a wife but no children. So Mr. Hoover was in Cincinnati on business, and Mrs. Hoover, whom *Wait had never seen, although he had mowed the lawn many times, was in the house. She was a recluse because, as *Wait had heard, she had a problem with alcohol and drugs prescribed by her doctor, and her big brain had simply become too erratic to be trusted in public.
*Wait was good-looking back then. His mother and father had also been good-looking. He was from a good-looking family. Despite the fact that it was so hot, *Wait would not take off his shirt--because he was so ashamed of all the scars he had from punishments inflicted by various foster parents. Later, when he was a prostitute on the island of Manhattan, his clients would find those scars, made by cigarettes and coat hangers and belt buckles and so on, very exciting.
*Wait was not looking for sexual opportunities. He had just about made up his mind to light out for Manhattan, and he did not want to do anything which might give the police an excuse for locking him up. He was well known to the police, who frequently questioned him about this or that burglary or whatever, although he had never committed an actual crime. The police were always watching him anyway. They would say to him things like "Sooner or later, Sonny, you're going to make a big mistake."
So Mrs. Hoover appeared in the front door in a skimpy bathing suit. There was a swimming pool out back. Her face was all raddled and addled, and her teeth were bad, but she still had a very beautiful figure. She asked him if he wouldn't like to come into the house, which was air-conditioned, and cool off with a glass of ice tea or lemonade.
The next thing *Wait knew, they were having sex in there, and she was saying they were two of a kind, both of them lost, and kissing his scars and so on.
Mrs. Hoover conceived, and gave birth to a son nine months later, which Mr. Hoover believed to be his own. It was a good-looking boy, who would grow up to be a good dancer and very musical, just like *Wait.
*Wait heard about the baby after he moved to Manhattan, but he could never consider it a relative. He would go years without thinking about it. And then his big brain would suddenly tell him for no good reason that somewhere in the world there was this young male walking around who wouldn't be in this world, if it weren't for him. It would make him feel creepy. That was much too big a result for such a little accident.
Why would he have wanted a son back then? It was the farthest thing from his mind.
The sexual prime for human males today, incidentally, comes at the age of six or so. When a six-year-old comes across a female in heat, there is no stopping him from engaging in sexual intercourse.
And I pity him, because I can still remember what I was like when I was sixteen. It was hell to be that excited. Then as now, orgasms gave no relief. Ten minutes after an orgasm, guess what? Nothing would do but that you have another one. And there was homework besides!
4
THESE PEOPLE on the Bahia de Darwin weren't uncomfortably hungry yet. Everybody's intestines, including those of *Kazakh, were still wringing the last of the digestible molecules from what they had eaten the previous afternoon. Nobody was consuming parts of his or her own body yet, the survival scheme of the Galapagos tortoises. The Kanka-bonos certainly knew what hunger was already. For the rest it would be a
discovery.
And the only two people who had to keep their strength up, and not just sleep all the time, were Mary Hepburn and the Captain. The Kanka-bono girls understood nothing about the ship or the ocean, and could make no sense of anything that was said to them in any language but Kanka-bono. Hisako was catatonic. Selena was blind, and *Wait was dying. That left only two people to steer the ship and care for *Wait.
During the first night, those two would agree that Mary should steer during the daytime, when the sun would tell her unambiguously which way was east, from which they were fleeing, and which way was west, where the supposed peace and plenty of Baltra lay. And the Captain would navigate by the stars at night.
Whoever wasn't steering would have to keep *Wait company, and presumably would catch some sleep while doing so. These were certainly long watches to stand. Then again, this was to be a very brief ordeal, since, according to the Captain's calculations, Baltra was only about forty hours from Guayaquil.
If they had ever reached Baltra, which they never did, they would have found it devastated and depopulated by yet another airmailed package of dagonite.
Human beings were so prolific back then that conventional explosions like that had few if any long-term biological consequences. Even at the end of protracted wars, there still seemed to be plenty of people around. Babies were always so plentiful that serious efforts to reduce the population by means of violence were doomed to failure. They no more left permanent injuries, except for the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, than did the Bahia de Darwin as it slit and roiled the trackless sea.
It was humanity's ability to heal so quickly, by means of babies, which encouraged so many people to think of explosions as show business, as highly theatrical forms of self-expression, and little more.
What humanity was about to lose, though, except for one tiny colony on Santa Rosalia, was what the trackless sea could never lose, so long as it was made of water: the ability to heal itself.