Cat's Cradle (22 page)

And at the foot of the ladder we found a state secret. “Papa” Monzano had caused a cozy bomb shelter to be constructed there. It had a ventilation shaft, with a fan driven by a stationary bicycle. A tank of water was recessed in one wall. The water was sweet and wet, as yet untainted by
ice-nine
. And there was a chemical toilet, and a short-wave radio, and a Sears, Roebuck catalogue; and there were cases of delicacies,
and liquor, and candles; and there were bound copies of the
National Geographic
going back twenty years.

And there was a set of
The Books of Bokonon
.

And there were twin beds.

I lighted a candle. I opened a can of Campbell’s chicken gumbo soup and I put it on a Sterno stove. And I poured two glasses of Virgin Islands rum.

Mona sat on one bed. I sat down on the other.

“I am about to say something that must have been said by men to women several times before,” I informed her. “However, I don’t believe that these words have ever carried quite the freight they carry now.”

“Oh?”

I spread my hands. “Here we are.”

T
HE
S
IXTH
B
OOK
OF
T
HE
B
OOKS OF
B
OKONON
is devoted to pain, in particular to tortures inflicted by men on men. “If I am ever put to death on the hook,” Bokonon warns us, “expect a very human performance.”

Then he speaks of the rack and the peddiwinkus and the iron maiden and the
veglia
and the oubliette.

And so it was in Mona’s and my rock womb. At least we could think. And one thing I thought was that the creature comforts of the dungeon did nothing to mitigate the basic fact of oubliation.

During our first day and night underground, tornadoes rattled our manhole cover many times an hour. Each time the pressure in our hole would drop suddenly, and our ears would pop and our heads would ring.

As for the radio—there was crackling, fizzing static and that was all. From one end of the short-wave band to the other not one word, not one telegrapher’s beep, did I hear. If life still existed here and there, it did not broadcast.

Nor does life broadcast to this day.

This I assumed: tornadoes, strewing the poisonous blue-white frost of
ice-nine
everywhere, tore everyone and everything above ground to pieces. Anything that still lived would die soon enough of thirst—or hunger—or rage—or apathy.

I turned to
The Books of Bokonon
, still sufficiently unfamiliar with them to believe that they contained
spiritual comfort somewhere. I passed quickly over the warning on the title page of
The First Book:

In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.

And God said, “Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done.” And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close as mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. “What is the
purpose
of all this?” he asked politely.

“Everything must have a purpose?” asked God.

“Certainly,” said man.

“Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,” said God. And He went away.

I thought this was trash.

“Of course it’s trash!” says Bokonon.

And I turned to my heavenly Mona for comforting secrets a good deal more profound.

I was able, while mooning at her across the space
that separated our beds, to imagine that behind her marvelous eyes lurked mysteries as old as Eve.

I will not go into the sordid sex episode that followed. Suffice it to say that I was both repulsive and repulsed.

The girl was not interested in reproduction—hated the idea. Before the tussle was over, I was given full credit by her, and by myself, too, for having invented the whole bizarre, grunting, sweating enterprise by which new human beings were made.

Returning to my own bed, gnashing my teeth, I supposed that she honestly had no idea what love-making was all about. But then she said to me, gently, “It would be very sad to have a little baby now. Don’t you agree?”

“Yes,” I agreed murkily.

“Well, that’s the way little babies are made, in case you didn’t know.”

“T
ODAY
I
WILL BE
a Bulgarian Minister of Education,” Bokonon tells us. “Tomorrow I will be Helen of Troy.” His meaning is crystal clear: Each one of us has to be what he or she is. And, down in the oubliette, that was mainly what I thought—with the help of
The Books of Bokonon
.

Bokonon invited me to sing along with him:

I made up a tune to go with that and I whistled it under my breath as I drove the bicycle that drove the fan that gave us air, good old air.

“Man breathes in oxygen and exhales carbon dioxide,” I called to Mona.

“What?”

“Science.”

“Oh.”

“One of the secrets of life man was a long time understanding: Animals breathe in what animals breathe out, and vice versa.”

“I didn’t know.”

“You know now.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

When I’d bicycled our atmosphere to sweetness and freshness, I dismounted and climbed the iron rungs to see what the weather was like above. I did that several times a day. On that day, the fourth day, I perceived through the narrow crescent of the lifted manhole cover that the weather had become somewhat stabilized.

The stability was of a wildly dynamic sort, for the tornadoes were as numerous as ever, and tornadoes remain numerous to this day. But their mouths no longer gobbled and gnashed at the earth. The mouths in all directions were discretely withdrawn to an altitude of perhaps a half of a mile. And their altitude varied so little from moment to moment that San Lorenzo might have been protected by a tornado-proof sheet of glass.

We let three more days go by, making certain that the tornadoes had become as sincerely reticent as they seemed. And then we filled canteens from our water tank and we went above.

The air was dry and hot and deathly still.

I had heard it suggested one time that the seasons
in the temperate zone ought to be six rather than four in number: summer, autumn, locking, winter, unlocking, and spring. And I remembered that as I straightened up beside our manhole, and stared and listened and sniffed.

There were no smells. There was no movement. Every step I took made a gravelly squeak in blue-white frost. And every squeak was echoed loudly. The season of locking was over. The earth was locked up tight.

It was winter, now and forever.

I helped my Mona out of our hole. I warned her to keep her hands away from the blue-white frost and to keep her hands away from her mouth, too. “Death has never been quite so easy to come by,” I told her. “All you have to do is touch the ground and then your lips and you’re done for.”

She shook her head and sighed. “A very bad mother.”

“What?”

“Mother Earth—she isn’t a very good mother any more.”

“Hello? Hello?” I called through the palace ruins. The awesome winds had torn canyons through that great stone pile. Mona and I made a half-hearted search for survivors—half-hearted because we could sense no life. Not even a nibbling, twinkle-nosed rat had survived.

The arch of the palace gate was the only man-made form untouched. Mona and I went to it. Written
at its base in white paint was a Bokononist “Calypso.” The lettering was neat. It was new. It was proof that someone else had survived the winds. The “Calypso” was this:

I
RECALLED AN ADVERTISEMENT
for a set of children’s books called
The Book of Knowledge
. In that ad, a trusting boy and girl looked up at their father. “Daddy,” one asked, “what makes the sky blue?” The answer, presumably, could be found in
The Book of Knowledge
.

If I had had my daddy beside me as Mona and I walked down the road from the palace, I would have had plenty of questions to ask as I clung to his hand. “Daddy, why are all the trees broken? Daddy, why are all the birds dead? Daddy, what makes the sky so sick and wormy? Daddy, what makes the sea so hard and still?”

It occurred to me that I was better qualified to answer those tough questions than any other human being, provided there were any other human beings alive. In case anyone was interested, I knew what had gone wrong—where and how.

So what?

I wondered where the dead could be. Mona and I ventured more than a mile from our oubliette without seeing one dead human being.

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:

The note was signed by Bokonon.

“W
HAT 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.

T
HEY 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
.