Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle

“Oh, yes!” she said happily.

“You aren’t to see him any more, either. Is that clear?”

“No.”

“No?”

“I will not marry a sin-wat .” She stood. “Good-bye.”

“Good-bye?” I was crushed.

“Bokonon tells us it is very wrong not to love everyone exactly the same. What does your religion say?”

“I — I don’t have one.”

“I do .”

I had stopped ruling. “I see you do,” I said.

“Good-bye, man-with-no-religion.” She went to the stone staircase.

“Mona…”

She stopped. “Yes?”

“Could I have your religion, if I wanted it?”

“Of course.”

“I want it.”

“Good. I love you.”

“And I love you,” I sighed.

So I became betrothed at dawn to the most beautiful woman in the world. And I agreed to become the next President of San Lorenzo.

“Papa” wasn’t dead yet, and it was Frank’s feeling that I should get “Papa’s” blessing, if possible. So, as Borasisi , the sun, came up, Frank and I drove to “Papa’s” castle in a Jeep we commandeered from the troops guarding the next President.

Mona stayed at Frank’s. I kissed her sacredly, and she went to sacred sleep.

Over the mountains Frank and I went, through groves of wild coffee trees, with the flamboyant sunrise on our right.

It was in the sunrise that the cetacean majesty of the highest mountain on the island, of Mount McCabe, made itself known to me. It was a fearful hump, a blue whale, with one queer stone plug on its back for a peak. In scale with a whale, the plug might have been the stump of a snapped harpoon, and it seemed so unrelated to the rest of the mountain that I asked Frank if it had been built by men.

He told me that it was a natural formation. Moreover, he declared that no man, as far as he knew, had ever been to the top of Mount McCabe.

“It doesn’t look very tough to climb,” I commented. Save for the plug at the top, the mountain presented inclines no more forbidding than courthouse steps. And the plug itself, from a distance at any rate, seemed conveniently laced with ramps and ledges.

“Is it sacred or something?” I asked.

“Maybe it was once. But not since Bokonon.”

“Then why hasn’t anybody climbed it?”

“Nobody’s felt like it yet.”

“Maybe I’ll climb it.”

“Go ahead. Nobody’s stopping you.”

We rode in silence.

“What is sacred to Bokononists?” I asked after a while.

“Not even God, as near as I can tell.”

“Nothing?”

“Just one thing.”

I made some guesses. “The ocean? The sun?”

“Man,” said Frank. “That’s all. Just man.”

We came at last to the castle.

It was low and black and cruel.

Antique cannons still lolled on the battlements. Vines and bird nests clogged the crenels, the machicolations, and the balistrariae.

Its parapets to the north were continuous with the scarp of a monstrous precipice that fell six hundred feet straight down to the lukewarm sea.

It posed the question posed by all such stone piles: how had puny men moved stones so big? And, like all such stone piles, it answered the question itself. Dumb terror had moved those stones so big.

The castle was built according to the wish of Tum-bumwa, Emperor of San Lorenzo, a demented man, an escaped slave. Tum-bumwa was said to have found its design in a child’s picture book.

A gory book it must have been.

Just before we reached the palace gate the ruts carried us through a rustic arch made of two telephone poles and a beam that spanned them.

Hanging from the middle of the beam was a huge iron hook. There was a sign impaled on the hook.

“This hook,” the sign proclaimed, “is reserved for Bokonon himself.”

I turned to look at the hook again, and that thing of sharp iron communicated to me that I really was going to rule. I would chop down the hook!

And I flattered myself that I was going to be a firm, just, and kindly ruler, and that my people would prosper.

Fata Morgana.

Mirage!

Frank and I couldn’t get right in to see “Papa.” Dr. Schlichter von Koenigswald, the physician in attendance, muttered that we would have to wait about half an hour. So Frank and I waited in the anteroom of “Papa’s” suite, a room without windows. The room was thirty feet square, furnished with several rugged benches and a card table. The card table supported an electric fan. The walls were stone. There were no pictures, no decorations of any sort on the walls.

There were iron rings fixed to the wall, however, seven feet off the floor and at intervals of six feet. I asked Frank if the room had ever been a torture chamber.

He told me that it had, and that the manhole cover on which I stood was the lid of an oubliette.

There was a listless guard in the anteroom. There was also a Christian minister, who was ready to take care of “Papa’s” spiritual needs as they arose. He had a brass dinner bell and a hatbox with holes drilled in it, and a Bible, and a butcher knife — all laid out on the bench beside him.

He told me there was a live chicken in the hatbox. The chicken was quiet, he said, because he had fed it tranquilizers.

Like all San Lorenzans past the age of twenty-five, he looked at least sixty. He told me that his name was Dr. Vox Humana, that he was named after an organ stop that had struck his mother when San Lorenzo Cathedral was dynamited in 1923. His father, he told me without shame, was unknown.

I asked him what particular Christian sect he represented, and I observed frankly that the chicken and the butcher knife were novelties insofar as my understanding of Christianity went.

“The bell,” I commented, “I can understand how that might fit in nicely.”

He turned out to be an intelligent man. His doctorate, which he invited me to examine, was awarded by the Western Hemisphere University of the Bible of Little Rock, Arkansas. He made contact with the University through a classified ad in Popular Mechanics , he told me. He said that the motto of the University had become his own, and that it explained the chicken and the butcher knife. The motto of the University was this:

MAKE RELIGION LIVE!

He said that he had had to feel his way along with Christianity, since Catholicism and Protestantism had been outlawed along with Bokononism.

“So, if I am going to be a Christian under those conditions, I have to make up a lot of new stuff.”

“ Zo ,” he said in dialect, “y eff jy bam gong be Kret-yeen hooner yoze kon-steez-yen, jy hap my yup oon lot nee stopf .”

Dr. Schlichter von Koenigswald now came out of “Papa’s” suite, looking very German, very tired. “You can see ‘Papa’ now.”

“We’ll be careful not to tire him,” Frank promised.

“If you could kill him,” said Von Koenigswald, “I think he’d be grateful.”

“Papa” Monzano and his merciless disease were in a bed that was made of a golden dinghy — tiller, painter, oarlocks and all, all gilt. His bed was the lifeboat of Bokonon’s old schooner, the Lady’s Slipper ; it was the lifeboat of the ship that had brought Bokonon and Corporal McCabe to San Lorenzo so long ago.

The walls of the room were white. But “Papa” radiated pain so hot and bright that the walls seemed bathed in angry red.

He was stripped from the waist up, and, his glistening belly wall was knotted. His belly shivered like a luffing sail.