Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle

The people on the seaward parapet looked in astonishment at the empty socket where the tower had stood. Then I could hear rockslides of all sizes in a conversation that was almost orchestral.

The conversation went very fast, and new voices entered in. They were the voices of the castle’s timbers lamenting that their burdens were becoming too great.

And then a crack crossed the battlement like lightning, ten feet from my curling toes.

It separated me from my fellow men.

The castle groaned and wept aloud.

The others comprehended their peril. They, along with tons of masonry, were about to lurch out and down. Although the crack was only a foot wide, people began to cross it with heroic leaps.

Only my complacent Mona crossed the crack with a simple step.

The crack gnashed shut; opened wider, leeringly. Still trapped on the canted deathtrap were H. Lowe Crosby and his Hazel and Ambassador Horlick Minton and his Claire.

Philip Castle and Frank and I reached across the abyss to haul the Crosbys to safety. Our arms were now extended imploringly to the Mintons.

Their expressions were bland. I can only guess what was going through their minds. My guess is that they were thinking of dignity, of emotional proportion above all else.

Panic was not their style. I doubt that suicide was their style either. But their good manners killed them, for the doomed crescent of castle now moved away from us like an ocean liner moving away from a dock.

The image of a voyage seems to have occurred to the voyaging Mintons, too, for they waved to us with wan amiability.

They held hands.

They faced the sea.

Out they went; then down they went in a cataclysmic rush, were gone!

The ragged rim of oblivion was now inches from my curling toes. I looked down. My lukewarm sea had swallowed all. A lazy curtain of dust was wafting out to sea, the only trace of all that fell.

The palace, its massive, seaward mask now gone, greeted the north with a leper’s smile, snaggle-toothed and bristly. The bristles were the splintered ends of timbers. Immediately below me a large chamber had been laid open. The floor of that chamber, unsupported, stabbed out into space like a diving platform.

I dreamed for a moment of dropping to the platform, of springing up from it in a breath-taking swan dive, of folding my arms, of knifing downward into a blood-warm eternity with never a splash.

I was recalled from this dream by the cry of a darting bird above me. It seemed to be asking me what had happened. “Pootee-phweet?” it asked.

We all looked up at the bird, and then at one another. We backed away from the abyss, full of dread. And, when I stepped off the paving stone that had supported me, the stone began to rock. It was no more stable than a teeter-totter. And it tottered now over the diving platform.

Down it crashed onto the platform, made the platform a chute. And down the chute came the furnishings still remaining in the room below.

A xylophone shot out first, scampering fast on its tiny wheels. Out came a bedside table in a crazy race with a bounding blowtorch. Out came chairs in hot pursuit.

And somewhere in that room below, out of sight, something mightily reluctant to move was beginning to move.

Down the chute it crept. At last it showed its golden bow. It was the boat in which dead “Papa” lay.

It reached the end of the chute. Its bow nodded. Down it tipped. Down it fell, end over end.

“Papa” was thrown clear, and he fell separately.

I closed my eyes.

There was a sound like that of the gentle closing of a portal as big as the sky, the great door of heaven being closed softly. It was a grand AH-WHOOM.

I opened my eyes — and all the sea was ice-nine . The moist green earth was a blue-white pearl. The sky darkened. Borasisi , the sun, became a sickly yellow ball, tiny and cruel.

The sky was filled with worms. The worms were tornadoes.

I looked up at the sky where the bird had been. An enormous worm with a violet mouth was directly overhead. It buzzed like bees. It swayed. With obscene peristalsis, it ingested air.

We humans separated; fled my shattered battlements tumbled down staircases on the landward side.

Only H. Lowe Crosby and his Hazel cried out. “American! American!” they cried, as though tornadoes were interested in the granfalloons to which their victims belonged.

I could not see the Crosbys. They had descended by another staircase. Their cries and the sounds of others, panting and running, came gabbling to me through a corridor of the castle. My only companion was my heavenly Mona, who had followed noiselessly.

When I hesitated, she slipped past me and opened the door to the anteroom of “Papa’s” suite. The walls and roof of the anteroom were gone. But the stone floor remained. And in its center was the manhole cover of the oubliette. Under the wormy sky, in the flickering violet light from the mouths of tornadoes that wished to eat us, I lifted the cover.

The esophagus of the dungeon was fitted with iron rungs. I replaced the manhole cover from within. Down those iron rungs we went.

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.”

The Sixth Book of The Books of Bokonon 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.

In any case, there’s bound to be much crying.

But the oubliette alone will let you think while dying.

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 oubliette.

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.