Cat's Cradle (17 page)

“I know I’ve got limitations,” Frank continued. “They’re the same limitations my father had.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve got a lot of very good ideas, just the way my father did,” Frank told me and the waterfall, “but he was no good at facing the public, and neither am I.”

“Y
OU’LL TAKE THE JOB
?” Frank inquired anxiously.

“No,” I told him.

“Do you know anybody who
might
want the job?” Frank was giving a classic illustration of what Bokonon calls
duffle. Duffle
, in the Bokononist sense, is the destiny of thousands upon thousands of persons when placed in the hands of a
stuppa
. A
stuppa
is a fogbound child.

I laughed.

“Something’s funny?”

“Pay no attention when I laugh,” I begged him. “I’m a notorious pervert in that respect.”

“Are you laughing at me?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Word of honor?”

“Word of honor.”

“People used to make fun of me all the time.”

“You must have imagined that.”

“They used to yell things at me. I didn’t imagine
that.”

“People are unkind sometimes without meaning
to be,” I suggested. I wouldn’t have given him my word of honor on that.

“You know what they used to yell at me?”

“No.”

“They used to yell at me, ‘Hey, X-9, where you going?’”

“That doesn’t seem too bad.”

“That’s what they used to call me,” said Frank in sulky reminiscence, “ ‘Secret Agent X-9.’”

I didn’t tell him I knew that already.

“ ‘Where are you going, X-9?’” Frank echoed again.

I imagined what the taunters had been like, imagined where Fate had eventually goosed and chivvied them to. The wits who had yelled at Frank were surely nicely settled in deathlike jobs at General Forge and Foundry, at Ilium Power and Light, at the Telephone Company….

And here, by God, was Secret Agent X-9, a Major General, offering to make me king … in a cave that was curtained by a tropical waterfall.

“They really would have been surprised if I’d stopped and told them where I was going.”

“You mean you had some premonition you’d end up here?” It was a Bokononist question.

“I was going to Jack’s Hobby Shop,” he said, with no sense of anticlimax.

“Oh.”

“They all knew I was going there, but they didn’t
know what really went on there. They would have been really surprised—especially the girls—if they’d found out what
really
went on. The girls didn’t think I knew anything about girls.”

“What
really
went on?”

“I was screwing Jack’s wife every day. That’s how come I fell asleep all the time in high school. That’s how come I never achieved my full potential.”

He roused himself from this sordid recollection. “Come on. Be President of San Lorenzo. You’d be real good at it, with your personality. Please?”

A
ND THE TIME OF NIGHT
and the cave and the waterfall—and the stone angel in Ilium….

And 250,000 cigarettes and 3,000 quarts of booze, and two wives and no wife….

And no love waiting for me anywhere….

And the listless life of an ink-stained hack….

And
Pabu
, the moon, and
Borasisi
, the sun, and their children….

All things conspired to form one cosmic
vin-dit
,
one mighty shove into Bokononism, into the belief that God was running my life and that He had work for me to do.

And, inwardly, I
sarooned
, which is to say that I acquiesced to the seeming demands of my
vin-dit
.

Inwardly, I agreed to become the next President of San Lorenzo.

Outwardly, I was still guarded, suspicious. “There must be a catch,” I hedged.

“There isn’t.”

“There’ll be an election?”

“There never has been. We’ll just announce who the new President is.”

“And nobody will object?”

“Nobody objects to anything. They aren’t interested. They don’t care.”

“There
has
to be a catch!”

“There’s kind of one,” Frank admitted.

“I knew it!” I began to shrink from my
vin-dit
. “What is it? What’s the catch?”

“Well, it isn’t really a catch, because you don’t have to do it, if you don’t want to. It
would
be a good idea, though.”

“Let’s hear this great idea.”

“Well, if you’re going to be President, I think you really ought to marry Mona. But you don’t have to, if you don’t want to. You’re the boss.”

“She would
have
me?”

“If she’d have me, she’d have you. All you have to do is ask her.”

“Why should she say yes?”

“It’s predicted in
The Books of Bokonon
that she’ll marry the next President of San Lorenzo,” said Frank.

F
RANK BROUGHT
M
ONA
to her father’s cave and left us alone.

We had difficulty in speaking at first. I was shy.

Her gown was diaphanous. Her gown was azure. It was a simple gown, caught lightly at the waist by a gossamer thread. All else was shaped by Mona herself Her breasts were like pomegranates or what you will, but like nothing so much as a young woman’s breasts.

Her feet were all but bare. Her toenails were exquisitely manicured. Her scanty sandals were gold.

“How—how do you do?” I asked. My heart was pounding. Blood boiled in my ears.

“It is not possible to make a mistake,” she assured me.

I did not know that this was a customary greeting
given by all Bokononists when meeting a shy person. So, I responded with a feverish discussion of whether it was possible to make a mistake or not.

“My God, you have no idea how many mistakes I’ve already made. You’re looking at the world’s champion mistakemaker,” I blurted—and so on. “Do you have any idea what Frank just said to me?”

“About
me?”

“About everything, but
especially
about you.”

“He told you that you could have me, if you wanted.”

“Yes.”

“That’s true.”

“I—I—I …”

“Yes?”

“I don’t know what to say next.”

“Boko-maru
would help,” she suggested.

“What?”

“Take off your shoes,” she commanded. And she removed her sandals with the utmost grace.

I am a man of the world, having had, by a reckoning I once made, more than fifty-three women. I can say that I have seen women undress themselves in every way that it can be done. I have watched the curtains part on every variation of the final act.

And yet, the one woman who made me groan involuntarily did no more than remove her sandals.

I tried to untie my shoes. No bridegroom ever did worse. I got one shoe off, but knotted the other one
tight. I tore a thumbnail on the knot; finally ripped off the shoe without untying it.

Then off came my socks.

Mona was already sitting on the floor, her legs extended, her round arms thrust behind her for support, her head tilted back, her eyes closed.

It was up to me now to complete my first—my first—my first, Great God …

Boko-maru
.

T
HESE ARE NOT
Bokonon’s words. They are mine.

Sweet wraith,
Invisible mist of …
I am—
My soul—
Wraith lovesick o’erlong,
O’erlong alone:
Wouldst another sweet soul meet?
Long have I
Advised thee ill
As to where two souls
Might tryst.
My soles, my soles!
My soul, my soul,
Go there,
Sweet soul;
Be kissed.
Mmmmmmm.

“D
O YOU FIND IT EASIER
to talk to me now?” Mona inquired.

“As though I’d known you for a thousand years,” I confessed. I felt like crying. “I love you, Mona.”

“I love you.” She said it simply.

“What a fool Frank was!”

“Oh?”

“To give you up.”

“He did not love me. He was going to marry me only because ‘Papa’ wanted him to. He loves another.”

“Who?”

“A woman he knew in Ilium.”

The lucky woman had to be the wife of the owner of Jack’s Hobby Shop. “He told you?”

“Tonight, when he freed me to marry you.”

“Mona?”

“Yes?”

“Is—is there anyone else in your life?”

She was puzzled. “Many,” she said at last.

“That you
love?”

“I love everyone.”

“As—as much as me?”

“Yes.” She seemed to have no idea that this might bother me.

I got off the floor, sat in a chair, and started putting my shoes and socks back on.

“I suppose you—you perform—you do what we just did with—with other people?”

“Boko-maru?”

“Boko-maru.”

“Of course.”

“I don’t want you to do it with anybody but me from now on,” I declared.

Tears filled her eyes. She adored her promiscuity; was angered that I should try to make her feel shame. “I make people happy. Love is good, not bad.”

“As your husband, I’ll want all your love for myself.”

She stared at me with widening eyes. “A
sin-wat!”

“What was that?”

“A
sin-wat!”
she cried. “A man who wants all of somebody’s love. That’s very bad.”

“In the case of marriage, I think it’s a very good thing. It’s the only thing.”

She was still on the floor, and I, now with my shoes and socks back on, was standing. I felt very tall, though I’m not very tall; and I felt very strong, though I’m not very strong; and I was a respectful stranger to my own voice. My voice had a metallic authority that was new.

As I went on talking in ball-peen tones, it dawned on me what was happening, what was happening already. I was already starting to rule.

I told Mona that I had seen her performing a sort of vertical
boko-maru
with a pilot on the reviewing stand shortly after my arrival. “You are to have nothing more to do with him,” I told her. “What is his name?”

“I don’t even know,” she whispered. She was looking down now.

“And what about young Philip Castle?”

“You mean
boko-maru?”

“I mean anything and everything. As I understand it, you two grew up together.”

“Yes.”

“Bokonon tutored you both?”

“Yes.” The recollection made her radiant again.

“I suppose there was plenty of
boko-maruing
in those days.”

“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. “Goodbye.”

“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.

S
O
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.”

W
E 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.