Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [33]
“On Vicuna,” says the judge, “we lived as though there were no tomorrow.”
The patriotic bonfires of time were the worst, he says. When he was an infant, his parents held him up to coo and gurgle with delight as a million years of future were put to the torch in honor of the birthday of the queen. But by the time he was fifty, only a few weeks of future remained. Great rips in reality were appearing everywhere. People could walk through walls. His own speedboat became nothing more than a steering wheel. Holes appeared in vacant lots where children were playing, and the children fell in.
So all the Vicunians had to get out of their bodies and sail out into space without further ado. “Ting-a-ling,” they said to Vicuna.
“Chronological anomalies and gravitational thunderstorms and magnetic whirlpools tore the Vicunian families apart in space,” the story goes on, “scattered them far and wide.” The judge manages to stay with his formerly beautiful daughter for a while. She isn’t beautiful anymore, of course, because she no longer has a body. She finally loses heart, because every planet or moon they come to is so lifeless. Her father, having no way to restrain her, watches helplessly as she enters a crack in a rock and becomes its soul. Ironically, she does this on the moon of Earth, with that most teeming of all planets only two hundred and thirty-nine thousand miles away!
Before he actually lands at the Air Force base, though, he falls in with a flock of turkey buzzards. He wheels and soars with them and almost enters the ear of one. For all he knows about the social situation on Earth, these carrion eaters may be members of the ruling class.
He decides that lives led at the center of the Air Force base are too busy, too unreflective for him, so he goes up in the air again and spots a much more quiet cluster of buildings, which he thinks may be a meditation center for philosophers. He has no way of recognizing the place as a minimum security prison for white-collar criminals, since there were no such institutions back on Vicuna.
Back on Vicuna, he says, convicted white-collar criminals, defilers of trustingness, had their ears plugged up, so their souls couldn’t get out. Then their bodies were put into artificial ponds filled with excrement—up to their necks. Then deputy sheriffs drove high-powered speedboats at their heads.
The judge says he himself sentenced hundreds of people to this particular punishment and that the felons invariably argued that they had not broken the law, but merely violated its spirit, perhaps, just the least little bit. Before he condemned them, he would put a sort of chamberpot over his head, to make his words more resonant and awesome, and he would pronounce this formula: “Boys, you didn’t just get the spirit of the law. You got its body and soul this time.”
And, according to the judge, you could hear the deputies warming up their speedboats on the pond outside the courthouse: “vrooom-ah, vrooom-a, va-va-va-roooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom!”
6
THE JUDGE in Dr. Bob Fender’s story tries to guess which of the philosophers in the meditation center is the wisest and most contented. He decides that it is a little old man sitting on a cot in a second-story dormitory. Every so often that little old man is so delighted with his thoughts, evidently, that he claps three times.
So the judge flies into the ear of that little old man and immediately sticks to him forever, sticks to him, according to the story … as tightly as Formica to an epoxy-coated countertop.” And what does he hear in that little old man’s head but this:
Sally in the garden,
Sifting cinders,
Lifted up her leg
And farted like a man …
And so on.
It is quite an interesting story. There is