Slapstick, Or, Lonesome No More! - Kurt Vonnegut [22]
Oh, yes—and long before I became President of the United States of America, the Chinese had begun to combine those synthetic minds into intellects so flabbergasting that the Universe itself seemed to be saying to them, “I await your instructions. You can be anything you want to be. I will be anything you want me to be.”
Hi ho.
• • •
I learned about this Chinese scheme long after Eliza died, and long after I lost all my authority as President of the United States of America. There was nothing I could do with such knowledge by then.
One thing amused me, though: I was told that poor old Western Civilization had provided the Chinese the inspiration to put together such synthetic geniuses. The Chinese got the idea from the American and European scientists who put their heads together during the Second World War, with the single-minded intention of creating an atomic bomb.
Hi ho.
17
OUR POOR PARENTS had first believed that we were idiots. They had tried to adapt to that. Then they believed that we were geniuses. They had tried to adapt to that. Now they were told that we were dull normals, and they were trying to adapt to that.
As Eliza and I watched through peepholes, they made a pitiful and fog-bound plea for help. They asked Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner how they were to harmonize our dullness with the fact that we could converse so learnedly on so many subjects in so many languages.
Dr. Cordiner was razor-keen to enlighten them on just this point. “The world is full of people who are very clever at seeming much smarter than they really are,” she said. “They dazzle us with facts and quotations and foreign words and so on, whereas the truth is that they know almost nothing of use in life as it is really lived. My purpose is to detect such people—so that society can be protected from them, and so they can be protected from themselves.
“Your Eliza is a perfect example,” she went on. “She has lectured to me on economics and astronomy and music and every other subject you can think of, and yet she can neither read nor write, nor will she ever be able to.”
• • •
She said that our case was not a sad one, since there were no big jobs we wished to hold. “They have almost no ambition at all,” she said, “so life can’t disappoint them. They want only that life as they have known it should go on forever, which is impossible, of course.”
Father nodded sadly. “And the boy is the smarter of the two?”
“To the extent he can read and write,” said Dr. Cordiner. “He isn’t nearly as socially outgoing as his sister. When he is away from her, he becomes as silent as a tomb.
“I suggest that he be sent to some special school, which won’t be too demanding academically or too threatening socially, where he can learn to paddle his own canoe.”
“Do what?” said Father.
Dr. Cordiner told him again. “Paddle his own canoe,” she said.
• • •
Eliza and I should have kicked our way through the wall at that point—should have entered the library ragingly, in an explosion of plaster and laths.
But we had sense enough to know that our power to eavesdrop at will was one of the few advantages we had. So we stole back to our bedrooms, and then burst into the corridor, and came running down the front stairs and across the foyer and into the library, doing something we had never done before. We were sobbing.
We announced that, if anybody tried to part us, we would kill ourselves.
• • •
Dr. Cordiner laughed at this. She told our parents that several of the questions in her tests were designed to detect suicidal tendencies. “I absolutely guarantee you,” she said, “that the last thing either one of these two would do would be to commit suicide.”
Her saying this so jovially was a tactical mistake on her part, for it caused something in Mother to snap. The atmosphere in the room became electrified as Mother stopped being a weak and polite and credulous doll.
Mother did not say anything at first. But she had clearly become subhuman in the finest sense.