The World of Kurt Vonnegut: Peace in Amber

Hugh Howey

Kindle Worlds

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Text copyright © 2014 Hugh Howey

All rights reserved.

This work was made possible by a special license through the Kindle Worlds publishing program. All characters, scenes, events, themes, plots, and related elements of The World of Kurt Vonnegut remain the exclusive copyrighted and/or trademarked property of RosettaBooks LLC, its affiliates, or licensors.

For more information on the Kindle Worlds publishing program:
www.amazon.com/kindleworlds

No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

Published by Kindle Worlds, Seattle

www.apub.com

Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Kindle Worlds are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.

eISBN: 9781477870044

Cover design by Jason Gurley

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

All this happened, more or less:

One morning I stood beneath a bright blue sky and watched it blossom orange and black as jet fuel went suddenly alight. I saw men and women jump and plummet like flightless birds, the howling wind sucking suit jackets from backs and whipping skirts in a frenzy. I heard the sharp cry of bending steel as it screeched downward, and I smelled that awful char of office furniture and asbestos as it burned and burned for days and days.

The movies get most of it right, I learned. Fireballs look just so. Crowds run just like this, with their eyes wide and with less screaming than you might imagine, just mouths agape as they push each other out of the way. We devolve into animals when we creep near to death. The movies with the big stomping lizards that crush buildings get most of it right. I think the lizards are something we remember, deep in our bones and in our DNA from earlier times.
Run
, we think, as buildings crumble.
Run
, as people perish.

I was a yacht captain for a number of years, which is decidedly less glamorous than it sounds to the untrained ear.
Yacht
and
captain
are a couple of five-dollar words, but the yachts were not mine and the rank was largely unearned. I was never a private like Billy Pilgrim, never worked my way through any ranks. I lived on a sailboat while I was in college, took a two-week course that required very little study, passed some government tests, and then billionaires let me drive their boats from one harbor to the next. That was my job. A glorified bus driver who also plunged the toilets, scrubbed the decks, and polished the stainless steel.

At the age of twenty-five, I was a certified captain living on a seventy-four-foot yacht in the shadow of two of the tallest buildings in the Western Hemisphere. The shadows of those buildings draped across North Cove Marina and cooled me on the hot summer days of the year 2001. Each morning, the sun rose above the Atlantic—far across the other side of Manhattan Island—and peered down at me between colossal towers of metal and glass. It was in those shadows that I scrubbed the decks, getting them clean before the broiling renewed. Here was my brief respite, given to me in those towering dark patches, where now there is only blue sky.

On the planet Tralfamadore, there lies a zoo comprised of scattered geodesic domes. Inside each dome are members of various races, kidnapped from their home planets and housed among the representative clutter of their former abodes. There are sea snakes from Zyx writhing in a flooded dome amid fake and crudely painted spike coral. The Zyx talk to one another by squeaks and blown bubbles, and so old conversations find themselves trapped at the top of the dome in a pocket of noise. The Zyx have lived on Tralfamadore long enough to have relinquished any hope of seeing their home reefs again, any dream of wrapping their tails around loved ones. But not long enough yet for the water to have lost that foul tinge of regret and despair, that smell of paint leaching from plastic coral.

Adjacent to this flooded dome are five balls of fur that roll about and bump into one another. The floor is an uneven series of steps and ramps carved out of dense foam and sprayed to look like the indigenous rock of the dwarf planet Upelote. The five Upes spin senselessly and carom off the large dome’s glass walls. These poor and hapless aliens are still shaken from the long flight aboard the Tralfamadorian zookeeper’s starship. The gravity isn’t right there on Tralfamadore. Neither are the suns and stars.

Across from the Upes, two Earthlings sit on display: Billy Pilgrim and Montana Wildhack. Montana is just waking up from her long slumber aboard a flying saucer. She was picked up two stops before the Upes, kidnapped to give Billy Pilgrim company. Her eyes flutter open, and then her mouth. Montana screams and screams while hundreds of Tralfamadorians gather around the dome to take in this newest exhibit. The heads of these strange aliens resemble oversized hands, a single eye in the palm. The Tralfamadorians clap by making fists, over and over. Montana Wildhack sees them through the glass and thinks that this is the time when people stir from their nightmares. This is the time. She goes on thinking this, screaming and screaming while the Tralfamadorians make their delighted fists.

It is one thing to know that there are more than three dimensions; it is another thing altogether to see them. It isn’t so hard to see up to nine dimensions, but humans rarely attempt the feat. They are happy enough to see in three. Many stick to two. Some are content with one and travel through life the way a subway moves through the earth. They are always on some line. Here is their stop. Work and home. Home and work. Back and forth, with a magazine read, perhaps, between the two. There was one woman who lived her entire life in a single dimension, never moving from where she was born. Seventy-five years later, she was buried on that very spot, and by all appearances seemed happy enough on most days. By the time Montana Wildhack was abducted from her home in Palm Springs, California, more and more people were attempting to live a life in one dimension. Advances in computing technology known as Zynga were making this more and more feasible. It was becoming
A Thing.

On Tralfamadore, there lived a race of beings shaped like plungers with hands for heads. They saw in four dimensions by natural course. They couldn’t see the world in any other way. For them, time didn’t slide by like the shadows of buildings. They saw every state of the world all at once, not in slices like Earthlings do (those who even bother).

Listen: There is Montana Wildhack inside a dome, screaming and terrified. There she is on a couch in a rented office space in Hollywood, California, silent and similarly afraid. A friend has sent her to audition for a movie. She is sixteen, but her driver’s license says she is older. A man who is a director but likes to call himself a producer keeps staring at the locket that hangs between Montana’s breasts. He rubs his mustache over and over and asks what she’s been in before. The room smells of old cigars and sweat. Montana Wildhack will be a famous movie star in a few years, and of course any Tralfamadorian can see that. But all Montana can see is a strange man leaning in too close, a hand on her knee, asking her if she wants to be a star.

There are books written in the Tralfamadorian way. You can read them in any order, front to back or sideways and inside out. It doesn’t matter, because it all happened. You have to see it all at once to know the book. To tell anyone what you are reading is pointless. You have to wait. You can only comment on your sense of the thing when studied from some distance. I studied a book like this in college, just a few years ago (a Tralfamadorian would say that I am still studying it). I hated the book when I read it the first time. A lot of people died. Truly awful things happened to a man who became an author, but he wrote of these things and utter nonsense in the same breath, and this made me dismiss the book. Until I finished it. You have to see all things at once, as on Tralfamadore. I read it again. I caught a glimpse of some other dimension. I began to back away, and I saw all of it at once, and that’s when I wept and saw that it was good.

The thing I hated while reading this book, it turns out, was me. Bad things happen, and shoulders are shrugged. The most serious of events are blended with the strange. The author pulled me inside his mind, and what I found there was a dead stillness, the somber and poignant wisdom of someone with little hope and scars across his eyes. There was humor there, too. But not the bright kind. The man who wrote that book is dead. So it goes.

Montana Wildhack was abducted while sunning beside her pool. She was twenty years old, which is middle-aged in her profession. In her first two years, she made over seventy films. It didn’t take long to film movies such as these, try as men might to prolong each scene. And Montana was in high demand, for in addition to being lovely, she could act. Had she known this skill had other outlets, she would have skipped her early career altogether and made a different sort of film, the kind with plot and wardrobe. But that would come after, and the least of the little a young person knows is what they’re capable of. It takes a Tralfamadorian to see all of time and know that life won’t always be so dim. Nor so good. Seen all at once, the way a Tralfamadorian sees time, life makes perfect sense. Which would be an odd way to live one.

Waking up naked inside a glass dome does strange things to Montana’s brain. There was a blue California sky and a burning sun overhead one moment, and now the sound of her own screaming voice. She can still smell the baby oil on her skin. A man is there, also naked. Tall and skinny and unattractive, with a leer that makes him look like a Hollywood director. And beyond the glass, hundreds of fleshy beings that look like plungers with hands for heads and eyes where the palms should be clap by making fists. This is how Tralfamadorians show that they are happy. This is how they know the world is right by them. They make fists.

If I try hard enough—which is to say by not trying at all—I can see in the fourth dimension the way a Tralfamadorian does. There I am, sitting in a college classroom. It is the summer of 2011, and I’m studying a book that jumps around and makes me feel angry and hollow inside. It’s also summertime ten years earlier in New York, and I’m working on a windlass in the stern of a fancy yacht. It is the summer of 2013, and I’m lying in a bed in Florida, typing. My dog is having a dream. On Tralfamadore, time is seen all at once, which makes it difficult at times to see how things are tied together. I’m reading a book about bombs being dropped on Dresden. Twenty-five thousand people are dying. There’s a plane banking over Manhattan right now. I can read the jumble of numbers and letters on the tail of that plane. I am screaming in my head for the pilot to pull up. On Tralfamadore, they communicate telepathically. They do not do this on Earth. No one will ever hear me. There is orange and black against a bright blue sky, and I think I can feel the heat of a movie effect against my face, but maybe it’s just fear and my imagination. My friend Kelly yells down at me from the neighboring yacht: “Did you
see
that?” Kelly’s brain is doing odd things. Montana Wildhack is screaming. All of us are. Twelve years later, I’m lying beside my dog in an otherwise empty house. She dreams and I cry. Thousands are dying all over again. So it goes.