The World of Kurt Vonnegut: Peace in Amber by Hugh Howey Read Free Book Online

1
----
    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