Read The World of Kurt Vonnegut: Peace in Amber for Free Online

she never wanted one. Never would have had one back at home. Not in that life. It made hating this place difficult at times. Stained seems to be reading her mind, the way he stares at her.
    “I was angry, you know,” she tells him. “For weeks and weeks, all I wanted was for all of you to die for what you did. Maybe you heard me screaming it in my head, those long speeches saying I’d get even with you, that my world would come for me, would blast you to smithereens.”
    Stained watches her.
    “But this is where we’re different. You see the future and refuse to change it. Where I come from, we can see the past, but we keep repeating it. That’s where we’re different. The same but different.” She nods vigorously. “I’ve never been free before, you see. Not once in my whole life. I used to make fists and hit walls, but it hurt me more than it hurt them. The people who did bad things to me, they didn’t care how angry I got. It didn’t fix a thing. So you go right on cleaning and peering in, and I’m going to—”
    “He loves you, too,” Stained says.
    Montana turns and peers at Billy Pilgrim, who has rolled over and has uncovered himself. She knits two and purls one. Knits two and purls one. “I know,” she says. She doesn’t say that she doesn’t really love Billy. Pities him, more like. After a long while, she remembers where the conversation had been going.
    “You know what I’ve realized? Just a week ago, sitting here, miserable for my kid who will be born in this zoo of yours. I realized that I have never owned myself. Not really. I’ve thought what others wanted me to think. I’ve felt the way I was supposed to feel. I used to get angry and want to hit things, thought that would make it better, make things right.” Montana laughs. She balls up her hand. “I used to make fists like you do, that’s what I did.”
    The glass before Montana has never been so clean.
    “And then I realized what a blessing it is that I don’t know the future. That I don’t see like you do. Because what would I do? I’d be as numb and callous as you are. A prisoner. I’d already know how this dress comes out, and that wouldn’t make me wanna go through with it. You know?”
    “It’s a boy,” Stained says.
    Montana looks from her knitting to the Tralfamadore with the red splotch on his palm. If Montana had lived a different life, she would have called this Tralf Macbeth. But that wasn’t the life given to her.
    “What did you say?” she asks.
    Stained blinks. Montana rubs her belly.
    “Can you read his mind? It’s gonna be a boy?”
    Tears blur her vision like the rainy Tralfamadorian nights streak the dome.
    “If you can talk to him, tell him I love him. Tell him everything’s gonna be okay.”
    Stained has gone back to cleaning. Montana wants to scream, but the thing she is angry at is in the past. The past can’t hear her. This is the thing, her great discovery. She smiles at the future. Happiness is a choice. She knits another row and loves every man who ever wronged her. More important, she loves those who will wrong her yet.
    “Because,” Stained says, curling a finger, and peering in at her.
    “Yes,” Montana agrees. “Because.” She laughs, and almost feels free.

9
----
    A plane disappears into an office building, and bombs erupt everywhere at once. In London and Baghdad, in Spain and Afghanistan, every bomb that ever was and ever will be detonates in unison. All the same bomb.
    The Tralfamadorians see time stretched out in all directions. They see a people who can do nothing but make joyous fists. Something is wrong with those who don’t. Something is terribly wrong with those who don’t. And where are the more like them?
    It is July 6, 2001, and I am on the deck of the motor yacht Symphony. There is a stranger beside me, a beautiful girl; I do not know her name. She is a dancer, one of the high-kicking Rockettes, and we have exchanged smiles more than once over the course of the