Lem, Stanislaw (6 page)

afterwards, when they were dismissed, they took to chatting, and

later, through the open windows of the barracks one could hear voices

booming in chorus, disputing such matters as absolute truth,

analytic versus synthetic a priori propositions, and the

Thing-in-itself, for their collective minds had already attained

that level. Various philosophical systems were hammered out,

till finally a certain battalion of sappers arrived at a position of

total solipsism, claiming that nothing really existed beyond itself.

And since from this it followed that there was no King, nor any

enemy, this battalion was quietly disconnected and its members

reassigned to units that firmly adhered to epistemological realism.

At about the same time, in the kingdom of Atrocitus, the sixth

amphibious division forsook naval operations for navel

contemplation and, thoroughly immersed in mysticism, very nearly

drowned. Somehow or other, as a result of this incident, war was

declared, and the troops, rumbling and clanking, slowly moved towards

the border from either side.

The law of Gargantius proceeded to

work with inexorable logic. As formation joined formation, in

proportion there developed an esthetic sense, which reached its apex

at the level of a reinforced division, so that the columns of such a

force easily became sidetracked, chasing off after butterflies,

and when the motorized corps named for Bartholocaust approached an

enemy fortress that had to be taken by storm, the plan of attack

drawn up that night turned out to be a splendid painting of the

battlements, done moreover in the abstractionist spirit, which

ran counter to all military traditions. Among the artillery corps the

weightiest metaphysical questions were considered, and, with an

absentmindedness characteristic of great genius, these large units

lost their weapons, misplaced their equipment and completely forgot

that there was a war on. As for whole armies, their psyches were

beset by a multitude of complexes, which often happens to overly

developed intellects, and it became necessary to assign to each a

special psychiatric motorcycle brigade, which applied

appropriate therapy on the march.

In the meantime, to the thunderous

accompaniment of fife and drum, both sides slowly got into position.

Six regiments of shock troops, supported by a battery of

howitzers and two backup battalions, composed, with the assistance of

a firing squad, a sonnet entitled "On the Mystery of Being,"

and this took place during guard duty. There was considerable

confusion in both armies; the Eightieth Marlabardian Corps, for

instance, maintained that the whole concept of "enemy"

needed to be more clearly defined, as it was full of logical

contradictions and might even be altogether meaningless.

Paratroopers tried to find algorithms

for the local terrain, flanks kept colliding with centers, so at last

the two kings sent airborne adjutants and couriers extraordinary to

restore order in the ranks. But each of these, having flown or

galloped up to the corps in question, before he could discover

the cause of the disturbance, instantly lost his identity in the

corporate identity, and the kings were left without adjutants or

couriers. Consciousness, it seemed, formed a deadly trap, in that one

could enter it, but never leave.

Atrocitus himself saw how his cousin,

the Grand Prince Bullion, desiring to raise the spirits of his

soldiers, leaped into the fray, and how, as soon as he had hooked

himself into the line, his spirit was literally spirited away, and he

was no more.

Sensing that something had gone amiss,

Ferocitus nodded to the twelve buglers at his right hand. Atrocitus,

from the top of his hill, did likewise; the buglers put the brass to

their lips and sounded the charge on either side. At this clarion

signal each army totally and completely linked up. The fearsome

metallic clatter of closing contacts reverberated over the future

battlefield; in the place of a thousand bombardiers and

grenadiers, commandos, lancers, gunners, snipers, sappers and

marauders—there stood two giant beings, who gazed at one

another through a million eyes across a mighty plain that lay beneath

billowing clouds. There was absolute silence. That famous culmination

of consciousness which the great Gargantius had predicted with

mathematical precision was now reached on both sides. For beyond

a certain point militarism, a purely local phenomenon, becomes civil,

and this is because the Cosmos Itself is by nature wholly civilian,

and indeed, the minds of both armies had assumed truly cosmic

proportions! Thus, though on the outside armor still gleamed, as well

as the death-dealing steel of artillery,
within
there surged

an ocean of mutual good will, tolerance, an all-embracing

benevolence, and bright reason. And so, standing on opposite

hilltops, their weapons sparkling in the sun, while the drums

continued to roll, the two armies smiled at one another. Trurl and

Klapaucius were just then boarding their ship, since that which they

had planned had come to pass: before the eyes of their mortified,

infuriated rulers, both armies went off hand in hand, picking flowers

beneath the fluffy white clouds, on the field of the battle that

never was.

The

First Sally (A)

OR
Trurl's

Electronic

Bard

First of all, to avoid any possible

misunderstanding, we should state that this was, strictly speaking, a

sally to nowhere. In fact, Trurl never left his house throughout

it— except for a few trips to the hospital and an unimportant

excursion to some asteroid. Yet in a deeper and/or higher sense this

was one of the farthest sallies ever undertaken by the famed

constructor, for it very nearly took him beyond the realm of

possibility.

Trurl had once had the misfortune to

build an enormous calculating machine that was capable of only one

operation, namely the addition of two and two, and that it did

incorrectly. As is related earlier in this volume, the machine

also proved to be extremely stubborn, and the quarrel that ensued

between it and its creator almost cost the latter his life. From that

time on Klapaucius teased Trurl unmercifully, making comments at

every opportunity, until Trurl decided to silence him once and for

all by building a machine that could write poetry. First Trurl

collected eight hundred and twenty tons of books on cybernetics and

twelve thousand tons of the finest poetry, then sat down to read it

all. Whenever he felt he just couldn't take another chart or

equation, he would switch over to verse, and vice versa. After a

while it became clear to him that the construction of the

machine itself was child's play in comparison with the writing

of the program. The program found in the head of an average poet,

after all, was written by the poet's civilization, and that

civilization was in turn programmed by the civilization that

preceded it, and so on to the very Dawn of Time, when those bits of

information that concerned the poet-to-be were still swirling about

in the primordial chaos of the cosmic deep. Hence in order to program

a poetry machine, one would first have to repeat the entire Universe

from the beginning—or at least a good piece of it.

Anyone else in Trurl's place would

have given up then and there, but our intrepid constructor was

nothing daunted. He built a machine and fashioned a digital model of

the Void, an Electrostatic Spirit to move upon the face of the

electrolytic waters, and he introduced the parameter of light, a

protogalactic cloud or two, and by degrees worked his way up to the

first ice age—Trurl could move at this rate because his machine

was able, in one five-billionth of a second, to simulate one hundred

septillion events at forty octillion different locations

simultaneously. And if anyone questions these figures, let him work

it out for himself.

Next Trurl began to model

Civilization, the striking of fires with flints and the tanning of

hides, and he provided for dinosaurs and floods, bipedality and

taillessness, then made the paleopaleface (Albuminidis sapienria),

which begat the paleface, which begat the gadget, and so it

went, from eon to millennium, in the endless hum of electrical

currents and eddies. Often the machine turned out to be too small for

the computer simulation of a new epoch, and Trurl would have to tack

on an auxiliary unit—until he ended up, at last, with a

veritable metropolis of tubes and terminals, circuits and shunts, all

so tangled and involved that the devil himself couldn't have made

head or tail of it. But Trurl managed somehow, he only had to go back

twice —once, almost to the beginning, when he discovered that

Abel had murdered Cain and not Cain Abel (the result, apparently, of

a defective fuse), and once, only three hundred million years

back to the middle of the Mesozoic, when after going from fish to

amphibian to reptile to mammal, something odd took place among

the primates and instead of great apes he came out with gray drapes.

A fly, it seems, had gotten into the machine and shorted out the

polyphase step-down directional widget. Otherwise everything

went like a dream. Antiquity and the Middle Ages were recreated, then

the period of revolutions and reforms —which gave the machine a

few nasty jolts—and then civilization progressed in such leaps

and bounds that Trurl had to hose down the coils and cores repeatedly

to keep them from overheating.

Towards the end of the twentieth

century the machine began to tremble, first sideways, then

lengthwise-—for no apparent reason. This alarmed Trurl; he

brought out cement and grappling irons just in case. But fortunately

these weren't needed; instead of jumping its moorings, the machine

settled down and soon had left the twentieth century far behind.

Civilizations came and went thereafter in fifty-thousand-year

intervals: these were the fully intelligent beings from whom

Trurl himself stemmed. Spool upon spool of computerized history was

filled and ejected into storage bins; soon there were so many spools,

that even if you stood at the top of the machine with high-power

binoculars, you wouldn't see the end of them. And all to construct

some versifier! But then, such is the way of scientific fanaticism.

At last the programs were ready; all that remained was to pick out

the most applicable—else the electropoet's education would

take several million years at the very least.

During the next two weeks Trurl fed

general instructions into his future electropoet, then set up all the

necessary logic circuits, emotive elements, semantic centers. He was

about to invite Klapaucius to attend a trial run, but thought better

of it and started the machine himself. It immediately proceeded to

deliver a lecture on the grinding of crystallo-graphical surfaces as

an introduction to the study of sub-molecular magnetic anomalies.

Trurl bypassed half the logic circuits and made the emotive more

electromotive; the machine sobbed, went into hysterics, then

finally said, blubbering terribly, what a cruel, cruel world

this was. Trurl intensified the semantic fields and attached a

strength of character component; the machine informed him that

from now on he would carry out its every wish and to begin with add

six floors to the nine it already had, so it could better meditate

upon the meaning of existence. Trurl installed a philosophical

throttle instead; the machine fell silent and sulked. Only after

endless pleading and cajoling was he able to get it to recite

something: "I had a little froggy." That appeared to

exhaust its repertoire. Trurl adjusted, modulated, expostulated,

disconnected, ran checks, reconnected, reset, did everything he could

think of, and the machine presented him with a poem that made him

thank heaven Klapaucius wasn't there to laugh—imagine,

simulating the whole Universe from scratch, not to mention

Civilization in every particular, and to end up with such dreadful

doggerel! Trurl put in six cliche filters, but they snapped like

matches; he had to make them out of pure corundum steel. This seemed

to work, so he jacked the semanticity up all the way, plugged in an

alternating rhyme generator—which nearly ruined everything,

since the machine resolved to become a missionary among destitute

tribes on far-flung planets. But at the very last minute, just as he

was ready to give up and take a hammer to it, Trurl was struck by an

inspiration; tossing out all the logic circuits, he replaced them

with self-regulating egocentripetal narcissistors. The machine

simpered a little, whimpered a little, laughed bitterly, complained

of an awful pain on its third floor, said that in general it was fed