Lem, Stanislaw (7 page)

up, through, life was beautiful but men were such beasts and how

sorry they'd all be when it was dead and gone. Then it asked for pen

and paper. Trurl sighed with relief, switched it off and went to bed.

The next morning he went to see Klapaucius. Klapaucius, hearing

that he was invited to attend the debut of Trurl's electronic bard,

dropped everything and followed—so eager was he to be an

eyewitness to his friend's humiliation.

Trurl let the machine warm up first,

kept the power low, ran up the metal stairs several times to take

readings (the machine was like the engine of a giant steamer,

galleried, with rows of rivets, dials and valves on every tier)—till

finally, satisfied all the decimal places were where they ought to

be, he said yes, it was ready now, and why not start with something

simple. Later, of course, when the machine had gotten the feel of it,

Klapaucius could ask it to produce poetry on absolutely whatever

topic he liked.

Now the potentiometers indicated the

machine's lyrical capacitance was charged to maximum, and Trurl, so

nervous his hands were shaking, threw the master switch. A voice,

slightly husky but remarkably vibrant and bewitching, said:

"Phlogisticosh.

Rhomothriglyph. Floof."

"Is that it?" inquired

Klapaucius after a pause, extremely polite. Trurl only bit his lip,

gave the machine a few kicks of current, and tried again. This time

the voice came through much more clearly; it was a thrilling

baritone, solemn yet intriguingly sensual:

Pev't o' tay

merlong gumin gots,

Untie yun furly

pazzen ye,

Confre an' ayzor,

ayzor ots,

Bither de furloss

bochre blee!

"Am I missing something?"

said Klapaucius, calmly watching a panic-stricken Trurl struggling at

the controls.

Finally Trurl waved his arms in

despair, dashed clattering several flights up the metal stairs, got

down on all fours and crawled into the machine through a trapdoor; he

hammered away inside, swearing like a maniac, tightened

something, pried at something, crawled out again and ran

frantically to another tier. At long last he let out a cry of

triumph, threw a burnt tube over his shoulder—it bounced off

the railing and fell to the floor, shattering at the feet of

Klapaucius. But Trurl didn't bother to apologize; he quickly put in

a new tube, wiped his hands on a chammy cloth and hollered down for

Klapaucius to try it now. The following words rang out:

Mockles! Fent on

silpen tree,

Blockards three

a-feening,

Mockles, what

silps came to thee

In thy pantry

dreaming?

"Well, that's an improvement!"

shouted Trurl, not entirely convinced. "The last line

particularly, did you notice?"

"If this is all you have to show

me…" said Klapaucius, the very soul of politeness.

"Damn!" said Trurl and again

disappeared inside the machine. There was a fierce banging and

clanging, the sputtering of shorted wires and the muttering of

an even shorter temper, then Trurl stuck his head out of a trapdoor

on the third story and yelled, "
Now
try it!"

Klaupaucius complied. The electronic

bard shuddered from stem to stern and began:

Oft, in that

wickless chalet all begorn,

Where whilom

soughed the mossy sappertort

And you were wont

to bong—

Trurl yanked out a few cables in a

fury, something rattled and wheezed, the machine fell silent.

Klapaucius laughed so hard he had to sit on the floor. Then suddenly,

as Trurl was rushing back and forth, there was
a crackle, a

clack, and
the machine with perfect poise said:

The Petty and the

Small;

Are overcome with

gall ;

When Genius,

having faltered, fails to
fall.

Klapaucius too, I

ween,

Will turn the

deepest green

To hear such

flawless verse from Trurl's machine.

"There you are, an epigram! And

wonderfully apropos!" laughed Trurl, racing down the metal

stairs and flinging himself delightedly into his colleague's arms.

Klapaucius, quite taken aback, was no longer laughing.

"What,
that
?" he

said. "That's nothing. Besides, you had it all set up

beforehand."

"Setup?!"

"Oh, it's quite obvious…

the ill-disguised hostility, the poverty of thought, the crudeness of

execution."

"All right, then ask it something

else! Whatever you like! Go on! What are you waiting for? Afraid?!"

"Just a minute," said

Klapaucius, annoyed. He was trying to think of a request as

difficult as possible, aware that any argument on the quality of the

verse the machine might be able to produce would be hard if not

impossible to settle either way. Suddenly he brightened and said:

"Have it compose a poem—a

poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of

love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of

certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning

with the letter
s
!!"

"And why not throw in a full

exposition of the general theory of nonlinear automata while you're

at it?" growled Trurl. "You can't give it such idiotic—"

But he didn't
finish. A
melodious voice filled the hall with the following:

Seduced, shaggy

Samson snored.

She scissored

short. Sorely shorn,

Soon shackled

slave, Samson sighed,

Silently

scheming,

Sightlessly

seeking

Some savage,

spectacular suicide.

"Well, what do you say to that?"

asked Trurl, his arms folded proudly. But Klapaucius was already

shouting:

"Now all in
g
! A sonnet,

trochaic hexameter, about an old cyclotron who kept sixteen

artificial mistresses, blue and radioactive, had four wings, three

purple pavilions, two lacquered chests, each containing exactly one

thousand medallions bearing the likeness of Czar Murdicog the

Headless…"

"Grinding gleeful gears,

Gerontogyron grabbed / Giggling gynecobalt-6o golems," began the

machine, but Trurl leaped to the console, shut off the power and

turned, defending the machine with his body.

"Enough!" he said, hoarse

with indignation. "How dare you waste a great talent on such

drivel? Either give it decent poems to write or I call the whole

thing off!"

"What, those aren't decent

poems?" protested Klapaucius.

"Certainly not! I didn't build a

machine to solve ridiculous crossword puzzles! That's hack work,

not Great Art! Just give it a topic, any topic, as difficult as you

like…"

Klapaucius thought, and thought some

more. Finally he nodded and said:

"Very well. Let's have a love

poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure

mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and

higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in

the cybernetic spirit."

"Love and tensor algebra? Have

you taken leave of your senses?" Trurl began, but stopped, for

his electronic bard was already declaiming:

Come, let us

hasten to a higher plane,

Where dyads tread

the fairy fields of Venn,

Their indices

bedecked from one to
n
,

Commingled in an

endless Markov chain!

Come, every

frustum longs to be a cone,

And every vector

dreams of matrices.

Hark to the

gentle gradient of the breeze:

It whispers of a

more ergodic zone.

In Riemann,

Hilbert or in Banach space

Let superscripts

and subscripts go their ways

Our asymptotes no

longer out of phase,

We shall

encounter, counting, face to face.

I'll grant thee

random access to my heart,

Thou'lt tell me

all the constants of thy love;

And so we two

shall all love's lemmas prove,

And in our bound

partition never part.

For what did

Cauchy know, or Christoffel,

Or Fourier, or

any Boole or Euler,

Wielding their

compasses, their pens and rulers,

Of thy supernal

sinusoidal spell?

Cancel me not—for

what then shall remain?

Abscissas, some

mantissas, modules, modes,

A root or two, a

torus and a node:

The inverse of my

verse, a null domain.

Ellipse of bliss,

converge, O lips divine!

The product of

our scalars is defined!

Cyberiad draws

nigh, and the skew mind

Cuts capers like

a happy haversine.

I see the

eigenvalue in thine eye,

I hear the tender

tensor in thy sigh.

Bernoulli would

have been content to die,

Had he but known

such a
²
cos 2 Ø
!

This concluded the poetic competition,

since Klapaucius suddenly had to leave, saying he would return

shortly with more topics for the machine; but he never did, afraid

that in so doing, he might give Trurl more cause to boast. Trurl of

course let it be known that Klapaucius had fled in order to hide his

envy and chagrin. Klapaucius meanwhile spread the word that Trurl had

more than one screw loose on the subject of that so-called mechanical

versifier.

Not much time went by before news of

Trurl's computer laureate reached the genuine—-that is, the

ordinary—poets. Deeply offended, they resolved to ignore the

machine's existence. A few, however, were curious enough to visit

Trurl's electronic bard in secret. It received them courteously,

in a hall piled high with closely written paper (for it worked day

and night without pause). Now these poets were all avant-garde, and

Trurl's machine wrote only in the traditional manner; Trurl, no

connoisseur of poetry, had relied heavily on the classics in setting

up its program. The machine's guests jeered and left in triumph. The

machine was self-programming, however, and in addition had a special

ambition-amplifying mechanism with glory-seeking circuits, and very

soon a great change took place. Its poems became difficult,

ambiguous, so intricate and charged with meaning that they were

totally incomprehensible. When the next group of poets came to mock

and laugh, the machine replied with an improvisation that was so

modern, it took their breath away, and the second poem seriously

weakened a certain sonneteer who had two State awards to his name,

not to mention a statue in the city park. After that, no poet could

resist the fatal urge to cross lyrical swords with Trurl's electronic

bard. They came from far and wide, carrying trunks and suitcases full

of manuscripts. The machine would let each challenger recite,

instantly grasp the algorithm of his verse, and use it to

compose an answer in exactly the same style, only two hundred and

twenty to three hundred and forty-seven times better.

The machine quickly grew so adept at

this, that it could cut down a first-class rhapsodist with no more

than one or two quatrains. But the worst of it was, all the

third-rate poets emerged unscathed; being third-rate, they didn't

know good poetry from bad and consequently had no inkling of their

crushing defeat. One of them, true, broke his leg when, on the way

out, he tripped over an epic poem the machine had just completed, a

prodigious work beginning with the words:

Arms, and

machines I sing, that, forc'd by fate,

And haughty

Homo's unrelenting hate,

Expell'd and

exil'd, left the Terran shore …

The true poets, on the other hand,

were decimated by Trurl's electronic bard, though it never laid a

finger on them. First an aged elegiast, then two modernists committed

suicide, leaping off a cliff that unfortunately happened to lie