The Star Diaries (30 page)

Much impressed by what I had heard, I returned to my cell and to my reading, the third volume now of Dichotican history. It described the Era of Transcarnal Centralization. The Sopsyputer at first worked to everyone’s satisfaction, but then new beings began appearing on the planet—bibods, tribods, quadribods, then octabods, and finally those that had no intention whatever of ending in an enumerable way, for in the course of a life they were constantly sprouting something new. This was the result of a defect, a faulty reiteration-recursion in the program, or—to put it in layman’s terms—the machine had started stuttering. Since however the cult of its perfection was in full sway, people actually praised these automorphic deviations, asserting for example that all that incessant budding and branching out was in fact the true expression of man’s Protean nature. And this praise not only held up the repairs, but led to the rise of so-called indeterminants or entites (N-tites), who lost their way in their own body, there was so much of it; completely baffled, they would get themselves into so-called bindups, entangulums and snorls; often an ambulance squad was needed to untie them. The repair of the Sopsyputer didn’t work—named the Oopsyputer, it was finally blown sky-high. The feeling of relief that followed didn’t last long however, for the accursed question soon returned, What to do about the body now?

It was then, for the first time, that timid voices made themselves heard, Oughtn’t we go back to the old look, but that suggestion was branded as obscurantist, medieval. In the elections of 2520 the Damn Wells and the Relativists came out on top, because their demagogic line caught on, to wit, that every man should look as he damn well pleased; limitations on looks would be functional only—the district body-building examiner approved designs that were existence-worthy, without concern for anything else. These designs SOPSYPLABD threw on the market in droves. Historians call the period of automorphosis under the Sopsyputer the Age of Centralization, and the years that followed—Reempersonalizationalism.

The turning over of individual looks to private initiative led, after several decades, to a new crisis. True, a few philosophers had already come forward with the notion that the greater the progress, the more the crises, and that in the absence of crises one ought to produce them, because they activated, integrated, aroused the creative impulse, the lust for battle, and gave both spiritual and material energies direction. In a word, crises spurred societies to concerted action, and without them you had stagnation, decadence, and other symptoms of decay. These views were voiced by the school of “optessimists,” i.e. philosophers who derived optimism for the future from a pessimistic appraisal of the present.

The period of private initiative in body building lasted three quarters of a century. At first there was much enjoyment taken in the newly won freedom of automorphosis, once again the young people led the way, the men with their gambrel thills and timbrels, the women with their pettifores, but before long a generation gap developed, and demonstrations—under the banner of asceticism—followed. The sons condemned their fathers for being interested only in making a living, for having a passive, often consumerist attitude towards the body, for their shallow hedonism, their vulgar pursuit of pleasure, and in order to disassociate themselves they assumed shapes deliberately hideous, uncomfortable beyond belief, downright nightmarish (the antleroons, wampdoodles). Showing their contempt for all things utilitarian, they set eyes in their armpits, and one group of young biotic activists made use of innumerable sound organs, specially grown (glottiphones, hawk pipes, knuckelodeons, thumbolas). They arranged mass concerts, in which the soloists—called hoot-howls—would whip up the crowd into a frenzy of convulsive percussion. Then came the fashion—the mania, rather—for long tentacles, which in caliber and strength of grip underwent escalation according to the typically adolescent, swaggering principle of “You haven’t seen anything yet!” And, since no one could lift those piles of coils by himself, so-called processionals were attached, caudalettes, a self-perambulating receptacle that grew out of the small of the back and carried, on two strong shanks, the weight of the tentacles after their owner. In the textbook I found illustrations depicting men of fashion, behind whom walked tentacle-bearing processionals on parade; but this was already the decline of the protest movement, or more precisely its complete bankruptcy, because it had failed to pursue any goals of its own, being solely a rebellious reaction against the orgiastic baroque of the age.

This baroque had its apologists and theoreticians, who maintained that the body existed for the purpose of deriving the greatest amount of pleasure from the greatest number of sites simultaneously. Merg Brb, its leading exponent, argued that Nature had situated—and stingily at that—centers of pleasurable sensation in the body for the purpose of survival only; therefore no enjoyable experience was, by her decree, autonomous, but always served some end: the supplying of the organism with fluids, for example, or with carbohydrates or proteins, or the guaranteeing—through offspring—of the continuation of the species, etc. From this imposed pragmatism it was necessary to break away, totally; the passivity displayed up till now in bodily design was due to a lack of imagination and perspective. Epicurean or erotic delight?—all a paltry by-product in the satisfying of instinctive needs, in other words the tyranny of Nature. It wasn’t enough to liberate sex—proof of that was ectogenesis—for sex had little future in it, from the combinatorial as well as from the constructional standpoint; whatever there was to think up in that department, had long ago been done, and the point of automorphic freedom didn’t lie in simple-mindedly enlarging this or that, producing inflated imitations of the same old thing. No, we had to come up with completely new organs and members, whose sole function would be to make their possessor feel good, feel great, feel better all the time.

Brb received the enthusiastic support of a group of talented young designers from SOPSYPLABD, who invented brippets and gnools; these were announced with great fanfare, in ads which promised that the old pleasures of the palate and bedroom would be like picking one’s nose in comparison with bripping and gnooling; ecstasy centers, of course, were implanted in the brain, programmed specially by nerve path engineers and hooked up, moreover, in series. Thus were created the brippive and gnoolial drives, also activities corresponding to those instincts, activities with a highly rich and varied range, for one could gnool and brip alternately or at the same time, alone, in pairs, trios, and later—after noffles were tacked on—in groups of several dozen individuals as well. Also new forms of art came into being, master brippers appeared, and gnool artists, but that was only the beginning; towards the end of the 26th century you had the mannerism of the marchpusses, the muckledong was a tremendous hit, and the celebrated Ondor Stert, who could simultaneously gnool, brip and surpospulate w
hile flying through the air
on spinal wings, became the idol of millions.

At the height of the baroque, sex went out of style; only two small parties kept it going—the integrationalists and the separatists. The separatists, averse to all debauchery, felt that it was improper to eat sauerkraut with the same mouth one used to kiss one’s sweetheart. For this a separate, “platonic” mouth was needed, and better yet, a complete set of them, variously designated (for relatives, for friends, and for that special person). The integrationalists, valuing utility above all else, worked in reverse, combining whatever was combinable to simplify the organism and life.

The decline of the baroque, typically tending to the extravagant and the grotesque, produced such curious forms as the stoolmaid and the hexus, which resembled a centaur, except that instead of hoofs it had four bare feet with the toes all facing one another: they also called it a syncopant, after a dance in which energetic stamping was the basic step. But the market now was glutted, exhausted. It was hard to come up with a startling new body; people used their natural horns for ear flaps; flap ears—diaphanous and with stigmatic scenes—fanned with their pale pinkness the cheeks of ladies of distinction; there were attempts to walk on supple pseudopodia; meanwhile SOPSYPLABD out of sheer inertia made more and more designs available, though everyone felt that all of this was drawing to a close.

Engrossed in my reading, with books scattered all about, and in the light of lamps that were crawling across the ceiling overhead, I fell asleep without realizing it; I was awakened only by the distant sound of the morning bell. Immediately my novice appeared, to ask if I might care for a change of scenery; if so, the prior invited me to join him on a tour of inspection of the entire diocese at the side of Father Memnar. I accepted. The prospect of leaving these gloomy catacombs delighted me.

Unfortunately the outing turned out differently than I imagined. We didn’t go up on the surface at all; the monks, having outfitted for the trip some short pack animals covered with floor-length cloths as gray as the monastic frocks, sat upon them bareback and off we went, shuffling slowly down the subterranean corridor. These were, as I had earlier guessed, part of a sewer system, unused for centuries by the metropolis that soared above us in a thousand half-ruined edifices. The measured gait of my mount had something strange about it; nor could I discern, beneath its coverlet, any indication of a head; discreetly lifting a corner of the canvas, I saw that the thing was a machine, a four-footed robot of some sort, extremely primitive. By noon we had traveled less than twenty miles, though it was hard to gauge the distance covered, since the way twisted through a labyrinth of sewers, dimly lit by bulbs that sometimes fluttered in a small flock above us and sometimes, glancing off the concave ceiling, hurried to the head of the column, where they were being whistled for.

We arrived finally at the abode of the Prognosticant Friars, where we were received with honor. I in particular became the object of much attention. Since the furniture grove was now quite far, the good Prognosticants had to go to special trouble to prepare, with me in mind, a decent meal. This was provided by the stores of the deserted metropolis, in the form of packets of seeds; two bowls were placed before me, one empty, the other full of water, and for the first time I was able to see the products of a biotic civilization in action.

The friars apologized profusely for the lack of soup: the monk they’d sent to the surface by way of a well shaft had simply been unable to find the right package. However the cutlet turned out fine: the seed, with a few spoonfuls of water poured over it, expanded, flattened out, and in less than a minute I had on my plate a deliciously browned slice of veal, all in butter, which sizzled as it oozed from the pores of the meat. The store this tidbit came from must have been in total disarray, seeing as how in among the packets with gastronomic seeds others had gotten mixed: instead of dessert, what took shape on my plate was a tape recorder, and a useless one at that, because on its reels it had suspenders. It was explained to me that this sort of hybridization had become fairly common of late, since the vending machines—unsupervised—were turning out seeds of poorer and poorer quality; those biotic products can cross-breed, and that is precisely how one gets such freakish combinations. So then, finally I had learned the origin of the wild furniture.

The worthy friars wanted to send one of the younger novices back up into the ruins of the city for my dessert, but I objected strongly. I was far more interested in conversation than in dessert.

Their refectory, once a great purification plant for the city sewers, appeared to be spotlessly clean, strewn with white sand, lit up with numerous bulbs—which were different here than at the Demolitians, namely winking and striped, as if they derived from giant wasps. We sat at a long table, alternately, so that beside each Demolitian monk there rested the chassis of a Prognosticant; for some reason I felt embarrassed to be the only one with face and hands exposed—there among the masked figures of the robot brothers, those coarse cowls with glass over the eyeholes, and among the Father Computers, who, being rectangular, in no way resembled living creatures; a number of these were connected by electric cords beneath the table, however I hadn’t the courage to inquire why they needed this additional channel of communication.