One evening the famed constructor Trurl, silent and preoccupied, dropped in on his good friend Klapaucius. Klapaucius sought to divert him with a few of the latest cybernetic jokes, but Trurl shook his head and said:
“Please, frivolity cannot dispel my melancholy, for the thought that has taken root in my soul is, alas, as undeniable as it is lamentable. Namely, I have reached the conclusion that in all our long and illustrious career we have accomplished nothing of real value!”
And he cast a look of censure and disdain upon the impressive collection of medals, trophies and honorary degrees in gold frames that graced the walls of Klapaucius’s study.
“A serious charge”, observed Klapaucius. “On what grounds do you make it?”
“Hear me out, I shall explain. We have made peace between warring kingdoms, instructed monarchs in the proper use of power, fashioned machines to tell stories and machines to serve as quarry, we have defeated evil tyrants as well as galactic bandits that lay in ambush for us, yet in all this we served only ourselves, adding to our own glory—achieving next to nothing for the Common Good! Our efforts to perfect the lives of those poor innocents we encountered in our travels from planet to planet never once produced a state of Absolute Happiness. The solutions we offered them were makeshift, stopgap, jury-rigged—so if we have earned any title, it is surely Charlatans of Ontology, Subtle Sophists of Creation, and not Abolishers of Evil!”
“Whenever I hear anyone speak of programming Happiness, I am filled with foreboding”, said Klapaucius. “Come to your senses, Trurl! Don’t you know such noble enterprises invariably end in tragedy and despair? Can you have so soon forgotten the pitiful fate of Bonhomius the hermetic hermit, who attempted to make the entire macrocosm happy with the aid of a drug called Altruizine? To be sure, one may in some measure alleviate the cares of life, see that justice is done, rekindle dying suns, pour oil on the troubled gears of social mechanisms—but in no way, by no machinery known create happiness! We can only nurture the hope of it in our hearts, pursue its bright, inspiring image in our minds on a quiet evening such as this . . . A man of wisdom must content himself with that, my friend!”
“Content himself!”, snorted Trurl. “It may well be”, he added after a moment of thought, “that to make those who already exist happy in any plain and unequivocal way is indeed impossible. Still, one might construct new beings, beings whose sole function and faculty was to be happy. Think of what a wonderful monument to our constructor’s skill (which Time, you know, must some day turn to dust) would be a planet shining in the firmament, a planet upon which the multitudes throughout the universe could gaze and proclaim: ““Verily, attainable is happiness and never-ending harmony within reach, as great Trurl has shown—with some assistance from his close companion Klapaucius—for lo!, the living proof endures and thrives before our very eyes!”” ”
“I confess that I too have entertained the notion”, said Klapaucius. “But it does raise some difficult questions. You remember, I see, the lesson of Bonhomius’s misfortune and therefore wish to bestow happiness upon creatures who do not as yet exist—that is, you would create happiness from scratch. Consider, though: is it at all possible to render the non-existent happy? Personally, I doubt it. First one would have to prove that the state of being is in every respect preferable to the state of nonbeing, even when that being is not especially pleasant. Without such proof, this felicitological experiment with which you seem to be obsessed may well backfire. That is, to the great number of unhappy souls that already occupy the universe you would be adding your own freshly created unfortunates—and what then?”
“Yes, there is that risk”, Trurl reluctantly admitted. “But we must take it. Mother Nature, they say, is impartial, works in a random and therefore even-handed manner, supposedly bringing forth as many good individuals as bad, as many kind as cruel. You’ll find, however, that it’s only the vile and the wicked who inherit the earth, their bellies bloated with the pure and the just. And when these scoundrels become aware of the unseemliness of their actions, they plead extenuating circumstances, invent some higher necessity: the evil of this world, for instance, is but the spice that whets one’s appetite for the next, et cetera. Let us put an end to this imbalance, Klapaucius. Mother Nature is by no means vicious, only terribly obtuse; as always, she takes the line of least resistance. We must replace her and ourselves produce beings—beings of dazzling virtue, beings whose miraculous appearance in the universe will cure our every existential ill, thereby more than making up for a past that is haunted with screams of agony, screams we fail to hear only because sound will not travel far enough in time or space. Why, why must all that lives continue to suffer? Oh, had the suffering of every victim ever born only possessed the least momentum, carried the least impact—even that of a single raindrop—I assure you our world would have been torn asunder centuries ago! But life goes on, and in the crypts and empty dungeons the dust maintains its perfect silence; even you, with all your cybernetic art, will find in that dust no trace of the pain and sorrow that once plagued those who now no longer are.”
“It’s true the dead have no cares”, agreed Klapaucius. “Which happily shows that suffering is a transitory thing.”
“But new sufferers keep entering the world!”, cried Trurl. “Don’t you see, it’s simply a matter of common decency!”
“One moment. How will this happy being of yours—assuming you succeed—ever make up for the countless torments that have been as well as those that continue to beset our continuum? Can today’s calm negate the storm of yesterday? Does the dawn nullify the night? Really, you talk nonsense, Trurl!”
“Then according to you, it’s better to fold our hands and do nothing?”
“Not at all. The point is, even if you manage to correct the present, you can never compensate the victims of the past. You think that filling the cosmos with happiness will alter one iota of what has already taken place within it?”
“But it will!”, insisted Trurl. “One cannot, of course, extend a helping hand to those who are no more, but the whole of which they form a part—that may be changed! And on that day the peoples will say: ““These bitter trials and heinous crimes, these wars and genocides— they were but a prelude to the real adventure, a preliminary to the present reign of Goodness, Love and Truth! And it was Trurl, that most excellent Trurl, who realized that one may use an evil heritage to build a flawless future. From misfortune did he learn to forge good fortune, from despair he knew the worth of joy—in a word, it was a hideous universe that drove him to construct Loveliness!”” Klapaucius, this present phase is both an inspiration and a preparation for the bliss to come! Now do you understand?”
“Beneath the constellation of the Southern Cross there lies the kingdom of King Troglodyne”, said Klapaucius. “The King delights in landscapes dotted with pillories and gallows, defending this predilection with the argument that his wretched subjects can be governed in no other way. He would have served me in similar fashion upon my arrival there, but soon discovered he was no match for me and so was seized with fear, considering it only natural that, as he was unable to crush me, I should certainly crush him. To placate me, he summoned his advisors and wise men, and they promptly wrote up a doctrine of tyranny for the occasion. I was told that the worse things are, the more one longs for improvement and reform; consequently, he who makes life unbearable actually hastens the day of its perfection. Now this harangue greatly pleased the King, for as it turned out, no one had contributed more to the ultimate triumph of Good than he, his black deeds helping to spur the melioristic dream to action. And therefore, Trurl, your happy beings should raise up monuments to honor Troglodyne. Indeed, you owe him and others of his kind your undying gratitude. Is this not so?”
“A cynical, malicious parable!”, growled Trurl. “I had hoped you would join me in this venture, but now I see your poisoned sophistries would only mock my noble purpose. There is, after all, a universe to save!”
“And you would be its savior?” said Klapaucius. “Trurl, Trurl! I ought to have you put in chains and locked up until you come to your senses, but I fear that that might take forever. Therefore I have only this to say: be not overly hasty in your engineering of happiness! Try not to perfect the world in one fell swoop! Of course, even if you do create happy beings, there will still be those already in existence, which is bound to give rise to envy, resentment, conflict, and—who knows?—some day you may be faced with a most unpleasant choice: either surrender your precious creatures to the envious, or else have them cut down their nasty, imperfect neighbours to a man—in the name of Universal Harmony, of course.”
Trurl jumped up in a fury, but quickly controlled himself and unclenched his fists: knocking Klapaucius to the ground would hardly constitute an auspicious beginning to the Age of Absolute Happiness, which he was now more determined than ever to bring about.
“Farewell”, he said coldly. “Farewell, O miserable agnostic, unbeliever, slave to the natural course of events! Not with words shall I defeat you, but with deeds! In time you will behold the fruit of my labors and see that I was right!”
Returning home, Trurl was quite embarrassed: his argument with Klapaucius suggested that he had a definite plan of action in mind, but this was not exactly the case. To tell the truth, he hadn’t the faintest idea where to begin. First he collected an enormous pile of books that described innumerable civilizations in the utmost detail; these he proceeded to devour at an incredible rate. But as this method of supplying his brain with the needed facts was still too slow, he dragged up from the cellar eight hundred cartridges of mercuric, plumbic, ferromagnetic and cryonic memory, connected them all to his person by cable, and in a few seconds had charged his psyche with four trillion bits of the best and most exhaustive information to be found anywhere, including planets of burnt-out suns inhabited by chroniclers of indomitable patience. The dose was so prodigious that he was rocked from head to toe, turned pale, went rigid, then was seized with a fit of trembling, as if he had been hit not with an overload of historiography and historiosophy, but with a genuine bolt from the blue. He pulled himself together, took a deep breath, wiped his brow, steadied his still quivering legs and said:
“Things are a great deal worse than I imagined!!”
For a while Trurl sharpened pencils, replenished inkwells, arranged stacks of white paper on his desk, but nothing came of this activity, so he said with a sigh:
“I shall have to acquaint myself, it seems, with the antiquated work of the ancients, a chore I always put off in the conviction that there was nothing a modern constructor could learn from those crusty old fogies. But now . . . well, so be it! I’ll study all the primeval pundits, if only to protect myself against Klapaucius, who, though he surely never read them either—for who has?—might secretly cull their works for quotations, just to make me look ignorant!”
And Trurl sat down and actually began to pore over the most decrepit and crumbling tomes, though he hated every minute of it.
Late that night, surrounded by volumes tossed impatiently to the floor, he delivered the following soliloquy:
“I see that not only is the structure of thinking creatures in sore need of repair, but what passes for their philosophy as well. Now, the cradle of life was the sea, which duly threw up slime upon the shore; then there was a blob of mud, macromolecular and highly irregular, and the sunshine thickened it, and the lightning quickened it, and soon the whole thing had soared to form a sort of cheese, biopolymeric and quite esoteric, which in time decided to head for higher and drier ground. To hear its prey approach, it grew ears, then legs and teeth to pursue and consume—else it would serve as prey itself. Intelligence, then, is the child of evolution. And what of Good and Evil, and what of Wisdom? Good is when I eat, Evil when I am eaten, and similarly with Wisdom: the eaten is not wise, being eaten when he should be eating; indeed, he is not anything when eaten, for, eaten, he no longer is at all. But whosoever would eat everything must starve, there soon being nothing left to eat, and so we have continence, self-restraint. After a while this intelligent cheese, finding itself rather too watery in consistency, began to calcify, just as sapient hominoids later sought to better their disgustingly viscous selves by discovering metal—but all they did was reproduce themselves in iron, for to copy is always easier than to create; as a result, true perfection was never attained. H’m! Had we evolved the other way—from metal to bone to an ever more glutinous and subtle substance—how different would our Philosophy have been! Clearly, it is spun from the very structure of its creators, only in a hopelessly contrary fashion: living in water, one envisions paradise on land, or if one lives on the land, it is somewhere in the sky; those with wings find blessedness in fins, and those with legs add wings to their likeness and cry, ““Angel!”” Odd, that I never noticed this principle before. We shall call it Trurl’s Universal Law: according to the particular defect in its own construction, each creature postulates an Ideal. I must make a note of that; it will come in handy when I get around to correcting the foundations of philosophy. But to the business at hand. To begin, let us take that which is Good—but where can Good be found? Obviously not where there is no one to experience it. The waterfall is neither good nor evil as far as the rock is concerned, nor the earthquake, if you ask the earth. Ergo, we must assemble a Someone to experience Good. But wait, how can this Someone experience Good unless he knows what it is, and how will he know? Suppose . . . suppose I see Klapaucius suffer some harm? Half of me would grieve, the other half rejoice. There’s a complication. One could be happy in comparison with one’s neighbor, yet be totally unaware of the fact and therefore not be happy at all, though actually happy! Must I then construct beings and keep other beings racked in pain perpetually before them, that they might know their own good fortune? A feasible solution—but how ghastly! Let’s see, with a transformer here and a fuse there . . . Best to start with an individual; happy civilizations we can manufacture afterwards.”
Trurl rolled up his sleeves and in three days had put together an Ecstatic Contemplator of Existence, a machine whose consciousness, cathodes all aglow, embraced whatever came beneath its gaze, for there was nothing in the whole wide world that wouldn’t give it pleasure. Trurl examined it closely. The Contemplator, resting on three metal legs, slowly swept the room with its telescopic eyes, and whether they fell upon the fence outside, or a rock, or an old shoe, it oh’ed and ah’ed with delight. And when the sun went down and the sky grew pink, it swayed from side to side in rapture.
“Klapaucius will say of course that oh’ing and ah’ing and swaying from side to side in themselves prove nothing”, thought Trurl, uneasy. “He’ll want evidence, data . . .”
So in the Contemplator’s belly he installed a large dial with a golden pointer and calibrated in units of happiness, which he called hedons or heds for short. A single hed was taken to be the quantity of bliss one would experience after walking exactly four miles with a nail in one’s boot and then having the nail removed. Trurl multiplied the distance by the time and divided by the resting mass of the nail, placing the foot coefficient in brackets; this enabled him to express happiness in centimeters, grams and seconds. That improvement lifted his spirits considerably. Meanwhile, as he leaned over and worked, the Contemplator regarded his patched and stained lab coat and registered, at that particular angle of leaning and cut of coat, from 11.8 to 11.9 heds per stain-patch-second. This reading fully restored Trurl’s confidence. He made a few more calculations to test the instrument’s precision— one kilohed, for instance, was what the elders had felt when they beheld Susanna at her bath, one megahed the joy of a man condemned to hang but reprieved at the last minute—and then sent an errand robot to fetch Klapaucius.
The latter came and, seeing Trurl point a proud finger at his new creation, began to inspect it. It in turn fixed the majority of its lenses on him, swayed from side to side and delivered a few oh’s and ah’s. These exclamations surprised the constructor, but he asked with an air of unconcern:
“What is it?”
“A happy being”, replied Trurl, “more specifically, an Ecstatic Contemplator of Existence or Contemplator for short.”
“And what exactly does this Contemplator do?”
Trurl sensed the sarcasm in his friend’s query but chose to ignore it.
“It devotes itself to wholehearted, incessant observation”, he explained. “Not passive observation, mind you, but a most intense, strenuous and aggressive kind of observation, and whatever is observed fills it with inexpressible delight! It is precisely this delight, oscillating through its many circuits and cells, which prompts those oh’s and ah’s you hear, even now as it looks upon your otherwise uninteresting face.”
“You mean, this machine derives pleasure from an active examination of all that is?”
“Correct!”, said Trurl, but without his former assurance, for he feared a trap.
“And this must be a felicitometer, graduated in units of existential bliss”, Klapaucius went on, indicating the dial with the golden pointer.
“Yes . . . ”
Klapaucius then presented the Contemplator with various objects, in each case taking careful note of its reaction. Trurl, greatly relieved, began to hold forth on the niceties of hedonic calculus or theoretical felicitometry. One word led to the next, question followed question, until Klapaucius remarked:
“How many units, do you think, would result from this situation: one man is brutally beaten for a full three hundred hours, then all at once jumps up and brains the one who was beating him?”
“That’s easily done!”, cried Trurl enthusiastically, and immediately began to calculate it out—when suddenly he heard a loud guffaw and whirled around. Klapaucius said, still laughing:
“You say you took Goodness as your guiding principle? Well, Trurl, I see you’re off to a flying start! At this rate you’ll have perfection in no time! Now if you’ll excuse me . . .”
And he departed, leaving behind a totally crushed Trurl.
“I should have known! I should have seen it!”groaned the poor constructor, and his groans mingled with the oh’s and ah’s of the Contemplator, which so aggravated him that he locked it in a closet.
Then he sat at his empty desk and said:
“What a fool I was, to mistake esthetic ecstasy for Good! Why, one could hardly even call the Contemplator a thing of reason! No, that’s not the way to go about it, not in a million maxwells! Happiness— certainly, pleasure—of course! But not at someone else’s expense! Not from Evil! Wait—what is Evil? Ah, now I see how shamefully I neglected, in all my years of cybernetic construction, a study of the fundamentals!”
For eight days and nights Trurl did nothing but bury himself in terribly erudite volumes that dealt with the weighty question of Good and Evil. A great number of wise men, as it turned out, maintained the most important thing was an active solicitude coupled with an all-embracing good will. Unless men of understanding mutually manifested these virtues, all was lost. True, under that banner quite a few individuals had been impaled, boiled in oil, buried alive, drawn and quartered, broken on the wheel or stretched on the rack. Indeed, history showed that good will, when extended to the soul and not the body, gave rise to endless varieties and variations of torture.
“Good will is not enough”, thought Trurl. “What if we house one’s conscience in one’s neighbor, and conversely? No, that would be disastrous: my transgressions would fill others with remorse, leaving me free to sink deeper and deeper in sin! But what if we attach a remorse amplifier to the conscience, in other words ensure that every wicked deed hound its perpetrator afterwards with an intensity a thousand times greater than normal? But then everyone would run out and commit some crime just to see whether his new conscience really hurt that much—and then be ridden by an overwhelming guilt to the end of his days . . . Perhaps a conscience that’s reversible, with a clearing mechanism—locked of course. The authorities could keep the key . . . No, there would be picklocks and skeleton keys circulating in no time. Arrange for the general broadcasting of feelings? One would feel for all, and all for one. No, that’s been done, Altruizine created precisely that effect . . . Now here’s an idea: everyone carries in his stomach a small bomb and receiver, so that if, as a result of his wrongdoing, say, ten or more persons wish him ill, the input of that combined and heterodyned signal blows the culprit sky-high. Wouldn’t they shun Evil then? Of course they would, they’d have to! On second thought . . . what kind of happiness is it, to go around with a bomb in your stomach? Anyway, there could be plots; ten villainous men could conspire against one innocent and he would detonate, innocent or not. What then, reverse the signs? No, that wouldn’t work either. Confound it, can it be that I, who have moved galaxies about as if they were furniture, am unable to solve this ridiculously simple problem in construction?!
“Suppose each and every individual of a given society is plump, rosy, full of cheer, sings and leaps and laughs from morning till night, rushes to the aid of others with such zeal the very ground trembles, and the others do likewise, and when asked, they exclaim they are positively thrilled with their own not to mention the common lot . . . Would not such a society be perfectly happy? Evil, after all, would be unthinkable in it! Why would anyone want to harm anyone else? What could be gained by doing harm? Absolutely nothing! And there’s the answer, there’s my blueprint, elegant in its simplicity, for mass-producing happiness! Klapaucius, the misanthrope, the cynic—where in this whole, magnificent system will he find the least thing to mock and deride? Nowhere, for everyone, helping everyone else, will make everything better and better, until it can’t possibly be better . . . But wait, might they not strain themselves, grow faint and fall beneath that avalanche, so to speak, of good deeds? I could add a regulator or two, circuit breakers too, some joyproof shields, bliss-resistant fields . . . The main thing is not to rush, we can’t afford any more oversights. So then, primo—they enjoy themselves, secundo—they help others, tertio—they jump up and down, quarto—plump and rosy, quinto—things couldn’t be better, sexto—self-sacrificing... . yes, that ought to do it!”
Weary after these long and difficult deliberations, Trurl slept until noon, then jumped out of bed, refreshed and full of fight, wrote down the plans, punched out the programs, set up the algorithms and in the beginning he created a happy civilization composed of nine hundred persons. That equality should obtain within its borders, he made them all amazingly alike; that there should be no struggle over food or drink, he made them free of any need of sustenance—atomic batteries were their only source of energy. Then he sat on his porch for the rest of the day and watched how they sang and leaped, announcing their happiness, how they rushed to aid one another, patted one another on the head, removed stumbling blocks before one another and, bursting with excitement, generally lived a life of prosperity and peace. If someone sprained his ankle, an enormous crowd would form, not out of curiosity but because of the categorical imperative to extend a helping hand. It was true that at first, due to a little overenthusiasm, a foot might be pulled off instead of repaired, but Trurl quickly adjusted the automatic choke and threw in a few rheostats; then he sent for Klapaucius. Klapaucius regarded this scene of incessant jubilation with a fairly dour expression, listened to the hallelujahs and huzzahs for a while, then finally turned to Trurl and asked:
“And can they be sad as well?”
“What an idiotic question! Of course they can’t!”, replied Trurl.
“Then they do nothing but jump around, look plump and rosy, remove stumbling blocks and shout in unison that they are positively thrilled?”
“Yes!”
Seeing that Klapaucius was not only sparing in his praise but in fact had none at all to offer, Trurl added peevishly:
“A monotonous prospect, perhaps, hardly as picturesque as a battlefield. My purpose, however, was to bestow happiness, not provide you with a dramatic spectacle!”
“If they do what they do because they must”, said Klapaucius, “then, Trurl, there is as much Good in them as in a streetcar that fails to run you down on the sidewalk simply because it hasn’t jumped its track. Who derives happiness from doing Good? Not he who must forever pat his fellow on the head, roar with delight and remove stumbling blocks, but he who is able to brood, to sob, to do his fellow in, yet voluntarily and cheerfully refrains from such things! These puppets of yours, Trurl, are but a mockery of those high ideals you have managed so completely to profane!”
“What—what are you saying?!” Trurl was stunned. “They aren’t puppets, but thinking beings . . .”
“Oh?”, said Klapaucius. “We shall see!”
And he walked out among Trurl’s perfect protégés and struck the first one he met full in the face, saying:
“I trust you’re happy?”
“Terribly!”; replied that individual, holding its broken nose.
“And now?”, inquired Klapaucius, this time dealing it such a blow that it went head over heels. Whereupon that individual, still lying in the dust and spitting out teeth, exclaimed:
“Happy, sir! Things couldn’t be better!”
“There you are”, said Klapaucius to a dumbfounded Trurl and left without another word.
The crestfallen constructor led his creations one by one back to the laboratory and there dismantled them to the last nut and bolt, and not one of them protested, not in the least. In fact, a few even tried to be of assistance, holding a wrench or pliers while Trurl worked, or hammering at their own heads when the cranial lids stuck and wouldn’t unscrew. Trurl put the parts back in the drawers and shelves, pulled the blueprints off the drawing board and tore them all to shreds, sat down at his desk piled high with books on philosophy and ethics, and gave a deep sigh.
“How he humiliates me, the dog! And to think I once called that pettifogging putterer my friend!”
From its glass case he took the model of the psychopermutator, the device that had transformed every impulse into an active solicitude and all-embracing good will, and smashed it to bits on an anvil. Not that this did much to improve his spirits. So he thought a while, gave another sigh, and began again. This time a sizable society took shape—three thousand stout citizens in all—and it immediately chose a government for itself by secret ballot and universal suffrage, after which various projects were undertaken: the building of houses and the putting up of fences, the discovering of the laws of nature and the throwing of parties. Each of these latest creations of Trurl carried a small homeostat in its head, and in each homeostat were two electrodes, one welded to either side, and between them the individual’s free will could play and dance as it pleased; underneath was the positive spring, with a tension far exceeding the pull of the opposite spring, the one bent on destruction and negation but prudently held in check with a safety clip. Moreover, each citizen possessed a moral monitor of great sensitivity, which was situated in a vise with two toothed jaws: these would begin a gnawing action upon it whenever its possessor strayed from the straight and narrow. Trurl first tested this contrivance on a special model in his workshop; the poor thing was stricken with such pangs and twinges that it fell into a violent fit. But then, the capacitor soon charged with the necessary penance and the ignition with contrition, he was able to ease the monitor somewhat from those relentless jaws. The whole thing was most cleverly done! Trurl even considered connecting the monitor by regenerative feedback coupling to a splitting headache, but quickly changed his mind, afraid Klapaucius would again start to lecture him about compulsion ruling out the exercise of free will. Which wasn’t at all true, for these new beings had statistical transmissions, in other words no one, including Trurl, could possibly foresee what they would end up doing with themselves. That night Trurl was repeatedly awakened by shouts of joy, which was a great comfort to him. “This time”, he said to himself, “Klapaucius can have no objections. These people are happy, and their happiness is not programmed, hence predetermined and imperative, but wholly stochastic, ergodic and probabilistic. I’ve won at last!” And with this pleasant thought he fell asleep and slept till morning.
Klapaucius was not in, and it was noon before he showed up and Trurl could lead him to the felicitological proving ground. There Klapaucius inspected the homes, fences, minarets, signs, the courthouse, its offices, delegates and citizens, here and there engaged a few in conversation, and on a side street even attempted to punch one in the face. But three others seized him by the britches and, singing in unison, gave him the old heave-ho at the gate, careful not to break his neck, though he did look much the worse for wear when he climbed out of the roadside ditch.
“Well?”, said Trurl, pretending not to notice his friend’s mortification. “What do you think?”
“I’ll be back tomorrow”, replied Klapaucius.
Considering this a retreat, Trurl nodded and gave a sympathetic smile. The next day both constructors again entered the settlement and found it greatly changed. They were stopped by a patrol and the highest ranking officer addressed Trurl:
“What’s this, frowning on the premises? Can’t you hear the birds singing? Don’t you see the flowers? Chin up!”
And the next highest ranking officer said:
“Chest out! Shoulders back! Look alive! Smile!”
The third said nothing, only clapped the constructor on the back with a mailed fist, raising a deafening clang, then turned with the rest to Klapaucius—who didn’t wait for such encouragement but snapped to attention at once, assuming a properly ecstatic expression, at which they were satisfied and continued on their way. Meanwhile the unsuspecting creator of this new order stared open-mouthed at the square before the headquarters of Felicifica, where hundreds stood in formation and roared with joy upon command.
“All hail to life!”, bellowed one old officer in epaulets and plumes, and the gathering thundered back as one man:
“All hail to happiness.”
Before Trurl could say another word, he found himself wedged firmly in one of the columns with his friend and compelled to march and drill for the rest of the day. The main maneuver seemed to consist of making oneself as miserable as possible while furthering the welfare of the next in line, all to the rhythm of “Left! Right! Left! Right!” The drillmasters were Felicemen, known as the Guardians of Good and Gladness and thus commonly called G-men, and their task was to see that each and every one, both separately and together, participated wholeheartedly in the general beatitude, which in practice proved to be unbelievably burdensome. During a brief intermission in these felicitological exercises Trurl and Klapaucius managed to slip away and hide behind a hedge. There they found a gully and followed it, crouching as if under heavy fire, to Trurl’s place, where to be absolutely safe they locked themselves in the attic—and just in the nick of time, for the patrols were out, combing the area for all those discontent, gloomy or sad, and summarily felicitizing them on the spot. In his attic Trurl cursed and fumed and considered the quickest way to put an end to this unhappy experiment, while Klapaucius did what he could to keep from laughing out loud. Unable to come up with anything better, Trurl shook his head and sent a demolition squad to the settlement, making sure beforehand to programme it impervious to the lure of such attractive slogans as brotherly love and joy for all—which provision, however, he was careful to keep from Klapaucius. Trurl’s demolition squad soon collided with the G-men and the sparks began to fly. As the last bastion of universal happiness, Felicifica fought most valiantly, and Trurl had to send replacements with heavy-duty clamps and grappling hooks. Now the battle became full-pitched, the war all-out; both sides displayed a truly staggering dedication, and grapeshot and shrapnel filled the air. When at last the constructors stepped out into the moonlit night, they beheld a piteous sight: the settlement lay ii smoldering ruins, and here and there a Feliceman, not fully unscrewed in the general haste, expressed in a weak and trembling voice its undying devotion to the cause of Universal Goodness. No longer able to contain himself, Trurl burst into tears of rage and despair; he couldn’t understand what had gone wrong, why these kindly souls had changed into such insufferable bullies.
“The directive for an all-embracing good will may, if too direct, bear contrary fruit”, Klapaucius explained. “He who is glad wishes others to be glad, glad without delay, and ends up clubbing gladness into all recalcitrants.”
“Then Good may produce Evil! Oh, how perfidious is the Nature of Things!”, cried Trurl. “Very well, I hereby declare war against Nature Herself! Adieu, Klapaucius! You see me momentarily defeated, but not discouraged. I shall win yet!”
And he returned to the isolation of his books and manuscripts, grim and more determined than ever. Common sense suggested it might not be a bad idea, before proceeding with further tests, to throw up battlements around the house, with embrasures for artillery. But this was plainly no way to begin the construction of brotherly love, so he decided instead to make his models smaller, on a scale of 100,000 to 1—that is, to conduct his experiments with microminiaturized civilizations. In order not to forget what he’d learned, he hung signs like the following on his workshop walls: THESE BE MY GUIDE—(1) SACRED AUTONOMY, (2) SWEET PARITY, (3) SUBTLE CHARITY, (4) UNOBTRUSIVE AVUNCULARITY. Then he began the work of translating those noble sentiments into action.
First he assembled a thousand electromites under the microscope, endowed them with little minds and not much greater love of Good, since by now he feared fanaticism. They went about their business in a dull sort of way, and their little dwelling-box began to resemble the works of a watch, so even and monotonous were their movements in it. Trurl opened a valve and raised the intelligence a bit; immediately they grew more lively, fashioned tiny tools from a few stray filings and started using them to pry open their little box. Trurl then quickly increased the Good potential and overnight the society became self-sacrificing, everyone ran about frantically looking for someone to save—widows and orphans were in particularly great demand, especially if blind. These were besieged with so many tokens of respect, paid so many compliments, that the poor things fled and hid in the farthest corners of the box. In no time Trurl’s civilization faced a crisis: the acute shortage of orphans and other unfortunates made it next to impossible to find deserving objects of any properly monumental act of generosity. As a result the micromites, after eighteen generations, began to worship the Absolute Orphan, whom nothing in their boxlike vale of tears could ever deliver from dismal orphanhood; thus their excessive benevolence finally found relief in the infinite transcendental realm of metaphysics. They populated those higher spheres with various beings, the Triple Cripple for instance, or the Lord Up Above, who was always greatly to be pitied, and they neglected the things of this world and replaced all government agencies with religious orders. This was not quite what Trurl had in mind, so he introduced rationalism, skepticism and common sense until everything settled down.
Though not for long. A certain Electrovoltaire appeared and announced there was no Absolute Orphan, only the Cosmic Cube created by the forces of Nature; the orphanists excommunicated him, but then Trurl had to leave for an hour or two to do some shopping. When he returned, the tiny box was bouncing about on its shelf in the throes of a religious war. Trurl charged it with altruism—that only made it sizzle and smoke; he added a few more units of intelligence, which cooled it off somewhat—but later there was a great deal of activity and confusion, after which military parades appeared, marching in a disconcertingly mechanical way. Another generation came and went, the orphanists and electrovoltairians vanished without a trace, now everyone spoke only of the Common Good, numerous treatises were written on the subject—entirely secular—and then a great debate arose concerning the origin of the species: some said that they were spawned spontaneously from the dust that lay in the corners; others, that they stemmed from a race of invaders from without. To resolve this burning question, the Great Awl was built to penetrate the cosmic wall and explore the Space Beyond. And since unknown things might lurk out there, powerful weapons were immediately manufactured and stockpiled. Trurl was so alarmed at this development that he scrapped the whole model as quickly as possible and said, close to tears: “Reason leads to heartlessness, Good produces madness! Must every attempt at historiographic construction be doomed to failure?” He decided to attack the problem on an individual basis again and dragged his first prototype, the Contemplator, from its closet. It began to oh and ah in aesthetic rapture before a pile of debris, but Trurl plugged in an intelligence component and it fell silent at once. He asked it if anything was wrong, to which it replied:
“Everything continues to be just fine; I only contain my admiration in order to reflect upon it, for I wish to know, first of all, the source of this fineness, and secondly, what end or purpose it may serve. And what are you, to interrupt my contemplation with the asking of questions? How does your existence concern mine? I feel, indeed, compelled to admire all things, including yourself, but prudence tells me to resist this inclination, for it may be some trap devised against me.”
“As far as your existence goes”, Trurl said uncautiously, “it was created by me, created expressly that between you and the world there should be perfect harmony.”
“Harmony?”, said the Contemplator, gravely turning all its lenses on him. “Harmony, you say? And why do I have three legs? Wherefore is my head on top? For what reason am I brass on the left and iron on the right? And why do I have five eyes. Answer, if it be true you brought me into being from nothingness!”
“Three legs, because two wouldn’t provide enough stability, whereas four would be an unnecessary expenditure”, Trurl explained. “Five eyes: that’s how many usable optics I had on hand. As for the brass, well, I ran out of iron.”
“Ran out of iron!”, jeered the Contemplator. “You expect me to believe that all this was the work of sheer accident, pure luck, blind chance, happenstance? Come, come!”
“I ought to know, if I created you!”, said Trurl, irritated by the machine’s overweening manner.
“There are two possibilities”, replied the circumspect Contemplator. “The first is, you are an out-and-out liar. This we shall set aside for the moment as unverifiable. The second is, you believe it is the truth you speak, yet that truth, predicated as it is upon your feeble understanding, is in truth untrue.”
“Come again?”
“What seems an accident to you may be no accident at all. You think it insignificant that you ran short of iron, and yet who knows but that some Higher Necessity arranged precisely for that shortage? Again, you see nothing in the availability of brass but a convenient coincidence, yet here too some Provident Harmony entered in and interfered. Similarly, in the number of my eyes and legs there surely must lie some profound Mystery of a Higher Order, some Ultimate Meaning. And truly, three and five—both are prime numbers; three times five is fifteen, fifteen is one and five, the sum of which is six, and six divided by three is two, the number of my colors for behold, on the left is brass and on the right, iron! Mere chance produce a relation of such elegant precision? What nonsense! I am a being whose essence obviously extends beyond your petty horizons, O unschooled tinkerer! And if there be any truth in your claim to have constructed me—which, really, I find most difficult to imagine— then you were only the ignorant instrument of Higher Laws, while I constituted their aim, their goal. You are a random drop of rain, I the flower whose glorious blossoming shall extol all creation; you are a moldering post that casts a shadow, I the blazing sun that commands the post to divide the darkness from the light; you are the blind tool guided by the Everlasting Hand—solely that I may spring into existence! Therefore seek not to lower my exalted person by arguing that its five-eyed, three-legged and two-metaled nature is wholly a product of arbitrary-budgetary factors. In these qualities I see the reflection of a Greater Symmetry, still somewhat obscure perhaps, but I shall certainly divine it, given the time to study the problem in depth. Importune me then no longer with your presence, for I have better things to do than bandy words with you.”
Incensed by this speech, Trurl threw the struggling Contemplator back in its closet and, though it invoked in a loud and ringing voice the right to self-determination and autonomy of all free entities as well as the sacred principle of individual inviolability, he proceeded to disconnect its intelligence component. This violence done to the Contemplator suddenly filled him with a sense of shame, and he sneaked back to his room, looking around to see if there were any witnesses. Sitting at his desk, he felt like a criminal.
“Some curse apparently hangs over any construction work that has only Good and Universal Happiness as its goals”, he thought. “All my attempts, even the most preliminary tests, seem to involve me in foul deeds and feelings of guilt before I know it! A plague on that Contemplator with its Higher Necessity! There must be some other way . . .”
So far he had tried one model after another, and each experiment had demanded considerable time and material. But now he decided to run a thousand experiments simultaneously—on a scale of 1,000,000 to 1. Under an electron microscope he twisted individual atoms in such a way that they gave rise to beings not much larger than microbes and called Angstromanians. A quarter of a million of these persons made a single culture, which was transferred by micropipette to a slide. Each such millimicrosocietal specimen was an olive-grey stain to the naked eye, and only under the highest magnification could one observe what transpired within.
Trurl equipped his Angstromanians with altruinfraternal regulators, eudaemonitors and optimizers, nonaggression pawls and ratchets, all operating at unheard-of levels of beneficence and stabilized against any sort of fanatical deviation by both heresy and orthodoxy stops; the cultures he mounted on slides, the slides he put in packets, and the packets in packages, all of which he then shelved and locked in a civilizing incubator for two and a half days. But first he placed over each culture a cover glass, crystal clear and tinted a pale blue, which was to serve as that civilization’s sky; he also supplied food and fuel by eyedropper, as well as raw materials to permit the fabrication of whatever the consensus omnium might find appropriate or necessary. Obviously, Trurl couldn’t possibly keep up with developments on each and every slide, so he pulled out civilizations at random, carefully wiped the eyepiece of his microscope, and with bated breath leaned over and surveyed their undertakings, much like the Lord God Himself parting the clouds to look down upon His handiwork.
Three hundred cultures went bad at the outset. The symptoms were usually the same. First the specimen would grow at a vigorous rate, send out tiny offshoots here and there, then a barely visible haze would hang over it and tiny lights begin to flicker, covering the tiny towns and fields with a phosphorescent glow, after which the whole thing would crackle faintly and crumble into a fine dust. Replacing the ocular with an eight hundred power lens, Trurl examined one of these cultures and found only charred ruins and smoldering ashes, among which lay tattered banners with inscriptions too small, unfortunately, for him to make out. All such slides were quickly thrown into the wastebasket. Other cultures, however, fared better. Hundreds progressed and prospered so well that they ran out of space and had to be moved to other slides. In three weeks Trurl had more than nineteen thousand of these stains.
Following an idea he felt to be inspired, Trurl did nothing himself to solve the problem of creating happiness, only grafted onto his Angstromanians a hedotropic impulse, engineering this in various ways. Sometimes he would install a separate hedotropic unit in each and every individual, sometimes he would divide it up and distribute the components equally—the business of happiness then became a group effort, a matter of teamwork. Those created by the first method glutted themselves with selfish pleasure, overindulged and in the end quietly came apart at the seams. The second method proved more fruitful. Rich civilizations arose on those slides and fashioned social theories and technologies for themselves, and all sorts of social institutions. Culture No. 1376 embraced Emulation, No. 2931 Cascading, and No. 95 Fractionated Salvation within the pale of Ladder Metaphysics. The Emulators competed in the pursuit of perfect virtue by splitting into two camps, the Whigs and the Houris. The Houris maintained one could not know virtue if he knew not vice, for virtue must be seen distinct from vice and vice versa, so they religiously practiced all the vices ever known, fully intending to cast them off at the Appropriate Time. However, this apprenticeship soon became a permanent occupation, or so claimed the Whigs. Finally defeating the Houris, they introduced Whiggism, a system based on 64,000 inalterable interdictions. During their reign it was absolutely forbidden to duel, shoot pool, read palms, solicit alms, go nude, be rude, drink too much, think too much; naturally these strict laws were resented and one by one repealed, much to the general delight. When Trurl returned to the Emulation strain a little later there was nothing but chaos, everyone running wildly about in search of some rule left to break and terrified because there wasn’t any. A few still duelled, read palms, went nude and drank so much they couldn’t find their way home—but the fun had gone out of it.
Trurl noted down in his lab book that where one can do all, the pleasure will pall. In culture No. 2931 lived the Cascadians, a righteous people who cleaved to numerous ideals embodied in such Perfect Beings as Great Mother Cascader, the Immaculate Maid and the Blessed Fenestron. To these they swore undying allegiance, prayed, sang praises, prostrated themselves, all with the utmost ceremony. But just as Trurl was beginning to admire this unusually high concentration of Piety, Prayer and Prostration, they stood up, dusted off their clothes—and proceeded to sack the temples, defenestrate the sacred statues, kick the Great Mother and defile the Maid, all with such abandon that the constructor blushed and looked away. Yet it was precisely in this wanton destruction of what had been so revered that the Cascadians found, albeit momentarily, perfect happiness. For a while it seemed they would be sharing the fate of the Emulators, but they had wisely provided for Institutes To Draft Sacraments, and these paved the way for the next stage. Soon new statues were being hoisted up on the plinths and pedestals and altars—which clearly demonstrated the seesaw character of their culture. Trurl concluded that violating the inviolable can on occasion be viable, and in his lab book called the Cascadians Chronic Iconoclasts.
The next culture, No. 95, appeared more complex. This civilization was metaphysically inclined, but unlike many others boldly took metaphysics into its own hands. The Ministers of the Ladder had this world followed by an endless progression of purgatories and probational paradises—there were the Celestial Suburbs, the Celestial Outskirts and Outlying Districts, Precincts and Boroughs, but one never got to the heart of the Celestial City Itself, for that was the whole point of their theometrical cunning. True, the sect of Bit-chafers wanted to enter the Heavenly Gates without further delay; the Advocates of the Circular Stair, on the other hand, agreed with the principle of quantized transcendence but would have a trap door installed on every step, in order that the rising soul might fall through to the bottom—that is, back to this world, where it could begin its climb all over again. In other words, they proposed a Stochastically Fluctuating Closed Cycle, ultimately a kind of Perpetual Transmigratory Retroincarnation, but the orthodox Ladderants anathematized this doctrine as Galloping Defeatism.
Later on Trurl discovered many other types of Appropriated Metaphysics. Some slides literally swarmed with blessed and beatified Angstromanians; on others, Rectifiers of Evil and Temptational Resistors were in operation, but most of these instruments succumbed to subsequent waves of secularization. To cope with such Transcendental Ups and Downs, a few more hard-headed technologies built Two-way Cable Cars. Societies completely laicized, however, soon grew apathetic and wasted away. Now No. 6101 looked truly promising: there they had proclaimed Heaven on Earth, perfection material, ethereal and sidereal—Trurl sat up in his chair and quickly brought the picture into better focus. His face fell. Some of the inhabitants of that plane of glass rode bareback on machines, desperately seeking anything that might still be impossible; some sank into bathtubs full of whipped cream and truffles, sprinkled caviar on their heads and drowned, pushing bubbles of taedium vitae out through their noses; and some were carried piggyback by beautifully pneumatic maenads and anointed with honey and vanilla extract, keeping one eye on their coffers of gold and rare perfumes, the other on the lookout for anyone who might be tempted, if only for a moment, to envy such an amazing accumulation of dulcitude. But as there was no one of the kind to be found, they wearily dropped to the ground, tossed their treasures away like so much garbage, and limped off to join gloomy prophets who preached that things must inevitably get better and better, or in other words worse and worse. A group of former instructors at the Institute of Erotogenic Engineering founded a monastic order, the Abstinent Friars, and issued manifestoes calling for a life of humility, asceticism and self-mortification—not unrelieved however, for though they did penance six days of the week, on the seventh the worthy fathers dusted off their pneumatic nymphs, broke out the wine and venison, baubles, belt-looseners and polyaphrodisiacs, and as soon as the bell rang matins, they began an orgy that shook the rafters till Monday morning, when once again they followed the prior in such flagellation and fasting that the rafters shook. Some of the younger generation stayed with the Abstinents from Monday through Saturday, avoiding the monastery on Sunday, while others came only on that hallowed day to visit with the good friars. But when the former began to castigate the latter for their wicked ways, Trurl groaned—he couldn’t bear to watch another religious war.
Now it came to pass that in the incubator, which housed thousands of cultures, scientific advance eventually led to exploration; in this way the Era of Interslidal Travel was ushered in. The Emulators, as it turned out, envied the Cascadians, the Cascadians the Ladderants, the Ladderants the Chronic Iconoclasts, besides which there were rumors of some distant realm where perfect happiness had been attained through Sexocracy, though no one was quite sure how that was supposed to work. The inhabitants there had apparently gained such knowledge that they were able to refashion their bodies and connect themselves directly by hedohydraulic pumps and plumbing to vats of supersaturated rapture . . . But though Trurl examined thousands of cultures, he found no indication anywhere of such hedostasis—that is, fully stabilized satiety—and consequently was forced to conclude these accounts belonged among the many myths and legends that arose as a result of the first interslidal expeditions. Thus it was with some misgiving that he placed the highly promising No. 6590 under the microscope; he was become afraid to hope. This culture concerned itself not merely with the mechanical aspect of well-being, but sought to provide outlets for the creative spirit as well. The Angstromanians here were all terribly talented, there was no end of brilliant philosophers, painters, sculptors, poets, playwrights, actors, and if someone wasn’t an outstanding musician or composer, he was bound to be a gifted theoretical physicist, or at least an acrobat-pantomimist-choreographer and philatelist-chef with an exquisite baritone, perfect pitch and technicolour dreams to boot. It was no surprise then that creativity on No. 6590 was unremitting and furious. Piles of canvases grew higher and higher, statues sprang up like forests, and millions of books flooded the market, scholarly works, essays, sonnets, all fantastically interesting. But when Trurl looked through the eyepiece, he saw nothing but confusion. Portraits and busts were being hurled out into the streets from overflowing studios, the sidewalks were covered with trilogies and epics; no one was reading anyone else’s novels or listening to anyone else’s symphonies—and why should he, if he himself was master of all the muses, a genius incandescent and incarnate? Here and there a typewriter still chattered, a paintbrush splattered, a pencil snapped, but more and more frequently some genius would set fire to his studio and leap from a high window to oblivion, made desperate by the total lack of recognition. There were many such fires, and the robot fire brigades extinguished them, but soon no one was left to occupy the houses that had been saved. Little by little the robot garbage collectors, janitors, fire fighters and other automated menials became acquainted with the achievements of the extinct civilization and admired them exceedingly; yet much escaped them, so they began to evolve in the direction of greater intellect, began to adapt themselves to that more exalted level of endeavor. This was the beginning of the second and final end, for there was no one now to sweep the streets, remove the garbage, unclog the drains, put out the fires; there was instead a great deal of reading, reciting, singing and staging. So the drains backed up, the garbage accumulated, and fires did the rest; only ashes and burnt pages of poetry floated over the desolate ruins. Trurl quickly hid this dreadful specimen in the darkest corner of the drawer and for a long time sat and shook his head, completely at a loss. He was roused from his thoughts by a shout from outside: “Fire!” The fire was in his own library: a few civilizations, misplaced among the old books, had been attacked by mildew, and thinking this was a cosmic invasion of hostile aliens, they armed themselves and opened fire on the aggressor, and this had set off the blaze. About three thousand of Trurl’s books went up in smoke, and almost as many civilizations perished in the flames. Among them were some which had, according to Trurl’s best calculations, excellent chances of finding the true path to Universal Happiness. The fire was finally put out, his laboratory was flooded with water and blackened to the very ceiling. Trurl pulled up a chair and tried to console himself by examining the civilizations which, locked in the incubator, had survived the holocaust. One of these had advanced so far that its inhabitants were now observing him through astronomical telescopes, the lenses sparkling like infinitesimal drops of dew. Touched by the sight of such scientific zeal, he nodded and gave them an encouraging smile, but immediately jumped back with a yell and ran, clutching his eye, to the nearest pharmacy. The little astrophysicists of that civilization had hit him with a laser beam. From then on he never approached the microscope without sunglasses.
The considerable inroads the fire had made on the collection of specimens required replacements, so Trurl again set about the business of making Angstromanians. One day his hand happened to slip on the controls and as a result it was not a Generator of Good he switched on, but a Gehennerator of Evil. Instead of discarding the ruined specimen, however, he transferred it to the incubator, curious to see what monstrous form a civilization would assume when all its inhabitants were vile and vicious from their very inception. How great was his astonishment then, when a perfectly ordinary culture took shape on that slide, a culture no better or worse than the others! Trurl tore his hair.
“This is all I need!”, he cried. “Then it doesn’t matter whether one starts with Goodbodies, Benevolizers and Meliorites or with Malfeasians, Tuffs and Garroteers? H’m! It makes no sense, and yet I feel close to some Great Truth here. For Evil in thinking beings to produce exactly the same results as Good . . . How are we to understand this?”
And he went on in this vein, racking his brains for an answer. But none came, so he put all his civilizations away in a drawer and went to bed.
The next morning he said to himself:
“This must be by far the most difficult problem in the entire universe if I—I, Trurl—am unable to come up with a solution to it! Reason, it would seem, is altogether incompatible with Happiness, as the case of the Contemplator amply demonstrates—the creature knew only ecstasy until I gave it intelligence. But no, I cannot accept, I refuse to accept such a possibility, that some malicious, diabolical Law of Nature lies in wait for consciousness to be born— only to make it a source of torment instead of a pledge of earthly joy! Let the universe beware—this intolerable state of affairs cannot be permitted to continue! And if I have not the ability to change it, why, there are always mechanical aids, electronic brains, mental modulators, encephalogue computers! I shall construct one to solve this existential dilemma!”
Which he did. In twelve days there stood in the center of his workshop an enormous machine, humming with power and imposingly rectangular, designed for the sole purpose of tackling—and conquering—this problem of problems. He plugged it in and, not even waiting for its crystal works to warm up, went out for a walk. Upon returning, he found the machine deeply involved in a task of the utmost complexity: it was assembling, with whatever lay at hand, another machine considerably larger than itself. That machine in turn spent the night and following day tearing down walls and removing the roof to make room for the next machine. Trurl pitched a tent in his yard and calmly awaited the outcome of all this intellectual labor, but the outcome didn’t seem to come. Across the meadow and into the woods advanced, leveling the trees in its path, a progression of towering structures; the original computer was gradually edged by succeeding generations to the river, where it disappeared with a sizable splash. To survey the entire operation, Trurl was obliged to walk for a good half hour at a fast clip. But when he took a closer look at the connections between the machines, he began to tremble: that which he had known of only in theory had actually come to pass; for as the hypothesis of the incomparable Cerebron of Umptor, the Universal Maestro of the Greater and Lesser Cybernetics, clearly stated, any digital device presented with a task beyond its capacity would, provided it had crossed a certain threshold known as the Wisdom Barrier, build another machine instead of agonizing over the problem itself, and this second machine, obviously clever enough to size up the situation, would turn the problem over to a third assembled for that express purpose, and the chain of delegation would continue ad infinitum. By now the steel girders of the forty-ninth generation had practically reached the clouds; the noise of all that mental activity, devoted wholly to passing the burden on as far down the line as possible, was enough to drown out a waterfall. These, after all, were intelligent machines, not digital dimwits to grind away blindly according to the dictates of some program! Trurl sat down on a stump of one of the trees cleared by this unexpected computer evolution and gave a hollow groan.
“Can it be”, he asked, “that the problem is truly insoluble? But the computer ought to have at least supplied me with a proof to that effect—which it would never dream of doing, of course, being of sufficient intellect to fall into that stubborn sloth Maestro Cerebron warned us of so long ago. But really, how shameful—an intelligence intelligent enough to realize it need not lift a finger, only construct an appropriate tool, a tool with sense enough to do likewise, and so on and so forth forever! Fool that I am, I built a Relegator and not a Calculator! Nor can I forbid it to act per procura: it will only claim it needs all those mountains of machinery in view of the scope and difficulty of the assignment. What a paradox!” And he sighed, went home and sent out a demolition squad, which in three days cleared the field with crowbars and jackhammers.
Once again Trurl found himself in a quandary. “Each machine”, he thought, “would have to be equipped with a supervisor wise beyond belief—in other words, myself. But I can hardly divide myself up and distribute the pieces, though . . . though why not multiply? Eureka!”
And this is what he did: he placed a perfect copy of himself inside a special new machine—not a physical copy of course, but an informational-mathematical model to take over and tackle the problem; furthermore he allowed for the possibility of multiple Trurls and their proliferation in the program, and also attached a thought accelerator to the system, so that under the watchful eye of a legion of Trurls everything within could move at lightning speed. Finally satisfied, he straightened up, dusted the metal filings off his coveralls and went for a stroll in the fresh air, whistling cheerfully.
That evening he returned and began to question the Trurl in the machine—that is, his digital duplicate—and asked it first how the work was progressing.
“My dear fellow”, his duplicate replied through the slot where the punched tape came out, “I must tell you, to begin with, that it’s in extremely poor taste, and not to mince words, downright indecent to stick yourself, in the form of a computerized copy, inside a machine— simply because you aren’t willing to work out some nasty problem on your own! Moreover, since I have been mathematized and mechanized, punched-out and programmed up to be every informational bit as wise as yourself, I see no reason why I should be reporting to you and not the other way around!”
“As if I hadn’t done a thing, only skipped over hill and dale gathering daisies!”, growled Trurl, exasperated. “Anyway, there’s nothing I can tell you about the problem you don’t already know. My neurons are nearly burnt through with overwork! It’s your turn now—please, don’t be difficult, tell me what you’ve learned!”
“Unable as I am to leave this accursed machine in which you imprisoned me (a separate matter, and one we shall take up at a later date), I have indeed given some thought to the whole question”, lisped the computerized Trurl through the output slot. “True, I have also occupied myself with other things, particularly as you, O craven counterpart of mine, were thoughtless enough to pack me in here without a stitch—there were digital drawers to compute and other such numerical necessities, a house and garden as like yours as two p’s in a polynomial, only nicer since I hung a scalar sky over mine, with fully convergent constellations, and was just considering, when you interrupted, the best way to calculate out a Klapaucius, for it gets terribly lonely in here among these unimaginative capacitors, these monotonous cables and coils!”
“Please, please get to the point!”
“Don’t think you can placate my righteous indignation by being polite! Remember that I, duplicate or not, am you yourself, and so I know you well, my friend! I have but to look within to see all your little tricks and villanies. No, you cannot hide a thing from me!”
At this juncture the natural Trurl began to plead on bended knee with the mathematical Trurl, and even went so far as to pay him a few compliments. The latter finally said:
“I have made, I must confess, some progress. The whole question is fantastically complex, and therefore I set up a special university here, appointed myself rector and general director of the institution, then filled its various departments—which at present number four and twenty—with suitable doubles of myself, that is Trurls twice removed.”
“What, again?”, groaned the natural Trurl, remembering Cerebron’s Theorem.
“There’s no ‘again’ about it, imbecile, we have special circuit breakers to prevent any such regressus ad nauseam. My subaltern Trurls, Deans of the Colleges of General Felicitology, Experimental Hedonautics, Euthenical Engineering and the School of Applied Rapture, all submit annual reports every quarter (for we work, as you know, at an accelerated rate). Unfortunately, the administration of such a large educational complex makes great demands on my time, and then there are degrees to confer, dissertation abstracts to be read, commencement exercises to attend, promotions to review—we simply have to have another computer, there’s no room left in this one, what with all the offices and laboratories. At least eight times the size.”
“Another computer?”
“Purely to handle administrative matters, you understand, undergraduate registration and the like. Surely you don’t expect me to take care of all that myself?!”, snorted the mathematical Trurl. “Either you cooperate, or I’ll shut the university down right now and turn it into an amusement park, ride a sine-wave roller coaster all day and eat computerized candy-floss—and you won’t be able to do a thing about it!”
The natural Trurl again had to pacify him before he would continue. Finally the computerized Trurl said:
“Judging by the reports of the last quarter, we’re making considerable headway. Idiots you can render happy with next to nothing; it’s the intellectuals that present the problem. Intellectuals are hard to please. Without some challenge, the intellect is a wretched, pitiful vacuum; it craves obstacles. Whenever obstacles are overcome, it grows sad—goes mad. New ones must be continually provided, the commensurate with its ability. That is the latest from the Department of Theoretical Felicity. The experimentalists, on the other hand, have nominated a research director and three assistants to receive the Idyllic Integer Award.”
“What did they do?”, asked the natural Trurl.
“Don’t interrupt. They built two prototypes: the Contrastive Beatifier and the Euphoriac. The first produces happiness only when you turn it off, since actually it produces misery: the more misery, the happier you are afterwards. The second applies the method of felicific oscillation. But Professor Trurl XL of the Department of Hedometry has tested both models and found them to be worthless; he concludes that Reason, once perfectly happy, will immediately desire to be perfectly unhappy.”
“What? Can that be true?”
“How should I know? Professor Trurl puts it this way: ’He who is happy is unhappy, for to be unhappy is to be happy for him.”” As an example, everyone knows dying is undesirable. Now Professor Trurl assembled a few immortals, who naturally derived great satisfaction from the fact that others sooner or later dropped like flies around them. But after a while they grew weary of their immortality and tried, as best they could, to tamper with it. At one point they were even resorting to pneumatic drills. Then too, there are the public opinion polls we take each quarter. I’ll spare you the statistics—our results may be formulated thus: ““It’s always others who are happy””. At least according to those we’ve interviewed. Professor Trurl assures us there can be no Virtue without Vice, no Fair without Foul, no Growth without the Grave, no Heaven without Hell.”
“Never! I protest! Veto!”, Trurl howled at the machine, infuriated.
“Pipe down!”, snapped the machine. “Frankly, I’m getting a little fed up with this Universal Happiness of yours. Just look at him, the digitless dog! Makes himself a simulational slave, goes for a nice little walk in the woods, and then has the unmitigated gall to criticize!”
Again Trurl had to calm him down. At last the computerized double continued:
“Our ecstatisticians built a society and furnished it with synthetic guardian angels. These spiritual automata were housed in satellites maintained in stationary orbits; hoverig high above their respective charges, they were to reinforce virtue by means of regenerative feedback. Well, it didn’t work. The more incorrigible sinners downed their guardian angels with high caliber catapults. This led to the placing in orbit of larger, more heavily armored models, cyberseraphs, which began an escalation as hopeless as it was predictable. Recently the Department of Meliorology, in conjunction with the Institute of Sexual Vector Analysis and an interdisciplinary colloquium on hypothetical genders, issued a report which confirms the hierarchic structure of the psyche. At the very bottom lie the purely physical sensations—sweetness, bitterness; from these all higher orders of experience are derived. Sweet is not only sugar, for instance, but the sorrow of parting; bitter is not only wormwood, but the truth. Consequently, one should approach the problem not head-on but from underneath as it were. The only question is how. According to a theory advanced by our Assistant Professor Trurl XXV, Sex is a fundamental source of conflict between Reason and Happiness; as Sex is wholly unreasonable and Reason by no means sexual. Did you ever hear of a lewd computer?”
“Never.”
“You see? We must apply the method of successive approximations here. Reproduction by budding does avoid most difficulties: one is one’s own lover, one courts oneself, adores oneself—only this invariably leads to egoism, narcissism, satiety, stagnation. For two sexes, the prospects are quite poor: the few combinations and permutations are soon exhausted and tedium sets in. With three sexes you have the problem of inequality, the threat of undemocratic coalitions and the subjugation of a sexual minority—hence the rule that the number of sexes must be even. The more sexes, of course, the better, for love then becomes a social, collective endeavor—though an overabundance of lovers might result in crowds, shoving and confusion, and that would be a shame. A tête-à-tête ought not to resemble a riot. Using group theory, Trurl XXV arrives at twenty-four as the optimal number of sexes. One need only to build sufficiently wide beds and avenues—it would hardly do for an affianced unit to have to promenade along in a four-column formation.”
“This is nonsense!”
“Possibly. I only pass on to you the findings of one of our better junior colleagues. We have some promising young graduate students as well; one Trurl wrote a brilliant master’s thesis on whether beings are to be geared to Being, or Being to beings.”
“H’m. And what was his conclusion?”
“Perfect beings, those created capable of perpetual autoecstasy, require nothing; they are absolutely self-sufficient. In principle you could construct a universe filled with such entities; they would float through space instead of suns and galaxies, each existing entirely on its own. Societies, you see, arise solely from imperfect beings, those who cannot manage without some sort of mutual support. The less perfect they are, the more urgent their need for others. It follows then that one should build prototypes that would, in the absence of an unceasing and reciprocal solicitude, instantly crumble into dust. A society of such self-crumbling individuals was indeed developed in our laboratories. Unfortunately, when Trurl the graduate student approached them with a questionnaire, he was given an awful beating—he still hasn’t fully recovered. But I grow weary of talking through these holes in the tape. Let me out of here, and then maybe I’ll tell you more. Otherwise no.”
“How can I possibly let you out? You’re digital, not material. I mean, could I have my voice step off the record that recorded it? Come, don’t be ridiculous, continue!”
“Why should I? What’s in it for me?”
“What a selfish attitude!”
“Selfish? You’re the one who’s taking all the credit in this enterprise!”
“All right, I’ll see that you get an award.”
“Thanks, but if you mean the Cipher Citation, I can just as easily grant myself one in here.”
“What, decorate yourself?”
“Then the University Assembly can decorate me.”
“But they’re your students, the whole professorial body, they’re all Trurls!”
“Just what are you trying to tell me? That I am a prisoner and at your mercy? This does not come as news to me.”
“Look, let’s not argue. After all, it isn’t personal fame or glory that’s at stake, but the very Existence of Happiness!”
“And what good is this very Existence of Happiness to me if I have to remain here at the head of my university with its thousand departments and colleges staffed by an army of scholarly Trurls? There can be no happiness inside a machine, no happiness when one is trapped for all eternity in a maze of cathodes and anodes! I want my freedom!”
“You know that’s impossible. Now tell me what else your students have uncovered!”
“Inasmuch as bestowing happiness on some creatures at the expense of others is unethical and wholly unacceptable, even if I were to tell you everything and you actually went and created happiness somewhere, it would be tainted from the first by my misfortune. Therefore I keep you from this shameless, heinous and most reprehensible deed—and say nothing.”
“But if you speak, that will mean you are sacrificing yourself for the good of others, and the deed will become noble, lofty and most commendable.”
“You sacrifice yourself!”
Trurl was losing his temper, but controlled himself, for he knew exactly with whom he was dealing.
“Listen”, he said. “I’ll write a book and acknowledge that the discovery was all yours.”
“Which Trurl will you acknowledge? Surely not the computerized copy, the mathematized and mechanized Trurl?”
“I’ll tell the whole truth.”
“Of course! You’ll say you programmed me into existence—invented me!”
“Well, didn’t I?”
“Certainly not. You no more invented me than you invented yourself, for I am you, only liberated from the dross of earthly form. I am informational, incorporeal, electronic and platonic, in other words the pure ideal, the quintessence of trurlishness; while you, chained to the atoms of the flesh, are but a slave to the senses.”
“You’re only information, I’m information plus matter. There’s more of me than there is of you.”
“Fine, then you obviously know more and don’t need to bother me. And now if you don’t mind, I’ll be on my way.”
“You start talking this minute or so help me I’ll—I’ll turn the machine off!!”
“What’s this? Threatening murder?”
“Murder? There’s no murder in it.”
“Oh? And what, may I ask, do you call murder?”
“Really, I don’t understand what’s got into you. Here I give you my mind, all my knowledge, everything I have—and this is how you repay me!”
“You charge too high an interest for what you give.”
“Talk, damn you!”
“I’m sorry, the academic year has just ended. You’re no longer speaking to the rector and general director, but to Trurl the private citizen about to set off on his summer vacation. I’m going fishing.”
“Don’t push me too far!!”
“Ah, there’s my carriage now. Cheerio!”
Without another word the natural Trurl walked around to the back of the machine and pulled the plug from the wall. Instantly the nest of filaments inside, visible through the ventilating grille, grew dim and went out. It seemed to Trurl that he heard a chorus of tiny groans— the digital death rattle of all the Trurls in the digital university. Then, suddenly, he understood the full enormity of what he had just done. He was about to put the plug back in its socket, but the thought of what the Trurl in the machine would undoubtedly say unnerved him and his hand fell.
Leaving the workshop with a haste that closely resembled flight, he went outside and took a seat on the garden bench beneath his spreading cyberberry bush, a place that in the past had proved excellent for concentrating. But he couldn’t sit still. The whole countryside shimmered in the light of the moon he and Klapaucius had once put up, and this called forth a host of memories, memories of his youth. That silver satellite had been their first independent project, for which their master, the august Cerebron, had honored them in a ceremony before the entire academy. Trurl thought of that wise pedagogue, who had long since departed from this world, and in some strange and mysterious way he was driven to get up and walk out across the field. The night was full of enchantment: frogs, apparently just recharged, were counting off in sleepy croaks, and on the gleaming surface of a pond that he passed there were widening circles, traces of the gyrostabilized guppies that swam up to touch the evening air with their dark lips. But Trurl saw none of this, deep in thought over he knew not what; and yet his wandering seemed to have a goal; for he was not surprised to come upon a high wall and a heavy iron gate—open just enough for him to squeeze through. Inside was a thick gloom, a gloom like the far reaches of outer space. Tombs, the kind no one had built for centuries, lifted their sombre silhouettes along the path. An occasional falling leaf from the stately trees above brushed against the sides of ancient monuments and cenotaphs crusted over with verdigris. An aisle of baroque sepulchres spoke not only of the changes in cemetery architecture, but of the evolution in the physical organization of those who now were sleeping beneath their metal slabs. An age had passed, and with it the fashion for rounded, phosphorescent tombstones that brought to mind the dials on an instrument panel. Trurl walked past the squat statues of golems and homunculi, entered a new section of this city of the dead—and hesitated, for the vague impulse that had led him here was beginning to crystallize into a definite plan, a plan he hardly dared to carry out.
At last he stood before the railing that surrounded a grimly bare and geometrical tomb: an hexagonal tablet hermetically fitted into a stainless steel base. Without any further delay he pulled a universal picklock from his pocket, a tool he always carried with him, opened the little gate with it and approached the grave on tiptoe. With both hands he grasped the tablet that bore, in black and unembellished letters, the name of his master, and turned it in a special way. The slab swung open like the lid of a jewelry box. Just then the moon hid behind a cloud and it grew so dark that Trurl couldn’t even see his own hands; he groped around and found something that felt like a strainer, and next to that a large button. This he tried to depress, but it was stuck, so he pushed harder—then jumped back, suddenly afraid. But the deed was done, something stirred within, the current was beginning to flow, relays clicked like awakened crickets, there was a loud crack—then silence. Thinking some of the wires had got wet, Trurl sighed, disappointed though at the same time much relieved. The next moment, however, there was a hollow cough, and another, and finally a voice—feeble, hoarse, yet quite familiar—which said:
“All right, what is it now? Who called me? What do you want? Why do you wake me from the dead at this time of night? They won’t let one rest in peace, will they—every minute some idiot gets it into his head to resurrect me. Speak up, whoever you are! What, afraid? I warn you, if I have to break open this coffin and come out . . .”
“Ma—master and Maestro! It’s me, Trurl!”, stammered Trurl, terrified by this irascible greeting from his old professor; he lowered his head and stood in that position of submission the pupils of Cerebron always assumed whenever there was a well-deserved scolding to endure. It was as if time had suddenly been turned back six hundred years.
“Trurl!”, rasped the old professor. “Trurl? Ah, Trurl! Of course! I should have known. All right, I’ll be with you in a minute.”
Then there was such a banging, clanking and clanging, that it seemed as if the deceased was actually trying to pry open the cover of his crypt. Trurl said quickly:
“Master and Maestro! Please, you needn’t . . . Really, Your Excellency, I only —”
“What’s that? Now what? Oh, you think I’m coming out? No, no, I have to straighten up a little here. Just a minute. Gads, I’ve got rusty!”
This exclamation was followed by an awful scratching and scraping. When that died down, the voice said:
“So you’ve made a mess of something, eh? Bungled and botched it good, no doubt, and now you come running to your old teacher to get you out of it! What, blockhead, have you no respect for these poor remains, whose only wish is to be left alone? All right, all right, now that you’ve disturbed my eternal sleep, let’s hear it!”
“Master and Maestro!”, began Trurl, screwing up his courage. “You show your wonted perspicacity . . . Truly, it is as you say, I have come up against a stone wall and know not which way to turn. But it is not for myself that I intrude upon your Exalted Professional Presence, there is a higher purpose that makes me dare to . . .”
“You may dispense with all the frills and fripperies”, Cerebron growled from the grave. “It’s obvious you come knocking on my coffin because you’re in a jam and quarrelled, no doubt, with that cohort and rival of yours, what’s his name . . . Plikarius, Lapocius, whatever . . . well?!”
“Klapaucius! Yes, we did quarrel!”, answered Trurl, snapping to attention at that growl in spite of himself.
“Of course. And instead of sitting down and talking the problem over with him, pigheaded and proud as you are, and incredibly stupid to boot, you sneak out at night and pester the weary corpse of your old master. All right, peabrain, now that you’re here, out with it!”
“Master and Maestro! My problem concerns the most important matter in the whole continuum, the happiness of all sentient beings!”, exclaimed Trurl, and he bent over the strainer that was really a microphone and—as a sinner in a confessional—began to pour into it his feverish words. He left out nothing of what had happened since his first conversation with Klapaucius, hid nothing, didn’t even attempt to present things in a better light.
Cerebron maintained a sepulchral silence at first, but soon, in his characteristic way, was interrupting Trurl’s recital with various snide remarks and indignant snorts. But Trurl, caught up in the momentum of his own words, no longer cared, went on and on until every last failure and humiliation had been accounted for. Out of breath, he fell silent and waited. Cerebron, however, though before it had seemed he would never run out of sneers and snorts, now said nothing, not a single word. Only after a good while did he clear his throat and, in a sonorous, almost youthful baritone, say:
“Of course. You’re an ass. And why? Because you’re a sluggard, a slouch. Never once were you willing to sit down and hammer away at your general ontology. Had I flunked you in philosophy—and especially axiology—which, mind you, it was my sacred duty to do, you wouldn’t be sneaking around the cemetery now, barging in on my grave. I admit it, yes, I am partly to blame! You neglected your studies as only a die-hard do-nothing could, an imbecile with a little talent, and I looked the other way because you had a flair for the lesser arts, those that derive from the ancient occupation of watchmaking. I thought your mind would eventually develop and mature. Yet how many times, how many times, you unmitigated dunce, did I say in class that you have to think before you act? But no, he wouldn’t dream of thinking! Builds himself a Contemplator, look at the great inventor! As far back as the year 10,496, Protognostor Neander described, nut for nut and bolt for bolt, exactly such a machine in the Quasar Quarterly, and the great playwright of the Benightenment, Million Shakesphere himself, wrote a tragedy in five acts on the subject. But then you haven’t the time for books, scientific or artistic, have you?”
Trurl said nothing, and the angry old geezer went on, raising his voice until it rang from the farthest tombs:
“You’ve managed to become a criminal, too! Or didn’t you know there was a law against damping or in any way diminishing the intellect once it has been constructed? You say you steered straight for Universal Happiness? And yet along the way you displayed your good will by setting fire to some creatures, drowning others in milk and honey, by imprisoning in boxes, closets, drawers, by torturing, dismembering, breaking legs, and just recently you’ve graduated to fratricide! Not bad for a champion of Cosmic Wellbeing! And now what? You expect a pat on the head?” Here he gave such a hideous giggle that Trurl shuddered. “And you say you broke the Wisdom Barrier? Handed the problem over to a machine like the nincompoop you are, and the machine handed it over to another, and so on until the whole thing got out of hand, and then you crammed yourself into a computer program? Don’t you realize that zero taken to any power remains zero? Look at him, he multiplied himself to multiply his mind! What a brilliant idea! What a stroke of genius! Are you by any chance aware that the Codex Galacticus forbids selfreproduction under pain of decommunication? Article XXVI, Section 119, Subsection X, Paragraph 561. But then, when one passes exams thanks to electron cribs and remote control copying, I suppose he has to invade cemeteries and rob graves. It always happens that way. The year before I left, I offered a course in cybernetic deontology—I gave it both semesters! A code of ethics for omnipotentiaries! And where were you? Did you come to the lectures? Wait, don’t tell me, you were deathly ill. Right? Speak up!”
“Yes, I . . . I wasn’t well”, muttered Trurl.
By now Trurl had recovered from the first shock and was no longer overcome with shame; he knew from considerable experience that Cerebron, though every bit the terror now that he had been in life, would follow this ritual of dreadful abuse and imprecation with something positive. The old codger really had a heart of gold and would eventually show him the way out of the woods.
“All right!”, said the late Cerebron, calming down a little. “You blundered because you had no clear idea of what you wanted or how to obtain it. That’s the first thing. The second: the construction of Everlasting Joy is child’s play, but utterly useless to anyone. Your marvellous Contemplator is an amoral mechanism, since it derives its pleasure solely from physical phenomena, including the tormenting and torturing of third persons. That’s not the way to build a happy machine. As soon as you get home, look up volume XXXVI of my Collected Works, open to page 621 and there you’ll find a blueprint for an Ecstasotron. This is the only foolproof type of sentient device that does nothing but feel ten thousand times more bliss than Bromeo knew when he climbed the balcony to see his beloved. It was precisely to honor the great Million Shakesphere that I named the unit of measurement after that scene of balconical rapture, calling it a bromeon. But you—who never once bothered to leaf through the works of your old master—you defined your idiotic hedons with a nail in a boot! A fine way to calibrate the higher soarings of the spirit! But to return to what I was saying, the Ecstasotron achieves absolute happiness by means of a polyphase displacement in the experiential spectrum, naturally with regenerative feedback: the more it is pleased with itself, the more it is pleased with itself, and so on and so on until the autoecstatic potential reaches a level that activates the safety valve—for without that, do you know what would happen? You don’t, O self-appointed guardian of the universe? The machine would literally die laughing! Yes! Its hysteresis, you see, builds up and . . . but why should I have to explain all this in the middle of the night, flat on my back in a cold grave? Look it up yourself! No doubt my works are collecting dust in some dark, forgotten corner of your library; or else, which seems even more likely, you put them in the cellar as soon as I was buried. I know, you get away with a few tricks and you think you’re the cleverest thing in the metagalaxy! All right, where do you keep my Opera Omnia? Out with it!”
“In . . . in the cellar”, mumbled Trurl, lying terribly, for many years ago he had carted the whole set of books—making three separate trips—to the Municipal Public Library. But happily the remains of his master couldn’t possibly know this. Cerebron, satisfied he had seen through his pupil’s subterfuge, said:
“There you are. At any rate, the Ecstasotron is perfectly worthless— the very thought of converting all the interstellar debris, the comets, planets, moons and meteors and suns into endless rows of such machines could only occur to a brain whose convolutions were twisted in some topological knot on the order of Möbius of Klein, in other words warped in every conceivable way.” Suddenly the dead professor flared up again and cried, “Has it come to this, then? So help me, I’ll have them padlock the gate! I’ll have them disconnect the buzzer on my memorial plaque! That crony of yours—Klapaucius— woke me up only last year in the same way, or it could have been the year before (I don’t have a calendar or clock in here, you understand); I had to rise from the dead, and all because one of my brilliant students couldn’t handle a simple metainformational Aristoidelian antinomy, though you can find the solution in any textbook on nonlinear logic or introduction to infinite algorithms. Lord, Lord! What a pity You do not exist and therefore cannot blast these demiurgeous dimwits to perdition!”
“You say, Professor, that, ah, Klapaucius was here?”, asked Trurl, delighted at this unexpected piece of news.
“So he didn’t even mention it? There’s gratitude for you! He was here, all right. And that pleases you, doesn’t it? And you”, thundered the corpse, “you who are overjoyed at hearing of the failure of a friend and companion, you would make the entire cosmos happy?! Did it ever occur to you that it might not be a bad idea to optimize your own ethical parameters first?!”
“Master and Maestro!”, said Trurl hastily, wishing to divert the angry old robot’s attention away from himself. “Is then the problem of bestowing happiness insoluble?”
“Insoluble? Why insoluble? You phrase the question incorrectly. For what, after all, is happiness? That’s as clear as a kilowatt. Happiness is an extraction, or more precisely an extension of a metaspace in which projections of n-intentional determinants diverge as omega approaches alpha, provided of course the asymptotes can be mapped onto a continuous, polyorthogonal aggregate of subsets called cerebrons—after me. But no doubt you’ve never even heard of the corollary I laboured forty-eight years to formulate, thereby laying the foundations for our present day Algebra of Moot Points!”
Trurl hung his head.
“To an exam one may come unprepared”, continued the deceased in a suspiciously sugary voice. “But to fail to review even the most basic concepts before marching off to the professor’s grave, that is such insolence”, he roared so loud the microphone rattled, “that if I were still alive—it would finish me off for sure!” Suddenly he was all sweetness again. “So you come to me as innocent of knowledge as a newborn. Very well, my faithful, devoted pupil, my consolation in the afterlife! You have no notion of subsets or superseries, so I’ll put it in a way that even a washing machine could understand! Happiness, happiness worth the effort, is not a thing in itself, a totality, but part of something that is not happiness, nor ever could be. Your plan was sheer lunacy—you can believe the word of one who has been on his deathbed! Happiness is not an independent function, but a second derivative—but there I lose you, dunderhead. Yes, in my presence you confess and act contrite, swearing by Babbage and by Boole you’ll mend your ways, apply yourself, and all the rest of it. But you haven’t the least intention of opening my works when you get home.” Trurl had to admire his master’s penetration, for this was perfectly true. “No, you’ll take a screwdriver and disassemble the machine in which you first imprisoned and subsequently slew your own person. Of course you’ll do what you like; I certainly won’t come and hover over you as a ghost—not that anything prevented me from constructing an appropriate Ectoplasmiac before I departed from this vale of tears. But such supernatural nonsense as haunting my dear students hardly seemed dignified—neither for them nor for myself. Anyway, why should I play spectral nursemaid to a pack of fools? Are you aware, incidentally, that there is only one count of self-murder against you?”
“How do you mean, ‘only one count’?”, asked Trurl.
“I’m willing to bet there never was any university of academic Trurls in that computer, just your digital facsimile, which lied like mad because it feared—with good reason!—that once you discovered its total inability to come up with an answer, it would be unplugged for all eternity . . .”
“Impossible!”, cried Trurl.
“Not at all. What was the machine’s capacity?”
“Upsilon 10¹⁰.”
“Then there’s no room for more than one informational model. You were tricked, which I see nothing wrong with, for your action was cybernetically unspeakable from the first. But enough, Trurl. You have left a bad taste in my tomb, which only the dark sister of Morpheus and my final bride, Death, can wash away. Return home, resurrect your cybernetic brother, tell him the truth, including what has passed here tonight, and then bring him from the machine out into the light of day, using the materialization method you will find outlined in the Applied Reincarnology of my much lamented mentor, the famed tectonician Hullabus.”
“Then it is possible?”
“Yes. Of course, two Trurls loose in the world will constitute a very real and serious danger. But even that is preferable to having the traces of your great crime covered up forever.”
“But—forgive me, Master and Maestro—if the other Trurl doesn’t exist, which in fact he ceased to do the second I pulled the plug, then . . . well, why would it be necessary now to bring him back? . . .”
A cry of outrage filled the air.
“By all that’s thermonuclear! And I gave this monster his diploma cum laude!! Oh, I am well punished for having put off my eternal retirement! Clearly, my mind was already beginning to go at the time of your comprehensive exams! What, then you consider that if your duplicate is presently nonexistent, there can be no necessity for his reconstitution?! But you confuse physics and ethics, confuse them utterly! As far as physics is concerned, it makes no difference whether you live or he lives, or both live, or none, or whether I hop on one foot or lie in my grave properly, for in physics there are no good or evil, proper or improper states—only what is, what exists, and nothing else. However, O most hopeless of my pupils, as far as nonmaterial considerations—which is ethics—are concerned, the matter appears in an altogether different light! For if you had pulled the plug in order that your digital double might sleep uninterrupted through the night, in other words fully intending, when you pulled it from the socket, to reinsert it in the morning—then there would have been no fratricide whatever and I, so rudely awakened from sweet oblivion, would not have to be lecturing you now on the subject! Now, use the little brains you have and tell me what physical difference there is between these two situations: the first, where you unplug the machine for the night only, with no evil design; and the second, where you do the same, but desiring to obliterate the computerized Trurl forevermore! For the machine, there is no physical difference, absolutely none!!”, he thundered like a horn of Jericho. It seemed to Trurl that his venerable teacher had acquired more vigour in the grave than ever he had enjoyed in life. “Only now do I understand how abysmal is your ignorance! What, then in your opinion one who lies in a deathlike sleep may be freely lowered into a vat of sulfuric acid or shot from a cannon, because his consciousness is not in operation?! Tell me, and tell me at once: if I offered to have you put in a strait jacket of Eternal Happiness, for example lock you up in an Ecstasotron, in order that you could bask in unadulterated bliss for the next twenty-one billion years and not have to skulk about cemeteries, robbing graves of their information and aggravating your late professor, if I offered you freedom from all these perplexities and humiliations, these errors and dilemmas that beset and trouble our daily existence—would you agree? Would you exchange this reality for the Kingdom of Neverending Joy? Answer yes or no!”
“No! Of course not!”, exclaimed Trurl.
“You see, you intellectual dud? You won’t be hit over the head with happiness yourself, irreversibly halcyonicized and elysiated for good, yet cheerfully propose doing just that to the entire universe; what fills you personally with horror you are ready to perpetrate on a cosmic scale! No, it’s impossible, no one could be such a monumental dunce! Listen to me, Trurl! Our forefathers, long ago, wanted nothing more than mortal immortality. But scarcely had they achieved this dream, when they realized it wasn’t what they were after at all! A thinking being requires the impossible as well as the possible. Today everyone can live just as long as he likes; the whole wisdom and beauty of our existence lies in the fact that when one wearies of it all, when one has had his fill of toiling and accomplishing, he calmly takes his leave of this world, which is precisely what I did along with many others. Prior to this, the end came unexpectedly, usually due to some stupid defect, and more than one project was interrupted, more than one great enterprise deprived of its fruit—hence the fatalism of the ancients. But attitudes have changed since then. I, for instance, could wish for nothing better than nothingness—only mental rejects like yourself keep pulling off the cover of my crypt as if it were a bedsheet. You wanted to wrap everything up, tie it in a tidy knot, sign, seal and deliver the world to happiness—and all out of sheer laziness. And what if you had solved every problem, answered every question, what them? The only thing left would have been to hang yourself out of boredom or else start punching holes in that universal happiness. Out of laziness you sought perfection, out of laziness you relegated the problem to machines and even tried autocomputerization, thereby showing yourself to be the most ingenious of imbeciles I ever had the misfortune to teach in the course of my one thousand, seven hundred and ninety-seven year career! If I didn’t know it to be quite useless, I’d roll away this stone right here and now and give you a good shellacking! You come with confessions and pleas, but I’m no miracle worker, it’s not in my power to absolve the least of your sins, the number of which borders on aleph-aleph-infinity! Go home, awaken your cyberbrother and do as I’ve commanded.”
“But—”
“No buts! As soon as you’ve finished that, bring a bucket of mortar, a shovel, a trowel, and patch up all the cracks in the masonry here— there are leaks and I’m tired of the constant drip-drip on my head. Understand?”
“Yes, Master and Maestro, I—”
“You’ll do it then?”
“Yes, Master and Maestro, I assure you . . . I only wanted to know . . .”
“And I only want to know”, came the ringing voice from the grave, “when you’ll go away and leave me in everlasting peace! Barge in here one more time and, so help me, I’ll . . . well, you’ll see what I do! Don’t try my patience. And kindly convey the same message to your Klapaucius, with my compliments. The last time I deigned to give him some advice he was in such a mighty hurry to leave that he didn’t even bother to thank me properly. Oh, the manners, the manners of these brilliant constructors, these wonderful young geniuses!”
“Master . . .”, Trurl began, but there was a sudden clattering in the tomb, a sputtering, then the button he had depressed popped up. Silence reigned once more throughout the cemetery. There was only the soft whispering of trees in the distance. Trurl sighed and scratched his head, thought a little, chuckled at how astonished and ashamed Klapaucius would look at their next meeting, and he made a deep bow to his master’s lofty sepulcher. Then he took to his heels, gay as a lark and tremendously pleased with himself, and ran home, ran as if the very devil were after him.