More Tales of Pirx the Pilot

by Stanisław Lem

  “May I?”

  “Please sit down.”

  Burns smiled.

  “I’m here to inform you that I’m not human.”

  Pirx abruptly swiveled around on his chair.

  “You’re not what?”

  “Not human. I’m on your side in this experiment.”

  Pirx breathed a deep sigh.

  “That’s confidential, of course.”

  “I leave that to your judgment; I don’t mind, either way.”

  “Pardon me?”

  The visitor smiled again.

  “It’s quite simple. I’m selfish. If you write a glowing commendation of the nonlinears, it’s bound to unleash a chain reaction of mass production, mass marketing… And not only on spaceships. Humans will have to bear the brunt of it—of a new kind of discrimination, hatred… I see it coming but, I repeat, I’m motivated more by self-interest. As long as I’m the only one, or one of a handful, it wouldn’t matter socially; we’d simply melt into the crowd, unnoticed and unnoticeable. My—our—future would be like that of any human, allowing for a significant difference in intelligence and versatility. Barring mass production, there’s no limit to what we might achieve.”

  “Yes, I see your point,” said Pirx, slightly bewildered. “But why the lack of discretion? Aren’t you afraid your company—”

  “Not in the least afraid,” said Burns in the subdued voice of a lecturer. “Of anything. You see, I’m awfully expensive. This thing here”—he touched his chest—“cost billions. You don’t believe some irate manufacturer will have me dismantled—figuratively, of course—screw by screw, do you? Sure, they’d be upset, but nothing would change; I’d still be on their payroll. I actually prefer my present company—its medical and disability plans are first-rate. But I doubt they would try to put me away. What for? Silencing me by force would only backfire. You know the power of the press.”

  The word “blackmail” flashed through Pirx’s mind. For a second he thought he was dreaming, but he went on listening with undivided attention.

  “Now you see why I want the report to be negative.”

  “Yes, I suppose I do. Can you tell me which of the others…?”

  “I would only be guessing, and my conjectures might do more harm than good. Better zero than a minus information, so to speak.”

  “Hm… Anyway, regardless of your motives, I’m grateful to you. Yes, grateful. Would you mind telling me a few things about yourself? About certain structural aspects that might help me…”

  “I read you, Commander. I know nothing of my constituent elements, as little as you know anything of your own anatomy or physiology—except what you may have read in some textbook. But the structural aspect probably interests you less than the psychological. Than our frailties.”

  “Those, too. But, look, everyone knows something, maybe not scientifically, but from experience, from self-observation…”

  “Observations based on the fact that one uses—lives in, so to speak—one’s body?” Burns smiled as before, exposing his moderately even teeth.

  “So you won’t object to a few questions?”

  “Go right ahead.”

  Pirx strained to collect his thoughts.

  “Even some indiscreet, personal questions?”

  “I have nothing to hide.”

  “Have you ever been surprised, alarmed, or even revolted by the fact that you’re not human?”

  “Only once, during an operation at which I assisted. The other assistant was a woman. By then I knew what that was.”

  “Sorry, I don’t…”

  “What a woman was,” said Burns. “Sex was a complete unknown to me until then.”

  “Oh, I see!” Pirx blurted out, much to his chagrin, “So a woman was there. What about it?”

  “The surgeon nicked my finger with the scalpel and the rubber glove split open, but no blood.”

  “Hold it! McGuirr told me that you bleed…”

  “Now, yes, but in those days I was still ‘dry’—as our ‘parents’ say in their own parlance. Our blood, you see, is just for show: the underside of the skin is like a sponge, blood-absorbent…”

  “I see. And the woman noticed? How about the surgeon?”

  “Oh, the surgeon knew who I was. But his assistant didn’t catch on until the very end, until the surgeon’s embarrassed look gave me away.”

  Burns grinned.

  “She grabbed hold of my hand, examined it up close, but when she saw what was under there … she dropped it and ran. But she forgot which way the operating-room door opened, kept pulling instead of pushing, and finally went into hysterics.”

  “I see,” said Pirx. He gulped. “How did that make you feel?”

  “I’m not in the habit of feeling, but … it wasn’t very flattering,” he said, his voice turning more deliberate, until he was smiling again. “I’ve never discussed this with anyone”—he resumed after a moment’s pause—“but I suspect that men, even newcomers, find us easier to take. Men accept the facts. Women don’t, at least not some facts. They’ll go on saying no even when yes is the only possible answer.”

  Pirx kept his gaze trained on him—especially when the other wasn’t looking—searching for some confirming alien quality, for a sign testifying to the imperfect incarnation of machines into men. Earlier, when he had been suspicious of all of them, the game had been different; now, even as he found himself gradually accepting the truth of Burns’s words, he was all the while searching for the telltale lie in the man’s pallor, which had struck him at their first encounter, or in his masterfully controlled gestures, or the calm limpidity of his gaze. And yet Pirx had to acknowledge that a pallid complexion and a composed manner were not uncommon among humans; and with that recognition came new doubts, a renewed probing, answered always by that smile, a smile reflecting not what was being said, but knowledge of what Pirx was actually feeling; a smile that disturbed, confuted, and impeded an interrogation made all the more difficult by the man’s unabashed candor.

  “Aren’t you generalizing a little?” muttered Pirx.

  “Oh, that was not my only encounter with women. Some of my instructors were women. They were told in advance and tried to hide their emotions, but my teasing didn’t make things any easier for them!”

  The smile with which he looked Pirx in the eye bordered on the lascivious.

  “You see, they had to find some inadequacies, imperfections, and just because they were so determined, it amused me to oblige them at times.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Oh, sure, you do. I played puppet—you know, stiff-jointed, submissive… But the moment they began to gloat, I’d drop the act. They must have taken me for a fiend.”

  “Aren’t you being presumptuous? If they were instructors, they must have had the relevant training.”

  “Man is a perfectly astigmatic creature,” said Bums coolly. “It was inevitable, given your type of evolution. Consciousness is a product of the brain, sufficiently isolated to constitute a subjective entity, but an entity that is an illusion of introspection, borne along like an iceberg on the ocean. It is never grasped directly, but sometimes it is so noticeably present that it is probed by the conscious faculty. From that very probing the devil was born—as a projection of something that, though actively present in the brain, can’t be located like a thought or a hand.”

  He was positively grinning now.

  “Here I am lecturing you on the cybernetic foundations of personality theory, when it’s probably kindergarten stuff to you. But anyway, an artificial intelligence differs from the human brain in its inability to handle several mutually contradictory programs. The brain, though, can; in fact, it does it all the time. That’s why a saint’s brain is a battleground, the average man’s a smoking rubble-heap of contradictions… A woman’s neuronic system is somewhat different; this says nothing about her intelligence—the difference is purely statistical. Women, as a rule, are better able to live with contradictions. Scientif
ic advances are usually the work of men because science is a search for a unified order free of contradictions. Men are more disturbed by contradictions, so they try to reduce phenomena to a unity.”

  “Could be,” said Pirx. “And that’s why they took you for a fiend?”

  “That’s going a bit far,” replied Burns, placing his hands on his knees. “I was repulsive to them … to the point of being attractive. I was an impossibility materialized, something forbidden, a contradiction to the world perceived as a natural order, and with the shock came the urge not only to escape, but also to self-destruct. They might not have phrased it this way, but in their eyes I stood for a rebellion against the biological order. A personified revolt against nature, a breakdown in the biologically rational, egotistical tie between emotions and the preservation of the species.”

  He skewered Pirx with a gaze.

  “A eunuch’s philosophy, you’re thinking. Wrong. I haven’t been castrated; I’m not deficient, only different. One whose love is—or can be—just as unselfish, just as disinterested as death, whose love is not a mere tool but a value in itself. A minus value, of course—like the devil. Why am I the way I am? My creators were men, who could more easily construct a potential rival than a potential object of desire. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Pirx. He was no longer looking at Burns; he couldn’t. “Aren’t you underestimating the economic factor…?”

  “Oh, for sure,” said Burns. “But it wasn’t the only factor. You see, Commander, our role has been grossly misunderstood. I was speaking of people’s attitudes, but in actual fact they’ve created a myth, a mythology of the nonlinear. Clearly I am not a devil, nor am I a potential erotic rival, which may be a little less clear. I look like a man, talk like a man, and to some extent I even have the psychology of a man—mind you, only to an extent. But, really, this has nothing to do with why I came to see you.”

  “Never can tell,” remarked Pirx, his gaze still fixed on his own clasped hands. “Please go on.”

  “If you like … but I can only speak for myself, not for the others. My personality is the product of pre-programming and training. A human is similarly formed, though less by pre-programming. But unlike a human, who is born relatively undeveloped, physically I was then what I am now. And because I had neither a childhood nor an adolescence, but was only a multistat, first pre-programmed and then polymorphically trained, mine was a more static development. A human is a walking geological formation, the product of myriads of ages of heating and cooling, of one layer deposited on another, the first and most decisive being the preverbal—a world that is later buried by speech but which continues to smolder below—that stage when the brain is invaded by colors, shapes, and smells, when the senses are awakened after birth, followed by a polarization into the world and the non-world, ‘the non-I’ and ‘the I.’ Then come the floods of hormones, the layering of religion and instinct, whose history is the history of wars, of the brain turned against itself. I never knew those stages of frenzy and despair, never experienced them, and that’s why there’s not a trace of the child in me. I’m capable of being moved, could probably even kill, but not from love. Words in my mouth sound the same as in yours, only they mean something different to me.”

  “So you can’t love?” asked Pirx, his gaze still reposing on his hands. “How can you be sure? Nobody knows until it happens…”

  “That’s not what I meant. Maybe I could love. But it would be a love very different from yours. I have two abiding sensations: one is astonishment, the other a sense of the comical, both in response to the arbitrariness of your world. Not just of your machines and customs, but of your bodies, the model for my own. I see how things could be different, look different, work differently. For you, the world simply is; it stands as the only alternative, while for me, ever since I could think, the world not only was, but was silly. I mean the world of cities, theaters, streets, domestic life, the stock exchange, unrequited love, movie stars…

  “Want to hear my favorite definition of a human? A creature who likes to talk most about what he knows least. Antiquity was defined by an all-embracing mythology—and contemporary civilization by the absence of one. Your assumptions? The sinfulness of the body is a consequence of the old evolutionary scheme joining the excretory and the sexual based on the economy of means. Your religious, philosophical views are the consequence of your biological structure: bound by time, humans of every generation have craved knowledge, understanding, answers … and this disparity gave rise to metaphysics—a bridge between the possible and the impossible. And what is science if not a surrender? One hears only of its achievements, which are slow in coming and far outnumbered by its failures. Science is the acceptance of mortality, of the randomness of the individual spawned by a static game of competing spermatozoa. It’s an acceptance of the passing, of the irreversible, of the lack of any reward, of a higher justice, of final illumination—it could even be heroic if scientists weren’t so often ignorant of what they were doing! Given a choice between fear and a sense of the absurd, I chose the latter, because I could afford to.”

  “You despise your creators, don’t you?” Pirx asked calmly.

  “Wrong. Any existence, I believe, even the most limited, is better than no existence at all. In many respects, they—my constructors—showed a lack of foresight. But more precious to me than anything, even more than my manmade intelligence, is the absence in me of any pleasure center. You have one in your brain, you know.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “But I don’t, which is why I’m not like a double amputee with a walking fixation…”

  “Everyone is silly except you. Is that it?”

  “Oh, I’m silly, too! Only in a different way. Each of you has the body you were given, but I could take any shape—a fridge, for example.”

  “Nothing silly about that,” muttered Pirx. The conversation was becoming increasingly tiresome.

  “It’s the whimsicality of it all,” said Burns. “Science is the renunciation of certain absolutes—of an absolute time and space, an absolute or eternal soul, and an absolute—because God-made—body. The conventions you take to be sovereign truth are legion.”

  “Morality? Love? Friendship?”

  “Feelings—never, though they may be arbitrarily determined. If I talk about you in this way, it’s because I find it easier to define myself by way of contrast. Your morality, above all, is a convention, yet it is binding even for me.”

  “Interesting. Why?”

  “I may lack any moral instinct, I may be insensitive—‘by nature,’ so to speak—but I know when one ought to show compassion, and I can discipline myself to do it. By necessity, you see. So, in a way, I fill the void in myself through logic. You might say I obey a ‘bogus morality,’ a facsimile so exact as to be authentic.”

  “You’ve lost me. Where’s the difference?”

  “The difference is that I act by the logic of accepted norms, not by instinct. Unfortunately for you, you obey almost nothing else but your impulses. In the past it might have been enough, but not any more. Your ‘brotherly love,’ for example, allows unbounded compassion for the individual—the victim of an accident, say—but not for ten thousand. Your compassion has its limits, only goes so far. And the more you advance technologically, the weaker your morality becomes. The glow of moral responsibility barely grazes the first few links in the chain of cause and effect. And the one who initiates the chain reaction feels absolved of the consequences.”

  “The atomic bomb, you mean?”

  “Oh, that’s just one of countless examples! No, when it comes to exercising moral judgment, you may be the sillier ones.”

  “How’s that?”

  “A couple with a history of mentally retarded children are allowed to conceive. It’s morally acceptable.”

  “Burns, the outcome is never certain, at most highly probable.”

  “Morality is as mechanical as a ledger. Commander, we could go
on arguing like this forever. What else do you want to know?”

  “You competed with humans in various mock-up tests. Did you always outperform the others?”

  “The greater the challenge in algorithmic, mathematical terms, the better I performed. I’m most vulnerable when it comes to intuition. That’s when my computer ancestry begins to tell…”

  “Meaning?”

  “As soon as things become too complicated, when the number of new factors exceeds the norm, I’m lost. A human can rely on guesswork, sometimes even with success, but not me. I have to calculate all the odds, precisely and methodically; if I can’t, I’m done for.”

  “What you’ve just told me is very important, Burns. So in an emergency…?”

  “It’s not that simple, Commander. Yes, I’m immune to fear—human fear, that is—but not to the threat of imminent disaster. Even so, I never lose my, as you say, head, and the equilibrium gained can compensate for my lack of intuition.”

  “You keep fighting to stay on top of the situation…?”

  “Even when I realize I can’t win.”

  “But that’s irrational, isn’t it?”

  “No—just purely logical, because I will it.”

  “Thanks, Burns. You may have been a big help to me,” said Pirx. “Oh, just one more thing. What are your plans for after our return?”

  “I’m a cyberneticist-neurologist, and a pretty fair one … though, without any intuition, not the most creative. But I’ll find enough interesting work.”

  “Thanks again.”

  Burns rose, made a slight bow, and left. The door had no sooner closed behind him than Pirx sprang up from his bunk and began pacing the deck.

  “What the hell! Either he’s a robot as he claims or—He sounded sincere enough. But why so talkative? The history of mankind—‘with commentary.’ Suppose he was on the level? If so, the emergency will have to be a tough one. But authentic, not faked. The real thing. Meaning dicey.”

  He slammed his fist into his open palm.

  “But what if it was just a ploy? In which case I hang both myself and my fellow humans, and the ship will be brought back to port by those … robots. Wouldn’t that make their owners happy! What better way to advertise the safety of robot-run ships! And all by buttering me up with that ‘Confidentially…’ routine!”