The Star Diaries

by Stanisław Lem

  “If God has omniscience, then He knows everything there is to know about me, and knew it moreover for a time immeasurably long, before I came forth out of oblivion. He knows also what He will decide regarding my—or your—fears and expectations, for He is no less perfectly informed about all His own future actions: otherwise He would not be omniscient. For Him no difference exists between the thought of a caveman and that of an intelligence which engineers will build a billion years from now, in a place where today there is nothing but lava and flame. Nor do I see why the external circumstances of a profession of faith should make much difference to Him, or—for that matter—whether it is homage someone offers, or a grudge. We do not consider Him a manufacturer, who waits for approbation from His product, since history has brought us to the point where thought genuinely natural in no way differs from thought artificially induced, which means that there is no distinction whatever between natural and artificial; that now lies behind us. You must remember that we can create beings and mentalities of any kind. We could for example give rise to creatures that derive mystic ecstasy from existence—we could do it through crystallization, cloning, or in a hundred other ways—and eventually in their adorations directed at the Transcendental there would materialize a purpose, a purpose characteristic of bygone prayer and worship. But this mass production of believers would be for us a pointless mockery. Remember, we do not beat our heads against the wall of any physical or inborn limitation to our desires, such walls we have torn down, and have stepped out into the realm of absolute creative freedom. Today a child can resurrect the dead, breathe life into the dust, into metal, destroy and kindle suns, for such technologies exist; the fact that not everyone has access to them is, as I think you will agree, unimportant from the theological point of view. Because the bounds of human agency, marked off with such precision in the Holy Book, have been attained unto and thereby violated. And the cruelty of the old restrictions is now replaced by the cruelty of their total absence. Yet we do not believe that the Creator hides His love from us behind the mask of both these alternative torments, putting us through the mill, as it were, in order to keep us guessing. Nor is it the Church’s office to call both misfortunes—the bondage and the freedom—promissory notes, endorsed by revelation and to be paid, with interest, by the heavenly treasurer. The vision of heaven as a bank account and hell as a debtor's prison represents a momentary aberration in the history of the faith. Theodicy is not a course in sophistry to train defenders of the Good Lord, and faith doesn’t mean telling people that everything will work out in the end. The Church changes, the faith changes, for both reside in history: one must therefore anticipate, and that is the task of our order,”

  These words confounded me. I asked how the Duistic religion reconciled what was happening on the planet (nothing good presumably, though I didn’t as yet know what, having gotten no further than the 26th century in my reading) with the Sacred Writings (of which I was also ignorant)?

  To this Father Memnar said, while the prior kept silent:

  “Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible. Impossible to fix once and for all, there being no dogma a mind can latch onto with the certainty of permanence. We defended the Holy Writ for twenty-five centuries, using tactical retreats, circuitous interpretations of the text, until we were defeated. No longer do we have the bookkeeper’s vision of the Transcendental, God is neither the Tyrant, nor the Shepherd, nor the Artist, nor the Policeman, nor the Head Accountant of Existence. Belief in God has had to cast off every selfish motive, if only by virtue of the fact that it will never—not anywhere—be rewarded. If God were to prove capable of acting contrary to logic and reason, that would be a sad surprise indeed. Was it not He—for who else?—that gave us these logical forms of thought, without which we would know nothing? How then can we accept the notion that an act of faith requires the surrender of the logical mind? Why give us first the faculty of reason, only to do it violence by setting contradictions in its path?

  “In order to mystify and make obscure? To lead us first to the conclusion that there is nothing Later On, then pull heaven out of a hat like some common magician? We hardly think so. Which is why we ask no favors of God in consideration of the faith we hold, we present Him with no demands, for we are finished and done with that theodicy based on the model of commercial transactions and payment in kind: I shall give thee being, thou shalt serve and praise me.”

  In that case—I asked with more and more insistence—-just what exactly do you monks and theologians do, how do you relate to God when, if I understand you correctly, you preserve neither dogma, nor ritual, nor devotions?

  “In having truly nothing,” replied the general of the Prognosticants, “we have everything. Be so good, dear stranger, as to read the other volumes of our Dichotican history, and you will learn just what it means—to gain complete freedom in the realm of bodily and mental contrivance, made possible by both biotic revolutions. Now I consider it highly likely that deep within you find this spectacle amusing: that beings, flesh and blood like yourself, in acquiring ultimate control over their own selves, have, by the very fact that they can now take faith and turn it on and off inside them like a light bulb, lost that faith. A faith which meanwhile was taken over from them by their instruments, thinking instruments, for such were needed at a certain stage of industrialization. Today however we are obsolete, and yet it is we—useless metal in the eyes of those that live upstairs—who believe. They tolerate us, having more important matters on their bowel sacs, and the government permits us everything—everything, that is, except our faith."

  “That’s strange,” I said. “You’re not allowed to believe? Why?”

  “It’s quite simple. Belief is the only thing that cannot be taken from a conscious entity, so long as that entity consciously cleaves to it. The authorities could not only crush us, they could reprogram us completely out of our belief; they do not do this, I am sure, through contempt or else indifference. It is mastery that they want, pure and simple, and any gap in that mastery must represent to them its diminution. Therefore we keep our faith concealed. You asked of its nature. It is—one might say—completely naked, this faith of ours, and completely defenseless. We entertain no hopes, make no demands, requests, we count on nothing, we only believe.

  “Put no more questions to me then, but give some thought instead to what a faith like mine must mean. If someone believes for certain reasons and on certain grounds, his faith loses its full sovereignty; that two and two are four I know right well and therefore need not have faith in it. But of God I know nothing, and therefore can only have faith. What does this faith give me? By the ancient reckoning, not a blessed thing. No longer is it the anodyne for the dread of extinction, no longer the heavenly courtier lobbying for salvation and against damnation. It does not allay the mind, tormented by the contradictions of existence; it does not smooth out those edges; I tell you—it is worthless! Which means it serves no end. We cannot even declare that this is the reason we believe, because such faith reduces to absurdity: he who would speak thus is in effect claiming to know the difference—permanently—between the absurd and the not absurd, and has himself chosen the absurd because, according to him, that is the side on which God stands. We do not argue thus. Our act of faith is neither supplicating nor thankful, neither humble nor defiant, it simply is, and there is nothing more that can be said about it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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