The Star Diaries

by Stanisław Lem

  “He’s come back to life?” I asked in a whisper.

  “Yes,” said the prior. “In order to die once more.”

  The one lying flat looked around and with a limp, seemingly boneless palm gripped a handle that stuck out on the side, gave a pull, and the bell slid back over his head, the slanting pincers, emerging from their sheaths, clutched the body, and a scream rang out, the same scream as before; so confounded was I now, that I let myself be led without resisting to the patiently waiting caravan of masked robots. In a kind of trance I clambered back up on my mount and listened to the words addressed to me—it was the prior explaining that the pavilion was a special service station, where one could live and relive one’s own death. The purpose here is to experience sensations as powerful as possible, and not necessarily suffering, for with the aid of stimuli transformers pain becomes an excruciating pleasure. All this derives from the fact that thanks to certain types of automorphosis Dichoticans can enjoy even the pangs of death, and those for whom once is not enough can—upon resurrection—have themselves remurdered, that they may experience that awful thrill again. And in fact, our iron caravan moved away from that place of self-service execution slowly enough for the groans and shrieks of the connoisseur of strong emotions to reach us long afterwards. This particular method bears the name of “Agonanism.”

  It is one thing to read of bloody maelstroms in a history text, another entirely to see with your own eyes, to experience even a tiny fragment of them. I was sick of our sojourn on the surface, beneath the sun, with the silver arcs of highways all around, and the pavilion shimmering in the distance behind us filled me with such horror, that it was with genuine relief that I descended into the gloom of the sewer, which received us with a cool and sheltering silence. The prior, divining my troubled state of mind, said nothing. Toward evening we visited the hermitage of an anchorite, also the order of some friars minor, who had taken up residence in the filtration plant of an outlying district, till finally, having completed our circuit of the diocese, we returned to the dwelling of the Demolitian Friars, in whose presence I felt a strange embarrassment for that brief moment in which I had conceived such fear and loathing of them.

  The little cell seemed like home to me; already waiting was a portion of cold stuffed drawer prepared by my thoughtful novice; wolfing it down, for I was hungry, I opened the volume of Dichotican history that dealt with modern times.

  Chapter One spoke of the autopsychic trends of the 29th century. The ennui with transmutability was by then so great, that the idea of turning away from the body and engaging in mind formation seemed to instill new life into society and rouse it from its indolence. Thus began the Renaissance. The wisdomites led the way, with their plan of turning everyone alive into a genius. This soon awakened a great thirst for knowledge, intensive activity in the sciences, the establishment of interstellar contact with other civilizations, but the information explosion necessitated further biological alterations, since the educated brain wouldn’t fit now even in the abdomen; society enwisdomized itself hyperbolically, and waves of braininess swept the planet. This Renaissance, finding the purpose of life in cogitation and cognition, lasted about seventy years. There were no end of great minds, masterminds, hyperminds and, finally, counterminds and underminds.

  And since moving a high-powered brain around on a processional grew more and more cumbersome, after the passing phase of the doublethinkers (these had two bodily wheelbarrows, fore and aft, for thoughts highbrow and low) life itself rendered the wisdomites immobile. Each sat in the tower of his own intelligence, wrapped in snaking cables like a Gorgon; society grew to resemble a vast honeycomb of wisdom, in which the living human larva lay imprisoned. People communicated by radio and paid televisits to one another; subsequent escalation led to conflict between those that advocated the pooling of individual stores of knowledge and the hoarders of wisdom, who wanted to own every scrap of information for themselves. The thoughts of others began to be tapped, brilliant ideas were intercepted, soon you had the towers of opponents in philosophy and the arts undermined, data falsified, wires cut, and there were even attempts to expropriate the psychic possessions of others along with the identity of their owner.

  The reaction, when it came, was violent. Our medieval woodcuts, offering representations of dragons and monstrosities from other lands, are child’s play alongside the physical abandonment that then beset the globe. The last wisdomites, half-blinded by the sun, crawled out from under the ruins and left the cities. In the resulting chaos whippersnappers, pederants and spotted thuglies stalked the land. There arose units of flesh and metal, adept at fornication (the collops, canards, pessaries and glyphs), and outrageous caricatures of the clergy sprang up—nunks and nunnesses—not to mention the caternary and the scroffle.

  This was also when agonanism came into vogue. Civilization retrogressed. Hordes of muscular throts in rut went crashing through the forest with tractor-dryads. In secluded hollow logs lurked flukes. There was nothing on the planet now to indicate that once it had been the cradle of anthropoid intelligence. In the parks all overgrown with table weeds and wild china there lay basking, between clumps of napkill, hullocks—veritable mountains of breathing meat. The majority of these monstrous forms did not arise through conscious choice and planning, but rather were the ghastly consequence of breakdowns in the body-building machinery: it produced not what had been ordered, but degenerate and crippled freaks. In this period of social teratolysis, as Prof. Gragz writes, prehistory seems to have taken astonishing revenge on the future, for that which the primitive mind had only imagined, peopling its myths with nightmares, that unearthly, hair-raising Word was—by the biotic machinery run out of control—made flesh.

  At the beginning of the 30th century the dictator Dzomber Glaubon assumed control of the planet and in the course of the next twenty years introduced physical unification, normalization and standardization, held then to be the means of salvation. He was an enlightened despot, of humanitarian principles, therefore did not permit the extermination of the degenerated forms of 29th-century vintage, but had them herded into special reservations. It was, incidentally, precisely at the edge of one of these reservations, beneath the rubble of an ancient provincial capital, that the subterranean monastery of the Demolitian Friars—where I had taken refuge—had ensconced itself. At D. Glaubon’s behest every citizen was to be a hindless she-male, that is, a sexually neutral individual that would have the same appearance coming and going. Dzomber wrote My Thoughts, a work in which he set forth his whole program. He deprived humanity of contrasting gender, for he saw in it the cause of the decline of the preceding century; the centers of pleasure he let his subjects keep, when they were socialized. He also let them keep their reason, not wishing to reign over idiots but be, instead, a reviver of civilization.

  But reason means variety, and so includes unorthodox ideas. The opposition, outlawed, went underground and abandoned itself to cheerless antifemasculine orgies. Or so at least said the official press. Glaubon however did not persecute the dissenters, who took on protest-shapes (lumplings, rumpists). Reportedly there were also doublerumpists active in the underground, who claimed that reason was only for realizing that reason ought to be disposed of, and quickly too, seeing as it was the cause of all the calamities in history; the head they replaced with what we think of as its opposite—they considered it encumbering, harmful, old hat; but Father Darg assured me that the official press had overstated the case. The rumpists didn’t like the head, so they discarded it, but the brain they merely moved lower, letting it look out at the world through an umbilical eye—the other was positioned in the back, a little farther down.

  Glaubon announced, having brought about some semblance of order, a plan for the millennial stabilization of society with the aid of “hedalgetics.” Its introduction was preceded by a great campaign in the press under the slogan of “SEX IN THE SERVICE OF LABOR!” Each citizen was assigned a particular job, and the nerve path engineers hooked
up the neurons of his brain in such a way, that he experienced pleasure only when he worked diligently and with a will. So whether someone planted trees or carried water, he wallowed in bliss, and the better he worked, the more intense his ecstasy became. But that perversity so typical of intelligence cut the ground from under this fool-proof (one would have thought) sociotechnological method as well. For nonconformists considered the pleasure experienced at work to be a form of compulsion. Resisting the lust for work (the laboribidinal urge), despite the sensual desires that pulled them irresistibly to their appointed tasks, they did not that to which their appetite inclined them, but exactly the reverse. The water carrier chopped wood, the woodcutter—hauled water, demonstrating in this way against the government. The intensification of the socialized sex drives, carried out several times at Glaubon’s command, produced no effect, except that the historians call these years of his reign the Age of the Martyrs. The biolice had great difficulty identifying the offenders, for those caught red-handed in torment would dissemble, claiming they had been groaning out of pleasure. Glaubon withdrew from the arena of biotic life deeply disillusioned, for his great plan lay in ruins.

  Then, at the turn of the 31st and 32nd centuries, you had the wars between the Diadox; the planet split up into provinces, each inhabited by citizens shaped according to the wishes of the local government. This was already the time of the postteratolytical Counter Reformation. From the many centuries there remained conglomerates of half-demolished cities, fetal factories, reservations only sporadically supervised by air, abandoned sex stadiums and other relics of the past, sometimes still functioning in a half-hearted way. Tetradox Glambron instituted censorship of the genetic codes, proclaiming certain genes forbidden, but uncensored persons either managed to bribe the inspection officials, or else used masks in public places, make-up, taping their tails between their shoulders, slipping them furtively down their pant legs, etc. These practices were an open secret.

  Pentadox Marmozel, operating on the principle of “divide et impera,” increased by law the number of officially recognized sexes. During his rule, in addition to the male and female, there were introduced the hipe, the syncarp, and two auxiliary sexes—frunts and fossicles. Life, especially one’s sex life, became in the reign of this Pentadox quite complicated. Moreover secret organizations, when holding their meetings, did so under the guise of government-approved six-person (sexisexual) intercourse, consequently the project was dropped, at least in part: today only the hipe and syncarp still exist.

  Under the Hexadoxies physical allusions came into use: these enabled one to get around the chromosomal censor. I saw sketches of people whose ear lobes extended into little calves. It was impossible to tell whether such a person was merely perking up his ears or making an allusion to the act of kicking. In certain circles tongues ending in miniature hooves were highly prized. True, the hoof was uncomfortable and served no real purpose, yet this was precisely how the spirit of somatic independence manifested itself. Guryl Hapsodor, who passed for a liberal, permitted citizens of extraordinary merit to own an additional leg; it was taken as a mark of distinction, but later on the leg, losing its locomotive character, became a badge of the rank one held; high officials had up to nine legs; thanks to this, it was now possible to recognize any person’s standing immediately, even in the public bath.

  Under the stern rule of Ronder Ischiolis a stop was put to this granting of supplementary living footage, and legs were even confiscated from people found guilty of infractions; he apparently intended to do away with all extremities and organs save those indispensable for life, and also to introduce microminiaturization, for smaller and smaller homes were being built; but Bzugis Thumn, who assumed power after Ischiolis, rescinded these directives and even allowed the tail, under the pretext that with its tassel one could sweep one’s dwelling. Then, in the reign of Gondel Gwana, you had the so-called backwing deviationalists, who augmented their extremities illegally, and in the next phase of repressive regimes there appeared again—or rather, were concealed—tonguenails and other protest organelles. Oscillations of this type were still going on when I arrived at Dichotica. Things which one would never be allowed to realize in the flesh found expression in “pornobiotic” literature, underground writings which numbered among the many forbidden books contained here in the monastic library. I leafed through, for example, a manifesto calling for a vampook, which was supposed to walk about on its hair; also, the creation of another anonymous author—a thapostulary, which would float through the air like a blimp.

  Having thus formed a rough idea of the planet’s history, I acquainted myself with its current scientific literature; the primary research-and-development agency now is COPROSOPS (Commission for the Coordination of Projects re Soma and Psyche). The brother librarian was kind enough to let me look at the most recent publications of this agency. Thus for example body eng. Dergard Nonk is the originator of a prototype bearing the temporary name of polymonoid or scattermind. Prof. Dr. Sr. eng. Dband Rabor, who heads a large research team, is working on a bold, even controversial design for what he calls an omnius—this is to be a functional system of channels operative in three respects: communicational, navigational, and official. I was also able to familiarize myself with the projective-futurological works of Dichotican body experts; I came away with the impression that automorphosis, as a whole, had reached a dead end in its development, though the specialists in the field were trying to overcome stagnation; an article by Prof. Gagbert Grauz, director of COPROSOPS, in the monthly Body Illustrated concluded with the words, “How can one not transform oneself, when one can?”

  After all this arduous studying I was so exhausted, that upon returning the last pile of books to the library I did nothing for an entire week but sun myself in the furniture grove.

  I asked the prior what he thought of the biotic situation. In his opinion a return to human forms was no longer possible for the Dichoticans, they had strayed too far from them. These forms aroused, due to many centuries of indoctrination, such prejudices and such general revulsion, that even they—the robots—were obliged, when appearing in public places, to cover themselves completely, every inch. I asked him then—we were alone in the refectory after dinner—what sense there was, within this sort of civilization, to monastic work and faith?

  The prior smiled at me with his voice.

  “Yes, I was expecting that question,” he said, “and shall give you two answers to it, one vulgar, and one more subtle. Duism, first, amounts to ‘six of one, half-dozen the other.’ For God is so deep a mystery, that one can have no certainty even as to the question of His existence. And therefore either He is, or He is not; from this derives the etymological root of the name of our religion. And now a second time, but more profoundly: God-Certainty is not a perfect mystery, seeing that one can pin Him down and limit Him totally in this respect at least: that He Exists. The guarantee of His existence represents an oasis, a place of rest, an easy chair for the spirit, and it is precisely in volumes of religious history that you will find, above all else, a constant, age-old, desperate, all-out effort of the mind, bordering on insanity, to accumulate arguments and proofs for His existence and, when those inevitably crumble, to take the bits and chips and raise them up anew. We did not burden you with the relating of our theological tomes, but if you looked in them you would discern those subsequent stages in the natural development of faith that are as yet unknown to younger civilizations. The phase of dogma does not break off suddenly, but passes from a closed system to an open system, since that which has been set down becomes, dialectically, by the dogma of the infallibility of the head of the Church—the dogma of the necessary fallibility of all thought in matters of faith, put succinctly thus: ‘Nothing which can be articulated Here has any bearing on what abides There.’ This leads to a further raising of the level of abstraction: kindly note that the distance between God and reason increases with the passage of time—everywhere, always!

  “According to anc
ient revelation God constantly interfered in everything, the righteous He bundled off to heaven, the wicked He doused with fire and brimstone, you could find Him sitting behind any old bush; it was only later that the withdrawal began, God lost His visibility, His human shape, His beard, the audio-visual aids of miracles disappeared, so did the classroom demonstrations of transplanting demons into goats, so did the visitations of angel-examiners; faith, in a word, had dispensed with circus metaphysics; thus from the realm of the senses it moved into the realm of abstractions. Nor then was there any shortage of proofs of His existence, of sanctions expressed in the language of higher algebra, of even more esoteric hermeneutics. These abstractions eventually reach the point at which God is pronounced dead, in order to achieve that cold, iron, devastating peace which belongs to the living when those most loved have forsaken them forever.

  “The manifesto of the death of God is, then, the next maneuver, intended—however brutally—to spare us further metaphysical fatigue. To wit, we are alone and do either what we like, or that to which future discoveries will lead us. But Duism has gone beyond this; in it, you believe by doubting and you doubt by believing; yet this state too is not the final one. According to some of the Prognosticant brothers, the evolutions and revolutions or, if you prefer, the turnings and upturnings of faith do not follow the exact same course throughout the Universe, and there are civilizations, powerful and great, that are attempting to organize an entire Cosmogony in the context of an anti-God provocation. According to this hypothesis there exist peoples among the stars who seek to break the terrible silence of God by throwing Him the challenge, that is, the threat of COSMICIDE: their idea is to have the whole Universe converge at a single point and be consumed in the fires of that final spasm; they wish, as it were, by tipping God’s work from its foundations, to force Him into making some response; though we have no definite knowledge of this, from the psychological standpoint such a design does seem possible to me. Possible and at the same time futile; for engaging in an antimatter crusade against the Lord hardly seems a sensible way to open a dialogue with Him.”