The Star Diaries

by Stanisław Lem

  “Lovely evening, isn’t it?” said Rodrillo. The friend shifted his weight from ambus to ambus, leaned halfway out of the fire and said:

  “Lovely indeed. The sal ammoniac has grown nicely this year, have you noticed?”

  “Yes, the harvest promises to be good.”

  Rodrillo swayed lazily, turned over on his belly and, opening all his opticules, gazed up at the stars.

  “You know,” he said after a moment, “whenever I look at the night sky, as now, I cannot help but feel that up there, far, far away, are other worlds, worlds similar to our own, and also inhabited by beings of intelligence…”

  “Who speaks here of intelligence?!” came a voice nearby. Both lads turned their backs in that direction to see who it was. They recognized the gnarled but still spry figure of Flamentius. That hoary scholar approached them with stately motions, and his future descendants, looking like bunches of grapes, were already swelling and sending out their first shoots on his spreading shoulders.

  “I was speaking of the intelligent beings that inhabit other worlds…” replied Rodrillo, lifting his squips respectfully.

  “Rodrillo was speaking of intelligent beings on other worlds?…” rejoined the scholar. “Just look at him! Other worlds yet!! Ah, that Rodrillo, that Rodrillo! Is this how you spend your time, my boy? Letting your imagination run wild? But of course … I approve … on an evening such as this… It’s gotten definitely colder, don’t you think?”

  “No,” said both lads together.

  “The fires of youth, yes, I know. All the same it’s now only eight hundred and sixty degrees; I should have put on my lava-lined pullover. That’s old age for you. So you say,” he continued, turning his back to Rodrillo, “that on other worlds there exists intelligent life? What sort of creatures are these, according to you?”

  “We cannot know exactly,” replied the youth timidly. “They are varied, I think. It’s conceivable even that on the cooler planets living organisms might arise from a substance called protein.”

  “Who told you that?!” Flamentius burst out in anger.

  “Implosio. He’s the young student of biochemistry who—”

  “Young fool, you mean!” snapped Flamentius. “Life from protein?! Living things from protein? Aren’t you ashamed to spout such nonsense in the presence of your teacher?! Here is the result of the ignorance and the arrogance that have spread so alarmingly of late! You know what they ought to do with that Implosio of yours? Give him a good watering down, that’s what!”

  “But Flamentius, sir,” ventured Rodrillo’s friend, “why demand such severe punishment for Implosio? Couldn’t you tell us what beings on other planets might look like? Might they not stand erect and move on things called legs?”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  Rodrillo said nothing, frightened.

  “From Implosio…” whispered his friend.

  “Enough, for heaven’s sake, enough of this Implosio and his fabrications!” shouted the scholar. “Legs! Really! As if I hadn’t only twenty-five Blazes ago proven mathematically that a two-footed being, as soon as one stood it up, would immediately fall flat on its face! I even constructed an appropriate model and diagrams, but what would you—sluggards—know of that? What do intelligent beings on other worlds look like? I’m not going to tell you straight out, think a little, learn to use your minds. First they’ll have to have organs to take in ammonia, right? And what can do this better than the twoons? And won’t they have to move through a medium as resistant and as warm as ours? Well, won’t they? Of course they will! And how can you do this if not with ambuses? Also they will probably form sense organs—opticules, nims, blulthbs. And of course they must be like us pentoids not merely in physical structure, but in the overall manner of living. Everyone knows, surely, that the pentex is the basic unit of our family life—try in your imagination to picture something different, exert your fancy as much as you wish, I promise you that you will fail! Yes, because in order to start a family, in order to produce progeny, one has to have a Tata, a Gaga, a Mama, a Fafa and a Haha. Mutual affection, plans, hopes and dreams, they are nothing if you lack a member of any one of these five genders—a situation which, unfortunately, does sometimes happen in life, we call it the tragic quadrangle, or unrequited love… And so you see, by reasoning without prejudice or preconceptions, by relying solely on the scientific facts, by employing the precise tool of logic, proceeding coldly and objectively, we reach the inescapable conclusion that every intelligent being must be similar to a pentoid… Yes. Well, now are you convinced?”

  THE

  TWENTY-EIGHTH

  VOYAGE

  In a little while now I shall place these written pages in an empty oxygen cylinder and throw it into the deep, overboard, letting it race off into the distant darkness, though I hardly expect that anyone will find it. Navigare necesse est, but apparently this interminable voyage is beginning to wear down even my resistance. I have been flying and flying for years, with still no end in sight. Worst of all, time gets tangled, intersects itself, I wind up in various branchings and shallows outside the calendar, hard to say whether it’s the future or the past, though sometimes things do smack of the medieval. There exists a special method of preserving one’s reason in extreme solitude, it was invented by my grandfather Cosimo, the idea is to make up a certain number of companions for oneself, of both sexes even, but then you have to stick to it consistently. My father used this too, though sometimes there are risks involved. In the silence here such companions grow too independent, they cause problems, complications, some made attempts on my life and I had to fight them, the cabin is a veritable battlefield. I couldn’t discontinue the method, out of loyalty to my grandfather. Thank God they’re dead and now I have a moment to myself. Perhaps I’ll sit down, as I planned to do so many times before, and write a short account of my ancestry, in order there—there in those generations of yore—to draw strength like Antaeus. The founder of the main line of Tichys was Anonymus, a man wrapped in mystery, which was closely connected with Einstein’s famous paradox of the twins. One twin flies off into space, the other remains on Earth, after which the former, returning, turns out to be younger than the latter. When the first experiment was undertaken to test this paradox, two young people came forward as volunteers, Caspar and Ezekiel. Due to some mix-up on takeoff both of them were put in the rocket. The experiment thus miscarried before it ever got off the ground, and what was worse—the rocket came back a year later with only one of them on board. He claimed, deep in mourning, that his brother had leaned out too far when they were passing over Jupiter. People didn’t give credence to these pain-filled words and in the course of the bitter campaign waged against him in the press he was charged with fratricide and cannibalism. What served the prosecutor as material evidence was a cookbook discovered in the rocket, with a chapter marked off in red and entitled, “Pickling in Outer Space.” Nevertheless a man was found, honorable and also intelligent, who consented to defend him. The man’s advice was not to say a single word throughout the trial, regardless of what happened. And indeed, in spite of itself the court was unable to condemn my ancestor, for in the delivering of the sentence both the first and last names of the defendant had to be given. The old chronicles differ—some say that even prior to this he had called himself Tichy, others, that that was a nickname resulting from the jury’s constant expression of disapproval (“tch-tch”). He really should have been named Tisky, from the more standard variant of that interjection. The lot of this progenitor of mine was far from enviable. Slanderers and liars, of whom there is never any lack, stated that during the court proceedings he had licked his lips whenever mention was made of his brother’s name; nor were they hindered, in the uttering of this calumny, by the fact that no one knew who here was the brother of whom. About the further fortunes of this forefather I know little. He had eighteen children and tried his hand at many trades, for a while he even supported himself as a door-to-door salesman of children’s s
pacesuits. In his old age he became a refurbisher of endings to literary works. As this is a fairly obscure profession, I must explain that it consisted in fulfilling requests expressed by lovers of novels and plays. A refurbisher, when he receives an order, must steep himself in the atmosphere, style and spirit of the original, to which he then appends a conclusion different from the author’s. In the family archives a few rough drafts have been preserved; they show what considerable artistic ability the first of the Tichys had. There are versions of “Othello” there, in which Desdemona smothers the Moor, also versions where she, he and Iago live happily ever after, together. There are variations of Dante’s Inferno, with special tortures added for those persons whom the particular customer named, moreover it was necessary on occasion to replace an author’s tragic finale with a happy ending, though the reverse was much more common. Rich epicures commissioned from my ancestor epilogues in which you had at the last minute not Virtue Saved but—just the opposite—Evil Triumphant. Those well-heeled patrons undoubtedly were motivated by the lowest instincts, nonetheless my great-great-grandfather, in turning out what had been ordered, created true gems of artistry, and at the same time—though unintentionally, as it were—he came closer to real life than did the actual authors. In any case he had many mouths to feed, so he did what he was able, and his aversion for spacefaring—easy enough to understand—never left him. Beginning with him there appeared in our family, over the centuries, a type of man who was talented, withdrawn, possessing an original mind, often prone to eccentricities, tenacious in the pursuit of the goals he set himself. In our archives there are numerous documents that attest these characteristic traits. It seems that one of the offshoots of the Tichy line lived in Austria, or more precisely in the former Austro-Hungarian Kingdom, for among the pages of the oldest chronicle I found a faded photograph of a handsome young man in cuirassier uniform, with a monocle and twirled mustache; on the back were written the words, “K. u. K. Cyberleutnant Adalbert Tichy.” Of what this cyberleutnant did I know nothing, except that—as a precursor of technological microminiaturization, at a time when no one even dreamed of such a thing—he had proposed a plan to put the cuirassiers on ponies instead of horses. Considerably more information has come down to us about Esteban Francis Tichy, the brilliant thinker who—unhappy in his personal life—wanted to change the climate of the Earth by sprinkling the polar regions with powdered soot. The blackened snow would melt, absorbing the rays of the sun, and the territories of Greenland and Antarctica, freed in this manner from the ice, were to be transformed—so wished that great-grandfather of mine—into a kind of Eden for humanity. Finding no backers for his project, he began single-handedly to accumulate supplies of soot, which led to marital discord that ended finally in divorce. His second wife, Eurydice, was the daughter of a druggist who, behind his son-in-law’s back, carried the soot out of the cellar and sold it as medicinal carbon icarbo animalis). When the druggist was unmasked, Esteban Francis, wholly ignorant of all this, was also charged with dispensing fraudulent medicines and paid with the confiscation of his entire supply of soot, which had been collected in the basement of his home over a period of many years. Deeply disillusioned in his fellow man, the poor soul died before his time. The only comfort he had in the last months of his life was the sprinkling with ashes of the snow-covered vegetable garden in winter and observing the progress of the thaw that ensued as a result of this measure. My grandfather placed a small memorial obelisk in the garden, with an inscription suited to the occasion.

  This grandfather, Jeremiah Tichy, is one of the most distinguished representatives of our family. He was raised in the home of his older brother Melchior, a cyberneticist and inventor known for his piety. Not overly radical in his views, Melchior had no wish to automate the entire ministry, but only sought to come to the aid of the broad masses of the clergy, he constructed therefore several foolproof, rapid-action and easy to service devices, like the anathematic excommunicator, as well as a special apparatus for the placing of ecclesiastical curses in reverse gear (to withdraw them). His achievements, alas, did not meet with the approval of those for whom he labored, what is more, they were pronounced heretical. With characteristic magnanimity he then offered to provide the local vicar with a model of the excommunicator, thus making it possible for it to be experimentally tested on himself. Unfortunately even this was denied him. Saddened, discouraged, he resigned from further work in this direction and switched—as a constructor only—to the religions of the East. Known to this very day are the electronic Buddhist prayer wheels of his devising, particularly the high-speed models, which can do up to 18,000 prayers per minute.

  Jeremiah, in contrast to Melchior, had not an ounce of compromise in him. Dropping out of school, he continued his studies at home, mainly in the cellar, which was to play so great a role in his life. He was marked by a most extraordinary single-mindedness. At the age of nine he decided to create a General Theory of Everything and nothing could divert him from that goal. The tremendous difficulty he experienced, from the earliest years on, in formulating concepts, only intensified after a disastrous street accident (a steamroller flattened his head). Yet even this disability failed to keep him from philosophy; he resolved to become a Demosthenes of thought, or perhaps rather its Stephenson, for much like the inventor of the locomotive, who himself went none too fast and wanted to force steam to move the wheels, he wanted to force electricity to move ideas. People frequently have distorted this notion, saying that he called for the beating of electronic brains. His slogan—according to such defamatory sources—was supposed to have been: “Show the Eniacs who’s boss!” This is a malicious perversion of the idea; he simply had the misfortune to appear with his theories too early. Jeremiah suffered much in life. On his house were scrawled epithets like “wife-beater” and “brain-driver,” the neighbors reported him for disturbing the peace at night with all the banging and swearing that rose up from the cellar, they even had the nerve to claim he had made attempts on the life of their children, strewing about poisoned candy. It’s true that Jeremiah—like Aristotle—couldn’t stand children, but the candies were intended for the starlings that plundered his garden, the labels they had on them made that plain enough. And as for the “profanities” he was supposed to have taught his machines, these were merely cries of frustration that escaped him during those long hours of work in the laboratory, when the results turned out to be negligible. To be sure, it was not exactly politic of him to use—in the pamphlets published at his own expense—crude, even vulgar terms, since in the context of a discussion on electronic systems such expressions as “smacking the tube one” and “throwing in a good boot” could easily give the reader the wrong impression. And it was out of pure cussedness, I am certain, that he made up that story which says he never sat down to program without a crowbar handy. His eccentricities made it difficult for him to get along with others; not everyone was able to appreciate his sense of humor (hence that incident with the milkman and the two letter carriers, who would have gone insane anyway—it was undoubtedly in their heredity—the skeletons had been on wheels after all, and the burrow measured only eight feet in depth). But then who can fathom the vagaries of genius? It was said that he wasted an entire fortune, buying up electronic brains for the purpose of smashing them to little pieces, that the fragments were piled high in his back yard. But was it his fault if the computers of the day proved unequal to the tasks he set them, being too limited and of insufficient stamina? Had they not fallen apart so easily, he would have ultimately led them to create the General Theory of Everything. His failure in no way discredits the basic concept.

  As far as his marital problems were concerned, the woman he married fell under the influence of neighbors hostile to him—they induced her to make false statements at the trial—and besides, electric shocks do develop a person’s character. Jeremiah felt himself isolated, ridiculed, and ridiculed no less by narrow-minded experts like Professor Brumber, who called him an electrical delinq
uent, because once Jeremiah had happened to use an induction coil improperly. Brumber was a nasty, worthless individual, and yet a brief moment of justifiable anger cost Jeremiah a four-year interruption in his scientific work. All this, because success was not allotted to him. Otherwise who would have been interested in the defects of his manner, his behavior, his style? Whoever spread gossip about the private life of a Newton or an Archimedes? Unfortunately Jeremiah was born before his time and for that he had to pay.

  Towards the end of his life, or more precisely in its decline, Jeremiah underwent a startling transformation, which totally changed his lot. Having, then, locked and double locked himself up in his cellar, from which he first removed every last bit and piece of machinery, so that he remained alone between four bare walls, with a bed made of planks, a stool and an old iron rail, until his death he never left that asylum, that voluntary prison. But was it indeed a prison, and his act—merely an escape from the world, a resigned withdrawal, the retreat into adversity of a hermit seeking to mortify himself? The facts clearly argue against such a supposition. It was not for quiet meditation that he lived out his days in self-imposed seclusion. Through a tiny window in the cellar door they handed him, besides crusts of bread and water, whatever objects he desired, and he desired—throughout those sixteen years—always the same thing: hammers of various weights and sizes. All together he used up 3,219 of them, and when that great heart ceased to beat, there were found in the cellar—scattered in the corners—hundreds and hundreds of rust-eaten hammer heads, all flattened with untold effort. Moreover, day and night from the basement came the ringing sound of forging, which let up only briefly, when the voluntary prisoner fed his aching body or when, after a short sleep, he would make notes in his diary, which lies before me now. From these one can see that his spirit hadn’t changed, on the contrary, more steadfast than ever, it had focused on a new goal. “I’ll fix her wagon!” “I’ll settle her hash!” “A little more, and her goose is cooked!”—such comments, jotted down in that characteristically illegible hand of his, fill these thick notebooks covered with metal filings. Whose hash did he wish to settle, whose goose did he hope to cook? We will never know for sure, for not once is there mentioned the name of that most mysterious—and presumably most powerful—adversary. I think he must have decided, in one of those sudden flashes that not infrequently visit the minds of the great, to accomplish on the highest possible level that which previously he had gone about in a much more modest way. Before, he had placed certain mechanisms in situations of duress, exhorting them to make it on their own. Now the proud old man, by his self-imprisonment, shut out the chorus of petty, sneering critics and through that cellar door entered history, for—this is my surmise—he grappled with the most formidable opponent of all: in the sixteen years of his labor the realization never left him, not for a moment, that he was storming the very heart and core of existence, that—in short—without the least hesitation or doubt, without mercy and without respite he was beating matter itself!!