The Cyberiad

by Stanisław Lem

“Mighty King! Here is a story, a nest of stories, with cabinets and cupboards, about Trurl the constructor and his wonderfully nonlinear adventures!”

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  It happened once that the Great Constructor Trurl was summoned by King Thumbscrew the Third, ruler of Tyrannia, who wished to learn from him the means of achieving perfection of both mind and body. Trurl answered in this way:

  “I once happened to land on the planet Legaria and, as is my custom, stayed at an inn, determined to keep to my room until I had acquainted myself more thoroughly with the history and habits of the Legarians. It was winter, the wind howled outside, and there was no one else in the gloomy building, till suddenly I heard a knocking at the gate. Looking out, I saw four hooded figures unloading heavy black suitcases from an armored carriage; they then entered the inn. The next day, around noon, the most curious sounds came from the neighboring room—whistling, hammering, rasping, the shattering of glass, and above all this noise there boomed a powerful bass, shouting without pause:

  —Faster, sons of vengeance, faster! Drain the elements, use the sieve! Evenly, evenly! And now the funnel! Pour him out! Fine, now give me that kludge-fudger, that winch-pincher, sprocketmonger, edulcorated data-dumper, that wretched reject of a widgeteer cowardly hiding in the grave! Death itself shall not protect him from our righteous wrath! Hand him over, with his shameless brain and his spindly legs! Take the tongs and pull the nose—more, more, enough to grip for the execution! Work the bellows, brave lads! Into the vise with him! Now rivet that brazen face—and again! Yes, yes, good! Perfect! Keep it up with that hammer! One-two, one-two! And tighten those nerves—he mustn’t faint too quickly, like the one yesterday! Let him taste our vengeance to the fullest! One-two, one-two! Hey! Ha! Ho!

  Thus did the voice thunder and roar, and was answered by the rumble of bellows and the clanging of hammers on anvils, when suddenly a sneeze resounded and a great shout of triumph burst forth from four throats, then a shuffling and struggling behind the wall, and I heard a door open. Peering through a crack, I saw the strangers sneaking out into the hall and—incredibly enough—counted five of them. They all went downstairs and locked themselves in the cellar, remained there for a long time, returning to their room only that evening—once again four—and silent, as if they had been to a funeral. I went back to my books, but this business, it gave me no peace, so I resolved to get to the bottom of it. The next day at the same time, noon, the hammers started up again, the bellows roared, and that terrifying voice cried out in a hoarse bass:

  —Hey now, sons of vengeance! Faster, my electric hearties! Shoulders to the wheel! Throw in the protons, the iodine! Step lively now, let’s have that flap-eared whigma-leeriac, that would-be hoodwinking wizard, misbegotten miscreant and incorrigible crank, let me grab him by his unwashed beak and lead him, kicking, to a sure and lingering death! Work those bellows, I say!

  And again a sneeze rang out, and a stifled scream, and once again they left the room on tiptoe; as before, I counted five when they went down to the cellar, four when they returned. Seeing then that I could learn the mystery only there, I armed myself with a laser pistol, and at the crack of dawn slipped down to the cellar, where I found nothing but charred and mangled bits of metal; covering myself with a clump of straw, I sat in the darkest corner and waited, until around noon I heard those now familiar shouts and hammering sounds, then all at once the door flew open and in walked four Legarians, with a fifth bound hand and foot.

  This fifth wore a doublet of old-fashioned cut, bright red and with a frill about the neck, and a feathered cap; he himself was fat of face and had an enormous nose, while the mouth was twisted in fear and babbled something all the while. The Legarians barred the door and, at a sign from the eldest, untied their prisoner and began to beat him savagely, yelling one after the other:

  —Take that for the Prophecy of Happiness! And that for the Perfection of Being! And have that for the Bed of Roses, and that for the Bowl of Cherries! And the Clover of Existence! And that’s for the Altruistic Communality! And take that for the Soarings of the Spirit!

  And they cudgeled and buffeted him so, that he surely would have given up the ghost had I not lifted my weapon from the straw, announcing in this way my presence. When they had released their victim, I asked them why they were abusing thus an individual who was neither an outlaw nor worthless vagabond, for, judging by the ruff and color of his doublet, this was some sort of scholar. The Legarians wavered and looked longingly at the guns they had left at the door, but when I cocked the actuator and scowled, they thought better of it and, nudging one another, asked the large one, the one with the deep bass, to speak for them all.

  —Know, O strange foreigner—he said, turning to me—it is not with common thrugs, tuffians or juggermuggers that you deal, or other degenerators of the robot species, for though a cellar hardly seems a savory place, what passes within these walls is to the highest degree praiseworthy and a thing of beauty!

  —Praiseworthy and a thing of beauty?!—I exclaimed. —What are you telling me, O base Legarian? Did I not see with my own eyes how you hurled yourselves upon the red-doubleted one and belabored him with such murderous blows, that the very oil did spatter from your joints? And you dare call this a thing of beauty!

  —If Your Esteemed Foreignness is going to interrupt— replied the bass—he will learn nothing, therefore I politely request him to tighten the reins on his worthy tongue and quell the restiveness of his oral orifice, else I must refrain from further discourse. Know then that before you stand our finest physickers, all cybernists and electriciates of the first order, in a word, my brilliant and ever vigilant pupils, the best minds in all Legaria, and I myself am Vendetius Ultor of Amentia, professor of matter both positive and negative and the originator of Omnigendrical Reincreation, and I have dedicated my life to the sacred work of vengeance. With the aid of these faithful followers I avenge the shame and misery of my people upon the ruddy-bedizened excrescency that kneels there, the low scrulp called—and may his name be forever cursed—Malaputz vel Malapusticus Pandemonius, who vilely and villainously, thievishly and irretrievably brought unhappiness to all Legarians! For he led them into detrimetry and other deviltry, did discompostulate them, embollix and thoroughly befottle them, then sneaked off to his grave to escape the consequences, thinking that no hand could ever reach him there!

  —That’s not true, Your Exalted Visitorship! I never meant… that is, I had no idea!… —wailed the kneeling noodle-nose in the rubicund attire. I stared, understanding nothing, while the bass intoned:

  —Gargomanticus, dear pupil, paste the puler one in his puffy puss!

  The pupil complied, and with such dispatch that the cellar rang. To which I said:

  —Until the conclusion of explanations, all beating and battering is absolutely forbidden by authority of this laser, meanwhile you, Professor Vendetius Ultor, have the floor and may continue!

  The professor growled, grumbled, and finally said:

  —That you may know how our great misfortune came to pass and why the four of us, forsaking worldly things, have formed this Holy Order of the Forge of Resurrection, consecrating the remainder of our days to sweet revenge, I will relate to you the history of our kind from the very beginning of creation…

  —Must we go back that far?—I asked, afraid my hand would weaken beneath the weight of the pistol.

  —Aye, Your Alienness! Listen and attend… There are legends, as you know, that speak of a race of paleface, who concocted robotkind out of a test tube, though anyone with a grain of sense knows this to be a foul lie… For in the Beginning there was naught but Formless Darkness, and in the Darkness, Magneticity, which moved the atoms, and whirling atom struck atom, and Current was thus created, and the First Light… from which the stars were kindled, and then the planets cooled, and in their cores the breath of Sacred Statisticality gave rise to microscopic Protomecha-noans, which begat Proteromechanoids, which begat the Primitive Mechanisms. These could not yet calcul
ate, nor scarcely put two and two together, but thanks to Evolution and Natural Subtraction they soon multiplied and produced Omnistats, which gave birth to the Servostat, the Missing Clink, and from it came our progenitor, Automatus Sapiens…

  After that there were the cave robots, the nomad robots, and then robot nations. Robots of Antiquity had to manufacture their life-giving electricity by hand, that is by rubbing, which meant great drudgery. Each lord had many knights, each knight many vassals, and the rubbing was feudal hence hierarchical, progressing from the lowly to the higher-up. This manual labor was replaced by machine when Ylem Symphiliac invented the rubberator, and Wolfram of Coulombia, the rubless lightning rod. Thus began the Battery Age, a most difficult time for all who did not possess their own accumulators, since on a clear day, without a cloud to tap, they had to scrimp and scrounge for every precious watt, and rub themselves constantly, else perish from a total loss of charge. And then there appeared a scholar, an infernal intellectrician and efficiency expert, who in his youth, doubtless owing to some diabolical intervention, never had his head staved in, and he began to teach and preach that the traditional method of electrical connection—namely parallel—was worthless, and they all ought to hook themselves up according to a revolutionary new plan of his, that is in series. For in series, if one rubs, the others are immediately supplied with current, even at a great distance, till every robot simply bubbles over with ohms and volts. And he showed his blueprints, and painted paradises of such parameters, that the old circuits, equal and independent, were disconnected and the system of Pandemonius promptly implemented.— Here the professor beat his head against the wall several times, rolled his eyes and finally continued. Now I understood why the surface of his knobby brow was so irregular. —And it came to pass that every second robot sat back and said, “Why should I rub if my neighbor rubs and it comes to the same thing?” And his neighbor did the same, and the drop in voltage became so severe, they had to place special taskmasters over everyone, and taskmasters over the taskmasters. Then a disciple of Malaputz, Clusticus the Mistaken, stepped forth and said that each should rub not himself but his neighbor, and after him was Dummis Altruicius with his program of flagellatory sadistomasochistorism, and after him was Magmndel Spoots, who proposed compulsory massage parlors, and after him appeared a new theoretician, Arsus Gargazon, saying that clouds should be gently stroked, not yoked, to yield their nimboid bolts, and then there was Blip of Leydonia, and Scrofulon Thermaphrodyne, advocating the installation of autofrotts, also called titillators or diddlegrids, and then Bestian Phystobufficus, who instead of rubbing recommended a good drubbing. Such differences of opinion produced great friction, which led to all sorts of exacerbations and excommunications, which in turn led to blasphemy, heresy, and finally Faradocius Offal, Prince and Heir to the Throne of the Alloys, was kicked in the pants, and war broke out between the Legarite Brassbound Umbutts and the Legaritian Empire of the Cold Welders, and it lasted eight and thirty years, and twelve more, for towards the end one could not tell, amid all the rubble, who had won, so they quarreled and fell to fighting again. And thus there was chaos and carnage, and a devastating decline in the vital voltage, an enervated emf and energy dissipation everywhere, or, as the simple folk put it, “total malaputziment"—all brought about by this infamous fiend and his thrice-accursed bright ideas!!

  —My intentions were the best!! I swear it, Your Laserosity! It was always the general welfare I had in mind!— squeaked the kneeling Malaputz, and his outsize snout trembled. But the professor only elbowed him aside and continued:

  —All this took place two hundred and twenty-five years ago. As you may have guessed, long before the outbreak of the Great Legarian War, long before this universal wretchi-tude began, Malapusticus Pandemonius, having spawned no end of ponderous treatises and tracts, in all of which he forwarded his vile, pernicious flummeries, died, smug and unruffled to the very end. Indeed, so pleased with himself was he, that in his last will and testament he wrote that he had every expectation of being named “Supreme Benefactor of Legaria.” At any rate, when it came time to settle accounts, there was no one with whom to settle, no one to make pay, no one that one might turn a little on a lathe. But I, O Illustrious Intruder, having formulated the General Theory of Facsimulation, studied the works of Malaputz until I was able to extract his algorithm, which, when fed into an atomic duplicating machine, could recreate ex atomis oriundum gemellum, identical to the nth degree, Malapusticus Pandemonius in his very own person. And so we gather every evening in this cellar to pass sentence on him, and when he has been returned to his grave, we avenge our people anew the next day, and thus it is and thus shall be for all eternity, amen!

  Horror-stricken, I blurted in reply:

  —Why, you have surely taken leave of your senses, Professor, if you think for a minute that this person, this person as innocent as a brand-new fuse, whom you hammer together out of atoms every day, has to answer for the actions, whatever they were, of some scholar who died three centuries ago!

  To which the professor said:

  —Then who is this proboscidian sniveler who himself calls himself Malapusticus Pandemonius? Come, what is your name, O cosmic corrosion?

  —Ma… Mala… Malaputz, Your Mighty Mercilessness… —stammered the groveling one through his nose.

  —Still, it is not the same—I said.

  —How, not the same?

  —Did you not yourself say, Professor, that Malaputz no longer lives?

  —But we have resurrected him!

  —A double perhaps, an exact duplicate, but not the self-same, true original!

  —Prove it, Sirrah!

  —I don’t need to prove a thing—I said—seeing that I hold this laser in my hand; besides which, I am well aware, my fine Professor, that to attempt to prove what you ask would be most foolhardy, for the nonidenticality of the identicalized recreatio ex atomis individui modo algorytmico is nothing other than the famous Paradoxon Antinomicum, or the Labyrinthum Lemianum, described in the works of that distinguished robophile, whom they also called Advocatus Laboratoris. So then, without proofs, unhand yon snouted one this instant, and do not dare venture any further molestations upon his person!

  —Many thanks, Your Magnanimitude!!—cried he in the bright red doublet, rising from his knees. —It so happens that here—he added, patting his vest pocket—I have an entirely new formula, this time foolproof, with which the Legarians may be brought to perfect bliss; it works by back coupling, that is, a hookup in reverse, and not in series, which was due purely to an error that crept into my calculations three centuries ago! I go immediately to convert this marvelous discovery into reality!!

  And indeed, his hand was already upon the doorknob as we all gaped, dumbfounded. I lowered my weapon and, turning away, said weakly to the professor:

  —I withdraw my objections… Do what you must…

  With a hoarse roar the four of them lunged at Malaputz, threw him down and dealt with him—until, at last, he was no more.

  Then, still panting, they straightened their frocks, adjusted their hoods, bowed stiffly to me, and left the cellar in single file, and I remained alone, the heavy laser in my trembling hand, full of dismay and melancholy.”

  Thus did Trurl conclude his tale to enlighten King Thumbscrew of Tyrannia, who had summoned him for that purpose. When however the King demanded further explanation concerning the attainment of nonlinear perfection, Trurl said:

  “Once, chancing upon the planet Ninnica, I was able to see the results of progress predicated on the perfectionistic principle. The Ninnicans had long ago assumed another name, that of Hedophagoi or Jubileaters, or just plain Jubilators. My arrival occurred during their Era of Plenty. Each and every Ninnican, or rather Jubilator, sat in his palace, which was built for him by his automate (for so they called their triboluminescent slaves), each with essences anointed, each with precious gems appointed, electrically caressed, impeccably dressed, pomaded, braided, gold-brocaded, lapped and lave
d in ducats gleaming, wrapped and wreathed in incense streaming, showered with treasures, plied with pleasures, marble halls, fanfares, balls, but for all that, strangely discontent and even a little depressed. And yet there was everything you could ask for! On this planet no one lifted a finger: instead of taking a walk, a drink, a nap, a trip or a wife, there was a Walker to walk one, a Napper to nap one, a Wiver to wive one, and so on, and it was even impossible for one to take a break, since there was a special apparatus for that as well. And thus, served and serviced by machines in every conceivable way, all medaled and maidened by appropriate automatic Decorators and Panderizers five to fifteen times per minute, covered with a seething, silvery swarm of mechanicules and machinerettes to coddle him, fondle him, wink, wave and whisper sweet nothings in his ear, back-rub, chin-chuck, cheek-pat and foot-grovel him, tirelessly kissing whatever he might present to be kissed—thus did the Jubilator vel Hedophage vel Ninnican wallow and carouse the livelong day, alone, while in the distance, all across the horizon, chugged the mighty Fabrifactories, churning out thrones of gold, dandle chains, pearl slippers and bibs, orbs, scepters, epaulets, spinels, spinets, cymbals, surreys, and a million other instruments and gratifacts to delight in. As I walked along, I constantly had to drive away machines that offered me their services; the more brazen ones, greedily seeking to be of use, had to be beaten over the head. Finally, fleeing the whole crowd of them, I found myself in the mountains —and saw a host of golden machines clamoring around the mouth of a cave walled up with stones, and through a narrow opening there I saw the watchful eyes of a Ninnican, who was apparently making a last stand against Universal Happiness. Seeing me, the machines immediately began to fan and fawn upon my person, read me fairy tales, stroke me, kiss my hands, promise me kingdoms, and I was saved thanks only to the one in the cave, who mercifully moved aside a stone and let me enter. He was half rusted through, yet glad of it, and said that he was the last philosopher of Ninnica. There was no need, of course, for him to tell me that plenitude, when too plenitudinous, was worse than destitution, for—obviously—what could one do, if there was nothing one could not? Truly, how could a mind, besieged by a sea of paradises, benumbed by a plethora of possibilities, thoroughly stunned by the instant fulfillment of its every wish and whim—decide on anything? I conversed with this wise individual, who called himself Trizivian Huncus, and we concluded that without enormous shields and an Ontological Complicositor-Imperfector, doom was unavoidable. Trizivian had for some time regarded complicositry as the ultimate existential solution; I, however, showed him the error of this approach, since it consisted simply in the removal of machines with the aid of other machines, namely gnawpers, thwockets, tenterwrenches, fracturacks, hobblers and winch-shrieks. Which obviously would only make matters worse—it wouldn’t be complicositry at all, but just the opposite. As everyone knows, History is irreversible, and there is no way back to the halcyon past other than through dreams and reveries.