View from Another Shore : European Science Fiction

by Rottensteiner, Franz(Author)

cry, ‘‘Angel!’’ Odd, that I never noticed this principle before. We shall call it Trurl’s Universal Law: according to the particular defect in its

  own construction, each creature postulates an Ideal. I must make a

  note of that; it will come in handy when I get around to correcting the

  foundations of philosophy. But to the business at hand. To begin, let

  us take that which is Good—but where can Good be found?

  Obviously not where there is no one to experience it. The waterfall

  is neither good nor evil as far as the rock is concerned, nor the

  earthquake, if you ask the earth. Ergo, we must assemble a Someone

  to experience Good. But wait, how can this Someone experience

  Good unless he knows what it is, and how will he know? Suppose . . .

  suppose I see Klapaucius suffer some harm? Half of me would grieve,

  the other half rejoice. There’s a complication. One could be happy in

  comparison with one’s neighbour, yet be totally unaware of the fact

  and therefore not be happy at all, though actually happy! Must I then

  construct beings and keep other beings racked in pain perpetually

  before them, that they might know their own good fortune? A

  feasible solution—but how ghastly! Let’s see, with a transformer

  here and a fuse there . . . Best to start with an individual; happy

  civilizations we can manufacture afterwards.’

  Trurl rolled up his sleeves and in three days had put together an

  Ecstatic Contemplator of Existence, a machine whose consciousness,

  In Hot Pursuit of Happiness

  7

  cathodes all aglow, embraced whatever came beneath its gaze, for

  there was nothing in the whole wide world that wouldn’t give it

  pleasure. Trurl examined it closely. The Contemplator, resting on

  three metal legs, slowly swept the room with its telescopic eyes, and

  whether they fell upon the fence outside, or a rock, or an old shoe, it

  oh’ed and ah’ed with delight. And when the sun went down and the

  sky grew pink, it swayed from side to side in rapture.

  ‘Klapaucius will say of course that oh’ing and ah’ing and swaying

  from side to side in themselves prove nothing’, thought Trurl, uneasy.

  ‘He’ll want evidence, data . . .’

  So in the Contemplator’s belly he installed a large dial with a golden

  pointer and calibrated in units of happiness, which he called hedons

  or heds for short. A single hed was taken to be the quantity of bliss

  one would experience after walking exactly four miles with a nail in

  one’s boot and then having the nail removed. Trurl multiplied the

  distance by the time and divided by the rest mass of the nail, placing

  the foot coefficient in brackets; this enabled him to express happiness

  in centimetres, grams and seconds. That improvement lifted his spirits

  considerably. Meanwhile, as he leaned over and worked, the Con-

  templator regarded his patched and stained lab coat and registered, at

  that particular angle of leaning and cut of coat, from 11.8 to 11.9 heds

  per stain-patch-second. This reading fully restored Trurl’s confidence.

  He made a few more calculations to test the instrument’s precision—

  one kilohed, for instance, was what the elders had felt when they

  beheld Susanna at her bath, one megahed the joy of a man con-

  demned to hang but reprieved at the last minute—and then sent an

  errand robot to fetch Klapaucius.

  The latter came and, seeing Trurl point a proud finger at his new

  creation, began to inspect it. It in turn fixed the majority of its lenses on him, swayed from side to side and delivered a few oh’s and ah’s.

  These exclamations surprised the constructor, but he asked with an

  air of unconcern:

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A happy being’, replied Trurl, ‘more specifically, an Ecstatic

  Contemplator of Existence or Contemplator for short.’

  ‘And what exactly does this Contemplator do?’

  Trurl sensed the sarcasm in his friend’s query but chose to ignore it.

  ‘It devotes itself to wholehearted, incessant observation’, he ex-

  plained. ‘Not passive observation, mind you, but a most intense,

  strenuous and aggressive kind of observation, and whatever is

  observed fills it with inexpressible delight! It is precisely this delight,

  8

  Stanisl/aw Lem

  oscillating through its many circuits and cells, which prompts those

  oh’s and ah’s you hear, even now as it looks upon your otherwise

  uninteresting face.’

  ‘You mean, this machine derives pleasure from an active examina-

  tion of all that is?’

  ‘Correct!’, said Trurl, but without his former assurance, for he

  feared a trap.

  ‘And this must be a felicitometer, graduated in units of existential

  bliss’, Klapaucius went on, indicating the dial with the golden pointer.

  ‘Yes . . . ’

  Klapaucius then presented the Contemplator with various objects,

  in each case taking careful note of its reaction. Trurl, greatly relieved, began to hold forth on the niceties of hedonic calculus or theoretical

  felicitometry. One word led to the next, question followed question,

  until Klapaucius remarked:

  ‘How many units, do you think, would result from this situation:

  one man is brutally beaten for a full three hundred hours, then all at

  once jumps up and brains the one who was beating him?’

  ‘That’s easily done!’, cried Trurl enthusiastically, and immediately

  began to calculate it out—when suddenly he heard a loud guffaw and

  whirled around. Klapaucius said, still laughing:

  ‘You say you took Goodness as your guiding principle? Well, Trurl,

  I see you’re off to a flying start! At this rate you’ll have perfection in no time! Now if you’ll excuse me . . .’

  And he departed, leaving behind a totally crushed Trurl.

  ‘I should have known! I should have seen it!’, groaned the poor

  constructor, and his groans mingled with the oh’s and ah’s of the

  Contemplator, which so aggravated him that he locked it in a closet.

  Then he sat at his empty desk and said:

  ‘What a fool I was, to mistake aesthetic ecstasy for Good! Why, one

  could hardly even call the Contemplator a thing of reason! No, that’s

  not the way to go about it, not in a million maxwells! Happiness—

  certainly, pleasure—of course! But not at someone else’s expense! Not

  from Evil! Wait—what is Evil? Ah, now I see how shamefully I

  neglected, in all my years of cybernetic construction, a study of the

  fundamentals!’

  For eight days and nights Trurl did nothing but bury himself in

  terribly erudite volumes that dealt with the weighty question of Good

  and Evil. A great number of wise men, as it turned out, maintained

  the most important thing was an active solicitude coupled with an all-

  embracing good will. Unless men of understanding mutually mani-

  In Hot Pursuit of Happiness

  9

  fested these virtues, all was lost. True, under that banner quite a few

  individuals had been impaled, boiled in oil, buried alive, drawn and

  quartered, broken on the wheel or stretched on the rack. Indeed,

  history showed that good will, when extended to the soul and not the />
  body, gave rise to endless varieties and variations of torture.

  ‘Good will is not enough’, thought Trurl. ‘What if we house one’s

  conscience in one’s neighbour, and conversely? No, that would be

  disastrous: my transgressions would fill others with remorse, leaving

  me free to sink deeper and deeper in sin! But what if we attach a

  remorse amplifier to the conscience, in other words ensure that every

  wicked deed hound its perpetrator afterwards with an intensity a

  thousand times greater than normal? But then everyone would run

  out and commit some crime just to see whether his new conscience

  really hurt that much—and then be ridden by an overwhelming guilt

  to the end of his days . . . Perhaps a conscience that’s reversible, with a clearing mechanism—locked of course. The authorities could keep the

  key . . . No, there would be picklocks and skeleton keys circulating in

  no time. Arrange for the general broadcasting of feelings? One would

  feel for all, and all for one. No, that’s been done, Altruizine created

  precisely that effect . . . Now here’s an idea: everyone carries in his

  stomach a small bomb and receiver, so that if, as a result of his

  wrongdoing, say, ten or more persons wish him ill, the input of that

  combined and heterodyned signal blows the culprit sky-high.

  Wouldn’t they shun Evil then? Of course they would, they’d have

  to! On second thought . . . what kind of happiness is it, to go around

  with a bomb in your stomach? Anyway, there could be plots; ten

  villainous men could conspire against one innocent and he would

  detonate, innocent or not. What then, reverse the signs? No, that

  wouldn’t work either. Confound it, can it be that I, who have moved

  galaxies about as if they were furniture, am unable to solve this

  ridiculously simple problem in construction?!

  ‘Suppose each and every individual of a given society is plump, rosy,

  full of cheer, sings and leaps and laughs from morning till night, rushes to the aid of others with such zeal the very ground trembles, and the

  others do likewise, and when asked, they exclaim they are positively

  thrilled with their own not to mention the common lot . . . Would not

  such a society be perfectly happy? Evil, after all, would be unthinkable

  in it! Why would anyone want to harm anyone else? What could be

  gained by doing harm? Absolutely nothing! And there’s the answer,

  there’s my blueprint, elegant in its simplicity, for mass-producing

  happiness! Klapaucius, the misanthrope, the cynic — where in this

  10

  Stanisl/aw Lem

  whole, magnificent system will he find the least thing to mock and

  deride? Nowhere, for everyone, helping everyone else, will make

  everything better and better, until it can’t possibly be better . . . But wait, might they not strain themselves, grow faint and fall beneath

  that avalanche, so to speak, of good deeds? I could add a regulator or

  two, circuit breakers too, some joyproof shields, bliss-resistant fields . . .

  The main thing is not to rush, we can’t afford any more oversights. So

  then, primo—they enjoy themselves, secundo—they help others, tertio—

  they jump up and down, quarto — plump and rosy, quinto — things

  couldn’t be better, sexto—self-sacrificing . . . yes, that ought to do it!’

  Weary after these long and difficult deliberations, Trurl slept until

  noon, then jumped out of bed, refreshed and full of fight, wrote down

  the plans, punched out the programs, set up the algorithms and in the

  beginning he created a happy civilization composed of nine hundred

  persons. That equality should obtain within its borders, he made them

  all amazingly alike; that there should be no struggle over food or

  drink, he made them free of any need of sustenance—atomic batteries

  were their only source of energy. Then he sat on his porch for the rest

  of the day and watched how they sang and leaped, announcing their

  happiness, how they rushed to aid one another, patted one another on

  the head, removed stumbling blocks before one another and, bursting

  with excitement, generally lived a life of prosperity and peace. If

  someone sprained his ankle, an enormous crowd would form, not

  out of curiosity but because of the categorical imperative to extend a

  helping hand. It was true that at first, due to a little over-enthusiasm, a foot might be pulled off instead of repaired, but Trurl quickly adjusted

  the automatic choke and threw in a few rheostats; then he sent for

  Klapaucius. Klapaucius regarded this scene of incessant jubilation with

  a fairly dour expression, listened to the hallelujahs and huzzahs for a

  while, then finally turned to Trurl and asked:

  ‘And can they be sad as well?’

  ‘What an idiotic question! Of course they can’t!’, replied Trurl.

  ‘Then they do nothing but jump around, look plump and rosy,

  remove stumbling blocks and shout in unison that they are positively

  thrilled?’

  ‘Yes!’

  Seeing that Klapaucius was not only sparing in his praise but in fact

  had none at all to offer, Trurl added peevishly:

  ‘A monotonous prospect, perhaps, hardly as picturesque as a

  battlefield. My purpose, however, was to bestow happiness, not

  provide you with a dramatic spectacle!’

  In Hot Pursuit of Happiness

  11

  ‘If they do what they do because they must’, said Klapaucius, ‘then,

  Trurl, there is as much Good in them as in a streetcar that fails to run

  you down on the sidewalk simply because it hasn’t jumped its tracks.

  Who derives happiness from doing Good? Not he who must forever

  pat his fellow on the head, roar with delight and remove stumbling

  blocks, but he who is able to brood, to sob, to do his fellow in, yet

  voluntarily and cheerfully refrains from such things! These puppets of

  yours, Trurl, are but a mockery of those high ideals you have

  managed so completely to profane!’

  ‘What—what are you saying?!’ Trurl was stunned. ‘They aren’t

  puppets, but thinking beings . . .’

  ‘Oh?’, said Klapaucius. ‘We shall see!’

  And he walked out among Trurl’s perfect prote´geś and struck the

  first one he met full in the face, saying:

  ‘I trust you’re happy?’

  ‘Terribly!’; replied that individual, holding its broken nose.

  ‘And now?’, inquired Klapaucius, this time dealing it such a blow

  that it went head over heels. Whereupon that individual, still lying in

  the dust and spitting out teeth, exclaimed:

  ‘Happy, sir! Things couldn’t be better!’

  ‘There you are’, said Klapaucius to a dumbfounded Trurl and left

  without another word.

  The crestfallen constructor led his creations one by one back to the

  laboratory and there dismantled them to the last nut and bolt, and not

  one of them protested, not in the least. In fact, a few even tried to be

  of assistance, holding a wrench or pliers while Trurl worked, or

  hammering at their own heads when the cranial lids stuck and

  wouldn’t unscrew. Trurl put the parts back in the drawers and

  shelves, pulled the blueprints off the drawing board and tore them

&nbs
p; all to shreds, sat down at his desk piled high with books on philosophy

  and ethics, and gave a deep sigh.

  ‘How he humiliates me, the dog! And to think I once called that

  pettifogging putterer my friend!’

  From its glass case he took the model of the psychopermutator, the

  device that had transformed every impulse into an active solicitude

  and all-embracing good will, and smashed it to bits on an anvil. Not

  that this did much to improve his spirits. So he thought a while, gave

  another sigh, and began again. This time a sizeable society took

  shape—three thousand stout citizens in all—and it immediately

  chose a government for itself by secret ballot and universal suffrage,

  after which various projects were undertaken: the building of houses

  12

  Stanisl/aw Lem

  and the putting up of fences, the discovering of the laws of nature and

  the throwing of parties. Each of these latest creations of Trurl carried a small homeostat in its head, and in each homeostat were two

  electrodes, one welded to either side, and between them the indivi-

  dual’s free will could play and dance as it pleased; underneath was the

  positive spring, with a tension far exceeding the pull of the opposite

  spring, the one bent on destruction and negation but prudently held

  in check with a safety clip. Moreover, each citizen possessed a moral

  monitor of great sensitivity, which was situated in a vice with two

  toothed jaws: these would begin a gnawing action upon it whenever

  its possessor strayed from the straight and narrow. Trurl first tested

  this contrivance on a special model in his workshop; the poor thing

  was stricken with such pangs and twinges that it fell into a violent fit.

  But then, the capacitor soon charged with the necessary penance and

  the ignition with contrition, he was able to ease the monitor some-

  what from those relentless jaws. The whole thing was most cleverly

  done! Trurl even considered connecting the monitor by regenerative

  feedback coupling to a splitting headache, but quickly changed his

  mind, afraid Klapaucius would again start to lecture him about

  compulsion ruling out the exercise of free will. Which wasn’t at all

  true, for these new beings had statistical transmissions, in other words

  no one, including Trurl, could possibly foresee what they would end

  up doing with themselves. That night Trurl was repeatedly awakened