View from Another Shore : European Science Fiction
Page 6
usually the same. First the specimen would grow at a vigorous rate,
send out tiny offshoots here and there, then a barely visible haze
would hang over it and tiny lights begin to flicker, covering the tiny
towns and fields with a phosphorescent glow, after which the whole
thing would crackle faintly and crumble into a fine dust. Replacing
the ocular with an eight hundred power lens, Trurl examined one of
these cultures and found only charred ruins and smouldering ashes,
among which lay tattered banners with inscriptions too small,
unfortunately, for him to make out. All such slides were quickly
thrown into the waste-basket. Other cultures, however, fared better.
Hundreds progressed and prospered so well that they ran out of space
and had to be moved to other slides. In three weeks Trurl had more
than nineteen thousand of these strains.
In Hot Pursuit of Happiness
19
Following an idea he felt to be inspired, Trurl did nothing himself to
solve the problem of creating happiness, only grafted onto his
Angstromanians a hedotropic impulse, engineering this in various
ways. Sometimes he would install a separate hedotropic unit in each
and every individual, sometimes he would divide it up and distribute
the components equally—the business of happiness then became a
group effort, a matter of teamwork. Those created by the first method
glutted themselves with selfish pleasure, over-indulged and in the
end quietly came apart at the seams. The second method proved more
fruitful. Rich civilizations arose on those slides and fashioned social
theories and technologies for themselves, and all sorts of social
institutions. Culture No. 1376 embraced Emulation, No. 2931 Cas-
cading, and No. 95 Fractionated Salvation within the pale of Ladder
Metaphysics. The Emulators competed in the pursuit of perfect virtue
by splitting into two camps, the Whigs and the Houris. The Houris
maintained one could not know virtue if he knew not vice, for virtue
must be seen distinct from vice and vice versa, so they religiously
practised all the vices ever known, fully intending to cast them off at
the Appropriate Time. However, this apprenticeship soon became a
permanent occupation, or so claimed the Whigs. Finally defeating the
Houris, they introduced Whiggism, a system based on 64,000 inalter-
able interdictions. During their reign it was absolutely forbidden to
duel, shoot pool, read palms, solicit alms, go nude, be rude, drink too
much, think too much; naturally these strict laws were resented and
one by one repealed, much to the general delight. When Trurl
returned to the Emulation strain a little later there was nothing but
chaos, everyone running wildly about in search of some rule left to
break and terrified because there wasn’t any. A few still duelled, read
palms, went nude and drank so much they couldn’t find their way
home—but the fun had gone out of it.
Trurl noted down in his lab book that where one can do all,
the pleasure will pall. In culture No. 2931 lived the Cascadians, a
righteous people who cleaved to numerous ideals embodied in such
Perfect Beings as Great Mother Cascader, the Immaculate Maid and
the Blessed Fenestron. To these they swore undying allegiance,
prayed, sang praises, prostrated themselves, all with the utmost
ceremony. But just as Trurl was beginning to admire this unusually
high concentration of Piety, Prayer and Prostration, they stood up,
dusted off their clothes—and proceeded to sack the temples, defene-
strate the sacred statues, kick the Great Mother and defile the Maid,
all with such abandon that the constructor blushed and looked away.
20
Stanisl/aw Lem
Yet it was precisely in this wanton destruction of what had been so
revered that the Cascadians found, albeit momentarily, perfect happi-
ness. For a while it seemed they would be sharing the fate of the
Emulators, but they had wisely provided for Institutes To Draft
Sacraments, and these paved the way for the next stage. Soon new
statues were being hoisted up on the plinths and pedestals and
altars—which clearly demonstrated the seesaw character of their
culture. Trurl concluded that violating the inviolable can on occasion
be viable, and in his lab book called the Cascadians Chronic Icono-
clasts.
The next culture, No. 95, appeared more complex. This civilization
was metaphysically inclined, but unlike many others boldly took
metaphysics into its own hands. The Ministers of the Ladder had
this world followed by an endless progression of purgatories and
probational paradises—there were the Celestial Suburbs, the Celestial
Outskirts and Outlying Districts, Precincts and Boroughs, but one
never got to the heart of the Celestial City Itself, for that was the
whole point of their theometrical cunning. True, the sect of Bit-
chafers wanted to enter the Heavenly Gates without further delay; the
Advocates of the Circular Stair, on the other hand, agreed with the
principle of quantized transcendence but would have a trap door
installed on every step, in order that the rising soul might fall through to the bottom—that is, back to this world, where it could begin its
climb all over again. In other words, they proposed a Stochastically
Fluctuating Closed Cycle, ultimately a kind of Perpetual Transmigra-
tory Retroincarnation, but the orthodox Ladderants anathematized
this doctrine as Galloping Defeatism.
Later on Trurl discovered many other types of Appropriated
Metaphysics. Some slides literally swarmed with blessed and beatified
Angstromanians; on others, Rectifiers of Evil and Temptational
Resistors were in operation, but most of these instruments succumbed
to subsequent waves of secularization. To cope with such Transcen-
dental Ups and Downs, a few more hard-headed technologies built
Two-way Cable Cars. Societies completely laicized, however, soon
grew apathetic and wasted away. Now No. 6101 looked truly promis-
ing: there they had proclaimed Heaven on Earth, perfection material,
ethereal and sidereal—Trurl sat up in his chair and quickly brought
the picture into better focus. His face fell. Some of the inhabitants of
that plane of glass rode bareback on machines, desperately seeking
anything that might still be impossible; some sank into bathtubs full of
whipped cream and truffles, sprinkled caviar on their heads and
In Hot Pursuit of Happiness
21
drowned, pushing bubbles of taedium vitae out through their noses;
and some were carried piggyback by beautifully pneumatic maenads
and annointed with honey and vanilla extract, keeping one eye on
their coffers of gold and rare perfumes, the other on the lookout for
anyone who might be tempted, if only for a moment, to envy such an
amazing accumulation of dulcitude. But as there was no one of the
kind to be found, they wearily dropped to the ground, tossed their
treasures away like so much garbage, and limped off to join gloomy
prophets who preached that things must inevitably get bett
er and
better, or in other words worse and worse. A group of former
instructors at the Institute of Erotogenic Engineering founded a
monastic order, the Abstinent Friars, and issued manifestos calling
for a life of humility, asceticism and self-mortification—not unre-
lieved however, for though they did penance six days of the week, on
the seventh the worthy fathers dusted off their pneumatic nymphs,
broke out the wine and venison, baubles, belt-looseners and poly-
aphrodisiacs, and as soon as the bell rang matins, they began an orgy
that shook the rafters till Monday morning, when once again they
followed the prior in such flagellation and fasting that the rafters
shook. Some of the younger generation stayed with the Abstinents
from Monday through Saturday, avoiding the monastery on Sunday,
while others came only on that hallowed day to visit the good friars.
But when the former began to castigate the latter for their wicked
ways, Trurl groaned—he couldn’t bear to watch another religious
war.
Now it came to pass that in the incubator, which housed thousands
of cultures, scientific advance eventually led to exploration; in this
way the Era of Interslidal Travel was ushered in. The Emulators, as
it turned out, envied the Cascadians, the Cascadians the Ladderants,
the Ladderants the Chronic Iconoclasts, besides which there were
rumours of some distant realm where perfect happiness had been
attained through Sexocracy, though no one was quite sure how that
was supposed to work. The inhabitants there had apparently gained
such knowledge that they were able to refashion their bodies and
connect themselves directly by hedohydraulic pumps and plumbing
to vats of supersaturated rapture . . . But though Trurl examined
thousands of cultures, he found no indication anywhere of such
hedostasis—that is, fully stabilized satiety—and consequently was
forced to conclude these accounts belonged among the many myths
and legends that arose as a result of the first interslidal expeditions.
Thus it was with some misgiving that he placed the highly promising
22
Stanisl/aw Lem
No. 6590 under the microscope; he was become afraid to hope. This
culture concerned itself not merely with the mechanical aspect of
well-being, but sought to provide outlets for the creative spirit as well.
The Angstromanians here were all terribly talented, there was no end
of brilliant philosophers, painters, sculptors, poets, playwrights,
actors, and if someone wasn’t an outstanding musician or composer,
he was bound to be a gifted theoretical physicist, or at least an
acrobat-pantomimist-choreographer and philatelist-chef with an ex-
quisite baritone, perfect pitch and technicolour dreams to boot. It was
no surprise then that creativity on No. 6590 was unremitting and
furious. Piles of canvases grew higher and higher, statues sprang up
like forests, and millions of books flooded the market, scholarly
works, essays, sonnets, all fantastically interesting. But when Trurl
looked through the eyepiece, he saw nothing but confusion. Portraits
and busts were being hurled out into the streets from overflowing
studios, the pavements were covered with trilogies and epics; no one
was reading anyone else’s novels or listening to anyone else’s
symphonies—and why should he, if he himself was master of all
the muses, a genius incandescent and incarnate? Here and there a
typewriter still chattered, a paintbrush splattered, a pencil snapped,
but more and more frequently some genius would set fire to his studio
and leap from a high window to oblivion, made desperate by the total
lack of recognition. There were many such fires, and the robot fire
brigades extinguished them, but soon no one was left to occupy the
houses that had been saved. Little by little the robot garbage
collectors, janitors, fire fighters and other automated menials
became acquainted with the achievements of the extinct civilization
and admired them exceedingly; yet much escaped them, so they
began to evolve in the direction of greater intellect, began to adapt
themselves to that more exalted level of endeavour. This was the
beginning of the second and final end, for there was no one now to
sweep the streets, remove the garbage, unclog the drains, put out the
fires; there was instead a great deal of reading, reciting, singing and
staging. So the drains backed up, the garbage accumulated, and fires
did the rest; only ashes and burnt pages of poetry floated over the
desolate ruins. Trurl quickly hid this dreadful specimen in the darkest
corner of the drawer and for a long time sat and shook his head,
completely at a loss. He was roused from his thoughts by a shout from
outside: ‘Fire!’ The fire was in his own library: a few civilizations,
misplaced among the old books, had been attacked by mildew, and
thinking this was a cosmic invasion of hostile aliens, they armed
In Hot Pursuit of Happiness
23
themselves and opened fire on the aggressor, and this had set off the
blaze. About three thousand of Trurl’s books went up in smoke, and
almost as many civilizations perished in the flames. Among them
were some which had, according to Trurl’s best calculations, excellent
chances of finding the true path to Universal Happiness. The fire was
finally put out, his laboratory was flooded with water and blackened
to the very ceiling. Trurl pulled up a chair and tried to console himself by examining the civilizations which, locked in the incubator, had
survived the holocaust. One of these had advanced so far that its
inhabitants were now observing him through astronomical tele-
scopes, the lenses sparkling like infinitesimal drops of dew. Touched
by the sight of such scientific zeal, he nodded and gave them an
encouraging smile, but immediately jumped back with a yell and ran,
clutching his eye, to the nearest pharmacy. The little astrophysicists of that civilization had hit him with a laser beam. From then on he
never approached the microscope without sunglasses.
The considerable inroads the fire had made on the collection of
specimens required replacements, so Trurl again set about the busi-
ness of making Angstromanians. One day his hand happened to slip
on the controls and as a result it was not a Generator of Good he
switched on, but a Gehennerator of Evil. Instead of discarding the
ruined specimen, however, he transferred it to the incubator, curious
to see what monstrous form a civilization would assume when all its
inhabitants were vile and vicious from their very inception. How great
was his astonishment then, when a perfectly ordinary culture took
shape on that slide, a culture no better or worse than the others! Trurl
tore his hair.
‘This is all I need!’, he cried. ‘Then it doesn’t matter whether one
starts with Goodbodies, Benevolizers and Meliorites or with Mal-
feasians, Tuffs and Garroteers? H’m! It makes no sense, and yet I feel
close to some Great Truth here. For Evil in thinking beings to produce
&nbs
p; exactly the same results as Good . . . How are we to understand this?’
And he went on in this vein, racking his brains for an answer. But
none came, so he put all his civilizations away in a drawer and went
to bed.
The next morning he said to himself:
‘This must be by far the most difficult problem in the entire
universe if I—I, Trurl—am unable to come up with a solution to it!
Reason, it would seem, is altogether incompatible with Happiness, as
the case of the Contemplator amply demonstrates—the creature
knew only ecstasy until I gave it intelligence. But no, I cannot
24
Stanisl/aw Lem
accept, I refuse to accept such a possibility, that some malicious,
diabolical Law of Nature lies in wait for consciousness to be born—
only to make it a source of torment instead of a pledge of earthly joy!
Let the universe beware—this intolerable state of affairs cannot be
permitted to continue! And if I have not the ability to change it, why,
there are always mechanical aids, electronic brains, mental modula-
tors, encephalogue computers! I shall construct one to solve this
existential dilemma!’
Which he did. In twelve days there stood in the centre of his
workshop an enormous machine, humming with power and impos-
ingly rectangular, designed for the sole purpose of tackling—and
conquering—this problem of problems. He plugged it in and, not
even waiting for its crystal works to warm up, went out for a walk.
Upon returning, he found the machine deeply involved in a task of
the utmost complexity: it was assembling, with whatever lay at hand,
another machine considerably larger than itself. That machine in turn
spent the night and following day tearing down walls and removing
the roof to make room for the next machine. Trurl pitched a tent in
his yard and calmly awaited the outcome of all this intellectual
labour, but the outcome didn’t seem to come. Across the meadow
and into the woods advanced, levelling the trees in its path, a
progression of towering structures; the original computer was gradu-
ally edged by succeeding generations to the river, where it disap-
peared with a sizeable splash. To survey the entire operation, Trurl
was obliged to walk for a good half hour at a fast clip. But when he
took a closer look at the connections between the machines, he began