The Star Diaries

by Stanisław Lem

  He showed me the way with his hand and followed after; I heard voices counting down, there was a flash here, a flash there, wisps of pale smoke drifting up, more and more exploring parties disappeared, new ones took their place, all exactly as in some huge movie studio during the filming of one of those awful history spectaculars. I soon realized that it was forbidden to take any anachronistic objects along with one into the past, the pollsters however kept trying to smuggle them through, either out of perversity or else for their own convenience; well, I thought, we’d put a stop to that soon enough, there would be some changes made, but I asked only:

  “And how long does such information gathering take? When will that knight with the squires return?”

  “We keep on schedule,” said Rosenbeisser with a satisfied smile. “Those three got in yesterday.”

  I said nothing, but thought to myself that it wouldn’t be easy getting accustomed to life in a chronomotive society. The laboratory electrocar that was supposed to take us to the administration building broke down, so Rosenbeisser ordered a couple of pollsters off their camels—they were Bedouins—and in this improvised fashion we made it to our destination.

  My office was enormous, and done up in the modern style, in other words transparent—which is an understatement, since most of the chairs were altogether invisible, and when I sat at my desk only the piles of paper indicated where the top was; yet because, in leaning over as I worked, I kept seeing my own legs in their striped trousers—and the sight of those stripes made it difficult to concentrate—I finally had all the furniture given a coat of paint, to make it opaque to the eye. But then it turned out that the chairs and tables possessed the most idiotic shapes, inasmuch as they hadn’t been designed for viewing; eventually they were all replaced with a set of antiques from the second half of the 23rd century—only then did I feel at home. I may be getting ahead of myself by mentioning such trivialities, yet they do give some idea of the inefficiency of the whole Project. Granted, my life as a director would have been paradise if all I had had to worry about was interior decorating.

  It would take an encyclopedia to relate everything the Project did under my supervision. Therefore I shall, as briefly as I can, sketch out only the major stages of our work. The organizational structure was symmetrical. I had under me TICK (the Time Interferometry and Calendrical Kinetics division), with sections in quantum field and dispersion temporology, and then there was the historical division, containing the faculties of Human and Inhuman. The head of the technologists was Dr. Rob Boskowitz, while Prof. Pat Lado was in charge of the history-makers. Beyond that I had at my personal disposal squads of historicommandos and chronochutists (horotroopers, time jumpers), with a brigade for emergency dethronement as well as a surveillance force. This stand-by corps, a sort of fire department for any unforeseen and dangerous turn of events, bore the acronym MOIRA (Mobile Inspection and Rescue Auxiliaries). At the time of my arrival the technologists-temporalists were ready to begin full-scale telechronic operations, while in the province of Human affairs (run by Harris S. Doddle, an assistant professor) the experts had worked out hundreds of EDENS (Educational Engrams). Similarly the department for Inhuman studies (Obadiah Goody, spheres engineer) had drafted up alternate proposals for improving the solar system, i.e. the planets with Earth at the head, also the course of Biological Evolution, anthropogenesis, etc. All these abovementioned subordinates of mine I later had to get rid of, one by one; each of them is connected, in my memory, with a different crisis within the Project. I shall deal with these at the proper time, to let the human race know to whom it owes its present predicament.

  In the beginning I was full of high hopes. Having taken a rush course in the elements of telechronics and chronoscopic permutation, and having mastered too the administrative intricacies (the delegation of authority, division of labor, and so on), during which—even then—I came into conflict with the Head Accountant (Eustace C. Liddy), I saw how monumental was the task that had been thrust upon me. The science of the 27th century provided me with many different technologies for operating in time, and as if that wasn’t enough, there were hundreds of different plans to renovate history all waiting for my signature. Behind each stood the weight and wisdom of world famous experts—and I was supposed to pick and choose among this embarrassment of riches! For so far there was no agreement, neither about which method we would use to improve upon the past, nor from which point to begin, nor even how much intervention there ought to be.

  The first phase of our activity was marked with great optimism; we decided not to touch the history of man just yet, but instead put in order all the epochs, eras and eons that preceded it; this grand design provided for—among other things—the devulcanization of the planets, the straightening of the Earth’s axis, the creation on Mars and Venus of conditions favorable for their future colonization, while the Moon was to serve as a kind of embarkation platform or way station for the emigration flights which would take place three to four billion years later. With visions of a Better Yesterday in my head I gave the order to launch the Generators for the Establishment of Isochronalities (GENESIS). Three models went into action—BREKEKE, KEX and KOAX. I no longer recall what exactly those abbreviations stood for; the first had something to do with kilowatts and kinematic effects, the second was either K-meson Excitation or Kenogenetical Exobiometry.

  The results surpassed our wildest apprehensions; there was one malfunction after another. Instead of braking gradually and synchronizing itself with the normal flow of time, KOAX fired Mars with an explosion and turned it into one big desert; the oceans all boiled off and evaporated into space, and the scorched crust of the planet cracked open, creating a strange network of troughs, each hundreds of miles in diameter. Hence the 19th-century hypothesis about the canals of Mars. Not wanting the people of the past to learn of our activity, for this could give them serious complexes, I ordered the canals to be all carefully patched, which engineer Lavache in fact did around the year 1910; subsequent astronomers were not surprised by the canals’ disappearance, attributing the whole thing to an optical illusion on the part of their predecessors. KEX, which was supposed to render Venus fertile, had been safeguarded against the malfunction of KOAX thanks to CUPID (Cyclochronic Unidirectional Polarization of Inchoate Differentials), however the Fail-safe Integrators (FALSIES) failed miserably and all of Venus was enveloped in a cloud of poisonous gas, caused by the ensuing chronoclysm. Engineer Wadenlecker, the man in charge of these operations, I summarily dismissed, but when the Research Committee interceded on his behalf I let him carry out the last stage of the experiment. This time it was no mere malfunction that followed, but a catastrophe of truly cosmic proportions. Set in motion against the current of duration, BREKEKE penetrated the present of 6.5 billion years before, emerging so close to the Sun that it pulled from it an enormous chunk of stellar material, which, coiling up under gravitational forces, gave rise to all the planets.

  Wadenlecker defended himself, claiming it was thanks to him that the solar system ever came into being, for if that chronal nose cone hadn’t proved defective, the chance of planets forming would have been practically nil. Astronomers were to wonder afterwards what star could have passed so close to the Sun as to pull from it the protoplanetary matter, for—indeed—such close approaches of stars are among the most unlikely of events. I removed the impertinent fellow once and for all from his position of technochronical director, since—as I saw it—it wasn’t the point or purpose of our Project, that such things be done by accident, through negligence and oversight. If it had come to it, we certainly could have done a better job of fashioning the planets. And anyway, the TICK division had nothing to boast of, not after what they did to Mars and Venus.

  Next on the agenda was a plan for straightening out the Earth’s rotational axis; the idea was that this would make its climate more uniform, without polar frost or equatorial heat. Our purpose here was humanitarian: more species were to survive in the struggle for existence
. The result turned out to be precisely what we didn’t want. The greatest ice age on Earth, in the Cambrian period, was produced by one engineer Hans Jacob Plötzlich when he fired off a heavy “rectifying” unit, which gave the Earth’s axis its so-called “wobble.” The first glacial epoch, instead of cautioning the hasty temporalist, indirectly brought about the second, for seeing what he had done, Plötzlich, without my knowledge, then proceeded to fire a “correctional” charge. Which led to chronoclasm and a new ice age, this time in the Pleistocene.

  Before I was able to remove him from his post, that incorrigible man succeeded in causing a third chronal collision: it’s because of him that the Earth’s magnetic pole doesn’t coincide with the axis of rotation, for the planet still hasn’t stopped teetering. One of the time fragments of the “Readjuster” flew to the year one million B.C.—in that place we have today the Great Crater of Arizona; fortunately no one got hurt, there weren’t any people around then; only the desert burned. Another splinter came to rest as late as the year 1908—the natives there speak of it as the “Tungus meteorite.” Well, that was no meteorite, but only bits and pieces of the shoddily constructed “Optimizer” careening through time. I kicked Plötzlich out without regard for anyone, and when he was caught sneaking into the chronotorium at night—his conscience bothered him, if you please, he wanted to “repair” the damage he had done—I demanded, as his punishment, exile in time.

  I finally relented, which I now regret, and, following the advice of Rosenbeisser, filled the vacancy with engineer Dizzard. I had no idea that he was the professor’s brother-in-law. The sequel to this nepotism, in which I had been unwittingly involved, wasn’t long in coming. Dizzard was the inventor of REIN (Radiant Energy Interchange), subsequently perfected by time specialist Bummeland. They reasoned thus: if even simple chronoclasm is accompanied by the release of tremendous temporal energy, then instead of having it take the form of destructive blasts (the sort that devastated Mars), let it at least be turned into pure radiation. This half-baked idea of theirs (intentions don’t count!) caused me a lot of grief. REIN did indeed convert the kinetic energy into radiation, but what good was that, when the radiation—right in the middle of the Mesozoic—killed off all my dinosaurs, every last one, and God only knows how many other species in the bargain?

  Bummeland tried to defend himself by arguing that this was actually a good thing, since it cleared the evolutionary stage, thereby permitting the appearance of the mammals, from which man himself derived. As if that were a foregone conclusion! They deprive us of our anthropogenic maneuverability by committing saurocide, and then have the nerve to boast about it! Dizzard made a great show of remorse and even submitted a written apology, but it isn’t true that he voluntarily stepped down from his post. The fact of the matter is, I told Rosenbeisser that as long as his brother-in-law remained on the Project, I wouldn’t set foot in the office.

  After this string of disasters I called the entire staff together and made a little speech, warning them that I saw no alternative but to take tough measures from now on against those endangering the safety of the past. It would no longer be simply a matter of losing a comfortable position!

  Accidents were understandable, they told me, if not unavoidable, what with the launching of so unprecedented a technology; just consider the number of rockets that fell apart when space travel was in its infancy; and our enterprise, taking place as it did in time, entailed dangers that were incomparably greater. The Research Committee recommended a new chronometrist; this was Prof. Lenny D. Vinch. I gave him and Boskowitz fair warning with regard to the next experiment, that nothing would—or could—again compel me to show leniency in the event of any serious mishap caused by carelessness.

  I showed them the memos Wadenlecker, Bummeland and Dizzard had written to the Research Committee behind my back, appeals full of contradiction, for sometimes they would lay the blame on the objective difficulties, and sometimes turn around and call the outcome of their errors commendable. I told those two that I wasn’t the ignoramus some people took me for. A simple knowledge of the four arithmetic operations was all one needed to figure out how much material from the Sun had already been wasted—irretrievably too, since the outer planets, real garbage dumps—no—cesspools full of ammonia, were completely useless; Mars and Venus too I scratched out, and gave the go-ahead for the final attempt to improve upon our solar system. The program envisioned converting the Moon into an oasis for the weary astronauts of the future, as well as a transfer point for those on their way to Athena.

  You never heard of Athena? I’m not surprised. That planet was supposed to have been perfected by the team of Gestirner, Starbuck and Astroianni. Such losers the Project never had before, DUNDER (Diachronic Uncertainty Detector and Entropy Regulator) didn’t work, DUFF (Durational Force Fields) broke down, and Athena, till then moving in orbit between Earth and Mars, shattered into ninety thousand separate pieces and what remained was the so-called Asteroid Belt. As for the Moon, those optimizing geniuses of ours butchered its surface completely. It’s a wonder the whole thing didn’t blow up too. Hence that famous riddle of 19th and 20th-century astronomy, for the scientists couldn’t understand where all those craters came from. They developed two theories to explain it—the volcanic and the meteor-impact.

  What nonsense. The author of the so-called volcanic craters was time technician Gestirner, in charge of DUFF, and the one responsible for the “meteorite” type—that was Astroianni, who had taken aim at Athena three billion years in the past and sent it off to kingdom come. The recoil of that chronoclasis, ricocheting in every direction, stopped what was left of Venus’s rotational motion, gave Mars two spurious satellites that went the wrong way, so you see by then it was peanuts for this specialist to turn the surface of the Moon into a missile range, letting fragments of Athena fall on it throughout the next billion years. But when I learned that one of the chips from the chronotractor—the explosion smeared it over 2,950,000,000 years—had landed in prehistoric times, had moreover plunged into the sea and bored a hole in the ocean floor, sinking Atlantis in the process, I personally threw the perpetrators of this compound catastrophe out on their ear, and took action against those responsible for the operation as a whole—in keeping with my previous decision. Appealing to the Committee didn’t help them one bit.

  Prof. Lenny D. Vinch I sent packing to the 16th century, and Boskowitz to the 17th, so they couldn’t get together and scheme. As you already know, Leonardo da Vinci spent the rest of his life trying to build himself a time coupe, but he never succeeded; Leonardo’s so-called “helicopters” and other machines, as bizarre as they were incomprehensible to his contemporaries, represented abortive attempts to escape exile in time.

  Boskowitz conducted himself more sensibly, I think. This was a man of uncommon abilities, with an exact mind, indeed he was a mathematician by training: in the seventeenth century Bosković became a truly brilliant albeit universally ignored thinker. He tried to popularize the ideas of theoretical physics, but none of his contemporaries understood a word of his treatises. To lighten his exile I sent him to Ragusa (Dubrovnik), for secretly I sympathized with him, yet still felt that it was necessary to punish those responsible with severity, no matter how much the Research Committee held it against me.

  And so the first phase of the Project ended a complete fiasco—I absolutely refused to consider the initiation of any further tries in the GENESIS series. Enough had been sunk into it already and lost. The barren wastes from Jupiter on out, Mars burnt to a crisp, Venus poisoned twice over, the Moon in ruins (those so-called “mascons,” mass concentrations beneath its surface, are actually the bits and pieces, embedded deep in the ground and set in hardened lava, of the nose cones of DUNDER and DUFF), and the lopsided axis of the Earth, the hole in the bottom of the ocean, the separation of the land masses of Eurasia and the two Americas brought on by the rift it caused—that was the dismal balance, so far, of all that we had undertaken. Nevertheless, forbidding myself t
o be discouraged, I threw open the doors of active optimization to the crews of the Historical division.

  It had, you will recall, two faculties, human affairs (ass’t. prof. H. Doddle) and inhuman (spheres eng. O. Goody); the entire division was headed by Prof. P. Lado, who from the very beginning aroused my distrust with the radical, uncompromising nature of his views. Which is why I preferred not to touch history proper just yet; anyway, it made more sense to design the kind of intelligent beings that could do the job of civilizing history themselves. Therefore I held back Lado and Doddle (it wasn’t easy, either, the way their hands were itching to get at the past) and ordered Goody to start the Evolution of Life on Earth rolling. And, so they couldn’t accuse me later of stifling creativity, I gave project BIPPETY (Biogenetic Implementation of Parameters to Perfect Terrestrial Intelligence) considerable autonomy. I did however exhort its directors (Obadiah Goody, Homer Gumby, Harry Bosch, Vance Eyck) to learn from the mistakes of Mother Nature, who had disfigured all living things, who had herself blocked the most likely routes leading to Intelligence—for which, of course, one could not blame her, seeing as how she worked in the dark so to speak, on a day-to-day basis. We, in contrast, should act purposefully, keeping ever before us the grand goal, namely BIPPETY. They promised me they would follow these guidelines implicitly and, guaranteeing success, went into action.

  Honoring that precious autonomy of theirs, I didn’t interfere, didn’t monitor them across the one and a half billion years, but the great quantity of anonymous mail that came in finally induced me to do some checking up. What I found was enough to turn one gray. First they had amused themselves like children for a good four hundred million years, turning out fish with armor and some sort of trilobites or other; then, seeing how little time remained until the end of the eon, they scrambled. They threw together units haphazardly, any which way, one more preposterous than the next, producing now a mountain of flesh on four legs, now a tail without a body, now something like a speck of dust; some specimens they paved all over with cobblestones of bone, with others they stuck on horns, tusks, tubes, trunks, tentacles—all indiscriminately; and oh, how ugly it was, how repulsive, senseless, altogether appalling: pure abstractionism, surrealism, a page straight out of modern art.