The Star Diaries

by Stanisław Lem

  What really infuriated me was their smugness; they said that my buttoned-down conventionality was a thing of the past, that I wasn’t “with it,” that I had no “feel for form,” etc. I held my peace: if only they had limited themselves to this! But no. In that carefully chosen group everyone was out to backstab everyone else. It was not of Homo Sapiens they thought, but rather how to torpedo the projects of their colleagues, thus hardly would a new species begin to make its way in Nature before some monstrosity was marshaled out, developed for the sole purpose of killing off the rival model, demonstrating thereby its inferiority. What has been called the “struggle for existence” resulted from professional jealousies and sabotage. The fangs and claws of Evolution, then, simply reflect the infighting that went on in the department. Instead of teamwork there I found widespread boondoggling, and constant attempts to trip up the species of one’s fellow employee; they got their greatest kick, it seemed, when they were able to scotch all further development on a line under someone else’s management; this is the reason we have so many blind alleys in the kingdom of living things. I shouldn’t say living; they had turned it into something halfway between a waxworks and a cemetery. Not finishing one job, they hurried off to the next; the lungfish and arthropods they never gave an even break, they put an end to their chances with the windpipe; and if it hadn’t been for me, we wouldn’t have even made it to the age of steam and electricity, for they “forgot” about carbon, i.e. about planting the trees which were supposed to produce the coal for future steam engines.

  During the inspection I wrung my hands in despair; the whole planet was cluttered with corpses and wrecks, Bosch in particular had had a field day—when I asked him what earthly purpose was served by that Rhamphornychus with its tail copied off of some child’s kite, and wasn’t he ashamed about the Proboscidae, and why lizards with spines like fence rails on their back, he replied that I didn’t understand the frenzy of creative inspiration. I asked him to show me just where then, in this state of affairs, intelligence was supposed to take root; the question was purely rhetorical, since between them they had stymied all the promising lines of descent. I hadn’t imposed upon them any ready-made solutions, but only reminded them beforehand of the birds, the eagles, and now here was something that flew—they’d microminiaturized its head—and here was something that ran like an ostrich—reduced to utter idiocy. Only two possibilities were left: either make Intelligent Man from the marginal remains, or, on the other hand, have a battering-ram sort of evolution, that is, forcing open all the blocked-up branches of development. But force was out of the question, for such obvious interference would later be recognized by the paleontologists as miraculous; and long ago I had forbidden the use of miracles, so as not to mislead the generations-to-come.

  All of these unprincipled designers I dismissed from their positions, that is, from their time; and then there were the mass burials of their abortions, for those—unfinished—died off by the millions. The rumor that I ordered the species killed is just another of the many calumnies that have been liberally disseminated against me. It wasn’t I who moved life from one corner of the evolutionary process to the other like a piece of furniture, who doubled the trunk of the amoebedodon, who inflated the dromedary (gigantocamelus) to the size of an elephant, who dabbled at whales, it wasn’t I who drove the mammoth to self-annihilation, for throughout I lived by the Project, not for the sort of shameless game which Goody’s group had made of Evolution. Eyck and Bosch I banished to the Middle Ages, and Gumby, since he had parodied the whole idea of BIPPETY (among other things he created the man-horse and the woman-fish, which in addition was equipped with a high soprano), Homer Gumby I sent as far back as antiquity, to Thrace. What followed was something I had seen happen before, and would again, more than once. The exiles, now deprived of the opportunity to create real things, gave vent to their frustrations in vicarious, sublimated work. Anyone interested in what else Bosch had up his sleeve can find out by taking a look at his paintings. Clearly, the man had talent. It shows, for one, in the way he was able to fit in with the spirit of the period—hence the ostensible religiousness of his canvases, all those Last Judgments and scenes from hell. Even so, Bosch couldn’t refrain from certain indiscretions. In the “Garden of Earthly Delights,” in the very center of the “Musical Hell” (the right wing of the triptych), stands a twelve-seat chronobus. Not a thing I could do about it.

  As for Homer, I think I acted wisely, packing him off—along with his creatures—to Ancient Greece. What he painted has been lost, but his writings were preserved. Strange, that no one has noticed the anachronisms in them. Surely it’s obvious he didn’t take seriously the occupants of Olympus, who are constantly out to foil one another’s plans, in a word behaving exactly like his colleagues at the institute. The Iliad and Odyssey are romans à clef; the irascible Zeus, for instance, that’s a satire on me.

  Goody however I didn’t dismiss right away, since Rosenbeisser spoke up for him: if this man let me down, he said, then I could send him, the research director of the Project, into the Archeozoic if I liked. Goody supposedly had hidden resources, contributions to make; when I opposed the idea of utilizing the monkey leftovers, he started in on BARF (Binary Anthropogenesis for Reciprocal Feedback). I didn’t put much stock in his BARF, but raised no objections, for by now the word was that I turned down any and all proposals. The next reconnaissance flight showed that he had forced a couple of small mammals into the ocean, made them similar to fish, threw in some frontal radar and was just then at the dolphin stage. Somehow he had gotten it into his head that to achieve harmony two intelligent species were needed: land and sea. How asinine! It would lead to conflicts, of course! I told him: “Intelligent beings in the water are out!” So the dolphin remained the way it was, with a brain several sizes too big, and we had a crisis on our hands.

  What now, start evolution all over again, from the beginning? I couldn’t, my nerves were shot. I told Goody to do as he saw fit, in other words I accepted the monkey as a working model, but made him promise to pretty it up a bit; and, so he couldn’t plead ignorance later on, I supplied him with guidelines—in writing, through official channels, though without (it’s true) going into all the details. I did however point out in what poor taste those naked anal areas were, and advised a sensitive, dignified approach to the matter of sex, suggesting something in the spirit of the flowers, lilies of the valley, buds, then on my way out—I had to attend a session of the Committee—I asked him personally not to muff it in his usual fashion but find instead some nice motifs. His studio was a shambles, here and there beams of some sort jutting out, planks, saws, what did they have to do with love? Have you gone mad, I said, love on the principle of the buzz saw? I made him give me his solemn word he’d throw away the saw, he nodded zealously—laughing to himself all the while, for he’d already learned that his walking papers lay waiting in my desk, therefore knew he had nothing to lose.

  He decided to get even with me. He blustered, telling everyone that the old boy (namely me) would crap in his pants when he returned; and I certainly did; Good Lord—I summoned him at once, he played the conscientious employee, insisting he’d adhered to the guidelines! Yet instead of getting rid of that bald spot in the back, he had shaved the entire monkey, or rather did it all in reverse, and as far as love and sex went, well, that was clear sabotage on his part. I mean, the very choice of the place! But I need hardly dwell on that piece of treachery. What its effect was, you can all see for yourselves. Yes, monsieur the engineer really went out of his way! The monkeys were what they were, but at least vegetarian. He made them carnivorous too.

  I called an emergency meeting of the Committee to consider the matter of the rehumanization of Homo sapiens, and there was told that this could no longer be accomplished in a single blow; one would have to backtrack twenty-five, possibly even thirty million years; I was outvoted, but didn’t make use of my veto power, perhaps I should have, but I was on my last legs now. Anyway signals were
coming in from the 18th and 19th centuries; to make things easier for themselves, the officials of MOIRA, tired of constantly having to drive back and forth in time, set up residence in various old castles, palaces, in basements, and taking absolutely no precautions, until there began to be rumors of damned souls, chains rattling (the sound of a chronocycle starting up), and ghosts (for they wore white, as if they couldn’t have picked a better color for their uniform); they made people’s heads spin, frightened them by passing through walls and doors (taking off in time always looks like that, for the chronocycle stays put while the earth continues turning), and all in all they created such a disturbance, that finally it brought on the birth of Romanticism. After punishing the culprits, I tended to Goody and Rosenbeisser.

  I deported the both of them, fully aware that the Research Committee would never forgive me for it. In any event I’m not vindictive: Rosenbeisser, who behaved towards me afterwards in a positively scandalous manner, in exile conducted himself quite decently (as Julian the Apostate). He did not a little to improve, in Byzantium, the lot of the poor. Which only shows that the reason he failed at his job was that he just didn’t measure up. Being an emperor is peanuts compared to overseeing the renovation of all history.

  Thus concluded the second phase of the Project. I then gave the department of social affairs permission to begin, since all we could perfect now was the history of civilization. Getting down to work, Doddle and Lado were clearly delighted that their predecessors had blundered so completely, yet at the same time they warned me in advance—playing it safe, the dogs—that one could not expect too much of THEOHIPPIP now, not with that kind of Homo sapiens!

  Doddle entrusted the carrying out of his first experimental corrective program to the chronologians. These were Khand el Abr, Canne de la Breux, Guirre Andaule and G. I. R. Andoll. The team was to work under the direct leadership of eng. historiologist Hemdreisser. He and his colleagues planned to expedite the cultural process through urbanizational acceleration. It was in Lower Egypt of the 12th, or maybe the 13th, Dynasty—I no longer remember which—that they amassed great piles of building material with the aid of temporal agents, whom we commonly called “time plants,” and raised the general level of architectural know-how, but owing to a lack of adequate supervision the plan miscarried. Briefly, instead of mass housing construction what we ended up with—in the framework of a cult of personality—was of no earthly use to anyone, i.e. tombs for various and sundry Pharaohs. I transported the entire team to Crete; that was how the palace of Minos came about. I don’t know if it’s true, but Betterpart told me that the exiles then quarreled, rose up against their former chief and put him in the Labyrinth. Not having checked the records, I can’t say for sure, but to me Hemdreisser doesn’t look like any Minotaur.

  I decided to put a stop to this hit-and-run approach and requested the submission of proposals of a more long-range nature. We had to make up our minds whether to act openly or in secret, that is, whether the people of various periods should be at all allowed to discover that someone was helping them from outside history. Doddle, something of a liberal, was in favor of cryptochronism, which I too advocated. The alternative strategy would make it necessary to place all the nations of the Past under an open Protectorate, which couldn’t help but give them the feeling of being disenfranchised. Therefore we ought to offer assistance, but anonymously. Lado objected, he had in mind a plan for an ideal government, into which he wanted to pull and consolidate all societies.

  I backed Doddle, who introduced me to one of the youngest and, presumably, best of his assistants; this graduate student, Otto Noy, was the inventor of monotheism. God, as he explained to me, was an idea which in itself could harm no one, yet would give us—the optimizers—a free hand, since according to the plan His decisions were to be ipso facto mysterious: the people wouldn’t be able to understand them, therefore they wouldn’t criticize, and neither would they suspect that anyone was tampering with their history—telechronically. Not a bad idea, on the face of it, but just to be safe I gave the young M. A. a small area only, to test his theory, and in a remote corner of the world at that, in Asia Minor; he could have at his disposal the tribe of Judah. His helper was one eng. historiologician Joseph Hobbs. A routine check revealed that they had committed a number of serious breaches. It was bad enough that Noy ordered 60,000 tons of pearl barley to be dropped during a desert outing of some Jews; the “discreet assistance” he was supposed to render them led to so much intervention (he opened and closed the Red Sea, sent remote-control locusts against the enemies of Judah), that the recipients of this patronage finally had their heads turned; they declared themselves a chosen people.

  Invariably, whenever a plan went wrong in its realization, the planner, instead of changing tactics, would resort to more and more powerful stimuli. But Otto Noy outdid everyone when he used napalm. Why did I permit it, you ask? Permit it! I knew nothing about it! At the Institute’s proving ground he had demonstrated only the remote-control igniting of a bush, assuring us that that was the sort of thing he’d be doing in the past; you know, a few dried-up cactuses in the desert might burn, nothing more. This display, I suppose, was an attempt on his part to comply with moral norms. After banishing him to the Sinai Peninsula, I strictly forbade all the group directors to license any acts of a supernatural appearance. And of course what Noy and Hobbs did had historical repercussions.

  But that was typical. Every telechronic intervention set off an avalanche of events, which couldn’t be held in check without appropriate measures, and those in turn produced new perturbations, and so on and so on. Otto Noy’s conduct in exile was highly improper, he capitalized on the fame he’d created for himself earlier, in the position of historiometrist. It’s true he was now no longer able to work his “miracles,” however the memory of them endured. As for Joe Hobbs, I know it’s been said that I had my time troopers lean on him, but that’s a lie. I’m not familiar with the facts of the case, there wasn’t time to bother about such details; but apparently he had fallen out with Otto Noy and the latter made things so hot for him that eventually it started the legend of job. The Jews came out the worst in this experiment, for by this time they firmly believed in their favored status, and consequently after the Project withdrew there was more than one bitter pill for them to swallow, both in their homeland and during the Diaspora. I won’t tell you what my enemies at the Project had to say about me on that particular subject.

  At any rate the Project now entered the stage of its most difficult crises. I bear some of the blame for this, inasmuch as—giving in to Doddle and Lado—I permitted the betterment of history on a broad front, i.e. not in isolated moments and locations, but over the whole length of the historical time-line. That strategy of amelioration, called “integrated,” made a tangle of our scene of operations; in order to head off which, I placed groups of observers in each century, and also gave Lado the authority to organize a secret tempolice force, which would combat delinquency in time.

  This delinquency, something that never would have entered my head even in a nightmare, had to do with the so-called business of the brooms. It was the work of groups of wild youths, mostly recruited from our staff personnel, lab technicians, secretaries, etc. Those endless medieval tales of pacts with the devil, incubi and succubi, sabbats, witch trials, temptations of saints, etc., all of that derived from “bootleg” chronomotion, practiced by adolescents bereft of any moral ballast. An individual chronocycle consists of a pipe, a saddle, and an exhaust funnel, therefore one could easily mistake it—particularly in bad lighting—for a broom. A number of shameless hussies went off on joy rides, usually at night, terrorizing villagers in the early Middle Ages. Not only did they go swooping over people’s heads, but actually set out—for the 13th, say, or 12th century—in shocking deshabille, topless even, it’s not surprising then that they were thought to be (for the lack of any better description) naked witches astraddle flying brooms. By an odd coincidence I was aided in the tracking do
wn and capture of the guilty parties by none other than H. Bosch, at that time already in exile; he certainly wasn’t about to faint at the sight of an ordinary temporician, and in his “hell” cycle painted true-to-life portraits—not of devils, but of dozens of illegal chronocyclists and their cohorts, which was all the easier for him, in that many he knew personally.

  Considering the number of people victimized by these chronooligan escapades, I sent the offenders back seven hundred years (the “20th-century student radicals”). Meanwhile, since the field of our activities had now spread over more than forty centuries, N. Betterpart, commander in chief of MOIRA, informed me that the situation was getting out of hand and asked for special reinforcements in the form of emergency crews of chronochutists. We began to take on hundreds of new workers, sending them off immediately to where the distress signals were coming from, though often these were people with little or no training. Their being concentrated in certain centuries led to serious incidents, things like migrations of whole nations; we did our best to conceal the arrival of each such landing party, but in the 20th century (about halfway through) there was common talk of “flying saucers,” for the circulation of the news was made possible by a then rapidly developing mass-media technology.

  Yet this was nothing compared to the next scandal, whose author and later principal character turned out to be the chief of MOIRA himself. I began to receive reports from time to the effect that his people were not so much observing the progress of meliorization as they were actively participating in the historical process, and this not in the spirit of Lado and Doddle’s instructions, but rather according to their own temporal politics, which was being merrily pursued by Betterpart. Before I was able to remove him from his post he absconded, that is, fled to the 18th century, for there he could count on his old cronies; the next thing I knew, he was emperor of France. This foul deed called for severe punishment; Lado suggested I dispatch a reserve brigade against Versailles of 1807, but that was quite out of the question, such a raid would undoubtedly produce an unparalleled perturbation in all subsequent history—mankind would realize, from there on out, that it was in protective custody. The more circumspect Doddle came up with a plan for the “natural,” i.e. cryptochronistic, castigation of Napoleon. The mounting of an anti-Bonapartist coalition was begun, military marching drills, but wouldn’t you know, the chief of MOIRA got wind of it immediately and lost no time in assuming the offensive himself; not for nothing was he a professional strategist, he had strategy in his little finger, and one by one defeated all the enemies Doddle sent up against him. For a while it looked like we had him cornered in Russia, but in that campaign too he gave us the slip somehow, meanwhile half of Europe lay in smoldering ruins; finally I made my well-meaning shapers of history step aside and dealt with Napoleon myself, near Waterloo. As if that were anything to boast about!