The Star Diaries

by Stanisław Lem

  Napoleon escaped from Elba, there hadn’t been time to arrange a better exile, so many other matters demanded my immediate attention; those guilty of infractions were now no longer quietly waiting to receive their just deserts, but taking off posthaste for the distant past, smuggling out things to help them acquire fame or an aura of extraordinary powers (these were the alchemists, Cagliostro, Simon Magus, and scores of others). And reports came in, reports I had no way of verifying, e.g. that Atlantis was sunk not by any ricochet from operation GENESIS, but by one Dr. Huey Hokum, with premeditation, to keep me from finding out what mischief he had perpetrated there. In a word, everything was falling apart on me. I lost my faith in a successful outcome and, what was worse, had grown suspicious. I no longer knew what was the result of optimization, and what the effect of its abandonment, and what—for that matter—was due to the insubordination and corruption among my centurial police patrols.

  I decided to attack the problem from the other end. I picked up a copy of the Great Encyclopedia of World History in twelve volumes and started studying it, and whenever anything seemed the least bit suspicious to me I sent out a reconnaissance flight. Such was the case, for example, with Cardinal Richelieu; having checked with MOIRA and made sure that this was not one of our agents, I asked Lado to place a controller of some intelligence there. He entrusted the mission to a certain Reichplatz; then something told me to consult a dictionary; I turned numb, for sure enough, Richelieu and Reichplatz meant the same thing—“Rich Place”—but by then it was too late, since he had already worked his way up into the higher circles of the court and was now the gray eminence of Louis XIII. I left him alone, for after the Napoleonic Wars I knew what such attempts could lead to.

  In the meantime another problem was developing. Certain centuries were literally crawling with exiles; the tempolice couldn’t keep tabs on them—they were spreading rumors, superstitions, purely to spite me, or actually tried bribing the controllers; so I started herding all those who were up to no good into a single place and single time, namely Ancient Greece, as a result of which, that turned out to be the spot where civilization made its greatest strides; why, there were more philosophers in the town of Athens than in all the rest of Europe. By then Lado and Doddle had already been banished; both of them abused my trust; Lado, one of the most hard-headed fanatics that ever was, sabotaged my orders by pursuing his own policy (its full exposition you can find in his “Republic”), which was undemocratic in the extreme, based on oppression in fact, take the Middle Kingdom for instance, the caste system in India, the Holy Roman Empire, and even the Japanese belief in the divinity of the Mikado from 1868 on, yes, that too was his doing. As to whether or not he married off some Miss Schicklgruber or other, so that that famous child could be born, who later trampled half of Europe underfoot, I can’t say for sure, as it was Doddle who told me this, and he and Lado had always been at one another’s throats.

  Lado designed the Aztec kingdom, Doddle sent the Spaniards there; at the last minute, receiving reports from MOIRA, I ordered Columbus’s trip postponed, and horses to be bred in South America, for Cortez’s men would never hold up against a cavalry of Indians, however the coordinators bungled and the horses all died out as far back as the Quaternary, when there weren’t any Indians around, so we had no one to pull the war wagons, though the wheel was available in plenty of time. As for Columbus, he made it in 1492, having greased the right palms. That’s how this optimization of ours worked. I was even accused—as if there weren’t more than enough philosophers in Greece already—of having Harris Doddle and Pat Lado transported there. Not true! It was precisely to show a little humanity that I let them choose the time and place of exile; I did, I’ll admit, deposit Plato not exactly where he wanted, but in Syracuse, for I knew that, what with the wars going on in that city, he wouldn’t be able to put into practice that pet idea of his, the “Kingdom of Philosophers.”

  Harris Doddle became, as everyone knows, tutor to young Alexander the Macedonian. He had been guilty of oversights, and with ghastly consequences. Giving in—as he invariably did—to that weakness he had for composing enormous encyclopedias, Doddle would dabble at classification as well as a general methodology for his Theory of the Perfect Project, while behind his back all sorts of things were going on. The head accountant, unsupervised, threw in with a frogman friend of his, together they fished out the gold of Montezuma from the same canal in which Cortez’s men had foundered during their retreat, and with that played the stock market, starting in 1922; but crime doesn’t pay and they brought on the well-known crash of 1929. I don’t believe I dealt unfairly with Aristotle, it was to me after all that he owed his fame, which he certainly didn’t merit as far as his work on the Project went. But then it was said that under the pretext of dismissals, replacements and exiles I was running a kind of nepotistic merry-go-round, setting my old pals up in plush sinecures throughout the ages. Well, with such critics I was damned if I did, damned if I didn’t.

  There isn’t time to go into details, so I won’t dwell on the allusions to myself contained in the works of Plato and Aristotle. Naturally they weren’t exactly thrilled about their exile, but I couldn’t concern myself with personal resentments, not with the fate of mankind hanging in the balance. Greece was another matter entirely, and I took her downfall very much to heart. It isn’t true I brought it about by putting all those philosophers together; Lado kept an eye on things there, he did it for the sake of Sparta, which he hoped to mold into the image of his beloved utopia, but after his removal there was no one to sustain the Spartans and they folded up before the Persian army; and what could I do about it? Local favoritism was unthinkable, no, we had to extend our protection to all humanity, and yet here was this problem of the exiles undermining our most vital plans; I couldn’t send anyone into the future, they were on the lookout up there, and since every blessed one of the condemned requested the Azure Coast, and I couldn’t refuse, great numbers of people possessing a higher education became concentrated around the Mediterranean and, well, that’s precisely where you have your cradle of civilization and, later, the culture of the West.

  As for Spinoza—a very good man, I grant you, but he allowed the Crusades, though he didn’t actually start them himself; I’d put him in Lado’s place, oh he had a sterling character, but what a woolgatherer, signing whatever they stuck in front of him, without even looking; he gave unlimited powers to Löwenherz (yes, the Lion-Hearted), then someone back in the 13th century was hatching something and when they began looking for the guilty party Löwenherz threw in chronobus after chronobus of secret agents, so the suspect—I forget who it was—caused the Crusades in order to hide in the resulting confusion. I didn’t know what to do with Spinoza, Greece was already overflowing with thinkers like himself, first I had him travel back and forth across the ages, letting him seesaw with a forty-century amplitude, which gave rise to the legend of the Wandering Jew, however each time he swung through our here-and-now he complained of fatigue, so I finally sent him off to Amsterdam, for he liked to tinker with things and there could cut diamonds to his heart’s content.

  More than once I’ve been asked why none of the exiles chose to reveal from where they came. A lot of good it would have done them. Anyone who told the truth would have found himself quickly headed for the loony bin. Wouldn’t a man have been thought crazy, before the 20th century, who claimed that out of ordinary water you could make a bomb capable of blowing the entire globe to bits? And before the 23rd century, certainly, there was no knowledge of chronomotion. Besides which, such admissions would have laid bare the derivative nature of the work of many of the exiles. We forbade them to prophesy the future, but even so they let more than one cat out of the bag. In the Middle Ages, happily, no one paid much attention to those references to jets and bathyspheres in Bacon, or the computers in Lull’s ARS MAGNA. It was worse with the exiles sent improvidently to the 20th century; calling themselves “futurologists,” they began to give out top-secret info
rmation.

  Fortunately General Angus Kahn, the new chief of MOIRA after Napoleon, employed the so-called Babel tactic. This was how it worked. Once, sixteen tempo engineers, summarily banished to Asia Minor, decided to build a time main to escape, under the guise of constructing some sort of tower or dome; the name given to it was the cryptonym-password of their plot (Banished Asian Builders’ Escape League). MOIRA, having detected their operation in a fairly advanced stage, dispatched its own specialists to the spot as “new exiles,” and these intentionally introduced such errors into the blueprint, that the mechanism flew apart at the very first trial run. Kahn repeated this maneuver of “communication confusion,” sending diversionary units into the 20th century; they completely discredited those who were trying to set themselves up as prophets—by turning out all sorts of rubbish (called “Science Fiction”) and placing in the ranks of the futurologists our secret agent, one McLuhan.

  I must confess that when I read through the malarkey that MOIRA had prepared, and which McLuhan was to disseminate as his “prognoses,” I threw up my hands in despair, for it didn’t seem possible to me that anyone with half a brain could take seriously, even for a minute, all that crap about the “global village” towards which the world was supposed to be heading, not to mention the other inanities contained in that hash. And yet, as it turned out, McLuhan was a much greater success than all the people who were betraying the simple truth; he acquired such fame that he ended up actually believing—so it seems—the drivel we had ordered him to advocate. We didn’t remove him, though, since this didn’t hurt us in the least. As for Swift and his Gulliver’s Travels, in which there is a reference, plain as day, to the two small satellites of Mars including all the elements of their motion, which no one could have known at the time—that was the result of an idiotic mistake. The orbital data for the moons of Mars served, then, as a secret password among a group of our controllers in southern England and one of them, nearsighted, took Swift (at a tavern) for the new agent he was scheduled to meet with there; he didn’t report his blunder, thinking that Swift had understood nothing of his words, however two years later (1726), in the first edition of Gulliver's Travels, we found an accurate description of both Martian moons; the password was immediately changed, but that passage had to stay the way it was, in print.

  Nevertheless these, ultimately, were trifling matters, of no great consequence; with Plato it was different; I am always overcome with pity when I read his story of the cave, in which one sits with one’s back to the world, seeing just its shadow on the wall. Is it so surprising that he should have felt the 27th century to be the only true reality, and the primitive age in which I had imprisoned him—a “gloomy cave”? And his doctrine of knowledge as naught but the “self-recollection” of that which once, “before life,” was known far better, is an allusion even more obvious.

  Meanwhile things were going from bad to worse. I had to drop Kahn because he helped Napoleon escape from Elba; this time I chose Mongolia as the place of exile, for he was hopping mad and swore that I’d remember him; what trouble the man could cause me out in that wilderness I couldn’t imagine, and yet he kept his word. Seeing what the situation was, our designers tried to outdo each other in coming up with harebrained schemes. For example, to supply impoverished nations with masses of goods via giant time mains—but that would have stopped all progress. Or, again, to take a million or so enlightened citizens from our modern day and deposit them, like an army, in the Paleolithic; fine, only what was I supposed to do with the people already sitting there in their caves?

  Reading these plans aroused my suspicions when I looked more closely at the 20th century. The means for mass annihilation, could they have been planted there? There were, I had heard, a couple of radicals at the Institute who wanted to twist time around in a circle, so that somewhere after the 21st century contemporaneity would merge with prehistory. In this way everything was to start out once more from the beginning, only better. A sick idea, bizarre, ridiculous, yet I saw what appeared to be the signs of preparations. Overgrowth demanded first the destruction of the existing civilization, a “return to Nature,” and indeed, from the middle of the 20th century on you had a marked increase in antisocial behavior, kidnappings, bombings, young people growing shaggier by the year, and all the erotica coarsened, became bestial, hordes of hairy rag-wearers rendered earsplitting homage not to the Sun, perhaps, but to certain stars and superstars, there were clamorous calls for the abolition of technology, of science, even those futurologists considered to be scientists proclaimed—but who put them up to it?!—impending doom, decline, the end, here and there you even had (already) caves being built, though they were called—possibly to avoid recognition—shelters.

  I decided to concentrate on the centuries that followed, for this whole business smacked of revolution, i.e. revolving time around in the opposite direction, precisely on the principle of the circle, but just then I was invited to attend a special session of the Research Committee. My friends told me privately that I would be tried there. This however didn’t keep me from the performance of my duties. My final action was to settle the matter of a certain Adler, who while working as an inspection officer brought back with him from the 12th century a young girl he had carried off in broad daylight; overtaken in an open field before the gaping multitude, she was lifted up onto his chronocycle; they considered her a saint, and her abduction in time—as her Assumption, I should have gotten rid of Adler long before, he was a thorough brute, of an appearance unusually repulsive, looking like a gorilla with those deep-set eyes of his and the heavy jaw, but I didn’t want people to think me prejudiced. Now however I sent him packing, and quite a distance too, to be safe—about 65,000 years back; he became a prehistoric Casanova and begat the Neanderthals.

  I showed up at the meeting with my head held high, for my conscience was clear. It went on for more than ten hours; I sat and listened to accusation after accusation. They charged me with acting arbitrarily, with riding roughshod over the scholars, with disregarding the opinions of the experts, with favoritism towards Greece, with the fall of Rome, with the Julius Caesar incident (that too was a lie: I hadn’t sent out any Brutus anywhere), with the Reichplatz affair, i.e. Cardinal Richelieu, with abuses in the MOIRA section and tempolice, with the popes and antipopes (actually, the “Dark Ages” were caused by Betterpart, who, with his predilection for the “iron hand” approach, had stuck so many informers in between the 8th and 9th centuries, that the result was mum’s-the-word and cultural stagnation).

  The recital of the bill of indictment, drawn up in 7000 separate clauses, amounted to a public reading of a textbook on world history. I was taken to task for Otto Noy, for the burning bush, Sodom and Gomorrah, for the Vikings, for the wheels on the war wagons in Asia Minor, for no wheels on the war wagons in South America, for the Crusades, for the slaughter of the Albigenses, Berthold Schwarz and his powder (and where was I supposed to put him, in antiquity? so they could get to grapeshot all the sooner?)—and so forth, on and on. Nothing suited the honorable Committee now, neither the Reformation nor the Counter Reformation, and the very same people who once had come running to me with exactly those proposals, swearing to their salutary nature (Rosenbeisser practically got down on his knees for permission to start the Reformation), now sat there, the very picture of innocence.

  When asked, at the end, if I had anything to say in my defense, I replied that I had no intention of defending myself. History would judge us. Still, I couldn’t resist one parting shot before relinquishing the floor. I observed, to wit, that whatever progress, whatever good the Past could show after the Project’s efforts, was entirely owing to me. I was referring here to the positive results of the mass banishment policy I had initiated. It was I whom mankind had to thank for Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Bosković, Leonardo da Vinci, Bosch, Spinoza, and those nameless thousands who sustained human creativity throughout the centuries. However bitter was the fate of the exiles, they had had it coming to them, a
nd yet at the same time they were able, thanks to me, to pay off their debt to history, for they furthered history the best they could—but only after their removal from high positions in the Project! On the other hand if anyone wished to know what the experts of the Project had been up to meanwhile, he could take a look at Mars, Jupiter, Venus, at the butchered Moon, he could go and see Atlantis buried at the bottom of the Atlantic, he could count the victims of two great glacial epochs, of plagues, epidemics, pestilences, wars, religious fanaticisms—in short, he could examine General History, which after “improvement” had become nothing but a battleground of melioristic schemes, a chaos, an unholy mess. History was the victim of the Institute, of its constant intrigues, connivings, confusion, shortsightedness, improvisation, incompetence, and if it had been up to me, I would have sent the whole epoch-making batch of them off to where the brontosaurs roamed free.