The Cyberiad

by Stanisław Lem

  “Well, yes, in that case,” said Trurl, considerably appeased. “Though your use of the Machine to Grant Your Every Wish was not, I would say, the most fortunate…”

  “Oh yes, one other thing I wanted to ask,” said Klapau-cius, all innocence. “What did you do with the artificial Trurl? Could I see it?”

  “It was beside itself with rage,” explained Trurl. “It said it would ambush you by that mountain pass near your house and tear you limb from limb. I tried to reason with it, but it called me names, ran out into the night and started putting together all sorts of booby traps for you—and so, dear Klapaucius, though you had insulted me, I remembered our old friendship and decided to remove this threat to your life and limb. Hence I had to disassemble it…”

  And he touched a few nuts and bolts on the floor with his shoe, and sighed.

  Whereupon they exchanged kind words, shook hands and parted the best of friends.

  From that time on, Trurl did nothing but tell everyone how he had given Klapaucius a Machine to Grant Your Every Wish, how then Klapaucius had insulted him by having it make an artificial Trurl, which he proceeded to beat black-and-blue; how then this excellently constructed copy of the great constructor made clever lies to save itself, and finally managed to escape while Klapaucius slept, and how Trurl himself, the real Trurl, eventually had to disassemble the artificial Trurl to protect his good friend and colleague from its vengeance. Trurl told this story so often and at such length, elaborating on his glorious achievement (and never failing to call on Klapaucius as a witness), that it reached the ears of the Royal Court at last, and now no one spoke of Trurl other than with the utmost respect, though not long ago he had been commonly called the Constructor of the World’s Stupidest Computer. When Klapaucius heard, one day, that the King himself had rewarded Trurl handsomely and decorated him with the Order of the Great Parallax, he threw up his hands and cried:

  “What? Here I was able to see through his little game and gave him so good a shellacking for it that he had to sneak home in the middle of the night and patch himself up, and even then he looked a sight! And for that they decorate him, praise him, shower him with riches? O tempora, O mores!…”

  Furious, he went home, locked himself in and drew the blinds. He too had been working on a Machine to Grant Your Every Wish, only Trurl had beat him to it.

  THE SEVEN SALLIES OF TRURL AND KLAPAUCIUS

  The First Sally

  or

  The Trap of Gargantius

  When the Universe was not so out of whack as it is today, and all the stars were lined up in their proper places, so you could easily count them from left to right, or top to bottom, and the larger and bluer ones were set apart, and the smaller, yellowing types pushed off to the corners as bodies of a lower grade, when there was not a speck of dust to be found in outer space, nor any nebular debris—in those good old days it was the custom for constructors, once they had received their Diploma of Perpetual Omnipotence with distinction, to sally forth ofttimes and bring to distant lands the benefit of their expertise. And so it happened that, in keeping with this ancient custom, Trurl and Klapaucius, who could kindle or extinguish suns as easily as shelling peas, did venture out on such a voyage. When the vastness of the traveled void had erased in them all recollection of their native skies, they saw a planet up ahead—not too little, not too big, just about right—with one continent only, down the middle of which ran a bright red line: everything on one side was yellow, everything on the other, pink. Realizing at once that here were two neighboring kingdoms, the constructors held a brief council of war before landing.

  “With two kingdoms,” said Trurl, “it’s best you take one, and I the other. That way nobody’s feelings get hurt.”

  “Fine,” said Klapaucius. “But what if they ask for military aid? Such things happen.”

  “True, they could demand weapons, even superweapons,” Trurl agreed. “We’ll simply refuse.”

  “And if they insist, and threaten us?” returned Klapaucius. “This too can happen.”

  “Let’s see,” said Trurl, switching on the radio. It blared martial music, a rousing march.

  “I have an idea,” said Klapaucius, turning it off. “We can use the Gargantius Effect. What do you think?”

  “Ah, the Gargantius Effect!” cried Trurl. “I never heard of anyone actually using it. But there’s always a first time. Yes, why not?”

  “We’ll both be prepared to use it,” Klapaucius explained. “But it’s imperative that we use it together, otherwise we’re in serious trouble.”

  “No problem,” said Trurl. He took a small golden box out of his pocket and opened it. Inside, on velvet, lay two white beads. “You keep one, I’ll keep the other. Look at yours every evening; if it turns pink, that’ll mean I’ve started and you must too.”

  “So be it,” said Klapaucius and put his bead away. Then they landed, shook hands and set off in opposite directions.

  The kingdom to which Trurl repaired was ruled by King Atrocitus. He was a militarist to the core, and an incredible miser besides. To relieve the royal treasury, he did away with all punishments except for the death sentence. His favorite occupation was to abolish unnecessary offices; since that included the office of executioner, every condemned citizen was obliged to do his own beheading, or else—on rare occasions of royal clemency—have it done by his next of kin. Of the arts Atrocitus supported only those that entailed little expense, such as choral recitation, chess and military calisthenics. The art of war he held in particularly high esteem, for a victorious campaign brought in excellent returns; on the other hand, one could properly prepare for war only during an interval of peace, so the King advocated peace, though in moderation. His greatest reform was the nationalization of high treason. As the neighboring kingdom was continually sending spies, he created the office of Royal Informer, who, through a staff of subordinate traitors, would hand over State secrets to enemy agents for certain sums of money. Though as a rule the agents purchased only outdated secrets—those were less expensive and besides, they were held accountable to their own treasury for every penny spent.

  The subjects of Atrocitus rose early, were well-behaved, and worked long hours. They wove fascines and gabions for fortifications, made guns and denunciations. In order that the kingdom not be flooded with the latter (which in fact had happened during the reign of Bartholocaust the Walleyed several hundred years before), whoever wrote too many denunciations was required to pay a special luxury tax. In this way they were kept at a reasonable level. Arriving at the Court of Atrocitus, Trurl offered his services. The King— not surprisingly—wanted powerful instruments of war. Trurl asked for a few days to think it over, and as soon as he was alone in the little cubicle they had assigned to him, he looked at the bead in the golden box. It was white but, as he looked, turned slowly pink. “Aha,” he said to himself, “time to start with Gargantius!” And without further delay he took out his secret formulae and set to work.

  Klapaucius meanwhile found himself in the other kingdom, which was ruled by the mighty King Ferocitus. Here everything looked quite different than in Atrocia. This monarch too delighted in campaigns and marches, and he too spent heavily on armaments—but in an enlightened way, for he was a most generous lord and a great patron of the arts. He loved uniforms, gold braid, stripes and tassels, spurs, brigadiers with bells, destroyers, swords and chargers. A person of keen sensibilities, he trembled every time he christened a new destroyer. And he lavishly rewarded paintings of battle scenes, patriotically paying according to the number of fallen foes depicted, so that, on those endless panoramic canvases with which the kingdom was packed, mountains of enemy dead reached up to the sky. In practice he was an autocrat, yet with libertarian views; a martinet, yet magnanimous. On every anniversary of his coronation he instituted reforms. Once he ordered the guillotines decked with flowers, another time had them oiled so they wouldn’t squeak, and once he gilded the executioners’ axes and had them all resharpened—out of huma
nitarian considerations. Ferocitus was not overly dainty, yet he did frown upon excesses, and therefore by special decree regulated and standardized all wheels, racks, spikes, screws, chains and clubs. Beheadings of wrongthinkers—a rare enough event— took place with pomp and pageantry, brass bands, speeches, parades and floats. This high-minded monarch also had a theory, which he put into action, and this was the Theory of Universal Happiness. It is well known, certainly, that one does not laugh because one is amused, but rather, one is amused because one laughs. If then everyone maintains that things just couldn’t be better, attitudes immediately improve. The subjects of Ferocitus were thus required, for their own good, to go about shouting how wonderful everything was, and the old, indefinite greeting of “Hello” was changed by the King to the more emphatic “Hallelujah!” —though children up to the age of fourteen were permitted to say, “Wow!” or “Whee!", and the old-timers, “Swell!”

  Ferocitus rejoiced to see his people in such good spirits. Whenever he drove by in his destroyer-shaped carriage, crowds in the street would cheer, and whenever he graciously waved his royal hand, those up front would cry: “Wow!"—"Hallelujah!"—"Terrific!” A democrat at heart, he liked to stop and chat awhile with old soldiers who had been around and seen much, liked to hear tales of derring-do told at bivouacs, and often, when some foreign dignitary came for an audience, he would out of the blue clap him on the knee with his baton and bellow: “Have at them!"—or: “Swiggle the mizzen there, mates!"—or: “Thunderation!” For there was nothing he loved so much or held so dear as gumption, crust and pluck, roughness and toughness, powder, chowder, hardtack, grog and ammo. And so, whenever he was melancholy, he had his troops march by before him, singing: “Screw up yer courage, nuts to the foe"—"When currents lag, crank out the flag"—"We’ll scrap, stout lads, until we’re nought but scrap"—or the rousing anthem: “Lock, stock, and barrel.” And he commanded that, when he died, the old guard should sing his favorite song over the grave: “Old Robots Never Rust.”

  Klapaucius did not get to the court of this great ruler all at once. At the first village he came to, he knocked on several doors, but no one opened up. Finally he noticed in the deserted street a small child; it approached him and asked in a thin, high voice:

  “Wanna buy any, mister? They’re cheap.”

  “What are you selling?” inquired Klapaucius, surprised.

  “State secrets,” replied the child, lifting the edge of its smock to give him a glimpse of some mobilization plans. This surprised Klapaucius even more, and he said:

  “No, thank you, my little one. But can you tell me where I might find the mayor?”

  “What’cha want the mayor for?” asked the child.

  “I wish to speak with him.”

  “In secret?”

  “It makes no difference.”

  “Need a secret agent? My dad’s a secret agent. Dependable and cheap.”

  “Very well then, take me to your dad,” said Klapaucius, seeing he would get nowhere with the child. The child led him to one of the houses. Inside, though it was in the middle of the day, a family sat around a lighted lamp—a gray grandfather in a rocking chair, a grandmother knitting socks, and their fully grown and numerous progeny, each busy at his own household task. As soon as Klapaucius entered, they jumped up and seized him; the knitting needles turned out to be handcuffs, the lamp a microphone, and the grandmother the local chief of police.

  “They must have made a mistake,” thought Klapaucius, when he was beaten and thrown in jail. Patiently he waited through the night—there was nothing else he could do. The dawn came and revealed the cobwebs on the stone walls of his cell, also the rusted remains of previous prisoners. After a length of time he was taken and interrogated. It turned out that the little child as well as the houses—the whole village, in fact—all of it was a plant to trick foreign spies. But Klapaucius did not have to face the rigors of a long trial; the proceedings were quickly over. For attempting to establish contact with the informer-dad the punishment was a third-class guillotining, because the local administration had already allotted funds to buy out enemy agents for that fiscal year, and Klapaucius, on his part, repeatedly refused to purchase any State secrets from the police. Nor did he have sufficient ready cash to mitigate the offense. Still, the prisoner continued to protest his innocence—not that the judge believed a word of it; even if he had, to free him lay outside his jurisdiction. So the case was sent to a higher court, and in the meantime Klapaucius was subjected to torture, though more as a matter of form than out of any real necessity. In about a week his case took a turn for the better; finally acquitted, he proceeded to the Capitol where, after receiving instructions in the rules and regulations of court etiquette, he obtained the honor of a private audience with the King. They also gave him a bugle, for every citizen was obliged to announce his comings and goings in official places with appropriate flourishes, and such was the iron discipline of that land, that the sun was not considered risen without the blowing of reveille.

  Ferocitus did in fact demand new weapons. Klapaucius promised to fulfill this royal wish; his plan, he assured the King, represented a radical departure from the accepted principles of military action. What kind of army—he asked first—always emerged victorious? The one that had the finest leaders and the best disciplined soldiers. The leader gave the orders, the soldier carried them out; the former therefore had to be wise, the latter obedient. However, to the wisdom of the mind, even of the military mind, there were certain natural limits. A great leader, moreover, could come up against an equally great leader. Then too, he might fall in battle and leave his legion leaderless, or do something even more dreadful, since he was, as it were, professionally trained to think, and the object of his thoughts was power. Was it not dangerous to have a host of old generals in the field, their rusty heads so packed with tactics and strategy that they started pining for the throne? Had not more than one kingdom come to grief thereby? It was clear, then, that leaders were a necessary evil; the problem lay in making that evil unnecessary. To go on: the discipline of an army consisted in the precise execution of orders. Ideally, we would have a thousand hearts and minds molded into one heart, one mind, one will. Military regimens, drills, exercises and maneuvers all served this end. The ultimate goal was thus an army that literally acted as one man, in itself both creator and executor of its objectives. But where was the embodiment of such perfection to be found? Only in the individual, for no one was obeyed as willingly as one’s own self, and no one carried out orders as cheerfully as the one who gave those orders. Nor could an individual be dispersed, and insubordination or mutiny against himself was quite out of the question. The problem then was to take this eagerness to serve oneself, this self-worship which marked the individual, and make it a property of a force of thousands. How could this be done? Here Klapaucius began to explain to the keenly interested King the simple ideas—for are not all things of genius simple?—discovered by the great Gargantius.

  Into each recruit (he explained) a plug is screwed in front, a socket in back. Upon the command “Close up those ranks!” the plugs and sockets connect and, where only a moment before you had a crowd of civilians, there stands a battalion of perfect soldiers. When separate minds, hitherto occupied with all sorts of nonmartial nonsense, merge into one regimental consciousness, not only is there automatic discipline, for the army has become a single fighting machine composed of a million parts—but there is also wisdom. And that wisdom is directly proportional to the numbers involved. A platoon possesses the acumen of a master sergeant; a company is as shrewd as a lieutenant colonel, a brigade smarter than a field marshal; and a division is worth more than all the army’s strategists and specialists put together. In this way one can create formations of truly staggering perspicacity. And of course they will follow their own orders to the letter. This puts an end to the vagaries and reckless escapades of individuals, the dependence on a particular commander’s capabilities, the constant rivalries, envies and
enmities between generals. And detachments, once joined, should not be put asunder, for that produces nothing but confusion. “An army whose only leader is itself—this is my idea!” Klapaucius concluded. The King was much impressed with his words and finally said:

  “Return to your quarters. I shall consult my general staff…”

  “Oh, do not do this, Your Royal Highness!” exclaimed the clever Klapaucius, feigning great consternation. “That is exactly what the Emperor Turbulon did, and his staff, to protect their own positions, advised him against it; shortly thereafter, the neighbor of Turbulon, King Enamuel, attacked with a revolutionized army and reduced the empire to ashes, though his forces were eight times smaller!”

  Whereupon he bowed, went to his room and inspected the little bead, which was red as a beet; that meant Trurl had done likewise at the court of Atrocitus. The King soon ordered Klapaucius to revolutionize one platoon of infantry; joined in spirit and now entirely of one mind, this tiny unit cried, “Kill, kill!” swooped down on three squadrons of the King’s dragoons, who were armed to the teeth and led moreover by six distinguished lecturers of the Academy of the General Staff—and cut them to ribbons. Great was the grief of the generals, marshals, admirals and commanders in chief, for the King sent them all into a speedy retirement; fully convinced of the efficacy of Klapaucius’ invention, he ordered the entire army revolutionized.