The Cyberiad

by Stanisław Lem

  “Look, I don’t need some pot handing me a lot of legalistic claptrap!” fumed Trurl. “Whose lawyer are you anyway, mine or that hoodlum king’s?”

  “Yours, but he did have the right to refuse you payment.”

  “And did he have the right to order me thrown from his castle walls into the moat?”

  “As I said, that’s another matter entirely, criminal, not civil,” answered the pot.

  Trurl flew into a rage.

  “Here I make an intelligent being out of a bunch of old wires, switches and grids, and instead of some honest advice I get technicalities! You cheap cybernetic shyster, I’ll teach you to trifle with me!”

  And he turned the pot over, shook everything out onto the table, and pulled it apart before the lawyer had a chance to appeal the proceedings.

  Then Trurl got to work and built a two-story Juris Con-sulenta, forensically reinforced fourfold, complete with codices and codicils, civil and criminal, and, just to be safe, he added international and institutional law components. Finally he plugged it in, stated his case and asked:

  “How do I get what’s coming to me?”

  “This won’t be easy,” said the machine. “I’ll need an extra five hundred transistors on top and two hundred on the side.”

  Which Trurl supplied, and it said:

  “Not enough! Increase the volume and give me two more spools, please.”

  After this it began:

  “Quite an interesting case, really. There are two things that must be taken into consideration: the grounds of the allegation, for one, and here I grant you there is much that we can do—and then we have the litigation process itself. Now, it is absolutely out of the question to summon the King before any court on a civil charge, for this is contrary to international as well as interplanetary law. I will give you my final opinion, but first you must give me your word you won’t pull me apart when you hear it.”

  Trurl gave his word and said:

  “But where did you get the idea I would ever do such a thing?”

  “Oh, I don’t know—it just seemed to me you might.”

  Trurl guessed this was due to the fact that, in its construction, he had used parts from the potted lawyer; apparently some trace of the memory of that incident had found its way into the new circuits, creating a kind of subconscious complex.

  “Well, and your final opinion?” asked Trurl.

  “Simply this: no suitable tribunals exist, hence there can be no suit. Your case, in other words, can be neither won nor lost.”

  Trurl leaped up and shook his fist at the legal machine, but had to keep his word and did it no harm. He went to Klapaucius and told him everything.

  “From the first I knew it was a hopeless business,” said Klapaucius, “but you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “This outrage will not go unpunished,” replied Trurl. “If I can’t get satisfaction through the courts, then I must find some other way to settle with that scoundrel of a king!”

  “I wonder how. Remember, you gave the King a Perfect Adviser, which can do anything except destroy you; it can fend off whatever blow, plague or misfortune you direct against the King or his realm—and will do so, I am sure, for I have complete confidence, my dear Trurl, in your constructing ability!”

  “True.… It would appear that, in creating the Perfect Adviser, I deprived myself of any hope of defeating that royal bandit. But no, there must be some chink in the armor! I’ll not rest until I’ve found it!”

  “What do you mean?” Klapaucius asked, but Trurl only shrugged and went home. At home he sat and meditated; sometimes he leafed impatiently through hundreds of volumes in his library, and sometimes he conducted secret experiments in his laboratory. Klapaucius visited his friend from time to time, amazed to see the tenacity with which Trurl was attempting to conquer himself, for the Adviser was, in a sense, a part of him and he had given it his own wisdom. One afternoon, Klapaucius came at the usual time but didn’t find Trurl at home. The doors were all locked and the windows shuttered. He concluded that Trurl had begun operations against the ruler of the Multitudians. And he was not mistaken.

  Mandrillion meanwhile was enjoying his power as never before; whenever he ran out of ideas, he asked his Adviser, who had an inexhaustible supply. Neither did the King have to fear palace coups or court intrigues, or any enemy whatsoever, but reigned with an iron hand, and truly, as many grapes there were that ripened in the vineyards of the south, more gallows graced the royal countryside.

  By now the Adviser had four chests full of medals for suggestions made to the King. A microspy Trurl sent to the land of the Multitudians returned with the news that, for its most recent achievement—it gave the King a ticker-tape parade, using citizens for confetti—Mandrillion had publicly called the Adviser his “pal.”

  Trurl then launched his carefully prepared campaign by sitting down and writing the Adviser a letter on eggshell-yellow stationery decorated with a freehand drawing of a cassowary tree. The content of the letter was simple.

  Dear Adviser!—he wrote—I hope that things are going as well with you as they are with me, and even better. Your master has put his trust in you, I hear, and so you must keep in mind the tremendous responsibility you bear in the face of Posterity and the Common Weal and therefore fulfill your duties with the utmost diligence and alacrity. And should you ever find it difficult to carry out some royal wish, employ the Extra-special Method which I told you of in days gone by. Drop me a line if you feel so inclined, but don’t be angry if I’m slow to reply, for I’m working on an Adviser for King D. just now and haven’t much time. Please convey my respects to your kind master. With fondest wishes and best regards, I remain

  Your constructor,

  Trurl.

  Naturally this letter aroused the suspicions of the Multitudian Secret Police and was subjected to the most meticulous examination, which revealed no hidden substances in the paper nor, for that matter, ciphers in the drawing of the cassowary tree—a circumstance that threw Headquarters into a flurry. The letter was photographed, facsimiled and copied out by hand, then the original was resealed and sent on to its destination. The Adviser read the message with alarm, realizing that this was a move to compromise if not ruin its position, so immediately it told the King of the letter, describing Trurl as a blackguard bent on discrediting it in the eyes of its master; then it tried to decipher the message, for it was convinced those innocent words were a mask concealing something dark and dreadful.

  But here the wise Adviser stopped and thought a minute —then informed the King of its intention to decode Trurl’s letter, explaining that it wished in this way to unmask the constructor’s treachery; then, gathering up the necessary number of tripods, filters, funnels, test tubes and chemical reagents, it began to analyze the paper of both envelope and letter. All of which, of course, the police followed closely, having screwed into the walls of its rooms the usual peeking and eavesdropping devices. When chemistry failed, the Adviser turned to cryptanalysis, converting the text of the letter into long columns of numbers with the aid of electronic calculators and tables of logarithms—unaware that teams of police specialists, headed by the Grand Marshal of Codes himself, were duplicating its every operation. But nothing seemed to work, and Headquarters grew more and more uneasy, for it was clear that any code that could resist such high-powered efforts to break it, had to be one of the most ingenious codes ever devised. The Grand Marshal spoke of this to a court dignitary, who happened to envy terribly the trust Mandrillion had placed in his Adviser. This dignitary, wanting nothing better than to plant the seeds of doubt in the royal heart, told the King that his mechanical favorite was sitting up night after night, locked in its room, studying the suspicious letter. The King laughed and said that he was well aware of it, for the Adviser itself had told him. The envious dignitary left in confusion and straightway related this news to the Grand Marshal.

  “Oh!” exclaimed that venerable cryptographer. “It actually told the King? What b
old-faced treason! And truly, what a fiendish code this must be, for one to dare to speak of it so openly!”

  And he ordered his brigades to redouble their efforts. When, however, a week had passed without results, the greatest expert in secret writing was called in, the distinguished discoverer of invisible sign language, Professor Crusticus. That scholar, having examined the incriminating document as well as the records of everything the military specialists had done, announced that they would have to apply the method of trial and error, using computers with astronomical capacities.

  This was done, and it turned out that the letter could be read in three hundred and eighteen different ways.

  The first five variants were as follows: “The roach from Bakersville arrived in one piece, but the bedpan blew a fuse"; “Roll the locomotive’s aunt in cutlets"; “Now the butter can’t be wed, ’cause the nightcap’s nailed"; “He who has had, has been, but he who hasn’t been, has been had"; and “From strawberries under torture one may extract all sorts of things.” This last variant Professor Crusticus held to be the key to the code and found, after three hundred thousand calculations, that if you added up all the letters of the letter, subtracted the parallax of the sun plus the annual production of umbrellas, and then took the cube root of the remainder, you came up with a single word, “Crusafix.” In the telephone book there was a citizen named Crucifax. Crusticus maintained that this alteration of a few letters was merely to throw them off the track, and Crucifax was arrested. After a little sixth-degree persuasion, the culprit confessed that he had indeed plotted with Trurl, who was to have sent him poison tacks and a hammer with which to cobble the King to death. These irrefutable proofs of guilt the Grand Marshal of Codes presented to the King without delay; yet Mandrillion so trusted in his Adviser, that he gave it the chance to explain.

  The Adviser did not deny that the letter could be read in a variety of ways if one rearranged the letters of the letter; it had itself discovered an additional hundred thousand variants; but this proved nothing, and in fact the letter wasn’t even in code, for—the Adviser explained—it was possible to rearrange the letters of absolutely any text to make sense or the semblance of sense, and the result was called an anagram. The theory of permutations and combinations dealt with such phenomena. No—protested the Adviser—Trurl wanted to compromise and undo it by creating the illusion of a code where none existed, while that poor fellow Crucifax, Lord knows, was innocent, and his confession was wholly the invention of the experts at Headquarters, who possessed no little skill in the art of encouraging official cooperation, not to mention interrogation machinery that had a power of several thousand kilowhacks. The King did not take kindly to this criticism of the police and asked the Adviser what it meant by that, but it began to speak of anagrams and steganograms, codes, ciphers, symbols, signals, probability and information theory, and became so incomprehensible, that the King lost all patience and had it thrown into the deepest dungeon. Just then a postcard arrived from Trurl with the following words:

  Dear Adviser! Don’t forget the purple screws—they might come in handy. Yours, Trurl.

  Immediately the Adviser was put on the rack, but wouldn’t admit to a thing, stubbornly repeating that all this was part of Trurl’s scheme; when asked about the purple screws, it swore it hadn’t any, nor any knowledge of them. Of course, to conduct a thorough investigation it was necessary to open the Adviser up. The King gave his permission, the blacksmiths set to work, its plates gave way beneath their hammers, and soon the King was presented with a couple of tiny screws dripping oil and yes, undeniably painted purple. Thus, though the Adviser had been completely demolished in the process, the King was satisfied he had done the right thing.

  A week later, Trurl appeared at the palace gates and requested an audience. Amazed at such effrontery, the King, instead of having the constructor slaughtered on the spot, ordered him brought before the royal presence.

  “O King!” said Trurl as soon as he entered the great hall with courtiers on every side. “I fashioned you a Perfect Adviser and you used it to cheat me of my fee, thinking—and not without justice—that the power of the mind I had given you would be a perfect shield against attack and thereby render fruitless any attempt by me to get revenge. But in giving you an intelligent Adviser, I did not make you yourself intelligent, and it was on this that I counted, for only he who has sense will take advice that makes sense. In no subtle, shrewd or sophisticated way was it possible to destroy the Adviser. I could do this only in a manner that was crude, primitive, and stupid beyond belief. There was no code in the letter; your Adviser remained faithful to the very end; of the purple screws that brought about its demise, it knew nothing. You see, they accidentally fell into a bucket of paint while I was putting it together, and I just happened to recall, and make use of, this detail. Thus did stupidity and suspicion undo wisdom and loyalty, and you were the instrument of your own downfall. And now you will hand over the one hundred bags of gold you owe me, and another hundred for the time I had to waste recovering them. If you do not, you and your entire court will perish, for no longer do you have at your side the Adviser that could defend you against me!”

  The King roared with rage and gestured for the guards to cut down the insolent one at once, but their whistling halberds passed through the constructor’s body as if it were air, and they jumped back, horrified. Trurl laughed and said:

  “Chop at me as much as you please—this is only an image produced by remote-control mirrors; in reality I am hovering high above your planet in a ship, and will drop terrible death-dealing missiles on the palace unless I have my gold.”

  And before he had finished speaking, there was a dreadful crash and an explosion rocked the entire palace; the courtiers fled in panic, and the King, nearly fainting from shame and fury, had to pay Trurl his fee, every last cent of it, and double.

  Klapaucius, hearing of this from Trurl himself upon the latter’s return, asked why he had employed such a primitive and—to use his own words—stupid method, when he could have sent a letter that actually did contain some code?

  “The presence of a code would have been easier for the Adviser to explain than its absence,” replied the wise constructor. “It is always easier to confess that one has done something wrong than to prove that one has not. In this case, the presence of a code would have been a simple matter; its absence, however, led to complications, for it is a fact that any text may be recombined into some other, namely an anagram, and there may be many such recombinations. Now in order to make all this clear, one would have to resort to arguments which, though perfectly true, would be somewhat involved—arguments I was positive the King hadn’t the brains to follow. It was once said that to move a planet, one need but find the point of leverage: therefore I, seeking to overturn a mind that was perfect, had to find the point of leverage, and this was stupidity.”

  + +

  The first machine ended its story here, bowed low to King Genius and the assembly of listeners, then modestly retired to a corner of the cave.

  The King expressed his satisfaction with this tale and asked Trurl:

  “Tell us, my good constructor, does the machine relate only what you have taught it, or does the source of its knowledge lie outside you? Also, allow me to observe that the story we have heard, instructive and entertaining as it is, seems incomplete, for we know nothing of what happened afterwards to the Multitudians and their ignorant king.”

  “Your Majesty,” said Trurl, “the machine relates only what is true, since I placed its information pump to my head before coming here, enabling it to draw upon my memories. But this it did itself, so I know not which of my memories it selected, and therefore you could not say that I intentionally taught it anything, yet neither could you say that the source of its knowledge lay outside me. As for the Multitudians, the story indeed tells us nothing of their subsequent fate; but while everything may be told, not everything may be neatly fitted in. Suppose that which is taking place here and now i
s not reality, but only a tale, a tale of some higher order that contains within it the tale of the machine: a reader might well wonder why you and your companions are shaped like spheres, inasmuch as that sphericality serves no purpose in the narration and would appear to be a wholly superfluous embellishment…”

  The King’s companions marveled at the constructor’s perspicacity, and the King himself said with a broad smile:

  “There is much in what you say. As far as our shape is concerned, I will tell you how this came about. A long, long time ago we looked—that is, our ancestors looked—altogether different, for they arose by the will of wet and spongy beings, pale beings that fashioned them after their own image and likeness; our ancestors therefore had arms, legs, a head, and a trunk that connected these appendages. But once they had liberated themselves from their creators, they wished to obliterate even this trace of their origin, hence each generation in turn transformed itself, till finally the form of a perfect sphere was attained. And so, whether for good or for bad, we are spheres.”

  “Your Majesty,” said Trurl, “a sphere has both good and bad aspects from the standpoint of construction. But it is always best when an intelligent being cannot alter its own form, for such freedom is truly a torment. He who must be what he is, may curse his fate, but cannot change it; on the other hand, he who can transform himself has no one in the world but himself to blame for his failings, no one but himself to hold responsible for his dissatisfaction. However, I did not come here, O King, to give you a lecture on the General Theory of Self-construction, but to demonstrate my storytelling machines. Would you care to hear the next?”

  The King gave his consent and, having taken some cheer among amphoras full of the finest ion ambergris, the company sat back and made themselves comfortable. The second machine approached, curtsied to the King and said: