Memoirs Found in a Bathtub

by Stanisław Lem

  English translation copyright © 1973 by The Seabury Press.

  Printed in the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  First American Edition

  Original edition: Pamietnik znaleziony w wannie, published by Wydawnietwo Literackie, Cracow, 1971.

  Work by Christine Rose by arrangement with Forrest J. Ackerman,

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Lem, Stanislaw.

  Memoirs found in a bathtub.

  Translation of Pamiętnik znaleziony w wannie.

  I. Title.

  PZ3.L5395Me [PG7158.L39] 891.8'5'37 72-10586

  ISBN 0-8164-9128-3

  INTRODUCTION

  “Notes from the Neogene” is unquestionably one of the most precious relics of Earth’s ancient past, dating from the very close of the Prechaotic, that period of decline which directly preceded the Great Collapse. It is indeed a paradox that we know much more of the civilizations of the Early Neogene, the protocultures of Assyria, Egypt and Greece, than we do of the days of paleoatomics and rudimentary astrogation. While those archaic cultures left behind permanent monuments in bone, stone, slate and bronze, almost the only means of recording and preserving knowledge during the Middle and Late Neogene was a substance called papyr.

  Papyr was whitish, flaccid, a derivative of cellulose, rolled out on cylinders and cut into rectangular sheets. Information of all kinds was impressed on it with a dark tint, after which the sheets were collated and sewn in a special way.

  In order to understand what brought about the Great Collapse, that catastrophic event which in a matter of weeks totally demolished the cultural achievement of centuries, we must go back three thousand years. Metamnestics and data crystallization did not exist in those days. Papyr performed all the functions now served by our mnemonitrons and gnostors. True, there were the beginnings of artificial memory; but these were large, bulky machines, troublesome to operate and maintain, and used only in the most limited, narrow way. They were called “electronic brains,” an exaggeration comprehensible only in the historical perspective, much like the boast of the builders of Asia Minor, that their sacred temple Baa-Bel was “sky-reaching.”

  No one knows exactly when and where the papyralysis epidemic broke out, Most likely, it happened in the desert regions of a land called Ammer-Ka, where the first spaceport was built. The people of that time did not immediately realize the scope of the impending danger. And yet we cannot accept the harsh judgment delivered by so many subsequent historians, that these were a frivolous people. To be sure, papyr was not distinguished by its durability; but one should not hold a Prechaotic civilization responsible for failing to foresee the existence of the RV catalyst, also known as the Hartian Agent. The true properties of this agent, after all, were discovered only in the Galactic Period by one Prodoctor Six Folses, who established RV’s origin as the third moon of Uranus. Unwittingly brought back to Earth by an early expedition (the eighth Malaldic, according to Prognostor Phaa-Vaak), the Hartian Agent set off a chain reaction and papyr disintegrated around the globe.

  The details of the cataclysm are not known. According to verbal reports crystallized only in the Fourth Galactium, the focal points of the epidemic were enormous data storage centers called li-brees. The reaction was practically instantaneous. In place of those great treasuries, those reservoirs of society’s memory, lay mounds of gray, powdery ash.

  The Prechaotic scientists thought they were dealing with some papyrophagous microbe, and wasted valuable time in the attempt to isolate it. One can hardly deny the justice of Histognostor Four Tauridus’s bitter remark, that humanity would have been better served had that time been spent engraving the disintegrating words onto stone.

  Gravitronics, cybereconomics and synthephysics were all unknown in the Late Neogene, when the catastrophe occurred. The economic systems of various ethnic groups called nashens were relatively autonomous, and wholly dependent upon the circulation of papyr, as was the flow of supplies to the Syrtic Tiberis colony on Mars.

  Papyralysis ruined a great deal more than the economy. That entire period is rightly named the Era of Papyrocracy, for not only did papyr regulate and coordinate all group activities, but it determined, in some obscure way, the fate of individuals (for example, the “identity papyrs”). The functional and ritual roles of papyr in the folklore of that time (the catastrophe took place when Prechaotic Neogene was at its height) have yet to be fully catalogued. While we do know the meaning of some expressions, others remain empty phrases (cheks, dok-ments, ree-seets, etc.). In that era one could not be born, grow up, obtain an education, work, travel, marry or die except through the aid and mediation of papyr.

  Only in the light of these facts can one appreciate the full extent of the disaster which struck Earth. The quarantine of whole cities and continents, the construction of hermetically sealed shelters—all such measures failed. The science of the day was helpless against the catalyst’s subatomic structure, the product of a most unusual anabiotic evolution. For the first time in history society was threatened with total dissolution. To quote an inscription carved upon the wall of a urinal in the Fris-Ko excavations by an anonymous bard of the cataclysm: “And the heavens above the cities grew dark with clouds of blighted papyr and it rained for forty days and forty nights a dirty rain, and thus with wind and streams of mud was the tale of man washed from the face of the earth forever.”

  It must have been a cruel blow indeed to the pride of Late Neogene man, who saw himself already reaching the stars. The papyralysis nightmare pervaded all walks of life. Panic hit the cities; people, deprived of their identity, lost their reason; the supply of goods broke down; there were incidents of violence; technology, research and development, schools—all crumbled into nonexistence; power plants could not be repaired for lack of blueprints. The lights went out, and the ensuing darkness was illumined only by the glow of bonfires.

  And so the Neogene entered into the Chaotic, which was to last over two hundred years. Obviously, the first quarter-century of the Great Collapse left no written records. We can only guess under what conditions government was maintained and anarchy avoided until the establishment, around mid-century, of the Earth Federation.

  The more complex a civilization, the more vital to its existence is the maintenance of the flow of information; hence the more vulnerable it becomes to any disturbance in that flow. Now that flow, the lifeblood of the society, had come to a halt. The last storehouse of information lay in the minds of living experts; to record and preserve that information had priority over all else. But this seemingly simple problem proved insoluble. In the Late Neogene, knowledge was so compartmentalized that no one specialist could possibly assimilate the entirety of his field. Reconstruction consequently demanded tedious, long-term collaboration of different groups of experts. Had the task been undertaken at once—so Polygnostor Laa Baar Eight of our Bermand Historical School tells us—Neogene civilization could have been speedily restored. In answer to the distinguished founder of Neogene Chronologistics, we must point out the activity he postulates could indeed have led to the accumulation of veritable mountains of knowledge—but who would there have been to derive benefit from this? Certainly not the hordes of nomads who left their devastated cities; nor their children, who grew up wild and illiterate. No, civilization could have been saved only at the very moment when industry began to fall apart, construction ceased and transportation ground to a halt, when the starving masses of whole continents first cried out for help, including
the colony on Mars, deprived of supplies and threatened with extinction. Clearly the experts could not shut themselves up in ivory towers and take the time to develop new techniques of transcription.

  Desperate measures were employed. Certain branches of the amusement industry (such as feelms) mobilized their entire production to record incoming information on the positions of spaceships and satellites, for collisions were multiplying rapidly. Circuit diagrams were printed, from memory, on fabrics. All available plastic writing materials were distributed among the schools. Physics professors personally had to tend atomic piles. Emergency teams of scientists flitted from one point of the globe to another. But these were merely tiny particles of order, atoms of organization that quickly dissolved in an ocean of spreading chaos. Shaken as it was by endless upheavals, engaged in a constant struggle against the tide of superstition, illiteracy and ignorance, the stagnant culture of the Chaotic should be judged not by what it lost of the heritage of centuries, but by what it was able to salvage, against all odds.

  To check the first fury of the Great Collapse necessitated tremendous sacrifices. Earth’s first footholds on Mars had been saved, and technology, that backbone of all civilization, was reconstructed. Microphones and tape banks replaced the storage centers of demolished papyr. Unfortunately, cruel losses were sustained in other areas.

  Because the supply of new writing materials failed to meet even the most urgent needs, anything that did not directly serve to save the bare framework of society had to be jettisoned. The humanities suffered the worst. Knowledge was disseminated orally, through lectures; the audiences became the educators of the next generation. This was one of those astonishing primitivisms of Chaotic civilization that rescued Earth from total disaster, though losses in the areas of history, historiography, paleology and paleoesthetics were quite irreparable. Only the smallest fragment of a rich literary legacy was preserved. Millions of volumes of chronicles, priceless relics of the Middle and Late Neogene, turned to dust forever.

  At the end of the Chaotic we find a most paradoxical situation: there was a relatively high level of technology, including the active initiation of gravitronics and technobiotics, not to mention the success of cisgalactic mass transport; yet the human race knew next to nothing of its own past. All that survives today of the enormous achievements of the Neogene are a few scattered and unrelated remnants, factual accounts altered beyond all recognition and thoroughly garbled through countless retellings in the oral tradition. Even the most important events are of doubtful chronology.

  One must concur with Subgnostor Nappro Leis when he says that papyralysis meant historioparalysis. Only in this perspective can we assess the true value of the work of Prognostor Wid-Wiss who, in his single-handed battle against official historiography, discovered the “Notes from the Neogene,” a voice speaking to us across the abyss of centuries, a voice belonging to one of the last inhabitants of the lost land of Ammer-Ka. This monument is all the more precious in that there are no others to rival it in importance; it cannot be compared, for example, with the papyrantic finds made by the archeological expedition of Syrtic Paleognostor Bradrah the Mnemonite at the Marglo shale diggings in the Lower Preneogene. Those finds concern religious beliefs prevalent during the Eighth Dynasty of Ammer-Ka; they speak of various Perils—Black, Red, Yellow—evidently cabalistic incantations connected in some way with the mysterious deity Rayss, to whom burnt offerings were apparently made. But this interpretation is still being debated by the Trans-Sindental and Greater Syrtic Schools, as well as by a group of disciples of the famous Bog-Waad.

  Most of the Neogene, we fear, will forever remain shrouded in mystery, for even chronotraction methods have failed to provide the most fundamental details of the social life at that age. Any systematic presentation of those few moments of history which we have been able to re-create goes well beyond the limits of this introduction. So we will limit ourselves to a few remarks in the way of background to the “Notes.”

  The evolution of ancient beliefs underwent a curious bifurcation. In the first period, the Archeocredonic, various religions were founded upon the recognition of a supernatural, nonmaterial principle, causative with respect to everything in existence. The Archeocredonic left behind permanent monuments—the pyramids of the Early Neogene, the excavations of the Mesogene (the Gothic cathedrals of Lafranss).

  In the second period, the Neocredonic, faith assumed a different aspect. The metaphysical principle somehow merged with the materialistic, the earthly. Worship of the deity Kap-Eh-Taahl (or, in the Cremonic palimpsests, Kapp-Taah) became one of the dominant cults of the time. This deity was revered throughout Ammer-Ka and the faith quickly spread to Australindia and parts of the European Peninsula. Any connection, however, between the cult of Kap-Eh-Taahl and the graven images of the elephant and the ass found here and there throughout Ammer-Ka does seem somewhat doubtful. It was forbidden to utter the name itself, “Kap-Eh-Taahl” (analogous to the Hebrew interdiction); in Ammer-Ka the deity was generally called “Almighty Da-Laahr.” But there were many other liturgical names, and special monastic orders devoted themselves entirely to an appraisal of their changing status (the Mer-L-Finches, for example). Indeed, the fluctuation in the accepted value of each of the many names (or were they attributes?) of Kap-Eh-Taahl remains an enigma to this day. The difficulty in understanding the true nature of that last of the Prechaotic religions lies in the fact that Kap-Eh-Taahl was denied any supernatural existence, was therefore not a spirit, nor was he even considered a being (which would help explain the totemistic features of that cult, so unusual in an age of science)—he was, to all extents and purposes, equated with assets, liquid, fixed, and hidden, and had no existence beyond that. However, it has been shown that in times of economic decline, sacrifices of sugar cane, coffee, and grain were made to placate the angry god. This contradiction is deepened by the fact that the cult of Kap-Eh-Taahl did possess some elements of the doctrine of incarnation, according to which, the world owed its continuing existence to “sacred property.” Any violation of that doctrine met with the most severe punishment.

  As we know, the epoch of global cybereconomics was preceded, at the close of the Neogene, by the rise of sociostasy. As the cult of Kap-Eh-Taahl, mired in complex corporational rites and intricate institutional rituals, began in the course of time to lose one territory after another to the followers of secular sociostatic management, there arose a conflict between the lands still ruled by that antiquated faith and the remaining world.

  Up to the very end—that is, to the formation of the Earth Federation—the center of the most fanatic devotion to Kap-Eh-Taahl was Ammer-Ka, a land governed by a series of dynasties of Prez-tendz. These were not high priests of Kap-Eh-Taahl in the strict sense of the word. It was during the Nineteenth Dynasty that the Prez-tendz (or Prexy-dents, in the nomenclature of the Thyrric School) built the Pentagon. What was it, that first of many granite leviathans, that stern edifice which ushered in the twilight of the Neogene? Prehistorians of the Aquillian School considered the Pentagon’s tombs for Prez-tendz, analogous to the Egyptian pyramids. This hypothesis was discarded in the light of subsequent discoveries, as was the theory that these were shrines to Kap-Eh-Taahl, where crusades were planned against the Heathen Dog, or strategies devised to ensure his successful conversion.

  Lacking the firsthand information needed to solve this puzzle, undoubtedly the key to an understanding of the whole final phase (the Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Dynasties), our historians turned to the Temporal Institute for help. The Institute’s full cooperation made possible the application of the latest technological developments in chronotraction to the task of penetrating the riddle of the Pentagons. We sent 290 probes into the far past, tapping 17 trillion erg-seconds from the time wells that orbit the Moon.

  According to the theory of chronotraction, movement back in time is practicable only at a considerable distance from objects of great mass, since their proximity consumes staggering amounts of energy. Conseq
uently, sightings of the past had to be taken from probes placed high in the stratosphere. Their sudden appearance and disappearance in the sky must have mystified the people of the Neogene. Prodoctor Two Sturlprans maintains that the projection of a retrochronal probe would show up in the past as a bulging disc, not unlike two horizontal saucers floating rim-to-rim through space.

  Chronotraction yielded an abundance of data, including authentic photoshots of the First Pentagon soon after its construction. This building, indeed a pentagon, each side measuring 460 feens, was a veritable labyrinth of steel and concrete. Histognostor Ser Een estimates the corridors ran about seventeen to eighteen of their mylz. The entrances were guarded day and night by over two hundred priests of lower rank. Further time delving, prompted by the chronicles excavated in the ruins of Waa-Sheetn, led to the discovery of the Second Pentagon, a much less imposing structure than the First, as most of it lay beneath the ground. Certain passages from the chronicles pointed to the existence of yet another, a Third Pentagon. This was to have been a closed, completely independent unit, a state within a state, by virtue of sophisticated camouflaging and enormous reserves of food, water and compressed air. However, after systematic chronoaxial soundings were taken over the entire length and breadth of twentieth-century Ammer-Ka and revealed not a trace of any such structure, most historians accepted the thesis that the Waa-Sheetn chronicles spoke of the Third Pentagon in a figurative sense only, that the building was raised purely in the minds and hearts of the faithful, and that the propagation of the legend was designed to uplift the flagging spirits of those few remaining followers of Kap-Eh-Taahl.

  So stood the official version of our historiography when the young Prognostor Wid-Wiss began his archeological career.

  Wid-Wiss reexamined all the available materials and published a treatise in which he maintained that, as the power of the Prez-tendz began to wane and their dominions diminish, they resolved to build a new seat of government, one far from all populated areas, somewhere in the mountainous regions of Ammer-Ka and hidden deep beneath the rocks, that this last refuge of Kap-Eh-Taahl might be inaccessible to the uninitiated. Wid-Wiss held that the postulated Pentagon of the Last Dynasty was a kind of collective military brain whose task was twofold: first, to watch over and preserve the purity of the faith, and secondly, to convert those peoples of the world who had abandoned the true path.