Peace on Earth

by Stanisław Lem

  Tarantoga, thank God, was home. You learn who your real friends are when the chips are down. He flew in to San Diego that night, and when I told him everything as succinctly and precisely as I could the good soul agreed to take me under his wing. Following his advice, I changed my hotel and started growing a beard, meanwhile he looked for a doctor who valued the Hippocratic oath more than the fame achieved by a rare case. We quarreled on the third day because he brought me some good news and I thanked him only partly. He didn’t appreciate the sardonic winking from my left side. I explained of course that it wasn’t I but the right hemisphere of my brain which I couldn’t control. But this didn’t mollify him; he said that even if there were two of me in one body, the sneering faces that half of me was making clearly showed that I must have harbored some animosity toward him in the past, which manifested itself now as black ingratitude, while he was of the opinion that one was either a friend or one wasn’t. A fifty-percent friendship he had no use for. I finally managed to calm him down, and after he left I bought an eye patch.

  The specialist he found for me was in Australia, so we flew to Melbourne. Joshua McIntyre, a professor of neurophysiology—his father and Tarantoga’s father had been best friends—inspired confidence immediately. He was tall, with a gray crew cut, calm, sober, and, as Tarantoga assured me, decent. He would not use me or notify the Americans, who were frantic to find me. After the examination, which lasted three hours, he put a decanter of whiskey on the desk and poured a glass for me and for himself. When the atmosphere warmed up, he crossed his legs, thought for a moment, cleared his throat, and said:

  “Mr. Tichy, I will address you in the singular, which is more comfortable. There is no question that your corpus callosum has been severed from anterior to posterior commissure, though the skull shows no sign of trephination…”

  “But I’ve told you, professor,” I interrupted him, “the skull wasn’t touched, it was a new weapon, a weapon of the future, designed not to kill but only to give the opposing army a total and remote cerebellotomy. Every soldier, his brain severed, would fall like a puppet whose strings are cut. That’s what I was told at the center whose name I cannot divulge. By accident I was standing sideways, or sagittally, as you doctors say, with respect to the ultrasound-inducing field. But this is only conjecture. Those robots work in secret, and the effects of the ultrasound aren’t clear…”

  “Be that as it may,” said the professor, looking at me with kindly, wise eyes from behind his gold-framed glasses. “Nonmedical circumstances need not concern us right now. As for the number of minds in a callotomized individual, there are eighteen different theories, each supported by experimental evidence, therefore none of them wholly wrong and none of them wholly true. You are not one, nor are you two, nor can we speak of split personalities.”

  “Then how many am I?” I asked, surprised.

  “The question is poorly phrased. Imagine twins, who from birth do nothing but saw wood with a two-handled saw. They work well together, otherwise they would be unable to saw. Take the saw from them, and they become like you in your present state.”

  “But each twin, whether he saws or not, has one and only one consciousness,” I said, disappointed. “Professor, your colleagues in America gave me plenty of such metaphors. Including the one about the twins and the saw.”

  “Of course,” said McIntyre, winking at me with his left eye, and I wondered whether he too had something severed. “My American colleagues are as green as a field of corn and their metaphors are a dime a dozen. I mention the twins one on purpose; it comes from an American and is misleading. If we were to show the brain graphically, yours would resemble a large letter Y, because you still have a homogeneous brain stem and midbrain. It’s the downstroke of the upsilon, while the arms of the letter are the divided hemispheres. Do you understand? Intuitively one can see—” the professor broke off with a groan because I kicked him in the kneecap.

  “Sorry, it wasn’t me, it was my left leg,” I said quickly. “I didn’t mean to…”

  McIntyre gave an understanding smile, but there was something forced about it, like the grimace of a psychiatrist who pretends that the madman biting him is a fine fellow. He pulled his chair back a little.

  “The right hemisphere does tend to be more aggressive than the left,” he said, rubbing his knee. “Would you mind keeping your legs crossed, and arms too? It will make our conversation easier…”

  “I’ve tried, but they go limp. Anyway that upsilon business, excuse me, doesn’t explain anything. Where is the consciousness—under the division, on it, over it, where?”

  “That cannot be precisely determined,” said the professor, still massaging his knee. “The brain, Mr. Tichy, is made up of a great number of functional subsystems, which in a normal person connect in various ways to perform various tasks. In your case the highest systems have been permanently disconnected and thus cannot communicate with each other.”

  “And about subsystems too I’ve heard a hundred times. I don’t want to be impolite, professor, or at least my left hemisphere, the one talking to you now, doesn’t, but I’m still in the dark. I walk normally, I eat, read, sleep, the only problem is I have to keep an eye on my left hand and leg because without warning they’ll misbehave. What I want to know is who is misbehaving. If it’s my brain, why am I unaware of it?”

  “Because the hemisphere that’s doing it is mute, Mr. Tichy. The center of speech resides in the left—”

  On the floor between us lay wires from the different instruments McIntyre had used to examine me. I had noticed my left foot playing with these wires. It looped one, thick and shiny black, around its ankle, but I didn’t think much about this until suddenly the foot jerked sharply backward and the wire turned out to be wound around the legs of the chair upon which the professor was sitting. The chair reared and the professor crashed to the linoleum. But he was an experienced doctor and disciplined scientist because he picked himself up from the floor and said in an even voice:

  “It’s nothing. Please don’t be concerned. The right hemisphere is the one with spatial ability, so it’s adept at this type of function. I would ask you again, Mr. Tichy, to sit well away from the desk, the wires, everything. It will facilitate our deliberation as to the therapy indicated.”

  “I only want to know where my consciousness is,” I replied, freeing the wire from my foot, which wasn’t easy because the foot pressed hard on the floor. “Was it I who pulled your chair out from under you, and if not I, then who?”

  “Your lower left extremity, governed by the right hemisphere.” The professor adjusted his glasses on his nose, moved his chair farther away from me, and after a moment’s hesitation stood behind the chair instead of sitting down. Which of my hemispheres suspected that the next time he might counterattack?

  “We could go on like this until Judgment Day,” I said, feeling my left side tense up. Uneasy, I crossed my legs and my arms. McIntyre, watching me carefully, continued in a pleasant voice.

  “The left hemisphere is dominant thanks to the speech center. Talking with you now, I’m speaking to it; the right side can only listen in. Its capacity for language is extremely limited.”

  “Perhaps in others but not in me,” I said, holding my left wrist with my right hand, to be safe. “It’s mute, yes, but I’ve taught it sign language, you see. Which wasn’t easy.”

  “Impossible!”

  The gleam in the professor’s eyes, I had seen it before in his American colleagues, and immediately regretted telling him the truth. But it was too late now.

  “The right hemisphere can’t conjugate verbs! That’s been proved…”

  “Doesn’t matter. Verbs are unnecessary.”

  “All right, then. Ask it, please, I mean ask yourself, what it thinks of our conversation? Can you do that?”

  I put my right hand in the left one, patting it a few times to pacify it, because that was the best way to begin, then made signs, touching the palm of my left hand. Its fingers b
egan to move. I watched them for a while, then, trying to hide my anger, put the left hand on my knee, though it resisted. Of course it pinched me hard on the thigh. I didn’t retaliate, not wanting to wrestle with myself in front of the professor.

  “Well, what did it say?” he asked, imprudently leaning forward from behind the chair.

  “Nothing really.”

  “But I saw myself that it made signs. They weren’t coherent?”

  “Coherent, yes, very coherent, but nothing important.”

  “Tell me! In science everything is important.”

  “It said I’m an asshole.”

  The professor didn’t even smile, he was so impressed.

  “Really? Ask it about me now.”

  “If you wish.”

  Again I addressed my left hand, and pointed at the professor. This time I didn’t have to pat it; it replied immediately.

  “Well?”

  “You’re an asshole too.”

  “Is that what it said?”

  “Yes. It may not be able to handle verbs but it can make itself understood, I still don’t know who is speaking. Speaking with fingers or lips, it makes no difference. In my head, is there an I and an It as well? And if an It, how is it I don’t experience what it experiences even though it’s in my head and part of my brain? It’s not external, after all. If my consciousness was doubled and everything confused, I could understand that—but this, no. Where did it come from, this It? Is it also Ijon Tichy? And if so, why do I have to speak to it indirectly, by signs, professor? And why does it cause me so much trouble?” No longer seeing any sense in reticence, I told him all about the scenes on the subway and the bus. He was fascinated.

  “Blondes only?”

  “Mainly. They can be bleached blondes.”

  “Is this still going on?”

  “Not on the bus.”

  “Elsewhere?”

  “I don’t know, I haven’t tried. I mean, I haven’t given it the opportunity. If you must know, I was slapped several times. It embarrassed and angered me, being slapped, because I wasn’t guilty, yet at the same time I was pleased. But once a woman slapped me and the slap landed fully on the left cheek, and when that happened I didn’t feel the slightest pleasure. I thought this over and finally figured out the reason.”

  “But of course!” cried the professor. “When the left-hemisphere Tichy was slapped on the cheek for the right-hemisphere Tichy, the right-hemisphere Tichy was pleased. But when the slap was wholly on the left, it didn’t like that at all.”

  “Exactly. So there is some sort of communication in my unfortunate head, but it appears to be more emotional than rational. Emotions too are experience, though not conscious experience. But how can experience be unconscious? No, that Eccles with his automatic reflexes was all wet. To see an attractive girl in a crowd, and maneuver yourself close to her, and pinch her—that’s a whole premeditated plan of attack, not a bunch of mindless reflexes. But whose plan? Who thinks it, who is conscious of it, if it’s not mine?”

  “It can be explained,” said the professor, excited. “The light of a candle is visible in the dark but not in the sun. The right brain may have consciousness, but a consciousness as feeble as candlelight, extinguished by the dominant consciousness of the left brain. It’s entirely possible that—”

  The professor ducked, avoiding a shoe in the head. My left foot had slipped it off, propped the heel against a chair leg, then kicked it so hard that the shoe flew like a missile and crashed into the wall, missing him by a hair.

  “You may be right,” I remarked, “but the right hemisphere is damned touchy.”

  “Perhaps it feels threatened by our conversation, not fully understanding it or misunderstanding it,” said the professor. “Perhaps we should address it directly.”

  “You mean, the way I do it? That’s possible. But what do you want to say to it?”

  “That will depend on its response. Yours, Mr. Tichy, is a unique situation. There’s never been a person completely sound of mind, and not an ordinary mind at that, who underwent a callotomy.”

  “Let me make myself clear,” I answered, stroking the back of my left hand to calm it because it was starting to move, flexing the fingers, which worried me. “I am not interested in sacrificing myself for science. If you or someone else enters into communication with It—you know what I mean—that could turn out to be harmful to me, let alone damned unpleasant, if, say, it becomes more independent.”

  “That’s quite impossible,” declared the professor, a little too confidently, I thought. He took off his glasses and wiped them with a piece of flannel. His eyes did not have that helpless expression of most people who can’t see without their glasses. He gave me a sharp look as if he didn’t need them at all, then immediately dropped his eyes.

  “What happens is always quite impossible,” I said, weighing my words. “The whole history of mankind consists of impossibilities, and the history of science too. A certain young philosopher told me that my condition is an impossibility, contradicting all established thought, which says that consciousness is an indivisible thing. The so-called split personality is essentially a consciousness that alternates between different states joined imperfectly by memory and a sense of identity. It’s not a cake that can be cut into pieces!”

  “I see you’ve been reading the literature,” observed the professor, putting on his glasses. He added something I didn’t hear. I was going to go on but stopped because my left hand was putting its fingers into my right palm, making signs. That had never happened before. McIntyre saw me looking at my hands and understood immediately.

  “Is It speaking?” he whispered as if not wanting to be overheard.

  “Yes.”

  The message surprised me, but I relayed it:

  “It wants a piece of cake.”

  The joy on the professor’s face made my blood run cold. Assuring the left hand that if it was patient it would have cake, I said to the professor:

  “From your scientific point of view it would be wonderful if It became more independent. I don’t hold that against you, I understand how fantastic it would be having two fully developed individuals in a single body, so much to learn, so many experiments to run, and all that. But I’m not thrilled by the thought of having a democracy established in my head. I want to be less plural, not more.”

  “You are giving me a vote of no confidence? Well, I can understand that.” The professor smiled sympathetically. “First let me assure you that all this information will remain confidential. My professional oath of secrecy. Beyond that, I will suggest no therapy for you. You must do what you believe is best. I hope you’ll think it over carefully. Will you be in Melbourne long?”

  “I don’t know yet. In any case, I’ll call you.”

  Tarantoga, sitting in the waiting room, jumped up when he saw me.

  “Well? Professor…? Ijon…?”

  “No decisions have been made,” said McIntyre in an official tone. “Mr. Tichy has various things to consider. I am at his service.”

  Being a man of my word, I asked the taxi driver to stop at a bakery on the way, and bought a piece of cake and had to eat it immediately in the car because It insisted, even though I wasn’t in the mood for anything sweet. But I had decided, for the present at least, not to torment myself with questions such as who wanted the cake, since no one but me could answer a question like that, and I couldn’t.

  Tarantoga and I had adjoining rooms, so I went to his and filled him in on what happened with McIntyre. My hand interrupted me several times because it was dissatisfied. The cake had been flavored with licorice, which I can’t stand. I ate it anyway, thinking I was doing it for It, but apparently It and I—or I and I—have the same taste. Which is understandable, in that the hand can’t eat by itself and It and I do have a mouth, palate, and tongue in common. I had the feeling I was in a dream, part nightmare, part comedy, and carrying not an infant exactly but a small, spoiled, precocious child. I remembered one psycholog
ist’s theory that small children didn’t have a continuous consciousness because the fibers of the commissure were still undeveloped.

  “A letter for you.” With these words Tarantoga brought me out of my reverie. I was surprised: no one knew where I was. The letter was postmarked Mexico City, airmail, no return address. In the envelope was a square of paper with the typed words: “He’s from the LA.”

  Nothing more. I turned the paper over. It was blank. Tarantoga took it, looked at it, and then at me:

  “What does this mean? Do you understand it?”

  “No. Yes … the LA is the Lunar Agency. They were the ones who sent me.”

  “To the moon?”

  “Yes. On a reconnaissance mission. I was supposed to submit a report afterward.”

  “And did you?”

  “Yes. I wrote what I remembered. And gave it to the barber.”

  “Barber?”

  “That was the arrangement. Instead of going to them. But who is ‘he’? It must be McIntyre. I haven’t seen anyone else here.”