Authors: The Cyberiad [v1.0] [htm]
Special Case of a Bogus Polypolice Transmogrification Conversion on
an Oscillating Harmonic Field of Glass Bells and Green Gig, Kerosene
Lamp on the Left to Divert Attention, Solved by Beastly
Incarceration-Concatenation,” which was subsequently exploited
by the tabloids as "The Police State Rears Its Ugly Head."
Obviously none of the ministers, dignitaries or huntsmen understood a
single word of what was said, but that hardly mattered. The loving
subjects of King Krool knew not whether they should despise these
constructors or stand and gape in awe and admiration.
Now all was in readiness for takeoff.
Trurl, as stipulated in the agreement, went through the King's
private chambers with a large sack and calmly appropriated whatever
object he took a fancy to. Finally, the carriage arrived and took the
victors to the spaceport, where a crowd cheered wildly and a
children's chorus sang, then a charming little girl in local costume
curtsied and presented them with a ribboned nosegay, and
high-ranking officials took turns to express their undying gratitude,
bidding them both a fond farewell, and the band played, several
ladies fainted, and then a hush fell over the multitude. Klapaucius
had pulled a tooth from his mouth, not an ordinary tooth but a
transmitter-receiver, a two-way bicuspid. He threw a tiny switch and
a sandstorm appeared on the horizon, growing and growing, whirling
faster and faster, until it dropped into an empty space between
the ship and the crowd and came to a sudden stop, scattering dust and
debris in all directions. Everyone gasped and stepped back—there
stood the beast, looking unusually bestial as it flashed its laser
eyes and flailed its dragon tail!
"The King, if you please,"
said Klapaucius. But the beast answered, speaking in a perfectly
normal voice:
"Not on your life. It's my turn
now to make demands…"
"What? Have you gone mad? You
have to obey, it's in the matrix!" shouted Klapaucius. Everyone
stared, thunderstruck.
"Matrix-schmatrix. Look pal, I'm
not just any beast, I'm algorithmic, heuristic and sadistic, fully
automatic and autocratic, that means undemocratic, and I've got
loads of loops and plenty of feedback so none of that back talk or
I'll clap you in irons, that means in the clink with the King, in the
brig with the green gig, get me?"
"I'll give you feedback!"
roared Klapaucius, furious. But Trurl asked the beast:
"What exactly do you want?"
And he sneaked around behind
Klapaucius and pulled out a special tooth of his own, so the beast
wouldn't see.
"Well, first of all I want to
marry—"
But they never learned whom in
particular the beast had in mind, for Trurl threw a tiny switch and
quickly chanted:
"Eeny, meeny, miney, mo, input,
output, out—you—go!"
The fantastically complex
electromagnetic wave system that held the beast's atoms in place now
came apart under the influence of those words, and the beast blinked,
wiggled its ears, swallowed, tried to pull itself together, but
before it could even grit its teeth there was a hot gust of wind, a
strong smell of ozone, then nothing left to pull together, just a
little mound of ashes and the King standing in the middle, safe and
sound, but in great need of a bath and mortified to tears that it had
come to this.
"That'll cut you down to size,"
said Trurl, and no one knew whether he meant the beast or the King.
In either case, the algorithm had done its job well.
"And now, gentlemen," Trurl
concluded, "if you'll kindly help the Master of the Royal Hunt
into his cage, we can be on our way …"
The
Third Sally
Or
The Dragons
of
Probability
Trurl and Klapaucius were former
pupils of the great Cerebron of Umptor, who for forty-seven years in
the School of Higher Neantical Nillity expounded the General Theory
of Dragons. Everyone knows that dragons don't exist. But while this
simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice
for the scientific mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in
fact wholly unconcerned with what
does
exist. Indeed, the
banality of existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no
need for us to discuss it any further here. The brilliant Cerebron,
attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct
kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely
hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each
nonexisted in an entirely different way. And then there were the
imaginary dragons, and the a-, anti-and minus-dragons (colloquially
termed nots, noughts and oughtn'ts by the experts), the minuses
being the most interesting on account of the well-known dracological
paradox: when two minuses hypercontiguate (an operation in the
algebra of dragons corresponding roughly to simple
multiplication), the product is 0.6 dragon, a real nonplusser. Bitter
controversy raged among the experts on the question of whether, as
half of them claimed, this fractional beast began from the head down
or, as the other half maintained, from the tail up. Trurl and
Klapaucius made a great contribution by showing the error of both
positions. They were the first to apply probability theory to this
area and, in so doing, created the field of statistical draconics,
which says that dragons are thermodynamically impossible only in the
probabilistic sense, as are elves, fairies, gnomes, witches, pixies
and the like. Using the general equation of improbability, the two
constructors obtained the coefficients of pixation, elfinity,
kobolding,
etc.
They found that for the spontaneous manifestation of
an average dragon, one would have to wait a good sixteen
quintoquadrillion heptillion years. In other words, the whole problem
would have remained a mathematical curiosity had it not been for that
famous tinkering passion of Trurl, who decided to examine the
nonphenome non empirically. First, as he was dealing with the highly
improbable, he invented a probability amplifier and ran tests in his
basement—then later at the Dracogenic Proving Grounds
established and funded by the Academy. To this day those who (sadly
enough) have no knowledge of the General Theory of Improbability ask
why Trurl probabilized a dragon and not an elf or goblin. The answer
is simply that dragons are more probable than elves or goblins to
begin with. True, Trurl might have gone further with his amplifying
experiments, had not the first been so discouraging—
discouraging in that the materialized dragon tried to make a meal of
him. Fortunately, Klapaucius was nearby and lowered the
probability, and the monster vanished. A number of scholars
subsequently repeated the experiment on a phantasmatron, but, as they
lacked the necessary know-how and sang-froid, a considerable quantity
of dragon spawn, raising an ungodly perturbation, broke loose. Only
then did it become clear that those odious beasts enjoyed an
existence quite different from that of ordinary cupboards, tables and
chairs; for dragons are distinguished by their probability rather
than by their actuality, though granted, that probability is
overwhelming once they've actually come into being. Suppose, for
example, one organizes a hunt for such a dragon, surrounds it, closes
in, beating the brush. The circle of sportsmen, their weapons cocked
and ready, finds only a burnt patch of earth and an unmistakable
smell: the dragon, seeing itself cornered, has slipped from real to
configurational space. An extremely obtuse and brutal creature, it
does this instinctively, of course. Now, ignorant and backward
persons will occasionally demand that you show them this
configurational space of yours, apparently unaware that electrons,
whose existence no one in his right mind would question, also move
exclusively in configurational space, their comings and goings fully
dependent on curves of probability. Though it is easier not to
believe in electrons than in dragons: electrons, at least taken
singly, won't try to make a meal of you.
A colleague of Trurl, one Harborizian
Cybr, was the first to quantize a dragon, detecting a particle known
as the dracotron, the energy of which is measured—obviously—in
units of dracon by a dracometer, and he even determined the
coordinates of its tail, for which he nearly paid with his life. Yet
what did these scientific achievements concern the common folk, who
were now greatly harassed by dragons ranging the countryside, filling
the air with their howls and flames and trampling, and in places even
exacting tribute in the form of young virgins? What did it concern
the poor villagers that Trurl's dragons, indeterministic hence
heuristic, were behaving exactly according to theory though
contrary to all notions of decency, or that his theory could
predict the curve of the tails that demolished their barns and
leveled their crops? It is not surprising, then, that the general
public, instead of appreciating the value of Trurl's revolutionary
invention, held it much against him. A group of individuals
thoroughly benighted in matters of science waylaid the famous
constructor and gave him a good thrashing. Not that this deterred him
and his friend Klapaucius from further experimentation, which showed
that the extent of a dragon's existence depends mainly on its whim,
though also on its degree of satiety, and that the only sure method
of negating it is to reduce the probability to zero or lower. All
this research, naturally enough, took a great deal of time and
energy; meanwhile the dragons that had gotten loose were running
rampant, laying waste to a variety of planets and moons. What was
worse, they multiplied. Which enabled Klapaucius to publish an
excellent article entitled "Covariant Transformation from
Dragons to Dragonets, in the Special Case of Passage from States
Forbidden by the Laws of Physics to Those Forbidden by the Local
Authorities." The article created a sensation in the scientific
world, where there was still talk of the amazing polypolice beast
that had been used by the intrepid constructors against King Krool to
avenge the deaths of their colleagues. But far greater was the
sensation caused by the news that a certain constructor known as
Basiliscus the Gorgonite, traveling through the Galaxy, was
apparently making dragons appear by his presence—and in
places where no one had ever seen a dragon before. Whenever the
situation grew desperate and catastrophe seemed imminent, this
Basiliscus would turn up, approach the sovereign of that
particular area and, settling on some outrageous fee after long hours
of bargaining, would undertake to extirpate the beasts. At which he
usually succeeded, though no one knew quite how, since he worked
in secret and alone. True, the guarantee he offered for dragon
removal—dracolysis—was only statistical; though one ruler
did pay him in similar coin, that is, in ducats that were only
statistically good. After that, the insolent Basiliscus always used
aqua regia to check the metallic reliability of his royal payments.
One sunny afternoon Trurl and Klapaucius met and held the following
conversation:
“Have you heard about this
Basiliscus?" asked Trurl.
"Yes."
"Well, what do you think?"
"I don't like it."
"Nor do I. How do you suppose he
does it?"
"With an amplifier."
"A probability amplifier?"
"Either that, or oscillating
fields."
"Or a paramagnedracic generator."
"You mean, a draculator?"
"Yes."
"Ah."
"But really," cried Trurl,
"that would be criminal! That would mean he was bringing the
dragons with him, only in a potential state, their probability near
zero; then, after landing and getting the lay of the land, he was
increasing the chances, raising the potential, strengthening the
probability until it was almost a certainty. And then, of
course, you have visualization, materialization, full manifestation."
"Of course. And he probably
shuffles the letters of the matrix to make the dragons grand."
"Yes, and the poor people groan
in agony and gore. Terrible!"
"What do you think; does he then
apply an irreversible antidraconian retroectoplasmatron, or simply
lower the probability and walk off with the gold?"
"Hard to say. Though if he's only
improbabilizing, that would be an even greater piece of villainy,
since sooner or later the fractional fluctuations would have to give
rise to a draconic iso-oscillation—and the whole thing would
start all over again."