Authors: The Cyberiad [v1.0] [htm]
smidgen of air, the joggling and jostling of atoms does indeed
produce deep truths and edifying dicta, yet it also produces
statements that make not the least bit of sense, and there are
thousands of times more of the latter than there are of the former.
So even if it were known that, right here and now under your sawlike
nose, in a milligram of air and in a fraction of a second, there
would come into being all the cantos of all the epic poems to be
written in the next million years, as well as an abundance of
wonderful truths—including the solutions to every enigma of
Existence and mystery of Being—you would still have no way
of isolating all that information, particularly since, just as soon
as the atoms had knocked their heads together and formed something,
they would fly apart and it would vanish, probably forever. And
therefore the whole trick lies in building a selector, which will, in
the atomic rush and jumble, choose only what has meaning. And that is
the whole idea behind the Demon of the Second Kind. Have you
understood any of this, O huge and hideous one? We want the Demon,
you see, to extract from the dance of atoms only information
that is genuine, like mathematical theorems, fashion magazines,
blueprints, historical chronicles, or a recipe for ion crumpets, or
how to clean and iron a suit of asbestos, and poetry too, and
scientific advice, and almanacs, and calendars, and secret
documents, and everything that ever appeared in any newspaper in
the Universe, and telephone books of the future…"
"Enough, enough!!" cried
Pugg. "I get the idea! But what good is it for atoms to combine
like that, if immediately they fly apart? And anyway, I can't believe
it's possible to select invaluable truths from a lot of careening and
colliding of particles in the air, which is completely senseless and
not worth a jot to anyone!"
"Then you're not so stupid as I
thought," said Trurl. "For truly, the whole difficulty
consists in implementing such a selection. I have no intention of
presenting you with the theoretical arguments for this, but, as I
promised, I will here and now—while you wait—construct a
Demon of the Second Kind, and you'll see for yourself the
wondrous perfection of that Metainformationator! All you have to
do is find me a box—any size will do, but it must be airtight.
We'll put a little pinhole in it and sit the Demon over the opening;
perched there, it will let out only significant information,
keeping in all the nonsense. For whenever a group of atoms
accidentally arranges itself in a meaningful way, the Demon will
pounce on that meaning and instantly record it with a special diamond
pen on paper tape, which you must keep in endless supply, for the
thing will labor day and night—until the Universe itself runs
down and no sooner—at a rate, moreover, of a hundred billion
bits a second… But you will see the Demon of the Second Kind
with your very own eyes."
And Trurl went back to the ship to
make the Demon. The pirate meanwhile asked Klapaucius:
"And what is the Demon of the
First Kind like?"
"Oh, it's not as interesting,
it's an ordinary thermodynamic demon, and all it does is let fast
atoms out of the hole and keep in the slow. That way you get a
thermodynamic perpetuum mobile, which hasn't a thing to do with
information. But you had better fetch the box now, for Trurl
will return any minute!"
The pirate with a Ph.D. went to
another cellar, poked around through various cans and tins, cursed,
kicked things and tripped, but finally pulled out an iron barrel, old
and empty, put a tiny hole in it and hurried back, just as Trurl
arrived, the Demon in his hand.
The air in the barrel was so foul,
that one's nose wanted to hide when brought near the little opening,
but the Demon didn't seem to mind; Trurl placed this mote of a
mite astride the hole in the barrel, affixed a large roll of paper
tape on the top and threaded it underneath the tiny diamond-tipped
pen, which quivered eagerly, then began to scratch and scribble,
clattering rat-tat, pit-pat, just like a telegraph, only a million
times faster. From under this frantic apparatus the information
tape slowly began to slide out, covered with words, onto the filthy
cellar floor.
Pugg sat down next to the barrel,
lifted the paper tape to his hundred eyes and read what the Demon
had, with its informational net, managed to dredge up out of the
eternal prancing and dancing of the atoms; those significant bits of
knowledge so absorbed him, that he didn't even notice how the two
constructors left the cellar in great haste, how they grabbed hold of
the helm of their ship, pulled once, twice, and on the third time
freed it from the mire in which the pirate had stuck them, then
climbed aboard and blasted off as fast as they possibly could, for
they knew that, though their Demon would work, it would work too
well, producing a far greater wealth of information than Pugg
anticipated. Pugg meanwhile sat propped up against the barrel and
read, as that diamond pen which the Demon employed to record
everything it learned from the oscillating atoms squeaked on and on,
and he read about how exactly Harlebardonian wrigglers wriggle,
and that the daughter of King Petrolius of Labondia is named
Humpinella, and what Frederick the Second, one of the paleface kings,
had for lunch before he declared war against the Gwendoliths, and how
many electron shells an atom of thermionolium would have, if
such an element existed, and what is the cloacal diameter of a small
bird called the tufted twit, which is painted by the Wabian
Marchpanes on their sacrificial urns, and also of the tripartite
taste of the oceanic ooze on Polypelagid Diaphana, and of the flower
Dybbulyk, that beats the Lower Malfundican hunters black and blue
whenever they waken it at dawn, and how to obtain the angle of the
base of an irregular icosahedron, and who was the jeweler of
Gufus, the left-handed butcher of the Bovants, and the number of
volumes on philately to be published in the year seventy
thousand on Marinautica, and where to find the tomb of Cybrinda
the Red-toed, who was nailed to her bed by a certain Clamonder in a
drunken fit, and how to tell the difference between a bindlesnurk and
an ordinary trundlespiff, and also who has the smallest lateral
wumpet in the Universe, and why fan-tailed fleas won't eat moss, and
how to play the game of Fratcher-My-Pliss and win, and how many
snapdragon seeds there were in the turd into which Abroquian
Phylminides stepped, when he stumbled on the Great Albongean Road
eight miles outside the Valley of Symphic Sighs—and little by
little his hundred eyes began to swim, and it dawned on him that all
this information, entirely true and meaningful in every particular,
was absolutely useless, producing such an ungodly confusion that
his head ached terribly and his legs trembled. But the Demon of the
Second Kind continued to operate at a speed of three hundred
million facts per second, and mile after mile of tape coiled out and
gradually buried the Ph.D. pirate beneath its windings, wrapping him,
as it were, in a paper web, while the tiny diamond-tipped pen
shivered and twitched like one insane, and it seemed to Pugg that any
minute now he would learn the most fabulous, unheard-of things,
things that would open up to him the Ultimate Mystery of Being, so he
greedily read everything that flew out from under the diamond nib,
the drinking songs of the Quaidacabondish and the sizes of bedroom
slippers available on the continent of Cob, with pompons and without,
and the number of hairs growing on each brass knuckle of the
skew-beezered flummox, and the average width of the fontanel in
indigenous stepinfants, and the litanies of the M'hot-t'ma-hon'h
conjurers to rouse the reverend Blotto Ben-Blear, and the inaugural
catcalls of the Duke of Zilch, and six ways to cook cream of wheat,
and a good poison for uncles with goatees, and twelve types of
forensic tickling, and the names of all the citizens of Foofaraw
Junction beginning with the letter M, and the results of a poll of
opinions on the taste of beer mixed with mushroom syrup…
And it grew dark before his hundred
eyes, and he cried out in a mighty voice that he'd had enough, but
Information had so swathed and swaddled him in its three hundred
thousand tangled paper miles, that he couldn't move and had to read
on about how Kipling would have written the beginning to his Second
Jungle Book
if he had had indigestion just then, and what
thoughts come to unmarried whales getting on in years, and all about
the courtship of the carrion fly, and how to mend an old gunny sack,
and what a sprothouse is, and why we don't capitalize paris in
plaster of paris or turkish in turkish bath, and how many bruises one
can have at a single time. And then a long list of the differences
between fiddle and faddle, not to be confused with twiddle and
twaddle or tittle and tattle, then all the words that rhyme with
"spinach," and what were the insults which Pope Urn of
Pendora heaped upon Antipope Mlum of Porking, and who plays the
eight-tone autocomb. In desperation he struggled to free himself from
the paper coils and toils, but suddenly grew faint, for though he
kicked and tore at the tape, he had too many eyes not to receive,
with at least a few of them, more and more new bits and pieces of
information, and so was forced to learn what authority the home guard
exercises in Indochina, and why the Coelenterids of Fluxis constantly
say they've had too much to drink, until he shut his eyes and sat
there, rigid, overcome by that great flood of information, and the
Demon continued to bind him with its paper strips. Thus was the
pirate Pugg severely punished for his inordinate thirst for
knowledge.
He sits there to this day, at the very
bottom of his rubbage heap and bins of trash, covered with a mountain
of paper, and in the dimness of that cellar the diamond pen still
jumps and flickers like the purest flame, recording whatever the
Demon of the Second Kind culls from dancing atoms in the rancid air
that flows through the hole of the old barrel; and so poor Pugg,
crushed beneath that avalanche of fact, learns no end of things
about rickshaws, rents and roaches, and about his own fate, which has
been related here, for that too is included in some section of the
tape—as are the histories, accounts and prophecies of all
things in creation, up until the day the stars burn out; and there is
no hope for him, since this is the harsh sentence the constructors
passed upon him for his pirately assault— unless of course the
tape runs out, for lack of paper.
The
Seventh Sally
OR
How Trurl's
Own Perfection Led to
No Good
The Universe is infinite but bounded,
and therefore a beam of light, in whatever direction it may travel,
will after billions of centuries return—if powerful
enough—to the point of its departure; and it is no different
with rumor, that flies about from star to star and makes the rounds
of every planet. One day Trurl heard distant reports of two mighty
constructor-benefactors, so wise and so accomplished that they had no
equal; with this news he ran to Klapaucius, who explained to him that
these were not mysterious rivals, but only themselves, for their fame
had circumnavigated space. Fame, however, has this fault, that it
says nothing of one's failures, even when those very failures are the
product of a great perfection. And he who would doubt this, let him
recall the last of the seven sallies of Trurl, which was
undertaken without klapaucius, whom certain urgent duties kept
at home at the time.
In those days Trurl was exceedingly
vain, receiving all marks of veneration and honor paid to him as his
due and a perfectly normal thing. He was heading north in his ship,
as he was the least familiar with that region, and had flown through
the void for quite some time, passing spheres full of the clamor of
war as well as spheres that had finally obtained the perfect
peace of desolation, when suddenly a little planet came into view,
really more of a stray fragment of matter than a planet.
On the surface of this chunk of rock
someone was running back and forth, jumping and waving his arms in
the strangest way. Astonished by a scene of such total loneliness and
concerned by those wild gestures of despair, and perhaps of
anger as well, Trurl quickly landed.
He was approached by a personage of
tremendous hau-teur, iridium and vanadium all over and with a great
deal of clanging and clanking, who introduced himself as Excelsius