Lem, Stanislaw (22 page)

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