Lem, Stanislaw (23 page)

the Tartarian, ruler of Pancreon and Cyspenderora; the inhabitants of

both these kingdoms had, in a fit of regicidal madness, driven His

Highness from the throne and exiled him to this barren asteroid,

eternally adrift among the dark swells and currents of gravitation.

Learning in turn the identity of his

visitor, the deposed monarch began to insist that Trurl—who

after all was something of a professional when it came to good

deeds—immediately restore him to his former position. The

thought of such a turn of events brought the flame of vengeance to

the monarch's eyes, and his iron fingers clutched the air, as if

already closing around the throats of his beloved subjects.

Now Trurl had no intention of

complying with this request of Excelsius, as doing so would

bring about untold evil and suffering, yet at the same time he wished

somehow to comfort and console the humiliated king. Thinking a

moment or two, he came to the conclusion that, even in this

case, not all was lost, for it would be possible to satisfy the king

completely—without putting his former subjects in jeopardy. And

so, rolling up his sleeves and summoning up all his mastery, Trurl

built the king an entirely new kingdom. There were plenty of

towns, rivers, mountains, forests and brooks, a sky with clouds,

armies full of derring-do, citadels, castles and ladies' chambers;

and there were marketplaces, gaudy and gleaming in the sun, days

of back-breaking labor, nights full of dancing and song until dawn,

and the gay clatter of swordplay. Trurl also carefully set into this

kingdom a fabulous capital, all in marble and alabaster, and

assembled a council of hoary sages, and winter palaces and summer

villas, plots, conspirators, false witnesses, nurses, informers,

teams of magnificent steeds, and plumes waving crimson in the wind;

and then he crisscrossed that atmosphere with silver fanfares and

twenty-one gun salutes, also threw in the necessary handful of

traitors, another of heroes, added a pinch of prophets and seers, and

one mes-siah and one great poet each, after which he bent over and

set the works in motion, deftly making last-minute adjustments

with his microscopic tools as it ran, and he gave the women of that

kingdom beauty, the men—sullen silence and surliness when

drunk, the officials—arrogance and servility, the

astronomers—an enthusiasm for stars, and the children—a

great capacity for noise. And all of this, connected, mounted and

ground to precision, fit into a box, and not a very large box, but

just the size that could be carried about with ease. This Trurl

presented to Excelsius, to rule and have dominion over forever; but

first he showed him where the input and output of his brand-new

kingdom were, and how to program wars, quell rebellions, exact

tribute, collect taxes, and also instructed him in the critical

points and transition states of that microminiaturized society—in

other words the maxima and minima of palace coups and

revolutions—and explained everything so well, that the

king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the

directions and, without hesitation, while the constructor watched,

issued a few trial proclamations, correctly manipulating the

control knobs, which were carved with imperial eagles and regal

lions. These proclamations declared a state of emergency, martial

law, a curfew and a special levy. After a year had passed in the

kingdom, which amounted to hardly a minute for Trurl and the king, by

an act of the greatest magnanimity—that is, by a flick of the

finger at the controls—the king abolished one death penalty,

lightened the levy and deigned to annul the state of emergency,

whereupon a tumultuous cry of gratitude, like the squeaking of

tiny mice lifted by their tails, rose up from the box, and through

its curved glass cover one could see, on the dusty highways and along

the banks of lazy rivers that reflected the fluffy clouds, the

people rejoicing and praising the great and unsurpassed benevolence

of their sovereign lord.

And so, though at first he had felt

insulted by Trurl's gift, in that the kingdom was too small and very

like a child's toy, the monarch saw that the thick glass lid made

everything inside seem large; perhaps too he dully understood

that size was not what mattered here, for government is not measured

in meters and kilograms, and emotions are somehow the same,

whether experienced by giants or dwarfs— and so he thanked the

constructor, if somewhat stiffly. Who knows, he might even have liked

to order him thrown in chains and tortured to death, just to be

safe—that would have been a sure way of nipping in the bud any

gossip about how some common vagabond tinkerer presented a mighty

monarch with a kingdom.

Excelsius was sensible enough,

however, to see that this was out of the question, owing to a very

fundamental disproportion, for fleas could sooner take their host

into captivity than the king's army seize Trurl. So with another cold

nod, he stuck his orb and scepter under his arm, lifted the box

kingdom with a grunt, and took it to his humble hut of exile. And as

blazing day alternated with murky night outside, according to the

rhythm of the asteroid's rotation, the king, who was acknowledged by

his subjects as the greatest in the world, diligently reigned,

bidding this, forbidding that, beheading, rewarding—in all

these ways incessantly spurring his little ones on to perfect fealty

and worship of the throne.

As for Trurl, he returned home and

related to his friend Klapaucius, not without pride, how he had

employed his constructor's genius to indulge the autocratic

aspirations of Excelsius and, at the same time, safeguard the

democratic aspirations of his former subjects. But Klapaucius,

surprisingly enough, had no words of praise for Trurl; in fact,

there seemed to be rebuke in his expression.

"Have I understood you

correctly?" he said at last. "You gave that brutal despot,

that born slave master, that slavering sadist of a painmonger,

you gave him a whole civilization to rule and have dominion over

forever? And you tell me, moreover, of the cries of joy brought on by

the repeal of a fraction of his cruel decrees! Trurl, how could you

have done such a thing?!"

"You must be joking!" Trurl

exclaimed. "Really, the whole kingdom fits into a box three feet

by two by two and a half… it's only a model…"

"A model of what?"

"What do you mean, of what? Of a

civilization, obviously, except that it's a hundred million

times smaller."

"And how do you know there aren't

civilizations a hundred million times larger than our own? And

if there were, would ours then be a model? And what importance do

dimensions have anyway? In that box kingdom, doesn't a journey from

the capital to one of the corners take months —for those

inhabitants? And don't they suffer, don't they know the burden of

labor, don't they die?"

"Now just a minute, you know

yourself that all these processes take place only because I

programmed them, and so they aren't genuine…"

"Aren't genuine? You mean to say

the box is empty, and the parades, tortures and beheadings are merely

an illusion?"

"Not an illusion, no, since they

have reality, though purely as certain microscopic phenomena, which I

produced by manipulating atoms," said Trurl. "The point is,

these births, loves, acts of heroism and denunciations are nothing

but the minuscule capering of electrons in space, precisely arranged

by the skill of my nonlinear craft, which—"

"Enough of your boasting, not

another word!" Klapaucius snapped. "Are these processes

self-organizing or not?"

"Of course they are!"

"And they occur among

infinitesimal clouds of electrical charge?"

"You know they do."

"And the phenomenological events

of dawns, sunsets and bloody battles are generated by the

concatenation of real variables?"

"Certainly."

"And are not we as well, if you

examine us physically, mechanistically, statistically and

meticulously, nothing but the minuscule capering of electron clouds?

Positive and negative charges arranged in space? And is our existence

not the result of subatomic collisions and the interplay of

particles, though we ourselves perceive those molecular

cartwheels as fear, longing, or meditation? And when you

daydream, what transpires within your brain but the binary

algebra of connecting and disconnecting circuits, the continual

meandering of electrons?"

"What, Klapaucius, would you

equate our existence with that of an imitation kingdom locked up in

some glass box?!" cried Trurl. "No, really, that's going

too far! My purpose was simply to fashion a simulator of statehood, a

model cybernetically perfect, nothing more!"

"Trurl! Our perfection is our

curse, for it draws down upon our every endeavor no end of

unforeseeable consequences!" Klapaucius said in a

stentorian voice. "If an imperfect imitator, wishing to

inflict pain, were to build himself a crude idol of wood or wax, and

further give it some makeshift semblance of a sentient being, his

torture of the thing would be a paltry mockery indeed! But consider a

succession of improvements on this practice! Consider the next

sculptor, who builds a doll with a recording in its belly, that it

may groan beneath his blows; consider a doll which, when beaten, begs

for mercy, no longer a crude idol, but a homeostat; consider a doll

that sheds tears, a doll that bleeds, a doll that fears death, though

it also longs for the peace that only death can bring! Don't you see,

when the imitator is perfect, so must be the imitation, and the

semblance becomes the truth, the pretense a reality! Trurl, you

took an untold number of creatures capable of suffering and abandoned

them forever to the rule of a wicked tyrant… Trurl, you have

committed a terrible crime!"

"Sheer sophistry!" shouted

Trurl, all the louder because he felt the force of his friend's

argument. "Electrons meander not only in our brains, but in

phonograph records as well, which proves nothing, and certainly gives

no grounds for such hypostatical analogies! The subjects of that

monster Excelsius do in fact die when decapitated, sob, fight,

and fall in love, since that
is
how I set up the parameters,

but it's impossible to say, Klapaucius, that they feel anything in

the process—the electrons jumping around in their heads will

tell you nothing of that!"

"And if I were to look inside

your head, I would also see nothing but electrons," replied

Klapaucius. "Come now, don't pretend not to understand what I'm

saying, I know you're not that stupid! A phonograph record won't run

errands for you, won't beg for mercy or fall on its knees! You say

there's no way of knowing whether Excelsius' subjects groan,

when beaten, purely because of the electrons hopping about

inside—like wheels grinding out the mimicry of a voice—or

whether they really groan, that is, because they honestly experience

the pain? A pretty distinction, this! No, Trurl, a sufferer is not

one who hands you his suffering, that you may touch it, weigh it,

bite it like a coin; a sufferer is one who behaves like a sufferer!

Prove to me here and now, once and for all, that they do not feel,

that they do not think, that they do not in any way exist as beings

conscious of their enclosure between the two abysses of oblivion—the

abyss before birth and the abyss that follows death—prove this

to me, Trurl, and I'll leave you be! Prove that you only
imitated
suffering, and did not create it!"

"You know perfectly well that's

impossible," answered Trurl quietly. "Even before I took my

instruments in hand, when the box was still empty, I had to

anticipate the possibility of precisely such a proof—in

order to rule it out. For otherwise the monarch of that kingdom