Authors: The Cyberiad [v1.0] [htm]
eldest, untied their prisoner and began to beat him savagely, yelling
one after the other:
—Take that for the Prophecy of
Happiness! And that for the Perfection of Being! And have that for
the Bed of Roses, and that for the Bowl of Cherries! And the Clover
of Existence! And that's for the Altruistic Communality! And
take that for the Soarings of the Spirit!
And they cudgeled and buffeted him so,
that he surely would have given up the ghost had I not lifted my
weapon from the straw, announcing in this way my presence. When they
had released their victim, I asked them why they were abusing thus an
individual who was neither an outlaw nor worthless vagabond, for,
judging by the ruff and color of his doublet, this was some sort of
scholar. The Legarians wavered and looked longingly at the guns
they had left at the door, but when I cocked the actuator and
scowled, they thought better of it and, nudging one another, asked
the large one, the one with the deep bass, to speak for them all.
—Know, O strange foreigner—he
said, turning to me—it is not with common thrugs, tuffians or
juggermuggers that you deal, or other degenerators of the robot
species, for though a cellar hardly seems a savory place, what passes
within these walls is to the highest degree praiseworthy and a thing
of beauty!
—Praiseworthy and a thing of
beauty?!—I exclaimed. —What are you telling me, O base
Legarian? Did I not see with my own eyes how you hurled yourselves
upon the red-doubleted one and belabored him with such murderous
blows, that the very oil did spatter from your joints? And you dare
call this a thing of beauty!
—If Your Esteemed Foreignness is
going to interrupt— replied the bass—he will learn
nothing, therefore I politely request him to tighten the reins on his
worthy tongue and quell the restiveness of his oral orifice, else I
must refrain from further discourse. Know then that before you stand
our finest physickers, all cybernists and electriciates of the first
order, in a word, my brilliant and ever vigilant pupils, the best
minds in all Legaria, and I myself am Vendetius Ultor of Amentia,
professor of matter both positive and negative and the originator of
Omnigendrical Reincreation, and I have dedicated my life to the
sacred work of vengeance. With the aid of these faithful followers I
avenge the shame and misery of my people upon the ruddy-bedizened
excrescency that kneels there, the low scrulp called—and may
his name be forever cursed—Malaputz vel Malapusticus
Pandemonius, who vilely and villainously, thievishly and
irretrievably brought unhappiness to all Legarians! For he led them
into detrimetry and other deviltry, did discompostulate them,
embollix and thoroughly befottle them, then sneaked off to his grave
to escape the consequences, thinking that no hand could ever reach
him there!
—That's not true, Your Exalted
Visitorship! I never meant… that is, I had no idea!…
—wailed the kneeling noodle-nose in the rubicund attire. I
stared, understanding nothing, while the bass intoned:
—Gargomanticus, dear pupil,
paste the puler one in his puffy puss!
The pupil complied, and with such
dispatch that the cellar rang. To which I said:
—Until the conclusion of
explanations, all beating and battering is absolutely forbidden by
authority of this laser, meanwhile you, Professor Vendetius Ultor,
have the floor and may continue!
The professor growled, grumbled, and
finally said:
—That you may know how our great
misfortune came to pass and why the four of us, forsaking worldly
things, have formed this Holy Order of the Forge of Resurrection,
consecrating the remainder of our days to sweet revenge, I will
relate to you the history of our kind from the very beginning of
creation…
—Must we go back that far?—I
asked, afraid my hand would weaken beneath the weight of the pistol.
—Aye, Your Alienness! Listen and
attend… There are legends, as you know, that speak of a race
of paleface, who concocted robotkind out of a test tube, though
anyone with a grain of sense knows this to be a foul lie… For
in the Beginning there was naught but Formless Darkness, and in the
Darkness, Magneticity, which moved the atoms, and whirling atom
struck atom, and Current was thus created, and the First Light…
from which the stars were kindled, and then the planets cooled, and
in their cores the breath of Sacred Statisticality gave rise to
microscopic Protomecha-noans, which begat Proteromechanoids, which
begat the Primitive Mechanisms. These could not yet calculate, nor
scarcely put two and two together, but thanks to Evolution and
Natural Subtraction they soon multiplied and produced Omnistats,
which gave birth to the Servostat, the Missing Clink, and from it
came our progenitor, Automatus Sapiens…
After that there were the cave robots,
the nomad robots, and then robot nations. Robots of Antiquity had to
manufacture their life-giving electricity by hand, that is by
rubbing, which meant great drudgery. Each lord had many knights,
each knight many vassals, and the rubbing was feudal hence
hierarchical, progressing from the lowly to the higher-up. This
manual labor was replaced by machine when Ylem Symphiliac invented
the rubberator, and Wolfram of Coulombia, the rubless lightning rod.
Thus began the Battery Age, a most difficult time for all who
did not possess their own accumulators, since on a clear day, without
a cloud to tap, they had to scrimp and scrounge for every precious
watt, and rub themselves constantly, else perish from a total loss of
charge. And then there appeared a scholar, an infernal
intellectrician and efficiency expert, who in his youth, doubtless
owing to some diabolical intervention, never had his head staved
in, and he began to teach and preach that the traditional method of
electrical connection—namely parallel—was worthless,
and they all ought to hook themselves up according to a revolutionary
new plan of his, that is in series. For in series, if one rubs, the
others are immediately supplied with current, even at a great
distance, till every robot simply bubbles over with ohms and
volts. And he showed his blueprints, and painted paradises of such
parameters, that the old circuits, equal and independent, were
disconnected and the system of Pandemonius promptly implemented.—
Here the professor beat his head against the wall several times,
rolled his eyes and finally continued. Now I understood why the
surface of his knobby brow was so irregular. —And it came to
pass that every second robot sat back and said, "Why should I
rub if my neighbor rubs and it comes to the same thing?" And his
neighbor did the same, and the drop in voltage became so severe, they
had to place special taskmasters over everyone, and taskmasters over
the taskmasters. Then a disciple of Malaputz, Clusticus the Mistaken,
stepped forth and said that each should rub not himself but his
neighbor, and after him was Dummis Altruicius with his program of
flagellatory sadistomasochistorism, and after him was Magmndel
Spoots, who proposed compulsory massage parlors, and after him
appeared a new theoretician, Arsus Gargazon, saying that clouds
should be gently stroked, not yoked, to yield their nimboid bolts,
and then there was Blip of Leydonia, and Scrofulon Thermaphrodyne,
advocating the installation of autofrotts, also called titillators or
diddlegrids, and then Bestian Phystobufficus, who instead of rubbing
recommended a good drubbing. Such differences of opinion
produced great friction, which led to all sorts of exacerbations
and excommunications, which in turn led to blasphemy, heresy, and
finally Faradocius Offal, Prince and Heir to the Throne of the
Alloys, was kicked in the pants, and war broke out between the
Legarite Brassbound Umbutts and the Legaritian Empire of the Cold
Welders, and it lasted eight and thirty years, and twelve more, for
towards the end one could not tell, amid all the rubble, who had won,
so they quarreled and fell to fighting again. And thus there was
chaos and carnage, and a devastating decline in the vital voltage, an
enervated emf and energy dissipation everywhere, or, as the simple
folk put it, "total malaputziment"—all brought about
by this infamous fiend and his thrice-accursed bright ideas!!
—My intentions were the best!! I
swear it, Your Laserosity! It was always the general welfare I had in
mind!— squeaked the kneeling Malaputz, and his outsize snout
trembled. But the professor only elbowed him aside and
continued:
—All this took place two hundred
and twenty-five years ago. As you may have guessed, long before the
outbreak of the Great Legarian War, long before this universal
wretchi-tude began, Malapusticus Pandemonius, having spawned no end
of ponderous treatises and tracts, in all of which he forwarded his
vile, pernicious flummeries, died, smug and unruffled to the very
end. Indeed, so pleased with himself was he, that in his last will
and testament he wrote that he had every expectation of being named
"Supreme Benefactor of Legaria." At any rate, when it came
time to settle accounts, there was no one with whom to settle,
no one to make pay, no one that one might turn a little on a lathe.
But I, O Illustrious Intruder, having formulated the General Theory
of Facsimulation, studied the works of Malaputz until I was able to
extract his algorithm, which, when fed into an atomic duplicating
machine, could recreate ex
atomis oriundum gemellum
,
identical to the
n
th degree, Malapusticus Pandemonius in his
very own person. And so we gather every evening in this cellar to
pass sentence on him, and when he has been returned to his grave, we
avenge our people anew the next day, and thus it is and thus shall be
for all eternity, amen!
Horror-stricken, I blurted in reply:
—Why, you have surely taken
leave of your senses, Professor, if you think for a minute that
this person, this person as innocent as a brand-new fuse, whom you
hammer together out of atoms every day, has to answer for the
actions, whatever they were, of some scholar who died three
centuries ago!
To which the professor said:
—Then who is this proboscidian
sniveler who himself calls himself Malapusticus Pandemonius? Come,
what is your name, O cosmic corrosion?
—Ma… Mala…
Malaputz, Your Mighty Mercilessness… —stammered the
groveling one through his nose.
—Still, it is not the same—I
said.
—How, not the same?
—Did you not yourself say,
Professor, that Malaputz no longer lives?
—But we have resurrected him!
—A double perhaps,
an
exact duplicate, but not the self-s
ame, true original!
—Prove it, Sirrah!
—I don't need to prove a thing—I
said—seeing that I hold this laser in my hand; besides which, I
am well aware, my fine Professor, that to attempt to prove what you
ask would be most foolhardy, for the nonidenticality of the
identicalized
recreatio ex
atomis individui modo algorytmico
is nothing other than the famous Paradoxon Antinomicum, or the
Labyrinthum Lemianum, described in the works of that distinguished
robophile, whom they also called Advocatus Laboratoris. So then,
without proofs, unhand yon snouted one this instant, and do not dare
venture any further molestations upon his person!
—Many thanks, Your
Magnanimitude!!—cried he in the bright red doublet, rising from
his knees. —It so happens that here—he added, patting his
vest pocket—I have an entirely new formula, this time
foolproof, with which the Legarians may be brought to perfect bliss;
it works by back coupling, that is, a hookup in reverse, and not in
series, which was due purely to an error that crept into my
calculations three centuries ago! I go immediately to convert
this marvelous discovery into reality!!
And indeed, his hand was already upon
the doorknob as we all gaped, dumbfounded. I lowered my weapon and,
turning away, said weakly to the professor:
—I withdraw my objections…
Do what you must…
With a hoarse roar the four of them
lunged at Malaputz, threw him down and dealt with him—until, at
last, he was no more.
Then, still panting, they straightened
their frocks, adjusted their hoods, bowed stiffly to me, and
left the cellar in single file, and I remained alone, the heavy laser
in my trembling hand, full of dismay and melancholy."
Thus did Trurl conclude his tale to
enlighten King Thumbscrew of Tyrannia, who had summoned him for that
purpose. When however the King demanded further explanation
concerning the attainment of nonlinear perfection, Trurl said:
"Once, chancing upon the planet
Ninnica, I was able to see the results of progress predicated on the