Lem, Stanislaw (32 page)

"Thou seekest Ineffabelle, poor

wretch! And yet thou knowest full well she doth not live these five

hundred years, hence how vain and unavailing is thy passion! The only

thing that I can do for thee is to let thee see her—not in the

flesh, forsooth, but a fair informational facsimile, a model that is

digital, not physical, stochastic, not plastic, ergodic and most

assuredly erotic, and all in yon Black Box, which I constructed in my

spare time out of odds and ends!"

"Ah, show her to me, show her to

me now!" exclaimed Zipperupus, quivering. The patriarch gave a

nod, examined the ancient volume for the princess' coordinates, put

her and the entire Middle Ages on punch cards, wrote up the program,

threw the switch, lifted the lid of the Black Box and said:

"Behold!"

The King leaned over, looked and saw,

yes, the Middle Ages simulated to a T, all digital, binary and

nonlinear, and there was the land of Dandelia, the Icicle Forest, the

palace with the Helical Tower, the Aviary That Neighed, and the

Treasury with a Hundred Eyes as well; and there was Ineffabelle

herself, taking a slow, stochastic stroll through her simulated

garden, and her circuits glowed red and gold as she picked simulated

daisies and hummed a simulated song. Zipperupus, unable to restrain

himself any longer, leaped upon the Black Box and in his madness

tried to climb into that computerized world. The patriarch, however,

quickly killed the current, hurled the King to the earth and said:

"Madman! Wouldst attempt the

impossible?! For no being made of matter can ever enter a system

that is naught but the flux and swirl of alphanumerical elements,

discontinuous integer configurations, the abstract stuff of

digits!"

"But I must, I must!!"

bellowed Zipperupus, beside himself, and beat his head against the

Black Box until the metal was dented. The old sage then said:

"If such is thy inalterable

desire, there
is
a way I can connect thee to the Princess

Ineffabelle, but first thou must part with thy present form, for I

shall take thy appurtenant coordinates and make a program of

thee, atom by atom, and place thy simulation in that world medievally

modeled, informational and representational, and there will it

remain, enduring as long as electrons course through these wires and

hop from cathode to anode. But thou, standing here before me now,

thou wilt be annihilated, so that thy only existence may be in the

form of given fields and potentials, statistical, heuristical,

and wholly digital!"

"That's hard to believe,"

said Zipperupus. "How will I know you've simulated me, and not

someone else?"

"Very well, we'll make a trial

run," said the sage. And he took all the King's measurements, as

if for a suit of clothes, though with much greater precision, since

every atom was carefully plotted and weighed, and then he fed the

program into the Black Box and said:

"Behold!"

The King peered inside and saw himself

sitting by the fire and reading in an ancient book about the Princess

Ineffabelle, then rushing out to find her, asking here and

there, until in the heart of the gold-plated desert he came upon a

humble hut and a snow-white patriarch, who greeted him with the

words, "Thou seekest Ineffabelle, poor wretch!" And so on.

"Surely now thou art convinced,"

said the patriarch, switching it off. "This time I shall program

thee in the Middle Ages, at the side of the sweet Ineffabelle, that

thou mayest dream with her an unending dream, simulated, nonlinear,

binary …"

"Yes, yes, I understand,"

said the King. "But still, it's only my likeness, not myself,

since I am right here and not in any Box!"

"But thou wilt not be here long,"

replied the sage with a kindly smile, "for I shall attend to

that…"

And he pulled out a hammer from under

the bed, a heavy hammer, but serviceable.

"When thou art locked in the arms

of thy beloved," the patriarch told him, "I shall see to it

that there be not two of thee, one here and one there, in the

Box—employing a method that is old and primitive, yet never

fails, so if thou wilt just bend over a little…"

"First let me take another look

at your Ineffabelle," said the King. "Just to make sure…"

The sage lifted the lid of the Black

Box and showed him Ineffabelle. The King looked and looked, and

finally said:

"The description in the ancient

volume is greatly exaggerated. She's not bad, of course, but nowhere

near as beautiful as it says in the chronicles. Well, so long, old

sage…"

And he turned to leave.

"Where art thou going, madman?!"

cried the patriarch, clutching his hammer, for the King was almost

out the door.

"Anywhere but in the Box,"

said Zipperupus and hurried out, but at that very moment the dream

burst like a bubble beneath his feet, and he found himself in the

vestibule facing the bitterly disappointed Subtillion, disappointed

because the King had come so close to being locked up in the

Black Box, and the Lord High Thaumaturge could have kept him there

forever…

"Listen here, Sir Cybernerian,"

said the King, "these dreams of yours with princesses are a

great deal more trouble than they're worth. Now either you show me

one I can enjoy—no tricks, no complications—or leave the

palace at once, and take your cabinets with you!"

"Sire!" Subtillion replied.

"I have just the dream for you, the finest quality and

tailor-made. Only give it a try, and you'll see I'm right!"

"Which one is that?" asked

the King.

"This one, Your Highness,"

said the Lord High Thaumaturge, and pointed to the little pearl

plaque with the inscription: "Mona Lisa, or The Labyrinth

of Sweet Infinity."

And before the King could answer yea

or nay, Subtillion himself took the chain to plug him in, and

quickly, for he saw that things were going none too well: Zipperupus

had escaped eternal imprisonment in the Black Box, too thickheaded

to fall completely for the captivating Ineffabelle.

"Wait," said the King, "let

me!"

And he pushed in the plug and entered

the dream, only to find himself still himself, Zipperupus, standing

in the palace vestibule, and at his side, Subtillion the Cybernerian,

who explains to him that of all the dreams, "Mona Lisa" is

the most dissolute and dissipated, for in it is the infinite in

femininity; hearing this, Zipperupus plugs in and looks about for

Mona Lisa, already yearning for her infinitely feminine caress, but

in this dream within a dream he finds himself still in the palace

vestibule, the Lord High Thaumaturge at his side, so impatiently

plugs into the cabinet and enters the next dream, but it's still the

same, the vestibule, the cabinets, the Cybernerian and himself. "Is

this a dream or isn't it?" he shouts, plugging in again, and

once again there's the vestibule, the cabinets, the Cybernerian; and

again, but it's still the same; and again and again, faster and

faster. "Where's Mona Lisa, knave?!" he snarls, and pulls

the plug to wake—but no, he's still in the vestibule with the

cabinets! Furious, he stamps his feet and hurls himself from dream to

dream, from cabinet to cabinet, from Cybernerian to Cybernerian, but

now he doesn't care about the dream, he only wants to get back to

reality, back to his beloved throne, the court intrigues and old

iniquities, and he pulls and pushes the plugs in a blind frenzy.

"Help!" he cries, and, "Hey! The King's in danger!"

and, "Mona Lisa! Yoo-hoo!," while he thrashes around in

terror and scrambles wildly from corner to corner, looking for a

chink in the dream, but in vain. He did not understand the how, the

why or the what of it, but his stupidity could not save him, nor

could his cowardice, nor his inordinate greed, for this time he had

gotten himself in too deep, and was trapped and wrapped in dreams as

if in a hundred tight cocoons, so that even when he managed,

straining with all his might, to free himself from one, that didn't

help, for immediately he fell into another, and when he pulled his

plug from the cabinet, both plug and cabinet were only dreamed, not

real, and when he beat Subtillion, Subtillion too turned out to be a

dream. Zipperupus leaped here and there, and everywhere, but

wherever he leaped, everything was a dream, a dream and nothing but a

dream, the doors, the marble floors, the gold-embroidered walls, the

tapestries, the halls, and Zipperupus too, he was a dream, a dream

that dreamed, a walking shadow, an empty apparition, insubstantial,

fleeting, lost in a labyrinth of dreams, sinking ever deeper,

though still he bucked and kicked—only that too was purely

imaginary! He punched Subtillion in the nose, but not really, roared

and howled, but nothing real came out, and when at last, dazed and

half-crazed, he really did tear his way into reality, he thought it

was a dream and plugged himself back in, and then it really was, and

on he dreamed, and on and on, which was inevitable, and thus

Zipperupus, whimpering, dreamed of waking in vain, not knowing that

'Mona Lisa' was—in reality—a diabolical code for

'monarch-olysis,' that is: the dissolution, dissociation and total

dissipation of the King. For truly, of all Subtillion's

treacherous traps, this was the most terrible…

--------------------+---+----------------------

Such was the tale, moving and

improving, that Trurl told to King Thumbscrew the Third, who by now

had a splitting headache and so dismissed the constructor without

further ado, presenting him first with the Order of the Sacred

Cy-bernia, a lilac sign of feedback upon a field of green, in-crusted

with precious bits of information.

+ +

And with these words the second

storytelling machine ground to a halt, its golden gears whirring

musically, and gave a giddy little laugh, for a few of its klystrons

had overheated slightly; but it lowered its anode potential,

waved away the smoke, sighed and retreated to the photon phaeton,

accompanied by much applause, the reward for its eloquence and

storytelling skill.

King Genius meanwhile offered Trurl a

cup of ion mead, wondrously carved with curves of probability and the

subtle play of quantum waves. Trurl quaffed it down, then snapped his

fingers, whereupon the third machine stepped out into the center of

the cave, bowed low and said, in a voice that was tonic, euphonic,

and most electronic:

+ +

This is the story of how the Great

Constructor Trurl, with the aid of an ordinary jug, created a local

fluctuation, and what came of it.

In the Constellation of the Wringer

there was a Spiral Galaxy, and in this Galaxy there was a Black

Nebula, and in this Nebula were five sixth-order clusters, and in the

fifth cluster, a lilac sun, very old and very dim, and around this

sun revolved seven planets, and the third planet had two moons, and

in all these suns and stars and planets and moons a variety of

events, various and varying, took place, falling into a statistical

distribution that was perfectly normal, and on the second moon

of the third planet of the lilac sun of the fifth cluster of the

Black Nebula in the Spiral Galaxy in the Constellation of the Wringer

was a garbage dump, the kind of garbage dump one might find on any

planet or moon, absolutely average, in other words full of garbage;

it had come into existence because the Glauberical Aberracleans once

waged a war, a war of the fission-and-fusion type, against the

Albumenid Ifts, with the natural result that their bridges, roads,

homes and palaces, and of course they themselves, were reduced to

ashes and shards, which the solar winds blew to the place whereof we

speak. Now for many, many centuries positively nothing took place in

this garbage dump but garbage, though an earthquake did occur and

shifted the garbage on the bottom to the top, and the garbage on the

top to the bottom, which in itself had no particular significance,

and yet this paved the way for a most unusual phenomenon. It so

happened that Trurl, the Fabulous Constructor, while flying in the

vicinity, was blinded by a certain comet with a garish tail. He fled

its path, frantically jettisoning out the spaceship window whatever

lay in reach—chess pieces, the hollow kind, which he'd filled

with liquor for the trip, some barrels the Ubbidubs of Chlorelei

employed for the purpose of compelling their opponents to yield, as

well as assorted utensils, and among these, an old earthenware

jug with a crack down the middle. This jug, accelerating in

accordance with the laws of gravity and boosted by the comet's tail,

crashed into a mountainside above the dump, fell, clattered down a

slope of junk toward a puddle, skittered across some mud, and finally

smacked into an old tin can; this impact bent the metal around a