Lem, Stanislaw (33 page)

copper wire, also knocked some pieces of mica between the edges, and

that made a condenser, while the wire, twisted by the can, formed the

beginnings of a solenoid, and a stone, set in motion by the jug,

moved in turn a hunk of rusty iron, which happened to be a magnet,

and this gave rise to a current, and that current passed through

sixteen other cans and snips of wire, releasing a number of sulfides

and chlorides, whose atoms linked with other atoms, and the ensuing

molecules latched onto other molecules, until, in the very center of

the dump, there came into being a Logic Circuit, and five more, and

another eighteen in the spot where the jug finally shattered

into bits. That evening, something emerged at the edge of the dump,

not far from the puddle which had by now dried up, and this

something, a creature of pure accident, was Mymosh the Selfbegotten,

who had neither mother nor father, but was son unto himself, for his

father was Coincidence, and his Mother—Entropy. And Mymosh rose

up from the garbage dump, totally oblivious of the fact that he

had about one chance in a hundred billion jillion raised to the

zillionth power of ever existing, and he took a step, and walked

until he came to the next puddle, which had not as yet dried up, so

that, kneeling over it, he could easily see himself. And he saw, in

the surface of the water, his purely accidental head, with ears like

muffins, the left one crushed and the right a trifle underdone, and

he saw his purely accidental body, a potpourri of pots and pegs and

flotsam, and somewhat barrel-chested, in that his chest was a barrel,

though narrower in the middle, like a waist, for in crawling out

from under the garbage, he had scraped against a stone right there;

and he gazed upon his littery limbs, and counted them, and as luck

would have it, there were two arms, two legs and, fortuitously

enough, two eyes too, and Mymosh the Selfbegotten took great delight

in his person, and sighed with admiration at the narrowness of the

waist, the symmetrical arrangement of the limbs, the roundness

of the head, and was moved to exclaim: —Truly, I am beautiful,

nay, perfect, which clearly implies the Perfection of All Created

Things!! Ah, and how good must be the One Who fashioned me!

And he hobbled on, dropping loose

screws along the way (since no one had tightened them properly),

humming hymns in praise of the Everlasting Harmony of Providence, but

on the seventh step he tripped and went headlong back down into the

garbage, after which he did nothing but rust, corrode and slowly

disintegrate for the next three hundred and fourteen thousand years,

for he had fallen on his head and shorted out, and was no more. And

at the end of this time it came to pass that a certain merchant,

carrying a shipment of sea anemones from the planet Medulsa to the

Thrycian Stomatopods, quarreled with his assistant as they neared the

lilac sun, and hurled his shoes at him, and one of these broke the

porthole window and flew out into space, where its subsequent orbit

subsequently experienced perturbation, due to the circumstance

that that very same comet, which had ages past blinded Trurl, now

found itself in the very same locality, and so the shoe, turning

slowly, hurtled towards the moon, was singed a little by the

atmospheric friction, bounced off the mountainside above the

dump, fell, and booted Mymosh the Selfbegotten, lying there, with

just the right resultant impulse and at just the right angle of

incidence to create just the right torsions, torques, centrifugal

forces and angular momenta needed to reactivate the accidental brain

of that accidental being— and in this way: Mymosh, thus booted,

went flying into the nearby puddle, where his chlorides and iodides

mingled with the water, and electrolyte seeped into his head and,

bubbling, set up a current there, which traveled around and

about, till Mymosh sat up in the mud and thought the following

thought: —Apparently, I am!

That, however, was all he was able to

think for the next sixteen centuries, and the rain beat down upon

him, and the hail pommeled him, and all the while his entropy

increased and grew, but after another thousand five hundred and

twenty years, a certain bird, flapping its way over the terrain, was

attacked by some swooping predator, and relieved itself out of

fright and also to increase its speed, and the droppings dropped and

hit Mymosh square on the forehead, whereupon he sneezed and

said:

—Yes, I am! And there's no

apparently about it! Yet the question remains, who is it who says

that I am? Or, in other words, who am I? Now, how may this be

answered? H'm! If only there was something else besides me, any sort

of something at all, with which I might juxtapose and compare

myself—that would be half the battle. But alas, there's not a

thing, for I can plainly see that I see nothing whatsoever! Therefore

there's only I that am, and I am everything that is and may be, for I

can think in any way I like, but am I then—an empty space for

thought, and nothing more?

In point of fact he no longer

possessed any senses; they had decayed and crumbled to dust over the

centuries, since Entropy, the bride of Chaos, is a cruel and

implacable mistress. Consequently Mymosh could not see his

mother-puddle, nor his brother-mud, nor the whole, wide world, and

had no recollection of what had happened to him before, and

generally was now capable of nothing but thought. This alone could he

do, and so devoted himself wholeheartedly to it.

—First I ought—he told

himself—to fill this void that is I, and thereby dispel its

insufferable monotony. So let us think of something, for when we

think, behold, there is thought, and nought but our thought has

existence.— From this one could see he was becoming somewhat

presumptuous, for already he referred to himself in the first

person plural.

—But wait—he then

said—might not something still exist outside myself? We must,

if only for a moment, consider this possibility, though it sound

preposterous and even a little insane. Let us call this outsideness

the Gozmos. Now, if there is a Gozmos, then I must be a part and

portion of it!

Here he stopped, pondered the matter

awhile, and finally rejected that hypothesis as wholly without basis

or foundation. Really, there was not a shred of evidence in its

favor, not a single, solid argument to support it, and so, ashamed he

had indulged in such wild, untutored speculation, he said to himself:

—Of that which lies beyond me,

if anything indeed there lie, I have no knowledge. But of that which

is within, I do, or rather shall, as soon as I think something into

thought, for who can know what I think, by thunder, better than

myself?!— And he thought and thought, and thought of the Gozmos

again, but this time thought of it inside himself, which seemed to

him a far more sensible and respectable solution, well within the

bounds of reason and propriety. And he began to fill his Gozmos with

various and sundry thoughts. First, because he was still new at it

and lacked skill, he thought out the Beadlies, who grambled whenever

they got the chance, and the Pratlings, who rejoiced in filicorts.

Immediately the Pratlings battled the Beadlies for the supremacy of

filicortion over gramblement, and all Mymosh got for his

world-creating pains was an awful headache.

In his next attempts at thought

creation, he proceeded with greater caution, first thinking up

elements, like Brutonium, a noble gas, and elementary particles, like

the cogiton, the quantum of intellect, and he created beings, and

these were fruitful and multiplied. From time to time he did make

mistakes, but after a century or two he grew quite proficient, and

his very own Gozmos, sound and stable, took shape in his mind's eye,

and it teemed with a multitude of entities, things, beings,

civilizations and phenomena, and existence was most pleasurable

there, for he had made the laws of that Gozmos highly liberal, having

no fondness for strict, inflexible rules, the sort of prison

discipline that Mother Nature imposes (though of course he'd never

heard of Mother Nature).

Thus the world of Selfbegotten was a

place of caprice and miracle; in it something might occur one way

once, and at another time be altogether different—and without

any special rhyme or reason. If, for example, an individual was

supposed to die, there were always ways of getting around it,

for Mymosh had firmly decided against irreversible events. And in his

thoughts the Zigrots, Calsonians, Flimmeroons, Jups, Arligynes and

Wallamachinoids all prospered and flourished, generation after

generation. During this time the haphazard arms and legs of Mymosh

fell off, returning to the garbage from which they'd come, and the

puddle rusted through the narrow waist, and his body slowly sank into

the stagnant mire. But he had just put up some brand-new

constellations, arranging them with loving care in the eternal

darkness of his consciousness, which was his Gozmos, and did his

level best to keep an accurate memory of everything that he had

thought into existence, even though his head hurt from the effort,

for he felt responsible for his Gozmos, deeply obligated, and needed.

Meanwhile rust ate deeper and deeper into his cranial plates, which

of course he had no way of knowing, and a fragment from Trurl's jug,

the selfsame jug that thousands of years ago had called him into

being, came floating on the puddle's surface, closer and closer to

his unfortunate head, for only that now remained above the water. And

at the very moment when Mymosh was imagining the gentle, crystal

Baucis and her faithful Ondragor, and as they journeyed hand in hand

among the dark suns of his mind, and all the people of the Gozmos

looked on in rapt silence, including the Beadlies, and as the pair

softly called to one another—the rust-eaten skull cracked open

at the touch of the earthenware shard, pushed by a puff of air, and

the murky water rushed in over the copper coils and extinguished the

current in the logic circuits, and the Gozmos of Mymosh the

Selfbegotten attained the perfection, the ultimate perfection that

comes with nothingness. And those who unwittingly had brought him

into the world never learned of his passing.

+ +

Here the black machine bowed, and King

Genius sat plunged in gloomy meditation, and brooded so long, that

the company began to murmur ill of Trurl, who had dared to cloud the

royal mind with such a tale. But the King soon broke into a smile and

asked:

"And have you not something else

up your manifold for us, my good machine?"

"Sire," it responded, bowing

low, "I will tell you the story, remarkably profound, of

Chlorian Theoreticus the Proph, intellectrician and pundit par

excellence."

+ +

It happened once that Klapaucius, the

famed constructor, longing to rest after his great labors (he had

just completed for King Thanaton a Machine That Wasn't, but that is

quite another story), arrived at the planet of the Mammonides and

there roamed hither and yon, seeking solitude, until he saw, at the

edge of a forest, a humble hut, all overgrown with wild

cyberberries and smoke rising from its chimney. He would have gladly

avoided it, but noticed on the doorstep a pile of empty inkwells, and

this singular sight prompted him to take a peek inside. There, at a

massive stone table sat an ancient sage, so broken-down, wired up and

rusted through, it was a wonder to behold. The brow was dented in a

hundred places, the eyes, turning in their sockets, creaked

dreadfully, as did the limbs, unoiled, and it seemed withal that he

owed his miserable existence entirely to patches, clamps and pieces

of string—and miserable that existence was indeed, as witnessed

by the bits of amber lying here and there: apparently, the poor soul

obtained his daily current by rubbing them together! The spectacle of

such penury moved Klapaucius to pity, and he was reaching into his

purse discreetly, when the ancient one, only now fixing a cloudy eye

upon him, piped in a reedy voice:

—Then you have come at last?!

—Well, yes… —mumbled

Klapaucius, surprised that he was expected in a place he had never

intended to be.

—In that case… may you

rot, may you come to an evil end, may you break your arms and neck

and legs—screeched the old sage, flying into a fury, and began

to fling whatever lay at hand, and this was mainly odds and ends of

trash, at the speechless Klapaucius. When finally he had tired and

ceased this bombardment, the object of his fury calmly inquired

as to the reason for so inhospitable a reception. For a while the

sage still muttered things like: —May you blow a fuse! —May

your mechanisms jam forever, O base corrosion!— but

eventually calmed down, and his humor improved to the degree