Lem, Stanislaw (35 page)

that master endure his cruel obscurity! How justified was his

anger towards our forefathers, and yet how noble of him, to have

bequeathed to us, even so, the fruits of his mighty wisdom!"

Yes, that's exactly what they'd say! And then what? Those idiots who

buried me alive, are they to go unpunished, shielded from my wrath

and vengeance by the grave? The very thought of it sets my oil aboil!

What, the sons would read my works in peace, politely rebuking their

fathers on my behalf? Never!! The least I can do is thumb my nose at

them from afar, from the past! Let them know, they who will worship

me and raise up gilded monuments to my memory, that in return I

wish them all to— to sprain their sprockets, pop their valves,

burn out their transmissions, and may their data be dumped, and

verdigris cover them from head to foot, if all they are able to do is

honor corpses exhumed from the cemetery of history! Perchance

there will arise among them a new sage, but they, slavishly poring

over the remains of some letters I wrote to my laundress, will take

no notice of him! Let them know, I say, oh let them know, once and

for all, that they have my heartfelt damnation and most sincere

contempt, that I hold them all for skeleton-kissers, corpse-lickers,

professional axle-jackals, who feed on carrion because they are blind

to wisdom when it is alive! Let them, in publishing my Complete

Works—which must include this Testament, my final curse upon

their future heads-—let the vile thanatomites and necrophytes

thereby be deprived of the chance to congratulate themselves, that

Chlorian Theoreticus the Proph, peerless pundit of yore who limned

the infinite tomorrow, was of their race! And as they grovel beneath

my pedestal, let them have the knowledge that I wished them nothing

but the very worst the Universe has to offer, and that the force of

my hatred, hurled forth into the future, was equaled only by its

impotence! Let them know that I disowned them utterly, and bestowed

upon them nothing but my loathing and anathema!!!

It was in vain that Klapaucius sought

to calm the raging sage throughout this long harangue. Upon uttering

these final words, the ancient one leaped up and, shaking his fist at

the generations to come, let loose a volley of shockingly pungent

imprecations (for where could he have learnt them, having led such an

exemplary life?); then, foaming and fuming, he stamped and bellowed,

and in a shower of sparks crashed to the floor, dead from an overload

of bile. Klapaucius, much discomfited by this unpleasant turn of

events, sat at the table of stone nearby, picked up the Testament and

began to peruse it, though his eyes were soon swimming from the

abundance of epithets therein addressed to the future, and by the

second page he broke into a sweat, for the now-departed Chlorian

Theoreticus gave evidence of a power of invective that was truly

cosmic. For three days Klapaucius read, his eyes riveted to that

manuscript, and was sorely perplexed: should he reveal it to the

world, or destroy it? And he sits there to this day, unable to

decide…"

+ +

"Methinks," said King

Genius, when the machine had finished and retired, "I see in

this some allusion to the question of monetary compensation,

which is now indeed at hand, for, after a night bravely whiled away

with tales, the dawn of a new day appears outside our cave. Well

then, my good constructor, how shall I reward you?"

"Your Majesty," said Trurl,

"places me in some difficulty. Whatever I request, should I

receive it, I must later regret, in that I did not ask for more. On

the other hand, I would not wish to cause offense by naming an

exorbitant figure. And so, the amount of the honorarium I leave to

the generosity of Your Majesty…"

"So be it," replied the King

affably. "The stories were excellent, the machines

unquestionably perfect, and therefore I see no alternative but to

reward you with the greatest treasure of all, one which, I am

certain, you will not want to exchange for any other. I grant you

health and life—this is, in my estimation, the only fitting

gift. Anything else would be an insult, for no amount of gold can

purchase Truth or Wisdom. Go then in peace, my friend, and continue

to hide your truths, too bitter for this world, in the guise of fairy

tale and fable."

"Your Majesty," said Trurl,

aghast, "did you intend, before, to deprive me of my life?

Was this then to have been my payment?"

"Put whatever interpretation you

wish upon my words," replied the King. "But here is how I

understand the matter: had you merely amused me, my munificence would

have known no bounds. But you did much more, and no wealth in the

Universe can equal that in value. Thus, in offering you the

opportunity to continue your illustrious career, I can give you no

higher reward or payment…"

Altruizine

OR

A True Account

of How Bonhomius the

Hermetic

Hermit Tried to Bring

About

Universal Happiness,

and

What Came of It

One bright summer day, as Trurl the

constructor was pruning the cyberberry bush in his back yard, he

spied a robot mendicant coming down the road, all tattered and torn,

a most woeful and piteous sight to behold. Its limbs were held

together by sections of old stovepipe fastened with string, its head

was a pot so full of holes you could hear its thoughts whir and

sputter inside, throwing off sparks, and its makeshift neck was

a rusty rail, and in its open belly were vacuum tubes that smoked and

rattled so badly, it had to hold them in place with its free hand—the

other was needed to tighten the screws that kept coming loose. Just

as it hobbled past the gate to Trurl's residence, it blew four fuses

at once and straightway began, spewing a foul cloud of burning

insulators, to fall apart, right before the constructor's eyes.

Trurl, full of compassion, took a screwdriver and a roll of electric

tape and hastened to offer what aid he could to the poor wayfarer,

who swooned repeatedly with a great grinding of gears, due to a total

asynchronization. At last Trurl managed to restore it to its senses,

such as they were, then helped it inside, sat it down in a

comfortable chair and gave it a battery to recharge itself, and while

the poor thing did so with trembling urgency, he asked it, unable to

contain his curiosity any longer, what had brought it to this

sorry pass.

"O kind and noble sir,"

replied the strange robot, its armatures still aquiver, "my name

is Bonhomius and I am, or rather was, a hermetic hermit, for I lived

sixty years and seven in a cave, where I passed the time solely in

pious meditation, until one morning it dawned on me that to spend a

life in solitude was wrong, for truly, did all my exceedingly

profound thoughts and strivings of the spirit ever keep one rivet

from falling, and is it not written that thy first duty is to help

thy neighbor and not to tend to thine own salvation, for yea and

verily—"

"Fine, fine," interrupted

Trurl. "I think I more or less understand your state of mind

that morning. What happened then?"

"So I hied myself to Photura,

where I chanced to meet a certain distinguished constructor, one

Klapaucius."

"Klapaucius?!" cried Trurl.

"Is something amiss, kind sir?"

"No, nothing—go on,

please!"

"I did not recognize him at

first: he was indeed a great lord and had an automatic carriage that

he not only rode upon but was able to converse with, much as I

converse with you now. This same carriage did affront me with a most

unseemly epithet as I walked in the middle of the street,

unaccustomed to city traffic, and in my surprise I inadvertently put

out its headlight with my staff, which drove the carriage into such a

frenzy, that its occupant was hard put to subdue it, but finally did,

and then invited me to join him. I told him who I was and why I had

abandoned my cave and that, forsooth, I knew not what to do next,

whereupon he praised my decision and introduced himself in turn,

speaking at great length of his work and many achievements. He told

me at last the whole moving history of that famous sage, pundit and

philosophist, Chlorian Theoreticus the Proph, at whose lamentable end

he had had the privilege to be present. From all that he said of the

Collected Works of that Greatest of Robots, the part about the

H. P. L. D.'s did intrigue me the most. Perchance, kind sir, you have

heard of them?"

"Certainly. They are the only

beings in the universe who have reached the Highest Possible Level of

Development."

"Indeed you are well-informed,

most kind and noble sir! Now while I sat at the side of this worthy

Klapaucius in his carriage (which continued to hurl the foulest

insults at whatever was imprudent enough to cross its path), the

thought suddenly came to me that these beings, developed as much as

possible, would surely know what one should do, when one, such as

myself, felt the call to help his fellow robot. So I questioned

Klapaucius closely concerning this, and asked him if he knew where

the H. P. L. D.'s lived, and how to find them. His only reply was a

wry smile and a shake of the head. I dared not press the matter

further, but later, when we had halted at an inn (the carriage had by

this time grown so hoarse that it lost its voice entirely, thus

Klapaucius was obliged to wait until the following day) and were

sitting over a jug of mulled electrolyte, which quickly put my

gracious host in a better humor, and as we watched the thermocouples

dance to the spirited tunes of a high-frequency band, he took me into

his confidence and proceeded to tell me… but perhaps you

grow weary of my tale."

"Not at all, not at all!"

protested Trurl. "I'm all ears, I assure you."

+ +

"My good Bonhomius,"

Klapaucius addressed me in that inn as the dancers worked themselves

into a positive heat, "know that I took very much to heart the

history of the unfortunate Chlorian and resolved to set out

immediately and find those perfectly developed beings whose existence

he had so conclusively proven on purely logical and theoretical

grounds. The main difficulty of the undertaking, as I saw it, lay in

the circumstance that nearly every cosmic race considered itself to

be perfectly developed—obviously I would get nowhere by merely

asking around. Nor did a trial-and-error method of search promise

much, for the Universe contained, as I calculated, close to fourteen

centigigaheptatrillion civilizations capable of reason; with such

odds one could hardly expect to simply happen on the correct address.

So I deliberated, read up on the problem, went methodically through

several libraries, pored over all sorts of ancient tomes, until one

day I found the answer in the work of a certain Cadaverius Malignus,

a scholar who had apparently arrived at exactly the same conclusion

as the Proph, only three hundred thousand years earlier, and who was

completely forgotten afterwards. Which shows, once more, that

there's nothing new under this or any other sun—Cadaverius even

met an end similar to that of our own Chlorian… But I digress.

It was precisely from these yellowed and crumbling pages that I

learned how to seek the H. P. L. D.'s. Malignus maintained that one

must examine star clusters for some impossible astrophysical

phenomenon, and that would surely be the place. A rather obscure

clue, to be sure, but then aren't they all? Without further ado I

stocked my ship with the necessary provisions, took off and, after

numerous adventures we need not go into here, finally spotted in

a great swarm of stars one that differed from all the rest, since it

was a perfect cube. Now that was quite a shock— every schoolboy

knows stars have to be spherical and any sort of stellar

angularities, let alone rectangularities, are not only highly

irregular but entirely out of the question! I drew near the star and

immediately saw that its planet was also cubiform and equipped,

moreover, with castellated corner cleats and crenelated quoins.

Farther out revolved another planet, which appeared to be quite

normal; a look through the telescope, however, revealed hordes of

robots locked in mortal combat, a sight which hardly invited closer

scrutiny. So I got the square planet back in my finder and increased

the resolution to full power. Imagine my surprise and joy when I

looked in the eyepiece and beheld a monogram engraved on one of the

planet's mile-long quoins, a monogram consisting of four letters

embellished with swirls and curlicues: H. P. L. D.!