Authors: The Cyberiad [v1.0] [htm]
afterwards, when they were dismissed, they took to chatting, and
later, through the open windows of the barracks one could hear voices
booming in chorus, disputing such matters as absolute truth,
analytic versus synthetic a priori propositions, and the
Thing-in-itself, for their collective minds had already attained
that level. Various philosophical systems were hammered out,
till finally a certain battalion of sappers arrived at a position of
total solipsism, claiming that nothing really existed beyond itself.
And since from this it followed that there was no King, nor any
enemy, this battalion was quietly disconnected and its members
reassigned to units that firmly adhered to epistemological realism.
At about the same time, in the kingdom of Atrocitus, the sixth
amphibious division forsook naval operations for navel
contemplation and, thoroughly immersed in mysticism, very nearly
drowned. Somehow or other, as a result of this incident, war was
declared, and the troops, rumbling and clanking, slowly moved towards
the border from either side.
The law of Gargantius proceeded to
work with inexorable logic. As formation joined formation, in
proportion there developed an esthetic sense, which reached its apex
at the level of a reinforced division, so that the columns of such a
force easily became sidetracked, chasing off after butterflies,
and when the motorized corps named for Bartholocaust approached an
enemy fortress that had to be taken by storm, the plan of attack
drawn up that night turned out to be a splendid painting of the
battlements, done moreover in the abstractionist spirit, which
ran counter to all military traditions. Among the artillery corps the
weightiest metaphysical questions were considered, and, with an
absentmindedness characteristic of great genius, these large units
lost their weapons, misplaced their equipment and completely forgot
that there was a war on. As for whole armies, their psyches were
beset by a multitude of complexes, which often happens to overly
developed intellects, and it became necessary to assign to each a
special psychiatric motorcycle brigade, which applied
appropriate therapy on the march.
In the meantime, to the thunderous
accompaniment of fife and drum, both sides slowly got into position.
Six regiments of shock troops, supported by a battery of
howitzers and two backup battalions, composed, with the assistance of
a firing squad, a sonnet entitled "On the Mystery of Being,"
and this took place during guard duty. There was considerable
confusion in both armies; the Eightieth Marlabardian Corps, for
instance, maintained that the whole concept of "enemy"
needed to be more clearly defined, as it was full of logical
contradictions and might even be altogether meaningless.
Paratroopers tried to find algorithms
for the local terrain, flanks kept colliding with centers, so at last
the two kings sent airborne adjutants and couriers extraordinary to
restore order in the ranks. But each of these, having flown or
galloped up to the corps in question, before he could discover
the cause of the disturbance, instantly lost his identity in the
corporate identity, and the kings were left without adjutants or
couriers. Consciousness, it seemed, formed a deadly trap, in that one
could enter it, but never leave.
Atrocitus himself saw how his cousin,
the Grand Prince Bullion, desiring to raise the spirits of his
soldiers, leaped into the fray, and how, as soon as he had hooked
himself into the line, his spirit was literally spirited away, and he
was no more.
Sensing that something had gone amiss,
Ferocitus nodded to the twelve buglers at his right hand. Atrocitus,
from the top of his hill, did likewise; the buglers put the brass to
their lips and sounded the charge on either side. At this clarion
signal each army totally and completely linked up. The fearsome
metallic clatter of closing contacts reverberated over the future
battlefield; in the place of a thousand bombardiers and
grenadiers, commandos, lancers, gunners, snipers, sappers and
marauders—there stood two giant beings, who gazed at one
another through a million eyes across a mighty plain that lay beneath
billowing clouds. There was absolute silence. That famous culmination
of consciousness which the great Gargantius had predicted with
mathematical precision was now reached on both sides. For beyond
a certain point militarism, a purely local phenomenon, becomes civil,
and this is because the Cosmos Itself is by nature wholly civilian,
and indeed, the minds of both armies had assumed truly cosmic
proportions! Thus, though on the outside armor still gleamed, as well
as the death-dealing steel of artillery,
within
there surged
an ocean of mutual good will, tolerance, an all-embracing
benevolence, and bright reason. And so, standing on opposite
hilltops, their weapons sparkling in the sun, while the drums
continued to roll, the two armies smiled at one another. Trurl and
Klapaucius were just then boarding their ship, since that which they
had planned had come to pass: before the eyes of their mortified,
infuriated rulers, both armies went off hand in hand, picking flowers
beneath the fluffy white clouds, on the field of the battle that
never was.
The
First Sally (A)
OR
Trurl's
Electronic
Bard
First of all, to avoid any possible
misunderstanding, we should state that this was, strictly speaking, a
sally to nowhere. In fact, Trurl never left his house throughout
it— except for a few trips to the hospital and an unimportant
excursion to some asteroid. Yet in a deeper and/or higher sense this
was one of the farthest sallies ever undertaken by the famed
constructor, for it very nearly took him beyond the realm of
possibility.
Trurl had once had the misfortune to
build an enormous calculating machine that was capable of only one
operation, namely the addition of two and two, and that it did
incorrectly. As is related earlier in this volume, the machine
also proved to be extremely stubborn, and the quarrel that ensued
between it and its creator almost cost the latter his life. From that
time on Klapaucius teased Trurl unmercifully, making comments at
every opportunity, until Trurl decided to silence him once and for
all by building a machine that could write poetry. First Trurl
collected eight hundred and twenty tons of books on cybernetics and
twelve thousand tons of the finest poetry, then sat down to read it
all. Whenever he felt he just couldn't take another chart or
equation, he would switch over to verse, and vice versa. After a
while it became clear to him that the construction of the
machine itself was child's play in comparison with the writing
of the program. The program found in the head of an average poet,
after all, was written by the poet's civilization, and that
civilization was in turn programmed by the civilization that
preceded it, and so on to the very Dawn of Time, when those bits of
information that concerned the poet-to-be were still swirling about
in the primordial chaos of the cosmic deep. Hence in order to program
a poetry machine, one would first have to repeat the entire Universe
from the beginning—or at least a good piece of it.
Anyone else in Trurl's place would
have given up then and there, but our intrepid constructor was
nothing daunted. He built a machine and fashioned a digital model of
the Void, an Electrostatic Spirit to move upon the face of the
electrolytic waters, and he introduced the parameter of light, a
protogalactic cloud or two, and by degrees worked his way up to the
first ice age—Trurl could move at this rate because his machine
was able, in one five-billionth of a second, to simulate one hundred
septillion events at forty octillion different locations
simultaneously. And if anyone questions these figures, let him work
it out for himself.
Next Trurl began to model
Civilization, the striking of fires with flints and the tanning of
hides, and he provided for dinosaurs and floods, bipedality and
taillessness, then made the paleopaleface (Albuminidis sapienria),
which begat the paleface, which begat the gadget, and so it
went, from eon to millennium, in the endless hum of electrical
currents and eddies. Often the machine turned out to be too small for
the computer simulation of a new epoch, and Trurl would have to tack
on an auxiliary unit—until he ended up, at last, with a
veritable metropolis of tubes and terminals, circuits and shunts, all
so tangled and involved that the devil himself couldn't have made
head or tail of it. But Trurl managed somehow, he only had to go back
twice —once, almost to the beginning, when he discovered that
Abel had murdered Cain and not Cain Abel (the result, apparently, of
a defective fuse), and once, only three hundred million years
back to the middle of the Mesozoic, when after going from fish to
amphibian to reptile to mammal, something odd took place among
the primates and instead of great apes he came out with gray drapes.
A fly, it seems, had gotten into the machine and shorted out the
polyphase step-down directional widget. Otherwise everything
went like a dream. Antiquity and the Middle Ages were recreated, then
the period of revolutions and reforms —which gave the machine a
few nasty jolts—and then civilization progressed in such leaps
and bounds that Trurl had to hose down the coils and cores repeatedly
to keep them from overheating.
Towards the end of the twentieth
century the machine began to tremble, first sideways, then
lengthwise-—for no apparent reason. This alarmed Trurl; he
brought out cement and grappling irons just in case. But fortunately
these weren't needed; instead of jumping its moorings, the machine
settled down and soon had left the twentieth century far behind.
Civilizations came and went thereafter in fifty-thousand-year
intervals: these were the fully intelligent beings from whom
Trurl himself stemmed. Spool upon spool of computerized history was
filled and ejected into storage bins; soon there were so many spools,
that even if you stood at the top of the machine with high-power
binoculars, you wouldn't see the end of them. And all to construct
some versifier! But then, such is the way of scientific fanaticism.
At last the programs were ready; all that remained was to pick out
the most applicable—else the electropoet's education would
take several million years at the very least.
During the next two weeks Trurl fed
general instructions into his future electropoet, then set up all the
necessary logic circuits, emotive elements, semantic centers. He was
about to invite Klapaucius to attend a trial run, but thought better
of it and started the machine himself. It immediately proceeded to
deliver a lecture on the grinding of crystallo-graphical surfaces as
an introduction to the study of sub-molecular magnetic anomalies.
Trurl bypassed half the logic circuits and made the emotive more
electromotive; the machine sobbed, went into hysterics, then
finally said, blubbering terribly, what a cruel, cruel world
this was. Trurl intensified the semantic fields and attached a
strength of character component; the machine informed him that
from now on he would carry out its every wish and to begin with add
six floors to the nine it already had, so it could better meditate
upon the meaning of existence. Trurl installed a philosophical
throttle instead; the machine fell silent and sulked. Only after
endless pleading and cajoling was he able to get it to recite
something: "I had a little froggy." That appeared to
exhaust its repertoire. Trurl adjusted, modulated, expostulated,
disconnected, ran checks, reconnected, reset, did everything he could
think of, and the machine presented him with a poem that made him
thank heaven Klapaucius wasn't there to laugh—imagine,
simulating the whole Universe from scratch, not to mention
Civilization in every particular, and to end up with such dreadful
doggerel! Trurl put in six cliche filters, but they snapped like
matches; he had to make them out of pure corundum steel. This seemed
to work, so he jacked the semanticity up all the way, plugged in an
alternating rhyme generator—which nearly ruined everything,
since the machine resolved to become a missionary among destitute
tribes on far-flung planets. But at the very last minute, just as he
was ready to give up and take a hammer to it, Trurl was struck by an
inspiration; tossing out all the logic circuits, he replaced them
with self-regulating egocentripetal narcissistors. The machine
simpered a little, whimpered a little, laughed bitterly, complained
of an awful pain on its third floor, said that in general it was fed