Authors: Stanislaw Lem
During the inspection I wrung my hands in despair; the whole planet was cluttered with corpses and wrecks, Bosch in particular had had a field day—when I asked him what earthly purpose was served by that Rhamphornychus with its tail copied off of some child’s kite, and wasn’t he ashamed about the Proboscidae, and why lizards with spines like fence rails on their back, he replied that I didn’t understand the frenzy of creative inspiration. I asked him to show me just
where
then, in this state of affairs,
intelligence
was supposed to take root; the question was purely rhetorical, since between them they had stymied all the promising lines of descent. I hadn’t imposed upon them any ready-made solutions, but only reminded them beforehand of the birds, the eagles, and now here was something that flew—they’d microminiaturized its head—and here was something that ran like an ostrich—reduced to utter idiocy. Only two possibilities were left: either make Intelligent Man from the marginal remains, or, on the other hand, have a battering-ram sort of evolution, that is, forcing open all the blocked-up branches of development. But force was out of the question, for such obvious interference would later be recognized by the paleontologists as
miraculous;
and long ago I had forbidden the use of miracles, so as not to mislead the generations-to-come.
All of these unprincipled designers I dismissed from their positions, that is, from their time; and then there were the mass burials of their abortions, for those—unfinished—died off by the millions. The rumor that I ordered the species killed is just another of the many calumnies that have been liberally disseminated against me. It wasn’t I who moved life from one corner of the evolutionary process to the other like a piece of furniture, who doubled the trunk of the amoebedodon, who inflated the dromedary (gigantocamelus) to the size of an elephant, who dabbled at whales, it wasn’t I who drove the mammoth to self-annihilation, for throughout I lived by the Project, not for the sort of shameless game which Goody’s group had made of Evolution. Eyck and Bosch I banished to the Middle Ages, and Gumby, since he had parodied the whole idea of BIPPETY (among other things he created the man-horse and the woman-fish, which in addition was equipped with a high
soprano),
Homer Gumby I sent as far back as antiquity, to Thrace. What followed was something I had seen happen before, and would again, more than once. The exiles, now deprived of the opportunity to create real things, gave vent to their frustrations in vicarious, sublimated work. Anyone interested in what
else
Bosch had up his sleeve can find out by taking a look at his paintings. Clearly, the man had talent. It shows, for one, in the way he was able to fit in with the spirit of the period—hence the ostensible religiousness of his canvases, all those Last Judgments and scenes from hell. Even so, Bosch couldn’t refrain from certain indiscretions. In the “Garden of Earthly Delights,” in the very center of the “Musical Hell” (the right wing of the triptych), stands a twelve-seat chronobus. Not a thing I could do about it.
As for Homer, I think I acted wisely, packing him off—along with his creatures—to Ancient Greece. What he painted has been lost, but his writings were preserved. Strange, that no one has noticed the anachronisms in them. Surely it’s obvious he didn’t take seriously the occupants of Olympus, who are constantly out to foil one another’s plans, in a word behaving exactly like his colleagues at the institute. The
Iliad
and
Odyssey
are
romans à clef;
the irascible Zeus, for instance, that’s a satire on me.
Goody however I didn’t dismiss right away, since Rosenbeisser spoke up for him: if this man let me down, he said, then I could send
him
, the research director of the Project, into the Archeozoic if I liked. Goody supposedly had hidden resources, contributions to make; when I opposed the idea of utilizing the monkey leftovers, he started in on BARF (Binary Anthropogenesis for Reciprocal Feedback). I didn’t put much stock in his BARF, but raised no objections, for by now the word was that I turned down any and all proposals. The next reconnaissance flight showed that he had forced a couple of small mammals into the ocean, made them similar to fish, threw in some frontal radar and was just then at the dolphin stage. Somehow he had gotten it into his head that to achieve harmony two intelligent species were needed: land and sea. How asinine! It would lead to conflicts, of course! I told him: “Intelligent beings in the water
are out!
” So the dolphin remained the way it was, with a brain several sizes too big, and we had a crisis on our hands.
What now, start evolution all over again, from the beginning? I couldn’t, my nerves were shot. I told Goody to do as he saw fit, in other words I accepted the monkey as a working model, but made him promise to pretty it up a bit; and, so he couldn’t plead ignorance later on, I supplied him with guidelines—in writing, through official channels, though without (it’s true) going into all the details. I did however point out in what poor taste those naked anal areas were, and advised a sensitive, dignified approach to the matter of sex, suggesting something in the spirit of the flowers, lilies of the valley, buds, then on my way out—I had to attend a session of the Committee—I asked him personally not to muff it in his usual fashion but find instead some nice motifs. His studio was a shambles, here and there beams of some sort jutting out, planks, saws, what did they have to do with love? Have you gone mad, I said, love on the principle of the buzz saw? I made him give me his solemn word he’d throw away the saw, he nodded zealously—laughing to himself all the while, for he’d already learned that his walking papers lay waiting in my desk, therefore knew he had nothing to lose.
He decided to get even with me. He blustered, telling everyone that the old boy (namely me) would crap in his pants when he returned; and I certainly did; Good Lord—I summoned him at once, he played the conscientious employee, insisting he’d adhered to the guidelines! Yet instead of getting rid of that bald spot in the back, he
had shaved
the entire monkey, or rather did it all in reverse, and as far as love and sex went, well,
that
was clear sabotage on his part. I mean, the very choice of the place! But I need hardly dwell on that piece of treachery. What its effect was, you can all see for yourselves. Yes, monsieur the engineer really went out of his way! The monkeys were what they were, but at least vegetarian. He made them carnivorous too.
I called an emergency meeting of the Committee to consider the matter of the rehumanization of Homo sapiens, and there was told that this could no longer be accomplished in a single blow; one would have to backtrack twenty-five, possibly even thirty million years; I was outvoted, but didn’t make use of my veto power, perhaps I should have, but I was on my last legs now. Anyway signals were coming in from the 18th and 19th centuries; to make things easier for themselves, the officials of MOIRA, tired of constantly having to drive back and forth in time, set up residence in various old castles, palaces, in basements, and taking absolutely no precautions, until there began to be rumors of damned souls, chains rattling (the sound of a chronocycle starting up), and ghosts (for they wore white, as if they couldn’t have picked a better color for their uniform); they made people’s heads spin, frightened them by passing through walls and doors (taking off in time always looks like that, for the chronocycle stays put while the earth continues turning), and all in all they created such a disturbance, that finally it brought on the birth of Romanticism. After punishing the culprits, I tended to Goody and Rosenbeisser.
I deported the both of them, fully aware that the Research Committee would never forgive me for it. In any event I’m not vindictive: Rosenbeisser, who behaved towards me afterwards in a positively scandalous manner, in exile conducted himself quite decently (as Julian the Apostate). He did not a little to improve, in Byzantium, the lot of the poor. Which only shows that the reason he failed at his job was that he just didn’t measure up. Being an emperor is peanuts compared to overseeing the renovation of all history.
Thus concluded the second phase of the Project. I then gave the department of social affairs permission to begin, since all we could perfect now was the history of civilization. Getting down to work, Doddle and Lado were clearly delighted that their predecessors had blundered so completely, yet at the same time they warned me
in advance
—playing it safe, the dogs—that one could not expect too much of THEOHIPPIP now, not with
that
kind of Homo sapiens!
Doddle entrusted the carrying out of his first experimental corrective program to the chronologians. These were Khand el Abr, Canne de la Breux, Guirre Andaule and G. I. R. Andoll. The team was to work under the direct leadership of eng. historiologist Hemdreisser. He and his colleagues planned to expedite the cultural process through urbanizational acceleration. It was in Lower Egypt of the 12th, or maybe the 13th, Dynasty—I no longer remember which—that they amassed great piles of building material with the aid of temporal agents, whom we commonly called “time plants,” and raised the general level of architectural know-how, but owing to a lack of adequate supervision the plan miscarried. Briefly, instead of mass housing construction what we ended up with—in the framework of a cult of personality—was of no earthly use to anyone, i.e. tombs for various and sundry Pharaohs. I transported the entire team to Crete; that was how the palace of Minos came about. I don’t know if it’s true, but Betterpart told me that the exiles then quarreled, rose up against their former chief and put him in the Labyrinth. Not having checked the records, I can’t say for sure, but to me Hemdreisser doesn’t look like any Minotaur.
I decided to put a stop to this hit-and-run approach and requested the submission of proposals of a more long-range nature. We had to make up our minds whether to act openly or in secret, that is, whether the people of various periods should be at all allowed to discover that someone was helping them from outside history. Doddle, something of a liberal, was in favor of cryptochronism, which I too advocated. The alternative strategy would make it necessary to place all the nations of the Past under an open Protectorate, which couldn’t help but give them the feeling of being disenfranchised. Therefore we ought to offer assistance, but anonymously. Lado objected, he had in mind a plan for an ideal government, into which he wanted to pull and consolidate all societies.
I backed Doddle, who introduced me to one of the youngest and, presumably, best of his assistants; this graduate student, Otto Noy, was the inventor of monotheism. God, as he explained to me, was an idea which in itself could harm no one, yet would give
us
—the optimizers—a free hand, since according to the plan His decisions were to be ipso facto mysterious: the people wouldn’t be able to understand them, therefore they wouldn’t criticize, and neither would they suspect that anyone was tampering with their history—telechronically. Not a bad idea, on the face of it, but just to be safe I gave the young M. A. a small area only, to test his theory, and in a remote corner of the world at that, in Asia Minor; he could have at his disposal the tribe of Judah. His helper was one eng. historiologician Joseph Hobbs. A routine check revealed that they had committed a number of serious breaches. It was bad enough that Noy ordered 60,000 tons of pearl barley to be dropped during a desert outing of some Jews; the “discreet assistance” he was supposed to render them led to so much intervention (he opened and closed the Red Sea, sent remote-control locusts against the enemies of Judah), that the recipients of this patronage finally had their heads turned; they declared themselves a chosen people.
Invariably, whenever a plan went wrong in its realization, the planner, instead of changing tactics, would resort to more and more powerful stimuli. But Otto Noy outdid everyone when he used napalm. Why did I permit it, you ask? Permit it! I knew nothing about it! At the Institute’s proving ground he had demonstrated only the remote-control igniting of a bush, assuring us that that was the sort of thing he’d be doing in the past; you know, a few dried-up cactuses in the desert might burn, nothing more. This display, I suppose, was an attempt on his part to comply with moral norms. After banishing him to the Sinai Peninsula, I strictly forbade all the group directors to license any acts of a supernatural appearance. And of course what Noy and Hobbs did had historical repercussions.
But that was typical. Every telechronic intervention set off an avalanche of events, which couldn’t be held in check without appropriate measures, and those in turn produced new perturbations, and so on and so on. Otto Noy’s conduct in exile was highly improper, he capitalized on the fame he’d created for himself earlier, in the position of historiometrist. It’s true he was now no longer able to work his “miracles,” however the memory of them endured. As for Joe Hobbs, I know it’s been said that I had my time troopers lean on him, but that’s a lie. I’m not familiar with the facts of the case, there wasn’t time to bother about such details; but apparently he had fallen out with Otto Noy and the latter made things so hot for him that eventually it started the legend of job. The Jews came out the worst in this experiment, for by this time they firmly believed in their favored status, and consequently after the Project withdrew there was more than one bitter pill for them to swallow, both in their homeland and during the Diaspora. I won’t tell you what my enemies at the Project had to say about me on
that
particular subject.
At any rate the Project now entered the stage of its most difficult crises. I bear some of the blame for this, inasmuch as—giving in to Doddle and Lado—I permitted the betterment of history on a
broad front
, i.e. not in isolated moments and locations, but over the whole length of the historical time-line. That strategy of amelioration, called “integrated,” made a tangle of our scene of operations; in order to head off which, I placed groups of observers in each century, and also gave Lado the authority to organize a secret tempolice force, which would combat delinquency
in time.