Authors: Stanislaw Lem
Two individuals in gray floor-length cowls girded with rope opened a door made of rough boards, and there inside the cell, which was somewhat larger than the one where they had tried to twist my nose and ears off, stood a hooded man, clearly moved at the sight of me. After fifteen minutes of conversation I formed more or less the following picture of the situation: I was in the monastery of a local religious order, which either was hiding from some unknown persecution or else had been outlawed; they had mistaken me for an “entrapment” decoy, since my appearance, being an object of veneration to the Demolitian Friars, was prohibited by law. The prior, for it was the prior with whom I spoke, explained that had I in fact been a decoy, I would have been composed of segments which, upon the pulling of the inner cord (attached to the ear), should have fallen into little pieces. As for the second question which the interrogating monk (the elder brother gatekeeper) had put to me, he had thought that I represented a type of plastic manikin with a built-in pocket computer; it was only the x-rays that revealed the truth.
The prior, Father Dyzz Darg, apologized profusely for the results of that unfortunate misunderstanding and added that he was returning me my freedom, but didn’t advise going out on the surface, where I would surely find myself in serious danger—for I was censorable in my entirety. Nor would being fitted with a bowel sac and retractable liver stalks render me safe, untutored as I was in the use of such camouflage. The best thing for me to do, therefore, was to stay with the Demolitian Friars as their esteemed and welcome guest; to the extent of their all-too-modest abilities, they would try to make my confinement as unburdensome as possible.
I wasn’t particularly happy about this arrangement, yet the prior inspired my confidence with his stately bearing, his serenity, the pith of his utterances, though indeed I couldn’t accustom myself to his masked appearance, for he was dressed as all the other monks. I was hesitant to ply him with questions all at once, so we talked about the weather on Earth and on Dichotica—I had already told him whence I came—and then too about the tedium of cosmic travel, finally he said that he could well imagine my curiosity concerning local affairs, however there was no real hurry, seeing as how I was obliged in any case to hide myself from the long arm of the censor. I would receive, as an honored guest, his own cell, also a novice to provide whatever assistance or advice was necessary, besides which the entire monastic library stood open to me. And since it contained innumerable prohibita and incunabula found on blacklists and Indexes, the accident which had brought me to these catacombs might profit me more than if I had landed elsewhere.
I thought that we would part company now, for the prior rose, but instead he asked, almost timidly, if I would permit him—as he put it—to touch my actual person. With a deep sigh, as if in an excess of the greatest sorrow or some unfathomable regret, he placed his hard gloved fingers upon my nose, forehead, cheeks, and as he stroked my hair (I had the impression that the hand of that holy man was made of iron) he even started softly sobbing. These signs of pent emotion bewildered me completely. I didn’t know what to ask first, whether about the furniture run wild, or the centaur with the many legs, or this censorship he spoke of, but prudently restraining myself, I said nothing. The prior assured me that the brothers of the order would see to the camouflaging of my rocket, making it resemble organs suffering from elephantiasis, whereupon we parted with an exchange of civilities.
The cell I received was small but homey, with a bed—unfortunately—as hard as the devil. I assumed that this was the sort of stern rule the Demolitian Friars had, but it turned out later that they simply forgot to put down a pallet for me. So far I felt no other hunger than that for information; the young novice under whose charge I was brought me whole armfuls of historical and philosophical works; I pored over these till late at night. My reading was hampered at first by the fact that the lamp would sometimes come over, and sometimes leave for another corner of the room. Later on I learned that it went off to relieve itself but would return to its former position when whistled for.
The novice suggested I begin with a short but instructive outline of Dichotican history penned by one Abuz Gragz, the official historiographer, yet “objective enough for all that,” as he put it. I followed this counsel.
As recently as the year 2300 the Dichoticans were the exact counterpart of people. Though progress in the sciences was indeed accompanied by the secularization of life, Duism, a faith that had reigned practically unopposed for twenty centuries on Dichotica, left its mark on the subsequent course of civilization as well. Duism holds that every life knows
two
deaths, the one ahead and the one behind, or in other words that before birth and that following the final breath. The Dichotican theologians, later, would throw up their hands in amazement upon hearing from me that on Earth we didn’t think in this fashion, that there were churches which concerned themselves with one thing only, namely the hereafter ahead; that it was upsetting for people to think that someday they would be no longer, but not equally upsetting for them to consider the fact that earlier they had never been. This the good friars could not understand.
Duism had modified its doctrine in the space of a hundred years, but throughout maintained a lively interest in eschatological problems, and this was what led, in the lifetime of Professor Gragz, to the first attempts to launch an immortalization technology. As everyone knows, we die because we age, and we age, that is we undergo physical breakdown—through the loss of vital information; our cells in time forget how not to decay. Nature keeps only the germ cells supplied with this knowledge, for the others are of absolutely no concern to her. Aging, then, is the depletion of information essential for the maintenance of life.
Braddag Fizz, inventor of the first perpetuator, constructed a unit which, tending the human organism (I use the term “human” here, in speaking of the Dichoticans, purely for the sake of convenience), gathered every scrap of information lost by the somatic cells and instantly restored the same to them. The first Dichotican—Dgunder Brabz—on whom eternitization was performed, became immortal for only a year. Longer than that he couldn’t hold out, for a battery of sixty machines watched over him, penetrating every nook and cranny of his being with countless gold electrodes. Unable to move a muscle, he led a pitiful existence in the midst of a veritable factory (an “imperpetuitron”). Dobder Gwarg, the next immortal, could indeed walk about, though he was accompanied on his strolls by a column of heavy tractors laden with the necessary immortalizing equipment. He too committed suicide out of frustration.
Still the prevailing opinion was that with continued technological progress microperpetuators would eventually be developed, Haz Berdergar however demonstrated mathematically that a PUBE (Personal Umbilico-Bioeternitizer Ensemble) at the very least had to weigh 169 times more than the one perpetuated, to the extent of course that the latter conformed to a typically evolutional design. This because, as I said before and as even our own scientists know, Nature is solicitous about a handful of reproductive cells in each individual, and the rest can go hang.
Haz’s Proof made a powerful impression and plunged society deep into despair, for it was understood that the Mortality Barrier could not be crossed without at the same time abandoning the body which Nature had provided. In philosophy one reaction to Haz’s Proof was the famous doctrine of that great Dichotican sage Donderwarg. Spontaneous death, he wrote, can hardly be called natural. Natural is that which is fitting, mortality on the other hand constitutes an outrage, a disgrace of truly cosmic proportions. The commonness of the offense in no way mitigates its enormity. Nor, in assessing the offense, does it make the least difference whether or not the perpetrator can be apprehended. Nature has dealt with us deceitfully, sending innocent people off on a mission purportedly pleasant—in reality hopeless. In life the more one gains in wisdom, the nearer one draws to the pit.
No decent person ought associate with murderers, by the same token any collaboration with that greatest of criminals—Nature—is inexcusable. Yet what is burial but collaboration through a game of hide-and-seek? The point being to dispose of the body, as accomplices are wont to do; on the tombstones various inconsequential things are written, save the only one that is material: for if people would but dare to look the truth in the eye, they would be carving there instead a couple of the more pungent profanities, addressed to Mother Nature, for it is she who got us into this. Meanwhile no one breathes a word, as if a murderer clever enough always to get away with it deserved, for that, some special consideration. Not “memento mori” but “Estote ultores,” onward to immortality, that should be the cry, even if it means parting with our traditional appearance. Such was the ontological testament of that eminent philosopher.
As I finished reading this, the novice appeared, to invite me on behalf of the prior to partake of their humble fare. I dined in the prior’s exclusive company. Father Darg himself ate nothing, but only now and then sipped water from a crystal goblet. The repast was modest, table leg stew—a bit stringy. It seemed clear to me then that the furniture of the adjoining countryside, growing wild, turned predominantly to flesh. However I didn’t ask why it wouldn’t sooner turn to wood—the reading had set my mind on higher matters; thus came about my first conversation with the prior. The topic was theology.
He explained to me that Duism is a belief in God divested of all dogma, its articles of faith having been one by one destroyed in the course of various biotic revolutions. The Church’s most difficult crisis was brought on by the crumbling of the dogma of the immortal soul, immortal in the sense of the prospect of an everlasting life. In the 25th century this dogma was challenged by three successive technologies: the refrigerational, the reversional, and the psychoinceptive. The first consisted in turning a man into ice, the second in reversing the direction of an individual organism’s development, and the third—in the free manipulation of mind. The cryostatic challenge could be refuted easily enough by maintaining that the death into which a person fell when frozen, but was later revived, was not the death of which the Holy Scriptures spoke, where afterwards the soul flies off into the great beyond. Indeed, there was no other possible interpretation, for if we were dealing here with ordinary death, then obviously a resurrectee should have some knowledge of where he had been—in spirit—during the hundred or six hundred years of his decease.
Some theologians, e.g. Gauger Drebdar, felt that true death took place only upon decomposition (“and unto dust shalt thou return”), however this version didn’t hold up, what with the introduction of the so-called revivificational field, which could put together a living man precisely out of dust, i.e. from a body reduced to atoms, for in that case too the one revivified had absolutely no knowledge of his soul going anywhere in the interim. The dogma was preserved, then, only through the careful avoidance of any designation as to when death was sufficiently out-and-out for one to say, with certainty, that the soul had left the body. But then came reversible ontogeny; it hadn’t been intentionally leveled at religious doctrine, but proved invaluable for the removal of defects in fetal development: science had learned how to arrest this development and back it up, turning it around 180 degrees, in order to begin once more from the fertilized cell. Then suddenly the dogma of immaculate conception as well as that of the immortal soul were in serious trouble, and both at one blow, for thanks to retroembryological techniques it was now possible to move any specimen back through all its previous stages, and even to make the fertilized cell from which it sprang divide back into an egg and sperm.
This presented quite a problem, for according to dogma God created the soul at the moment of conception, but if one could reverse conception and thereby annul it, separating both its components, what then happened to the already created soul? One spin-off of this technology was cloning, that is, the inducing of any cell whatever, taken from the living body, say, from the nose, the heel, the lining of the palate, etc., to develop into a normal organism; and as this took place entirely without fertilization, we clearly had here the bioengineering of immaculate conception, which in due course was commercialized and applied on a mass scale. Embryogeny by now could also be slowed down, stepped up or deflected in such a way, as to turn the human fetus—for instance—into something simian. And what of the soul then, was it compressed and drawn out like an accordion, or, in the switching of the embryo from the human to the simian track, did it simply disappear somewhere along the line?
But dogma said that the soul, once created, could neither disappear nor be diminished, for it was an entity unto itself and indivisible. Consideration was already being given to the possibility of excommunicating these prenatal engineers, this however was not done, and rightly too, for ectogenesis had now become widespread. First no one to speak of, then no one at all was born of man and woman, but instead from a cell implanted in a uterator (an artificial womb), and one could hardly deny all humankind the sacraments on the grounds that it arose parthenogenetically, i.e. by virgin birth. Then along came, on top of this, the next technology—that of consciousness. The problem of the Ghost in the Machine, posed by intellectronics and its thinking computers, could be dealt with more or less, but it was followed by other problems, by minds and intelligences in liquids. Sentient, reasoning solutions were synthesized, and these could be bottled, poured, mixed, and after each time you ended up with a new personality, one often more spiritual and wiser than all the Dichoticans put together.
The question of whether a machine or fluid could possess a soul was the subject of much heated debate at the Ecumenical Council of 2479, till finally they promulgated there a new dogma, the dogma of Secondhand Creation, which stated that God had invested the intelligent beings of His making with the power to engender intelligence twice removed. But even that wasn’t an end to the transmutations, for it soon turned out that artificial mentalities could themselves produce others, successors, or even synthesize for reasons of their own not only creatures of humanoid appearance, but perfectly real people, using any old pile of material for that purpose. There were other attempts made later on to preserve the dogma of immortality, but these collapsed beneath the onslaught of subsequent discoveries, which in a veritable avalanche descended upon the 26th century; no sooner would a new interpretation be offered to bolster the beleaguered dogma, than a new technology arose to negate it.