The Star Diaries (28 page)

This led to a number of heresies and the springing up of sects, all of which stood in direct contradiction to universally acknowledged facts, meanwhile the Duistic Church kept in force one dogma only, that of Secondhand Creation, but as far as life after death went, and faith in the continuation of personal identity, it was no longer possible to stave off defeat, since neither personality nor individuality remained intact in
this
world. You could now mix two or more minds into one, with machines and solutions, and with people too; you could—thanks to functional noetics—produce whole worlds inside machines, worlds that gave rise to intelligent beings, beings which in turn were able within the confines of their prison to construct yet another generation of sentient entities; you could expand mentality, divide it, multiply it, factor it, retract it, and so on. The decline of dogma spelt the decline of the Church’s authority; hope in the world to come, despite assurances given earlier, was extinguished, at least for individual persons.

Seeing that theological progress wasn’t keeping up with technological, the Council of 2542 established the order of the Prognosticants, who were to engage in futurological research in the area of the holy faith. For the need to anticipate its further vicissitudes was pressing. The amorality of many new biotechniques alarmed not only the true believers; with modern cloning methods, for example, it was possible to produce—besides normal individuals—biological beings that were practically brainless, thus fit for mechanical tasks; possible even to upholster rooms and walls with suitably cultivated tissues that came from human or animal bodies; possible also to produce inserts, plugs, amplifiers as well as modulators of intelligence; to create states of mystical transport in a computer, in a fluid; to take a frog’s egg and turn it into a sage with the body of a man, or a sage with the body of an animal hitherto unknown, being specially designed by the experts in fetal architecture. There was strong opposition, and from secular quarters too, but to no avail.

All this Father Darg related with the utmost tranquility, as though he spoke of self-evident things, indeed for him they were self-evident, belonging as they did to Dichotican history. Countless questions came rushing to my lips, yet I did not wish to seem importunate, and so, retiring to my cell after supper, I sat down with the second volume of professor A. Gragz’s work. This one, as the annotation on the first page indicated, was forbidden.

I learned that in the year 2401 Byg Brogar, Dyrr Daagard and Merr Drr threw open the gates to limitless autoevolutionary freedom; these scholars earnestly believed that Homo Autofac Sapiens, the Self-made Man, made possible by their discovery, would achieve the ultimate in harmony and happiness, endowing himself with those aspects of form and qualities of spirit he judged to be most perfect, and break the Mortality Barrier itself if he so desired. In short, they displayed throughout the Second Biotic Revolution (it was to the first that we owed the seminal production of consumer goods), the kind of wild-eyed optimism so common in the history of science. For such hopes usually attend the appearance of any great and new technology.

At first autoevolutionary engineering, or—as they called it—the Fetalistic Movement, burgeoned in a way that seemed to accord with the expectations of its illustrious inventors. Ideals in health, congruity, spiritual and physical beauty became universalized, by constitutional law every citizen was guaranteed the right to acquire whatever psychic or somatic attributes were deemed the most desirable. Soon, too, all deformities and congenital defects, all ugliness and stupidity were rendered obsolete. But progress has this about it, that it is driven ever onward by its own advance, hence things did not stop there. The transformations that followed seemed innocent enough at the outset. Young women beautified themselves by the cultivation of epidermal jewelry and other efflorescences of the flesh (valentine ears, cuticle pearls), young men sported side and back beards, cockscomb crests, jaws with double bites, etc.

Twenty years later the first majority parties came into being. It took a while before I realized, reading, that “majority party” meant something different on Dichotica than it did to us. In opposition to the majority party platform, that called for the proliferation of anatomies, there was the minority group, which advocated reductionism, that is, the elimination of those organs considered by the minority leaders of various factions to be non-vital. I had just gotten to this fascinating place in the text, when suddenly my novice burst into the cell without knocking and, betraying great agitation, told me to collect my things at once, for the brother gatekeeper had sounded the alarm. I inquired what the trouble was; but he urged me to hurry, crying that there wasn’t a moment to lose. I had no personal effects, only the book, so putting it under my arm I ran after my guide.

In the underground refectory all the Demolitian Friars were working at a fever pitch; down a stone spout tumbled heaps of books, pushed from above by brethren librarians with poles, then loaded into vessels and with the greatest haste lowered down a well cut out of solid rock; before my very eyes the monks then stripped themselves naked and, as quickly as possible, threw their frocks and cowls also in the stone-cased opening; they were robots, all of them, and only roughly humanoid in form. Next they set to work on me, crowding around, gluing to my body strange appendages, balloon-shaped, snakelike, tails or limbs—I couldn’t tell which, so swiftly was it done. The prior himself set on my head a bowel sac, which looked somewhat like a blown-up, split-open cockroach; some were still gluing, others had begun painting me with bands or stripes; there being no mirror around nor shiny surface, I couldn’t see myself, but they seemed pleased with the overall effect.

Given a shove, I found myself in a corner, it was only then that I noticed I resembled more a quadruped, or perhaps even a sextuped, than any upright being. They told me to stay squatted and answer all questions, in the event that any were asked of me, with a baa. The next thing I knew, there was a fearful pounding at the door; the robot friars rushed over to some sort of apparatuses that had been dragged out into the middle of the refectory and which resembled (though not really) sewing machines, then the entire room was filled with the din of their simulated labor. Down the stone steps and towards us walked the inspectors. I nearly fell off all four of my feet when I got a good look at them. I didn’t know whether they were clothed or naked; each produced an altogether different impression.

All, I believe, had tails, tails that ended in a tuft of hair concealing a sizable fist; they carried them, as a rule, carelessly slung over the shoulder—to the extent that one could call a bulbous protuberance encircled with huge warts a shoulder; the skin in the middle of this bulge was white as milk; on it appeared stigmata in various colors—after a while I realized that they communicated not only by voice, but also by flashing, on that body screen of theirs, different captions and abbreviations. I tried counting their legs (?) and found that they had a minimum of two apiece, though there were also a couple of three-leggers and a fiver; it did seem however that the greater number of legs one had, the more he tended to trip. They went poking around the entire hall, examining the monks in a perfunctory way as the latter hunched over their machines and worked with the utmost intensity, till finally the head inspector, taller than the rest, and with an enormous orange membrane atop his bowel sac, which distended and glowed feebly when he spoke, ordered the short one—barely a biped, and with a skimpy tail: a clerk, no doubt—to have a look at the fripple winches. They jotted something down, took measurements, this without so much as a word to the robot friars, and were about to leave, when a greenish three-legger took notice of me; he tugged at one of my fringed extremities, so just in case I gave a quiet bleat.

“Eh, it’s that old thumnist, he’s certified bugs, let him be!” said the big one, brightening, and the little one quickly replied:

“Very good, Your Bodyship!”

With an instrument similar to a flashlight they made another tour of the refectory, but didn’t even bother with the well. More and more this looked to me like the carrying out of a formality. Ten minutes later they were gone, the machines went off into a dark corner, the monks began hoisting up the vessels, wrung out their soaking frocks, then hung them on a line to dry; the brother librarians shook their heads ruefully, for water had gotten into one of the leaky barrels, which meant they immediately had to sandwich blotting paper in between the soaked pages of those ancient texts; meanwhile the prior—that is, the father robot—I no longer knew just how or what to think of him—approached me with a smile and said that everything, praise be, had ended well, but in the future I must watch myself: here he pointed to the history book I had dropped in the general confusion. He himself had sat on it during the entire search.

“Then the possession of books is forbidden?” I asked.

“It depends on who is doing the possessing,” said the prior. “For us, yes! And especially those kinds of books! We are looked upon as old machines, unneeded ever since the First Biotic Revolution; they tolerate us, like everything else here in the catacombs, for such has been the custom—unofficial, mind you—since the reign of Glaubon.”

“And what is a ‘thumnist’?” I asked.

The prior seemed embarrassed.

“A follower of Bzugis Thumn, who governed some ninety years ago. It’s awkward for me to speak of this … an unfortunate thumnist did seek refuge among us, and so we took him in; he always sat in that corner, pretended—poor man—not to be in his right mind; thanks to which he was never held accountable and could say what he liked … last month he had himself frozen, to wait for ‘better days’ … so I thought that, in case of an emergency you understand, we might dress you up … yes? I was going to tell you, but didn’t have the chance. I didn’t expect a search so soon, they are irregular, but as of late fairly infrequent…”

Of this I understood not a word. At any rate I was now in store for a great deal of unpleasantness, since the glue used by the Demolitian Friars to disguise me as that thumnist held like the dickens and it felt as if they were pulling off those artificial wattle flaps and liver stalks along with pieces of my own flesh; I sweated, I groaned, till finally, more or less restored to human form, I turned in for the night. Later on, the prior suggested that I could be physically altered, in a reversible way of course, but when they showed me a picture of how that would look, I decided instead to risk remaining censorable; the officially prescribed shapes were not only monstrous in my eyes, but inconvenient in the highest degree. Lying down, for example, was an impossibility: one hung oneself up at night.

As it was late when I turned in, I hadn’t gotten the proper sleep when my young guardian awoke me by bringing breakfast into the cell. Now I understood better the trouble they went to on my account, for the brethren themselves ate nothing, and as for the water, they were probably battery-powered and needed distilled, but even so a few drops would hold them for the day, while in order to provide for me they had to venture out into the furniture grove. The dish this time was a well prepared armrest; if I say well prepared, it isn’t that it tasted good, but while eating I now made allowances for all the circumstances accompanying that culinary endeavor.

Still under the strong impression of last night’s raid, I was unable to connect it with what I had read so far in the history book, therefore immediately after breakfast I returned to my studies.

From the very beginning of autoevolution the camp of progressive anatomy was torn by sharp differences of opinion on basic issues. Conservative opposition had vanished a mere forty years after the moment of the great discovery; conservatives were now considered gloomy reactionaries. The progressives meanwhile had divided into the overnighters, the step-at-a-timers, the changelings, transmutes, effluvians, and many other parties whose names and platforms I cannot recall. The overnighters wanted the government to decide on a perfect anatomical prototype and put it into law at once. The step-at-a-timers, more critically inclined, felt that perfection could not be achieved in one fell swoop and therefore favored a deliberate approach to the ideal body, though it was not at all clear what course that approach ought to take, and above all, could it he—for the intervening generations—
disagreeable
? On this point they split into two factions. Others, like the transmutes and the changelings, maintained that there was merit in looking different for different occasions, and also, that man was no worse than the insects—if
they
could undergo several metamorphoses in a single lifetime, then why not he? A child, an adolescent, a young man, an older man could all personify fundamentally distinct designs. And as for the effluvians, they were the radicals; condemning the skeleton as hopelessly outmoded, they called for an end to all vertebrae and endorsed complete plasticity. An effluvian could physically shape or unshape himself at will; this was certainly practical in crowds, and also with regard to ready-made clothing of different sizes; some of them kneaded and rolled themselves out into the most peculiar forms, wishing to express—according to the situation and particular mood—their self-enmembered selves. Their opponents in the body politic contemptuously referred to them as blobsters.