Lem, Stanislaw (37 page)

question and thereby obtain the Ultimate Answers!"

"But how does one build such a

device?" I asked. "And how can you be sure, O illustrious

Klapaucius, that it won't respond by sending us packing in much the

same instamatic hyperstitial and so forth manner the original H. P.

L. D.'s employed, as you say, on your worthy person?"

"Leave that to me," he said.

"Rest assured, I shall learn the Great Mystery of the H. P. L.

D.'s, good Bonhomius, and you shall find the optimal way in which to

put your natural abhorrence of evil into action!"

You can imagine, kind sir, the great

joy that filled me upon hearing these words, and the eagerness with

which I assisted Klapaucius in the execution of his plan. As it

turned out, this digital device was none other than the famed

Gnostotron conceived by Chlorian Theoreticus the Proph just before

his lamentable demise, a machine able literally to contain the

Universe Itself within its innumerable memory banks.

(Klapaucius, however, was not satisfied with the name, and now and

then tried to think up others to christen it: the Omniac, the

Pansophoscope, APOC for All Purpose Ontologue Computer, or the

Mahatmatic 500, to mention a few.) In exactly one year and six days,

this mighty machine was completed, and so enormous was it, we

had to house it in Phlaphundria, the hollowed-out moon of the

Phlists-—and truly, an ant had been no more lost aboard an

ocean liner than we in the bowels of this binary behemoth, among its

endless coils and cables, eschatological toggles and transformers,

those hagiopneumatic rectifiers and tempta-tional resistors. I

confess my wire hair stood on end and my laminated alternator skipped

a beat when my distinguished mentor sat me down before the Central

Control Console and left me face-to-face with this awesome, towering

thing. The flashing lights that played across its panels were like

the very stars in the firmament; everywhere were signs that read

danger: highly ineffable!; and potentiometers, their dials spinning

wildly, showed logic and semantic fields building up to unheard-of

levels of intensity. Beneath my feet heaved a sea of preternatural

and pretermechanical wisdom, wisdom that swirled like a spell through

parsecs of circuitry and megahectares of magnets, swirled and

surrounded me on every side, that I felt, in my shameful ignorance,

of no more consequence than a mere mote of dust. I overcame this

weakness only by recalling my lifelong love of Good, the passion I

had conceived for Truth and Beauty when little more than a gleam in

my constructor's oscilloscope. Thus fortified, I managed to stammer

out the first question: "Speak, what manner of machine art

thou?"

A hot wind then arose from its glowing

tubes, and there came a voice from that wind, a whispering thunder

that seared me to the core, and the voice said:

Ego
sum Ens Omnipotens,

saecula saeculorum
litterus opera omnia cognoscens,
et
caetera, et caetera.

Such was my fright upon hearing this

reply, that I was quite unable to continue the interrogation until

Klapaucius returned and reduced the EMF (epistemotive force) to one

billionth of its voltage by adjusting the theostats. Then I asked the

Gnostotron if it would be so kind as to answer questions touching the

Highest Possible Level of Development and its Terrible Secret.

But Klapaucius said that that was not the way: one should instead

request the Ontologue Computer to model within its silver and crystal

depths a single inhabitant of that square planet, and at the same

time provide the model with an adequate degree of loquacity. This

promptly done, we were ready to begin in earnest.

Still I quaked and quailed and could

hardly speak, so Klapaucius took my place before the Central Control

Console and said:

"What are you?"

"I already answered that,"

snapped the machine, clearly annoyed.

"I mean, are you man or robot?"

explained Klapaucius.

"And what, according to you, is

the difference?" said the machine.

"Look, if you're going to answer

questions with questions, we'll get absolutely nowhere," said

Klapaucius sternly. "You know what I'm after, all right. Start

talking!"

Though I was appalled at the tone he

took with the machine, it did seem to work, for the machine

said:

"Sometimes men build robots,

sometimes robots build men. What does it matter, really, whether one

thinks with metal or with protoplasm? As for myself, I can assume

whatever substance and shape I choose—or rather, used to

assume, for we no longer indulge in such trifles."

"Indeed," said Klapaucius.

"Then why do you lie around all day and do nothing?"

"And what exactly are we supposed

to do?" the machine replied. At this, Klapaucius grew angry and

said:

"How should I know? We in the

lower levels of development do all sorts of things."

"We did too, in our day."

"But not now?"

"Not now."

"Why not?"

Here the computerized H. P. L. D.

representative balked, saying he had already endured six million such

interrogations and neither he nor his questioners ever profited

from them in the least. But after Klapaucius had raised the

loquacity a little and opened a valve here and there, the voice

answered:

"A trillion years ago we were a

civilization like any other. We believed in the transmittance of

souls, the Virgin Matrix, the infallibility of Pi Squared,

looked upon prayer as regenerative feedback to the Great Programmer,

and so on and so forth. But then skeptics appeared, empiricists and

accidentalists, and in nine centuries they came to the conclusion

that There's No One Up There At All and consequently things

happen not out of any higher plan or purpose, but—well,

they just happen."

"Just happen?" I could not

help but exclaim. "What do you mean?"

"There are, on occasion, deformed

robots," said the voice. "If you should be afflicted with a

hump, for example, but firmly believe the Almighty somehow needs your

hump to realize His Cosmic Design and that it was therefore ordained

along with the rest of Creation, why, then you may be easily

reconciled to your deformity. If, however, they tell you that it's

merely the result of a misplaced molecule, an atom or two that

happened to go the wrong way, then nothing remains for you but

to bay at the moon."

"But a hump may be straightened,"

I protested, "and really any deformity corrected, given a high

enough level of science!"

"Yes, I know," sighed the

machine. "That's how it appears to the ignorant and

simple-minded…"

"You mean, that isn't true?"

Klapaucius and I cried, astounded.

"When a civilization starts

straightening humps," said the machine, "believe me,

there's no end to it! You straighten humps, then you repair and

amplify the mind, make suns rectilinear, give planets legs, fabricate

fates and fortunes of all kinds… Oh, it begins innocently

enough, like discovering fire by rubbing two sticks together, but

eventually it leads to the construction of Omniacs, Deifacts,

Hyperboreons and Ultimathuloriums! The desert on our planet is in

reality no desert, but a Gigagnostotron, in other words a good 10
⁹
times more powerful than this primitive device of yours. Our

ancestors created it for the simple reason that anything else would

have been too easy for them; in their megalomania they thought to

make the very sand beneath their feet intelligent. Quite pointless,

for there is absolutely no way to improve upon perfection. Can you

understand that, O ye of little development?!"

"Yes, of course," said

Klapaucius, while I quaked and quailed. "Yet why, instead of at

least engaging in some stimulating activity, do you sprawl in that

ingenious sand and only scratch yourselves from time to time?"

"Omnipotence is most omnipotent

when one does nothing!" answered the machine. "You

climb to reach the summit, but once there, discover that all

roads lead down! We are, after all, sensible folk, why should we want

to
do
anything? Our ancestors, true, turned our sun

into a cube and made a box of our planet, arranging its mountains in

a monogram, but that was only to test their Gnostotron. They could

have just as easily assembled the stars in a checkerboard,

extinguished half the heavens and lit up the other half, constructed

beings peopled with lesser beings, giants whose thoughts would be the

intricate dance of a million pygmies, and they could have redesigned

the galaxies, revised the laws of time and space-—but tell

me, what sense would there have been to any of this? Would the

universe be a better place if stars were triangular, or comets went

around on wheels?"

"That's ridiculous!!"

Klapaucius shouted, highly indignant, while I quaked and quailed

all the more. "If you are truly gods, your duty is clear:

immediately banish all the misery and misfortune that oppresses other

sentient beings! You could at least begin with your poor

neighbors—I've seen with my own eyes how they batter one

another! But no, you'd rather lie around all day and pick your noses,

and insult honest travelers in search of knowledge with your

indecent elves in abdomens and messages in ears!"

"Really, you have no sense of

humor," said the machine. "But enough of that. If I

understand you correctly, you wish us to bestow happiness upon

everyone. Well, we devoted over fifteen millennia to that project

alone—that is, eudaemonic tectonics, of which there are

basically two schools, the sudden and revolutionary, and the slow and

evolutionary. Evolutionary eudaemonic tectonics consists

essentially in not lifting a finger to help, confident that every

civilization will eventually muddle through on its own.

Revolutionary solutions, on the other hand, boil down to either

the Carrot or the Stick. The Stick, or bestowing happiness by force,

is found to produce from one to eight hundred times more grief than

no interference whatever. As for the Carrot, the results—believe

it or not—are exactly the same, and that, whether you use an

Ultradeifact, Hypergnostotron, or even an Infernal Machine and

Gehennerator. You've heard, perhaps, of the Crab Nebula?"

"Certainly," said

Klapaucius. "It's the remnants of a supernova that exploded

long ago…"

"Supernova, he says,"

muttered the voice. "No, my well-wishing friend, there was a

planet there, a fairly civilized planet as planets go, flowing with

the usual quantity of blood, sweat and tears. Well, one morning we

dropped eight hundred million transistorized Universal Wish Granters

on that planet, but were no more than a light-week out on our way

home, when suddenly it blew up—and the bits and pieces are

flying apart to this day! The very same thing happened with the

planet of the Hominates… care to hear of that?"

"No, don't bother," replied

a morose Klapaucius.—But I refuse to believe it's impossible,

with a little ingenuity, to make others happy!"

"Believe what you like! We tried

it sixty-four thousand five hundred and thirteen times. The hair on

every one of my heads stands on end when I think of the results. Oh,

we spared no pains for the good of our fellow-creature! We devised a

special telescanner for observing dreams, though you realize of

course that if, say, a religious war were raging on some planet and

each side dreamt only of massacring the other, it would hardly be to

our purpose to make such dreams come true! We had to bestow

happiness, then, without violating any Higher Laws. The problem

was further complicated by the fact that most cosmic civilizations

long for things, in the depths of their souls, they would never