The Cyberiad Part 2

The First Sally

Or The Trap of Gargantius

When the Universe was not so out of whack as it is today, and all the stars were lined up in their proper places, so you could easily count them from left to right, or top to bottom, and the larger and bluer ones were set apart, and the smaller, yellowing types pushed off to the corners as bodies of a lower grade, when there was not a speck of dust to be found in outer s.p.a.ce, nor any nebular debris-in those good old days it was the custom for constructors, once they had received their Diploma of Perpetual Omnipotence withdis-tinction, to sally forth ofttimes and bring to distant lands the benefit of their expertise.

And so it happened that, in keeping with this ancient custom, Trurl and Klapaucius, who could kindle or extinguish suns as easily as sh.e.l.ling peas, did venture out on such a voyage. When the vastness of the traveled void had erased in them all recollection of their native skies, they saw a planet up ahead-not too little, not too big, just about right-with one continent only, down the middle of which ran a bright red line: everything on one side was yellow, everything on the other, pink. Realizing at once that here were two neighboring kingdoms, the con-structors held a brief council of war before landing.

"With two kingdoms," said Trurl, "it's best you take one, and I the other. That way n.o.body's feelings get hurt."

"Fine," said Klapaucius. "But what if they ask for mili-tary aid? Such things happen."

"True, they could demand weapons, even superweapons," Trurl agreed. "We'll simply refuse."

"And if they insist, and threaten us?" returned Klapaucius. "This too can happen."

"Let's see," said Trurl, switching on the radio. It blared martial music, a rousing march.

"I have an idea," said Klapaucius, turning it off. "We can use the Gargantius Effect.

What do you think?"

"Ah, the Gargantius Effect!" cried Trurl. "I never heard of anyone actually using it.

But there's always a first time. Yes, why not?"

"We'll both be prepared to use it," Klapaucius explained. "But it's imperative that we use it together, otherwise we're in serious trouble."

"No problem," said Trurl. He took a small golden box out of his pocket and opened it.

Inside, on velvet, lay two white beads. "You keep one, I'll keep the other. Look at yours every evening; if it turns pink, that'll mean I've started and you must too."

"So be it," said Klapaucius and put his bead away. Then they landed, shook hands and set off in opposite directions.

The kingdom to which Trurl repaired was ruled by King Atrocitus. He was a militarist to the core, and an incredible miser besides. To relieve the royal treasury, he did away with all punishments except for the death sentence. His favorite occupation was to abolish unnecessary offices; since that included the office of executioner, every condemned citizen was obliged to do his own beheading, or else-on rare occasions of royal clemency-have it done by his next of kin. Of the arts Atrocitus supported only those that entailed little expense, such as choral recitation, chess and military calisthenics. The art of war he held in particularly high esteem, for a victorious campaign brought in excellent returns; on the other hand, one could properly prepare for war only during an interval of peace, so the King advocated peace, though in moderation. His greatest reform was the nationalization of high treason. As the neighboring kingdom was continually sending spies, he created the office of Royal Informer, who, through a staff of subordinate traitors, would hand over State secrets to enemy agents for certain sums of money. Though as a rule the agents purchased only outdated secrets-those were less expensive and besides, they were held accountable to their own treasury for every penny spent.

The subjects of Atrocitus rose early, were well-behaved, and worked long hours. Theywove fascines and gabions for fortifications, made guns and denunciations. In order that the kingdom not be flooded with the latter (which in fact had happened during the reign of Bartholocaust the Wall-eyed several hundred years before), whoever wrote too many denunciations was required to pay a special luxury tax. In this way they were kept at a reasonable level. Arriving at the Court of Atrocitus, Trurl offered his services. The King- not surprisingly-wanted powerful instruments of war. Trurl asked for a few days to think it over, and as soon as he was alone in the little cubicle they had a.s.signed to him, he looked at the bead in the golden box. It was white but, as he looked, turned slowly pink.

"Aha," he said to him-self, "time to start with Gargantius!" And without further delay he took out his secret formulae and set to work.

Klapaucius meanwhile found himself in the other king-dom, which was ruled by the mighty King Ferocitus. Here everything looked quite different than in Atrocia. This mon-arch too delighted in campaigns and marches, and he too spent heavily on armaments-but in an enlightened way, for he was a most generous lord and a great patron of the arts. He loved uniforms, gold braid, stripes and ta.s.sels, spurs, brigadiers with bells, destroyers, swords and chargers. A person of keen sensibilities, he trembled every time he chris-tened a new destroyer. And he lavishly rewarded paintings of battle scenes, patriotically paying according to the num-ber of fallen foes depicted, so that, on those endless pano-ramic canvases with which the kingdom was packed, moun-tains of enemy dead reached up to the sky. In practice he was an autocrat, yet with libertarian views; a martinet, yet magnanimous. On every anniversary of his coronation he inst.i.tuted reforms. Once he ordered the guillotines decked with flowers, another time had them oiled so they wouldn't squeak, and once he gilded the executioners' axes and had them all resharpened-out of humanitarian considerations. Ferocitus was not overly dainty, yet he did frown upon excesses, and therefore by special decree regulated and standardized all wheels, racks, spikes, screws, chains and clubs. Beheadings of wrongthinkers-a rare enough event- took place with pomp and pageantry, bra.s.s bands, speeches, parades and floats. This high-minded monarch also had a theory, which he put into action, and this was the Theory of Universal Happiness. It is well known, certainly, that one does not laugh because one is amused, but rather, one is amused because one laughs. If then everyone maintains that things just couldn't be better, att.i.tudes immediately im-prove. The subjects of Ferocitus were thus required, for their own good, to go about shouting how wonderful every-thing was, and the old, indefinite greeting of "h.e.l.lo" was changed by the King to the more emphatic "Hallelujah!" -though children up to the age of fourteen were permitted to say, "Wow!" or "Whee!", and the old-timers, "Swell!"

Ferocitus rejoiced to see his people in such good spirits. Whenever he drove by in his destroyer-shaped carriage, crowds in the street would cheer, and whenever he gra-ciously waved his royal hand, those up front would cry: "Wow!"-"Hallelujah!"-"Terrific!" A democrat at heart, he liked to stop and chat awhile with old soldiers who had been around and seen much, liked to hear tales of derring-do told at bivouacs, and often, when some foreign dignitary came for an audience, he would out of the blue clap him on the knee with his baton and bellow: "Have at them!"-or: "Swiggle the mizzen there, mates!"-or: "Thunderation!" For there was nothing he loved so much or held so dear as gumption, crust and pluck, roughness and toughness, pow-der, chowder, hardtack, grog and ammo. And so, whenever he was melancholy, he had his troops march by before him, singing: "Screw up yer courage, nuts to the foe"-"When currents lag, crank out the flag"-"We'll sc.r.a.p, stout lads, until we're nought but sc.r.a.p"-or the rousing anthem: "Lock, stock, and barrel." And he commanded that, when he died, the old guard should sing his favorite song over the grave: "Old Robots Never Rust."Klapaucius did not get to the court of this great ruler all at once. At the first village he came to, he knocked on sev-eral doors, but no one opened up. Finally he noticed in the deserted street a small child; it approached him and asked in a thin, high voice: "Wanna buy any, mister? They're cheap."

"What are you selling?" inquired Klapaucius, surprised.

"State secrets," replied the child, lifting the edge of its smock to give him a glimpse of some mobilization plans. This surprised Klapaucius even more, and he said: "No, thank you, my little one. But can you tell me where I might find the mayor?"

"What'cha want the mayor for?" asked the child.

"I wish to speak with him."

"In secret?"

"It makes no difference."

"Need a secret agent? My dad's a secret agent. Depend-able and cheap."

"Very well then, take me to your dad," said Klapaucius, seeing he would get nowhere with the child. The child led him to one of the houses. Inside, though it was in the mid-dle of the day, a family sat around a lighted lamp-a gray grandfather in a rocking chair, a grandmother knitting socks, and their fully grown and numerous progeny, each busy at his own household task. As soon as Klapaucius entered, they jumped up and seized him; the knitting needles turned out to be handcuffs, the lamp a microphone, and the grand-mother the local chief of police.

"They must have made a mistake," thought Klapaucius, when he was beaten and thrown in jail. Patiently he waited through the night-there was nothing else he could do.

The dawn came and revealed the cobwebs on the stone walls of his cell, also the rusted remains of previous prisoners. After a length of time he was taken and interrogated. It turned out that the little child as well as the houses-the whole village, in fact-all of it was a plant to trick foreign spies. But Klapaucius did not have to face the rigors of a long trial; the proceedings were quickly over. For attempting to estab-lish contact with the informer-dad the punishment was a third-cla.s.s guillotining, because the local administration had already allotted funds to buy out enemy agents for that fiscal year, and Klapaucius, on his part, repeatedly refused to purchase any State secrets from the police. Nor did he have sufficient ready cash to mitigate the offense. Still, the prisoner continued to protest his innocence-not that the judge believed a word of it; even if he had, to free him lay outside his jurisdiction. So the case was sent to a higher court, and in the meantime Klapaucius was subjected to torture, though more as a matter of form than out of any real necessity. In about a week his case took a turn for the better; finally acquitted, he proceeded to the Capitol where, after receiving instructions in the rules and regulations of court etiquette, he obtained the honor of a private audience with the King.

They also gave him a bugle, for every citizen was obliged to announce his comings and goings in official places with appropriate flourishes, and such was the iron discipline of that land, that the sun was not considered risen without the blowing of reveille.

Ferocitus did in fact demand new weapons. Klapaucius promised to fulfill this royal wish; his plan, he a.s.sured the King, represented a radical departure from the accepted principles of military action. What kind of army-he asked first-always emergedvictorious? The one that had the finest leaders and the best disciplined soldiers. The leader gave the orders, the soldier carried them out; the former therefore had to be wise, the latter obedient. However, to the wisdom of the mind, even of the military mind, there were certain natural limits. A great leader, moreover, could come up against an equally great leader. Then too, he might fall in battle and leave his legion leaderless, or do something even more dreadful, since he was, as it were, professionally trained to think, and the object of his thoughts was power. Was it not dangerous to have a host of old generals in the field, their rusty heads so packed with tactics and strategy that they started pining for the throne? Had not more than one kingdom come to grief thereby? It was clear, then, that leaders were a necessary evil; the problem lay in making that evil unnecessary. To go on: the discipline of an army con-sisted in the precise execution of orders. Ideally, we would have a thousand hearts and minds molded into one heart, one mind, one will. Military regimens, drills, exercises and maneuvers all served this end. The ultimate goal was thus an army that literally acted as one man, in itself both creator and executor of its objectives. But where was the embodi-ment of such perfection to be found? Only in the individ-ual, for no one was obeyed as willingly as one's own self, and no one carried out orders as cheerfully as the one who gave those orders. Nor could an individual be dispersed, and insubordination or mutiny against himself was quite out of the question. The problem then was to take this eagerness to serve oneself, this self-wors.h.i.+p which marked the individ-ual, and make it a property of a force of thousands. How could this be done? Here Klapaucius began to explain to the keenly interested King the simple ideas-for are not all things of genius simple?-discovered by the great Gargantius.

Into each recruit (he explained) a plug is screwed in front, a socket in back. Upon the command "Close up those ranks!" the plugs and sockets connect and, where only a moment before you had a crowd of civilians, there stands a battalion of perfect soldiers.

When separate minds, hith-erto occupied with all sorts of nonmartial nonsense, merge into one regimental consciousness, not only is there auto-matic discipline, for the army has become a single fighting machine composed of a million parts-but there is also wisdom. And that wisdom is directly proportional to the numbers involved. A platoon possesses the ac.u.men of a master sergeant; a company is as shrewd as a lieutenant colonel, a brigade smarter than a field marshal; and a divi-sion is worth more than all the army's strategists and spe-cialists put together. In this way one can create formations of truly staggering perspicacity. And of course they will follow their own orders to the letter.

This puts an end to the vagaries and reckless escapades of individuals, the de-pendence on a particular commander's capabilities, the con-stant rivalries, envies and enmities between generals. And detachments, once joined, should not be put asunder, for that produces nothing but confusion. "An army whose only leader is itself-this is my idea!"

Klapaucius concluded. The King was much impressed with his words and finally said: "Return to your quarters. I shall consult my general staff..."

"Oh, do not do this, Your Royal Highness!" exclaimed the clever Klapaucius, feigning great consternation. "That is exactly what the Emperor Turbulon did, and his staff, to protect their own positions, advised him against it; shortly thereafter, the neighbor of Turbulon, King Enamuel, at-tacked with a revolutionized army and reduced the empire to ashes, though his forces were eight times smaller!"

Whereupon he bowed, went to his room and inspected the little bead, which was red as a beet; that meant Trurl had done likewise at the court of Atrocitus. The King soon ordered Klapaucius to revolutionize one platoon of infantry; joined in spirit and now entirely of one mind, this tiny unit cried, "Kill, kill!" swooped down on three squadrons of the King's dragoons, who were armed to the teeth and led moreover by six distinguishedlecturers of the Academy of the General Staff-and cut them to ribbons. Great was the grief of the generals, marshals, admirals and command-ers in chief, for the King sent them all into a speedy retire-ment; fully convinced of the efficacy of Klapaucius'

inven-tion, he ordered the entire army revolutionized.

And so munitions electricians worked day and night, turn-ing out plugs and sockets by the carload, and these were installed as necessary in all the barracks. Covered with medals, Klapaucius rode from garrison to garrison and super-vised everything. Trurl fared similarly in the kingdom of Atrocitus, except that, due to that monarch's well-known parsimony, he had to content himself with the lifelong t.i.tle of Great Betrayer of the Fatherland. Both kingdoms were now preparing for war. In the heat of mobilization, conven-tional as well as nuclear weapons were brought into battle trim, and cannons and atoms subjected to the utmost spit and polish, as per regulations. Their work now all but done, the two constructors packed their bags in secret, to be ready to meet, when the time came, at the appointed place near the s.h.i.+p they had left in the forest.

Meanwhile miracles were taking place among the rank and file, particularly in the infantry. Companies no longer had to practice their marching drills, nor did they need to count off to learn their number, just as one who has two legs never mistakes his right for his left, nor finds it neces-sary to calculate how many of himself there are. It was a joy to see those new units do the Forward March, About Face and Company Halt; and afterwards, when they were dismissed, they took to chatting, and later, through the open windows of the barracks one could hear voices boom-ing in chorus, disputing such matters as absolute truth, a.n.a.lytic versus synthetic a priori propositions, and the Thing-in-itself, for their collective minds had already at-tained that level. Various philosophical systems were ham-mered 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 rea.s.signed to units that firmly adhered to epistemological realism. At about the same time, in the kingdom of Atrocitus, the sixth amphibi-ous division forsook naval operations for navel contempla-tion 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 inexor-able 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 but-terflies, 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 more-over 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 mult.i.tude of com-plexes, which often happens to overly developed intellects, and it became necessary to a.s.sign to each a special psychi-atric 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 regi-ments of shock troops, supported by a battery of howitzers and two backup battalions, composed, with the a.s.sistance of a firing squad, a sonnet ent.i.tled "On the Mystery of Be-ing," and this took place during guard duty. There was con-siderable confusion in both armies; the Eightieth Marlabardian Corps, forinstance, maintained that the whole con-cept of "enemy" needed to be more clearly defined, as it was full of logical contradictions and might even be alto-gether 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 gal-loped up to the corps in question, before he could discover the cause of the disturbance, instantly lost his ident.i.ty in the corporate ident.i.ty, and the kings were left without ad-jutants 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 bra.s.s 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 bom-bardiers and grenadiers, commandos, lancers, gunners, snip-ers, 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 mathemati-cal 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 a.s.sumed 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 s.h.i.+p, since that which they had planned had come to pa.s.s: 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 no-where. 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 didincor-rectly. As is related earlier in this volume, the machine also proved to be extremely stubborn, and the quarrel that en-sued between it and its creator almost cost the latter his life. From that time on Klapaucius teased Trurl unmerci-fully, making comments at every opportunity, until Trurl decided to silence him once and for all by building a ma-chine 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 con-struction of the machine itself was child's play in compari-son 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 pro-grammed 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 fas.h.i.+oned 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 (Alb.u.minidis sapienria), which be-gat 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 hun-dred million years back to the middle of the Mesozoic, when after going from fish to amphibian to reptile to mam-mal, 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 every-thing 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 ma-chine 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 be-ings 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 theway of scientific fanaticism. At last the programs were ready; all that remained was to pick out the most applicable-else the electropoet's educa-tion 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 bypa.s.sed half the logic circuits and made the emotive more electromotive; the ma-chine sobbed, went into hysterics, then finally said, blub-bering terribly, what a cruel, cruel world this was. Trurl in-tensified the semantic fields and attached a strength of char-acter 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 medi-tate upon the meaning of existence. Trurl installed a philo-sophical 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 Uni-verse 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 dest.i.tute 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 up, through, life was beautiful but men were such beasts and how sorry they'd all be when it was dead and gone. Then it asked for pen and paper. Trurl sighed with relief, switched it off and went to bed. The next morn-ing he went to see Klapaucius. Klapaucius, hearing that he was invited to attend the debut of Trurl's electronic bard, dropped everything and followed-so eager was he to be an eyewitness to his friend's humiliation.

Trurl let the machine warm up first, kept the power low, ran up the metal stairs several times to take readings (the machine was like the engine of a giant steamer, galleried, with rows of rivets, dials and valves on every tier)-till finally, satisfied all the decimal places were where they ought to be, he said yes, it was ready now, and why not start with something simple. Later, of course, when the machine had gotten the feel of it, Klapaucius could ask it to produce poetry on absolutely whatever topic he liked.

Now the potentiometers indicated the machine's lyrical capacitance was charged to maximum, and Trurl, so nervous his hands were shaking, threw the master switch. A voice, slightly husky but remarkably vibrant and bewitching, said:"Phlogisticosh. Rh.o.m.othriglyph. Floof."

"Is that it?" inquired Klapaucius after a pause, extremely polite. Trurl only bit his lip, gave the machine a few kicks of current, and tried again. This time the voice came through much more clearly; it was a thrilling baritone, sol-emn yet intriguingly sensual: Pev't o' tay merlong gumin gots, Untie yun furly pazzen ye, Confre an' ayzor, ayzor ots, Bither de furloss bochre blee!

"Am I missing something?" said Klapaucius, calmly watching a panic-stricken Trurl struggling at the controls.

Finally Trurl waved his arms in despair, dashed clattering several flights up the metal stairs, got down on all fours and crawled into the machine through a trapdoor; he ham-mered away inside, swearing like a maniac, tightened some-thing, pried at something, crawled out again and ran franti-cally to another tier. At long last he let out a cry of triumph, threw a burnt tube over his shoulder-it bounced off the railing and fell to the floor, shattering at the feet of Klapau-cius. But Trurl didn't bother to apologize; he quickly put in a new tube, wiped his hands on a chammy cloth and hollered down for Klapaucius to try it now. The following words rang out: Mockles! Fent on silpen tree, Blockards three a-feening, Mockles, what silps came to thee In thy pantry dreaming?

"Well, that's an improvement!" shouted Trurl, not en-tirely convinced. "The last line particularly, did you notice?"

"If this is all you have to show me..." said Klapaucius, the very soul of politeness.

"d.a.m.n!" said Trurl and again disappeared inside the ma-chine. There was a fierce banging and clanging, the sputter-ing of shorted wires and the muttering of an even shorter temper, then Trurl stuck his head out of a trapdoor on the third story and yelled,"Now try it!"

Klaupaucius complied. The electronic bard shuddered from stem to stern and began: Oft, in that wickless chalet all begorn, Where whilom soughed the mossy sappertort And you were wont to bong- Trurl yanked out a few cables in a fury, something rattled and wheezed, the machine fell silent. Klapaucius laughed so hard he had to sit on the floor. Then suddenly, as Trurl was rus.h.i.+ng back and forth, there was a crackle, a clack, and the machine with perfect poise said: The Petty and the Small; Are overcome with gall ; When Genius, having faltered, fails to fall.

Klapaucius too, I ween, Will turn the deepest green To hear such flawless verse from Trurl's machine.

"There you are, an epigram! And wonderfully apropos!" laughed Trurl, racing down the metal stairs and flinging himself delightedly into his colleague's arms. Klapaucius, quite taken aback, was no longer laughing.

"What, that?" he said. "That's nothing. Besides, you had it all set up beforehand."

"Setup?!"

"Oh, it's quite obvious... the ill-disguised hostility, the poverty of thought, the crudeness of execution."

"All right, then ask it something else! Whatever you like! Go on! What are you waiting for? Afraid?!"

"Just a minute," said Klapaucius, annoyed. He was try-ing to think of a request as difficult as possible, aware that any argument on the quality of the verse the machine might be able to produce would be hard if not impossible to settle either way. Suddenly he brightened and said:"Have it compose a poem-a poem about a haircut! But lofty, n.o.ble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribu-tion, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!!"

"And why not throw in a full exposition of the general theory of nonlinear automata while you're at it?" growled Trurl. "You can't give it such idiotic-"

But he didn't finish. A melodious voice filled the hall with the following: Seduced, s.h.a.ggy Samson snored.

She scissored short. Sorely shorn, Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed, Silently scheming, Sightlessly seeking Some savage, spectacular suicide.

"Well, what do you say to that?" asked Trurl, his arms folded proudly. But Klapaucius was already shouting: "Now all in g! A sonnet, trochaic hexameter, about an old cyclotron who kept sixteen artificial mistresses, blue and radioactive, had four wings, three purple pavilions, two lacquered chests, each containing exactly one thousand medallions bearing the likeness of Czar Murdicog the Head-less..."

"Grinding gleeful gears, Gerontogyron grabbed / Giggling gynecobalt-6o golems,"

began the machine, but Trurl leaped to the console, shut off the power and turned, defending the machine with his body.

"Enough!" he said, hoa.r.s.e with indignation. "How dare you waste a great talent on such drivel? Either give it decent poems to write or I call the whole thing off!"

"What, those aren't decent poems?" protested Klapau-cius.

"Certainly not! I didn't build a machine to solve ridicu-lous crossword puzzles! That's hack work, not Great Art! Just give it a topic, any topic, as difficult as you like..."

Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Finally he nodded and said: "Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor alge-bra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cyber-netic spirit."

"Love and tensor algebra? Have you taken leave of your senses?" Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming:Come, let us hasten to a higher plane, Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn, Their indices bedecked from one to n, Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

Come, every frustum longs to be a cone, And every vector dreams of matrices.

Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze: It whispers of a more erG.o.dic zone.

In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach s.p.a.ce Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways Our asymptotes no longer out of phase, We shall encounter, counting, face to face.

I'll grant thee random access to my heart, Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love; And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove, And in our bound part.i.tion never part.

For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel, Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler, Wielding their compa.s.ses, their pens and rulers, Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?

Cancel me not-for what then shall remain?

Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes, A root or two, a torus and a node:The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!