Lem, Stanislaw (28 page)

eldest, untied their prisoner and began to beat him savagely, yelling

one after the other:

—Take that for the Prophecy of

Happiness! And that for the Perfection of Being! And have that for

the Bed of Roses, and that for the Bowl of Cherries! And the Clover

of Existence! And that's for the Altruistic Communality! And

take that for the Soarings of the Spirit!

And they cudgeled and buffeted him so,

that he surely would have given up the ghost had I not lifted my

weapon from the straw, announcing in this way my presence. When they

had released their victim, I asked them why they were abusing thus an

individual who was neither an outlaw nor worthless vagabond, for,

judging by the ruff and color of his doublet, this was some sort of

scholar. The Legarians wavered and looked longingly at the guns

they had left at the door, but when I cocked the actuator and

scowled, they thought better of it and, nudging one another, asked

the large one, the one with the deep bass, to speak for them all.

—Know, O strange foreigner—he

said, turning to me—it is not with common thrugs, tuffians or

juggermuggers that you deal, or other degenerators of the robot

species, for though a cellar hardly seems a savory place, what passes

within these walls is to the highest degree praiseworthy and a thing

of beauty!

—Praiseworthy and a thing of

beauty?!—I exclaimed. —What are you telling me, O base

Legarian? Did I not see with my own eyes how you hurled yourselves

upon the red-doubleted one and belabored him with such murderous

blows, that the very oil did spatter from your joints? And you dare

call this a thing of beauty!

—If Your Esteemed Foreignness is

going to interrupt— replied the bass—he will learn

nothing, therefore I politely request him to tighten the reins on his

worthy tongue and quell the restiveness of his oral orifice, else I

must refrain from further discourse. Know then that before you stand

our finest physickers, all cybernists and electriciates of the first

order, in a word, my brilliant and ever vigilant pupils, the best

minds in all Legaria, and I myself am Vendetius Ultor of Amentia,

professor of matter both positive and negative and the originator of

Omnigendrical Reincreation, and I have dedicated my life to the

sacred work of vengeance. With the aid of these faithful followers I

avenge the shame and misery of my people upon the ruddy-bedizened

excrescency that kneels there, the low scrulp called—and may

his name be forever cursed—Malaputz vel Malapusticus

Pandemonius, who vilely and villainously, thievishly and

irretrievably brought unhappiness to all Legarians! For he led them

into detrimetry and other deviltry, did discompostulate them,

embollix and thoroughly befottle them, then sneaked off to his grave

to escape the consequences, thinking that no hand could ever reach

him there!

—That's not true, Your Exalted

Visitorship! I never meant… that is, I had no idea!…

—wailed the kneeling noodle-nose in the rubicund attire. I

stared, understanding nothing, while the bass intoned:

—Gargomanticus, dear pupil,

paste the puler one in his puffy puss!

The pupil complied, and with such

dispatch that the cellar rang. To which I said:

—Until the conclusion of

explanations, all beating and battering is absolutely forbidden by

authority of this laser, meanwhile you, Professor Vendetius Ultor,

have the floor and may continue!

The professor growled, grumbled, and

finally said:

—That you may know how our great

misfortune came to pass and why the four of us, forsaking worldly

things, have formed this Holy Order of the Forge of Resurrection,

consecrating the remainder of our days to sweet revenge, I will

relate to you the history of our kind from the very beginning of

creation…

—Must we go back that far?—I

asked, afraid my hand would weaken beneath the weight of the pistol.

—Aye, Your Alienness! Listen and

attend… There are legends, as you know, that speak of a race

of paleface, who concocted robotkind out of a test tube, though

anyone with a grain of sense knows this to be a foul lie… For

in the Beginning there was naught but Formless Darkness, and in the

Darkness, Magneticity, which moved the atoms, and whirling atom

struck atom, and Current was thus created, and the First Light…

from which the stars were kindled, and then the planets cooled, and

in their cores the breath of Sacred Statisticality gave rise to

microscopic Protomecha-noans, which begat Proteromechanoids, which

begat the Primitive Mechanisms. These could not yet calculate, nor

scarcely put two and two together, but thanks to Evolution and

Natural Subtraction they soon multiplied and produced Omnistats,

which gave birth to the Servostat, the Missing Clink, and from it

came our progenitor, Automatus Sapiens…

After that there were the cave robots,

the nomad robots, and then robot nations. Robots of Antiquity had to

manufacture their life-giving electricity by hand, that is by

rubbing, which meant great drudgery. Each lord had many knights,

each knight many vassals, and the rubbing was feudal hence

hierarchical, progressing from the lowly to the higher-up. This

manual labor was replaced by machine when Ylem Symphiliac invented

the rubberator, and Wolfram of Coulombia, the rubless lightning rod.

Thus began the Battery Age, a most difficult time for all who

did not possess their own accumulators, since on a clear day, without

a cloud to tap, they had to scrimp and scrounge for every precious

watt, and rub themselves constantly, else perish from a total loss of

charge. And then there appeared a scholar, an infernal

intellectrician and efficiency expert, who in his youth, doubtless

owing to some diabolical intervention, never had his head staved

in, and he began to teach and preach that the traditional method of

electrical connection—namely parallel—was worthless,

and they all ought to hook themselves up according to a revolutionary

new plan of his, that is in series. For in series, if one rubs, the

others are immediately supplied with current, even at a great

distance, till every robot simply bubbles over with ohms and

volts. And he showed his blueprints, and painted paradises of such

parameters, that the old circuits, equal and independent, were

disconnected and the system of Pandemonius promptly implemented.—

Here the professor beat his head against the wall several times,

rolled his eyes and finally continued. Now I understood why the

surface of his knobby brow was so irregular. —And it came to

pass that every second robot sat back and said, "Why should I

rub if my neighbor rubs and it comes to the same thing?" And his

neighbor did the same, and the drop in voltage became so severe, they

had to place special taskmasters over everyone, and taskmasters over

the taskmasters. Then a disciple of Malaputz, Clusticus the Mistaken,

stepped forth and said that each should rub not himself but his

neighbor, and after him was Dummis Altruicius with his program of

flagellatory sadistomasochistorism, and after him was Magmndel

Spoots, who proposed compulsory massage parlors, and after him

appeared a new theoretician, Arsus Gargazon, saying that clouds

should be gently stroked, not yoked, to yield their nimboid bolts,

and then there was Blip of Leydonia, and Scrofulon Thermaphrodyne,

advocating the installation of autofrotts, also called titillators or

diddlegrids, and then Bestian Phystobufficus, who instead of rubbing

recommended a good drubbing. Such differences of opinion

produced great friction, which led to all sorts of exacerbations

and excommunications, which in turn led to blasphemy, heresy, and

finally Faradocius Offal, Prince and Heir to the Throne of the

Alloys, was kicked in the pants, and war broke out between the

Legarite Brassbound Umbutts and the Legaritian Empire of the Cold

Welders, and it lasted eight and thirty years, and twelve more, for

towards the end one could not tell, amid all the rubble, who had won,

so they quarreled and fell to fighting again. And thus there was

chaos and carnage, and a devastating decline in the vital voltage, an

enervated emf and energy dissipation everywhere, or, as the simple

folk put it, "total malaputziment"—all brought about

by this infamous fiend and his thrice-accursed bright ideas!!

—My intentions were the best!! I

swear it, Your Laserosity! It was always the general welfare I had in

mind!— squeaked the kneeling Malaputz, and his outsize snout

trembled. But the professor only elbowed him aside and

continued:

—All this took place two hundred

and twenty-five years ago. As you may have guessed, long before the

outbreak of the Great Legarian War, long before this universal

wretchi-tude began, Malapusticus Pandemonius, having spawned no end

of ponderous treatises and tracts, in all of which he forwarded his

vile, pernicious flummeries, died, smug and unruffled to the very

end. Indeed, so pleased with himself was he, that in his last will

and testament he wrote that he had every expectation of being named

"Supreme Benefactor of Legaria." At any rate, when it came

time to settle accounts, there was no one with whom to settle,

no one to make pay, no one that one might turn a little on a lathe.

But I, O Illustrious Intruder, having formulated the General Theory

of Facsimulation, studied the works of Malaputz until I was able to

extract his algorithm, which, when fed into an atomic duplicating

machine, could recreate ex
atomis oriundum gemellum
,

identical to the
n
th degree, Malapusticus Pandemonius in his

very own person. And so we gather every evening in this cellar to

pass sentence on him, and when he has been returned to his grave, we

avenge our people anew the next day, and thus it is and thus shall be

for all eternity, amen!

Horror-stricken, I blurted in reply:

—Why, you have surely taken

leave of your senses, Professor, if you think for a minute that

this person, this person as innocent as a brand-new fuse, whom you

hammer together out of atoms every day, has to answer for the

actions, whatever they were, of some scholar who died three

centuries ago!

To which the professor said:

—Then who is this proboscidian

sniveler who himself calls himself Malapusticus Pandemonius? Come,

what is your name, O cosmic corrosion?

—Ma… Mala…

Malaputz, Your Mighty Mercilessness… —stammered the

groveling one through his nose.

—Still, it is not the same—I

said.

—How, not the same?

—Did you not yourself say,

Professor, that Malaputz no longer lives?

—But we have resurrected him!

—A double perhaps,
an

exact duplicate, but not the self-s
ame, true original!

—Prove it, Sirrah!

—I don't need to prove a thing—I

said—seeing that I hold this laser in my hand; besides which, I

am well aware, my fine Professor, that to attempt to prove what you

ask would be most foolhardy, for the nonidenticality of the

identicalized
recreatio ex
atomis individui modo algorytmico

is nothing other than the famous Paradoxon Antinomicum, or the

Labyrinthum Lemianum, described in the works of that distinguished

robophile, whom they also called Advocatus Laboratoris. So then,

without proofs, unhand yon snouted one this instant, and do not dare

venture any further molestations upon his person!

—Many thanks, Your

Magnanimitude!!—cried he in the bright red doublet, rising from

his knees. —It so happens that here—he added, patting his

vest pocket—I have an entirely new formula, this time

foolproof, with which the Legarians may be brought to perfect bliss;

it works by back coupling, that is, a hookup in reverse, and not in

series, which was due purely to an error that crept into my

calculations three centuries ago! I go immediately to convert

this marvelous discovery into reality!!

And indeed, his hand was already upon

the doorknob as we all gaped, dumbfounded. I lowered my weapon and,

turning away, said weakly to the professor:

—I withdraw my objections…

Do what you must…

With a hoarse roar the four of them

lunged at Malaputz, threw him down and dealt with him—until, at

last, he was no more.

Then, still panting, they straightened

their frocks, adjusted their hoods, bowed stiffly to me, and

left the cellar in single file, and I remained alone, the heavy laser

in my trembling hand, full of dismay and melancholy."

Thus did Trurl conclude his tale to

enlighten King Thumbscrew of Tyrannia, who had summoned him for that

purpose. When however the King demanded further explanation

concerning the attainment of nonlinear perfection, Trurl said:

"Once, chancing upon the planet

Ninnica, I was able to see the results of progress predicated on the