The Star Diaries (40 page)

Towards the end of his life, or more precisely in its decline, Jeremiah underwent a startling transformation, which totally changed his lot. Having, then, locked and double locked himself up in his cellar, from which he first removed every last bit and piece of machinery, so that he remained alone between four bare walls, with a bed made of planks, a stool and an old iron rail, until his death he never left that asylum, that voluntary prison. But was it indeed a prison, and his act—merely an escape from the world, a resigned withdrawal, the retreat into adversity of a hermit seeking to mortify himself? The facts clearly argue against such a supposition. It was not for quiet meditation that he lived out his days in self-imposed seclusion. Through a tiny window in the cellar door they handed him, besides crusts of bread and water, whatever objects he desired, and he desired—throughout those sixteen years—always the same thing: hammers of various weights and sizes. All together he used up 3,219 of them, and when that great heart ceased to beat, there were found in the cellar—scattered in the corners—hundreds and hundreds of rust-eaten hammer heads, all flattened with untold effort. Moreover, day and night from the basement came the ringing sound of forging, which let up only briefly, when the voluntary prisoner fed his aching body or when, after a short sleep, he would make notes in his diary, which lies before me now. From these one can see that his spirit hadn’t changed, on the contrary, more steadfast than ever, it had focused on a new goal. “I’ll fix her wagon!” “I’ll settle her hash!” “A little more, and her goose is cooked!”—such comments, jotted down in that characteristically illegible hand of his, fill these thick notebooks covered with metal filings. Whose hash did he wish to settle, whose goose did he hope to cook? We will never know for sure, for not once is there mentioned the name of that most mysterious—and presumably most powerful—adversary. I think he must have decided, in one of those sudden flashes that not infrequently visit the minds of the great, to accomplish on the highest possible level that which previously he had gone about in a much more modest way. Before, he had placed certain mechanisms in situations of duress, exhorting them to make it on their own. Now the proud old man, by his self-imprisonment, shut out the chorus of petty, sneering critics and through that cellar door entered history, for—this is my surmise—he grappled with the most formidable opponent of all: in the sixteen years of his labor the realization never left him, not for a moment, that he was storming the very heart and core of existence, that—in short—without the least hesitation or doubt, without mercy and without respite he was beating matter itself!!

But to what end did he do this? Oh, this had nothing in common with the action of that ancient monarch, who ordered the sea flogged because it had swallowed up his ships. No, in this Sisyphean toil carried out with such heroism I sense the presence of an idea that is more than simply unusual. Future generations will understand that Jeremiah hammered in the name of humanity. He wanted to drive matter to the limit, to torture it, exhaust it, pound from it its ultimate essence and thereby triumph over it. What was supposed to have followed then? The total anarchy of defeat, an end to all physical laws? Or perhaps the rise of new laws? We do not know. Someday those who follow in Jeremiah’s footsteps will find out.

I would be only too glad to conclude his story on this note, but it must be added that, even afterwards, the scandalmongers spread the most incredible nonsense, saying that the deceased had been hiding in the cellar from his wife and creditors! That is how the world repays its gifted for their greatness!

The next of whom the chronicles speak was Igor Sebastian Tichy, son of Jeremiah, an ascetic and cybermystician. With him terminates the earthly branch of our lineage, for thereafter all the descendants of Anonymus go off into the Galaxy. Igor Sebastian was by nature contemplative, and for that reason only—and not because of any mental retardation, which was wrongfully attributed to him—did he utter his first word at the age of eleven. Like all the great revolutionary minds, who with a critical eye perceive man in a new light, he did accordingly and arrived at the conclusion that the root of all evil lay in the animal vestiges within us, destructive of both individual and society. In his opposition of the darkness of the instinctual drives and the brightness of the human spirit there was nothing new as yet, but Igor Sebastian went a step farther than ever dared his predecessors. Man—he said to himself—must bring his spirit to where only the body, till now, has reigned! A remarkably talented control-system stereochemist, after many years of research he came up with a substance that transformed his dreams into reality. I am speaking, of course, of the well-known drug obnoxynol, a pentose derivative of dial­ly­lor­tho­pen­tyl­per­hy­dro­phe­nan­thre­ne. Obnoxynol, nontoxic, when taken in microscopic amounts, causes the act of procreation to become—the reverse of what it has been—highly unpleasant. With the aid of a pinch of white powder a man begins to look upon the world with an eye unclouded by desire, he discerns the proper priority of things, not blinded at every step by animal urges. He acquires a great deal of time and, delivered from the slavery of sex imposed by evolution, throws off the chains of erotic alienation and at last is free. The perpetuation of the species should be, after all, the result of a conscious decision, of a sense of responsibility towards humanity, and not the involuntary—since autonomic—outcome of the gratification of carnal appetites. At first Igor Sebastian planned to make the act of copulation neutral; he realized however that this was not enough, since people do too many things not for pleasure but simply out of boredom or else by force of habit. The act was to become, from then on, a sacrifice laid at the altar of the common good, a burden willingly assumed; those who produced offspring, by this demonstration of courage, were counted heroes, as is anyone who gives of himself for the sake of others. Like a true scientist, Igor Sebastian tested the effects of obnoxynol on himself first, and then, in order to prove that even after heavy doses of it one could still reproduce, with unremitting fortitude, with the greatest self-control he sired thirteen children. His wife, they say, ran away from home on several occasions—there
is
some truth to this, however the main reason for those domestic tiffs was, as in Jeremiah’s time, the neighbors, who set that woman—none too bright to begin with—against her husband. They accused Igor Sebastian of maltreating his wife, though he explained to them many times that he wasn’t tormenting her at all, it was merely the above-mentioned act, now a source of suffering, which had turned his house into a place of howls and groans. But those narrow minds only kept repeating, like parrots, that the father beat electrobrains, and the son—his wife. Yet this was but the prologue to the tragedy, for when, unable to find volunteers and spurred by the vision of purifying man everlastingly of lust, he put obnoxynol in all the village wells, Igor was beaten by an angry mob, then lynched most shamefully. He was not unaware of the risk he ran. He understood that the triumph of the spirit over the body would not come of its own accord; many passages of his book, published posthumously at the expense of his family, testify to this. In it, he writes that every great idea must be backed by force, as one can see in numerous examples from history, which illustrate that the best argument in defense of a theory is the police. Regrettably he didn’t have his own and hence came to a sad end.

There were, of course, men with evil tongues, who maintained that the father had been a sadist, and the son—a masochist. There’s not a word of truth in that. I may be getting into delicate matters, but the good name of our family must be protected, kept from being dragged through the mud. Igor was no masochist, despite his self-control he more than once had to resort to the physical assistance of two devoted cousins, who held him down, particularly after large doses of obnoxynol, on the marriage bed, from which—as soon as the deed was done—he fled like one scalded.

The sons of Igor did not carry on their father’s work. The eldest dabbled for a time in the synthesis of ectoplasm, a substance well-known to spiritualists, being emanated by mediums under trance, but he failed because—so he said—the margarine which served as the starting material had contained impurities. The youngest son was the black sheep of the family. They bought him a one-way ticket to the star Mira Coeti, which not long after his arrival there went out. Of the fate of the daughters I know nothing.

One of the first astronauts after the one hundred and fifty year interruption—or, as they were already calling them then, spacefarers—was my great-uncle Pafnuce. He owned a star ferry in one of the smaller galactic sounds and carried on his little craft innumerable travelers. He spent a quiet and uneventful life among the stars, not at all like his brother, Euzebius, who became a pirate, though—true—relatively late in life. A born practical joker, Euzebius had a marvelous sense of humor; the entire crew called him “a card.” He would rub out the stars with shoe polish and scatter tiny flashlights along the Milky Way, to confuse the captains, and the rockets that went off course he fell upon and plundered. But then he would return the victims everything, order them to continue on their way, overtake them in his black cruiser, board them and start plundering all over again; this would happen six, even ten times in a row. The passengers could hardly see each other for the bruises.

And yet Euzebius was not a wicked man. It was only that, lying in wait for years on end at sidereal crossroads for prey, he grew terribly bored, so that when finally someone did come his way he simply couldn’t bring himself to part with them immediately upon completion of the robbery. Interplanetary buccaneering is, as you know, financially unprofitable, which no doubt accounts for the fact that it hardly exists. Euzebius Tichy did not act out of low, materialistic motives, on the contrary, he was fired by the spirit of ancient ideals, for he wanted to bring back the venerable Earth tradition of piracy on the high seas, seeing in this his sacred mission. People imputed to him many vile tendencies, there were even some who called him a necrophiliac, since numerous corpses circled his ship. Nothing could be further from the truth than these loathsome slanders. In space, you can’t just bury someone who meets an untimely end, the only way to dispose of the body is by chucking it out the hatch of the rocket; the fact that it doesn’t leave but goes into orbit around the bereaved rocket is the result of Newton’s laws of motion, and not of anyone’s perverted inclinations. Indeed, with the passing years the number of bodies surrounding the ship of my relative grew considerably; maneuvering, he moved as if in an aureole of death, practically a thing out of Dürer’s dances, but—I repeat—this wasn’t his idea, it was Nature’s.

In the nephew of Euzebius and my cousin, Arystarch Felix Tichy, were united all the valuable talents which till now had appeared separately in our family. He was the only one, also, to achieve fame and a considerable fortune—through gastronomical engineering, or gastronautics, which he so brilliantly developed. The origin of this branch of technology goes back as far as the second half of the 20th century; it was known then in the crude, primitive form of “rocketry cannibalization.” In order to conserve material and space, ship partitions and bulkheads began to be manufactured out of laminated food concentrates, i.e. various cereals, tapiocas, legumes, etc. Later the scope of this construction enterprise was expanded to include the rocket’s furniture. My cousin aptly summed up the quality of those early products when he said that on a good-tasting chair you can’t sit, and one that’s comfortable gives you indigestion. Arystarch Felix set about the problem in an altogether different way. Small wonder, that the United Shipyards of Aldebaran named their first three-stage rocket (Hors D’oeuvres, Entrée, Dessert) after him. Today no one looks twice at frosted petit-four dashboards (electrotartlets), layer cake condensers, macaroni insulation, marzipan solenoids, or cells with gingerbread and alternating currants, or even windows made of rock candy, though naturally not everyone goes in for suits of scrambled eggs, or pillows of pumpkin pie and feather turnovers (they
do
make crumbs in bed). All this is the work of my cousin. He was the one who invented beef jerky towlines, strudel bedsheets, soufflé quilts, as well as the semolina noodle drive, he too was the first to use Emmenthaler in radiators. Substituting yeast for nitric acid, he came up with a fuel that made a delicious and refreshing (and nonalcoholic!) beverage. No less ingenious are his cranberry fire extinguishers, which can quench a fire or a thirst equally well. Arystarch had imitators too, but none of them could match him. A certain Globkins tried to put on the market, as a source of illumination—a Sacher torte with a wick, which proved a complete fiasco, since the torte gave off little light and had a burnt taste besides. Similarly, his risotto doormats attracted few buyers, as was the case with the halvah siding, that splattered at the first touch of a meteor. Once again it had been shown that a general concept is not enough, that each and every concrete application of it must be, in itself, creative—as for example that idea of my cousin’s, brilliant in its simplicity, to fill all the empty places in the rocket’s frame with consommé, whereby wasted space was put to use, and nutritiously too. This Tichy, I think, fully deserved to be called the benefactor of cosmic navigation. Its pioneers assured us—not so long ago, either—when we couldn’t look at an algae hamburger or a moss-and-lichen stew, that
that
was the diet of men traveling to the stars. Bless you, cousin! A good thing, that I’ve lived to see better times, for in my youth how very many crews there were that starved to death, adrift among the dark currents of space, their only choice being whether to draw lots or vote democratically, the simple majority deciding. He will agree with me, who remembers the oppressive atmosphere of those gatherings where such distasteful matters were debated. You also had the Drulps Plan, which created quite a sensation in its day, to spread throughout the entire solar system—having shipwrecks in mind—oatmeal or cream of wheat, also instant cocoa, but the thing was never adopted, first, because it turned out to be too expensive, and secondly, with clouds of cocoa in the way one couldn’t see the stars to steer by. Yes, it was only rocket cannibalism that freed us from all that.