The Cyberiad

TALE OF THE THREE STORYTELLING MACHINES OF KING GENIUS

One day to Trurl’s abode there came a stranger, and it was plain just as soon as he alighted from his photon phaeton that here was no ordinary personage but one who hailed from distant parts, for where all of us have arms he had only a gentle breeze, and where there are usually legs he had nothing but a shimmering rainbow, and in lieu of a head he sported a plumed fedora; his voice issued forth from his center, and indeed, he was a perfect sphere, a sphere of the most engaging appearance and girdled with an elegant semipermeable cummerbund. Bowing low to Trurl, he revealed that there were really two of him, the top half and the bottom; the top was called Synchronicus, the bottom Symphonicus. To Trurl this seemed an excellent solution to the problem of constructing intelligent beings, and he had to confess he had never met an individual so well turned, so precise, and with such a fine shine. The stranger returned the compliment by praising Trurl’s corpus, then broached the purpose of his visit: a close friend and loyal servant of the famous King Genius, he had come to place an order for three storytelling machines.

“Our mighty lord and sovereign,” he said, “has long refrained from all reigning and ruling, to which total abdication he was brought by a wisdom achieved through careful study of the ways of this and other worlds. Leaving his kingdom, he retired to a dry and airy cave, there to give himself up to meditation. Yet oft times sorrow comes upon him, and self-abhorrence, and then nothing can console him but stories, stories that are new and unusual. But alas, the few of us who have remained faithfully at his side ran out of new stories long ago. And so we turn to you, O constructor, to help us divert our King by means of machines, which you do build so well.”

“Yes, that’s possible,” said Trurl. “But why do you need as many as three?”

“We should like,” replied Symchrophonicus, spinning slowly, “the first to tell stories that are involved but untroubled, the second, stories that are cunning and full of fun, and the third, stories profound and compelling.”

“In other words, to (1) exercise, (2) entertain and (3) edify the mind,” said Trurl. “I understand. Shall we speak of payment now, or later?”

“When you have completed the machines, rub this ring,” was the reply, “and the phaeton shall appear before you. Climb into it with your machines, and it shall carry you at once to the cave of King Genius. There voice your wishes; he shall do what he can to grant them.”

And he bowed again, handed Trurl a ring, gave a radiant wink and floated back to the phaeton, which was instantly wrapped in a cloud of blinding light, and the next moment Trurl was standing alone in front of his house, holding the ring, not overly happy about what had just transpired.

“Do what he can,” he muttered, returning to his workshop. “Oh, how I hate it when they say that! It means only one thing: you bring up the matter of the fee, and that’s the end of the curtsies and courtesies; all you get for your pains is a lot of trouble, and bruises, more often than not…”

At which the ring stirred in the palm of his hand and said:

“The expression ‘do what he can’ indicates merely that King Genius, lacking a kingdom, is a king of limited means. He appeals to you, O constructor, as one philosopher to another—and apparently is not mistaken in so doing, for these words, I see, uttered though they be by a ring, do not surprise you. Be then not surprised at His Highness’ somewhat straitened circumstances. Have no fear, you shall receive your payment as is meet, albeit not in gold. Yet there are things more to be desired than gold.”

“Indeed, Sir Ring,” observed Trurl wryly. “Philosophy is all very well and good, but the ergs and amps, the ions and the atoms, not to mention other odds and ends needed in the building of machines—they cost, they cost like the devil! So I like my contracts to be clear, everything spelled out in articles and clauses, and with plenty of signatures and seals. And, though I am hardly the greedy, grasping sort, I do love gold, particularly in large quantities, and am not ashamed to admit it! Its sparkle, its yellow hue, the sweet weight of it in the hand—these things, when I pour a sack or two of tinkling ducats on the floor and wallow in them, warm my heart and brighten my soul, as if someone had kindled a little sun within. Aye, damn it, I love my gold!” he cried, carried away by his own words.

“But why must it be the gold that others bring? Are you not able to supply yourself with as much as you desire?” inquired the ring, blinking with surprise.

“Well, I don’t know how wise this King Genius of yours is,” Trurl retorted, “but you, I see, are a thoroughly uneducated ring! What, you would have me make my own gold? Whoever heard of such a thing?! Is a cobbler a cobbler to mend his own shoes? Does a cook do his own cooking, a soldier his own fighting? Anyway, in case you didn’t know, next to gold I love to complain. But enough of this idle chatter, there is work to be done.”

And he placed the ring in an old tin can, rolled up his sleeves and built the three machines in three days, not once leaving his workshop. Then he considered what external shapes to give them, wanting something that would be both simple and functional. He tried on various casings, one after the other, while the ring kept interfering with comments and suggestions, until he had to close the can.

Finally Trurl painted the machines—the first white, the second an azure blue, and the third jet black—then rubbed the ring, loaded the phaeton which instantly appeared, climbed in himself and waited to see what would happen next. There was a whistling and a hissing, the dust rose, and when it fell, Trurl looked out the window and saw that he was in a large cave, the floor of which was covered with white sand; then he noticed several wooden benches piled high with books and folios, and then a row of gleaming spheres. In one of these he recognized the stranger who had ordered the machines, and in the middle sphere, larger than the rest and etched with the lines of old age, he guessed the King. Trurl stepped down and gave a bow. The King greeted him kindly and said:

“There are two wisdoms: the first inclines to action, the second to inaction. Do you not agree, worthy Trurl, that the second is the greater? For surely, even the most far-sighted mind cannot foresee the ultimate consequences of present undertakings, consequences therefore so uncertain, that they render problematical those very undertakings. And thus perfection lies in the abstention from all action. In this then does true wisdom differ from mere intellect.”

“Your Majesty’s words,” said Trurl, “can be taken in two ways. They may contain, for one, a subtle hint intended to belittle the value of my own labor, namely the undertaking which has as its consequence the three machines delivered in this phaeton. Such an interpretation I find most unpleasant, as it indicates a certain, shall we say, disinclination regarding the matter of remuneration. Or else we have here simply a statement of the Doctrine of Inaction, of which it may be said that it is self-contradictory. To refrain from acting, one must first be capable of acting. He who does not move the mountain for lack of means, yet claims that wisdom did dictate he move it not, merely plays the fool with his display of philosophy. Inaction is certain, and that is all it has to recommend it. Action is uncertain, and therein lies its fascination. As for further ramifications of the problem, if Your Majesty so wishes, I can construct a suitable mechanism with which he may converse on the subject.”

“The matter of remuneration let us leave to the end of this delightful occasion which has brought you to our shore,” said the King, betraying by slight revolving motions the great amusement Trurl’s peroration had afforded him. “You are our guest, noble constructor. Come therefore and sit at our humble table among these faithful friends and tell us of the deeds you have performed, and also of the deeds you chose not to.”

“Your Majesty is too kind,” replied Trurl. “Yet I fear I lack the necessary eloquence. Perchance these three machines may serve in my stead—which would have the added merit of providing Your Majesty with the opportunity to test them.”

“Let it be as you say,” agreed the King.

Everyone assumed an attitude of the utmost interest and expectation. Trurl brought out the first machine—the one painted white—from the phaeton, pushed a button, then took a seat at the side of King Genius. The machine said:

“Here is the story of the Multitudians, their king Man-drillion, his Perfect Adviser, and Trurl the constructor, who built the Adviser, and later destroyed it!”

The land of the Multitudians is famous for its inhabitants, who are distinguished by the fact that they are multitudinous. One day the constructor Trurl, passing through the saffron regions of the constellation Deliria, strayed a little from the main path and caught sight of a planet that appeared to writhe. Drawing nearer, he saw that this was due to the multitudes that covered its surface; he landed, having found—not without difficulty—a few square feet of relatively unoccupied ground. The natives immediately ran up and thronged about him, exclaiming how multitudinous they were, although, as they all talked at once, Trurl couldn’t make out a single word. When finally he understood, he asked:

“Multitudinous, are you?”

“We are!!” they shouted, bursting with pride. “We are innumerable.”

And others cried:

“We are like fish in the sea!”

“Like pebbles on the beach!”

“Like stars in the sky! Like atoms!!”

“Supposing you are,” returned Trurl. “What of it? Do you spend all day counting yourselves, and does that give you pleasure?”

“Know, O unenlightened alien,” was their reply, “that when we stamp our feet, the very mountains tremble, and when we huff and puff, it is a hurricane that sends trees flying, and when we all sit down together, there is hardly room enough to breathe!!”

“But why should mountains tremble and hurricanes send trees flying, and why should there be hardly room enough to breathe?” asked Trurl. “Is it not better when mountains stay at rest, and there are no hurricanes, and everyone has room enough to breathe?”

The Multitudians were highly offended by this lack of respect shown to their mighty numbers and their numerical might, so they stamped, huffed and puffed, and sat down to demonstrate their multitudinality and show just what it meant. Earthquakes toppled half the trees, crushing seven hundred thousand persons, and hurricanes leveled the rest, causing the demise of seven hundred thousand more, while those who remained alive had hardly room enough to breathe.

“Good heavens!” cried Trurl, packed in among the sitting natives like a brick in a brick wall. “What a catastrophe!”

Which insulted them even more.

“O barbarous and benighted alien!” they said. “What are a few hundred thousand to the Multitudians, whose myriads are countless?! A loss that goes unnoticed is no loss at all. You have seen how powerful we are in our stamping, in our huffing and puffing, and in our sitting down. Imagine then what would happen if we turned to bigger things!”

“You mustn’t think,” said Trurl, “that your way of thinking is altogether new to me. Indeed, it’s well known that whatever comes in sufficiently large quantities commands the general admiration. For example, a little stale gas circulating sluggishly at the bottom of an old barrel excites wonder in no one; but if you have enough of it to make a Galactic Nebula, everyone is instantly struck with awe. Though really, it’s the same stale and absolutely average gas —only there’s an awful lot of it.”

“We do not like what you say!” they shouted. “We do not like to hear about this stale gas!”

Trurl looked around for the police, but the crowd was too great for the police to push through.

“My dear Multitudians,” he said. “Permit me to leave your planet, for I do not share your faith in the glory of great numbers when there is nothing more to them than what may be counted.”

But instead, exchanging a look and nodding, they snapped their fingers, which set up a shock wave of such prodigious force, that Trurl was hurled into the air and flew, turning head over heels, for quite some time before landing on his feet in a garden of the royal palace. Mandrillion the Greatest, ruler of the Multitudians, approached; he had been watching the constructor’s flight and descent, and now said:

“They tell me, O alien, that you have not paid proper tribute to the numerosity of my people. I ascribe this to your general infirmity of mind. Yet, though you show no understanding of higher matters, you apparently possess some skill in the lower, which is fortunate, as I require a Perfect Adviser and you shall build me one!”

“What exactly is this Adviser supposed to do, and what will I receive for building it?” inquired Trurl, brushing himself off.

“It should answer every question, solve every problem, give absolutely the best advice and, in a word, put the greatest wisdom entirely at my disposal. For this, you shall receive two or three hundred thousand of my subjects, or more if you like—we won’t quibble over a few thousand.”

Trurl thought:

“It would seem that an overabundance of thinking beings is a dangerous thing, if it reduces them to the status of sand. This king would sooner part with a legion of his subjects than I with a pair of old slippers!”

But he said aloud:

“Sire, my house is small and would not hold so many slaves.”

“Fear not, O backward alien, I have experts who will explain to you the endless benefits one may derive from owning a horde of slaves. You can, for example, dress them in robes of different colors and have them stand in a great square to form a living mosaic, or signs providing sentiments for every occasion. You can tie them in bundles and roll them down hills, you can make a huge hammer—five thousand for the head, three thousand for the handle—to break up boulders or clear forests. You can braid them into rope and make decorative hangings, where those at the very bottom, by the droll gyrations of their bodies, the kicking and the squeaking as they dangle over the abyss, create a sight that gladdens the heart and rejoices the eye. Or take ten thousand young female slaves, stand them all on one leg and have them make figure eights with their right hands and circles with their left—a spectacle, believe me, which you won’t wish to part with, and I speak from experience!”

“Sire!” answered Trurl. “Forests and boulders I can manage with machines, and as for signs and mosaics, it is not my custom to fashion them out of beings that might prefer to be otherwise employed.”

“What then, O insolent alien,” said the King, “do you want in return for the Perfect Adviser?”

“A hundred bags of gold!”

Mandrillion was loath to part with the gold, but an idea came to him, a most ingenious plan, which however he kept to himself, and he said:

“So be it!”

“Your Royal Highness shall have his Perfect Adviser,” promised Trurl, and proceeded to the castle tower which Mandrillion had set aside for him as a workshop. It wasn’t long before they could hear the blowing of bellows there, the ringing of hammers, the rasping of saws. The King sent spies to have a look; these returned much amazed, for Trurl had not constructed an Adviser at all, but a variety of forging, welding, cutting and wiring machines, after which he sat down and with a nail made little holes in a long strip of paper, programming out the Adviser in every particular, then went for a walk while the machines toiled in the tower all night, and by early morning the work was done. Around noon, Trurl entered the main hall with an enormous doll that had two legs and one small hand; he brought it before the King, declaring that this was the Perfect Adviser.

“Indeed,” muttered Mandrillion and ordered the marble floor sprinkled with saffron and cinnamon, so strong was the smell of hot iron given off by the Adviser—the thing, just out of the oven, even glowed in places. “You may go,” the King said to Trurl. “Return this evening, and then we shall see who owes how much and to whom.”

Trurl took his leave, feeling that these parting words of Mandrillion did not promise any great generosity and perhaps even concealed some evil intention. Which made him glad he had qualified the Adviser’s universality with one small yet far from trivial condition, that is, he had included in its program an instruction to the effect that whatever it did, it was never to permit the destruction of its creator.

Remaining alone with the Adviser, the King said:

“What are you and what can you do?”

“I am the King’s Perfect Adviser,” replied the machine in a hollow voice, as if it spoke from an empty barrel, “and I can provide him with the best advice possible.”

“Good,” said the King. “And to whom do you owe allegiance and perfect obedience, me or the one who constructed you?”

“Allegiance and obedience I owe only to His Royal Highness,” boomed the Adviser.

“Good, good…” said the King. “Now to begin with, I… that is, well… I mean, I shouldn’t like my first request to give the impression that I was, shall we say, stingy… however, ah, to some extent, you understand, if only to uphold certain principles—don’t you think?”

“His Royal Highness has not yet deigned to say what it is that he wishes,” said the Adviser, propping itself on a third leg it put out from its side, for it suffered a momentary loss of balance.

“A Perfect Adviser ought to be able to read its master’s thoughts!” snapped Mandrillion.

“Of course, but only on request, to avoid embarrassments,” said the Adviser and, opening a little door in its belly, turned a knob that read “Telepathitron.” Then it nodded and said:

“His Royal Highness doesn’t wish to give Trurl a plug nickel? I understand!”

“Speak one word of this to anyone and I’ll have you thrown in the great mill, whose stones can grind up thirty thousand of my subjects at a time!” threatened the King.

“I won’t tell a soul!” the Adviser assured him. “His Royal Highness doesn’t wish to pay for me—that’s easily done. When Trurl comes back, simply tell him there won’t be any gold and he should kindly go away.”

“You’re an idiot, not an adviser!” snorted the King. “I don’t want to pay, but I want it to look like it’s all Trurl’s fault! Like I don’t owe him a thing, understand?”

The Adviser turned on the device to read the royal thoughts, reeled a little, then said in a hollow voice:

“His Royal Highness wishes in addition that it should appear that he is acting justly and in accordance with the law and his own sacred word, while Trurl turns out to be nothing but a despicable charlatan and scoundrel… Very well. With His Royal Highness’ permission, I will now seize His Royal Highness by the throat and choke him, and if he would be so good as to struggle and scream for help…”

“Have you gone mad?” said Mandrillion. “Why should you choke me and why should I scream?”

“That you may accuse Trurl of attempting to commit, with my aid, the crime of regicide,” explained the Adviser brightly. “Thus, when His Royal Highness has him whipped and thrown into the moat, everyone will say that this was an act of the greatest mercy, since for such an offense one is usually drawn and quartered, if not tortured first. To me His Royal Highness will grant a full pardon, as I was but an unwitting tool in the hands of Trurl, and everyone will praise the King’s magnanimity and compassion, and everything will be exactly as His Royal Highness wishes it.”

“All right, choke me—but carefully, you dog!” said the King.

Everything happened just as the Perfect Adviser said it would. True, the King wanted to have Trurl’s legs pulled off before they threw him into the moat, but somehow this wasn’t done—no doubt a mix-up in the orders, the King thought later, but actually it was owing to the machine’s discreet intervention with one of the executioner’s helpers. Afterward, the King pardoned his Adviser and reinstated it at court; Trurl meanwhile, battered and bruised, painfully hobbled home. Immediately after his return, he went to see Klapaucius and told him the whole story. Then he said:

“That Mandrillion was more of a villain than I thought. Not only did he shamefully deceive me, but he even used the very Adviser I gave him, used it to further his scurvy scheme against me! Ah, but he is sadly mistaken if he thinks that Trurl accepts defeat! May rust eat through me if ever I forget the vengeance that I owe the tyrant!”

“What do you intend to do?” inquired Klapaucius.

“I’ll take him to court, I’ll sue him for the amount of my fee, and that’s only the beginning: there are damages he’ll have to pay—for insults and injuries.”

“This is a difficult legal question,” said Klapaucius. “I suggest you hire yourself a good lawyer before you try anything.”

“Why hire a lawyer? I’ll make myself one!”

And Trurl went home, threw six heaping teaspoons of transistors into a big pot, added again as many condensers and resistors, poured electrolyte over it, stirred well and covered tightly with a lid, then went to bed, and in three days the mixture had organized itself into a first-rate lawyer. Trurl didn’t even need to remove it from the pot, since it was only to serve this once, so he set the pot on the table and asked:

“What are you?”

“I’m a consulting attorney and specialist in jurisprudence,” the pot gurgled, for there was a little too much electrolyte in it. Trurl related the whole affair, whereupon it said:

“You say you qualified the Adviser’s program with an instruction making it incapable of engineering your death?”

“Yes, so it couldn’t destroy me. That was the only condition.”

“In that case you failed to live up to your part of the bargain: the Adviser was to have been perfect, without any limitations. If it couldn’t destroy you, then it wasn’t perfect.”

“But if it destroyed me, then there would be no one to receive payment!”

“A separate matter and a different question entirely, which comes under those paragraphs in the docket determining Mandrillion’s criminal liability, while your claim has more the character of a civil action.”

“Look, I don’t need some pot handing me a lot of legalistic claptrap!” fumed Trurl. “Whose lawyer are you anyway, mine or that hoodlum king’s?”

“Yours, but he did have the right to refuse you payment.”

“And did he have the right to order me thrown from his castle walls into the moat?”

“As I said, that’s another matter entirely, criminal, not civil,” answered the pot.

Trurl flew into a rage.

“Here I make an intelligent being out of a bunch of old wires, switches and grids, and instead of some honest advice I get technicalities! You cheap cybernetic shyster, I’ll teach you to trifle with me!”

And he turned the pot over, shook everything out onto the table, and pulled it apart before the lawyer had a chance to appeal the proceedings.

Then Trurl got to work and built a two-story Juris Con-sulenta, forensically reinforced fourfold, complete with codices and codicils, civil and criminal, and, just to be safe, he added international and institutional law components. Finally he plugged it in, stated his case and asked:

“How do I get what’s coming to me?”

“This won’t be easy,” said the machine. “I’ll need an extra five hundred transistors on top and two hundred on the side.”

Which Trurl supplied, and it said:

“Not enough! Increase the volume and give me two more spools, please.”

After this it began:

“Quite an interesting case, really. There are two things that must be taken into consideration: the grounds of the allegation, for one, and here I grant you there is much that we can do—and then we have the litigation process itself. Now, it is absolutely out of the question to summon the King before any court on a civil charge, for this is contrary to international as well as interplanetary law. I will give you my final opinion, but first you must give me your word you won’t pull me apart when you hear it.”

Trurl gave his word and said:

“But where did you get the idea I would ever do such a thing?”

“Oh, I don’t know—it just seemed to me you might.”

Trurl guessed this was due to the fact that, in its construction, he had used parts from the potted lawyer; apparently some trace of the memory of that incident had found its way into the new circuits, creating a kind of subconscious complex.

“Well, and your final opinion?” asked Trurl.

“Simply this: no suitable tribunals exist, hence there can be no suit. Your case, in other words, can be neither won nor lost.”

Trurl leaped up and shook his fist at the legal machine, but had to keep his word and did it no harm. He went to Klapaucius and told him everything.

“From the first I knew it was a hopeless business,” said Klapaucius, “but you wouldn’t believe me.”

“This outrage will not go unpunished,” replied Trurl. “If I can’t get satisfaction through the courts, then I must find some other way to settle with that scoundrel of a king!”

“I wonder how. Remember, you gave the King a Perfect Adviser, which can do anything except destroy you; it can fend off whatever blow, plague or misfortune you direct against the King or his realm—and will do so, I am sure, for I have complete confidence, my dear Trurl, in your constructing ability!”

“True.… It would appear that, in creating the Perfect Adviser, I deprived myself of any hope of defeating that royal bandit. But no, there must be some chink in the armor! I’ll not rest until I’ve found it!”

“What do you mean?” Klapaucius asked, but Trurl only shrugged and went home. At home he sat and meditated; sometimes he leafed impatiently through hundreds of volumes in his library, and sometimes he conducted secret experiments in his laboratory. Klapaucius visited his friend from time to time, amazed to see the tenacity with which Trurl was attempting to conquer himself, for the Adviser was, in a sense, a part of him and he had given it his own wisdom. One afternoon, Klapaucius came at the usual time but didn’t find Trurl at home. The doors were all locked and the windows shuttered. He concluded that Trurl had begun operations against the ruler of the Multitudians. And he was not mistaken.

Mandrillion meanwhile was enjoying his power as never before; whenever he ran out of ideas, he asked his Adviser, who had an inexhaustible supply. Neither did the King have to fear palace coups or court intrigues, or any enemy whatsoever, but reigned with an iron hand, and truly, as many grapes there were that ripened in the vineyards of the south, more gallows graced the royal countryside.

By now the Adviser had four chests full of medals for suggestions made to the King. A microspy Trurl sent to the land of the Multitudians returned with the news that, for its most recent achievement—it gave the King a ticker-tape parade, using citizens for confetti—Mandrillion had publicly called the Adviser his “pal.”

Trurl then launched his carefully prepared campaign by sitting down and writing the Adviser a letter on eggshell-yellow stationery decorated with a freehand drawing of a cassowary tree. The content of the letter was simple.

Naturally this letter aroused the suspicions of the Multitudian Secret Police and was subjected to the most meticulous examination, which revealed no hidden substances in the paper nor, for that matter, ciphers in the drawing of the cassowary tree—a circumstance that threw Headquarters into a flurry. The letter was photographed, facsimiled and copied out by hand, then the original was resealed and sent on to its destination. The Adviser read the message with alarm, realizing that this was a move to compromise if not ruin its position, so immediately it told the King of the letter, describing Trurl as a blackguard bent on discrediting it in the eyes of its master; then it tried to decipher the message, for it was convinced those innocent words were a mask concealing something dark and dreadful.

But here the wise Adviser stopped and thought a minute —then informed the King of its intention to decode Trurl’s letter, explaining that it wished in this way to unmask the constructor’s treachery; then, gathering up the necessary number of tripods, filters, funnels, test tubes and chemical reagents, it began to analyze the paper of both envelope and letter. All of which, of course, the police followed closely, having screwed into the walls of its rooms the usual peeking and eavesdropping devices. When chemistry failed, the Adviser turned to cryptanalysis, converting the text of the letter into long columns of numbers with the aid of electronic calculators and tables of logarithms—unaware that teams of police specialists, headed by the Grand Marshal of Codes himself, were duplicating its every operation. But nothing seemed to work, and Headquarters grew more and more uneasy, for it was clear that any code that could resist such high-powered efforts to break it, had to be one of the most ingenious codes ever devised. The Grand Marshal spoke of this to a court dignitary, who happened to envy terribly the trust Mandrillion had placed in his Adviser. This dignitary, wanting nothing better than to plant the seeds of doubt in the royal heart, told the King that his mechanical favorite was sitting up night after night, locked in its room, studying the suspicious letter. The King laughed and said that he was well aware of it, for the Adviser itself had told him. The envious dignitary left in confusion and straightway related this news to the Grand Marshal.

“Oh!” exclaimed that venerable cryptographer. “It actually told the King? What bold-faced treason! And truly, what a fiendish code this must be, for one to dare to speak of it so openly!”

And he ordered his brigades to redouble their efforts. When, however, a week had passed without results, the greatest expert in secret writing was called in, the distinguished discoverer of invisible sign language, Professor Crusticus. That scholar, having examined the incriminating document as well as the records of everything the military specialists had done, announced that they would have to apply the method of trial and error, using computers with astronomical capacities.

This was done, and it turned out that the letter could be read in three hundred and eighteen different ways.

The first five variants were as follows: “The roach from Bakersville arrived in one piece, but the bedpan blew a fuse"; “Roll the locomotive’s aunt in cutlets"; “Now the butter can’t be wed, ’cause the nightcap’s nailed"; “He who has had, has been, but he who hasn’t been, has been had"; and “From strawberries under torture one may extract all sorts of things.” This last variant Professor Crusticus held to be the key to the code and found, after three hundred thousand calculations, that if you added up all the letters of the letter, subtracted the parallax of the sun plus the annual production of umbrellas, and then took the cube root of the remainder, you came up with a single word, “Crusafix.” In the telephone book there was a citizen named Crucifax. Crusticus maintained that this alteration of a few letters was merely to throw them off the track, and Crucifax was arrested. After a little sixth-degree persuasion, the culprit confessed that he had indeed plotted with Trurl, who was to have sent him poison tacks and a hammer with which to cobble the King to death. These irrefutable proofs of guilt the Grand Marshal of Codes presented to the King without delay; yet Mandrillion so trusted in his Adviser, that he gave it the chance to explain.

The Adviser did not deny that the letter could be read in a variety of ways if one rearranged the letters of the letter; it had itself discovered an additional hundred thousand variants; but this proved nothing, and in fact the letter wasn’t even in code, for—the Adviser explained—it was possible to rearrange the letters of absolutely any text to make sense or the semblance of sense, and the result was called an anagram. The theory of permutations and combinations dealt with such phenomena. No—protested the Adviser—Trurl wanted to compromise and undo it by creating the illusion of a code where none existed, while that poor fellow Crucifax, Lord knows, was innocent, and his confession was wholly the invention of the experts at Headquarters, who possessed no little skill in the art of encouraging official cooperation, not to mention interrogation machinery that had a power of several thousand kilowhacks. The King did not take kindly to this criticism of the police and asked the Adviser what it meant by that, but it began to speak of anagrams and steganograms, codes, ciphers, symbols, signals, probability and information theory, and became so incomprehensible, that the King lost all patience and had it thrown into the deepest dungeon. Just then a postcard arrived from Trurl with the following words:

Dear Adviser! Don’t forget the purple screws—they might come in handy. Yours, Trurl.

Immediately the Adviser was put on the rack, but wouldn’t admit to a thing, stubbornly repeating that all this was part of Trurl’s scheme; when asked about the purple screws, it swore it hadn’t any, nor any knowledge of them. Of course, to conduct a thorough investigation it was necessary to open the Adviser up. The King gave his permission, the blacksmiths set to work, its plates gave way beneath their hammers, and soon the King was presented with a couple of tiny screws dripping oil and yes, undeniably painted purple. Thus, though the Adviser had been completely demolished in the process, the King was satisfied he had done the right thing.

A week later, Trurl appeared at the palace gates and requested an audience. Amazed at such effrontery, the King, instead of having the constructor slaughtered on the spot, ordered him brought before the royal presence.

“O King!” said Trurl as soon as he entered the great hall with courtiers on every side. “I fashioned you a Perfect Adviser and you used it to cheat me of my fee, thinking—and not without justice—that the power of the mind I had given you would be a perfect shield against attack and thereby render fruitless any attempt by me to get revenge. But in giving you an intelligent Adviser, I did not make you yourself intelligent, and it was on this that I counted, for only he who has sense will take advice that makes sense. In no subtle, shrewd or sophisticated way was it possible to destroy the Adviser. I could do this only in a manner that was crude, primitive, and stupid beyond belief. There was no code in the letter; your Adviser remained faithful to the very end; of the purple screws that brought about its demise, it knew nothing. You see, they accidentally fell into a bucket of paint while I was putting it together, and I just happened to recall, and make use of, this detail. Thus did stupidity and suspicion undo wisdom and loyalty, and you were the instrument of your own downfall. And now you will hand over the one hundred bags of gold you owe me, and another hundred for the time I had to waste recovering them. If you do not, you and your entire court will perish, for no longer do you have at your side the Adviser that could defend you against me!”

The King roared with rage and gestured for the guards to cut down the insolent one at once, but their whistling halberds passed through the constructor’s body as if it were air, and they jumped back, horrified. Trurl laughed and said:

“Chop at me as much as you please—this is only an image produced by remote-control mirrors; in reality I am hovering high above your planet in a ship, and will drop terrible death-dealing missiles on the palace unless I have my gold.”

And before he had finished speaking, there was a dreadful crash and an explosion rocked the entire palace; the courtiers fled in panic, and the King, nearly fainting from shame and fury, had to pay Trurl his fee, every last cent of it, and double.

Klapaucius, hearing of this from Trurl himself upon the latter’s return, asked why he had employed such a primitive and—to use his own words—stupid method, when he could have sent a letter that actually did contain some code?

“The presence of a code would have been easier for the Adviser to explain than its absence,” replied the wise constructor. “It is always easier to confess that one has done something wrong than to prove that one has not. In this case, the presence of a code would have been a simple matter; its absence, however, led to complications, for it is a fact that any text may be recombined into some other, namely an anagram, and there may be many such recombinations. Now in order to make all this clear, one would have to resort to arguments which, though perfectly true, would be somewhat involved—arguments I was positive the King hadn’t the brains to follow. It was once said that to move a planet, one need but find the point of leverage: therefore I, seeking to overturn a mind that was perfect, had to find the point of leverage, and this was stupidity.”

The first machine ended its story here, bowed low to King Genius and the assembly of listeners, then modestly retired to a corner of the cave.

The King expressed his satisfaction with this tale and asked Trurl:

“Tell us, my good constructor, does the machine relate only what you have taught it, or does the source of its knowledge lie outside you? Also, allow me to observe that the story we have heard, instructive and entertaining as it is, seems incomplete, for we know nothing of what happened afterwards to the Multitudians and their ignorant king.”

“Your Majesty,” said Trurl, “the machine relates only what is true, since I placed its information pump to my head before coming here, enabling it to draw upon my memories. But this it did itself, so I know not which of my memories it selected, and therefore you could not say that I intentionally taught it anything, yet neither could you say that the source of its knowledge lay outside me. As for the Multitudians, the story indeed tells us nothing of their subsequent fate; but while everything may be told, not everything may be neatly fitted in. Suppose that which is taking place here and now is not reality, but only a tale, a tale of some higher order that contains within it the tale of the machine: a reader might well wonder why you and your companions are shaped like spheres, inasmuch as that sphericality serves no purpose in the narration and would appear to be a wholly superfluous embellishment…”

The King’s companions marveled at the constructor’s perspicacity, and the King himself said with a broad smile:

“There is much in what you say. As far as our shape is concerned, I will tell you how this came about. A long, long time ago we looked—that is, our ancestors looked—altogether different, for they arose by the will of wet and spongy beings, pale beings that fashioned them after their own image and likeness; our ancestors therefore had arms, legs, a head, and a trunk that connected these appendages. But once they had liberated themselves from their creators, they wished to obliterate even this trace of their origin, hence each generation in turn transformed itself, till finally the form of a perfect sphere was attained. And so, whether for good or for bad, we are spheres.”

“Your Majesty,” said Trurl, “a sphere has both good and bad aspects from the standpoint of construction. But it is always best when an intelligent being cannot alter its own form, for such freedom is truly a torment. He who must be what he is, may curse his fate, but cannot change it; on the other hand, he who can transform himself has no one in the world but himself to blame for his failings, no one but himself to hold responsible for his dissatisfaction. However, I did not come here, O King, to give you a lecture on the General Theory of Self-construction, but to demonstrate my storytelling machines. Would you care to hear the next?”

The King gave his consent and, having taken some cheer among amphoras full of the finest ion ambergris, the company sat back and made themselves comfortable. The second machine approached, curtsied to the King and said:

“Mighty King! Here is a story, a nest of stories, with cabinets and cupboards, about Trurl the constructor and his wonderfully nonlinear adventures!”

It happened once that the Great Constructor Trurl was summoned by King Thumbscrew the Third, ruler of Tyrannia, who wished to learn from him the means of achieving perfection of both mind and body. Trurl answered in this way:

“I once happened to land on the planet Legaria and, as is my custom, stayed at an inn, determined to keep to my room until I had acquainted myself more thoroughly with the history and habits of the Legarians. It was winter, the wind howled outside, and there was no one else in the gloomy building, till suddenly I heard a knocking at the gate. Looking out, I saw four hooded figures unloading heavy black suitcases from an armored carriage; they then entered the inn. The next day, around noon, the most curious sounds came from the neighboring room—whistling, hammering, rasping, the shattering of glass, and above all this noise there boomed a powerful bass, shouting without pause:

—Faster, sons of vengeance, faster! Drain the elements, use the sieve! Evenly, evenly! And now the funnel! Pour him out! Fine, now give me that kludge-fudger, that winch-pincher, sprocketmonger, edulcorated data-dumper, that wretched reject of a widgeteer cowardly hiding in the grave! Death itself shall not protect him from our righteous wrath! Hand him over, with his shameless brain and his spindly legs! Take the tongs and pull the nose—more, more, enough to grip for the execution! Work the bellows, brave lads! Into the vise with him! Now rivet that brazen face—and again! Yes, yes, good! Perfect! Keep it up with that hammer! One-two, one-two! And tighten those nerves—he mustn’t faint too quickly, like the one yesterday! Let him taste our vengeance to the fullest! One-two, one-two! Hey! Ha! Ho!

Thus did the voice thunder and roar, and was answered by the rumble of bellows and the clanging of hammers on anvils, when suddenly a sneeze resounded and a great shout of triumph burst forth from four throats, then a shuffling and struggling behind the wall, and I heard a door open. Peering through a crack, I saw the strangers sneaking out into the hall and—incredibly enough—counted five of them. They all went downstairs and locked themselves in the cellar, remained there for a long time, returning to their room only that evening—once again four—and silent, as if they had been to a funeral. I went back to my books, but this business, it gave me no peace, so I resolved to get to the bottom of it. The next day at the same time, noon, the hammers started up again, the bellows roared, and that terrifying voice cried out in a hoarse bass:

—Hey now, sons of vengeance! Faster, my electric hearties! Shoulders to the wheel! Throw in the protons, the iodine! Step lively now, let’s have that flap-eared whigma-leeriac, that would-be hoodwinking wizard, misbegotten miscreant and incorrigible crank, let me grab him by his unwashed beak and lead him, kicking, to a sure and lingering death! Work those bellows, I say!

And again a sneeze rang out, and a stifled scream, and once again they left the room on tiptoe; as before, I counted five when they went down to the cellar, four when they returned. Seeing then that I could learn the mystery only there, I armed myself with a laser pistol, and at the crack of dawn slipped down to the cellar, where I found nothing but charred and mangled bits of metal; covering myself with a clump of straw, I sat in the darkest corner and waited, until around noon I heard those now familiar shouts and hammering sounds, then all at once the door flew open and in walked four Legarians, with a fifth bound hand and foot.

This fifth wore a doublet of old-fashioned cut, bright red and with a frill about the neck, and a feathered cap; he himself was fat of face and had an enormous nose, while the mouth was twisted in fear and babbled something all the while. The Legarians barred the door and, at a sign from the 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 nth 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-same, 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 perfectionistic principle. The Ninnicans had long ago assumed another name, that of Hedophagoi or Jubileaters, or just plain Jubilators. My arrival occurred during their Era of Plenty. Each and every Ninnican, or rather Jubilator, sat in his palace, which was built for him by his automate (for so they called their triboluminescent slaves), each with essences anointed, each with precious gems appointed, electrically caressed, impeccably dressed, pomaded, braided, gold-brocaded, lapped and laved in ducats gleaming, wrapped and wreathed in incense streaming, showered with treasures, plied with pleasures, marble halls, fanfares, balls, but for all that, strangely discontent and even a little depressed. And yet there was everything you could ask for! On this planet no one lifted a finger: instead of taking a walk, a drink, a nap, a trip or a wife, there was a Walker to walk one, a Napper to nap one, a Wiver to wive one, and so on, and it was even impossible for one to take a break, since there was a special apparatus for that as well. And thus, served and serviced by machines in every conceivable way, all medaled and maidened by appropriate automatic Decorators and Panderizers five to fifteen times per minute, covered with a seething, silvery swarm of mechanicules and machinerettes to coddle him, fondle him, wink, wave and whisper sweet nothings in his ear, back-rub, chin-chuck, cheek-pat and foot-grovel him, tirelessly kissing whatever he might present to be kissed—thus did the Jubilator vel Hedophage vel Ninnican wallow and carouse the livelong day, alone, while in the distance, all across the horizon, chugged the mighty Fabrifactories, churning out thrones of gold, dandle chains, pearl slippers and bibs, orbs, scepters, epaulets, spinels, spinets, cymbals, surreys, and a million other instruments and gratifacts to delight in. As I walked along, I constantly had to drive away machines that offered me their services; the more brazen ones, greedily seeking to be of use, had to be beaten over the head. Finally, fleeing the whole crowd of them, I found myself in the mountains —and saw a host of golden machines clamoring around the mouth of a cave walled up with stones, and through a narrow opening there I saw the watchful eyes of a Ninnican, who was apparently making a last stand against Universal Happiness. Seeing me, the machines immediately began to fan and fawn upon my person, read me fairy tales, stroke me, kiss my hands, promise me kingdoms, and I was saved thanks only to the one in the cave, who mercifully moved aside a stone and let me enter. He was half rusted through, yet glad of it, and said that he was the last philosopher of Ninnica. There was no need, of course, for him to tell me that plenitude, when too plenitudinous, was worse than destitution, for—obviously—what could one do, if there was nothing one could not? Truly, how could a mind, besieged by a sea of paradises, benumbed by a plethora of possibilities, thoroughly stunned by the instant fulfillment of its every wish and whim—decide on anything? I conversed with this wise individual, who called himself Trizivian Huncus, and we concluded that without enormous shields and an Ontological Complicositor-Imperfector, doom was unavoidable. Trizivian had for some time regarded complicositry as the ultimate existential solution; I, however, showed him the error of this approach, since it consisted simply in the removal of machines with the aid of other machines, namely gnawpers, thwockets, tenterwrenches, fracturacks, hobblers and winch-shrieks. Which obviously would only make matters worse—it wouldn’t be complicositry at all, but just the opposite. As everyone knows, History is irreversible, and there is no way back to the halcyon past other than through dreams and reveries.

Together we walked across a vast plain, knee-deep in ducats and doubloons, waving sticks to shoo off clouds of pesky blisserits, and we saw several Ninnican-Jubilators lying senseless, gasping softly, all sated, satiated, supersaturated with pleasure; the sight of such excessive surfeit, such reckless success, would have moved anyone to pity. Then there were the inhabitants of the automated palaces, who wildly threw themselves into cyberserking and other electroeccentricities, some setting machine against machine, some smashing priceless vases, for no longer could they endure the ubiquitous beatitude, and they opened fire on emeralds, guillotined earrings, ordered diadems broken on the wheel, or tried to hide from happiness in garrets and attics, or else ordered their appliances to whip themselves, or did all of these things at once, or in alternation. But absolutely nothing helped, and every last one of them perished, petted and attended to death. I advised Trizivian against simply shutting down the Fabrifactories, for having too little is as dangerous as having too much; but he, instead of studying up on the consequences of ontological complicositry, immediately began to dynamite the automates sky-high. A grievous mistake, for there followed a great depression, though indeed, he never lived to see it—it happened that a flock of flyrts swooped down upon him somewhere, and gallivamps and libidinators grabbed him, carried him to a cossetorium, there befuddled him with cuddlebutts, ogled, bussed and gnuzzled him to distraction, till he succumbed with a strangled cry of Rape!—and afterwards lay lifeless in the wasteland, buried in ducats, his shabby armor charred with the flames of mechanical lust… And that, Your Highness, was the end of one who was wise but could have been wiser!” concluded Trurl, adding, when he saw that these words still did not satisfy King Thumbscrew:

“Just what does Your Most Royal Highness want?”

“O constructor!” replied Thumbscrew. “You say that your tales are to improve the mind, but I do not find this to be so. They are, however, amusing, and therefore it is my wish that you tell me more and more of them, and do not stop.”

“O King!” answered Trurl. “You would learn from me what is perfection and how it may be gained, yet prove unable to grasp the deep meanings and great truths with which my narratives abound. Truly, you seek amusement and not wisdom—yet, even as you listen, my words do slowly penetrate and act upon your brain, and later too will act, much as a time bomb. To this end, allow me to present an account that is intricate, unusual and true, or nearly true, from which your royal advisers may also derive some benefit.

Hear then, noble sirs, the history of Zipperupus, king of the Partheginians, the Deutons, and the Profligoths, of whom concupiscence was the ruin!

Now Zipperupus belonged to the great house of Tup, which was divided into two branches: the Dextrorotarory Tups, who were in power, and the Levorotarory Tups, also called the Left-handed or Counterclockwise Tups, who were not—and therefore consumed with hatred for their ruling cousins. His sire, Calcyon, had joined in morganatic marriage with a common machine, a manual water pump, and so Zipperupus inherited—from the distaff side—a tendency to fly off the handle, and—from the spear side—faint-heartedness coupled with a wanton nature. Seeing this, the enemies of the throne, the Sinistral Isomers, thought of how they might destroy him through his own lascivious proclivities. Accordingly, they sent him a Cybernerian named Subtillion, an adept in mental engineering; Zipperupus took an instant liking to him and made him Lord High Thaumaturge and Apothecary to the Throne. The wily Subtillion devised various means to gratify the unbridled lust of Zipperupus, secretly hoping so to enfeeble and debilitate the King, that he would altogether waste away. He built him an erotodrome and a debaucherorium, regaled him with endless automated orgies, but the iron constitution of the King withstood all these depravities. The Sinistral Isomers grew impatient and ordered their agent to bring all his cunning to bear and achieve the desired end without any further delay.

“Would you like me,” he asked them at a secret meeting in the castle catacombs, “to short-circuit the King, or demagnetize his memory to render him mindless?”

“Absolutely not!” they replied. “In no way must we be implicated in the King’s demise. Let Zipperupus perish through his own illicit desires, let his sinful passions be his undoing—and not us!”

“Fine,” said Subtillion. “I’ll set a snare for him, I’ll weave it out of dreams, and bait it with a tempting lure, which he will seize and, in so seizing, of his own volition plunge into figments and mad fictions, sink into dreams lurking within dreams, and there I’ll give him such a thorough finagling and inveigling, that he’ll never get back to reality alive!”

“Very well,” they said. “But do not boast, O Cybernerian, for it is not words we need, but deeds, that Zipperupus might become an autoregicide, that is, his own assassin!”

And thus Subtillion the Cybernerian got down to work and spent an entire year on his dreadful scheme, requesting from the royal treasury more and more gold bullion, brass, platinum and no end of precious stones, telling Zipperupus, whenever the latter protested, that he was making something for him, something no other monarch had in all the world!

When the year was up, three enormous cabinets were carried from the Cybernerian’s workshop and deposited with great ceremony outside the King’s privy chamber, for they wouldn’t fit through the door. Hearing the steps and the knocking of the porters, Zipperupus came out and saw the cabinets, there along the wall, stately and massive, four cubits high, two across, and covered with gems. The first cabinet, also called the White Box, was all in mother-of-pearl and blazing albite inlays, the second, black as night, was set with agates and morions, while the third glowed deep red, studded with rubies and ruby spinels. Each had legs ornamented with winged griffins, solid gold, and a polished pilastered frame, and inside, an electronic brain full of dreams, dreams that dreamed independently, needing no dreamer to dream them. King Zipperupus was much amazed at this explanation and exclaimed:

“What’s this you say, Subtillion?! Dreaming cabinets? Whatever for? What use are they to me? And anyway, how can you tell they’re really dreaming?”

Then Subtillion, with a humble bow, showed him the rows of little holes running down the cabinet frames; next to each hole was a little inscription on a little pearl plaque, and the astonished King read:

“War Dream with Citadels and Damsels"—"Dream about the Wockle Weed"—"Dream about Alacritus the Knight and Fair Ramolda, Daughter of Heteronius"— “Dream about Nixies, Pixies and Witchblende"—"The Marvelous Mattress of Princess Bounce"—"The Old Soldier, or The Cannon That Couldn’t"—"Salto Erotale, or Amorous Gymnastics"—"Bliss in the Eightfold Embrace of Octopauline"—"Perpetuum Amorobile"—"Eating Lead Dumplings under the New Moon"—"Breakfast with Maidens and Music"—"Tucking in the Sun to Keep It Warm” —"The Wedding Night of Princess Ineffabelle"—"Dream about Cats"—"About Silks and Satins"—"About You-Know-What"—"Figs without Their Leaves, and Other Forbidden Fruit"—"Also Prurient Prunes"—"How the Lecher Got His Tots"—"Devilry and Divers Revelry before Reveille, with Croutons"—"Mona Lisa, or The Labyrinth of Sweet Infinity.”

The King went on to the second cabinet and read: “Dreams and Diversions.” And under this heading: “Cybersynergy"—"Corpses and Corsets"—"Tops and Toggles” —"Klopstock and the Critics"—"Buffer the Leader"— “Fratcher My Pliss"—"Counterpane and Ventilator"—"Cybercroquet"—"Robot Crambo"—"Flowcharts and Go-carts"—"Bippety-flippety"—"Spin the Shepherdess"—"Pin the Murder on the Girder"—"Executioner, or Screaming Cutouts"—"Spin the Shepherdess One More Time"—"Cy-clodore and Shuttlebox"—"Cecily and the Cyanide Cyborg” —"Cybernation"—"Harem Racing"—and finally—"Kludge Poker.” Subtillion, the mental engineer, quickly explained that each dream dreamed itself, entirely on its own, until someone plugged into it, for as soon as his plug—hanging on this watch chain—was inserted in the given pair of holes, he would be instantly connected with the cabinet dream, and connected so completely, that the dream for him would be like real, so real you couldn’t tell the difference. Zipperupus, intrigued, took the chain and impulsively plugged himself into the White Box, right where the sign said, “Breakfast with Maidens and Music"—and felt spiny ridges growing down his back, and enormous wings unfolding, and his hands and feet distending into paws with wicked claws, and from his jaws, which had six rows of fangs, there belched forth fire and brimstone. Greatly taken aback, the King gasped, but instead of a gasp, a roar like thunder issued from his throat and shook the earth. This amazed him even more, his eyes grew wide, and in the darkness illumined by his fiery breath he saw that they were bringing him, high on their shoulders, virgins in serving bowls, four to each, garnished with greens and smelling so good, he started to drool. The table soon set—salt here, pepper over there—he licked his chops, made himself comfortable and, one by one, popped them into his mouth like peanuts, crunching and grunting with pleasure; the last virgin was so luscious, so succulent, that he smacked his lips, rubbed his tummy, and was about to ask for seconds, when everything flickered and he woke. He looked—he was standing, as before, in the vestibule outside his private quarters. At his side was Subtillion, Lord High Thaumaturge and Apothecary to the Throne, and before him, the dream cabinets, glittering with precious gems.

“How were the maidens?” inquired Subtillion.

“Not bad. But where was the music?”

“The chimes got stuck,” the Cybernerian explained. “Would Your Royal Highness care to try another dream?”

Of course he would, but this time from another cabinet. The King went up to the black one and plugged into the dream entitled “Alacritus the Knight and Fair Ramolda, Daughter of Heteronius.”

He blinked—and saw that this was indeed the age of electrical errantry. He was standing, all clad in steel, in a wooded glen, a freshly vanquished dragon at his feet; the leaves rustled, a gentle zephyr blew, a brook gurgled nearby. He looked into the water and saw, from the reflection, that he was none other than Alacritus, a knight of the highest voltage and hero without peer. The whole history of his glorious career was recorded, in battle scars, upon his person, and he recalled it all, as if the memory were his own. Those dents in the visor of the helmet—made by the mailed fists of Morbidor, in his death throes, having been dispatched with customary alacrity; the broken hinges on the right greave—that was the work of the late Sir Basher de Bloo; and the rivets across his left pauldron—gnawed by Skivvian the Scurvy before giving up the ghost; and the tembrace grille had been crushed by Gourghbrast Buggeruckus ere he was felled. Similarly, the cuissfenders, crosshasps, beaver baffles, hauberk latches, front and rear jambguards and grommets—all bore the marks of battle. His shield was scored and notched by countless blows, but the backplate, that was as shiny and rust-free as a newborn’s, for never had he turned to flee an adversary! Though his glory, truth to tell, was a matter of complete indifference to him. But then he remembered the fair Ramolda, leaped upon his supercharger and began to search the length and breadth of the dream for her. In time he arrived at the castle of her father, the Autoduke Hetero-nius; the drawbridge planks thundered beneath horse and rider, and the Autoduke himself came out to greet him with open arms.

The knight would fain see his Ramolda, but etiquette requires he curb his impatience; meanwhile the old Autoduke tells him that another knight is staying at the castle, one Mygrayn of the house of Polymera, master swordsman and redoubtable elastician, who dreams of nothing else but to enter the lists with Alacritus himself. And now here is Mygrayn, spry and supple, stepping forward with these words:

“Know, O Knight, that I desire Ramolda the streamlined, Ramolda of the hydraulic thighs, whose bust no diamond drill can touch, whose limpid eyes are magnetized! She is thy betrothed, true, but lo, I herewith challenge thee to mortal combat, sith only one of us may win her hand in marriage!”

And he throws his gage, white and polymerous.

“We’ll hold the wedding right after the joust,” adds the Autoduke-father.

“Very well!’ says Alacritus, but inside, Zipperupus thinks: “It doesn’t matter, I can have her after the wedding and then wake up. But who asked for this Mygrayn character?”

“This very day, brave Knight,” says Heteronius, “thou wilt encounter Mygrayn of Polymera on beaten ground and contend with him by torchlight. But for now, retire thee to thy room and rest!”

Inside Alacritus, Zipperupus is a little uneasy, but what can he do? So he goes to his room, and after a while hears a furtive knock-knock at the door, and an old cybercrone tiptoes in, gives a wrinkled wink and says:

“Fear naught, O Knight, thou shalt have the fair Ramolda and forsooth, this very day she’ll clasp thee to her alabaster bosom! Of thee alone doth she dream, both day and night! Remember only to attack with might and main, for Mygrayn cannot harm thee and the victory is thine!”

“That’s easy enough to say, my cybercrone,” replies the knight. “But anything can happen. What if I trip, for example, or fail to parry in time? No, it’s a risky business! But perhaps you have some charm that will be certain.”

“Hee-hee!” cackles the cybercrone. “The things thou sayest, steel sir! There are no charms, surely, nor hast thou need of any, for I know what will be and guarantee thou winnest hands down!”

“Still, a charm would be more sure,” says the knight, “particularly in a dream… but wait, did by any chance Subtillion send you, to give me confidence?”

“I know of no Subtillion,” answers she, “nor of what dream ye speak. Nay, this is reality, my steely liege, as thou wilt learn ere long, when fair Ramolda gives thee her electric lips to kiss!”

“Odd,” mutters Zipperupus, not noticing that the cybercrone has left the room as quietly as she came. “Is this a dream or not? I had the impression that it was. But she says this is reality. H’m. Well, in any event I’d best be doubly on my guard!” And now the trumpets sound, and one can hear the rattle of armor; the galleries are packed and everyone awaits the principals. Here comes Alacritus, a little weak in the knees; he enters the lists and sees Ramolda, daughter of Heteronius. She looks upon him sweetly—ah, but there’s no time for that now! Mygrayn is stepping into the ring, the torches blaze all around, and their swords cross with a mighty clang. Now Zipperupus is frightened in earnest and tries as hard as he can to wake up, he tries and tries, but it won’t work—the armor’s too heavy, the dream isn’t letting go, and the enemy’s attacking! Faster and faster rain the blows, and Zipperupus, weakening, can hardly lift his arm, when suddenly the foe cries out and shows a broken blade; Alacritus the knight is ready to leap upon him, but Mygrayn dashes from the ring and his squires hand him another sword. Just then Alacritus sees the cybercrone among the spectators; she approaches and whispers in his ear:

“Sire of steel! When anon thou art near the open gate that leadeth to the bridge, Mygrayn will lower his guard. Strike bravely then, for ’tis a sign, certain and true, of thy victory!”

Wherewith she vanishes, and his rival, rearmed, comes charging. They fight, Mygrayn hacking away like a threshing machine out of control, but by degrees he slackens, parries sluggishly, backs away, and now the time is ripe, the moment arrives, but the opponent’s blade gleams formidably still, so Zipperupus pulls himself together and thinks, “To hell with the fair Ramolda!"—turns tail and runs like mad, pounding back over the drawbridge and into the forest and the darkness of the night. Behind him he hears shouts of “Disgraceful!” and “For shame!", crashes headfirst into a tree, sees stars, blinks, and there he is, standing in the palace vestibule in front of the Black Cabinet of dreams that dream, and by his side, Subtillion the mental engineer, smiling a crooked smile. Crooked, as Subtillion was hiding his disappointment: the Alacritus-Ramolda dream had in reality been a trap set for the King, for had Zipperupus heeded the old cybercrone’s advice, Mygrayn, who was only pretending to weaken, would have run him through at the open gate. This the King avoided, thanks only to his extraordinary cowardice.

“Did Milord enjoy the fair Ramolda?” inquired the sly Cybernerian.

“She wasn’t fair enough,” said Zipperupus, “so I didn’t see fit to pursue the matter. And besides, there was some trouble, and fighting too. I like my dreams without fighting, do you understand?”

“As Your Royal Highness wishes,” replied Subtillion. “Choose freely, for in all these cabinet dreams there is only delight in store, no fighting…”

“We’ll see,” said the King and plugged into the dream entitled “The Marvelous Mattress of Princess Bounce.” He was in a room of unsurpassed loveliness, all in gold brocade. Through crystal windowpanes light streamed like water from the purest spring, and there by her pearly vanity the Princess stood, yawning, preparing herself for bed. Zipperupus was greatly amazed at this unexpected sight and tried to clear his throat to inform her of his presence, but not a sound came out—had he been gagged?—so he tried to touch his mouth, but couldn’t, tried to move his legs—no, he couldn’t—then desperately looked around for a place to sit down, feeling faint, but that too was impossible. Meanwhile the Princess stretched and gave a yawn, and another, and a third, and then, overcome with drowsiness, she fell upon the mattress so hard, that King Zipperupus was jolted from head to toe, for he himself was the mattress of Princess Bounce! Evidently the young damsel was having an unpleasant dream, seeing how she turned and tossed about, jabbing the King with her little elbows, digging him with her little heels, until his royal person (transformed into a mattress by this dream) was seized with a mighty rage. The King struggled with his dream, strained and strained, and finally the seams burst, the springs sprang, the slats gave way and the Princess came crashing down with a shriek, which woke him up and he found himself once again in the palace vestibule, and by his side, Subtillion the Cybernerian, bowing an obsequious bow.

“You chuckleheaded bungler!” cried the indignant King. “How dare you?! What, villain, am I to be a mattress, and someone else’s mattress at that? You forget yourself, sirrah!”

Subtillion, alarmed by the King’s fury, apologized profusely and begged him to try another dream, persuading and pleading until Zipperupus, finally appeased, took the plug and hooked himself into the dream, “Bliss in the Eightfold Embrace of Octopauline.” He was standing in a crowd of onlookers in a great square, and a procession was passing by with waving silks, muslins, mechanical elephants, litters in carved ebony; the one in the middle was like a golden shrine, and in it, behind eight veils, sat a feminine figure of miraculous beauty, an angel with a dazzling face and galactic gaze, high-frequency earrings too, and the King, all a-tremble, was about to ask who this heavenly vision was, when he heard a murmur of awe and adoration surge through the multitude: “Octopauline! It’s Octopauline!”

For they were celebrating, with the utmost pomp and pageantry, the royal daughter’s betrothal to a foreign knight of the name Oneiromant.

The King was a bit surprised that he wasn’t this knight, and when the procession had passed and disappeared behind the palace gates, he went with the others in the crowd to a nearby inn; there he saw Oneiromant, who, clad in nothing but galligaskins of damask studded with gold nails and holding a half-empty stein of fortified phosgene in his hand, came over to him, put an arm around him, gave him a hug and whispered in his ear with searing breath:

“Look, I have a rendezvous with Princess Octopauline tonight at midnight, behind the palace, in the grove of barb-wire bushes next to the mercury fountain—but I don’t dare show up, not in this condition, I’ve had too much to drink, you see—but you, good stranger, why you’re the spit and image of me, so please, please go in my place, kiss the Princess’ hands for me and say that you’re Oneiromant, and gosh, I’ll be beholden to you forever and a day!”

“Why not?” said the King after a little thought. “Yes, I think I can manage it. But when?”

“Right now, there’s not a moment to lose, it’s almost midnight, just remember—the King knows nothing of this, no one does, only the Princess and the old gatekeeper, and when he bars your way, here, put this heavy bag of ducats in his hand, and he’ll let you pass!”

The King nodded, took the bag of ducats and ran straight for the castle, since the clocks, like cast-iron hoot owls, were already beginning to strike the hour. He sped over the drawbridge, took a quick look into the gaping moat, shuddered, lowered his head and slipped under the spiked grating of the portcullis—then across the courtyard to the barbwire bushes and the fountain that bubbled mercury, and there in the pale moonlight he saw the divine figure of Princess Octopauline, beautiful beyond his wildest dreams and so bewitching, that he shook with desire.

Observing these shakings and shudderings of the sleeping monarch in the palace vestibule, Subtillion chortled and rubbed his hands with glee, this time certain of the King’s demise, for he knew that when Octopauline enfolded the unfortunate lover in those powerful eightfold arms of hers and drew him deep into the fathomless dream with her tender tentacles of love, he would never, never make it back to the surface of reality! And in fact, Zipperupus, burning to be wrapped in the Princess’ embrace, was running along the wall in the shadow of the cloisters, running towards that radiant image of silvery pulchritude, when suddenly the old gatekeeper appeared and blocked the way with his halberd. The King lifted the bag of ducats but, feeling their pleasant weight in his hand, was loath to part with them—what a shame, really, to throw away a whole fortune on one embrace!

“Here’s a ducat,” he said, opening the bag. “Now let me by!”

“It’ll cost you ten,” said the gatekeeper.

“What, ten ducats for a single hug?” jeered the King. “You’re out of your mind!”

“Ten ducats,” said the gatekeeper. “That’s the price.”

“Can’t you lower it a little?”

“Ten ducats, not a ducat less.”

“So that’s how it is!” yelled the King, flying off the handle in his usual way. “Very well then, dog, you don’t get a thing!” Whereupon the gatekeeper whopped him good with the halberd and everything went spinning around, the cloisters, the fountain, the drawbridge, and Zipperupus fell —not asleep, but awake, opening his eyes to see Subtillion at his side and in front of him, the Dream Cabinet. The Cybernerian was greatly confounded, for now he had failed twice: the first time, because of the King’s craven character, the second, because of his greed. But Subtillion, putting a good face on a bad business, invited the King to help himself to another dream.

This time Zipperupus selected the “Wockle Weed” dream.

He was Dodderont Debilitus, ruler of Epilepton and

Maladyne, a rickety old codger and incurable lecher besides, with a soul that longed for evil deeds. But what evil could he do with these creaking joints, these palsied arms and gouty legs? “I need a pick-me-up,” he thought and ordered his degenerals, Tartaron and Torturus, to go out and put whatever they could to fire and sword, sacking, pillaging and carrying off. This they did and, returning, said:

“Sire and Sovereign! We put what we could to fire and sword, we sacked, we pillaged, and here is what we carried off: the beauteous Adoradora, Virgin Queen of the Mynamoacans, with all her treasure!”

“Eh? What’s that you say? With her treasure?” wheezed the quimsy King. “But where is she? And what’s all that sniveling and shivering over there?”

“Here, upon yon royal couch, Your Highness!” barked the degenerals in chorus. “The sniveling comes from the prison-eress, the above-mentioned Queen Adoradora, recumbent on her antimacassar of pearls! And she shivers first, because she is clad in naught but this exquisite, gold-embroidered shift, and secondly, in anticipation of great indignities and degradation!”

“What? Indignities, you say? Degradation? Good, good!” rasped the King. “Hand her over, I’ll ravish and outrage the poor thing at once!”

“Impossible, Your Highness,” interposed the Royal Surgeon and Chirurgeon, “for reasons of national security.”

“What? I can’t ravish? I can’t violate? I, the King? Have you gone mad? What else did I ever do throughout my reign?”

“That’s just it, Your Highness!” urged the Surgeon. “Your Highness’ health has been seriously impaired by those excesses!”

“Oh? Well, in that case… give me an ax, I’ll just lop off her, ah, head…”

“With Your Highness’ permission, that too would be extremely unwise. The least exertion…”

“Odsbodkins and thunderation! What blessed use is this kingship to me then?!” sputtered the King, growing desperate. “Cure me, blast it! Restore me! Make me young again, so I can-—you know—like it used to be… Otherwise, so help me, I’ll… I’ll…”

In terror all the courtiers, degenerals and medical assistants rushed out to find some way to rejuvenate the royal person; at last they summoned the great Calculon himself, a sage of infinite wisdom. He came before the King and asked:

“What is it that Your Royal Highness wishes?”

“Eh? Wishes, is it? Hah!” croaked the King. “I’ll tell you what he wishes! He wishes to continue with his debaucheries, saturnalian carousals, incontinent wallowings and wild oats, and in particular to defile and properly deflower Queen Adoradora, who for the time being sits in the dungeon!”

“There are two courses of action open to us,” said Calculon. “Either Your Highness deigns to choose a suitably competent individual, who will perform per procuram everything Your Highness, wired to that individual, commands, and in this way Your Highness can experience whatever that individual experiences, exactly as if he had experienced the experience himself. Or else you must summon the old cyberhag who lives in the forest outside the village, in a hut on three legs, for she is a geriatric witch and deals exclusively with the infirmities of advanced age!”

“Oh? Well, let’s try the wires first!” said the King. And it was done in a trice; the royal electricians connected the Captain of the Guard to the King, and the King immediately commanded him to saw the sage in half, for this was precisely the kind of foul deed in which he took such delight. Calculon’s pleas and screams were to no avail. However, the insulation on one of the wires was torn during the sawing, and consequently the King received only the first half of the execution.

“A paltry method. The charlatan deserved to be sawed in half,” wheezed His Highness. “Now let’s have that old cyberhag, the one with the hut on three legs!”

His courtiers headed full speed for the forest, and before long the King heard a mournful singsong, which went something like this:

“Ancient persons repaired here! I renovate, regenerate, I fix as good as new; corroded or scleroded, why, everyone pulls through! So if you quake, or creak, or shake, or have the rust, or feel the ache, yes I’m the one for you!”

The old cyberhag listened patiently to the King’s complaints, bowed low and said:

“Sire and Sovereign! Beyond the blue horizon, at the foot of Bald Mountain, there flows a spring, and from this spring there flows a stream, a stream of oil, of castor oil, and o’er it grows the wockle weed, a high-octane antisenescent re-juvenator—one tablespoon, and kiss forty-seven years goodbye! Though you have to be careful not to take too much: an overdose of wockle juice can youthen to the point of euthanasia and poof, you disappear! And now, Sire, I shall prepare this remedy tried and true!”

“Wonderful!” cried the King. “And I’ll have them prepare the Queen Adoradora—let the poor thing know what awaits her, heh-heh!”

And with trembling hands he tried to straighten his loose screws, muttering and clucking all the while, and even twitching in places, for he had grown most senile, though his passion for evil never abated.

Meanwhile knights rode out beyond the blue horizon to the castor-oil stream, and later, over the old cyberhag’s cauldron vapors swirled, whirled and curled as concoctions were being concocted, till finally she hastened to the throne, fell on her knees and handed the King a goblet, full to the brim with a liquid that shone and shimmered like quicksilver, and she said in a great voice:

“King Dodderont Debilitus! Lo, here is the rejuvenescent essence of the wockle weed! Invigorating, exhilarating, just the thing for dalliance and derring-do! Drain this cup, and for you the entire Galaxy will not hold cities enough to despoil, nor maidens enough to dishonor! Drink, and to your health!”

The King raised the goblet, but spilled a few drops on his footstool, which instantly reared up, snorted and hurled itself at Degeneral Tartaron, with frenzied intent to humiliate and profane. In a twinkling of an eye, it had ripped off six fistfuls of medals.

“Drink, Your Highness, drink!” prompted the cyberhag. “You see yourself what miracles it works!”

“You first,” said the King in a barely audible whisper, as he was aging fast. The cyberhag turned pale, backed away, refused, but at a nod from the King three soldiers seized her and, using a funnel, forced several drops of the glittering brew down her throat. A flash, a thunderclap, smoke everywhere! The courtiers looked, the King looked—nothing, not a trace of the cyberhag, only a black hole gaping in the floor, and through it one could see another hole, a hole in the dream itself, clearly revealing somebody’s foot—elegantly shod, though the sock was singed and the silver buckle turning dark, as if eaten with acid. The foot of course, along with its sock and shoe, belonged to Subtillion, Lord High Thaumaturge and Apothecary to King Zipperupus. For so potent was that poison the cyberhag had called the wockle weed, that not only did it dissolve both her and the floor, but went clear through to reality, there spattering the shin of Subtillion, which gave him a nasty burn. The King, terrified, tried to wake, but (fortunately for Subtillion) De-general Torturus managed to bash him good over the head with his mace; thanks to this, Zipperupus, when he came to, was unable to recall a thing of what had happened when he was Dodderont Debilitus. Still, once again he had foiled the Cybernerian, slipping out of the third deadly dream, saved this time by his overly suspicious nature.

“There was something… but I forget just what,” said the King, back in front of the Cabinet That Dreamed. “But why are you, Subtillion, hopping about on one leg like that and holding the other?”

“It’s—it’s nothing, Your Highness… a touch of rhom-botism… must be a change in the weather,” stammered the crafty Thaumaturge, and then continued to tempt the King to sample yet another dream. Zipperupus thought awhile, read through the Table of Contents and chose, “The Wedding Night of Princess Ineffabelle.” And he dreamt he was sitting by the fire and reading an ancient volume, quaint and curious, in which it told, with well-turned words and crimson ink on gilded parchment, of the Princess Ineffabelle, who reigned five centuries ago in the land of Dandelia, and it told of her Icicle Forest, and her Helical Tower, and the Aviary That Neighed, and the Treasury with a Hundred Eyes, but especially of her beauty and abounding virtues. And Zipperupus longed for this vision of loveliness with a great longing, and a mighty desire was kindled within him and set his soul afire, that his eyeballs blazed like beacons, and he rushed out and searched every corner of the dream for Ineffabelle, but she was nowhere to be found; indeed, only the very oldest robots had ever heard of that princess. Weary from his long peregrinations, Zipperupus came at last to the center of the royal desert, where the dunes were gold-plated, and there espied a humble hut; when he approached it, he saw an individual of patriarchal appearance, in a robe as white as snow. The latter rose and spake thusly:

“Thou seekest Ineffabelle, poor wretch! And yet thou knowest full well she doth not live these five hundred years, hence how vain and unavailing is thy passion! The only thing that I can do for thee is to let thee see her—not in the flesh, forsooth, but a fair informational facsimile, a model that is digital, not physical, stochastic, not plastic, ergodic and most assuredly erotic, and all in yon Black Box, which I constructed in my spare time out of odds and ends!”

“Ah, show her to me, show her to me now!” exclaimed Zipperupus, quivering. The patriarch gave a nod, examined the ancient volume for the princess’ coordinates, put her and the entire Middle Ages on punch cards, wrote up the program, threw the switch, lifted the lid of the Black Box and said:

“Behold!”

The King leaned over, looked and saw, yes, the Middle Ages simulated to a T, all digital, binary and nonlinear, and there was the land of Dandelia, the Icicle Forest, the palace with the Helical Tower, the Aviary That Neighed, and the Treasury with a Hundred Eyes as well; and there was Ineffabelle herself, taking a slow, stochastic stroll through her simulated garden, and her circuits glowed red and gold as she picked simulated daisies and hummed a simulated song. Zipperupus, unable to restrain himself any longer, leaped upon the Black Box and in his madness tried to climb into that computerized world. The patriarch, however, quickly killed the current, hurled the King to the earth and said:

“Madman! Wouldst attempt the impossible?! For no being made of matter can ever enter a system that is naught but the flux and swirl of alphanumerical elements, discontinuous integer configurations, the abstract stuff of digits!”

“But I must, I must!!” bellowed Zipperupus, beside himself, and beat his head against the Black Box until the metal was dented. The old sage then said:

“If such is thy inalterable desire, there is a way I can connect thee to the Princess Ineffabelle, but first thou must part with thy present form, for I shall take thy appurtenant coordinates and make a program of thee, atom by atom, and place thy simulation in that world medievally modeled, informational and representational, and there will it remain, enduring as long as electrons course through these wires and hop from cathode to anode. But thou, standing here before me now, thou wilt be annihilated, so that thy only existence may be in the form of given fields and potentials, statistical, heuristical, and wholly digital!”

“That’s hard to believe,” said Zipperupus. “How will I know you’ve simulated me, and not someone else?”

“Very well, we’ll make a trial run,” said the sage. And he took all the King’s measurements, as if for a suit of clothes, though with much greater precision, since every atom was carefully plotted and weighed, and then he fed the program into the Black Box and said:

“Behold!”

The King peered inside and saw himself sitting by the fire and reading in an ancient book about the Princess Ineffabelle, then rushing out to find her, asking here and there, until in the heart of the gold-plated desert he came upon a humble hut and a snow-white patriarch, who greeted him with the words, “Thou seekest Ineffabelle, poor wretch!” And so on.

“Surely now thou art convinced,” said the patriarch, switching it off. “This time I shall program thee in the Middle Ages, at the side of the sweet Ineffabelle, that thou mayest dream with her an unending dream, simulated, nonlinear, binary…”

“Yes, yes, I understand,” said the King. “But still, it’s only my likeness, not myself, since I am right here and not in any Box!”

“But thou wilt not be here long,” replied the sage with a kindly smile, “for I shall attend to that…”

And he pulled out a hammer from under the bed, a heavy hammer, but serviceable.

“When thou art locked in the arms of thy beloved,” the patriarch told him, “I shall see to it that there be not two of thee, one here and one there, in the Box—employing a method that is old and primitive, yet never fails, so if thou wilt just bend over a little…”

“First let me take another look at your Ineffabelle,” said the King. “Just to make sure…”

The sage lifted the lid of the Black Box and showed him Ineffabelle. The King looked and looked, and finally said:

“The description in the ancient volume is greatly exaggerated. She’s not bad, of course, but nowhere near as beautiful as it says in the chronicles. Well, so long, old sage…”

And he turned to leave.

“Where art thou going, madman?!” cried the patriarch, clutching his hammer, for the King was almost out the door.

“Anywhere but in the Box,” said Zipperupus and hurried out, but at that very moment the dream burst like a bubble beneath his feet, and he found himself in the vestibule facing the bitterly disappointed Subtillion, disappointed because the King had come so close to being locked up in the Black Box, and the Lord High Thaumaturge could have kept him there forever…

“Listen here, Sir Cybernerian,” said the King, “these dreams of yours with princesses are a great deal more trouble than they’re worth. Now either you show me one I can enjoy—no tricks, no complications—or leave the palace at once, and take your cabinets with you!”

“Sire!” Subtillion replied. “I have just the dream for you, the finest quality and tailor-made. Only give it a try, and you’ll see I’m right!”

“Which one is that?” asked the King.

“This one, Your Highness,” said the Lord High Thaumaturge, and pointed to the little pearl plaque with the inscription: “Mona Lisa, or The Labyrinth of Sweet Infinity.”

And before the King could answer yea or nay, Subtillion himself took the chain to plug him in, and quickly, for he saw that things were going none too well: Zipperupus had escaped eternal imprisonment in the Black Box, too thickheaded to fall completely for the captivating Ineffabelle.

“Wait,” said the King, “let me!”

And he pushed in the plug and entered the dream, only to find himself still himself, Zipperupus, standing in the palace vestibule, and at his side, Subtillion the Cybernerian, who explains to him that of all the dreams, “Mona Lisa” is the most dissolute and dissipated, for in it is the infinite in femininity; hearing this, Zipperupus plugs in and looks about for Mona Lisa, already yearning for her infinitely feminine caress, but in this dream within a dream he finds himself still in the palace vestibule, the Lord High Thaumaturge at his side, so impatiently plugs into the cabinet and enters the next dream, but it’s still the same, the vestibule, the cabinets, the Cybernerian and himself. “Is this a dream or isn’t it?” he shouts, plugging in again, and once again there’s the vestibule, the cabinets, the Cybernerian; and again, but it’s still the same; and again and again, faster and faster. “Where’s Mona Lisa, knave?!” he snarls, and pulls the plug to wake—but no, he’s still in the vestibule with the cabinets! Furious, he stamps his feet and hurls himself from dream to dream, from cabinet to cabinet, from Cybernerian to Cybernerian, but now he doesn’t care about the dream, he only wants to get back to reality, back to his beloved throne, the court intrigues and old iniquities, and he pulls and pushes the plugs in a blind frenzy. “Help!” he cries, and, “Hey! The King’s in danger!” and, “Mona Lisa! Yoo-hoo!,” while he thrashes around in terror and scrambles wildly from corner to corner, looking for a chink in the dream, but in vain. He did not understand the how, the why or the what of it, but his stupidity could not save him, nor could his cowardice, nor his inordinate greed, for this time he had gotten himself in too deep, and was trapped and wrapped in dreams as if in a hundred tight cocoons, so that even when he managed, straining with all his might, to free himself from one, that didn’t help, for immediately he fell into another, and when he pulled his plug from the cabinet, both plug and cabinet were only dreamed, not real, and when he beat Subtillion, Subtillion too turned out to be a dream. Zipperupus leaped here and there, and everywhere, but wherever he leaped, everything was a dream, a dream and nothing but a dream, the doors, the marble floors, the gold-embroidered walls, the tapestries, the halls, and Zipperupus too, he was a dream, a dream that dreamed, a walking shadow, an empty apparition, insubstantial, fleeting, lost in a labyrinth of dreams, sinking ever deeper, though still he bucked and kicked—only that too was purely imaginary! He punched Subtillion in the nose, but not really, roared and howled, but nothing real came out, and when at last, dazed and half-crazed, he really did tear his way into reality, he thought it was a dream and plugged himself back in, and then it really was, and on he dreamed, and on and on, which was inevitable, and thus Zipperupus, whimpering, dreamed of waking in vain, not knowing that ‘Mona Lisa’ was—in reality—a diabolical code for ‘monarch-olysis,’ that is: the dissolution, dissociation and total dissipation of the King. For truly, of all Subtillion’s treacherous traps, this was the most terrible…

Such was the tale, moving and improving, that Trurl told to King Thumbscrew the Third, who by now had a splitting headache and so dismissed the constructor without further ado, presenting him first with the Order of the Sacred Cy-bernia, a lilac sign of feedback upon a field of green, in-crusted with precious bits of information.

And with these words the second storytelling machine ground to a halt, its golden gears whirring musically, and gave a giddy little laugh, for a few of its klystrons had overheated slightly; but it lowered its anode potential, waved away the smoke, sighed and retreated to the photon phaeton, accompanied by much applause, the reward for its eloquence and storytelling skill.

King Genius meanwhile offered Trurl a cup of ion mead, wondrously carved with curves of probability and the subtle play of quantum waves. Trurl quaffed it down, then snapped his fingers, whereupon the third machine stepped out into the center of the cave, bowed low and said, in a voice that was tonic, euphonic, and most electronic:

This is the story of how the Great Constructor Trurl, with the aid of an ordinary jug, created a local fluctuation, and what came of it.

In the Constellation of the Wringer there was a Spiral Galaxy, and in this Galaxy there was a Black Nebula, and in this Nebula were five sixth-order clusters, and in the fifth cluster, a lilac sun, very old and very dim, and around this sun revolved seven planets, and the third planet had two moons, and in all these suns and stars and planets and moons a variety of events, various and varying, took place, falling into a statistical distribution that was perfectly normal, and on the second moon of the third planet of the lilac sun of the fifth cluster of the Black Nebula in the Spiral Galaxy in the Constellation of the Wringer was a garbage dump, the kind of garbage dump one might find on any planet or moon, absolutely average, in other words full of garbage; it had come into existence because the Glauberical Aberracleans once waged a war, a war of the fission-and-fusion type, against the Albumenid Ifts, with the natural result that their bridges, roads, homes and palaces, and of course they themselves, were reduced to ashes and shards, which the solar winds blew to the place whereof we speak. Now for many, many centuries positively nothing took place in this garbage dump but garbage, though an earthquake did occur and shifted the garbage on the bottom to the top, and the garbage on the top to the bottom, which in itself had no particular significance, and yet this paved the way for a most unusual phenomenon. It so happened that Trurl, the Fabulous Constructor, while flying in the vicinity, was blinded by a certain comet with a garish tail. He fled its path, frantically jettisoning out the spaceship window whatever lay in reach—chess pieces, the hollow kind, which he’d filled with liquor for the trip, some barrels the Ubbidubs of Chlorelei employed for the purpose of compelling their opponents to yield, as well as assorted utensils, and among these, an old earthenware jug with a crack down the middle. This jug, accelerating in accordance with the laws of gravity and boosted by the comet’s tail, crashed into a mountainside above the dump, fell, clattered down a slope of junk toward a puddle, skittered across some mud, and finally smacked into an old tin can; this impact bent the metal around a copper wire, also knocked some pieces of mica between the edges, and that made a condenser, while the wire, twisted by the can, formed the beginnings of a solenoid, and a stone, set in motion by the jug, moved in turn a hunk of rusty iron, which happened to be a magnet, and this gave rise to a current, and that current passed through sixteen other cans and snips of wire, releasing a number of sulfides and chlorides, whose atoms linked with other atoms, and the ensuing molecules latched onto other molecules, until, in the very center of the dump, there came into being a Logic Circuit, and five more, and another eighteen in the spot where the jug finally shattered into bits. That evening, something emerged at the edge of the dump, not far from the puddle which had by now dried up, and this something, a creature of pure accident, was Mymosh the Selfbegotten, who had neither mother nor father, but was son unto himself, for his father was Coincidence, and his Mother—Entropy. And Mymosh rose up from the garbage dump, totally oblivious of the fact that he had about one chance in a hundred billion jillion raised to the zillionth power of ever existing, and he took a step, and walked until he came to the next puddle, which had not as yet dried up, so that, kneeling over it, he could easily see himself. And he saw, in the surface of the water, his purely accidental head, with ears like muffins, the left one crushed and the right a trifle underdone, and he saw his purely accidental body, a potpourri of pots and pegs and flotsam, and somewhat barrel-chested, in that his chest was a barrel, though narrower in the middle, like a waist, for in crawling out from under the garbage, he had scraped against a stone right there; and he gazed upon his littery limbs, and counted them, and as luck would have it, there were two arms, two legs and, fortuitously enough, two eyes too, and Mymosh the Selfbegotten took great delight in his person, and sighed with admiration at the narrowness of the waist, the symmetrical arrangement of the limbs, the roundness of the head, and was moved to exclaim: —Truly, I am beautiful, nay, perfect, which clearly implies the Perfection of All Created Things!! Ah, and how good must be the One Who fashioned me!

And he hobbled on, dropping loose screws along the way (since no one had tightened them properly), humming hymns in praise of the Everlasting Harmony of Providence, but on the seventh step he tripped and went headlong back down into the garbage, after which he did nothing but rust, corrode and slowly disintegrate for the next three hundred and fourteen thousand years, for he had fallen on his head and shorted out, and was no more. And at the end of this time it came to pass that a certain merchant, carrying a shipment of sea anemones from the planet Medulsa to the Thrycian Stomatopods, quarreled with his assistant as they neared the lilac sun, and hurled his shoes at him, and one of these broke the porthole window and flew out into space, where its subsequent orbit subsequently experienced perturbation, due to the circumstance that that very same comet, which had ages past blinded Trurl, now found itself in the very same locality, and so the shoe, turning slowly, hurtled towards the moon, was singed a little by the atmospheric friction, bounced off the mountainside above the dump, fell, and booted Mymosh the Selfbegotten, lying there, with just the right resultant impulse and at just the right angle of incidence to create just the right torsions, torques, centrifugal forces and angular momenta needed to reactivate the accidental brain of that accidental being— and in this way: Mymosh, thus booted, went flying into the nearby puddle, where his chlorides and iodides mingled with the water, and electrolyte seeped into his head and, bubbling, set up a current there, which traveled around and about, till Mymosh sat up in the mud and thought the following thought: —Apparently, I am!

That, however, was all he was able to think for the next sixteen centuries, and the rain beat down upon him, and the hail pommeled him, and all the while his entropy increased and grew, but after another thousand five hundred and twenty years, a certain bird, flapping its way over the terrain, was attacked by some swooping predator, and relieved itself out of fright and also to increase its speed, and the droppings dropped and hit Mymosh square on the forehead, whereupon he sneezed and said:

—Yes, I am! And there’s no apparently about it! Yet the question remains, who is it who says that I am? Or, in other words, who am I? Now, how may this be answered? H’m! If only there was something else besides me, any sort of something at all, with which I might juxtapose and compare myself—that would be half the battle. But alas, there’s not a thing, for I can plainly see that I see nothing whatsoever! Therefore there’s only I that am, and I am everything that is and may be, for I can think in any way I like, but am I then—an empty space for thought, and nothing more?

In point of fact he no longer possessed any senses; they had decayed and crumbled to dust over the centuries, since Entropy, the bride of Chaos, is a cruel and implacable mistress. Consequently Mymosh could not see his mother-puddle, nor his brother-mud, nor the whole, wide world, and had no recollection of what had happened to him before, and generally was now capable of nothing but thought. This alone could he do, and so devoted himself wholeheartedly to it.

—First I ought—he told himself—to fill this void that is I, and thereby dispel its insufferable monotony. So let us think of something, for when we think, behold, there is thought, and nought but our thought has existence.— From this one could see he was becoming somewhat presumptuous, for already he referred to himself in the first person plural.

—But wait—he then said—might not something still exist outside myself? We must, if only for a moment, consider this possibility, though it sound preposterous and even a little insane. Let us call this outsideness the Gozmos. Now, if there is a Gozmos, then I must be a part and portion of it!

Here he stopped, pondered the matter awhile, and finally rejected that hypothesis as wholly without basis or foundation. Really, there was not a shred of evidence in its favor, not a single, solid argument to support it, and so, ashamed he had indulged in such wild, untutored speculation, he said to himself:

—Of that which lies beyond me, if anything indeed there lie, I have no knowledge. But of that which is within, I do, or rather shall, as soon as I think something into thought, for who can know what I think, by thunder, better than myself?!— And he thought and thought, and thought of the Gozmos again, but this time thought of it inside himself, which seemed to him a far more sensible and respectable solution, well within the bounds of reason and propriety. And he began to fill his Gozmos with various and sundry thoughts. First, because he was still new at it and lacked skill, he thought out the Beadlies, who grambled whenever they got the chance, and the Pratlings, who rejoiced in filicorts. Immediately the Pratlings battled the Beadlies for the supremacy of filicortion over gramblement, and all Mymosh got for his world-creating pains was an awful headache.

In his next attempts at thought creation, he proceeded with greater caution, first thinking up elements, like Brutonium, a noble gas, and elementary particles, like the cogiton, the quantum of intellect, and he created beings, and these were fruitful and multiplied. From time to time he did make mistakes, but after a century or two he grew quite proficient, and his very own Gozmos, sound and stable, took shape in his mind’s eye, and it teemed with a multitude of entities, things, beings, civilizations and phenomena, and existence was most pleasurable there, for he had made the laws of that Gozmos highly liberal, having no fondness for strict, inflexible rules, the sort of prison discipline that Mother Nature imposes (though of course he’d never heard of Mother Nature).

Thus the world of Selfbegotten was a place of caprice and miracle; in it something might occur one way once, and at another time be altogether different—and without any special rhyme or reason. If, for example, an individual was supposed to die, there were always ways of getting around it, for Mymosh had firmly decided against irreversible events. And in his thoughts the Zigrots, Calsonians, Flimmeroons, Jups, Arligynes and Wallamachinoids all prospered and flourished, generation after generation. During this time the haphazard arms and legs of Mymosh fell off, returning to the garbage from which they’d come, and the puddle rusted through the narrow waist, and his body slowly sank into the stagnant mire. But he had just put up some brand-new constellations, arranging them with loving care in the eternal darkness of his consciousness, which was his Gozmos, and did his level best to keep an accurate memory of everything that he had thought into existence, even though his head hurt from the effort, for he felt responsible for his Gozmos, deeply obligated, and needed. Meanwhile rust ate deeper and deeper into his cranial plates, which of course he had no way of knowing, and a fragment from Trurl’s jug, the selfsame jug that thousands of years ago had called him into being, came floating on the puddle’s surface, closer and closer to his unfortunate head, for only that now remained above the water. And at the very moment when Mymosh was imagining the gentle, crystal Baucis and her faithful Ondragor, and as they journeyed hand in hand among the dark suns of his mind, and all the people of the Gozmos looked on in rapt silence, including the Beadlies, and as the pair softly called to one another—the rust-eaten skull cracked open at the touch of the earthenware shard, pushed by a puff of air, and the murky water rushed in over the copper coils and extinguished the current in the logic circuits, and the Gozmos of Mymosh the Selfbegotten attained the perfection, the ultimate perfection that comes with nothingness. And those who unwittingly had brought him into the world never learned of his passing.

Here the black machine bowed, and King Genius sat plunged in gloomy meditation, and brooded so long, that the company began to murmur ill of Trurl, who had dared to cloud the royal mind with such a tale. But the King soon broke into a smile and asked:

“And have you not something else up your manifold for us, my good machine?”

“Sire,” it responded, bowing low, “I will tell you the story, remarkably profound, of Chlorian Theoreticus the Proph, intellectrician and pundit par excellence.”

It happened once that Klapaucius, the famed constructor, longing to rest after his great labors (he had just completed for King Thanaton a Machine That Wasn’t, but that is quite another story), arrived at the planet of the Mammonides and there roamed hither and yon, seeking solitude, until he saw, at the edge of a forest, a humble hut, all overgrown with wild cyberberries and smoke rising from its chimney. He would have gladly avoided it, but noticed on the doorstep a pile of empty inkwells, and this singular sight prompted him to take a peek inside. There, at a massive stone table sat an ancient sage, so broken-down, wired up and rusted through, it was a wonder to behold. The brow was dented in a hundred places, the eyes, turning in their sockets, creaked dreadfully, as did the limbs, unoiled, and it seemed withal that he owed his miserable existence entirely to patches, clamps and pieces of string—and miserable that existence was indeed, as witnessed by the bits of amber lying here and there: apparently, the poor soul obtained his daily current by rubbing them together! The spectacle of such penury moved Klapaucius to pity, and he was reaching into his purse discreetly, when the ancient one, only now fixing a cloudy eye upon him, piped in a reedy voice:

—Then you have come at last?!

—Well, yes… —mumbled Klapaucius, surprised that he was expected in a place he had never intended to be.

—In that case… may you rot, may you come to an evil end, may you break your arms and neck and legs—screeched the old sage, flying into a fury, and began to fling whatever lay at hand, and this was mainly odds and ends of trash, at the speechless Klapaucius. When finally he had tired and ceased this bombardment, the object of his fury calmly inquired as to the reason for so inhospitable a reception. For a while the sage still muttered things like: —May you blow a fuse! —May your mechanisms jam forever, O base corrosion!— but eventually calmed down, and his humor improved to the degree that, huffing, he raised his finger and— though he still dropped an occasional oath and threw off such sparks, that the air reeked with ozone—proceeded to tell his story in the following words:

—Know then, O foreigner, that I am a pundit, a pundit’s pundit, first among philosophists, for my lifelong passion and profession is ontology, and my name (which the stars must some day outshine) is Chlorian Theoreticus the Proph. I was born of impoverished parents and from earliest childhood felt an irresistible attraction to abstract thought. At the age of sixteen I wrote my first opus, The Gnostotron. It set forth the general theory of a posteriori deities, deities which had to be added to the Universe later by advanced civilizations, since, as everyone knows, Matter always comes first and no one, consequently, could have possibly thought in the very beginning. Clearly then, at the Dawn of Creation thoughtlessness reigned supreme, which is only obvious, really, when you take a look at this, this Cosmos of ours!!— Here the ancient one choked with sudden rage, stamped his feet, but then weakened, and finally went on. —I simply explained the necessity of providing gods after the fact, inasmuch as there were none available beforehand. Indeed, every civilization that engages in intellectronics strives for nothing else but to construct some Omniac, which, in Its infinite mercy, might rectify the currents of evil and plot the path of righteousness and true wisdom. Now in this work of mine I included a blueprint for the first Gnostotron, as well as graphs of its omnipotence output, measured in units called jehovahs. One jehovah would be equivalent to the working of one miracle with a radius of one billion parsecs. As soon as this treatise appeared in print (at my own expense), I rushed out into the street, certain that the people would lift me up on their shoulders, crown me with garlands, shower me with gold, but no one, not even so much as a lame cybernerian, approached with words of praise. Feeling dismay rather than disappointment at this neglect, I immediately sat down and wrote The Scourge of Reason, two volumes, in which I showed that each civilization may choose one of two roads to travel, that is, either fret itself to death, or pet itself to death. And in the course of doing one or the other, it eats its way into the Universe, turning cinders and flinders of stars into toilet seats, pegs, gears, cigarette holders and pillowcases, and it does this because, unable to fathom the Universe, it seeks to change that Fathomlessness into Something Fathomable, and will not stop until the nebulae and planets have been processed to cradles, chamber pots and bombs, all in the name of Sublime Order, for only a Universe with pavement, plumbing, labels and catalogues is, in its sight, acceptable and wholly respectable. Then in the second volume, entitled Advocatus Materiae, I demonstrated how the Reason, a greedy, grasping thing, is only satisfied when it succeeds in chaining some cosmic geyser, or harnessing an atomic swarm—say, to produce an ointment for the removal of freckles. This accomplished, it hurries on to the next natural phenomenon, to add it, like a stuffed trophy, to its precious collection of scientific spoils. But alas, these two excellent volumes of mine were also received with silence by the world; I said to myself then, that patience was the way, and perseverance. Now having defended, first, the Reason against the Universe (the Reason absolved from blame, in that Matter permits all sorts of abominations only because it is mindless), and second, the Universe against the Reason (which I demolished utterly, I dare say), on a sudden inspiration I then wrote The Existential Tailor, where I proved conclusively the absurdity of more than one philosopher, for each must have his own philosophy, that fits him like a glove, or a coat cut to specifications. And as this work too was totally ignored, I straightway wrote another; in it I presented all the possible hypotheses concerning the origin of the Universe —first, the opinion that it doesn’t exist at all, second, that it’s the result of all the mistakes made by a certain Demiurgon, who set out to create the world without the faintest idea of how to go about it, third, that the world is actually an hallucination of some Superbrain gone berserk in a manner infinite but bounded, four, that it is an asinine thought materialized as a joke, five, that it is matter that thinks, but with an abysmally low IQ—and then I sat back and waited, expecting vehement attacks, heated debates, notoriety, laurels, lawsuits, fan mail and anonymous threats. But once again, nothing, absolutely nothing. It was quite beyond belief. Then I thought, well, perhaps I hadn’t read enough of other thinkers, and so, obtaining their works, I acquainted myself with the most famous among them, one by one— Phrensius Whiz, Buffon von Schneckon, founder of the Schneckonist movement, then Turbulo Turpitus Catafalicum, Ithm of Logar, and of course Lemuel the Balding.

Yet in all of this I discovered nothing of significance. Meanwhile my own books were gradually being sold, I assumed therefore that someone was reading them, and if so, I would sooner or later hear of it. In particular I had no doubt but that the Tyrant would summon me, with the demand that I devote myself exclusively to the immortalization of his glorious name. Of course I would tell him that Truth alone did I serve and would lay down my life for it, if necessary; the Tyrant, desirous of the praises my brilliant brain could formulate, would then attempt to bring me round with honeyed words and even toss sacks of clinking coins at my feet, but, seeing me unmoved and resolute, would say (prompted by his wise men) that as I dealt with the Universe, I ought to deal with him as well, for he represented, after all, a part of the Cosmic Whole. Outraged at this mockery, I would answer sharply, and he would have me put to torture. Thus I toughened my body in advance, that it might endure the worst with philosophical indifference. Yet days and months passed by, and nothing, no word from the Tyrant—so I had readied myself for martyrdom in vain. There was only a certain scribbler by the name of Noxion, who wrote in some cheap, vulgar evening gazette that this prankster Chlorian made up no end of farfetched yarns in his book facetiously entitled, The Gnostotron, or The Ultimate Omnipotentiometer, or A Pee into the Future. I rushed to my bookshelf—yes, there it was, the printer had somehow left out the k. . .. My first impulse was to go out and murder him, but reason prevailed. “My time will come!” I told myself. “It cannot be, for someone to cast forth pearls of eternal wisdom left and right, day and night, till the mind is blinded by the surging Light of Final Understanding—and nothing! No, fame will be mine, acclaim will be mine, thrones of ivory, the title of Prime Mentorian, the love of the people, sweet solace in a shaded grove, my very own school, pupils that hang on every word, and a cheering crowd!” For verily, O foreign one, every pundit cherishes such dreams. True, they’ll tell you that Knowledge is their only sustenance, and Truth their only joy, that not for them are the trappings of this world, the ribbons, medals and awards, the warm embrace of thermomours, and gold, and glory, and applause. Humbug, my dear sir, sheer humbug! They all crave the same thing, and the only difference between them and myself is that I, at least, have the greatness of spirit to admit to such frailties, openly and without shame. But the years went by, and I was referred to only as Chlorian the Fool, or Poor Old Chlorio. When the fortieth anniversary of my birth arrived, I was amazed to find myself still waiting for the masses to beat a path to my door. So I sat down and wrote a dissertation on the H. P. L. D.’s, that is, the civilization that has progressed the farthest in the entire Universe. What, you say you never heard of them? But then neither did I, nor did I see them, nor for that matter do I ever expect to; I established their existence on purely deductive grounds, in a manner that was strictly logical, inevitable and theoretical. For if—so went my argument —the Universe contains civilizations at varying stages of development, the majority must be more or less average, with a few that have either fallen behind or managed to forge ahead. And whenever you have a statistical distribution, say, for example, of height in a group of individuals, most will be medium, but one and only one may be the highest, and similarly, in the Universe there must exist a civilization that has achieved the Highest Possible Level of Development. Its inhabitants, the H. P. L. D.’s, know things of which we do not even dream. All this I placed in four volumes, paying for the glossy paper and the frontispiece portrait of the author out of my own pocket, but in vain—it shared the fate of its predecessors. A year ago I read the whole work through, from cover to cover, and wept, so brilliantly was the thing written, so full of the breath of the Absolute—no, it simply cannot be described! And then, at the age of fifty, I nearly hit the ceiling! You see, I would occasionally purchase the works of other sages, who enjoyed great riches and the sweets of success, to learn what sort of things they wrote about. Well, they wrote about the difference between the front and the rear, about the wondrous structure of the Tyrant’s throne, its sweeping arms and all-enduring legs, and tracts about good manners, and detailed descriptions of this and that, during which no one ever praised himself in any way, and yet it worked out somehow that Phrensius stood in awe of Schneckon, and Schneckon of Phrensius, while both were lauded by the Logarites. And then there were the three Voltaic brothers catapulted to fame: Vaultor elevated Vauntor, Vauntor elevated Vanitole, and Vanitole did likewise for Vaultor. As I studied all these works, suddenly I saw red, and wildly threw myself upon them, and ripped and tore, and gnashed and gnawed… until my sobs abated, and then, drying my tears, I proceeded to write The Evolution of Reason As a Two-cycle Phenomenon. For, as I showed in that essay, robots and paleface are joined by a reciprocal bond. First, as the result of an accumulation of mucilaginous slime upon some saline shore, beings come into being, viscous, sticky, albescent and albuminous. After centuries, these finally learn how to breathe the breath of life into base metals, and they fashion Automata to be their slaves. In time, however, the process is reversed, and our Automata, having freed themselves from the Albuminids, eventually conduct experiments, to see if consciousness can subsist in any gelatinous substance, which of course it can, and does, in albuminose protein. But now those synthetic paleface, after millions of years, again discover iron, and so on, back and forth for all eternity. As you can see, I had thus settled the age-old question of which came first, robot or paleface. This opus I submitted to the Academy, six volumes bound in leather, and the expense of its publication quite exhausted the remainder of my inheritance. Need I tell you that it too was passed over in silence? I was already past sixty, going on seventy, and all hope of glory within my lifetime was swiftly fading. What then could I do? I began to think of posterity, of the future generations that must some day discover me and prostrate themselves in the dust before my name. But what benefit, I asked myself, would I derive from that, when I no longer was? And I was forced to conclude, in keeping with my teachings contained in four and forty volumes, with prolegomena, paralipomena and appendices, that there would be no benefit whatever. So, my soul seething with spleen, I sat down to write my Testament for Descendants, to kick them, spit upon them, abuse, revile and curse them as much as possible, and all in the most rigorously scientific way. What’s that, you say? That this was unjust, and my indignation would have been better directed at my contemporaries, who failed to recognize my genius? Bah! Consider, worthy stranger! By the time my Testament is enshrined by future fame, its every syllable refulgent with the glow of greatness, these contemporaries will have long since turned to dust, and how shall my curses reach them then? No, had I done as you say, their descendants would surely study my works with perfect equanimity, now and then remarking with a comfortable, self-righteous sigh: “Alas! With what quiet heroism did that master endure his cruel obscurity! How justified was his anger towards our forefathers, and yet how noble of him, to have bequeathed to us, even so, the fruits of his mighty wisdom!” Yes, that’s exactly what they’d say! And then what? Those idiots who buried me alive, are they to go unpunished, shielded from my wrath and vengeance by the grave? The very thought of it sets my oil aboil! What, the sons would read my works in peace, politely rebuking their fathers on my behalf? Never!! The least I can do is thumb my nose at them from afar, from the past! Let them know, they who will worship me and raise up gilded monuments to my memory, that in return I wish them all to— to sprain their sprockets, pop their valves, burn out their transmissions, and may their data be dumped, and verdigris cover them from head to foot, if all they are able to do is honor corpses exhumed from the cemetery of history! Perchance there will arise among them a new sage, but they, slavishly poring over the remains of some letters I wrote to my laundress, will take no notice of him! Let them know, I say, oh let them know, once and for all, that they have my heartfelt damnation and most sincere contempt, that I hold them all for skeleton-kissers, corpse-lickers, professional axle-jackals, who feed on carrion because they are blind to wisdom when it is alive! Let them, in publishing my Complete Works—which must include this Testament, my final curse upon their future heads-—let the vile thanatomites and necrophytes thereby be deprived of the chance to congratulate themselves, that Chlorian Theoreticus the Proph, peerless pundit of yore who limned the infinite tomorrow, was of their race! And as they grovel beneath my pedestal, let them have the knowledge that I wished them nothing but the very worst the Universe has to offer, and that the force of my hatred, hurled forth into the future, was equaled only by its impotence! Let them know that I disowned them utterly, and bestowed upon them nothing but my loathing and anathema!!!

It was in vain that Klapaucius sought to calm the raging sage throughout this long harangue. Upon uttering these final words, the ancient one leaped up and, shaking his fist at the generations to come, let loose a volley of shockingly pungent imprecations (for where could he have learnt them, having led such an exemplary life?); then, foaming and fuming, he stamped and bellowed, and in a shower of sparks crashed to the floor, dead from an overload of bile. Klapaucius, much discomfited by this unpleasant turn of events, sat at the table of stone nearby, picked up the Testament and began to peruse it, though his eyes were soon swimming from the abundance of epithets therein addressed to the future, and by the second page he broke into a sweat, for the now-departed Chlorian Theoreticus gave evidence of a power of invective that was truly cosmic. For three days Klapaucius read, his eyes riveted to that manuscript, and was sorely perplexed: should he reveal it to the world, or destroy it? And he sits there to this day, unable to decide…”

“Methinks,” said King Genius, when the machine had finished and retired, “I see in this some allusion to the question of monetary compensation, which is now indeed at hand, for, after a night bravely whiled away with tales, the dawn of a new day appears outside our cave. Well then, my good constructor, how shall I reward you?”

“Your Majesty,” said Trurl, “places me in some difficulty. Whatever I request, should I receive it, I must later regret, in that I did not ask for more. On the other hand, I would not wish to cause offense by naming an exorbitant figure. And so, the amount of the honorarium I leave to the generosity of Your Majesty…”

“So be it,” replied the King affably. “The stories were excellent, the machines unquestionably perfect, and therefore I see no alternative but to reward you with the greatest treasure of all, one which, I am certain, you will not want to exchange for any other. I grant you health and life—this is, in my estimation, the only fitting gift. Anything else would be an insult, for no amount of gold can purchase Truth or Wisdom. Go then in peace, my friend, and continue to hide your truths, too bitter for this world, in the guise of fairy tale and fable.”

“Your Majesty,” said Trurl, aghast, “did you intend, before, to deprive me of my life? Was this then to have been my payment?”

“Put whatever interpretation you wish upon my words,” replied the King. “But here is how I understand the matter: had you merely amused me, my munificence would have known no bounds. But you did much more, and no wealth in the Universe can equal that in value. Thus, in offering you the opportunity to continue your illustrious career, I can give you no higher reward or payment…”