Stanislaw Lem: The Cyberiad

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…”

One bright summer day, as Trurl the constructor was pruning the cyberberry bush in his back yard, he spied a robot mendicant coming down the road, all tattered and torn, a most woeful and piteous sight to behold. Its limbs were held together by sections of old stovepipe fastened with string, its head was a pot so full of holes you could hear its thoughts whir and sputter inside, throwing off sparks, and its makeshift neck was a rusty rail, and in its open belly were vacuum tubes that smoked and rattled so badly, it had to hold them in place with its free hand—the other was needed to tighten the screws that kept coming loose. Just as it hobbled past the gate to Trurl’s residence, it blew four fuses at once and straightway began, spewing a foul cloud of burning insulators, to fall apart, right before the constructor’s eyes. Trurl, full of compassion, took a screwdriver and a roll of electric tape and hastened to offer what aid he could to the poor wayfarer, who swooned repeatedly with a great grinding of gears, due to a total asynchronization. At last Trurl managed to restore it to its senses, such as they were, then helped it inside, sat it down in a comfortable chair and gave it a battery to recharge itself, and while the poor thing did so with trembling urgency, he asked it, unable to contain his curiosity any longer, what had brought it to this sorry pass.

“O kind and noble sir,” replied the strange robot, its armatures still aquiver, “my name is Bonhomius and I am, or rather was, a hermetic hermit, for I lived sixty years and seven in a cave, where I passed the time solely in pious meditation, until one morning it dawned on me that to spend a life in solitude was wrong, for truly, did all my exceedingly profound thoughts and strivings of the spirit ever keep one rivet from falling, and is it not written that thy first duty is to help thy neighbor and not to tend to thine own salvation, for yea and verily—”

“Fine, fine,” interrupted Trurl. “I think I more or less understand your state of mind that morning. What happened then?”

“So I hied myself to Photura, where I chanced to meet a certain distinguished constructor, one Klapaucius.”

“Klapaucius?!” cried Trurl.

“Is something amiss, kind sir?”

“No, nothing—go on, please!”

“I did not recognize him at first: he was indeed a great lord and had an automatic carriage that he not only rode upon but was able to converse with, much as I converse with you now. This same carriage did affront me with a most unseemly epithet as I walked in the middle of the street, unaccustomed to city traffic, and in my surprise I inadvertently put out its headlight with my staff, which drove the carriage into such a frenzy, that its occupant was hard put to subdue it, but finally did, and then invited me to join him. I told him who I was and why I had abandoned my cave and that, forsooth, I knew not what to do next, whereupon he praised my decision and introduced himself in turn, speaking at great length of his work and many achievements. He told me at last the whole moving history of that famous sage, pundit and philosophist, Chlorian Theoreticus the Proph, at whose lamentable end he had had the privilege to be present. From all that he said of the Collected Works of that Greatest of Robots, the part about the H. P. L. D.’s did intrigue me the most. Perchance, kind sir, you have heard of them?”

“Certainly. They are the only beings in the universe who have reached the Highest Possible Level of Development.”

“Indeed you are well-informed, most kind and noble sir! Now while I sat at the side of this worthy Klapaucius in his carriage (which continued to hurl the foulest insults at whatever was imprudent enough to cross its path), the thought suddenly came to me that these beings, developed as much as possible, would surely know what one should do, when one, such as myself, felt the call to help his fellow robot. So I questioned Klapaucius closely concerning this, and asked him if he knew where the H. P. L. D.’s lived, and how to find them. His only reply was a wry smile and a shake of the head. I dared not press the matter further, but later, when we had halted at an inn (the carriage had by this time grown so hoarse that it lost its voice entirely, thus Klapaucius was obliged to wait until the following day) and were sitting over a jug of mulled electrolyte, which quickly put my gracious host in a better humor, and as we watched the thermocouples dance to the spirited tunes of a high-frequency band, he took me into his confidence and proceeded to tell me… but perhaps you grow weary of my tale.”

“Not at all, not at all!” protested Trurl. “I’m all ears, I assure you.”

“My good Bonhomius,” Klapaucius addressed me in that inn as the dancers worked themselves into a positive heat, “know that I took very much to heart the history of the unfortunate Chlorian and resolved to set out immediately and find those perfectly developed beings whose existence he had so conclusively proven on purely logical and theoretical grounds. The main difficulty of the undertaking, as I saw it, lay in the circumstance that nearly every cosmic race considered itself to be perfectly developed—obviously I would get nowhere by merely asking around. Nor did a trial-and-error method of search promise much, for the Universe contained, as I calculated, close to fourteen centigigaheptatrillion civilizations capable of reason; with such odds one could hardly expect to simply happen on the correct address. So I deliberated, read up on the problem, went methodically through several libraries, pored over all sorts of ancient tomes, until one day I found the answer in the work of a certain Cadaverius Malignus, a scholar who had apparently arrived at exactly the same conclusion as the Proph, only three hundred thousand years earlier, and who was completely forgotten afterwards. Which shows, once more, that there’s nothing new under this or any other sun—Cadaverius even met an end similar to that of our own Chlorian… But I digress. It was precisely from these yellowed and crumbling pages that I learned how to seek the H. P. L. D.’s. Malignus maintained that one must examine star clusters for some impossible astrophysical phenomenon, and that would surely be the place. A rather obscure clue, to be sure, but then aren’t they all? Without further ado I stocked my ship with the necessary provisions, took off and, after numerous adventures we need not go into here, finally spotted in a great swarm of stars one that differed from all the rest, since it was a perfect cube. Now that was quite a shock— every schoolboy knows stars have to be spherical and any sort of stellar angularities, let alone rectangularities, are not only highly irregular but entirely out of the question! I drew near the star and immediately saw that its planet was also cubiform and equipped, moreover, with castellated corner cleats and crenelated quoins. Farther out revolved another planet, which appeared to be quite normal; a look through the telescope, however, revealed hordes of robots locked in mortal combat, a sight which hardly invited closer scrutiny. So I got the square planet back in my finder and increased the resolution to full power. Imagine my surprise and joy when I looked in the eyepiece and beheld a monogram engraved on one of the planet’s mile-long quoins, a monogram consisting of four letters embellished with swirls and curlicues: H. P. L. D.!