Stanislaw Lem: Peace on Earth

“Jackass.”

“Me?”

“You. You should have done that to begin with.”

“Why didn’t you let me know?”

“A hundred times, jerk. You didn’t notice.”

It dawned on me now, yes, that the left hand had been tapping at me quite a bit, but it never entered my head (my side of my head) that this was in Morse.

“Amazing,” I tapped back, on the hand. “Then you can speak?”

“Better than you.”

“Then speak. You will save me, that is, save us.”

I don’t know whether it was I or It who got better at this, but our silent conversation went faster and faster.

“What happened on the moon?”

“Tell me what you remember.”

This sudden turning of the tables floored me.

“You don’t know?”

“I know that you wrote it down. Then buried it in a jar. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Did you write the truth?”

“Yes. What I could remember.”

“And they dug it up. That first one.”

“Shapiro?”

“I don’t remember names. The one who looked at the moon.”

“Do you understand spoken speech?”

“Not well. It’s better in French.”

Whatever that meant.

“Only in Morse?”

“Morse is best.”

“So talk.”

“You’ll write it down and they’ll steal it.”

“I won’t, word of honor.”

“Okay. You know some of it and I know some of it You go first.”

“You didn’t read what I wrote?”

“I can’t read.”

“All right… The last thing I remember… I was trying to make contact with Wivitch after getting out of that underground ruin in the Japanese sector, but I couldn’t. Or if I did, I don’t remember. All I know is that later I landed myself. Sometimes I think maybe I wanted to retrieve something from the remote, which had got into something… or else it had discovered something… but I don’t know what, or even which remote it was. Probably not the molecular remote. I don’t know what happened to that.”

“The powdered one?”

“Yes. But… you must know,” I suggested carefully.

“First tell yours to the end,” It answered. “Sometimes you think. And other times?”

“That there was no remote there at all, or there might have been but I wasn’t looking for it, because…”

“Because what?”

I hesitated. What I sometimes remembered was like a surreal dream impossible to put into words and which left only the feeling of an extraordinary revelation.

“I don’t know what you’re thinking,” It tapped on me, “but I know you have something up your sleeve. I can feel it.”

“Why should I have something up my sleeve?”

“Why, because. I’m the intuition half. Continue. You think you were looking for…”

“Sometimes I think I landed because I was summoned.”

“What did you write in the log?”

“About that, nothing.”

“But they have tapes. If you were summoned by the moon, they would know. The Agency was monitoring.”

“I don’t know what the Agency knows. I never laid eyes on any tapes at the base. But you must know that.”

“I know more than that.”

“What?”

“You lost the powdered one.”

“The dispersant? Well, obviously, if I later got into a spacesuit myself and —”

“Not what I mean.”

“It broke down?”

“No. They took it.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. The moon. The remote was changing down there. By itself. One could see it from the ship.”

“I saw it?”

“Yes, and you had no control over it.”

“Then who was operating it?”

“I don’t know. It had been disconnected from the ship but was still changing. Using all those different programs.”

“Impossible.”

“But true. And then back on the moon, down there. I was. That is, you and I were. And then Tichy fell.”

“What are you saying?”

“He fell. It must have been the callotomy. There’s a hole there for me. Then back on the ship and you put the spacesuit in its container and the sand fell out.”

“Did I go down to see what happened to the molecular remote?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. There’s a hole there. The callotomy was for that.”

“On purpose?”

“I think. I’m sure. So you’d come back and not come back.”

“They already told me that. Shapiro and Kramer too, though not so clearly.”

“Because it’s a game. There are things they know and things they don’t. They must have a hole too.”

“But wait, why did I fall?”

“The callotomy, stupid. You lost consciousness. How could you not fall?”

“And that sand? The talcum dust? Where did it come from?”

“I have no idea.”

I thought furiously. It was light now, almost eight o’clock. The lunar project failed? But in the rubble of that failure was more than senseless battles and tactics — for from it also had emerged something that no one on Earth ever programmed or anticipated. And this something had apparently taken control of the remote of Professor Lax-Gugliborc. Then lured me to land, intending evil or something else. Why deprive me of my memory? What purpose would that serve? None that I could see. Or was it to give me something? Or to tell me something? But in that case I wouldn’t have needed to land. Did it give me that dust? And then something — another party — not wanting this to succeed, cut the great commissure of my brain. Let’s say that’s what happened. Then did the thing operating the dispersant save me? But was the point to save Ijon Tichy? Probably not. The point was that the thing that was given reach Earth. The powder, the sticky dust, was the message. No, it had to be more than information. A material thing. And I was to bring it back with me. Yes. A piece of the puzzle had been fitted in. I quickly explained this theory to my other half.

“Could be,” It said finally. “They have the dust. But it’s not enough.”

“Hence the abductions and rescues, the persuading, visits, and nightmares?”

“To get you to submit to an examination. That is, me.”

“But they’ll learn nothing if you know no more than you’re saying.”

“True.”

“But if something has arisen there that is powerful enough to take over the molecular remote, why couldn’t it communicate directly with Earth? With the Agency, with Control, with anyone it wanted. At the very least with the men the Agency sent after my return.”

“Where did they land?”

“I don’t know. In any case it appears that there are opposing parties both here and there. What could have evolved on the moon, out of that cancer, that chaos? What word did Kramer use? Orthogenesis. Order out of chaos. Electronic self-organization. But to what end?”

“To no end. Like life on Earth. The hardware fought claw and fang, and the programs diverged. Some went in circles, repeating themselves, some broke down completely, and some entered the no man’s land and set up mirrors and mirages…”

“Maybe, maybe.” I felt a strange exaltation. “Yes, I can picture it. Out of the general deterioration something grew like photobacteria, viruses made of integrated circuits. But it couldn’t have been everywhere, it happened only in one particular place, an extremely rare event… and from there it began to multiply and spread. Fine, I agree that’s possible. But for some entity to arise out of that — no! This is pure fantasy. You can’t have an intelligence coming into the world made of spare parts, broken bits of electronics.”

“Then who took control of the molecular remote?”

“You’re sure that’s what happened?”

“Consider the evidence. After you left the Japanese ruin, you weren’t able to contact the base, were you?”