Stanislaw Lem: The Futurological Congress

On the way to the convention hall I stopped at a newsstand and bought a batch of local papers, as is my habit. I don't buy them everywhere I go, of course, but an educated man can get the gist of something in Spanish, even if he doesn't speak the language.

Above the podium stood a decorated board showing the agenda for the day. The first item of business was the world urban crisis, the second-the ecology crisis, the third-the air pollution crisis, the fourth-the energy crisis, the fifth-the food crisis. Then adjournment. The technology, military and political crises were to be dealt with on the following day, after which the chair would entertain motions from the floor.

Each speaker was given four minutes to present his paper, as there were so many scheduled-198 from 64 different countries. To help expedite the proceedings, all reports had to be distributed and studied beforehand, while the lecturer would speak only in numerals, calling attention in this fashion to the salient paragraphs of his work. To better receive and process such wealth of information, we all turned on our portable recorders and pocket computers (which later would be plugged in for the general discussion). Stan Hazelton of the U.S. delegation immediately threw the hall into a flurry by emphatically repeating: 4, 6, 11, and therefore 22; 5, 9, hence 22; 3, 7, 2, 11, from which it followed that 22 and only 22!! Someone jumped up, saying yes but 5, and what about 6, 18, or 4 for that matter; Hazelton countered this objection with the crushing retort that, either way, 22. I turned to the number key in his paper and discovered that 22 meant the end of the world. Hayakawa from Japan was next; he presented plans, newly developed in his country, for the house of the future-eight hundred levels with maternity wards, nurseries, schools, shops, museums, zoos, theaters, skating rinks and crematoriums. The blueprints provided for underground storage of the ashes of the dear departed, forty-channel television, intoxication chambers as well as sobering tanks, special gymnasiums for group sex (an indication of the progressive attitude of the architects), and catacombs for nonconformist subculture communities. One rather novel idea was to have each family change its living quarters every day, moving from apartment to apartment like chessmen-say, pawns or knights. That would help alleviate boredom. In any event this building, having a volume of seventeen cubic kilometers, a foundation set in the ocean floor and a roof that reached the very stratosphere, would possess its own matrimonial computers-matchmaking on the sadomasochistic principle, for partners of such opposite persuasions statistically made the most stable marriages (each finding in that union the answer to his or her dreams)-and there would also be a round-the-clock suicide prevention center. Hakayawa, the second Japanese delegate, demonstrated for us a working model of such a house-on a scale of 10,000 to 1. It had its own oxygen supply, but without food or water reserves, since the building would operate entirely on the recycling principle: all waste products, excreta and effluvia, would be reclaimed and reprocessed for consumption. Yahakawa, the third on the team, read a list of all the delicacies that could be reconstituted from human excrement. Among these were artificial bananas, gingerbread, shrimp, lobster, and even artificial wine which, notwithstanding its rather offensive origin, in taste rivaled the finest burgundies of France. Samples of it were available in the hall, in elegant little bottles, and there were also cocktail sausages wrapped in foil, though no one seemed to be particularly thirsty, and the sausages were discreetly deposited under chairs. Seeing which, I did the same. The original plan was to have this house of the future be mobile, by means of a powerful propeller, thereby making collective sightseeing excursions possible, but that was ruled out because, first of all, there would be 900 million houses to begin with and, secondly, all travel would be pointless. For even if a house had 1,000 exits and its occupants employed them all, they would never be able to leave the building; by the time the last was out, a whole new generation of occupants would have reached maturity inside. The Japanese were clearly delighted with their own proposal. Then Norman Youhas from the United States took the floor and outlined seven different measures to halt the population explosion, namely: mass media and mass arrests, compulsory celibacy, full-scale deeroticization, onanization, sodomization, and for repeated offenders-castration. Every married couple would be required to compete for the right to have children, passing examinations in three categories, copulational, educational and nondeviational. All illegal offspring would be confiscated; for premeditated birth, the guilty parties could face life sentences. Attached to this report were those detachable sky-blue coupons-sex rations-we had received earlier with the conference materials. Hazelton and Youhas then proposed the establishment of new occupations: connubial prosecutor, divorce counselor, perversion recruiter and sterility consultant. Copies of a draft for a new penal code, in which fertilization constituted a major felony, tantamount to high treason against the species, were promptly passed around. Meanwhile someone in the spectator gallery hurled a Molotov cocktail into the hall. The police squad (on hand in the lobby, evidently prepared for such an eventuality) took the necessary steps, and a maintenance crew (no less prepared) quickly covered the broken furniture and corpses with a large nylon tarpaulin which was decorated in a cheerful pattern. Between reports I tried to decipher the local papers, and even though my Spanish was practically nonexistent, I did learn that the government had summoned armored units to the capital, put all law enforcement agencies on extreme alert, and declared a general state of emergency. Apparently no one in the audience besides myself grasped the seriousness of the situation developing outside the hotel walls. At seven we adjourned for supper-at our expense, this time-and on my way back to the conference I bought a special evening edition of Nacion, the official newspaper, as well as a few of the opposition tabloids. Perusing these (with considerable difficulty), I was amazed to find articles full of saccharine platitudes on the theme of the tender bonds of love as the surest guarantee of universal peace-right beside articles that were full of dire threats, articles promising bloody repression or else an equally bloody insurrection. The only explanation I could think of for this peculiar incongruity was that some of the journalists had been drinking the water that day, and some hadn't. Of course less water would be consumed by the staff of a right-wing newspaper, since reactionary editors were better paid than their radical counterparts and consequently could afford to imbibe more exclusive liquids while they worked. The radicals, on the other hand, though they were known to display a certain degree of asceticism in the name of higher principles, hardly ever quenched their thirst with water. Especially since quartzupio, a fermented drink from the juice of the melmenole plant, was extremely cheap in Costa Rica.

We had settled back in our comfortable armchairs, and Professor Dringenbaum of Switzerland was just delivering the first numeral of his report, when all at once the hollow rumble of an explosion shook the building and made the windows rattle. The optimists among us passed this off as a simple earthquake, but I was inclined to think that the group of demonstrators outside that had been picketing the hotel since morning was now resorting to incendiary tactics. Though the following blast and concussion, much more powerful, changed my mind; now I could hear the familiar staccato of machine-gun fire in the streets. No, there was no longer any doubt: Costa Rica had entered into the stage of open hostilities. Our reporters were the first to disappear; at the sound of shooting they jumped to their feet and rushed out the door, eager to cover this new assignment. But Professor Dringenbaum went on with his lecture, which was fairly pessimistic in tone, for it maintained that the next phase of our civilization would be cannibalism. He cited several well-known American theoreticians, who had calculated that, if things on Earth continued at their present rate, in four hundred years humanity would represent a living sphere of bodies with a radius expanding at approximately the speed of light. But new explosions interrupted the report. The futurologists, confused, began to leave the hall and mingle in the lobby with people from the Liberated Literature convention. Judging by the appearance of these latter, the outbreak of the fighting had caught them in the middle of activity which suggested complete indifference to the threat of overpopulation. Behind some editors from the publishing house of Knopf stood naked secretaries-though not entirely naked, for their limbs were painted with various op designs. They carried portable water pipes and hookahs filled with a popular mixture of LSD, marijuana, yohimbine and opium. The liberationists, someone told me, had just burned the United States Postmaster General in effigy (it seems he had ordered the destruction of a pamphlet calling for the initiation of mass incest) and now, gathered in the lobby, they were behaving most inappropriately-particularly given the seriousness of the situation. With the exception of a few who were exhausted or remained in a narcotic stupor, they all carried on in a positively scandalous fashion. I heard screams from the reception desk, where switchboard operators were being raped, and one potbellied gentleman in a leopardskin tore through the hotel cloakroom, waving a hashish torch as he chased the attendants. It took several porters to restrain him. Then someone from the mezzanine threw armfuls of photographs down on our heads, photographs depicting in vivid color exactly how one man could satisfy his lust with another, and a great deal more besides. When the first tanks appeared in the streets-clearly visible from our windows-panic-stricken phillumenists and student protesters came pouring from the elevators; trampling underfoot the abovementioned pate mounds and salad molds (which the publishers had brought out with them), these newcomers scattered in all directions. And there was the bearded anti-papist bellowing like a bull and wildly swinging his papalshooter, knocking down anyone who stood in the way. He pushed through the crowd and ran out in front of the hotel, where he hid behind a corner of the building and-I saw this with my own eyes-opened fire on the figures running past. Obviously this dedicated, ideologically motivated fanatic really didn't care, when it came down to it, whom he shot at. The lobby, filled with cries of terror and revelry, became a scene of utter pandemonium when the huge picture windows began to shatter. I tried to locate my reporter friends and, seeing them dash up the street, followed after; the atmosphere in the Hilton had really become too oppressive. Behind a low concrete wall along the hotel driveway crouched two cameramen, frantically filming everything, which made little sense, since everyone knows that the first thing that happens on such occasions is the burning of a car with foreign license plates. Flames and smoke were already rising from the hotel parking lot. Mauvin, standing beside me, rubbed his hands and chuckled at the sight of his Dodge crackling in the blaze-he had rented it from Hertz. The majority of the American reporters, however, did not find this amusing. I noticed some people struggling to put out the fire: these were mainly old men, poorly dressed, and they were hauling water in buckets from a nearby fountain. That struck me as odd. In the distance, at the far end of the Avenida del Salvacion and the Avenida del Resurreccion, police helmets glimmered; yet the square in front of the hotel, with its surrounding lawns and luxuriant palms, was still empty. Those doddering old men, hoarsely calling to one another, quickly formed a fire brigade, in spite of their canes and crutches; such gallantry was astounding, but then I remembered what had happened earlier that day and immediately shared my suspicions with Mauvin. The rattle of machine guns and the thunder of bursting shells made it difficult to talk; for a while the Frenchman's keen face showed a total lack of comprehension, but suddenly his eyes lit up. "Aha!" he roared above the din. "The water! The drinking water! Great God, for the first time in history… cryptochemocracy!" And with these words he ran back to the hotel like one possessed. To get to a telephone, apparently. Strange though, that the lines should still be open.