"We'll see," said the King and plugged into the dream ent.i.tled "The Marvelous Mattress of Princess Bounce." He was in a room of unsurpa.s.sed 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.

Zipper-upus 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 un-pleasant 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 pa.s.sing 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 miracu-lous 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 mult.i.tude: "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 pa.s.sed 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 hold-ing 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 Prin-cess' 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 pa.s.s!"

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 draw-bridge, 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 Octo-pauline, beautiful beyond his wildest dreams and so be-witching, 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, burn-ing to be wrapped in the Princess' embrace, was running along the wall in the shadow of the cloisters, running to-wards that radiant image of silvery pulchritude, when sud-denly 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 him-self 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, rec.u.mbent on her antimaca.s.sar of pearls! And she shivers first, because she is clad in naught but this exquisite, gold-embroidered shift, and secondly, in antic.i.p.ation 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 Sur-geon 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 des-perate. "Cure me, blast it! Restore me! Make me young again, so I can--you know-like it used to be... Other-wise, so help me, I'll... I'll..."

In terror all the courtiers, degenerals and medical a.s.sis-tants 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 debauch-eries, 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 Cal-culon. "Either Your Highness deigns to choose a suitably competent individual, who will perform per procuram every-thing 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 ex-clusively 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 imme-diately commanded him to saw the sage in half, for this was precisely the kind of foul deed in which he took such de-light. 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 good-bye! 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 pre-pare 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 pa.s.sion 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 quick-silver, 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 de-spoil, 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 hu-miliate 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 every-where! 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 Ineffa-belle, 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 eyeb.a.l.l.s 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 weregold-plated, and there espied a humble hut; when he ap-proached 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 pa.s.sion! 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, erG.o.dic and most a.s.suredly 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, how-ever, quickly killed the current, hurled the King to the earth and said: "Madman! Wouldst attempt the impossible?! For no be-ing made of matter can ever enter a system that is naught but the flux and swirl of alphanumerical elements, discon-tinuous 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 ap-purtenant 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 po-tentials, 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 In-effabelle, 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, non-linear, 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 be-cause 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 inscrip-tion: "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 thick-headed to fall completely forthe 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 Thauma-turge 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 c.h.i.n.k 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 coc.o.o.ns, 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 every-where, 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, fleet-ing, 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 dis-sipation 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 goldengears whirring musically, and gave a giddy little laugh, for a few of its klystrons had over-heated slightly; but it lowered its anode potential, waved away the smoke, sighed and retreated to the photon phae-ton, 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 cl.u.s.ters, and in the fifth cl.u.s.ter, 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 nor-mal, and on the second moon of the third planet of the lilac sun of the fifth cl.u.s.ter 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 Alb.u.menid 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 s.p.a.ceship 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 a.s.sorted uten-sils, 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 pa.s.sed 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 eigh-teen 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 gar-bage 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 thenext 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 m.u.f.fins, 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 nar-rower in the middle, like a waist, for in crawling out from under the garbage, he had sc.r.a.ped 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 sym-metrical 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 pa.s.s that a certain merchant, carrying a shipment of sea anemones from the planet Medulsa to the Thrycian Stomatopods, quarreled with his a.s.sistant as they neared the lilac sun, and hurled his shoes at him, and one of these broke the porthole window and flew out into s.p.a.ce, where its subsequent orbit subsequently experienced per-turbation, due to the circ.u.mstance 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 atmos-pheric 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, bub-bling, set up a current there, which traveled around and about, till Mymosh sat up in the mud and thought the fol-lowing 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 in-creased 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 re-lieved itself out of fright and also to increase its speed, and the droppings dropped and hit Mymosh square on the fore-head, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 mis-tress. 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 be-fore, and generally was now capable of nothing but thought. This alone could he do, and sodevoted himself whole-heartedly 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 presumptu-ous, 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 founda-tion. 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 n.o.ble 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 mult.i.tude of ent.i.ties, 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 spe-cial rhyme or reason. If, for example, an individual was sup-posed 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 onthe 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 cir-cuits, 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 pa.s.sing.

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 over-grown 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 ma.s.sive 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 in-quired 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 cor-rosion!- but eventually calmed down, and his humor im-proved 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 pa.s.sion 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 Crea-tion 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 G.o.ds after the fact, in-asmuch 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 pa.r.s.ecs. As soon as this treatise appeared in print (at my own expense), I rushed out into the street, certain that the peo-ple would lift me up on their shoulders, crown me with gar-lands, 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 Sub-lime Order, for only a Universe with pavement, plumbing, labels and catalogues is, in its sight, acceptable and wholly respectable. Then in the second volume, ent.i.tled Advocatus Materiae, I demonstrated how the Reason, a greedy, grasp-ing thing, is only satisfied when it succeeds in chaining some cosmic geyser, or harnessing an atomic swarm-say, to pro-duce an ointment for the removal of freckles. This accom-plished, 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 ig-nored, 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 man-ner 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, lau-rels, lawsuits, fan mail and anonymous threats. But once again, nothing, absolutely nothing. It was quite beyond be-lief. Then I thought, well, perhaps I hadn't read enough of other thinkers, and so, obtaining their works, Iacquainted myself with the most famous among them, one by one- Phrensius Whiz, Buffon von Schneckon, founder of the Schneckonist movement, then Turbulo Turpitus Catafalic.u.m, 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 as-sumed 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 de-mand that I devote myself exclusively to the immortaliza-tion 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 indiffer-ence. Yet days and months pa.s.sed 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 ent.i.tled, The Gnostotron, or The Ultimate Omnipotentiometer, or A Pee into the Fu-ture. 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 Under-standing-and nothing! No, fame will be mine, acclaim will be mine, thrones of ivory, the t.i.tle 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 be-tween 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 ma.s.ses 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 logi-cal, inevitable and theoretical. For if-so went my argument -the Universe contains civilizations at varying stages of de-velopment, 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 pur-chase the works of other sages, who enjoyed great riches and thesweets 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 like-wise 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 Evolu-tion 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 acc.u.mulation of mucilaginous slime upon some saline sh.o.r.e, beings come into being, viscous, sticky, albescent and alb.u.minous. 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 Alb.u.minids, eventually conduct experiments, to see if consciousness can subsist in any gelatinous substance, which of course it can, and does, in alb.u.minose 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 pa.s.sed 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 recog-nize 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 com-fortable, self-righteous sigh: "Alas! With what quiet hero-ism did that master endure his cruel obscurity! How justi-fied was his anger towards our forefathers, and yet how n.o.ble 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 monu-ments 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! Per-chance 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 d.a.m.nation 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 wis-dom 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!!!