In Hot Pursuit of Happiness
37
‘So he didn’t even mention it? There’s gratitude for you! He was
here, all right. And that pleases you, doesn’t it? And you’, thundered
the corpse, ‘you who are overjoyed at hearing of the failure of a friend
and companion, you would make the entire cosmos happy?! Did it
ever occur to you that it might not be a bad idea to optimize your own
ethical parameters first?!’
‘Master and Maestro!’, said Trurl hastily, wishing to divert the
angry old robot’s attention away from himself. ‘Is then the problem
of bestowing happiness insoluble?’
‘Insoluble? Why insoluble? You phrase the question incorrectly.
For what, after all, is happiness? That’s as clear as a kilowatt.
Happiness is an extraction, or more precisely an extension of a
metaspace in which projections of n-intentional determinants diverge
as omega approaches alpha, provided of course the asymptotes can be
mapped onto a continuous, polyorthogonal aggregate of subsets called
cerebrons—after me. But no doubt you’ve never even heard of the
corollary I laboured forty-eight years to formulate, thereby laying the
foundations for our present-day Algebra of Moot Points!’
Trurl hung his head.
‘To an exam one may come unprepared’, continued the deceased in
a suspiciously sugary voice. ‘But to fail to review even the most basic
concepts before marching off to the professor’s grave, that is such
insolence’, he roared so loud the microphone rattled, ‘that if I were
still alive—it would finish me off for sure!’ Suddenly he was all
sweetness again. ‘So you come to me as innocent of knowledge as a
newborn. Very well, my faithful, devoted pupil, my consolation in the
afterlife! You have no notion of subsets or superseries, so I’ll put it in a way that even a washing machine could understand! Happiness,
happiness worth the effort, is not a thing in itself, a totality, but
part of something that is not happiness, nor ever could be. Your plan
was sheer lunacy—you can believe the word of one who has been on
his deathbed! Happiness is not an independent function, but a second
derivative—but there I lose you, dunderhead. Yes, in my presence
you confess and act contrite, swearing by Babbage and by Boole you’ll
mend your ways, apply yourself, and all the rest of it. But you haven’t
the least intention of opening my works when you get home.’ Trurl
had to admire his master’s penetration, for this was perfectly true.
‘No, you’ll take a screwdriver and disassemble the machine in which
you first imprisoned and subsequently slew your own person. Of
course you’ll do what you like; I certainly won’t come and hover over
you as a ghost—not that anything prevented me from constructing an
38
Stanisl/aw Lem
appropriate Ectoplasmiac before I departed from this vale of tears. But
such supernatural nonsense as haunting my dear students hardly
seemed dignified—neither for them nor for myself. Anyway, why
should I play spectral nursemaid to a pack of fools? Are you aware,
incidentally, that there is only one count of self-murder against you?’
‘How do you mean, ‘‘only one count’’?’, asked Trurl.
‘I’m willing to bet there never was any university of academic
Trurls in that computer, just your digital facsimile, which lied like
mad because it feared—with good reason!—that once you discovered
its total inability to come up with an answer, it would be unplugged
for all eternity . . .’
‘Impossible!’, cried Trurl.
‘Not at all. What was the machine’s capacity?’
‘Upsilon 1010.’
‘Then there’s no room for more than one informational model. You
were tricked, which I see nothing wrong with, for your action was
cybernetically unspeakable from the first. But enough, Trurl. You
have left a bad taste in my tomb, which only the dark sister of
Morpheus and my final bride, Death, can wash away. Return home,
resurrect your cybernetic brother, tell him the truth, including what
has passed here tonight, and then bring him from the machine out
into the light of day, using the materialization method you will find
outlined in the Applied Reincarnology of my much lamented mentor,
the famed tectonician Hullabus.’
‘Then it is possible?’
‘Yes. Of course, two Trurls loose in the world will constitute a very
real and serious danger. But even that is preferable to having the
traces of your great crime covered up forever.’
‘But—forgive me, Master and Maestro—if the other Trurl doesn’t
exist, which in fact he ceased to do the second I pulled the plug, then
. . . well, why would it be necessary now to bring him back? . . .’
A cry of outrage filled the air.
‘By all that’s thermonuclear! And I gave this monster his diploma
cum laude!! Oh, I am well punished for having put off my eternal
retirement! Clearly, my mind was already beginning to go at the time
of your comprehensive exams! What, then you consider that if your
duplicate is presently nonexistent, there can be no necessity for his
reconstitution?! But you confuse physics and ethics, confuse them
utterly! As far as physics is concerned, it makes no difference whether
you live or he lives, or both live, or none, or whether I hop on one foot or lie in my grave properly, for in physics there are no good or evil,
In Hot Pursuit of Happiness
39
proper or improper states—only what is, what exists, and nothing
else. However, O most hopeless of my pupils, as far as non-material
considerations—which is ethics—are concerned, the matter appears
in an altogether different light! For if you had pulled the plug in order that your digital double might sleep uninterrupted through the night,
in other words fully intending, when you pulled it from the socket, to
reinsert it in the morning—then there would have been no fratricide
whatever and I, so rudely awakened from sweet oblivion, would not
have to be lecturing you now on the subject! Now, use the little brains
you have and tell me what physical difference there is between these
two situations: the first, where you unplug the machine for the night
only, with no evil design; and the second, where you do the same, but
desiring to obliterate the computerized Trurl forevermore! For the
machine, there is no physical difference, absolutely none!!’, he
thundered like a horn of Jericho. It seemed to Trurl that his venerable
teacher had acquired more vigour in the grave than ever he had
enjoyed in life. ‘Only now do I understand how abysmal is your
ignorance! What, then in your opinion one who lies in a deathlike
sleep may be freely lowered into a vat of sulphuric acid or shot from a
cannon, because his consciousness is not in operation?! Tell me, and
tell me at once: if I offered to have you put in a strait jacket of Eternal Happiness, for example lock you up in an Ecstasotron, in order that
you could bask in unadulterated bliss for the next twenty-one billion
years and not have to skulk about cem
eteries, robbing graves of their
information and aggravating your late professor, if I offered you
freedom from all these perplexities and humiliations, these errors
and dilemmas that beset and trouble our daily existence—would you
agree? Would you exchange this reality for the Kingdom of Never-
ending Joy? Answer yes or no!’
‘No! Of course not!’, exclaimed Trurl.
‘You see, you intellectual dud? You won’t be hit over the head with
happiness yourself, irreversibly halcyonicized and elysiated for good,
yet cheerfully propose doing just that to the entire universe; what fills you personally with horror you are ready to perpetrate on a cosmic
scale! No, it’s impossible, no one could be such a monumental dunce!
Listen to me, Trurl! Our forefathers, long ago, wanted nothing more
than mortal immortality. But scarcely had they achieved this dream,
when they realized it wasn’t what they were after at all! A thinking
being requires the impossible as well as the possible. Today everyone
can live just as long as he likes; the whole wisdom and beauty of our
existence lies in the fact that when one wearies of it all, when one has
40
Stanisl/aw Lem
had his fill of toiling and accomplishing, he calmly takes his leave of
this world, which is precisely what I did along with many others. Prior
to this, the end came unexpectedly, usually due to some stupid defect,
and more than one project was interrupted, more than one great
But attitudes have changed since then. I, for instance, could wish for
nothing better than nothingness—only mental rejects like yourself
keep pulling off the cover of my crypt as if it were a bedsheet. You
wanted to wrap everything up, tie it in a tidy knot, sign, seal and
deliver the world to happiness—and all out of sheer laziness. And
what if you had solved every problem, answered every question, what
them? The only thing left would have been to hang yourself out of
boredom or else start punching holes in that universal happiness. Out
of laziness you sought perfection, out of laziness you relegated the
problem to machines and even tried autocomputerization, thereby
showing yourself to be the most ingenious of imbeciles I ever had the
misfortune to teach in the course of my one thousand, seven hundred
and ninety-seven year career! If I didn’t know it to be quite useless,
I’d roll away this stone right here and now and give you a good
shellacking! You come with confessions and pleas, but I’m no miracle
worker, it’s not in my power to absolve the least of your sins, the
number of which borders on aleph-aleph-infinity! Go home, awaken
your cyberbrother and do as I’ve commanded.’
‘But—’
‘No buts! As soon as you’ve finished that, bring a bucket of mortar,
a shovel, a trowel, and patch up all the cracks in the masonry here—
there are leaks and I’m tired of the constant drip-drip on my head.
Understand?’
‘Yes, Master and Maestro, I—’
‘You’ll do it then?’
‘Yes, Master and Maestro, I assure you . . . I only wanted to
know . . .’
‘And I only want to know’, came the ringing voice from the grave,
‘when you’ll go away and leave me in everlasting peace! Barge in
here one more time and, so help me, I’ll . . . well, you’ll see what I do!
Don’t try my patience. And kindly convey the same message to your
Klapaucius, with my compliments. The last time I deigned to give him
some advice he was in such a mighty hurry to leave that he didn’t
even bother to thank me properly. Oh, the manners, the manners of
these brilliant constructors, these wonderful young geniuses!’
‘Master . . .’, Trurl began, but there was a sudden clattering in the
In Hot Pursuit of Happiness
41
tomb, a sputtering, then the button he had depressed popped up.
Silence reigned once more throughout the cemetery. There was only
the soft whispering of trees in the distance. Trurl sighed and scratched
his head, thought a little, chuckled at how astonished and ashamed
Klapaucius would look at their next meeting, and he made a deep
bow to his master’s lofty sepulchre. Then he took to his heels, gay as a
lark and tremendously pleased with himself, and ran home, ran as if
the very devil were after him.
translated by MICHAEL KANDEL
FRANCE
The Valley of Echoes
GE
ŔARD KLEIN
This time we ventured a little beyond the pink mountains of Tula, the
oasis of crystal, and for days on end we passed between innumerable
dunes. The Martian sky was always like itself, very pure, a very dark
blue with an occasional hint of grey, and with admirable pink
efflorescences at sunrise and sunset.
Our tractors performed quite satisfactorily. We were venturing into
regions that had hardly been explored thus far, at least by land, and
we were reasonably sure of being the first to negotiate these desolate
passes. The first men, at any rate; for what we were more or less
vaguely searching for was some trace of an ancient civilization. It has
never been admitted on Earth that Mars is not only a dead world, but
a world eternally deserted. It has long been hoped that we would
discover some remains of defunct empires, or perhaps the fallen
stories have been told about Mars for ten years of scientific and
fruitless exploration on this point to undo all the legends.
But neither Ferrier nor La Salle nor I particularly believed in the
possibility of so fantastic an encounter. We were mature and slightly
disillusioned men, and we had left the Earth some years before to
escape the wind of insanity which at that time was sweeping our
native planet. This was something that we did not like to talk about,
as it pained us. We sometimes thought it was due to the immense
solitude of a species that had just achieved self-awareness, that
confronted the universe, that hoped to receive a response, even a
fatal one, to its challenge. But space remained silent and the planets
deserted.
We were descending, then, toward the south, in the direction of the
Martian equator. The maps were still imprecise at this time, and we
had been assigned to make certain geological reports which could not
be done from an airplane. As a psychologist, I was only moderately
qualified for this task, but I also knew how to drive a tractor and how
the instruments worked, and men were scarce on Mars.
The worst thing was the monotony that prevailed throughout these
days. People on Earth, comfortably installed behind their desks, write
The Valley of Echoes
43
things about us that bring tears of compassion to the eyes of
thousands of readers; they speak of our heroism and the adventure
that lies in wait for us at each step, of the eternally renewed
splendours of unknown worlds. I have never encountered such
&n
bsp; things. We know danger, but it doesn’t rise up from the dunes; it is
insidious, a leak in our breathing apparatus or a corresponding defect
in our tractors or in our radio posts. It is, above all, the danger of
boredom. Mars is a deserted world. Its horizons are short, curtailed.
And there are more inspiring scenes than that of an immense plain of
grey sand and scattered lichens. The landscape is not terrible in itself.
But what one does feel, with poignant acuteness, is the awareness of
these thousands of kilometres, all alike, stretching out in all directions as far as you can see and farther still, kilometres which slowly pass
beneath your treads while you remain immobile. It’s a little as if you
were sure of finding in tomorrow the exact replica of yesterday.
And then you drive. For hours. Like a machine. And you are the
machine, you are the tractor, you creep along between the dunes for
hours on end, you avoid the heaps of stones, slowly modelled by the
wind and themselves destined to become sand, and from time to time
you lift your eyes to the sky and, through flinching lids, perceive the
stars’ sparkling in midday, which at first surprises and then bores you
mortally, so that you would give anything for these eyes of the night
to finally close.
Then you think of what you will do on Earth, when you return to
it: you have heard the news; it is bad, always bad: no event occurs on
Earth that is not aberrant: these are the ‘Insane Years’, they say, and
the desire to go back down there turns to a kind of loathing; nausea
grips you.
Always, you drive. Without hoping for anything. At the end of a
certain time, you see things rising up from among the dunes. You
brake abruptly to avoid them, but there is never anything there.
There are also those who fall asleep. The others notice it because the
tractor suddenly loses it way; then they shake the driver or take the
wheel themselves. This provides a little recreation.
As for me, it depends. Sometimes I make up stories. Stories that
take place on Mars or in space or on another world, but never on
Earth. I prefer not to think of Earth. La Salle is like myself. For Ferrier, it’s worse, he can’t stop thinking about it for a minute. I ask myself
where this will lead him.
He’s a geologist. I have watched him dig in the sand and hold up
some tiny shell, the ancient abode of a creature long since withered,