Peace on Earth

  “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. Pm 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?”

  “Yes, but I have no idea what happened after that. I tried to raise Control and also the Trojan satellites through the ship’s computer to see if Control had me on its screen. But no one answered, no one. So the micropes must have been destroyed again, and the Agency didn’t learn what happened to the remote. All they knew was that shortly after that I landed on my own, then returned. The rest is only guesses. So?”

  “But that’s the evidence. The only person who knows more is the inventor of the dispersant. What was his name?”

  “Lax-Gugliborc. But he works for the Agency.”

  “He didn’t want to give you the remote.”

  “He said it was my decision.”

  “That’s evidence too.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yes. He had misgivings.”

  “You mean he feared that the moon—?”

  “There is no technology that can’t be figured out.”

  “And that’s what happened?”

  “I’m sure. Except differently from what he imagined.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “Everything is always different from what we imagine.”

  “I see it now,” I tapped in the surrounding silence. “This was no taking over of controls. Hybridization, more likely! The thing that came into being there joined with the thing fashioned here in Professor Lax-Gugliborc’s workshop. One dispersion electronics combined with another that also had the ability to dissipate and metamorphose. The molecular remote, you see, contained a memory, and transformation programs, like little crystals of ice that can join together to form millions of different snowflakes. Each flake has hexagonal symmetry yet is different. Yes! I operated the remote, in a sense was the remote, but at the same time I was only providing it with signals telling it in which way to change. It did the changing itself, at the scene, on the surface of the moon and also below.”

  “Did it have intelligence?”

  “I really don’t know. One doesn’t need to know how a car is constructed to drive one. I drove, and saw what it saw, that was all. I couldn’t tell
you whether it was an ordinary remote, an empty shell, or could function like a robot.”

  “But Lax-Gugliborc could tell us.”

  “Indeed. But I would prefer not to approach him, at least not directly.”

  “Write to him.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Write so that only he will understand.”

  “They read all letters. The telephone is out too.”

  “Write, but don’t sign it.”

  “And the handwriting?”

  “I’ll write, you dictate.”

  “It’ll be chicken scrawls.”

  “So? Now I’m hungry, I want an omelette with jam. And then we’ll do the letter.”

  “Who will send it? And how?”

  “Breakfast first.”

  The letter seemed an impossible task. I didn’t know the professor’s home address. And that was the least of our problems. We had to let him know that I wished to see him but in such a way that nobody else would understand the message. All correspondence was examined by the best experts, so we would have to be fiendishly clever. Forget about codes. Moreover there was no one I could trust even in the matter of sending the letter. And possibly Lax-Gugliborc wasn’t working anymore at the Agency, and even if by some miracle the letter reached him and he decided to see me, a horde of agents and intelligence operatives would not let him out of their sight. Also, there were probably special satellites in stationary orbit keeping my building under constant surveillance. I trusted House no more than I did Kramer. Nor could I turn to Tarantoga, whom I trusted like myself but there was no way to inform him of my (our) plan without drawing attention to him, and even as it was, ultrasensitive laser microphones were no doubt aimed at his every window, and when he bought com flakes and yogurt at the supermarket, they were both no doubt x-rayed as he carried his groceries to the car.

  After breakfast I went to the town, taking the same bus I took the first time. In front of the department store was a stand selling colorful postcards, and I looked through them and found the perfect one: it showed, against a red background, a golden cage and in it a white owl with big round eyes. I wasn’t so stupid as to reach for this card then and there, but selected it with eight others, and one with a parrot, then two more. I bought stamps and headed back to the asylum on foot. The town was almost deserted. A few people puttering in their gardens, and at a car wash across from the spot where that shoot-out for me took place cars were moving slowly through water and big blue brushes. No one seemed to be following me, or watching me, or preparing to kidnap me. The sun beat down. My shirt was soaked with sweat when I returned after an hour of walking, so I showered and changed, then sat down to send greetings to friends—Tarantoga, both Cybbilkises, Wivitch, two of Tarantoga’s cousins—the messages not too short and not too long, and of course with no mention of the Agency, the Mission, the moon, only pleasant, innocent sentiments, and my return address, why not? To make clear the lightheartedness of the postcards, I drew on each one, two black-and-white pandas for the twins, with mustaches and ties, a dachshund with a halo for Tarantoga, and I gave the owl glasses just like the professor’s, and on the bar where it was perched I drew a mouse. How does a mouse behave, especially around an owl? It is quiet, quiet as a mouse, and the professor might know that my name, Tichy, meant quiet in Czech or Russian, moreover at his place we had sat together in a cage. Writing to each one that it would be nice to see him, I could do the same with the professor, and thanked him for everything, and in a postscript conveyed greetings from Mrs. Mudstone, a subtle allusion, by anagram, to moon dust. If the professor didn’t get it, the card would fail, but I couldn’t be more explicit.

  I didn’t call Shapiro, and Kramer did not go out of his way to talk to me. I spent half the day by the pool. My other self, since I had come to an understanding with it, caused no trouble. At night, lying in bed, I sometimes exchanged a few words with It before dropping off to sleep. It occurred to me that it might have been better to send Lax-Gugliborc the parrot instead of the owl, but it was too late, the ball was in his court now. Three days passed and nothing happened. Twice I swung with Kramer in the canopied swing by the fountain, but he didn’t talk business. Perhaps he too was waiting. He sweat, breathed heavily, groaned, complained about his rheumatism, was obviously in a bad mood. Bored, I took to watching television in the evening and reading the paper. The Lunar Agency reported that analysis of the data from the lunar reconnaissance was under way and so far revealed no irregularities or malfunctions in the various sectors. The media demanded more information, called for a hearing, for the director of the Lunar Agency and the heads of its different departments to appear before a special commission of the UN, and that a press conference be held to throw light on matters about which a fearful public was in the dark.

  Russell, the young ethnologist who wanted to write his dissertation about millionaires, came to see me in the evenings. He had most of his material now thanks to his interviews with Kramer, but I couldn’t tell him those interviews were worthless and that Kramer was only playing the role of a Croesus while the true millionaires, especially the ones from Texas, were dull as dishwater. Even in the asylum they had their own secretaries, masseurs, and bodyguards, and each had a pavilion to himself. They were so reclusive, Russell had to set up a special telescope on my roof to observe them through their windows. He was discouraged, because even when they were stark raving mad, what they did was unoriginal. Since nothing was happening, Russell would come down his ladder and drop in on me for some human conversation.

  The prosperity that obtained after the weapons were moved to the moon had unfortunate consequences, made worse by automation. Russell called it the electronics Stone Age. Illiteracy increased, particularly since now you didn’t even have to sign a check, only a thumbprint was necessary and a computer scanner did the rest. The American Medical Association finally lost the battle to save their profession, because computers gave better diagnoses and were much more patient with patients. Prosthetic sex was replaced by a simple device called an Orgaz. This was a headset with electrodes and a handgrip that resembled a toy pistol. Pulling the trigger gave you the ultimate pleasure because the appropriate place in your brain was stimulated with no effort, no exertion necessary, plus there were no upkeep expenses for male or female remotes, nor indeed the aggravations of natural courtship and matrimony. Orgazes flooded the market. To be fitted you went to special clinics. Gynandroics and other firms that manufactured synthetic women, angels, nymphs, fauns, etc., went out of business with much gnashing of teeth. As for education, most of the developed countries did away with compulsory school attendance. “Children,” went the new doctrine, “should not be subjected to daily imprisonment and the psychological torture called learning.” Who needs to know how many men’s shirts you can sew out of six yards of Egyptian cotton if one shirt requires seven eighths of a yard, or when two trains will collide if one engineer is eighteen, drunk, and going 100 miles an hour and the other is colorblind and doing 75, if they’re separated by 15 miles of track and 43 pre-automation semaphores? Equally useless are facts about kings, wars, battles, crusades, and all the other rotten behavior of history. Geography is best learned by traveling. All you have to know is the price of the ticket and when the plane takes off. Why learn foreign languages when you can put a translator chip in your ear? The study of biology depresses and depraves young minds, nor is it practical since no one now can become a doctor or dentist (after the appearance of dentautomata, about thirty thousand out-of-work dentists in both the Americas and Eurasia have committed suicide each year). And chemistry is of no more value than a knowledge of hieroglyphics. Meanwhile on traffic signs and street signs words are slowly being replaced with pictures.

  Russell saw no point complaining about this state of affairs because nothing could be done. There were still some fifty thousand scientists and scholars left in the world but their average age was now 61.7. Everything had been smothered in the boredom of prosperity, and that was why, said Russ
ell, most people were actually pleased by the prospect of an invasion from the moon, and the panic reported in the papers and on television was only to increase sales. Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur, the ethnologist concluded, staring at the now empty bottle of bourbon. His field work was so disappointing that he had stopped aiming his telescope at the windows of the millionaires and turned it instead to the solarium where the nurses and their aides sunbathed in the nude. I thought that odd, since after all he could simply go there and look at them up close, but when I said this, he shrugged, remarking that that was the problem: nowadays one could just do that.

  In the rec room of the new pavilion workmen were almost finished setting up the fants. Russell took me there one evening. You put a cassette into a fant and an image appears in front of the machine. More than an image, a whole artificial reality, Mount Olympus, for example, packed with gods and goddesses, or something more from life, a two-wheel tumbrel carrying a bunch of illustrious people through a furious crowd toward the guillotine. Or Hansel and Gretel at the witch’s house stuffing themselves with shingles of gingerbread. Or a convent after Tartars or Martians break in. The idea is that what happens next depends on the viewer, who has a pedal under each foot and a joystick in his hand. You can go from idyll to bloodbath, have the gods depose Zeus, put ear wings on the heads falling into the guillotine basket so they fly away. Anything is possible. The witch wants to make cutlets out of Hansel, but you can have Hansel make cutlets out of her. The Prince of Denmark can steal the royal jewels and run off with Ophelia, or with Rosencrantz, depending on which key you push, because some fants have a keyboard. The instruction manual is a thick book but you can do without it. We tired of the fants after fifteen minutes of playing, even though we were both a little drunk, and went to bed. The asylum bought twenty fants, but they are hardly ever used. Dr. House is not happy about that. He went from patient to patient, trying to persuade them to give it a try because it’s good therapy. But apparently none of the millionaires or billionaires ever heard of Hansel and Gretel or Olympus or Hamlet. Tartars or Martians, it’s all the same to them. The guillotine they consider an oversize cigar cutter and silly. Dr. House worked the fants himself, probably out of a sense of duty, mixing the Middle Ages, Shakespeare, Agatha Christie, and volcanoes, and tried to get me to join him, but I refused. I was still waiting for a sign from Professor Lax-Gugliborc. Kramer too seemed to be waiting for something, and that’s probably why he avoided me. Waiting for new instructions? But I was in a good mood, having reached an understanding with myself.