The Cyberiad

“That never occurred to me,” muttered Klapaucius. “You’re quite right, the prospects aren’t encouraging… Have you thought of a way out of this dilemma?”

“Well, we might make the beast multimortal. Picture this: the King slays it, it falls, then it gets up again, resurrected, and the King chases it again, slays it again, and so on, until he gets sick and tired of the whole thing.”

“That he won’t like,” said Klapaucius after some thought. “And anyway, how would you design such a beast?”

“Oh, I don’t know… We could make it without any vital organs. The King chops the beast into little pieces, but the pieces grow back together.”

“How?”

“Use a field.”

“Magnetic?”

“If you like.”

“How do we operate it?”

“Remote control, perhaps?” asked Trurl.

“Too risky,” said Klapaucius. “How do you know the King won’t have us locked up in some dungeon while the hunt’s in progress? Our poor predecessors were no fools, and look how they ended up. More than one of them, I’m sure, thought of remote control—yet it failed. No, we can’t expect to maintain communication with the beast during the battle.”

“Then why not use a satellite?” suggested Trurl. “We could install automatic controls-—”

“Satellite indeed!” snorted Klapaucius. “And how are you going to build it, let alone put it in orbit? There are no miracles in our profession, Trurl! We’ll have to hide the controls some other way.”

“But where can we hide the controls when they watch our every step? You’ve seen how the servants skulk about, sticking their noses into everything. We’d never be able to leave the premises ourselves, and certainly not smuggle out such a large piece of equipment. It’s impossible!”

“Calm down,” said prudent Klapaucius, looking over his shoulder. “Perhaps we don’t need such equipment in the first place.”

“Something has to operate the beast, and if that something is an electronic brain anywhere inside, the King will smash it to a pulp before you can say goodbye.”

They were silent. Night had fallen and the village lights below were flickering on, one by one. Suddenly Trurl said:

“Listen, here’s an idea. We only pretend to build a beast but in reality build a ship to escape on. We give it ears, a tail, paws, so no one will suspect, and they can be easily jettisoned on takeoff. What do you think of that? We get off scot-free and thumb our noses at the King!”

“And if the King has planted a real constructor among our servants, which is not unlikely, then it’s all over and into the pit with us. Besides, running away—no, it just doesn’t suit me. It’s him or us, Trurl, you can’t get around it.”

“Yes, I suppose a spy could be a constructor too,” said Trurl with a sigh. “What then can we do, in the name of the Great Comet?! How about—a photoelectric phantom?”

“You mean, a mirage? Have the King hunt a mirage? No thanks! After an hour or two of that, he’d come straight here and make phantoms of us!”

Again they were silent. Finally Trurl said:

“The only way out of our difficulty, as far as I can see, is to have the beast abduct the King, and then—”

“You don’t have to say another word. Yes, that’s not at all a bad idea… Then for the ransom we—and haven’t you noticed, old boy, that the orioles here are a deeper orange than on Maryland IV?” concluded Klapaucius, for just then some servants were bringing silver lamps out on the veranda. “There’s still a problem though,” he continued when they were alone again. “Assuming the beast can do what you say, how will we be able to negotiate with the prisoner if we’re sitting in a dungeon ourselves?”

“You have a point there,” said Trurl. “We’ll have to figure some way around that… The main thing, however, is the algorithm!”

“Any child knows that! What’s a beast without an algorithm?”

So they rolled up their sleeves and sat down to experiment—by simulation, that is mathematically and all on paper. And the mathematical models of King Krool and the beast did such fierce battle across the equation-covered table, that the constructors’ pencils kept snapping. Furious, the beast writhed and wriggled its iterated integrals beneath the King’s polynomial blows, collapsed into an infinite series of indeterminate terms, then got back up by raising itself to the nth power, but the King so belabored it with differentials and partial derivatives that its Fourier coefficients all canceled out (see Riemann’s Lemma), and in the ensuing confusion the constructors completely lost sight of both King and beast. So they took a break, stretched their legs, had a swig from the Leyden jug to bolster their strength, then went back to work and tried it again from the beginning, this time unleashing their entire arsenal of tensor matrices and grand canonical ensembles, attacking the problem with such fervor that the very paper began to smoke. The King rushed forward with all his cruel coordinates and mean values, stumbled into a dark forest of roots and logarithms, had to backtrack, then encountered the beast on a field of irrational numbers (F₁) and smote it so grievously that it fell two decimal places and lost an epsilon, but the beast slid around an asymptote and hid in an n-dimensional orthogonal phase space, underwent expansion and came out, fuming factorially, and fell upon the King and hurt him passing sore. But the King, nothing daunted, put on his Markov chain mail and all his impervious parameters, took his increment ?k to infinity and dealt the beast a truly Boolean blow, sent it reeling through an x-axis and several brackets—but the beast, prepared for this, lowered its horns and—wham!!—the pencils flew like mad through transcendental functions and double eigentransformations, and when at last the beast closed in and the King was down and out for the count, the constructors jumped up, danced a jig, laughed and sang as they tore all their papers to shreds, much to the amazement of the spies perched in the chandelier-—perched in vain, for they were uninitiated into the niceties of higher mathematics and consequently had no idea why Trurl and Klapaucius were now shouting, over and over, “Hurrah! Victory!!”

Well after midnight, the Leyden jug from which the constructors had on occasion refreshed themselves in the course of their labors was quietly taken to the headquarters of the King’s secret police, where its false bottom was opened and a tiny tape recorder removed. This the experts switched on and listened to eagerly, but the rising sun found them totally unenlightened and looking haggard. One voice, for example, would say:

“Well? Is the King ready?”

“Right!”

“Where’d you put him? Over there? Good! Now—hold on, you have to keep the feet together. Not yours, idiot, the King’s! All right now, ready? One, two, find the derivative! Quick! What do you get?”

“Pi.”

“And the beast?”

“Under the radical sign. But look, the King’s still standing!”

“Still standing, eh? Factor both sides, divide by two, throw in a few imaginary numbers—good! Now change variables and subtract—Trurl, what on earth are you doing?! The beast, not the King, the beast! That’s right! Good! Perfect!! Now transform, approximate and solve for x. Do you have it?”

“I have it! Klapaucius! Look at the King now!!”

There was a pause, then a burst of wild laughter.

That same morning, as all the experts and high officials of the secret police shook their heads, bleary-eyed after a sleepless night, the constructors asked for quartz, vanadium, steel, copper, platinum, rhinestones, dysprosium, yttrium and thulium, also cerium and germanium, and most of the other elements that make up the Universe, plus a variety of machines and qualified technicians, not to mention a wide assortment of spies—for so insolent had the constructors become, that on the triplicate requisition form they boldly wrote: “Also, kindly send agents of various cuts and stripes at the discretion and with the approval of the Proper Authorities.” The next day they asked for sawdust and a large red velvet curtain on a stand, a cluster of little glass bells in the center and a large tassel at each of its four corners; everything, even down to the littlest glass bell, was specified with the