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 entitled, The Gnostotron, or The Ultimate Omnipotentiometer, or A Pee into the Future. 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 Understanding—and nothing! No, fame will be mine, acclaim will be mine, thrones of ivory, the title 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 between 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 masses 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 logical, inevitable and theoretical. For if—so went my argument — the Universe contains civilizations at varying stages of development, 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 purchase the works of other sages, who enjoyed great riches and the sweets 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 likewise 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 Evolution 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 accumulation of mucilaginous slime upon some saline shore, beings come into being, viscous, sticky, albescent and albuminous. 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 Albuminids, eventually conduct experiments, to see if consciousness can subsist in any gelatinous substance, which of course it can, and does, in albuminose 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 passed 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 recognize 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 comfortable, self-righteous sigh: “Alas! With what quiet heroism did that master endure his cruel obscurity! How justified was his anger towards our forefathers, and yet how noble 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 monuments 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! Perchance 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 damnation 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 wisdom 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!!!
It was in vain that Klapaucius sought to calm the raging sage throughout this long harangue. Upon uttering these final words, the ancient one leaped up and, shaking his fist at the generations to come, let loose a volley of shockingly pungent imprecations (for where could he have learnt them, having led such an exemplary life?); then, foaming and fuming, he stamped and bellowed, and in a shower of sparks crashed to the floor, dead from an overload of bile. Klapaucius, much discomfited by this unpleasant turn of events, sat at the table of stone nearby, picked up the Testament and began to peruse it, though his eyes were soon swimming from the abundance of epithets therein addressed to the future, and by the second page he broke into a sweat, for the now-departed Chlorian Theoreticus gave evidence of a power of invective that was truly cosmic. For three days Klapaucius read, his eyes riveted to that manuscript, and was sorely perplexed: should he reveal it to the world, or destroy it? And he sits there to this day, unable to decide…”
+ + “Methinks,” said King Genius, when the machine had finished and retired, “I see in this some allusion to the question of monetary compensation, which is now indeed at hand, for, after a night bravely whiled away with tales, the dawn of a new day appears outside our cave. Well then, my good constructor, how shall I reward you?”
“Your Majesty,” said Trurl, “places me in some difficulty. Whatever I request, should I receive it, I must later regret, in that I did not ask for more. On the other hand, I would not wish to cause offense by naming an exorbitant figure. And so, the amount of the honorarium I leave to the generosity of Your Majesty…”
“So be it,” replied the King affably. “The stories were excellent, the machines unquestionably perfect, and therefore I see no alternative but to reward you with the greatest treasure of all, one which, I am certain, you will not want to exchange for any other. I grant you health and life—this is, in my estimation, the only fitting gift. Anything else would be an insult, for no amount of gold can purchase Truth or Wisdom. Go then in peace, my friend, and continue to hide your truths, too bitter for this world, in the guise of fairy tale and fable.”
