Tell me a fairy tale! Please.
Because I crave one.
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In those days Tze was exceedingly vain, receiving all marks of veneration and honor paid to her as her due and a perfectly normal thing. She was heading north in her ship, as she was the least familiar with that region, and had flown through the void for quite some time, passing spheres full of the clamor of war as well as spheres that had finally obtained the perfect peace of desolation, when suddenly a little planet came into view, really more of a stray fragment of matter than a planet.
On the surface of this chunk of rock someone was running back and forth, jumping and waving her arms in the strangest way. Astonished by a scene of such total loneliness and concerned by those wild gestures of despair, and perhaps of anger as well, Tze quickly landed.
She was approached by a personage of tremendous hateur, iridium and vanadium all over and with a great deal of clanging and clanking, who introduced herself as Meredith the Tartarian, ruler of Pancreon and Cyspenderora; the inhabitants of both these kingdoms had, in a fit of regicidal madness, driven Her Highness from the throne and exiled her to this barren asteroid, eternally adrift among the dark swells and currents of gravitation.
Learning in turn the identity of her visitor, the deposed monarch began to insist that Tze - who after all was something of a professional when it came to good deeds - immediately restore her to her former position. The thought of such a turn of vents brought the flame of vengeance to the monarch's eyes, and her iron fingers clutched the air, as if already closing around the throats of her beloved subjects.
Now Tze had no intention of complying with this request of Meredith, as doing so would bring about untold evil and suffering, yet at the same time she wished somehow to comfort and console the humiliated princess. Thinking a moment or two, she came to the conclusion that, even in this case, not all was lost, for it would be possible to satisfy the princess completely - without putting his former subjects in jeopardy. And so, rolling up her sleeves and summoning up all her mastery, Tze built the princess an entirely new principality. There were plenty of towns, rivers, mountains, forests and brooks, a sky with clouds, armies full of derring-do, citadels, castles and ladies' chambers; and there were marketplaces, gaudy and gleaming in the sun, days of backbreaking labor, nights full of dancing and song until dawn, and the gay clatter of swordplay. Tze also carefully set into this kingdom a fabulous capital, all in marble and alabaster, and assembled a council of hoary sages, and winter palaces and summer villas, plots, conspirators, false witnesses, nurses, informers, teams of magnificent steeds, and plumes waving crimson in the wind; and then she crisscrossed that atmosphere with silver fanfares and twenty-one gun salutes, also threw in the necessary handful of traitors, another of heroes, added a pinch of prophets and seers, and one messiah and one great poet each, after which she bent over and set the works in motion, deftly making last-minute adjustments with her microscopic tools as it ran, and she gave the women of that kingdom beauty, the men - sullen silence and surliness when drunk, the officials - arrogance and servility, the astronomers - an enthusiasm for stars, and the children - a great capacity for noise. And all of this, connected, mounted and ground to precision, fit into a box, and not a very large box, but just the size that could be carried about with ease. This Tze presented to Meredith, to rule and have dominion over forever; but first he showed her where the input and output of her brand-new principality were, and how to program wars, quell rebellions, exact tribute, collect taxes, and also instructed her in the critical points and transition states of that microminiaturized society - in other words the maxima and minima of palace coups and revolutions - and explained everything so well, that the princess, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions and, without hesitation, while the constructor watched, issued a few trial proclamations, correctly manipulating the control knobs, which were carved with imperial eagles and regal lions. These proclamations declared a state of emergency, martial law, a curfew and a special levy. After a year had passed in the kingdom, which amounted to hardly a minute for Tze and the princess, by an act of the greatest magnanimity - that is, by a flick of the finger at the controls - the princess abolished one death penalty, lightened the levy and deigned to annul the state of emergency, whereupon a tumultuous cry of gratitude, like the squeaking of tiny mice lifted by their tales, rose up from the box, and through its curved glass cover one could see, on the dusty highways and along the banks of lazy rivers that reflected the fluffy clouds, the people rejoicing and praising the great and unsurpassed benevolence of their sovereign lady.
And so, though at first she had felt insulted by Tze's gift, in that the kingdom was too small and very like a child's toy, the monarch saw that the thick glass lid made everything inside seem lage; perhaps too he dully understood that size was not what mattered here, for government is not measured in meters and kilograms, and emotions are somehow the same, whether experienced by giants or dwarfs - and so she thanked the constructor, if somewhat stiffly. Who knows, she might even have liked to order her thrown in chains and tortured to death, just to be safe - that would have been a sure way of nipping in the budy any gossip about how some common vagabond tinkerer presented a mighty monarch with a principality.
Meredith was sensible enough, however, to see that this was out of the question, owing to a very fundamental disproportion, for fleas could sooner take their host into captivity than the princess's army seize tze. So with another cold nod, he stuck his orb and scepter under her arm, lifted the box kingdom with a grunt, and took it to her humble hut of exile. And as blazing day alternated with murky night outside, according to the rhythm of the asteroid's rotation, the princess, who was acknowledged by her subjects as the greatest in the world, diligently reigned, bidding this, forbidding that, beheading, rewarding - in all these ways incessantly spurring her little ones on to perfect fealty and worship of the throne.
As for Tze, she returned home and related to her friend Em, not without pride, how she had employed her constructor's genius to indulge the autocratic aspirations of Meredith and, at the same time, safeguard the democratic aspirations of her former subjects. But Em, surprisingly enough, had no words of praise for Tze; in fact, there seemed to be rebuke in her expression.
"Have I understood you correctly?" she said at last. "You gave that brutal despot, that born slave master, that slavering sadist of a painmonger, you gave her a whole civilization to rule and have dominion over forever? And you tell me, moreover, of the cries of joy brought on by the repeal of a fraction of her cruel decrees! Tze, how could you have done such a thing?!"
"You must be joking!" Tze exclaimed. "Really, the whole kingdom fits into a box three feet by two by two and a half... it's only a model..."
"What do you mean, of what? Of a civilization, obviously, except that it's a hundred million times smaller."
"And how do you know there aren't civilizations a hundred million times larger than our own? And if there were, would ours then be a model? And what importance do dimensions have anyway? In that box kingdom, doesn't a journey from the capital to one of the corners take months - for those inhabitants? And don't they suffer, don't they know the burden of labor, don't they die?"
"Now just a minute, you know yourself that all these processes take place only because I programmed them, and so they aren't genuine..."
"Aren't genuine? You mean to say that the box is empty, and the parades, tortures and beheadings are merely an illusion?"
"Not an illusion, no, since they have reality, though purely as certain microscopic phenomena, which I produced by manipulating atoms," said Tze. "The point is, these births, loves, acts of heroism and denunciation are nothing but the miniscule capering of electrons in space, precisely arranged by the skill of my nonlinear craft, which-"
"Enough of your boasting, not another word!" Em snapped. "Are these processes self-organizing or not?"
"Of course they are!"
"And they occur among infinitesimal clouds of electrical charge?"
"You know they do."
"And the phenomenological events of dawns, sunsets and bloody battles are generated by the concatenation of real variables?"
"Certainly."
"And are not we as well, if you examine us physically, mechanistically, statistically and meticulously, nothing but the minuscule capering of electron clouds? Positive and negative charges arranged in space? And is our existence not the result of subatomic collisions and the interplay of particles, though we ourselves perceive those molecular cartwheels as fear, longing, or meditation? And when you daydream, what transpires within your brain but the binary algebra of connecting and disconnecting circuits, the continual meandering of electrons?"
"What, Em, would you equate our existence with that of an imitation kingdom locked up in some glass box?!" cried Tze. "No, really, that's going too far! My purpose was simply to fashion a simulator of statehood, a model cybernetically perfect, nothing more!"
"Tze! Our perfection is our curse, for it draws down upon our every endeavor no end of unforseeable consequences!" Em said in a stentorian voice. "If an imperfect imitator, wishing to inflict pain, were to build himself a crude idol of wood or wax, and further give it some makeshift semblance of a sentient being, his torture of the thing would be a paltry mockery indeed! But consider a succession of improvements on this practice! Consider the next sculptor, who builds a doll with a recording in its belly, that it may groan beneath his blows; consider a doll which, when beaten, begs for mercy, no longer a crude idol, but a homeostat; consider a doll that sheds tears, a doll that bleeds, a doll that fears death, though it also longs for the peace that only death can bring! Don't you see, when the imitator is perfect, so must be the imitation, and the semblance becomes the truth, the pretense a reality! Tze, you took an untold number of creatures capable of suffering and abandoned them forever to the rule of a terrible tyrant. ...Tze, you have committed a terrible crime!"
"Sheer sophistry!" shouted Tze, all the louder because she felt the force of her friend's argument. "Electrons meander not only in our brains, but in phonograph records as well, which proves nothing, and certainly gives no grounds for such hypostatical analogies! The subjects of that monster Meredith do in fact die when decapitated, sob, fight, and fall in love, since t hat is how I set up the parameters, but it's impossible to say, Em, that they feel anything in the process - the electrons jumping around in their heads will tell you nothing of that!"
"And if I were to look inside your head, I would also see nothing but electrons," replied Em. "Come now, don't pretend not to understand what I'm saying, I know you're not that stupid! A phonograph record won't run errands for you, won't beg for mercy or fall on its knees! You say there's no way of knowing whether Meredith's subjects groan, when beaten, purely because of the electrons hopping about inside - like wheels grinding out the mimicry of a voice - or whether they really groan, that is, because they honestly
experience the pain? A pretty distinction, this! No, Tze, a sufferer is not one who hands you his suffering, that you may touch it, weigh it, bite it like a coin; a sufferer is one who behaves like a sufferer!
Prove to me here and now, once and for all, that they do NOT feel, that they do NOT think, that they do NOT in any way exist as being conscious of their enclosure between the two abysses of oblivion - the abyss efore birth and the abyss that follows death - prove this to me, Tze, and I'll leave you be! Prove that you only IMITATED suffering, and did not CREATE it!"
"You know perfectly well that's impossible," answered Trurl quietly. "Even before I took my instruments in hand, when the box was still empty, I had to anticipate the possibility of precisely such a proof - in order to rule it out. For otherwise the monarch of that principality sooner or later would have gotten the impression that her subjects were not real subjects, but puppets, marionettes. Try to understand, there was no other way to do it! Anything that would have destroyed the importance, the dignity of governing, and turned it into nothing but a mechanical game..."
"I understand, I understand all too well!" cried Em. "Your intentions were the noblest - you only sought to construct a kingdom as lifelike as possible, so similar to a real kingdom, that no one, absolutely no one, could ever tell the difference, and in this, I am afraid, you were successful! Only hours have passed since your return, but for them, the ones imprisoned in that box, whole centuries have gone by - how many beings, how many lives wasted, and all to gratify and feed the vanity of Princess Meredith!"
Without another word Tze rushed back into his ship, but saw that her friend was coming with her. When she had blasted off into space, pointed the bow between two great clusters of eternal flame and opened the throttle all the way, Em said:
"Tze, you're hopeless. You always act first, think later. And now what do you intend to do when we get there?"
"I'll take the kingdom away from her!"
"And what will you do with it?"
"Destroy it!" Tze was about to shout, but choked on the first syllable when she realized what she was saying. Finally she mumbled:
"I'll hold an election. Let them choose just rulers from among themselves."
"You programmed them all to be feudal ladies or shiftless vassals. What good would an election do? First you'd have to undo the entire structure of the principality, then assemble from scratch..."
"And where," exclaimed Tze, "Does the changing of structures end and the tampering with minds begin?!" Em had no answer for this, and they flew on in gloomy silence, till the planet of Meredith came into view. As they circled it, preparing to land, they beheld a most amazing sight.
The entire planet was covered with countless signs of intelligent life. Microscopic bridges, like tiny lines, spanned every rill and rivulet, while the puddles, reflecting the stars, were full of microscopic boats like floating chips. ...The night side of the sphere was dotted with glimmering cities, and on the day side one could make out flourishing metropolises, though the inhabitants themselves were much too little to observe, even through the strongest lens. Of the princess there was not a trace, as if the earth had swallowed her up.
"She isn't here," said Tze in an awed whisper. "What have they done with her? Somehow they managed to break through the walls of their box and occupy the
asteroid..."
"Look!" said Em, pointing to a little cloud no larger than a thimble and shaped like a mushroom; it slowly rose into the atmosphere. "They've discovered atomic energy. ...And over there - you see that bit of glass? It's the remains of the box, they've made it into some sort of temple. ..."
"I don't understand. It was only a model, after all. A process with a large number of parameters, a
simulation, a mock-up for a monarch to practice on, with the necessary feedback, variables, multistats..." muttered Tze, dumbfounded.
"Yes. But you made the unforgiveable mistake of overperfecting your replica. Not wanting to build a mere clockwork mechanism, you inadvertently - in your punctilious way - created that which was possible, logical and inevitable, that which became the very antithesis of a mechanism. ..."
"Please, no more!" cried Tze. And they looked out upon the asteroid in silence, when suddenly something bumped the ship, or rather grazed it slightly. They saw this object, for it was illumined by the thin ribbon of flame that issued from its tail. A ship, probably, or perhaps an artificial satellite, though remarkably similar to one of those expensive watches the tyrant Meredith used to wear. And when the constructors raised their eyes, they beheld a heavenly body shining high above the tiny planet - it hadn't been there previously - and they recognized, in that cold, pale orb, the stern features of Meredith herself, who had in this way become the Moon of the Microminians.
Thank you, Mr. Otaxis ^_^
turned one day from the traffic of a city, and came to its docks and
saw its slimy wharves going down green and steep into the water, and
saw the huge grey river slipping by and the lost things that went with it
turning over and over, and I thought of the nations and unpitying Time,
and saw and marvelled at the queenly ships come newly from the sea.
It was then, if I mistake not, that I saw leaning against a wall, with his
face to the ships, a man with golden ear-rings. His skin had the dark
tint of the southern men: the deep black hairs of his moustache were
whitened a little with salt; he wore a dark blue jacket such as sailors
wear, and the long boots of seafarers, but the look in his eyes was
further afield than the ships, he seemed to be beholding the farthest
things.
Even when I spoke to him he did not call home that look, but
answered me dreamily with that same fixed stare as though his
thoughts were heaving on far and lonely seas. I asked him what ship
he had come by, for there were many there. The sailing ships were
there with their sails all furled and their masts straight and still like a
wintry forest; the steamers were there, and great liners, puffing up idle
smoke into the twilight. He answered he had come by none of them.
I asked him what line he worked on, for he was clearly a sailor; I
mentioned well-known lines, but he did not know them. Then I asked
him where he worked and what he was. And he said: "I work in the
Sargasso Sea, and I am the last of the pirates, the last left alive." And
I shook him by the hand I do not know how many times. I said: "We
feared you were dead. We feared you were dead." And he answered
sadly: "No. No. I have sinned too deeply on the Spanish seas: I am
not allowed to die."