Mymosh the Selfbegotten by Stanislaw Lem
(From The Cyberiad, Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius, 1965, English , The Continuum Publishing Corporation, 1974)
This is the story
of how the Great Constructor Trurl, with the aid of an ordinary jug, created a
local fluctuation, and what came of it.
In the
constellations of the Wringer there was a Spiral Galaxy, and in this Galaxy
there was a Black Nebula, and in this Nebula were five sixth-order clusters,
and in the fifth cluster, a lilac sun, very old and very dim, and around this
sun revolved seven planets, and the third planet had two moons, and in all
these suns and stars and planets and moons a variety of events, various and
varying, took place, falling into a statistical distribution that was perfectly
normal, and on the second moon of the third planet of the lilac sun of the fifth
cluster of the Black Nebula in the Spiral Galaxy in the Constellation of the
Wringer was a garbage dump, the kind of garbage dump one might find on any
planet or moon, absolutely average, in other words full of garbage; it had come
into existence because the Glauberical Aberracleaans once wage a war, a war of
the fission-and-fusion type, against the Albumenid Ifts, with the natural
result that their bridges, roads, homes, and palaces, and of course they
themselves, were reduced to ashes and shards, which the solar winds blew to the
place whereof we speak. Now for many,
many centuries positively nothing took place in this garbage dump but garbage,
though an earthquake did occur and shifted the garbage on the bottom to the
top, and the garbage on the top to the bottom, which in itself had no
particular significance, and yet this paved the way for a most unusual
phenomenon. It so happened that Trurl,
the Fabulous Constructor, while flying in the vicinity, was blinded by a
certain comet with a garish tail. He
fled its path, frantically jettisoning out the spaceship window whatever lay in
reach - chess pieces, the hollow kind, which he'd filled with liquor for the
trip, some barrels the Ubbiduds of Chlorelei employed for the purpose of
compelling their opponents to yield, as well as assorted utensils, and among
these, an old earthenware jug with a crack down the middle. This jug, accelerating in accordance with the
laws of gravity and boosted by the comet's tail, crashed into a mountainside
above the dump, fell, clattered down a slope of junk toward a puddle, skittered
across some mud, and finally smacked
into an old tin can; this impact bent the metal around a copper wire, also
knocked some pieces of mica between the edges, and that made a condenser, while
the wire, twisted by the can, formed the beginnings of a solenoid; and a stone,
set in motion by the jug, moved in turn a hunk of rusty iron, which happened to
be a magnet, and this gave rise to a current, and that current passed through
sixteen other cans and snips of wire, releasing a number of sulfides and
chlorides, whose atoms linked with other atoms, and the ensuing molecules
latched onto other molecules, until, in the very center of the dump, there came
into being a Logic Circuit, and five more, and another eighteen in the spot
where the jug finally shattered into bits.
That evening,
something emerged at the edge of the dump, not far from the puddle which had by
now dried up, and this something, a creature of pure accident, was Mymosh the
Selfbegotten, who had neither mother nor father, but was son unto himself, for
his father was Coincidence, and his Mother --Entropy. And Mymosh rose up from the garbage dump,
totally oblivious of the fact that he had about one chance in a hundred billion
jillion raised to the zillionth power of ever existing, and he took a step, and
walked until he came to the next puddle, which had not as yet dried up, so
that, kneeling over it, he could easily see himself.
And he saw, in
the surface of the water, his purely accidental head, with ears like muffins,
the left one crushed and the right a trifle underdone, and he saw his purely
accidental body, a potpourri of pots and pegs and flotsam, and somewhat
barrel-chested, in that his chest was a barrel, though narrower in the middle,
like a waist, for in crawling out from under the garbage, he had scraped
against a stone right there; and he gazed upon his littery limbs, and counted
them, and as luck would have it, there were two arms, two legs and,
fortuitously enough, two eyes too, and Mymosh the Selfbegotten took great
delight in his person, and sighed with admiration at the narrowness of the
waist, the symmetrical arrangement of the limbs, the roundness of the head, and
was moved to exclaim: “Truly, I am beautiful, nay, perfect, which clearly
implies the Perfection of All Created Things!!
Ah, and how good must be the One Who fashioned me!”
And he hobbled
on, dropping loose screws along the way (since no one had tightened them
properly), humming hymns in praise of the Everlasting Harmony of Providence,
but on the seventh step he tripped and went headlong back down into the
garbage, after which he did nothing but rust, corrode and slowly disintegrate
for the next three hundred and fourteen thousand years, for he had fallen on his
head and shorted out, and was no more.
And at the end of this time it came to pass that a certain merchant,
carrying a shipment of sea anemones from the planet Medulsa to the Thrycian
Stomatopods, quarreled with his assistant as they neared the lilac sun, and
hurled his shoes at him, and one of these broke the porthole window and flew
out into space, where its subsequent orbit subsequently experienced
perturbation, due to the circumstance that that very same comet, which had ages
past blinded Trurl, now found itself in the very same locality, and so the
shoe, turning slowly, hurtled towards the moon, was singed a little by the
atmospheric friction, bounced off the mountainside above the dump, fell, and
booted Mymosh the Selfbegotten, lying there, with just the right resultant
impulse and at just the right angle of incidence to create just the right
torsions, torques, centrifugal forces and angular momenta needed to reactivate
the accidental brain of that accidental being—and in this way: Mymosh, thus booted,
went flying into the nearby puddle, where his chlorides and iodides mingled
with the water, and electrolyte seeped into his head and, bubbling, set up a
current there, which traveled around and about, till Mymosh sat up in the mud
and thought the following thought: “Apparently, I am!”
That, however, was all he was able to think for the next sixteen
centuries, and the rain beat down upon him, and the hail pummeled him, and all
the while his entropy increased and grew, but after another thousand five hundred
and twenty years, a certain bird, flapping its way over the terrain, was
attacked by some swooping predator, and relieved itself out of fright and also
to increase its speed, and the droppings dropped and hit Mymosh square on the
forehead, whereupon he sneezed and said:
“Yes, I am! And there's no apparently about it! Yet the question remains, who is it who says
that I am? Or, in other words, who am I? Now, how may this be answered? H'm!
If only there was something else besides me, any sort of something at
all, with which I might juxtapose and compare myself--that would be half the
battle. But alas, there's not a thing,
for I can plainly see that I see nothing whatsoever! Therefore there's only I that am, and I am
everything that is and may be, for I can think in any way I like, but am I
then--an empty space for thought, and nothing more?”
In point of fact he no longer possessed any senses; they had decayed and
crumbled to dust over the centuries, since Entropy, the bride of Chaos, is a cruel
and implacable mistress. Consequently
Mymosh could not see his mother-puddle, nor his brother-mud, nor the whole,
wide world, and had no recollection of what had happened to him before, and
generally was now capable of nothing but thought. This alone could he do, and so devoted
himself wholeheartedly to it.
“First I ought,”
he told himself, “to fill this void that is I, and thereby dispel its
insufferable monotony. So let us think
of something, for when we think, behold, there is thought, and naught but
thought has existence.” From this one
could see he was becoming somewhat presumptuous, for already he referred to
himself in the first person plural.
“But wait,” he
then said, “might not something still exist outside myself? We must, if only for a moment, consider this
possibility, though it sound preposterous and even a little insane. Let us call this outsideness the Gozmos. Now, if there is a Gozmos, then I must be a part
and portion of it!”
Here he stopped,
pondered the matter awhile, and finally rejected that hypothesis as wholly
without basis or foundation. Really,
there was not a shred of evidence in its favor, not a single, solid argument to
support it, and so, ashamed he had indulged in such wild, untutored
speculation, he said to himself: “Of that which lies beyond me, if anything
indeed there lie, I have no knowledge.
But of that which is within, I do, or rather shall, as soon as I think
something into thought, for who can know what I think, by thunder, better than
myself!” And he thought and thought, and
thought of the Gozmos again, but this time thought of it inside himself, which
seemed to him a far more sensible and respectable solution, well within the
bounds of reason and propriety. And he
began to fill his Gozmos with various and sundry thoughts. First, because he was still new at it and
lacked skill, he thought out the Beadlies, who grambled whenever they got the
chance; and the Pratlings, who rejoiced in filicorts. Immediately the Pratlings battled the
Beadlies for the supremacy of filicortions over gramblement, and all Mymosh got
for his world-creating pains was an awful headache.
In his next
attempts at thought creation, he proceeded with greater caution, first thinking
up elements, like Brutonium, a noble gas, and elementary particles, like the
cogiton, the quantum of intellect, and he created beings, and these were
fruitful and multiplied. From time to
time he did make mistakes, but after a century or two he grew quite proficient,
and his very own Gozmos, sound and stable, took shape in his mind's eye, and it
teemed with a multitude of entities, things, beings, civilizations and
phenomena, and existence was most pleasurable there, for he had made the laws
of the Gozmos highly liberal, having no fondness for strict, inflexible rules,
the sort of prison discipline that Mother Nature imposes (though of course he'd
never heard of Mother Nature).
Thus the world of Selfbegotten
was a place of caprice and miracle; in it something might occur one way once,
and at another time be altogether different--and without any special rhyme or
reason. If, for example, an individual
was supposed to die, there were always ways of getting around it, for Mymosh
had firmly decided against irreversible events.
And in his thoughts the Zigrots, Calsonians, Flimmeroons, Jups,
Arligynes and Wallamachinoids all prospered and flourished, generation after
generation. During this time the
haphazard arms and legs of Mymosh fell off, returning to the garbage from which
they'd come, and the puddle rusted through the narrow waist, and his body
slowly sank into the stagnant mire. But
he had just put up some brand-new constellations, arranging them with loving
care in the eternal darkness of his consciousness, which was his Gozmos, and
did his level best to keep an accurate memory of everything that he had thought
into existence, even though his head hurt from the effort, for he felt
responsible for his Gozmos, deeply obligated, and needed.
Meanwhile rust
ate deeper and deeper into his cranial plates, which of course he had no way of
knowing, and a fragment from Trurl's jug, the selfsame jug that thousands of
years ago had called him into being, came floating on the puddle's surface,
closer and closer to his unfortunate head, for only that now remained above the
water. And at the very moment when
Mymosh was imagining the gentle, crystal Baucis and her faithful Ondragor, and
as they journeyed hand in hand among the dark suns of his mind, and all the
people of the Gozmos looked on in rapt silence, including the Beadlies, and as
the pair softly called to one another--the rust-eaten skull cracked open at the
touch of the earthenware shard, pushed by a puff of air, and the murky water
rushed in over the copper coils and extinguished the current in the logic circuits,
and the Gozmos of Mymosh the Selfbegotten attained the perfection, the ultimate
perfection that comes with nothingness.
And those who unwittingly had brought him into the world never learned
of his passing.
