A Cyberiapocryphal Tale
by Andrew Shellshear
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Trurl the constructor was suffering from apathy. He could see no freshness in the world. He looked far and wide, and saw nothing that inspired him in the slightest.
At times it seemed to him that everything that could be invented, was invented. He came up with ideas less and less often, and often found that they had already been invented, or that they had been superseded, or that the solution he proposed was more awkward than the problem it was intended to solve.
His friend Klapaucius started visiting him often. He would bound up the spiral staircase of Trurl's home, currently a disused lighthouse carved from the single tusk of a giant unolophant, barge through the door without knocking, and insolently wander through his workshop delightedly sneering at Trurl's progress. And Trurl could scarcely deny his problems, as Klapaucius had done a great deal in the last year, constructing a machine that distilled the essence of capitalism and selling it for big bucks, writing a book that could transform non-sentient beings into librarians simply by following its sub-verbal instructions, and creating a device for inaesthetes to distinguish art from illustration.
If there is anything worse than doing badly, it is doing badly and having your friends do well. Klaupacius took every opportunity to enjoy Trurl's discomfort, and Trurl eventually became convinced that he was ill. He took himself apart, and analysed his joints and his limbs, and had his brain scanned in slices from left to right and top to bottom, but failed to find so much as a wire out of place. He secretly went on a course by the inspirational robot DeLogio Reductionis Eurekis, but was forced to flee as he found that the most common inspirational examples featured the recent works of Klaupacius.
But eventually, as Klaupacius saw that his barbs and jabs were hitting deeply and that there were none from Trurl in return, his pretend pity became genuine concern that his friend was, in fact, really unable to construct. Unkind observers may remark that Klaupacius was simply worried that he would follow in Trurl's footsteps without the competition to drive him onward - but in any case, Klaupacius decided to help him.
"You must listen for cries for help," said Klapaucius kindly, one day at Trurl's workshop. "You need a focussed task to inspire your creative talents, a real problem that oppresses sentient beings, who entreat their leaders for succor but fall away in despair as the leaders shrug their shoulders in helplessness! True satisfaction can only come from solving real problems, and when you cannot intuit these problems yourself, why then, you must listen for the cries for help!"
It was not long after that Klaupacius heard rumours of King Looning the Voracious of Tindilarig, a tremendously rich and eccentric King who had called for help for a problem that plagued his kingdom, a problem that had already defeated many skillful constructors. Klaupacius needed no more information to convince him that this was just the kind of task that would shake Trurl out of his doldrums, and without further ado he made an appointment, and they set off for the distant star cluster that contained Tindilarig.
Klaupacius was convinced that he had hit upon the solution in barely enough time, for Trurl was apathetic and sullen throughout the trip, and though it pained Klaupacius to see his companion in such a state, by the end of the voyage, he was ready to throttle him.
When they finally arrived at Tindilarig and set down their space ship near the palace, they were greeted by a group of twenty identical courtioids, who escorted them to a sunny throne room filled to the brim with all manners of beautiful artworks, treasures, devices and delights. Bags of gold coins were stacked like sandbags, and chests full of rubies squatted under gilded tables supporting iron clockwork gewgaws.
It was unencumbered by Kings, however, and after some time spent admiring the treasures, Klaupacius turned on the courtioids who were standing silently in the entrance. "What is going on?" said Klapaucius. "Where is the King? We are busy constructors, and our time is valuable!"
"Welcome," said the courtioids in chorus, bowing low.
"Greetings, constructors." said the throne itself, imperiously. Klaupacius and Trurl whirled around, but there was no-one sitting on the throne.
"You are here...", said a gruff floor tile, below their feet.
"To develop a delightfully delicate and desirable device", tinkled a chandelier above them.
Trurl and Klaupacius twisted and turned their heads to try and follow where the voices was coming from, for they were the same voice, though emerging as it did from different locations, and in different registers, and with different accents.
"I take it that you know our skills." said Klaupacius, addressing the throne and acting unfazed by the phasing voice. He looked for hidden microphones in the throne, the floor tile, the chandelier and the curtain, and slyly looked around for hidden vantage points, but such was the confusion of objects in the room that he quickly gave up. "We would like to speak with the King, if he is present."
Trurl was more blunt. "Please stop these antics," he groaned to the Throne, "and fix your vantage point to some single object that we can address, or my head will twist right off!"
A curtain spoke up next to them, in a low, confidential voice. "Very well! Know then, master Constructors, that I am King Looning. The Kingdom of Trindilarig has a problem of the greatest subtlety and originality! Generous rewards shall follow brilliant solutions. Observe for your elucidation, my good fellows, the woeful and depressing aspect of the sun!"
Klaupacius and Trurl observed that the sun was shining brightly in through the windows, for it was a pleasant summer's day.
"Observe it's violent ultra-violet! Observe the furious refractions of it's photons! Such tempestuous, wasteful over-indulgence in energy bakes the Earth, fries the fields, and sautes my subjects!" said the curtain in a wounded and unhappy voice. "And at night, after this gluttonous excess, whatever good we might have extracted from the sun's light is now taken away from us, so that just as we were becoming accustomed to its bullying and beginning to rally a defence, we are left staggering and swinging our fists at nothing at all! The sun is too bright in the cusp of the day, and the dead of the night is too dark to display all the beauties and the plunder and our booty so we wonder will you help us? Will you help us to reorganise the sun? So the light is much more even and is tunable for fun?"
"It sounds like all you need is a set of beach umbrellas, curtains and suntan lotion for the day, and electric lights for the night!" said Klaupacius sternly. "What kind of a task is this for the premier constructors in the known Universe?" Even as he said this, however, he noticed Trurl perk up at the prospect of a trivial task, and sigh despondently at his boasts of their greatness.
The curtain spoke again. "What a pretty sight would be our fields covered with beach umbrellas, and our oceans covered in a fine film of suntan oil! Giant curtains around our great buildings would no doubt be regarded as artistic, but would flap quite unacceptably in the wind and what kind of debates would rage when Megoparaxis Corporation sets up with Lemon and Lime curtains over its headquarters, next to Natrilangamar Corporation with blood red and royal purple? And shall we string lightbulbs from aeroplanes and rockets to illuminate all the night-side of the planet? No, it seems quite clean that a more radical solution is required, and there is not a single inventor in the know galaxy more capable of coming up with some ingenious scheme better than your good selves!"
"And our reward?" said Klaupacius.
"We are a generous Kingdom to our saviours. Should you succeed, you may take as much of the treasure in this throne room as your ship can carry. But I must warn you: no constructor has ever satisfied my demands!"
Klaupacius was prepared to debate the matter further, but the deep sighs from Trurl convinced him that such a relatively simple task may better recover his companions enthusiasm. So Klaupacius and Trurl retired to their spaceship, and Klaupacius announced that Trurl should mastermind the solution, and he would be a willing helper and reviewer. At this, Trurl launched such a deep and melancholy sigh that Klaupacius could no longer stand to talk to him, and went to relax on the beach.
When Klaupacius returned, Trurl was still sitting where he had left him, doodling with a pencil and abstractedly differentiating and integrating in the margins around a drawing of some fluffy clouds. "What is this?" said Klaupacius, snatching the paper away.
Trurl sighed again. "Well, I started thinking about the problem," he said. "and I think I have come up with a simple, cheap and neat solution." And he explained the solution to Klaupacius, who was so cheered by his friends simple, cheap and neat solution, that he pounded Trurl on the back and rushed out to get the equipment to build it. And after a single day, under Trurl's instructions, Klaupacius had built a human-sized box with a funnel on one side and a spout on the other, all brand new and studded with sparkling transistors, diodes, resistors and capacitors picked out in the choicest colours and shapes. Once the box was completed, they tested it with some drinking water, and Trurl seemed most satisfied with his small achievement. They summoned the courtioids, and had them bring the box to the throne room, where it was squeezed between a trunk of emeralds and a bookcase of rare plays.
"King Looning!" called Trurl. "We have built the machine you desire!"
A floor tile beneath them spoke. "Oh? And what is that?"
Trurl smiled. "If your highness can spare a glass of water, I will demonstrate!" So a courtioid was dispatched to fetch a glass of water. On its return, Trurl took the glass to the box and poured the water into the funnel. "Observe, King Looning, that on the front of the box is a dial and a button. I turn the dial... so! Like a toaster, you can decide the exact darkness that you desire."
He opened one of the windows, pointed the spout outside, and pressed the button. Immediately, dark vapour began rising out of the spout and going out of the window. Tiny speckles of light flashed from within the vapour, and within a few minutes a cloud had formed outside, which slowly drifted upward, casting a shadow over the palace.
"The cloud absorbs, reflects and diffuses," said Trurl, "all according to the setting on the dial. At night, the clouds will release the absorbed light and glow. During the day, they will cast permanent shadows over your kingdom according to how dark or light you wish it to be! The clouds dissipate in time, so when you get tired of one level of light, you can turn the dial and generate new clouds with different lighting levels!" He stood proudly by the box, in the shadow of the cloud that it had generated.
"What would I want with a machine that can change light levels?" said the floor tile.
"Wait a moment!" said Klaupacius, storming forward. "What do you mean? You quite clearly complained that the sun was too bright in the cusp of the day, and the dead of the night was too dark to display all the beauties and the plunder and your booty, so that under this command we set about to make devices that would rout the brightest sunlight from your land and light the night to earn a grand and royal reward of as much booty as we can get our hands on!"
"I recall no such instruction," said the King coldly. "The sun, the light, and the time of day, are of no relevance to me whatsoever."
Klaupacius was lost for words. The King went on: "In fact, what concerns me over all else, the reason I summoned you, and the vital problem that this kingdom faces is this: Earthquakes! We have long since driven the scourges of monsters, pirates, hurricanes, floods, bureaucrats and lawyers from our Kingdom. We live in complete prosperity except for one thing, which obsesses our minds and makes us tremble in our dreams and quiver with awful anticipation in the mornings: the prospect of Earthquakes. Children are afraid of stepping on cracks for fear of them opening up to swallow them whole. Adults stifle yawns and turn down loud music, for fear that their vibrations may disguise the trembling of the ground and lose them vital seconds in racing for safety! You must placate our populace and pre-empt the percussive problems that plague us!"
"We will do no such thing!" said Trurl, angrily. "We have provided you with the perfect solution to the problem you claimed that pained you more than no other, just yesterday!"
"As I said," yawned the floor tile, "I recall no such instruction. I am completely indifferent to the sun, and cannot imagine why I would ever say such a thing. Are you going to solve my problem, or are you unable to?"
At this, Klaupacius took Trurl by the arm and marched them back to the space-ship, now understanding how King Looning the Voracious of Tindilarig had defeated many skillful constructors. But when they arrived at the spaceship, they found it surrounded by courtioids.
"The King has decided that, though your device in no way satisfied his requirements, it is sufficiently ingenious that he considers you the perfect constructors to solve his most pressing problem!" said a courtioid courteously.
"Please thank the King for us, but we have decided to take our constructing services elsewhere," said Klaupacius coldly. "For there is nothing elegant or clever about satisfying the needs of a King who cannot make up his mind what he wants. There is only frustration."
The courtioid bowed. "I regret to inform you that the King has pressed upon us that this is not a request. It is an order, and should you attempt to escape, we are commanded to leap upon you and beat you within an inch of your lives."
With that, Trurl fell into despair, and had to be supported by courtioids as they escorted the two constructors to the palace guest quarters, and placed them in rooms 412 and 413. Day and night, courtioids stood over them to ensure they couldn't escape, and supervised the design of their solution to the Earthquake problem, to ensure they weren't building weapons or devices to escape.
Klaupacius had indeed proved prescient in his suggestion that the King would be unable to make up his mind, for no sooner than he had designed a mega-vibration dampatron, than the King explained through a courtioid that he really wanted a machine to educate the populace in the ways of etiquette, and to detect failings thereof.
In the meanwhile, Trurl's resurgence in creativity started by the cloud-generating machine had once again ground to a halt in the face of the ever-changing requirements, and he had retreated to his room, muttering darkly about becoming a philosopher. Klaupacius knocked on his door.
"Trurl! I apologise for getting us into this mess. But we could much better get ourselves out by thinking together!"
There was no answer. The courtioids stayed so close that Klaupacius was unable to come up with escape plans, and Trurl stayed in his room. Klaupacius came close to madness as invention after invention was discarded - skyscraper skyhooks, rose-coloured infant placators, machines that could rub their bellies and pat their heads at the same time, surgical stainless-steel rotary nose-rust scourers, chairs that followed you around in case of sudden fainting fits, and so many more that he grew faint himself and began wishing that he had never become a constructor! Worst of all, every time Klaupacius presented a prototype to King Looning, the King laughed and ridiculed the idea that anybody could desire such a thing, while making yet another ridiculous request - like the one for enormous hammers to stamp out the plague of mountains that was threatening his kingdom. Klaupacius was never able to get any more than a verbal request from the King, for the King never showed his face, and if he refused to construct something, the courtioids would beat him black and blue.
Meanwhile, Trurl had become a complete recluse, staying in his room and stealing components from Klaupacius' prototypes in the dead of the night. By the time the courtioids discovered this, Trurl had designed such a cunning lock that even they were unable to enter and find out what he was doing.
One day, after Klaupacius had presented the prototype for a musical antirust algae-attractor and been rejected as the King pressed on him importance of building a hostileotronic enemycentric emotosensor (which, Klaupacius feared, would have to be designed so that his own feelings on the matter would have to be suppressed), the door to Trurl's room was flung open and Trurl stood there, beaming from ear to ear and wearing a strange helmet contraption. The courtioids took the opportunity to fling themselves into Trurl's room to look for cunning escape plans or devices, so Trurl closed the door behind them and locked it.
"Hello!" said Trurl. "I thought I should reassure you that I am still alive and well."
"Trurl! What have you been doing?" said Klaupacius. "And what is that on your head?"
"On the whole," said Trurl, "I have been recovering from depression. After the King took us prisoner, you will recall that I started sulking. It wasn't long after that, that I fell into a funk, and declined into a pout. I observed with dispassionate alarm my willpower decrease, and realised that if I did not do anything soon, I wouldn't be able to bring myself out of it. The vision of spiralling decrease in motivation inspired me - I realised that all I had to do was to reverse this trend and the feedback loop that plagued me, would become my ally - my motivation would increase again!"
"So what is that thing on your head?"
"This is an ambition enhancer. I designed it with the last gasps of creativity in my mind, and over the past weeks I have been building it. And I am proud to say that it works perfectly!"
"An ambition enhancer?"
"It enhances ambition."
"And how does that help you?"
"Have I not been lethargic lately?"
"You have been lethargic, apathetic, indifferent, unenthusable, and, frankly, a pain."
"And have I not been uninspired lately?"
"You have been uninspired, uncreative, boring, tedious, dull and... unambitious!"
"Exactly! Though not *perfectly* true. I did have *some* ambition - just enough, in fact, to build a machine that would give me more ambition. Ah! I can feel it working on me already!"
"So now you feel like solving our problems with the King?"
"Not yet. I'll need a more powerful ambition enhancer for that!", said Trurl, and opened the door to his room again. The courtioids rushed out, expecting to find the constructors hiding or run away, and Trurl slipped back into his room and relocked it. The courtioids were so annoyed at being tricked twice, that they beat Klaupacius black and blue, and he had to spend the rest of the night hammering out his dents.
Over the next week, Klaupacius was forced to respond to still more of the Kings bizarre demands, while the King showed no signs of being satisfied. He designed a spinning, floating island with a hole in the middle so that ships drawn into the whirlpool in the centre could be lifted out by crane, and scavenged for parts. He hypothesized a colony of robotic dunces, rogues and pessimists for the Kingdom to look down upon and make jokes about. He created a widget to anagramise all the Kingdoms weapon manuals to protect them against foreign attack. All the while he could feel his creativity cramped, his enthusiasm enervated, and his persistence paralysed, and began to fear that he, too, would suffer Trurl's apathy. Despite the Courtiods watching his every move, Klaupacius desperately started to design subtle weapons and escape strategies, but the Courtioids informed him that they had hidden a device on his space-ship that would self-destruct if he tried to take off without the King's permission. And his plans for holding the King hostage for their escape were entirely impractical until he found out where the King was hiding.
In the meantime, Trurl continued to steal parts in the dead of night, though the courtioids who stayed up to watch never spotted him. Exactly one week after his first re-appearance, Trurl emerged triumphantly from his room with a still larger contraption on his head.
"This," he said proudly, "is an ambition megaenhancer!"
The courtioids rushed at him, but he pointed a second contraption at them, and they stopped their charge, sat on the ground, and started weeping.
"This is the first ambition enhancer, but with the polarities reversed," Trurl explained to Klaupacius.
Klaupacius sat wearily at his drawing board, and could barely rouse the interest to turn around and look. "Are you ready to help me out?" he said.
"Not yet! I need to build an even better ambition enhancer first!"
"Oh no you don't!" said Klaupacius, roused by anger. "It sounds like all your ambition enhancer is good for is to enhance your ambition to build new versions of it!"
"That is not true. I need to be much more ambitious that I am now. I need to feel the urge to reorganise the entire universe. I need to feel like nothing is right, and everything needs changing! I need to feel that only I can make the universe perfect!"
"It sounds like your ambition to become more ambitious is perfectly over-developed," said Klaupacius crossly. He leapt up, snatched the ambition megaenhancer from Trurl's head, and stamped it to tiny pieces. "I don't think you need this any more!"
Trurl braced himself for an onslaught of ennui, but after a moment realised that he felt perfectly normal, no longer apathetic or mega-ambitious, no longer gloomy or euphoric, and was pleased, though he hid it from Klaupacius. "Luckily I have recovered somewhat from my despair," he said, pretending to be cross, "no thanks to you."
Klaupacius tromped on the debris once more with considerable satisfaction. "I hope you have something else to show for your weeks of hiding," he said, a dangerous look in his eye.
Trurl pondered for a moment. "That depends on whether you are going to trample it into the ground if you don't like it."
"I may," said Klaupacius. "In fact, I think anger is the only thing keeping me from despair, so you had better have something good to show me, or you're going to be its target!"
Trurl grinned impishly. "Oh, I think that you'll exhaust your anger long before you run out of things to jump on. Come into my room!"
Klaupacius followed Trurl into his room, which was empty apart from a bed, a workbench with electronic detritus on it, a chair, and a pronged stick leaning against a wall.
"There is nothing in here!" said Klaupacius angrily. He picked up the pronged stick and was about to beat Trurl with it, when Trurl snatched it from his hands.
"Wait and watch," said Trurl, carefully moving the chair so that the three legs stood on three scratches on the floor near the far wall. He stood on the chair and pushed the pronged end of the stick against three similar scratches on the ceiling. A section of the wall silently lifted, revealing another room beyond. Trurl jumped off the chair and took it with him into the next room. Klaupacius followed him.
This room was filled with wooden crates, packed in so tightly from floor to roof that the only way through the room was a narrow winding passage between boxes. Trurl ignored the boxes, and picked his way to the other side of the room, where he carefully set the chair on the ground, stood on it, and pressed the pronged stick to the roof again. A section of the wall lifted, revealing yet another room beyond.
"What is this?" said Klaupacius, his anger evaporated. "How many rooms are there?"
"There are four-hundred and twenty-three rooms that I can enter by using these secret passages," said Trurl as he went into the new room, taking the chair with him once again. Klaupacius followed him into the new room, which was empty except for a closed door and a tall black contraption. The contraption had wheels and gears and blades, blinking lights and information screens, and it softly hummed.
"This is a secret-passage building contraption," said Trurl. "This is the first thing I built when I regained my enthusiasm. We won't be needing it from now on."
He walked to the opposite wall, ignoring the door. "Much to my surprise, when I instructed the secret-passage building contraption to build a secret passage in this wall, it refused." He took his left shoe off, and balanced on his other foot. "It said that there was already a secret passage here." Trurl extended his left foot and touched it to a smudge of dirt on the wall, reached out to the right with his right hand, touching another smudge, and reached upward with his left hand to touch a third smudge. A section of wall slid sideways, revealing yet another room. He gestured for Klaupacius to enter.
"Somebody else built a secret-passage building contraption?" said Klaupacius.
"Yes. Altogether, I have found seven different secret-passage building contraptions throughout the palace. There may be others," said Trurl.
They entered the next room, which had a nice view of the palace grounds, a pair of locked double doors, and a set of devices laid out neatly on low tables.
"This," said Trurl, pointing at a pocked orange ball skewered on a purple plinth, "is an artificial carbon-based life form. Feed it carbon, and it will convert oxygen into carbon dioxide. And this," he said, pointing at a squat black cylinder, "you can see at a glance is a self-generating pipe. It will extend in both directions, compressing earth and rock to form walls, until it runs out of earth to build with."
"What is this?" said Klaupacius, pointing at a humanoid figure lying in the foetal position on another table.
"That is Sebastian," said Trurl. "Sebastian was once a constructor, hired by King Looning the Voracious of Tindilerig to fix a pressing problem that plagued his Kingdom. Sebastian built these devices and the others around this room, before falling into despair and apathy. His ennui is so strong that he is now beyond the reach of the ambition mega-enhancer. His neurons fire in a purely circular pattern, repeating the same sluggish flow of thoughts twice a day without fail."
"I see. And each of the other four-hundred-odd rooms..."
"Contains similar scenes. Hundreds of constructors have entered the Kingdom of Tindilerig. The rooms are filled with destroyed and undesired devices, cold comatose constructors, and gradually increasing layers of dust and disuse."
"These rooms aren't particularly dusty," said Klaupacius.
"Not yet," said Trurl. "But they will get dustier as we go along." He walked to the wall behind the tables, balanced on one leg, and touched three innocuous looking smudges. A secret door opened, and they went through.
"Where are we going?" said Klaupacius.
"To meet the King," said Trurl. He triggered the next secret door. They went through dozens of rooms, making seemingly random turns to the left and right, each room containing past sorrows, and inventions that would never be used. As they went onward, the rooms became dustier, and more of the inventions were broken, obscure or obsolete. Finally, they came to a room, empty except for a figure huddled in a corner.
"Marius," said Trurl, pointing at the figure, "the first constructor to answer the call of King Tindilarig after his transformation." As Klaupacius looked at Marius, Trurl went to the door of the room and opened it. There was a number on the other side of the door: "2".
"Aren't you going to use the secret door?" said Klaupacius.
"There is no secret door. The only way into guest room number one is through the front door," said Trurl, pulling out a key from his pocket and peeking out into the corridor. "Follow me. Quickly." He hurried into the corridor, and unlocked the last door in the corridor, which had a number "1" on it. "The King is within," said Trurl in a low voice. Klaupacius nodded grimly. They stepped inside.
Room 1 was no larger or smaller than any of the other rooms, but it was dominated by a large machine, still active, to judge by the flashing lights on the front, with a headset sitting on an inset chair at the front, and with pipes and wires going out through the ceiling and the walls. The word "SEPT" was engraved on a brass plaque on the front. There was just enough space in the room to stand in front of the machine, which is what Klaupacius did. Trurl closed and locked the door.
"What's this?" said Klaupacius. "It looks like some sort of perspectotron, by the look of the headset."
"A good guess," said Trurl, "but the answer is not as simple as you may think."
"And where is the King?" said Klaupacius. "Is he inside it?"
"A good question," said Trurl smugly, "but the answer is not as simple as you may think. Please bear with me. What was the first task we had from King Looning?"
"The light-modulating cloud machine, of course."
"And what asked us to carry out that task?"
"The King, of course! That mad, mercurial, Machiavellian monarch! The venomous, vindictive, vacillating villain! That jabbering..."
"But from what vantage point did he ask us? Where was the hidden microphone?"
"I don't remember. Should I?"
"It was a curtain, wasn't it? The King talked to us from the point of view of a curtain."
"Yes. That's right. So what?"
"The second task was for an earthquake remover, wasn't it?"
"Yes. And the King talked to us from the point of view of a floor tile."
"And the third?"
"The etiquette machine... and I'm not sure what the King appeared as, because we had the message passed on by a courtioid."
"What if it wasn't passed on by a courtioid? What if the King was talking from the vantage point of the courtioid?"
"Well, maybe. So what?"
"Doesn't it strike you as strange that in each of the King's appearances, he asked for something of importance to the object he was speaking from? In the first case, he was speaking from the point of view of a curtain. What kind of concerns would a curtain have? Being faded by sunlight, wouldn't you think? And wouldn't the floor tile would be concerned by earthquakes? And the courtioid with etiquette?"
"Dubious," muttered Klaupacius. "but now that I consider it - the throne itself addressed me on the vitality of an effective diet program for overweight citizens. I remember thinking it odd at the time - but I assumed the King was taking a form sympathetic to his requirements. I take it that you have a different explanation? Something involving this machine?"
"I think that the King, long ago, was concerned about his subjects. Perhaps he felt out of touch with the needs of the commoners, surrounded by obsequious Courtioids, and wished to be more receptive to their secret wishes. Or maybe he just wanted to spy on them and suppress revolutionary thought. He either didn't trust his spy network or didn't wish to have one, for it is a difficult and tedious task to train subjects to be cunning but faithful.
"Instead, he sent out a message to the furthermost parts of the galaxy: 'Master Constructors! The Kingdom of Trindilarig has a Problem of the Greatest Subtlety and Originality! Generous Rewards shall follow Brilliant Solutions!'
"A nearby constructor arrived. I can only speculate about who it was, but it must have been one with a particularly devious mind. It listened to the King's problem, and it considered it from angles theoretical, theological and philosophical, came up with a clever solution, and got to work. After several months of building, the King became curious as to what his money was being spent on, summoned his retinue of Courtiods, and swept down to Room 1 of the guest quarters of the palace. On entering the room, they say what you see before you here."
"'What,' wandered the King out aloud, 'is this?'"
"The voice of the constructor echoed from inside the machine. 'This is the Subjectacentric Empathotronic Perspectivational Transformer, or SEPT for short.' A panel popped open, and it poked its head through, and addressed the King. 'As the name states, it allows your highness to transform your perspective to empathise with your subjects more, and if you would care for a demonstration, please sit on the chair.'
"The King sat down on the chair, and the constructor clambered out, attached the headset to him, made some last-minute tweaks, and turned the machine on. The King suddenly felt dizzy, and the world swirled around him and grew dark, just as if he had been struck on the head. Then his vision and his dizziness cleared, and he found himself looking anxiously at a crowned figure sitting before him with its eyes closed and a set of wires emerging from between two of the spokes of the crown.
"At first he found himself not wishing to speak, out of a feeling of subservience to the figure. Then he realised what had happened. 'Good gracious!' said the King, 'I'm occupying the body of a Courtioid!'
"The other Courtioids looked at him in astonishment, and the constructor grinned at him. 'Very good! Do you feel yourself?'
"The King thought for a moment. 'Well, no.' he said meekly. 'I feel very humble.'
"'Perfect!' said the constructor. 'The empathotronic circuits are working perfectly. Don't worry, you won't become a Courtioid yourself - the personality equilibrium feedback circuits should take care of that - but now you know what it feels like to be one!'
"'If you say so, sir,' said the King, looking meekly down.
"'Hmm,' said the constructor. 'Perhaps I'd better put in some extra circuits to ensure you don't get stuck in a positive feedback loop.' It pressed some switches, and the King found himself back in his own body again.
"'What an invigorating experience!' said the King. 'What else can it do?'
"'A pleasing beginning,' said the constructor. 'There are still a few functions to be completed. When it is finished, you will be able to change perspectives at will, as often as you like. As a failsafe, it will change perspectives for you, if you occupy a single perspective for more than a day. And finally, if you will excuse me, I have a little work to do on the subjectatronic inhabitor.'
"Several more weeks passed. The constructor finished the machine, was well paid, and left to popular acclaim. The King was delighted with the SEPT. He spent several hours a day in Room 1 of the Guest quarters of the Palace connected to it, skipping from one to another of his subjects. Within weeks, there was not a traitor left in the Kingdom. The need for police disappeared, as the King merely had to occupy the mind of the suspects to determine their guilt, in mind if not in deed, and could carry out the sentence on himself immediately - marching to prison, or into the ocean. For relaxation, the King could occupy the minds of philosophers; for nostalgia, small children; for excitement, newly wed couples; for danger, hot-blooded young duellists. The King started spending more and more time connected to the machine, and the Courtioids grew fearful that he would pass away for lack of sustenance. At one point, the King grew curious: what were the limits of what he could occupy? He concentrated on passing birds, but was unable to take them over. One day, he concentrated on a pet dog, and was pleased and surprised to find himself wagging his tail, smelling all kinds of exciting offal and thinking daft and doggy thoughts.
"The Constructor had taken the King's word literally - he could occupy anything that was his Subject. The passing birds, of course, belonged to no-one, so he could not occupy them. Once he realised this, the King found that he was even able to occupy inanimate objects - so long as they belonged to the Kingdom! In the meanwhile, the King's body had, indeed, wasted away and died. But the King was not perturbed. He had achieved immortality. Any time a host body was about to die or be destroyed, he could simply transfer out. And so he has existed to this day - flitting from one thing to another, and ruling his Kingdom alone, but with everybody."
"So why doesn't he remember anything from one moment to the next?" said Klaupacius.
"I'm not sure. I've had a look at the memory circuits in the SEPT, but they seem fine. There must be something subtle wrong with them. I was hoping you could tell me."
"Very good," said Klaupacius. "And how did you work all this out? Talk to the King?"
"Induction," lied Trurl, who had found the constructor's diary inside the SEPT when he was first exploring.
"Right," said Klaupacius, with a glint in his eyes. "Let's get some sledgehammers and see how immortal the King feels when half of his machine is turned upside down and the other half is turned inside-out!"
"No!" said Trurl. "To destroy the SEPT would amount to Regicide, which would prompt swift and unpleasant revenge. After all, all the subjects of the Kingdom must feel well disposed toward the King, or they wouldn't be alive today. We must think of a better solution."
So they opened the access panels of the SEPT, and poked and prodded around inside, following the wiring around and drawing circuit diagrams. Klaupacius analysed the memory logic circuits with logic probes, and Trurl analysed the inputs and outputs with spectrographs, geiger counters and antennas, and they got together to compare notes.
"The bad news," said Trurl, "is that if we make the slightest change to the circuitry, the King will be summoned to this room, undoubtably with a platoon of guards. And we cannot turn the machine off, because the power supply is an internal radioactive source. Did you find out why his memory is so bad?"
"It's a fault of the SEPT," said Klaupacius gloomily. "If the King changes bodies twice in quick succession, his short-term memory circuits get reset before they can pass the information on to the long-term memory. So he forgets everything as soon as he completes a thought. No doubt this wasn't noticed when the King was first using it, because he wouldn't have changed bodies as often."
"If we could only make him keep the same body for longer! Then we could solve one of his problems and get the reward. But he flits around like a butterfly."
The machine made a faintly audible clunk. It had been doing every couple of minutes, each time the King changed bodies.
"I have an idea," said Trurl suddenly. "Let's take a look at the cooling circuitry."
"We won't be able to change any of the circuitry without summoning the guards," said Klaupacius.
"We won't have to," said Trurl.
Ten minutes later, they were grimly marching down the hallway outside the Guest quarters, side by side. There were no courtioids to be seen as they entered the throne room this time. It was a sunny day once again, and Klaupacius' voice rang out as it had the first time: "Where is the King? We are busy constructors, and our time is valuable!"
This time the King's voice rang out from a ledger. "Greetings, constructors Trurl and Klaupacius! I am glad that you (that is, Trurl and Klaupacius) are here - you see, Our Kingdom (as defined in The Constitution of Tindilarig Section 23, (Kingdoms and Principalities) Paragraph 3 onwards) has a most dire problem..."
But before King Looning could continue, Klaupacius strode forward and picked up the ledger. "Now I've got you!" he cried furiously. He hurled it to the ground and jumped on it, and, noticing that this was ineffectual, threw it into the fireplace.
"Guards! Guards!" cried a table. "Get these lunatics out of Our Throne Room! Help!" Klaupacius leapt onto the table and jumped up and down on the middle of it until it collapsed.
"Help!" droned a tall vase of flowers. "Heeeeelp!" Klaupacius was now armed with a table leg, and he brought it into sharp contact with the vase. Flowers, water, and ceramic splinters flew about the room. As an afterthought, he barred the throne-room doors with the table leg.
"Help!" screamed a golden kettle, piled in the treasure. "Courtoids! Guards! Immediate help required!" Klaupacius battered the kettle against a wall until it resembled a pancake.
There were thumps on the throne-room doors.
The King continued to shout for help, tinkling wails from the chandelier, barking howls from a chest and piercing shrieks from a phonograph, but he didn't change perspectives out the throne room, as he was too busy being appalled by the destruction. Klaupacius leapt from object to object, gleefully demolishing each in turn.
"Help!" shouted the King from a Thesaurus. "Assistance, aid, succor, remedy, intervention!"
Klaupacius leapt at the Thesaurus and ripped out the pages from Beginning to Ending, when the King's voice rang out from a Grandfather Clock. "Stop destroying Our property!" he gonged slowly. "Why do you Constructors always become violent? You can't hurt Us, you know!"
Trurl had been counting each of the King's switches from object to object, and as Klaupacius turned toward the Grandfather Clock, he leapt onto his back and whispered "This is it! The seventh switch!". Klaupacius collapsed onto the ground and allowed himself to be subdued.
"I'm terribly sorry," said Trurl to the Grandfather clock, "my colleague seems to have suffered a fit, and has damaged some of your property. We will pay it back, I assure you. Speaking of which, did you know that non-sequitur are the single most common conversation-stoppers?"
"Huh?" said the King. He struggled to encompass the thought that the constructors were destroying his throne-room, while trying to remember what a non-sequitur was, and the former short-term memory slid away into the ether. He cleared his mind (quite literally) and noticed the constructors.
"Ah, my dear constructors!" he said, in a somewhat puzzled voice, as he noticed that one was sprawled on the ground, and that the other one was sitting on him. "I have a task for you." He thought for a moment, and couldn't remember what the task was. Eventually, he concluded that empathising with the grandfather clock was making him think slowly. He decided to switch objects to something more quick-minded, but to his irritation, found that he was unable. "Ermm..."
"It seems to be working!" whispered Klaupacius to Trurl.
The King couldn't work out why he couldn't switch away from the Grandfather clock. In fact, the failsafe mechanism on the object switching mechanism had triggered. The failsafe mechanism had triggered because the cooling fins on the object switching mechanism had overheated. The cooling fins on the object switching mechanism had overheated because the King had switched bodies exactly seven times in quick succession, and also because somebody had wrapped a fire-proof blanket around the cooling fins fifteen minutes ago which, as the culprit reminded his companion, did not constitute making a change to the circuitry, and so could be done without summoning the guards.
"Ermm," said the King. "Ermm. My good constructors, I have a task for you that I fear may be too difficult for even your good selves to take on. But as reward, you may take as much of the treasure in this throne room as you can carry!"
Trurl quickly and surreptitiously brought the reversed polarity ambition enhancer to bear on the Grandfather clock, and pressed the button. The King suddenly felt unambitious, and was unable to think of anything that the Kingdom particularly needed. He cast about for inspiration.
"For far too long the Kingdom has suffered," he said slowly, "ermm... from the throne room not having... ermm... an adequate clock-winder." He warmed to the subject, and told of the problems that this had caused in the Kingdom. Courtoids missing appointments by minutes. The palace pets to be fed late. Etcetera. Meanwhile, Trurl and Klaupacius created an atomic, long-lasting, fracture-resistant, aesthetically pleasing advanced clock-winder out of the demolished remains of the phonograph, and fitted it to the Grandfather clock before he had even finished talking.
"Oh!" said the Grandfather clock, examining the clock-winder in a convenient mirror. "Ermm..."
"If it pleases your excellency," said Trurl, "we will take our promised reward now, for we have an urgent appointment elsewhere." He unbarred the door and let the courtioids rush inside, but since the King was happy with his clock-winder and no was longer interested in throwing the Constructors into prison, they grumblingly left again. Trurl quickly picked up a chest full of gems and staggered back to the spaceship, while Klaupacius collected as many rare books as he could carry, and hurried after him.
They strapped themselves in, and set course for home. As they set the count-down sequence they heard faint honks, as if a foghorn had come to life and was trying to talk to them across an ocean. "Waaaait!" it said, "A proooblem trooooubles my kiiingdoom!" But at that point, the rocket took off and they heard no more.
Eventually, the noise and gravity faded, and they unbuckled and floated about the cabin.
"I feel burned out," said Klaupacius listlessly, watching one of his rare books float past.
"Oh? I feel completely refreshed and invigorated," said Trurl, briskly checking the control instruments. "You are obviously getting too old to be constructing."
"I am definitely not helping you out again, for all the gratitude you've shown! I try to get you enthusiastic about constructing, and see how you reward me!", yelled Klaupacius.
Trurl turned the reversed-polarity ambition enhancer on Klaupacius.
"Thanks," he said.
"Oh, you're welcome," said Klaupacius, instantly subsiding. "Don't mention it."
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