Free The Star Diaries by Stanislaw Lem Page A

can hardly keep their feet.
    “There are certain insensitive natures who have no sympathy for this. They provoke the brains out of all patience. An electronic brain, gentlemen, wishes us nothing but good; however the endurance of coils and tubes has its limits too. It was only as a result of endless persecution from its captain, who turned out to be a notorious drunkard, that the electronic calculator of Grenobi, designed to make in-flight course corrections, announced in a sudden fit of madness that it was the remote-control child of the Great Andromeda and therefore hereditary emperor of all Murglandria. Treated at our most exclusive institution, the patient finally quieted down, came to its senses, and is now almost completely normal. There are, of course, more serious cases. Such for example was a certain university brain, which, having fallen in love with the wife of a mathematics professor, began out of jealousy to falsify all the calculations, till the poor mathematician grew despondent, convinced that he could no longer add. But in that brain’s defense it must be stated that the mathematician’s wife had methodically seduced it, asking it to total up the bills for her most intimate undergarments. The case we are considering here brings to mind another—that of the great spacebrain of the Pancratius. As a result of defective wiring it became connected with the ship’s other brains and, in an uncontrollable impulse to expand (which we call electrodynamic gigantophilia) pillaged the stockroom of its spare parts, deposited the crew on craggy Mizzeron, then dived into the ocean of Alantropia and proclaimed itself Patriarch of the lizards there. Before we were able to reach the planet with sedative equipment, the thing blew out its tubes in a fit of rage, for the lizards wouldn’t listen. It’s true that in this instance too there were extenuating circumstances: we learned later that the second mate of the Pancratius, a known cosmic cardsharp, had cleaned out the unfortunate brain to the last rivet—with the aid of a marked deck. But the case of the Computer, gentlemen, is exceptional. We have here the clear symptoms of such disorders as gigantomania ferrogenes acuta, as paranoia misantropica persecutoria, as polyplasia panelectropsychica debilitativa gravissima, not to mention necrofilia, thanatofilia and necromantia. Gentlemen! I must bring to your attention certain facts which are fundamental for an understanding of the case. The Jonathan II had in its hold, besides the lumber destined for the shipbuilders of Procyon, a number of receptacles carrying mercury-based synthetic memory, which was to have been delivered to the Galactic University in Fomalhaut. These contained two kinds of information: one in the field of psychopathology, the other—in archaic lexicology. We must assume that the Computer, in expanding, consumed the contents of those receptacles, and thereby absorbed into itself a comprehensive knowledge of such matters as the history of Jack the Ripper, the Boston Strangler, the Strangler of Gloomspick, also the biography of Sacher-Masoch, the memoirs of the Marquis de Sade, and the records of the flagellant sect of Pirpinact, and a first edition of Murmuropoulos’s Impalement through the Centuries, as well as that famous collector’s item from the Abercrombie library— Stabbing, in manuscript, by one Hapsodor, beheaded in the year 1673 in London and better known under the alias of ‘the Baby Butcher.’ In addition, an original work of Janick Pidwa, A Concise Torturatorium, and by the same author, Rack, Strap and Garrote: Prolegomena to the Gentle Art of Execution, plus the only extant copy of The Boil-in-oil Cookbook, written by Father Galvinari of Amagonia on his deathbed. Those fatal receptacles also included the minutes, deciphered from stone slabs, of the meetings of the cannibal section of the Federation of Neanderthal Literati, as well as Reflections on the Gibbet by the Vicomte de