Stanislav Lem
	PROFESSOR A.DONDA
	From the reminiscences of Ioon Tihi
	I am writing these lines on clay tiles, seated outside my
small cave. I have often wondered how they did it in Babylon, but
even in my wildest dreams I never imagined that I would have to
do it myself. The clay was probably better in those times, or
perhaps the cuneiform script is more suitable for this kind of
writing.
	My clay either squashes or crumbles, but it is still better
than scrapping a stone tile with a piece of limestone: I haven't
been able to stand scratching noises since my childhood. At least
now I will no longer call primitive any primitive technique.
Before leaving, the professor watched for a long time how I was
trying to put out a fire and, after breaking our can opener, our
pocket knife and our scissors one after the other, he noted that
forty years ago, when doctor Tompkins from the British Museum had
tried to make manually a scraper of the kind made during the
Stone Age, he had not only sprained his wrist, but had also
broken his glasses. The professor added something about the
contemptuous arrogance with which we are accustomed to regard our
cave-dwelling ancestors. He is right. My new flat is miserable,
the bedding is completely rotten, and a sick old gorilla, brought
out of the jungle by the devil, drove us out of the artillery
bunker where we had settled so well. The professor insists that
the gorilla did not chase us away at all. That, too, is true - it
showed no aggressiveness, but its playing with the shells
unnerved me. Perhaps I could have tried to chase it away; I
noticed that it feared the red boxes containing crab soup - a lot
of those were left behind - but then,it did not fear them all
that much, and besides, Maramotu, who now openly admits to being
a shaman, declared that he had recognized his uncle's soul in the
monkey and forbade us to irritate it. I am very sad about the
bunker. It had once been part of the border fortifications
between Gurunduwai and Lamblia, but now the soldiers have gone,
and we were driven out by the monkey. I am constantly on the
alert, because playing with shells can never end well, but for
the time being all that can be heard are the groans of the
overfed uruvotu and the jabbering of that baboon with the sore
eye which Maramotu claims isn't an ordinary baboon, and which,
unless I decide to do something foolish, is unlikely to take any
action.
	A proper chronicle should be dated. I know that the end of
the world came immediately after the rainy season. Several weeks
have passed since then, although I can't say exactly how many,
because the gorilla stole the calendar where I had started
recording the most important events, at first in ink and later
on, when it finished, in crab soup.
	The professor is convinced that this is by no means the end
of the world, but merely the end of civilization as we know it. I
am forced to agree with him, because events of such magnitude
can't be measured by personal discomforts. Nothing terrible has
happened, the professor said at first, and suggested that
Maramotu and I sing something; when he ran out of tobacco,
however, he lost his peace of mind and, after attempting to fill
his pipe with coir, he rushed off to town for more tobacco,
although he was perfectly aware of the dangers inherent in such
an act. I doubt if I will ever see him again. This obliges me
even more to bequeath his life story to posterity, whose task it
will be to revive civilization. It so happened that in my
lifetime I was able to closely watch the outstanding
personalities of this age and who can say whether Donda won't
head their list some day. But first of all I must explain how I
came to be in the heart of Africa, which has now become no man's
land.
	My achievements in the field of astronautics had brought me
a certain fame, and various organizations, departments and
persons started approaching me with requests for cooperation,
addressing me as professor, member of the Academy or at least
doctor.
	I disliked all this, since I do not consider that I deserve
titles of any kind, but Prof. Tarantoga convinced me that public
opinion couldn't be reconciled to the empty space preceding my
name, and after consulting some influential friends of his behind
my back, he promoted me to the post of General Representative of
FAO - the Food and Agriculture Organization - in Africa.
	I accepted this post together with the title Counsellor and
Expert since I believed it to be a purely sinecural position, but
it turned out that in Lamblia - a Republic which had suddenly
passed straight from the paleolithic period to the monolith of
contemporary social structure - FAO had built a coconut cannery
which I, as it authorized representative, had to open with due
pomp. But why on earth should engineer Armandu Baer who was
accompanying me at the insistence of Unesco, lose his spectacles
at the reception in the French embassy and, not seeing too well,
take the jackal at hand for a hunting dog and decide to stroke
it? It is a well-known fact that on the teeth of jackals there is
a deadly poison. Alas, the venerable Frenchman ignored that
danger and died three days later. Rumors started spreading in the
lobbies of the Lamblian parliament that the jackal had been
possessed of an evil spirit implanted by a magician, and that the
candidature of this magician for the post of Minister of
Religious Cults and National Education had been dropped after a
protest from the French Embassy. The embassy made no official
denial, a delicate situation was created and Lamblia's statesmen,
inexperienced in diplomatic protocol, instead the sending the
mortal remains to France without further ago, looked upon this
event as yet another occasion to shine upon the international
scene. General Mahabutu, the Minister of War, gave a funeral
cocktail at which, as is acceptable in such cases, everybody,
glass in hand, was talking about everything and nothing and I, at
one time at another, replied to the question of Colonel Bamatugu,
Director of the Department of European Questions, that the
highly-placed departures in our country are sometimes really
buried in welded coffins. It never occurred me that this question
had something to do with the late Frenchman, and the Lamblians,
in turn, saw nothing unnatural in using factory devices in the
funeral ritual. The body was loaded on to an Air France plane in
a case advertising canned coconuts, but the most offensive thing
was that it contained 96 welded boxes.
	After that I was made into a scapegoat for allegedly not
having prevented the scandal. But how could I possible have
foreseen such a thing, seeing that the case was closed and
covered with the French flag? What is more, everybody was
indignant that I hadn't sent a memorandum to the Lamblian
authorities explaining how inappropriate their piece-meal canning
of dead people is. But I had other things to do. For reasons
unknown to me, General Mahabutu sent a liana to my hotel room and
only later did I learn from Professor Donda that it had hinted at
the gallows. Following this overture an execution party arrived
at the hotel which I, not knowing the language, took to be a
guard of honor. If it hadn't been for Donda I probably wouldn't
be telling his story, nor any other for that matter. Back in
Europe I had been warned to be wary of him as of an unscrupulous
crook who made use of the gullibility and artlessness of the
young state in order to build there a warm nest for himself. He
had raised the unscrupulous tricks of the shamans to the level of
a theory which he taught at the local university. Trusting my
informers, I considered the professor a crook and a scoundrel and
tried to stay away from him at official receptions, although he
impressed me as a very nice person.
	The French Consul-General,whose residence lay closest (I was
separated from the British Embassy by a river swarming with
crocodiles) denied me the right of refuge, and that at the moment
when I had run to him from the Hilton in just my pajamas. The
Consul referred to considerations of state, namely to the damages
I had inflicted on France's interests. Our conversation through
the peephole took place against a background of smoky volleys -
the party sent for me was training in the hotel backyard - and I
started debating with myself whether I should opt for execution
or throw myself on the crocodiles' mercy, when the Professor's
luggage-laden boat suddenly emerged from the reeds. When I was
seated on the suitcases, the Professor thrust an oar into my
hands and explained that his contract with the Kulaharian
University had just expired and that he was sailing to Gurunduwai
where he had been invited as Professor of Svarnetics. Such an
unexpected change of universities might seem strange, but at that
moment I did not feel up to asking questions.
	Donda saved my life, even if he took me just because he
needed me as an oarsman. We sailed for four days and got to know
each other better during that time. True, I was swollen from
mosquito bites, while Donda drove them away with a repellent,
telling me that very little was left in the tube. Even that did
not pique me, considering that delicacy of the situation. Donda
had read my books and I could not tell him anything new about
myself, but I learned a lot about his own life instead.
	Donda is not a slav, despite his surname. In fact, he had
been named thus quite by chance. For six years now he has been
known by the name of Affidavit, since, when leaving Turkey, he
wrote the affidavit required by the authorities, but put the word
into the wrong column of the inquiry, and so ended up receiving a
passport, visa, medical certificate, credit card and insurance
policy all in the name of Affidavit Donda. After giving it some
thought, he reconciled himself to it, for after all, a rose by
any other name...
	Professor Donda saw the light of day thanks to a series of
errors. His father was a half-breed woman of the Navajo tribe, he
had two-point-something mothers: a white Russian, a red Negress
and finally Miss Eileen Sebury, a Quaker, who delivered him after
a seven day pregnancy under the most dramatic circumstances, i.e
in a sinking submarine.
	The woman who was Donda's father was sentenced to life for
blowing up some extremists' headquarters and, at the same time,
for the Pan Am crash. She was ordered to throw a petard filled
with laughing gas into the extremists headquarters' as a warning.
She set off from the States for Bolivia, but while going through
customs at the airport, mistakenly took the bag of the Japanese
standing next to her and the extremists were blown up because the
Jap's bag contained a real bomb, intended for somebody else. The
plane in which her own bag was loaded by the mistake - the ground
service staff was on strike that day - crashed immediately after
take-off. It appears that the pilot lost control because of a
laughing fit, and jet liners, as we all know, are not aired
during take-off. Because of all this the poor woman was put into
jail for the rest of her days. Everybody does or does not have
the chance, but this virgin, it appears, had no chance at all of
leaving any offspring. It should not be forgotten, however, that
we are living in the age of science. 
	At precisely that time Professor Harley Pombernac was
researching the heredity of Bolivian prisons' inmates. He
obtained living cells in the following way: each of the detainees
was required to lick a microscope slide; this suffices for a few
cells to be separated from the mucous membrane. In the same
laboratory another American, Doctor Juggernaut, was artificially
fertilizing human ova. Somehow Pombernac's slides got mixed up
with those of Juggernaut and went into the refrigerator where the
male sex cells were to be kept. In this muddle the cell from the
half-breed's mucosa was used to fertilize an ovum donated by a
Russian, the daughter of a white emigrant. You probably realize
now why I called the half-breed Donda's father: the one who
donates the fertilizing cell is naturally the father, even if he
is a woman.
	Prombernac's assistant realized what had happened at the
last minute and rushed into the laboratory crying: "Don't do
it!", but, as most Anglo-Saxons, he pronounced the words
indistinctly, so out came something like "Dondo". Later, when his
birth certificate was being issued, this was somehow recalled,
resulting in the surname of Donda - at least that's what they
told the Professor twenty years later.
	Pombernac placed the fertilized ovum in an incubator. The
embryonic development in a test tube usually lasts about two
weeks, after which the embryo dies. By a coincidence, however,
precisely at that time the American League for Struggle against
Extogenesis achieved the passing of a sentence stipulating the
confiscation of all fertilized ova from the laboratories, while,
at the same time, the press began an appeal for charitable women
who would be willing to have the embryos implanted. Many women
responded to the appeal, including the Negress, who at that time
had no idea that in four months time she would be taking part in
a raid on the cooking-salt warehouses of the Nadelbaker
Corporation. The Negress belonged to a group of active
environmental protectionists which protested against the erection
of a nuclear power plant in Massachusetts and, not restricting
themselves solely to publicity, they decided to destroy the salt
warehouse, because by means of electrolysis salt is turned into
sodium, which serves as a thermal conductor, transmitting energy
from the nuclear reactors to the turbines. True, the reactor they
intended to build in Massachusetts did not need any sodium. It
was to run on fast neutrons with a new heat conductor and the
company producing it was located in Oregon and was called
Madlebaker Corporation. As regards the salt that was destroyed,
is turned out that it wasn't cooking salt after all, but
potassium salt instead, intended for the production of artificial
fertilizers.
	The case of the Negress was dragged from one court to
another for a long time, since the versions of the defence and
the prosecution were both sufficiently substantiated. The
prosecution insisted that it was a matter of an attempt on the
property of the federal government and that the court should take
into consideration the premeditated actions and not the
accidental mistakes in the actual execution. The defence, for
it's part, held the position that all there was to it was merely
the additional destruction of the anyhow rotten and stale
privately-owned fertilizer, and that therefore the case was in
the competence of the state court. The Negress, realizing that
she would have to give birth in prison one way or another,
rejected the continuation of motherhood in favor of a new female
philanthropist, i.e the Quaker, some woman named Seabury. On the
sixth day of her pregnancy this Quaker, out for some fun, went on
a submarine ride in the superaquarium in Disneyland. The
submarine broke down and although everything ended well, the
nervous shock caused Miss Seabury to miscarry. The foetus,
however, was saved. But since Miss Seabury had only been pregnant
for a week, she could hardly be regarded as Donda's true mother -
thus the fractional denotation.
	Two detective agencies were forced to pool their efforts in
order to clarify the facts regarding both the paternity and
maternity of the child. The progress of science annulled the old
principle of Roman Law: "Mater semper serta est". In order to be
precise I will add that the Professor's sex remained a mystery
because only a female could develop from two female cells. Nobody
knows where the male chromosome came from. But I have heard a
retired employe of the Pinkerton Agency who had come to Lamblia
on safari say that Donda's sex presented no mystery whatsoever -
in the third ward of Pombernac's laboratory the slides were given
to frogs to lick.
	The professor spent his childhood in Mexico after which he
became naturalized in Turkey where he turned from the episcopal
faith to Zen Buddhism, graduated from three faculties and finally
arrived in Lamblia to head the Department of Svarnetics of the
Kulaharian University.
	His true vocation was to design poultry farms, but when he
turned to Buddhism he could no longer stand the thought of
inflicting pain on the broilers. A plastic netting replaces their
yard, a quartz lamp - the sun, a small indifferent computer - the
brood hen, and the pressure pump which fills the stomach with a
mixture of plankton and fish flour - pecking at liberty. They are
permanently tuned to music, usually Wagner's overtures, which
causes them to panic. The chickens spread their wings in despair,
causing their chest muscles to expand and making them most
desirable in a culinary respect. Possibly Wagner was the reason
which caused Donda's patience to run out.
	In these chicken concentration-camps, the Professor would
say, the unfortunate creatures are together during their
development with the belt to which the cells are attached to the
end of the conveyor where, never having even seen a patch of blue
sky, even a grain of sand, they are beheaded, boiled and stuffed
into cans. It is interesting, the way the idea of cans is
constantly popping up in my memories.
	While still in Turkey, Donda received a telegram with the
following contents: "Will you be appointed professor of
svarnetics at Kulaharian University ten kilodollars yearly answer
immediately please colonel Dronfutu Lamblian Bambulian Dramblian
Security Police."
	He immediately replied in agreement, on the premise that he
might just as well discover the meaning of svarnetics right on
the spot and that his three degrees would suffice for lecturing
in any of the exact sciences. After his arrival in Lamblia Donda
discovered that colonel Dronfutu had long since been forgotten.
In answer to his inquiries everybody merely coughed discreetly.
The contract, however, was signed and the new government was
forced to pay Donda damages for three years so that he ended by
getting the department. Nobody asked the new professor about his
subject. One of the crowded prisons probably contained the man
who knew the meaning of svarnetics. Donda looked for the term in
every conceivable encyclopedia, but to no avail. The only
scientific aid which the Kulaharian University possessed was a
brand new IBM computer, a gift from UNESCO. Donda, however, had
no right to lecture in cybernetics - this contradicted the
contract. The worst thing (he confided while we were still rowing
at dusk, hardly able to distinguish the roots from the
crocodiles) were the lonely evenings in the hotel which he spent
wrecking his brains over the secret of svarnetics.
	What usually happens is this: a new sphere of research
appears and it is labeled with a new name. Donda had the name
without the subject. The Professor hesitated for a long time
between the various possible interpretations and in the end
decided to settle for indefiniteness as such, believing the word
"inter" to be the most suitable one in this case. Ever since then
the reports intended for European magazines started using the
terms "interistics" and the school's followers began colloquially
calling themselves "interistics". But only as the creator of
svarnetics did Donda gain a true and alas, sad fame.
	Naturally, he could not possibly deal with the common points
of all sciences, but here again chance came to the rescue. The
Ministry of Culture decided to subsidize those departments whose
research was linked to the country's national traditions. This
was perfect for Donda. He decided to study the border region
between the rational and the irrational. He started off modestly,
with a mathematical explanation of spells. The prosecution of
enemies in effigio had been practiced by the Lamblian tribe Hotu
Babotu for centuries. The enemy figure, pierced with thorns, was
fed to a donkey. If the donkey survived such a feast, it was
considered a good omen and heralded the enemy's approaching
death. Donda embarked on the digital modelling of enemies,
thorns, donkeys, etc. In this way he gradually uncovered the
meaning of svarnetics.
	The word turned out be an abbreviation of Stochastic
Verification of Automatized Rules of Negative Enchantment. Nature
magazine, to which Donda sent an article on svarnetics, published
excepts from it accompanied by derogatory comments in it's
Curiosa column. The commentator called Donda a cybershaman who
himself does not believe in what he is doing, and, for this
reason - such was the profound conclusion - was an ordinary
crook. Donda found himself in an ambiguous situation. He did not
really believe in spells and in his report he did not claim to do
so, but at the same time he could not very well publicly proclaim
his disbelief because he had already accepted the proposal of the
Ministry of Agriculture to embark on a project for the
maximization of spells against the drought and the crop pests.
	Being unable either to set himself apart from all this
magic, or to admit to it, the Professor discovered a way out in
the nature of svarnetics itself as an interdisciplinary science.
He decided to stick between magic and science. Although
circumstances forced him to take such a step, precisely this
caused him to embark on the road which led him to the greatest
discovery in the history of mankind.
	The backwardness of the police in Lamblia had led to a
serious rise of in crimes in general, and attempts on the life of
the citizens in particular. The chieftains of those tribes who
had turned atheist in the new conditions immediately switched
from the magic persecution of their opponents to a more realistic
kind of persecution and not a day would pass without giving the
crocodiles who normally lay in the mud-bank opposite the
parliament building the chance to gnaw at somebody's limbs. Donda
embarked on a digital analysis of this phenomenon, calling his
new project Methodology of Zeroing Illicit Murder - MZIMU. News
soon spread through the country that the powerful magician Bwana
Kubwa Donda, possessing MZIMU, had appeared in Kulahari, and was
watching every step of Lamblia's inhabitants. During the next few
months the crime rate dropped significantly.
	The politicians, elated by this success, asked the Professor
to develop a program of economic enchantments for the purpose of
making Lamblia's balance of payments a positive one. They also
insisted on the development of a gun for casting curses and
spells on the neighboring state of Gurunduwai which had
supplanted the Lamblian coconuts on the international market.
Donda had a hard time resisting the pressure, for at that time
the numerous candidates for a Ph.d. started believing in the
computer's magic power. In their neophyte ardor they no longer
imagined a coconut spell, but a political enchantment which would
enable Lamblia to rule the world.
	Naturally Donda could claim that nothing of that kind should
be the essence of svarnetics. But then he would have had to
explain its true purpose to people who would be unable to
understand it. In this way he was doomed to eternal compromising.
Meanwhile the rumors of Donda's Mzimu increased labor
productivity so that in the balance from these achievements the
Professor would also have deprived himself of the subsidies
without which his other grandondiose projects would crumble. I
don't know when he got the idea. The Professor was talking about
it at precisely the moment when an extremely vicious crocodile
gnawed through the blade of my oar. I hit it between the eyes
with the stone mug which Donda had received from a delegation of
magicians who had given him the title Mag honoris causa. The mug
broke, the distressed Professor showered me with reproaches, and
we quarrelled until the next stop. All I remember is that the
department was turned into an Institute of Experimental and
Theoretical Svarnetics, with Donda becoming chairman of  the
commission for the year 2000 at the Council of Ministers, whose
aim it was to compile horoscopes and their magic embodiments in
life. I think he let circumstances carry him along, but I said
nothing at the time - after all, he had saved my life.
	The conversation lagged on the next day, too, because for 20
miles the river served as a frontier between Lamblia and
Gurunduwai and the border guards of the two states would aim at
us from time to time for good luck,although not very
accurately.The crocodiles had disappeared somewhere,though I
would have preferred their company to the border incidents. Donda
had the flags of Lamblia and Gurunduwai ready, and we waved them
to the soldiers, but the river there made sharp bends and once or
twice we didn't wave the appropriate flag, so we were forced to
lie flat on the bottom of the boat.  Nature magazine, to which
Donda owed his reputation of a quack, upset him most of all.The
Lamblian Embassy, however, pressed the Foreign office and the
Professor was nevertheless invited to the World Congress of
Cybernetics in Oxford. This is where he read a paper on the Law
of Donda.
	It will be remembered that the inventor of the perceptrone,
Rosenblatt, proposed the following thesis: the bigger the
perceptrone, the less education is needed for the recognition of
geometrical figures. The Rosenblatt rule is: the infinitely large
perceptrone does not need any education. This agreed with Donda's
own law. What a small computer can do with a large program, a
large computer can do with a small one; thus the conclusion that
an infinitely large program can act without any computer
whatsoever. But what happened? The audience responded to his
words with outraged whistling. Where had the customary scientific
restraint and good manners gone? Nature magazine wrote that if
Donda was to be believed, any infinitely long enchantment should
take effect. The Professor was accused of mixing the pure water
of science with idealistic mud. This is when people started
calling him "Prophet of the Cybernetic Absolute".
	Donda was ultimately crushed by the statement of associate
professor Bogu Wamogu from Kulahari who also turned up in Oxford
since he was the son-in-law of the Minister of Culture, and
presented a paper entitled "The Stone as the Driving Force of
European Thought". Crucial discoveries, he claimed, frequently
contain the word stone, as follows, for example, from the surname
of the greatest physicist(EinSTEIN), the great philosopher
(WittgenSTEIN), the great film director (EisenSTEIN), and the
theatrical figure (FelsenSTEIN). The same holds true of writer
Gertrude STEIN and philosopher Rudolf STEINer. Referring to
biology, Bogu Wamogu cited the founder of hormonal rejuvenation
STAIach and, finally, did not omit to add that Wamogu in Lamblian
meant "stone of stones". Since he quoted Donda in all instances
and called his stone genealogy the "svarnetic all-immanent
component of the predicate "to be a stone"", in it's next issue
the magazine presented him and the Professor as a pair of crazy
twins.
	I listened to this story in the close fog of the overflowing
Wambezi, diverting my attention in the main only to hit on the
head some particularly impudent crocodile who snatched at the
manuscripts protruding from the Professor's bags or took fun in
rocking the boat. I was beginning to have my doubts. If Donda
enjoyed such a stable position in Lamblia, why was he secretly
escaping from the country? What did he really aim for and what
had he achieved? If he doesn't believe in magic and makes fun of
Bogu Wamogu, why curse the crocodiles instead of grabbing the gun
(only in Gurunduwai did he explain that his Buddhist faith did
not permit this). I found it difficult to get the truth out of
him then. Actually, I accepted Donda's proposal to become his
assistant at Gurunduwai University only out of curiosity. After
the regretful episode at the cannery I no longer had any desire
to return to Europe - I preferred to wait for the time when the 
incident would be completely forgotten. And although I later
suffered a lot because of my sudden decision, I do not regret it
in the least and when the boat finally hit the Gurunduwaian shore
of Wambezi, I was the first to jump out and extend a hand to the
Professor:there was something symbolic in this handshake, for our
destinies have been inseparable ever since.
	Gurunduwai is a state three times larger than Lamblia. The
rapid industrialization there, as usually happens in Africa, was
accompanied by the inevitable corruption. But at the time we
arrived in the country the mechanism had started slipping. That
is, bribes were still accepted but no services were being
received in exchange. True, the one not having offered a bribe
could well be beaten up. Why industry, trade and the
administration were still functioning is something we could not
fathom in the beginning.
	According to European ideas, the country ought to fall to
pieces at any moment. Only after a long stay in Lumia, the
capital of Gurunduwai, was I able to get an inkling of the new
setup which replaces that which is known as "public contract" in
the Old Continent. Mwagi Tabuin, the Lumian postmaster-general
with whom we were staying (the capital's hotel had been closed
seventeen years ago for some routine repairs), told us without
beating about the bush the reasons behind each his six daughters'
marriages. With the oldest one he at the same time married the
electric power plant and the shoe factory. He put the second one
in the food plant by means of its door-keeper. It appears that he
made the only right move. One after the other, the managements
were put behind bars, only the door-keeper stayed put because he
himself never misappropriated anything, he only accepted the
gifts. Thanks to this the postmaster's table was laden with
scarce food items. Mwagi wed his third daughter to the inspector
of repair workshops. Because of this his roof never leaked during
the rainy season, the walls were always freshly painted, the
doors shut so tightly that even a snake would have been unable to
wriggle through, and there were panes in every window. He gave
his fourth daughter to the warden of the town prison - just in
case. The fifth got married to the city administration's clerk.
Precisely the clerk rather than, say, the deputy mayor, whom
Mwagi sent a black crocodile-stomach soup as a sign of rejection.
The administration changed as swiftly as the clouds in the sky,
but the clerk remained, changing only his views like the phases
of the moon. The nuclear troops supply chief took the sixth and
last daughter for his wife. These troops existed only in writing,
but their supply was real enough. Besides this, the chief's
cousin on his mother's side was a keeper at the zoo. This
connection seemed quite useless to me, unless one needed an
elephant. Mwagi condescendingly smiled: "Why an elephant? A
scorpion, now is something else."
	Being the postmaster, Mwagi needed no family connections
with the post and even I, his lodger, had my letters and parcels
delivered unopened - a rare thing indeed in Gurunduwai. I've
often seen how the postmen, leaving the post office building in
the morning with their full bags, empty batches of letters sent
without the proper protection straight into the river. As to the
parcels, the postal clerks played a guessing game with their
contents. The one who guessed right could choose what he liked.
	Our host's only worry was his lack of connections in the
cemetery's administration. "They'll feed me to the crocodiles,
the skunks!" He would sigh when he was overcome with emotion.
	The high population growth rate in Gurunduwai was explained
by the fact that every father tried, above all, to ensure for
himself relations with the vitally important departments. Mwagi
told me how, just before the hotel was closed, it's guests were
fainting with hunger, while the ambulance was delivering coir
rugs to friends and acquaintances in the meantime.
	Houwari, a former corporal in the Foreign Legion (after
taking power he proclaimed himself a marshal and decorated
himself with new medals every other day through the Ministry of
Distinctions), did not condemn this mass striving to settle one's
affairs at somebody else's expense. On the contrary, he was the
first to think of nationalizing corruption.
	Houwari, whom the local press called the Older Brother of
Eternity, spared no means for science, getting them from the
taxes that were levied on foreign companies in the country.
Parliament approved the new tax which was followed by the
confiscation and the inventory of property and by protest notes,
of no consequence in their majority, since there were always
others who were eager to try their luck in Gurunduwai, whose ore
deposits, particularly those of chrome and nickel,were enormous,
even if some geological data supported the claim that they were
arranged at the instruction of the authorities. Houwari bought
arms on credit, including fighters and tanks, which he sold to
Lamblia for cash.
	The Older Brother of Eternity was not to be trifled with.
When the great drought hit, he offered equal worship to the
christian God and to the Blua Turmutu, the senior spirit of the
magicians, and after three weeks, without waiting any more for
the rain, he executed all magicians and exiled all missionaries.
	After reading the biographies of Napoleon, Chenghis Khan and
other statesmen for the sake of their experiences, he began
encouraging his subordinates towards excessive robberies,
definitely on a large scale. As a result of this the government
quarter was built from the materials which the Ministry of
Construction stole from the Ministry of Water Transport, which
had intended to use them for the building of a port on the
Wambezi; the money for the building of the railway was diverted
from the Ministry of Coconut Trade; the embezzlements alone
enabled sufficient means to be collected for the erection of the
Trial and Investigation buildings: in a word, the thefts and
misappropriation yielded excellent results.
	Houwari, who at the time had already been named Father of
Eternity, very pompously and very personally opened the
Corruption Bank from which any serious businessman could receive
long-term credit for bribes, provided, of course, that it was
established by the board that his interests coincided with the
interests of the state.
	With Mwagi's help the Professor and I settled in quite well.
The postal inspector brought us delicious smoked cobras. Bread
was delivered by an Air France coach. Experienced travellers soon
realized that there was no point in waiting for a coach, and the
inexperienced ones gained experience after walking about with
their luggage. We had milk and cheese in abundance thanks to the
telegraph operators, who only asked for distilled water from our
laboratory in exchange. I couldn't in the least imagine what they
wanted the water for, but it eventually turned out that all they
needed were the blue plastic bottles, in which they poured the
brandy which they made in the town's anti-alcohol committee.
There was no need for us to go shopping and this was very
important, for I never saw an open shop in Lumia. There was
always some sign hanging on the doors: "We're receiving
amulets","I'm going to the sorceress", etc. We had the hardest
time with departments because the clerks paid absolutely no
attention to visitors. According to the local custom, offices
were places of public events, gambling and above all
match-making. This general merriment was occasionally darkened by
the arrival of the police who put all and sundry behind bars.
This measure for non-deviation was chosen on the presumption that
everybody is guilty - who and to what extent being something not
worthy of losing one's time and energy over.
	Soon after our arrival the boiler affair was discovered. For
the needs of parliament the cousin of the Father of Eternity had
bought steam boilers from Sweden, instead of air conditioners.
The temperature in Lumia never drops below 25 C. Hauwari tried to
persuade the Meteorology Institute to lower the temperatures and
thus to justify the purchase. Parliament was permanently in
session - it was a matter of his own interests. A committee of
inquiry was set up and Mnumnu, an old rival of the Father of
Eternity, was appointed it's chairman. Clashes occurred in the
council chamber, the normal dances during breaks turned into
militant ones and the opposition benches wore gaudy colored
tatoos. And suddenly Mnumnu disappeared. Three version started
circulating: some claimed that Mnumnu had been eaten by the
government coalition, others that he had escaped together with
the boilers, and still others that he had devoured himself. Mwagi
himself also made a mysterious statement (after a dozen jugs of
well-fermented kiwu-kiwu, it is true): "If you look tasty, better
not stroll about in the park at night!". Perhaps it was just a
joke.
	The Svarnetics Department of Lumia University opened up new
prospects to Donda. It should be mentioned that exactly at that
time the government commission on motorization had decided to
purchase a licence for the Bell-94 family helicopter, because
calculation had shown that the helicopterization of the country
would be cheaper than the construction of roads. Indeed, there
was already a 60 m long motorway in the capital but it was used
only for military parades.
	News of the purchase of this licence caused panic among the
population - everybody realized that this meant the collapse of
the system. A helicopter consists of 39.000 parts, and requires
petrol and five kinds of lubricants. Nobody would be able to
ensure all this, even if he had a daughter born to him every
year.
	I have a certain idea of this kind of supply mechanism. When
the chain of my bicycle broke I was forced to hire a hunter to
catch a young antelope; its skin was used to cover the tam-tam
for the telegraph's director; the director sent a telegram of
condolences to Uniami on the occasion of his grandfather's death
in the jungle; and Uniami, through Matarere, was related to an
army supply officer who had this and that in store, because the
main brigade was advancing of wheels. Things would, of course, be
rather more difficult with the helicopter.
	Luckily, Europe, this eternal source of novelties, offered a
fresh example of mutual relations: group sex in arbitrary
compositions. In the harsh economic conditions, instead of
turning into a source of keen sensations, it turned into a means
of satisfying current needs. The Professor's fears that we might
have to part with our bachelorhood for the sake of science proved
unfounded. We managed quite well even if the additional
obligations we were forced to shoulder in order to supply the
department with all that was necessary exhausted us completely.
	The Professor let me in on his new idea - he wanted to
program a computer with all the curses, enchantments, magic
rituals and shaman formulae created by mankind. I saw no sense in
this, but the Professor was adamant. Such enormous information
could only be fed into the latest photoelectronic computer which
cost 11 million dollars.
	I doubted that we would be able to get such a huge credit,
particularly keeping in mind the fact that the Minister of
Finance refused to grant 43 dollars to the institute for the
purchase of toilet paper. The Professor, however, was sure of
success. He did not tell me the details of his plan, but it was
obvious that he was completely preoccupied with it. In the
evening, after variegating himself, he would set off somewhere
with a chimpanzee skin belt wrapped around his hips: this was the
accepted costume for visits to high-ranking circles in Lumia.
Mysterious parcels arrived for him from Europe; when I
accidentally dropped one of them once, a quiet Mendelssohn march
floated from it. Donda dug out some recipes from old cookbooks,
lugged home snake-like glass tubes for distillers from the
laboratory, made me prepare a spirit-boiled brew, cut out
photographs of women from Playboy and We, framed tiny pictures
which he showed no one and, finally, asked Dr. Alfen, the
director of the government hospital, to let him have some of his
blood and I saw him wrap the phial in gold paper. And then, one
fine day, the Professor washed the paints and creams off his
face, burned the remains of Playboy, and for four days stolidly
smoked a pipe on the veranda of Mwagi's house. Uamotu, the
Director of the Capital Investments Department, rang on the fifth
day. The permission for the purchase of the computer had come
through. I couldn't believe my ears. The Professor answered all
my questions with merely a vague smile.
	Programming the magic took more than two years. There were
plenty of difficulties. For example, we had to play around with
the translation of the enchantments of the American Indians
recorded in quipu, and with the snow-iced spells of the Kuril
tribes and the Eskimos; two of our programmers were taken ill
with fatigue, because group cohabitation was still in vogue, I
believe, but according to some rumors their illness had been
caused by illegal magicians who were troubled by Donda's
superiority in their common field of activity. To top it all, a
group of progressive youths which had heard of the protest
movements planted a bomb in the institute.
	Fortunately the explosion damaged only one of the
toilets.They did not repair it till the end of the world because
the empty coconuts, which, according to the genius of some local
inventor, had to substitute the floats in the flushing cistern,
constantly sank. I asked the Professor to use his growing
influence to get a spare float, but he said that only a great end
justifies such laborious means.
	The residents in our quarter staged anti-Donda
demonstrations on two occasions; they feared that the computer
would shower an avalanche of spells on the university and thus on
themselves, since the enchantments might not be sufficiently
accurate. The Professor ordered the building to be fenced in with
a high wall which he himself painted with totem signs for
protection from evil spells. The wall cost four bottles of
brandy, if I remember correctly.
	We gradually stored 490 billion bytes of magic information
in the memory units - in svarnetic calculation this equalled 200
tetragigamagemi. The machine, which performed 18 million
operations per second, worked non-stop for three months. Engineer
Jeffries from IBM was present when the computer went into
operation and regarded us as crazy, particularly after the
Professor placed the memory units on the high-sensitivity scales
specially ordered from Switzerland.
	The programmers were terribly upset: after working for three
months the computer had not even bewitched an ant. Donda,
however, lived in constant expectation, did not answer any
questions and daily checked the chart which the writing pen of
the scales drew on the paper. Naturally, it drew a straight line
which showed that the computer had not moved even by a micron,
and anyway, why should it move? By the end of the third month the
Professor showed signs of depression, didn't answer the phone and
didn't touch his correspondence. On the evening of September 12,
just as I was preparing to go to bed, he burst into my room, pale
and excited.
	"It's happened!" He screamed from the door. "It's accurate
now!" I admit that I was in fear for his reason.
	"It's happened!" He repeated several times.
	"What's happened?" I finally shouted.
	He looked at me as if woken from a dream.
	"It has increased its weight by one hundredth of a gram.
This damn scale is too crude. If I had a better one I would have
known at least a month ago, and perhaps even earlier."
	"Who has increased his weight?"
	"Not who, but what. The computer. The memory units. You
know, don't you, that matter and energy possess mass. Information
is not matter and it is not energy, however, it exists, therefore
it must also have mass. I started thinking of this as soon as I
had formulated the Law of Donda. Infinitely large information
acts directly without any apparatus whatsoever. What could this
mean? That the entire mass of information will find a direct
application. I thought of this but I still did not know the rules
of balance. Why are you looking at me like that? I have finished
my project and I now know how much information weighs. The
machine has become 0.01 g heavier. Do you understand?"
	"Professor," I mumbled, "what about all these prayers and
spells, all these measuring units of ours - magic in drams and
seconds?"
	I fell silent, while Donda appeared to be crying. He was
shaking, but it was soundless laughter.
	"And what else was there for me to do?" He suddenly said
calmly. "Look, every information has mass. The meaning has
absolutely no importance as such. Atoms are atoms no matter where
they are - in a stone or inside my head. The mass of information,
however, is unbelievably small. The information contained in an
entire encyclopedia weighs less than a milligram. This is why I
needed this computer. Who do you think would give me a machine
costing 11 million for half a year to fill with nonsense,
balderdash, rubbish and what not?"
	"If, however," I objected uncertainly, "we were working in a
serious scientific establishment, as for example the Institute of
Higher Research or the Massachusetts Technological..."
	"Skip it! I had no proof, nothing but the Law of Donda which
became a common laughing-stock. I had to buy machine time. Do you
know what an hour's work with this thing costs? And I need
months! And where would I find a place in the States? There
machines of this kind are surrounded by crowds of futurologists
who are calculating the variants of zero growth in the economy -
that's the current trend, that and not the fabrications of some
Donda from Kulahari."
	"So all these spells are unnecessary and we lost two years
just for collecting the material..."
	Donda impatiently shook his shoulders.
	"That which is necessary cannot be in vain. Without the
project we would not have received a single cent."
	"But what about Wabamotu, the government, the Father of
Eternity - they all are expecting the miracle!"
	"There will be a miracle, and what a miracle! Listen. There
is a critical mass of information just as there is a critical
mass of uranium. We are coming close to it. Not only we here, but
the whole earth; every civilization which makes computers. The
development of cybernetics is a trap set by nature for Reason."
	"Critical mass of information?" I repeated. "But every human
brain contains a sea of information and if one does not take into
account whether it is clever or stupid..."
	"Don't interrupt me. The important thing is not the amount
of information, but its density. Just as in the case of uranium.
Scattered in the bowels of the earth uranium is safe. The
condition for it's explosion are it's extraction and
concentration. It is the same in our case. Information in books
or in the heads of people can be enormous, but it is passive. It
must be concentrated."
	"And what will happen then? A miracle?"
	"What miracle?" He smiled. "It seems you really believed in
the nonsense I used as a starting point. No miracle at all. After
the critical point a chain reaction will be triggered. Obiit
animus, natus est atomus! Information will vanish - it will
become matter."
	"How?" I was amazed.
	"Matter, energy and information, these are the three
manifestations of mass." Donda started patiently explaining.
"According to the laws of conservation they can turn into one
another. Matter is transformed into energy, energy and matter are
needed for the creation of information, and information again can
turn into matter, but only under certain conditions. Exceeding
the critical mass, it will disappear as if blown away by the
wind. This precisely is the Barrier of Donda, the limit to the
growth of knowledge. Naturally, it can continue to accumulate,
but only in a rarefied form. Any civilization that does not think
of this will fall into the trap: the more knowledge it acquires,
the further back it will be pushed into ignorance. Do you know
how close to that threshold we are? If the flow of information
grows at the same rates, after two years there will be..."
	"An explosion?"
	"You'd like that, wouldn't you? No, an insignificant spark
which would not even harm a fly. In the place of the billions of
bytes only a handful of atoms will remain. The fire of the chain
reaction will travel round the world at the speed of light and
wherever the density of information exceeds one million bytes per
cubic millimeter, it will produce protons and emptiness."
	"But then we must warn..."
	"Of course. I have already done it. But to no avail."
	"Why? Were you too late?"
	"No, simply nobody believes me. Such an announcement needs
to come from an authority and in their eyes I am a fool and a
crook."
	"Actually, I could shake off the fraudulence but I could
never shake off the clownery. Nor will I try. I've sent an
official announcement to the States and this telegram to Nature
magazine."
	He showed me the rough copy: "Cognovi naturam. Lord's
countdown made the world. Truly Yours Donda."
	Noticing my stupor, the Professor smiled maliciously.
	"You thought bad things about me, eh? My dear, I am too
human to pay back evil with good. The despatch contains an
important thought but they will either toss it into the waste-
paper basket or publicly ridicule it. This is my revenge. Don't
you understand? The latest theory of the emergence of the
Universe - the Big Bang theory - do you know it? What exploded?
What materialized suddenly? There you have the divine recipe: to
count from infinity to zero. When God counted to zero,
information immediately materialized - according to the formula
of balance. That's how the world was incarnated, it exploded in
nebulosity and stars. Cosmos emerged from information!
	"Do you really think so, Professor?"
	"It cannot be proved, but in any case the idea does not
contradict the Law of Donda. I don't necessarily think it was
God, but somebody did it at an earlier stage, perhaps several
civilizations which exploded at the same time, like some
constellation of Supernovae. And now it is our turn.
Computerization will tear off the head of civilization, in fact,
quite delicately."
	I understood the state of the Professor, but I could not
believe him. It seemed to me that his desire to avenge himself
for his previous humiliations was blinding him. But, alas, he
proved right...
	My hand is growing shaky and the clay is running out, but I
must continue writing. In the general futurological confusion
nobody paid any attention to Donda's words. Nature magazine
passed over them in silence. One or two papers printed the full
text of his warning, but the scientific world didn't even lift a
finger. I couldn't get it. When I realized that the world was
facing a catastrophe, while the Professor was regarded as a liar,
I could not suppress the bitter words. One night I blamed the
Professor for having donned the mask of a fool, compromising his
research with magic. He listened to me with a wretched, trembling
smile. Perhaps it was just a nervous tick.
	"Illusions." He finally said. "Illusions. If magic is
stupidity, then I, too, have been born out of stupidity. I cannot
tell you when my idea turned into a hypothesis, because I myself
do not know. I staked on indefiniteness. My discovery belongs to
physics, only to that part of it which nobody has noticed,
because the way to it leads through mockery and spheres placed
outside the law. We should have started with the thought that the
word can become a body, that a spell can materialize, and then
dived into this absurdity in order to reach the opposite bank
where information and mass are balanced. One way of another, it
was necessary to pass through magic, thought not necessarily by
means of the game I played - any step would have looked
senseless, suspicious, heretic and would have provided food for
ridicule. You are right, I made a mistake, but my mistake is that
I did not assess the entire folly of the official wisdom which
reigns in our science. In our age of colorful wrappings attention
is paid to the labels and not to the content... By declaring me a
crook and a good-for-nothing, the lords of science considered
that I no longer existed and even had I cried in a stentorian
voice, nobody would have heard me. Who among us has actually
dabbled in magic? Newsweek was the last to write about the Law of
Donda, before that Time, Der Spiegel, L'Express did so - I cannot
complain of a lack of popularity. But precisely for this reason
the situation seems hopeless to me: I am read throughout the
whole world yet nobody reads me. Who has not heard about the Law
of Donda? They are reading it and rolling with laughter: "Don't
do it!" You see, they are not concerned with the result, but with
the way in which it is attained. There are people deprived in the
eyes of the world of the right of discovery - I, for example. Now
I could swear a hundred times over that the project was nothing
but a tactical move, not nice, but necessary. I could publicly
repent - they would only laugh in reply. Having once joined the
clownade I can no longer get out of it. My only consolation is
the fact that the catastrophe cannot be prevented despite
everything."
	I was forced to start shouting when I tried to argue with
the Professor, because the date set for the opening of the family
helicopter plant was approaching, and in anticipation of these
wonderful machines the people of Gurunduwai, clenching their
teeth, stubbornly and passionately arranged the necessary
connections: behind the walls of my room the family of the
postmaster-general was raging together with invited clerks,
mechanics, shop assistants and the growing noise showed how great
an attraction motorization held for these worthy people.
	The Professor pulled a bottle of White Horse from his back
pocket and, pouring the whisky into glasses, said:
	"You are not right again. Even if the scientific world
accepted my words in good faith, it would still set out to test
them. They would sit down before their computers and collect
information, bringing the catastrophe closer."
	"What shall we do?" I screamed in despair.
	The Professor finished his whisky, threw the empty bottle
out of the window and, staring at the wall behind which passions
were running wild, replied:
	"Sleep."
	I'm writing again after rubbing my palm with coconut milk
because my hand is stiff with cramp. Maramotu says that the rainy
season this year will start early and last long. Ever since the
Professor left for Lumia to get tobacco for his pipe, I have been
completely alone. I am even ready now to read an old newspaper,
but all I have here is a sack of books on computers and
programming. I found it in the jungle while looking for batatas.
Naturally, only the rotten ones remained - as usual the monkeys
had gobbled up the good ones. I also visited my former dwelling.
The gorilla, despite being sicker than ever, did not let me
enter. I think that the sack of books was thrown off as ballast
from the large orange balloon - it flew south over the jungle a
month ago. People probably travel in balloons nowadays. At the
bottom of the sack I discovered an issue of last year's Playboy.
Maramotu found me exactly as I was leafing through it. He was
very glad to see it - nudity to him is a part of propriety and he
took the magazine photos as a sign that the good old customs were
being revived. It had never occurred to me that in his childhood
he must have walked around naked together with his entire family,
and that all these minis and maxis which the black beauties
donned later must have seemed the height of indecency to him. He
asked me what was happening in the world but I could not tell him
anything because the batteries of the transistor had gone flat.
	While the radio was still working I sat and listened to it
all day long. The catastrophe occurred exactly as the Professor
had
	prophesied. It had the greatest impact in the developed 
countries.
	The number of libraries that had been transferred there into
computers in recent years! And suddenly the ocean of wisdom
evaporated in a fraction of a second from the tapes, the
crystals, the ferrite discs and the cryotrons. I listened closely
to the gasping voices of the speakers. The fall wasn't equally
painful to all, for these who had ascended higher on the ladder
of progress were hit harder.
	After the brief shock, euphoria set in in the Third World.
It was no longer necessary to catch up with the first at any
cost, to abandon loin-cloths and reed skirts, to become
urbanized, industrialized and especially computerized. Life,
which had until only recently been crammed with commissions,
futurologists, arms, purifying equipment and borders, suddenly
spilled into a pleasant swamp, into the warm monotony of a
permanent siesta. Even coconuts were easy to come by , whereas
only a few years ago they had been something of a dream - an
export item! The troops dispersed somehow by themselves. I often
came across abandoned gas-masks, overalls, rucksacks and mortars
in the jungle, all covered in lianas. One night I was woken by an
explosion and thought that this was the gorilla at last, but it
turned out that roaming baboons had discovered a box with
detonators.
	The black women of Lumia, without bothering to stifle their
sights of satisfaction,rid themselves of the patent leather shoes
and women's pants in which they felt dreadfully hot. Group sex
vanished into thin air - first, because there wouldn't be any
helicopters, secondly, there was no petrol, and third, nobody
would be going anywhere, so why do it? It must be very quiet in
Lumia now....
	To tell the truth, the catastrophe did not turn out all that
bad. Neither love nor money can get you to London in an hour, to
Bangkok in two and to Melbourne in three. Well, you won't be, and
so what? Naturally, many companies went bankrupt. They say that
IBM is now manufacturing plates and numbers, but perhaps it's
just a joke. There are no strategic computers, no self-guiding
warheads, no digital machines, there is no underwater, land, air
or space war. The news agencies blared about the drop in
production, the stock markets, and on Fifth Avenue businessmen
jumped from the windows so frequently in October that they
collided in mid-air.
	Train and plane time tables, as well as hotel room bookings
were all muddled. In the metropolises nobody has to wonder
whether to fly to Corsica or drive by car, to rent a car on the
spot through a computer, or perhaps to tour Turkey, Mesopotamia,
the Antilles and Mozambique, with Greece thrown in as a
supplement.
	I wonder who makes these balloons. Probably some craftsmen.
The net of the last balloon I watched through the binoculars,
before the monkey took them, was made of very short pieces of
string, like shoe-laces - perhaps they've started walking around
barefoot in Europe, too? The long pieces of string were probably
netted under the control of a computer. I'm afraid to say so, but
I heard it with my own ears just before the radio went dead, that
there is not a single dollar left. The poor darling has expired.
My only regret is that I was unable to watch the Turning Point at
close quarters.
	I can just imagine: a tiny flash and a crackle - and, in a
wink, the machine memory is drained like the brains of a newborn
infant, while a small Cosmos, Universe, or World is formed
unexpectedly from the information turned into matter -all the
knowledge accumulated for centuries has become a speck of nuclear
dust. From the radio broadcasts I learned what this Microcosmos
looks like, tiny and so closed that it is impossible to enter it.
From the point of view of our physics it represents a particular
type of emptiness, namely "Equally Dense Emptiness, Completely
Impenetrable." It does not absorb light, it cannot be stretched,
shrunk, shattered or peeled because it is outside our own
Universe, despite being inside it as well. The light glides along
its smooth ends, all particles streamline along it and no matter
how hard it is to imagine, the authorities claim that the
"Cosmososuckling" in question, as Donda calls it, is an universe,
completely equal to our own, i.e. containing nebulae, galaxies,
star clusters, and perhaps also planets with stirring life as
well. It might be said that people have repeated the phenomenon
of Creation: true, without at all wanting to, because the least
they did was to aim for a result of this kind.
	When the Cosmososuckling saw the light of day, utter
confusion ensued among scientists. That's when they remembered
the Law of Donda and started sending the Professor letters,
invitations and telegrams, as well as all kinds of honorary
diplomas. But at that moment exactly the Professor packed his
suitcases and persuaded me to leave with him for the border
region to which he had earlier taken a liking. He took a safe
full of books along with him - dreadfully heavy as I was able to
convince myself, since I carried it on my back for the last five
kilometers, after we ran out of petrol and our buggy stopped.
There's probably nothing left of it now - the  baboons have taken
it to pieces. We did, of course, have a good supply of guns,
instruments, files, nails, compasses, axes and other objects of
which the Professor had made a list, guided by a pocket edition
of Robinson Crusoe. Besides this he took files of Nature,
Physical Abstracts, Physical Review and Futurum magazines, as
well as folders containing newspaper clippings dedicated to the
Law of Donda.
	Every evening after dinner a revenge pleasure seance was
held: the radio broadcast the latest nightmarish news with
commentaries by prominent scientists while the Professor,
dragging on his pipe and with half-closed eyes, listened to me
while I read aloud the worst sneers regarding the Law of Donda
selected for the evening, as well as the various abuses flung at
the author (the latter, underlined in red pencil by Donda
himself, I sometimes read several times). I admit that this way
of spending my time soon started boring me. Alas, even a great
mind can succumb to an obsessive idea. When I refused to read
aloud any more, the Professor started withdrawing to the jungle
for walks, allegedly for health reasons, but once I accidentally
caught him in a clearing where he was quoting the most remarkable
places from Nature magazine to a group of stunned baboons.
	The Professor became unbearable, but nevertheless, I am
eagerly expecting his return. Old Maramotu says that Bwana Kubwa
won't return, because he has been kidnaped by the evil Mzimu,
clad in the guise of a donkey. Before leaving, the Professor let
me in on some important information which greatly impressed me.
First, the equivalence of all information follows from the Law of
Donda - irrespective of whether the information is ingenious or
idiotic, either way, the creation of the proton requires 100
billion bytes. The wise and the idiotic word alike turn into
matter. This remark puts the philosophy of life in a completely
new light. Perhaps the Gnostics with their Manichaeism were not,
after all, such heretics as The Church would have it. Is it
possible though, for the Cosmos, having emerged from the
utterance of heptillion stupidities, not to differ in anything
from the Cosmos created by the obvious wisdom?
	I noticed Donda writing at night. With great reluctance he
admitted this to be his new work: Introduction to Svarnetics, or
an Inquiry into the General Technology of Cosmoproduction.
	Unfortunately, the Professor took the manuscript with him.
All I know is that according to him, any civilization approaches
the threshold of the creation of a Cosmos in time. A world is
created both by the one who is super-brilliant and by the one who
is a complete idiot. The black and white holes discovered by
astrophysicists are the places where unusually powerful
civilizations attempted to skirt the Law of Donda or to knock out
its foundation, but nothing came of it - they knocked themselves
out of the Universe instead.
	At first glance there seems to be nothing greater in the
world than this conclusion. But no, Donda embarked on writing the
methods and theory of the Creation!
	I must admit that I was most shaken by what he told me on
the night before his tobacco expedition. We were drinking coconut
milk, fermented according to the recipe of old Maramotu - a
dreadful concoction, which we nevertheless consumed because we
regretted the effort we had put into its making. Not everything
that had gone was all that bad - take whisky for instance... And
after rinsing his mouth with spring water, the Professor said:
	"Ioon, do you remember the day when you called me a fool? I
see you remember. I told you then I had become a fool in the eyes
of the scientific world when I invented the magic essence of
Svarnetics. But if you had taken a closer look at my entire life,
you would have noticed still greater confusion and chaos. In my
life everything has been topsy-turvy. All of me is the product of
accidents and misunderstandings - that's my true name. As a
result of a mistake I created Svarnetics, because the telegraph
operator probably misprinted the words which were used by the
unknown, yet unforgettable Colonel Dronfutu of the Kulaharian
police. I was sure of this right from the start. But I did not
try to correct the telegram, no, I did much more, I adapted the
mistake to my activity which, as you see, did have certain
consequences. What happened? Some guy, having seen the light of
day by mistake, with an absurd career, entangled in a ball of
African misunderstandings, suddenly discovers how the world came
into being and what will happen to it? Oh no, old chap! Far too
many coincidences. Far more than necessary for a new law to be
formulated. It is not necessary to see that which is before our
eyes, all that is needed is a new viewpoint. Look at the
evolution of life. Billions of years ago pre-amoebas appeared.
What were they capable of? Of reproducing themselves. In what
way? Thanks to the stability of hereditary traits. If heredity is
indeed faultless, the Earth would still be inhabited by nothing
but amoebas. So what happened? Simply mistakes! Biologists call
them mutations. But what is mutation if not the mistake of
nature? A misunderstanding between the donor-parent and the
receiver-offspring.
	In its image - yes, but not in exactness! Not in a
stereotyped way! And since the image was constantly changing, the
trilobites, dinosaurs, sequoias, goats, monkeys and, finally, we
appeared.
	This is precisely how my own life was formed too: I appeared
on this world by an oversight, found myself in Turkey by
accident, and chance took me from there to Africa. True, I have
always struggled, like a swimmer struggles with the waves, but
despite everything the waves carried me, it was not me who ruled
them... Do you understand? We, my dear, do not appreciate
properly the creative role of error as a fundamental category of
life. But don't think Manichaeistically. This school holds that
God creates a harmony in whose wheel the devil is forever putting
a spoke. It is not so! If I find tobacco I will write the last
chapter of the book of philosophical trends, namely the ontology
of apostasy or the theory of life which is sustained by error, is
moved by errors, creates from errors - and, in the final
analysis, becomes the fate of the Universe."
	Thus spoke the Professor, braced himself and disappeared
into the jungle, while I stayed behind to wait for his return,
holding the latest issue of Playboy in my hands, from whose cover
a sex bomb, disarmed by the Law of Donda, naked, like truth, is
still looking at me.
	