Part 1 (1/2)

Memoirs Found in a Bathtub

by Stanislaw Leene” is unquestionably one of thefrom the very close of the Prechaotic, that period of decline which directly preceded the Great Collapse It is indeed a paradox that we know ene, the protocultures of assyria, Egypt and Greece, than we do of the days of paleoatoation While those archaic cultures left behind permanent monuments in bone, stone, slate and bronze, ale during the Middle and Late Neogene was a substance called papyr

Papyr hitish, flaccid, a derivative of cellulose, rolled out on cylinders and cut into rectangular sheets Information of all kinds was impressed on it with a dark tint, after which the sheets were collated and sewn in a special way

In order to understand what brought about the Great Collapse, that catastrophic event which in a matter of weeks totally deo back three thousand years Metamnestics and data crystallization did not exist in those days Papyr perfornostors True, there were the beginnings of artificial e, bulky machines, troublesome to operate and maintain, and used only in the most limited, narroay They were called ”electronic brains,” an exaggeration comprehensible only in the historical perspective, much like the boast of the builders of Asia Minor, that their sacred te”

No one knows exactly when and where the papyralysis epideions of a land called Ammer-Ka, where the first spaceport was built The people of that tier And yet we cannot accept the harsh judgment delivered by so many subsequent historians, that these were a frivolous people To be sure, papyr was not distinguished by its durability; but one should not hold a Prechaotic civilization responsible for failing to foresee the existence of the RV catalyst, also known as the Hartian Agent The true properties of this agent, after all, were discovered only in the Galactic Period by one Prodoctor Six Folses, who established RV's origin as the third ht back to Earth by an early expedition (the eighth Malaldic, according to Prognostor Phaa-Vaak), the Hartian Agent set off a chain reaction and papyr disintegrated around the globe

The details of the cataclys to verbal reports crystallized only in the Fourth Galactiue centers called li-brees The reaction was practically instantaneous In place of those great treasuries, those reservoirs of society's ray, powdery ash

The Prechaotic scientists thought they were dealing with soous microbe, and wasted valuable time in the attenostor Four Tauridus's bitter remark, that humanity would have been better served had that ti words onto stone

Gravitronics, cybereconoene, when the catastrophe occurred The econoroups called nashens were relatively autonomous, and wholly dependent upon the circulation of papyr, as was the flow of supplies to the Syrtic Tiberis colony on Mars

Papyralysis ruined a great deal htly naulate and coordinate all group activities, but it determined, in some obscure way, the fate of individuals (for example, the ”identity papyrs”) The functional and ritual roles of papyr in the folklore of that tiene was at its height) have yet to be fully catalogued While we do know theof some expressions, others remain empty phrases (cheks, dok-row up, obtain an education, work, travel, h the aid and ht of these facts can one appreciate the full extent of the disaster which struck Earth The quarantine of whole cities and continents, the construction of hermetically sealed shelters -- all such ainst the catalyst's subatomic structure, the product of a most unusual anabiotic evolution For the first time in history society was threatened with total dissolution To quote an inscription carved upon the wall of a urinal in the Fris-Ko excavations by an anonymous bard of the cataclysrew dark with clouds of blighted papyr and it rained for forty days and forty nights a dirty rain, and thus ind and streams of mud was the tale of man washed from the face of the earth forever”

It enethe stars The papyralysis nightmare pervaded all walks of life Panic hit the cities; people, deprived of their identity, lost their reason; the supply of goods broke down; there were incidents of violence; technology, research and development, schools -- all crumbled into nonexistence; power plants could not be repaired for lack of blueprints The lights went out, and the ensuing darkness was illuene entered into the Chaotic, which was to last over two hundred years Obviously, the first quarter-century of the Great Collapse left no written records We can only guess under what conditions government was maintained and anarchy avoided until the establishment, around mid-century, of the Earth Federation

The more complex a civilization, the more vital to its existence is the maintenance of the flow of information; hence the more vulnerable it becomes to any disturbance in that flo that flow, the lifeblood of the society, had come to a halt The last storehouse of infor experts; to record and preserve that inforly sie was so compartmentalized that no one specialist could possibly assimilate the entirety of his field Reconstruction consequently deroups of experts Had the task been undertaken at once -- so Polygnostor Laa Baar Eight of our Berene civilization could have been speedily restored In answer to the distinguished founder of Neogene Chronologistics, we must point out the activity he postulates could indeed have led to the accue -- but ould there have been to derive benefit from this? Certainly not the hordes of nomads who left their devastated cities; nor their children, who greild and illiterate No, civilization could have been saved only at the very an to fall apart, construction ceased and transportation ground to a halt, when the starving masses of whole continents first cried out for help, including the colony on Mars, deprived of supplies and threatened with extinction Clearly the experts could not shut themselves up in ivory towers and take the time to develop new techniques of transcription

Desperate measures were employed Certain branches of the amusement industry (such as feel information on the positions of spaceshi+ps and satellites, for collisions were rams were printed, frothe schools Physics professors personally had to tend atoency tealobe to another But these were anization that quickly dissolved in an ocean of spreading chaos Shaken as it was by endless upheavals, engaged in a constant struggle against the tide of superstition, illiteracy and ignorance, the stagnant culture of the Chaotic should be judged not by what it lost of the heritage of centuries, but by what it was able to salvage, against all odds

To check the first fury of the Great Collapse necessitated tremendous sacrifices Earth's first footholds on Mars had been saved, and technology, that backbone of all civilization, was reconstructed Microphones and tape banks replaced the storage centers of demolished papyr Unfortunately, cruel losses were sustained in other areas

Because the supply of neritingthat did not directly serve to save the bare framework of society had to be jettisoned The hue was disseh lectures; the audiences becaeneration This was one of those astonishi+ng primitivisms of Chaotic civilization that rescued Earth froh losses in the areas of history, historiography, paleology and paleoesthetics were quite irreparable Only the sacy was preserved Millions of volumes of chronicles, priceless relics of the Middle and Late Neogene, turned to dust forever

At the end of the Chaotic we find a h level of technology, including the active initiation of gravitronics and technobiotics, not to alacticof its own past All that survives today of the enorene are a few scattered and unrelated renition and thoroughly garbled through countless retellings in the oral tradition Even the y

One nostor Nappro Leis when he says that papyralysis meant historioparalysis Only in this perspective can we assess the true value of the work of Prognostor Wid-Wiss who, in his single-handed battle against official historiography, discovered the ”Notes fro to us across the abyss of centuries, a voice belonging to one of the last inhabitants of the lost land of Ammer-Ka This monument is all the more precious in that there are no others to rival it in importance; it cannot be compared, for exaical expedition of Syrtic Paleognostor Bradrah the Mneene Those finds concern religious beliefs prevalent during the Eighth Dynasty of Ammer-Ka; they speak of various Perils -- Black, Red, Yellow -- evidently cabalistic incantations connected in sos were apparentlydebated by the Trans-Sindental and Greater Syrtic Schools, as well as by a group of disciples of the faene, we fear, will forever remain shrouded in mystery, for even chronotraction methods have failed to provide the e Any systematic presentation of those few oes well beyond the limits of this introduction So ill liround to the ”Notes”

The evolution of ancient beliefs underwent a curious bifurcation In the first period, the Archeocredonic, various religions were founded upon the recognition of a supernatural, non in existence The Archeocredonic left behind perene, the excavations of the Mesogene (the Gothic cathedrals of Lafranss)

In the second period, the Neocredonic, faith assumed a different aspect The ed with the materialistic, the earthly Worshi+p of the deity Kap-eh-Taahl (or, in the Cremonic palimpests, Kapp-Taah) became one of the dohout Ammer-Ka and the faith quickly spread to Australindia and parts of the European Peninsula Any connection, however, between the cult of Kap-Eh-Taalh and the graven ies of the elephant and the ass found here and there throughout Ammer-Ka does seem somewhat doubtful It was forbidden to utter the naous to the Hebrew interdiction); in Ahty Da-Laahr” But there were ical names, and special monastic orders devoted the status (the Mer-L-Finches, for example) Indeed, the fluctuation in the accepted value of each of the many na the true nature of that last of the Prechaotic religions lies in the fact that Kap-Eh-Taahl was denied any supernatural existence, was therefore not a spirit, nor was he even considered a being (which would help explain the totee of science) -- he was, to all extents and purposes, equated with assets, liquid, fixed, and hidden, and had no existence beyond that However, it has been shown that in tiar cane, coffee, and grain were ry God This contradiction is deepened by the fact that the cult of Kap-Eh-Taahl did possess so to which, the world owed its continuing existence to ”sacred property” Any violation of that doctrine met with the lobal cybereconoene, by the rise of sociostasy As the cult of Kap-Eh-Taahl, mired in complex corporational rites and intricate institutional rituals, began in the course of time to lose one territory after another to the followers of secular sociostatic ement, there arose a conflict between the lands still ruled by that antiquated faith and the re world

Up to the very end -- that is, to the formation of the Earth Federation -- the center of the overned by a series of dynasties of Prez-tendz These were not high priests of Kap-Eh-Taahl in the strict sense of the word It was during the Nineteenth Dynasty that the Prez-tendz (or Prexy-dents, in the noon What was it, that first of ranite leviathans, that stern edifice which ushered in the twilight of the Neogene? Prehistorians of the Aquillian School considered the Pentagon's toyptian pyraht of subsequent discoveries, as was the theory that these were shrines to Kap-Eh-Taahl, where crusades were planned against the Heathen Dog, or strategies devised to ensure his successful conversion

Lacking the firsthand information needed to solve this puzzle, undoubtedly the key to an understanding of the whole final phase (the Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Dynasties), our historians turned to the Temporal Institute for help The Institute's full cooperation ical develop the riddle of the Pentagons We sent 290 probes into the far past, tapping 17 trillion erg-seconds fro to the theory of chronotraction, movement back in time is practicable only at a considerable distance frogering as of the past had to be taken froh in the stratosphere Their sudden appearance and disappearance in the sky ene Prodoctor Two Sturlprans maintains that the projection of a retrochronal probe would show up in the past as a bulging disc, not unlike two horizontal saucers floating rih space

Chronotraction yielded an abundance of data, including authentic photoshots of the First Pentagon soon after its construction This building, indeed a pentagon, each side460 feens, was a veritable labyrinth of steel and concrete Histognostor Ser Een estihteen of their ht by over two hundred priests of lower rank Further ti, prompted by the chronicles excavated in the ruins of Waa-Sheetn, led to the discovery of the Second Pentagon, astructure than the First, as es from the chronicles pointed to the existence of yet another, a Third Pentagon This was to have been a closed, completely independent unit, a state within a state, by virtue of sophisticated ca and enormous reserves of food, water and cos were taken over the entire length and breadth of twentieth-century Ammer-Ka and revealed not a trace of any such structure, most historians accepted the thesis that the Waa-Sheetn chronicles spoke of the Third Pentagon in a figurative sense only, that the building was raised purely in the ation of the legend was designed to uplift the flagging spirits of those few re followers of Kap-Eh-Taahl

So stood the official version of our historiography when the young Prognostor Wid-Wiss began his archeological career

Wid-Wiss reexamined all the available materials and published a treatise in which he an to wane and their doovernment, one far froions of Ame of Kap-Eh-Taahl ht be inaccessible to the uninitiated Wid-Wiss held that the postulated Pentagon of the Last Dynasty was a kind of collective military brain whose task ofold: first, to watch over and preserve the purity of the faith, and secondly to convert those peoples of the world who had abandoned the true path

But Wid-Wiss's treatise was pooh-poohed by the experts; it clearly ran counter to nostors Yoo Na Vaak, Quirlsto and Pisuovo of the Martian School of Coraphy pointed out the y

For exa to Wid-Wiss, only a few decades before the papyr catastrophe But if this Third Pentagon had really existed, argued the critics, the Prez-tendz within would have surely taken advantage of the postpapyr anarchy and attempted to conquer the world in the very first days of the Chaotic And even had such an attempt to overthrow the Federation been thwarted, some trace of it would have survived in the oral tradition Yet our historiography notes nothing of the kind

Wid-Wiss defended his hypothesis, clai that when the populace of Ammer-Ka went over to the side of the ”heretics” and joined the Federation, the priests of the Last Pentagon ordered it to be coround Moloch isolated itself from the rest of hue of as taking place on the surface of the earth

This absolute, hermetic isolation of a community of priests and warriors of Kap-Eh-Taahl did seem, Wid-Wiss admitted, a bit unlikely So he went on to speculate that the Last Pentagondevices on the outside He did not think, however, that the collective military brain of the Last Dynasty was capable of any offensive or even diversive action It certainly could not have attacked or engineered a coup against the Federation, for once the colossus had buried itself in rock and severed all ties with the future course of history, it was imprisoned not only by ianization Froend of the glory that was Kap-Eh-Taahl, and investigated, rooted out and waged bitter war against heresy -- the heresy within

Our Histognostors answered these arguive in For twenty-seven years, with only a handful of loyal colleagues to help him, he combed the Rocket Mountains frootten him, his stubbornness was draical tea cleared away several hundred tons of rubble at the foot of Haar-Vurd Peak, stood before a convex shi+eld, cleverly caed, excellently preserved: this was the entrance to the Last Pentagon

Exploration of the underground building, however, proved extremely difficult and demanded extraordinary methods In the seventy-second year of its retreat froon of the Last Dynasty succuht shi+ft in the ranite core produced a fissure that traveled down through several strata until it ca's concrete protective shell could not withstand the volcanic pressure; molten lava entered and filled the interior froe anthill of the last of the Prez-tendz becaiant fossil and, as such, waited one thousand six hundred and eighty years to be discovered

It is not our task to describe here the tres We refer the interested reader to the many volumes devoted specially to that subject Only a few remarks remain to be added to this introduction to the ”Notes”

The ”Notes” were discovered in the third year of excavation, on the fourth level, within an intricate corridor system where there were several sanitation facilities In one of these facilities, filled as the rest with igneous rock, were two human skeletons and, beneath them, a scroll of papyr -- the ”Notes”

The reader will see for hinostor Wid-Wiss were for the most part quite accurate The ”Notes” portray the fate of a community locked beneath the earth, a community that refused to allow the infiltration of any news of real events, pretending it constituted the Brain, the Headquarters of an ealaxies In time the pretense became belief, the belief a certainty The reader itness how the fanatical servants of Kap-Eh-Taahl created the , how they spent their lives in mutual surveillance, in tests of loyalty and devotion to the Mission, even when the last figment of that Mission's reality had beco remained but to sink ever deeper into the pit of collective raphy has not yet passed final judgment on the ”Notes,” commonly called, for the location of their discovery, ”Mereement has been reached as to when and in what order certain parts of the manuscript ritten The Hyberiad Gnostors, for exaes apocryphal, an addition of later years But the reader will hardly be interested in such technical e froene, the Era of Papyrocracy, to speak to us in its own voice

1

I couldn't seenated on my pass First I wound up at the Department of Verification, then the Department of Misinformation, then soht, but on level eight they ignored ot stuck in a crowd of orousof heels, and over that martial noise I could hear the distantofpercolators, now and then I would stumble into rest rooms where secretaries hastily renewed their uised as elevator men would strike up conversations -- one of the and he took an waving tome with the camera-carnation in his lapel By noon ere buddies, and he showed me his pride and joy, a tape recorder under the elevator floor But I was getting more and more depressed and couldn't share his enthusiasm

Stubborn, I went froh the ansere invariably wrong I was still on the outside, still excluded fro But I had to get in somewhere, find an entry at soe cellar and leafed through so there of any value to ry as well (it was past lunchtime and there wasn't even a cafeteria to be found), I decided to take a different tack

I recalled that the highest concentration of tall, gray officers was on the fourth level, so I headed there, opened a door bearing the sign BY APPOINTMENT ONLY and entered an eh a side door marked KNOCK BEFORE ENTERING and into a conference roo mobilization plans Here I ran into a problem -- there were two doors One said NO ADMITTANCE, the other CLOSED After some deliberation I decided on the second door -- the correct choice as it turned out, since this was the office of General Kashenblade himself, the Commander in Chief I walked in, and the officer as on duty at the ti any questions

A powerful, bald old man, Kashenblade stirred his coffee His head was perched upon the collar of his unifornia and stripes like a bib The desk was cluttered with phones and surrounded by computer consoles, speakers, buttons, and in the center was a row of labeled glass jars -- speci in the on his shi+ny pate, was busy pushi+ng buttons to silence the phones as soon as they began to ring When several rang together, he rammed his fist into the whole bank of buttons Then he noticed ri of his teaspoon

”So there you are!” he snapped It was a powerful voice

”Yes,” I answered