Stanislaw Lem: The Cyberiad

The princess was amazed, for truly, he spoke in paleface fashion, and she said:

“Tell me, you who call yourself Myamlak the paleface, what do your brothers do during the day?”

“O Princess,” said Ferrix, “in the morning they wet themselves in clear water, pouring it upon their limbs as well as into their interiors, for this affords them pleasure. Afterwards, they walk to and fro in a fluid and undulating way, and they slush, and they slurp, and when anything grieves them, they palpitate, and salty water streams from their eyes, and when anything cheers them, they palpitate and hiccup, but their eyes remain relatively dry. And we call the wet palpitating weeping, and the dry—laughter.”

“If it is as you say,” said the princess, “and you share your brothers’ enthusiasm for water, I will have you thrown into my lake, that you may enjoy it to your fill, and also I will have them weigh your legs with lead, to keep you from bobbing up…”

“Your Majesty,” replied Ferrix as the sage had taught him, “if you do this, I must perish, for though there is water within us, it cannot be immediately outside us for longer than a minute or two, otherwise we recite the words ‘blub, blub, blub,’ which signifies our last farewell to life.”

“But tell me, Myamlak,” asked the princess, “how do you furnish yourself with the energy to walk to and fro, to squish and to slurp, to shake and to sway?”

“Princess,” replied Ferrix, “there, where I dwell, are other palefaces besides the hairless variety, palefaces that travel predominantly on all fours. These we perforate until they expire, and we steam and bake their remains, and chop and slice, after which we incorporate their corporeality into our own. We know three hundred and seventy-six distinct methods of murdering, twenty-eight thousand five hundred and ninety-seven distinct methods of preparing the corpses, and the stuffing of those bodies into our bodies (through an aperture, called the mouth) provides us with no end of enjoyment. Indeed, the art of the preparation of corpses is more esteemed among us than astronautics and is termed gastronautics, or gastronomy—which, however, has nothing to do with astronomy.”

“Does this then mean that you play at being cemeteries, making of yourselves the very coffins that hold your four-legged brethren?” This question was dangerously loaded, but Ferrix, instructed by the sage, answered thus:

“It is no game, Your Highness, but rather a necessity, for life lives on life. But we have made of this necessity a great art.”

“Well then, tell me, Myamlak the paleface, how do you build your progeny?” asked the princess.

“In faith, we do not build them at all,” said Ferrix, “but program them statistically, according to Markov’s formula for stochastic probability, emotional-evolutional albeit distributional, and we do this involuntarily and coincidentally, while thinking of a variety of things that have nothing whatever to do with programming, whether statistical, alinear or algorithmical, and the programming itself takes place autonomously, automatically and wholly autoerotically, for it is precisely thus and not otherwise that we are constructed, that each and every paleface strives to program his progeny, for it is delightful, but programs without programming, doing all within his power to keep that programming from bearing fruit.”

“Strange,” said the princess, whose erudition in this area was less extensive than that of the wise Polyphase. “But how exactly is this done?”

“O Princess!” replied Ferrix. “We possess suitable apparatuses constructed on the principle of regenerative feedback coupling, though of course all this is in water. These apparatuses present a veritable miracle of technology, yet even the greatest idiot can use them. But to describe the precise procedure of their operation I would have to lecture at considerable length, since the matter is most complex. Still, it is strange, when you consider that we never invented these methods, but rather they, so to speak, invented them- | selves. Even so, they are perfectly functional and we have | nothing against them.”

“Verily,” exclaimed Crystal, “you are a paleface! That which you say, it’s as if it made sense, though it doesn’t really, not in the least. For how can one be a cemetery without being a cemetery, or program progeny, yet not program it at all?! Yes, you are indeed a paleface, Myamlak, and therefore, should you so desire it, I shall couple with you in a closed-circuit matrimonial coupling, and you shall ascend the throne with me—provided you pass one last test.”

“And what is that?” asked Ferrix.

“You must…” began the princess, but suddenly suspicion again entered her heart and she asked, “Tell me first, what do your brothers do at night?”

“At night they lie here and there, with bent arms and twisted legs, and air goes into them and comes out of them, raising in the process a noise not unlike the sharpening of a rusty saw.”

“Well then, here is the test: give me your hand!” commanded the princess.

Ferrix gave her his hand, and she squeezed it, whereupon he cried out in a loud voice, just as the sage had instructed him. And she asked him why he had cried out.

“From the pain!” replied Ferrix.

At this point she had no more doubts about his palefaceness and promptly ordered the preparations for the wedding ceremony to commence.

But it so happened, at that very moment, that the spaceship of Cybercount Cyberhazy, the princess’ Elector, returned from its interstellar expedition to find a paleface (for the insidious Cybercount sought to worm his way into her good graces). Polyphase, greatly alarmed, ran to Ferrix’s side and said:

“Prince, Cyberhazy’s spaceship has just arrived, and he’s brought the princess a genuine paleface—I saw the thing with my own eyes. We must leave while we still can, since all further masquerade will become impossible when the princess sees it and you together: its stickiness is stickier, its ickiness is ickier! Our subterfuge will be discovered and we beheaded!”

Ferrix, however, could not agree to ignominious flight, for his passion for the princess was great, and he said:

“Better to die, than lose her!”

Meanwhile Cyberhazy, having learned of the wedding preparations, sneaked beneath the window of the room where they were staying and overheard everything; then he rushed back to the palace, bubbling over with villainous joy, and announced to Crystal:

“You have been deceived, Your Highness, for the so-called Myamlak is actually an ordinary mortal and no paleface. Here is the real paleface!”

And he pointed to the thing that had been ushered in. The thing expanded its hairy breast, batted its watery eyes and said:

“Me paleface!”

The princess summoned Ferrix at once, and when he stood before her alongside that thing, the sage’s ruse became entirely obvious. Ferrix, though he was smeared with mud, dust and chalk, anointed with oil and aqueously gurgling, could hardly conceal his electroknightly stature, his magnificent posture, the breadth of those steel shoulders, that thunderous stride. Whereas the paleface of Cybercount Cyberhazy was a genuine monstrosity: its every step was like the overflowing of marshy vats, its face was like a scummy well; from its rotten breath the mirrors all covered over with a blind mist, and some iron nearby was seized with rust.

Now the princess realized how utterly revolting a paleface was—when it spoke, it was as if a pink worm tried to squirm from its maw. At last she had seen the light, but her pride would not permit her to reveal this change of heart. So she said:

“Let them do battle, and to the winner—my hand in marriage…”

Ferrix whispered to the sage: