Stanislaw Lem - Mortal Engines

When, after a long voyage, the ship came to port, Automatthew surprised everyone by expressing a desire, incomprehensible to them, to visit a nearby ironworks, which boasted a great steam hammer. It was said that in the course of this visit he behaved somewhat strangely, for, having gone up to the steel anvil in the main shop, he began shaking his head violently, as if he intended to knock the very brains out through his ear and into his raised hand, and he even hopped on one leg; those present, however, made as if they didn’t notice, judging that a person so recently rescued from terrible straits might well be given to eccentricities, the product of an unbalanced mind. And indeed, afterwards Automatthew changed his former way of life, seemingly falling into one mania after another. Once he gathered explosives of some sort, and even tried setting them off in his own room, the neighbors however put a stop to that, they went straight to the authorities; and once, for no apparent reason, he took to collecting hammers and carborundum files, telling his acquaintances that he planned to build a new type of mind-reading machine. Later on he became a recluse and acquired the habit of conversing with himself, and sometimes you could hear him running about the house in loud soliloquy, even shouting words very much like curses.

Finally, after many years, developing a new obsession, he began to buy cement, sacks and sacks of it. From this he fashioned an enormous sphere and, when the thing had hardened, carted it off to an unknown destination. It has been said that he hired himself out as a caretaker at an abandoned mine, that one dark night he dropped down its shaft an enormous block of concrete, and thereafter, to the end of his days, he prowled the vicinity, and there was not a piece of garbage he would not pick up, in order to throw it down that empty shaft. True, his ways were rather strange, but most of these rumors do not—I think—merit credence. It is difficult to believe that for all those years he harbored in his heart a grudge against his electrofriend, to which—after all—he owed so much.

Globares, ruler of Eparida, once summoned his greatest sages to appear before him, and he said:

“Truly, hard is the lot of a king who has learned everything there is to learn, so that what is said to him sounds hollow as a broken jug! I wish to be astounded, yet am bored, I seek stimulation, yet hear wearisome twaddle, I long for novelty, and they treat me to insipid flatteries. Know, O wise ones, that today I have ordered all my fools and jesters executed, along with my advisers high and low, and this same fate awaits you if you fail to do my bidding. Let each of you tell me the strangest tale he knows, but if it moves me neither to laughter nor to tears, confounds not nor dismays, provides no entertainment nor food for thought—he parts with his head!” The King made a sign and the sages heard the iron step of the myrmidons that surrounded them at the foot of the throne, and whose naked swords did gleam like flame. They were afraid and nudged one another, for none of them wished to risk the King’s anger and lay his head upon the block. Finally the first spoke:

“O King and ruler! The strangest tale in all the visible and invisible Universe is without question that of the stellar tribe known in the chronicles as the Awks. From the dawn of their history the Awks did everything opposite compared to all other beings of intelligence. Their ancestors settled on Urdruria, a planet famous for its volcanoes; each year it gives birth to new mountain chains, during which time terrible spasms convulse it, so that nothing remains standing. And, to make the misery of the inhabitants complete, the heavens saw fit to have their globe pass through the Meteor Stream; this for two hundred days out of the year pounds the planet with droves of stone battering rams. The Awks (who at that time were not yet called thus) raised edifices of tempered iron and steel, and themselves they covered with such quantities of steel plates, they resembled walking mounds of armor. Nevertheless the ground opened up during the quakes and swallowed their steel cities, and meteor hammers crushed their suits of armor. When the entire race became threatened with annihilation, its sages gathered and held council, and the first one said:—Our people will not survive in their present form and there is no escape save through transmutation. The earth opens from below in crevices, therefore in order not to fall in, each Awk must possess a base that is wide and flat; the meteors on the other hand come from above, and so each Awk must be sharp-ended at the top. As cones, we will be safe from harm.

“And the second one said:—That is not the way to do it. If the earth opens its jaws wide, it will swallow up a cone as well, and a meteor falling at an angle will pierce its side. The ideal shape is a sphere. For when the ground begins to tremble and heave, a sphere will always roll aside by itself, and a falling meteor will hit its oblique surface and skim off; we should therefore transform ourselves in order to roll onward towards a brighter future.

“And the third one said:—A sphere is subject to being crushed or swallowed up no less than any other material form. No shield exists, which a powerful enough sword cannot penetrate, nor a sword which will not be notched by a hard shield. Matter, O my brothers, means perpetual change, flux and transformation, it is impermanent. Not in it should beings truly blessed with intelligence take up residence, but in that which is immutable, eternal and all-perfect, though of this world!

“—And what is that?—inquired the other sages.

“—I shall not tell you, but instead show you!—replied the third. And before their eyes he began to undress; he removed his outer robe, studded with crystals, and the second, gold-embroidered, and the silver trousers, then removed the top of his skull and his breast, then stripped himself with increasing speed and precision, going from joints to couplings, from couplings to bolts, from bolts to filaments, scintillas, till finally he got down to atoms. And then that sage began to shell his atoms, and shelled them so swiftly, nothing could be seen except for his dwindling and his disappearing, yet he proceeded so adroitly and in such great haste, that in the course of those dismantling movements—before the eyes of his flabbergasted fellow sages—he remained as a perfect absence, which was so exact as to be, in a manner of speaking, negatively present. For there where he had had, previously, a single atom, now he did not have that single atom, where a moment ago six had been, six were now missing, in the place where a little screw had been, the lack of a little screw appeared, perfectly faithful and in no wise departing from it. And in this way he became a vacuum, arranged just as was arranged, previously, that which it replaced, namely himself; and no existence interfered with his nonexisting, for he had worked quickly and maneuvered nimbly in order that no particle, no material intrusion should pollute the perfection of the presence of his absence! And the others saw him as a void shaped exactly as he had been only an instant before, they recognized his eyes by the absence of their black color, his face by the missing sky-blue shine, and his limbs by the vanished fingers, joints and shoulderplates!—In this very way, O my brothers—said the One There Not There—through active self-incorporation into nothingness, we shall acquire not only tremendous immunity, but immortality as well. For only matter changes, and nothingness does not accompany it on that path of continual uncertainty, therefore perfection lies in nonbeing, not in being, and we must choose the first, and spurn the latter!

“And they decided, and did accordingly. From then on the Awks were, and are to this day, an invincible race. They owe their existence not to that which is within them, for within them there is nothing, but wholly to that which surrounds them. And when one of them enters a home, he is visible as that home’s nonpresence, and if he steps into a mist—as its local discontinuity. Thus, in ridding themselves of the vicissitudes of precarious matter, have they made possible the impossible…”