Stanislaw Lem: Mortal Engines

Upon hearing this, he covered his eyes with his hand and said: “You are my sister.”

“How am I to understand that?” I asked, astonished.

“Exactly as I say it,” he said, “and it means I neither raise myself above you nor humble myself before you, for however much we may differ, your ignorance, which you have confessed to me and which I believe, makes us equals in the face of Providence. That being so, come with me and I shall show you something.”

We went, one after the other, through the monastery garden, and came to an old woodshed, the monk pushed and the creaking door opened, in the dimness inside I made out a dark form lying on a bundle of straw, and a smell entered my lungs through my nostrils, a smell I had pursued incessantly, and so strong here, that I felt my sting stir of its own accord and emerge from its ventral sheath, but in the next instant my vision grew accustomed to the darkness and I perceived my error. On the straw lay only discarded clothes. The monk saw by my trembling that I was greatly agitated, and he said: Yes, Arrhodes was here. He hid in our monastery a month ago, when he had succeeded in throwing you off the scent. He regretted that he was unable to work as before, and so secretly notified his followers, who sometimes visited him at night, but two traitors sneaked in among them and carried him off five days ago.

“Do you mean to say ‘agents of the King’?” I asked, still quivering and prayerfully pressing to my breast my crossed arms.

“No, I say ‘traitors,’ for they abducted him by a ruse and using force; the little deaf-mute boy whom we took in, he alone saw them leave at dawn, Arrhodes bound and with a knife held to his throat.”

“Abducted him?” I asked, not understanding. “Who? To what place? For what reason?”

“In order, I think, to have use of his mind. We cannot appeal to the law for help, for the law is the King’s. Therefore they will force him to serve them, and if he refuses they will kill him and go unpunished.”

“Father,” I said, “praised be the hour in which I made so bold as to approach you and speak. I will go now on the trail of the abductors and free Arrhodes. I know how to hunt, how to track down, there is nothing I do better, only show me the right direction, known to you from the words of the mute!”

He replied: And yet you do not know whether you will be able to restrain yourself, you admitted as much to me! To which I said: That is so, however I think that I will find a way. I have no clear idea as yet—perhaps I will seek out a skillful master craftsman, who will find in me the right circuit and change it, such that my desire becomes my destiny.

The monk said: Before you set out you may, if you like, consult with one of our brothers, because before he joined us he was, in the world, conversant with precisely such arts. He serves us now as a physician.

We were standing once more in the sunny garden, and though he gave no indication of it, I understood that still he did not trust me. The scent had dissipated in the course of five days, thus he could have given me the wrong as well as the right direction. I consented.

The physician examined me, maintaining the necessary caution, shining a dark lantern inside my body through the chinks of my interabdominal rims, and this with the utmost care and concentration. Then he stood, brushed the dust from his habit and said:

“It often happens that a machine sent out with these sort of instructions is waylaid by the condemned man’s family or his friends, or by other persons who for reasons unknown to the authorities attempt to foil their plans. In order to prevent this, the prudent armorers of the King lock such contents hermetically and connect them with the core in such a way that any tampering whatever must prove fatal. After the placing of the final seal even they cannot remove the sting. Thus it is with you. It also often happens that the victim disguises himself in different clothing, alters his appearance, his behavior and odor, but his mind he cannot alter and hence the machine does not content itself with using the lower and upper senses of smell to hunt, but puts questions to the quarry, questions devised by the foremost experts on the individual characteristics of the human psyche. Thus it is with you also. In addition, I see in your interior a mechanism which none of your predecessors possessed, a multiple memory of things superfluous to a hunting machine, for these are recorded feminine histories, filled with names and turns of phrase that lure the mind, and a conductor runs from them down into the fatal core. Therefore you are a machine perfected in a way unknown to me, and perhaps even an ultimate machine. To remove your sting without at the same time producing the usual result is impossible.”

“I will need my sting,” I said, still lying on my back, “as I must rush to the aid of the abducted one.”

“As for whether you will succeed, if making every effort, in restraining the releases that are poised above the core of which we speak, I cannot tell you yes or no,” continued the physician, as though he hadn’t heard my words. “I can do—if you wish—one thing only, namely, I can sprinkle the poles of the place in question with finely ground particles of iron using a tube. This would increase somewhat the bounds of your freedom. Yet even if I do this, you will not know up until the last moment whether, in rushing to the aid of someone, you are not still an obedient tool against him.”

Seeing them both look at me, I agreed to submit to this operation, which did not take long, it caused me no pain but then neither did it produce in my mental state any perceptible change. To gain their trust even more, I asked if they would allow me to spend the night in the monastery, the entire day having passed in talk, deliberations and auscultations. They willingly agreed, but I devoted that time to a thorough examination of the woodshed, familiarizing myself with the smell of the abductors. I was capable of this, because it sometimes happens that a King’s agent finds its way blocked not by the victim himself, but by some other daredevil. Before daybreak I lay down on the straw where for many nights had slept the one allegedly abducted, and motionless I breathed in his odor, waiting for the monks. For I reasoned that if they had deceived me with some fabricated story, then they would fear my vengeful return from the false trail, therefore this darkest hour at early dawn would suit their purpose best, if they meant to destroy me. I lay, pretending to be deep in sleep, alert to the slightest sound coming from the garden, for they could barricade the door from the outside and set fire to the woodshed, in order that the fruit of my womb tear me asunder in flames. They would not even have to overcome their characteristic repugnance for murder, inasmuch as they considered me to be not a person but merely a machine of death; my remains they could bury in the garden and nothing would happen to them. I did not really know what I would do if I heard them approach, and never learned, since that did not come about. And so I remained alone with my thoughts, in which recurred over and over the amazing words spoken by the elder monk as he looked into my eyes, You are my sister. I still could not understand them, but when I bent over them something warm spread through my being and transformed me, it was as if I had lost a heavy fetus, with which I had been pregnant. In the morning however I ran out through the half-open gate and, steering clear of the monastery buildings according to the monk’s directions, headed full speed for the mountains visible on the horizon—for there he had aimed my pursuit.

I hastened greatly and by noon more than one hundred miles separated me from the monastery. I tore like a shell between the white birches, and when I ran straight through the high grass of the foothill meadows, it fell on either side as if beneath the measured strokes of a scythe.