Mortal Engines (7 page)

In one of the corners of the deck, against the very armor-plated wall, the scientists came upon a puddle, a ruddy sort of spatter that colored their silver fingers when they drew near; from this puddle they extricated shreds of an unknown garment, wet and red, and in addition a few slivers of something not very hard, fairly chalky. They knew not why, but a feeling of dread came over them as they stood there in the dark, in the prickling light of their crystals. But now the king had learned of this event; his messengers arrived at once, with the strictest orders to destroy the foreign vessel including everything that was upon it, and in particular the king commanded that the foreign travelers be committed to atomic fire.

The scientists replied that there was no one at all on board, only darkness and broken fragments, metal entrails and some dust speckled with tiny stains of red. The royal messenger started and immediately ordered the atomic piles to be ignited.

“In the name of the King!” he said. “The red that you have found is the harbinger of doom! It carries the white death, which knows nothing but to wreak vengeance upon those whose only crime is their existence…”

“If that was the white death, it can threaten us no longer, for the vessel is without life and whoever sailed it has perished in the ring of fortified reefs,” they answered.

“Infinite is the power of those pallid beings, that if they die, they are reborn anew countless times, far from the mighty suns! Carry out your orders, O atomizers!”

The wise ones and the scientists were greatly troubled when they heard these words. Still, they did not believe the prophecy of doom, for its likelihood seemed to them remote. Nevertheless they lifted the entire ship from its resting place, smashed it on anvils of platinum and, when it fell apart, immersed the pieces in heavy radiation, so that it was reduced to a myriad of flying atoms, which keep eternal silence, for atoms have no history, all are equal to each other, whether they come from the strongest of stars or from dead planets, or intelligent beings, both good and evil, because matter is the same throughout the Universe and no one need have fear of it.

However they took even these atoms and froze them down into a single lump, and shot that lump out towards the stars, and only then did they say to themselves with relief: “We are saved. Nothing can happen now.”

But while the platinum hammers had been striking the ship and as it crumbled, from a scrap of cloth besmeared with blood, from a torn-out seam there dropped an invisible spore, a spore so small that even a hundred like it could have been covered by a single grain of sand. And from this spore there hatched—at night, in the dust and ashes among the stones of the cavern—a white bud. From it sprang a second, a third, a hundredth, and in a gust of air they gave off oxygen and moisture, wherewith rust attacked the flagstones of the mirror cities, and imperceptible threads wound and wove about, incubating in the cool bowels of the Enterites, so that by the time they rose, they carried with them their own deaths. And a year did not pass, and they were stricken down. In the caves machines stood still, the crystal fires went out, a brownish leprosy ate at the sparkling domes, and when the last atomic heat had leaked away, darkness fell, and in that darkness there grew, penetrating the brittle skeletons, invading the rusted skulls, filling the extinguished sockets—a downy, damp, white mold.

Astronomers tell us that everything that is—the nebulae, the galaxies, the stars—is receding in all directions and as a result of this unending flight the Universe has been expanding now for billions of years.

Many are confounded by such universal retreat, and, turning it over in their minds backward, come to the conclusion that very, but
very
long ago the entire Cosmos was concentrated in a single point, a sort of stellar droplet, and that for some unaccountable reason something somehow led to its explosion, which continues to the present day.

And when they reason thus, their curiosity is roused as to what then could have been before, and they cannot solve that riddle. But here is how it happened.

In the previous Universe lived two constructors, masters without peer in the cosmogonic art, there being not a thing they could not put together. In order however to construct a thing, first a plan of it is needed, and a plan must be conceived, for where else is one to obtain it? And so both these constructors, Microx and Gigant, continually pondered the question of how to discover what it was possible to construct beyond the prodigies that occurred to them.

“I can assemble anything that enters my head,” said Microx. “But on the other hand not everything enters it. This limits me, as it does you—for we are unable to think of everything there is to think of, and it may well be that some other thing, not the thing which we think up and which we make, is worthier of execution! What say you to this?”

“You are right, of course,” Gigant replied. “Yet what can we do about it?”

“Whatever we create, we create from matter,” answered Microx, “and in it are contained all possibilities. If we contemplate a house, we build a house, if a crystal palace—then a palace we fashion, if a thinking star, we design a brain of flame—and this too we are able to construct. However there are more possibilities in matter than in our heads; the thing to do, then, is provide matter with a mouth, that it may tell us itself what else can be created from it, which would never cross our minds!”

“A mouth is necessary,” agreed Gigant. “But a mouth alone is not sufficient, for it expresses what the intellect within conceives. Therefore we must not only give matter a mouth, but implant in it intelligence as well, and then it will surely tell us all its secrets!”

“Well spoken,” said Microx. “The thing is worth attempting. I understand it thus: since everything that is, is energy, from energy we must fashion thought, beginning with the smallest, that is, the quantum. This quantum thought we must confine in a tiny cage built of atoms, that being the smallest, in other words we ought attack the problem as engineers of atoms, with a constant eye to miniaturization. When I can pour a hundred million geniuses into my pocket, and have room to spare—the goal will be attained: those geniuses will multiply and then any handful of intelligent sand will tell you, like a council composed of countless beings, what to do and how to go about it!”

“No, that’s not the way!” objected Gigant. “We must proceed from the other end, since everything that is, is mass. Out of the entire mass of the Universe, therefore, we must build a single brain, a brain of positively extraordinary magnitude, brimming with thought; when I question it, it will reveal to me the secrets of Creation—it alone. Your thinking powder is a useless oddity, for if each grain of genius says something different, you will lose and not gain in knowledge!”

Word led to word, the constructors quarreled, the quarrel grew heated, till it was quite out of the question that they undertake the task together. And so they parted, jeering at one another, and each got down to work in his own way. Microx took to catching quanta and locking them in atom cages, and since they could be packed most tightly into crystals, he then trained diamonds how to think, chalcedonies, rubies. The rubies worked best, and he imprisoned in them so much reasoning energy, that they gleamed. He also had a number of other self-thinking mineral minutiae, such as emeralds, greenly perspicacious, and topazes, sage in yellowness, yet the red mentality of the rubies pleased him most of all. As Microx labored thus among a host of piping diminutives, Gigant meanwhile devoted his time to augmentation; with tremendous effort he hauled together suns and whole galaxies, melted them down, mixed, welded, cemented, and, working his fingers to the bone, created a cosmocolossal macromegalopican, of such all-encompassing girth, that apart from it hardly anything remained, only a tiny crevice and—in it—Microx and his gems.

When both were finished, by then they did not care which of them would learn the more secrets from his creation, but rather which of them was right and had chosen well. Therefore they challenged one another to a contest, a competition. Gigant awaited Microx at the side of his cosmocolossus, which extended for endless light-years up, down and sideways, which had a corpus of dark stellar clouds, a breath of solar clusters, arms and legs of galaxies (fastened on with gravitation), a head of a hundred trillion iron globes, and on top a shaggy cap, aflame, a solar mane. When adjusting his cosmocolossus, Gigant flew from its ear to its mouth, and each such journey lasted seven months. Microx meantime appeared upon the field of battle by his solitary self, with empty hands; in his pocket he had a tiny ruby, which he wished to set against the titan. At the sight of it Gigant burst into laughter.

“And what will this speck tell us?” he asked. “What can its knowledge be, compared with that vast abyss of galactic thought, that nebular reasoning, in which suns convey ideas to other suns, powerful gravitation gives them weight, exploding stars add brilliance, and the interplanetary darkness depth?”

“Rather than praise ourselves and boast, let us get down to business,” Microx replied. “But no, wait. Why should we put questions to these things of our devising? They themselves can carry on the discourse and contend! Let my infinitesimal genius meet your immeasurable cosmosity in the lists of this tournament, where the shield is wisdom, and the sword—closely argued thought!”

“So let it be,” agreed Gigant. They then withdrew, leaving their handiwork alone on the field. In the darkness the red ruby circled, circled above the oceans of space, in which swam mountains of stars, he circled above the looming, luminous immensity of the leviathan, and he piped:

“Hey! You! Gargantuan galoot of fire, overblown good-for-what-I-can’t-imagine! Are you really able to think at all?!”

A year passed before these words reached the brain of the colossus, in which the firmaments had begun to turn, joined together with masterful harmony, and he marveled at such insolence and tried to see what it was that dared address him thus.

So he began to turn his head in the direction from which the question had come, however by the time he turned it, two years went by. He looked with bright galaxy-eyes into the void and saw nothing there, for the ruby had left long ago and now squeaked from behind his back:

“Goodness, what a sluggardly slow-wit we are, what a lunkering lug of a bugaboo! Instead of twisting your star-scraggly, nebulous head about like that, tell me if you can manage to add two and two together before half your blue giants bum out in that brobdingnagian brain and fizzle from old age!”

This impudent mockery angered the cosmocolossus, so he began—as fast as he possibly could—to turn around, since the voice was behind his back; and he turned more and more rapidly, and the milky ways whirled about the axis of his body, and the arms of his galaxies—till now straight—from the momentum curled and furled into spirals, and the stellar clouds twirled, becoming spherical clusters, and all the suns, globes and planets swirled like dervishes; but before he could shine his eyes on his opponent, the latter was already jeering at him from the side.

The jeering jewel rushed faster and faster, and the cosmocolossus also began to circle and circle, but he could in no way catch up, though now he was spinning like a top, until he built up such rotation, until he started wheeling with such frightful speed, that the bonds of gravitation became undone, the seams of attraction, which Gigant had put in, were strained to the limit and gave way, the stitches of electrostatic force all snapped, and—like a runaway cyclotron—the cosmocolossus suddenly burst apart and went flying off in all directions of the world, galaxies reeling like spiral torches, milky ways strewn here and there. And thus, dispersed by that centrifugal force, the Universe began to expand. Microx claimed afterwards that the victory was his, since Gigant’s cosmocolossus had exploded before it could say a single word; to this, however, Gigant replied that the purpose of the rivalry was to measure not cohesion, but intelligence, i.e. which of their creations was the wiser, and not—which held together the best. Inasmuch as this had nothing to do with the substance of the quarrel, Microx had hoodwinked and disgracefully deceived him.

Since that time, their quarrel has become more heated still. Microx searches for his ruby, which got mislaid somewhere during the catastrophe, but he cannot find it, for wherever he looks he sees a red glow, and runs there at once, but it is only the light of the nebulae receding since antiquity which glows red, so he continues his search, and it continues to be futile. As for Gigant, he attempts with gravitation-cords and radiation-threads to sew together the broken fabric of his cosmocolossus, using for a needle the hardest gamma rays. But whatever he sews together instantly falls apart, such is the terrible power of expansion that has been unleashed. And neither one nor the other succeeded in wresting from matter its secrets, though they schooled it in thought and equipped it with a mouth besides, yet before the crucial conversation came about, this misfortune intervened, a misfortune that some fools in their ignorance call the creation of the world.

For in reality it was only Gigant’s cosmocolossus that split into tiny fragments, owing to Microx’s ruby, and it flew into fragments so very tiny, that they are flying in all directions to this very day. And he who doubts this, let him ask the scientists whether or not it is true, that absolutely everything in the Universe turns upon its axis like a top; for from that dizzying turning everything began.

King Poleander Partobon, ruler of Cyberia, was a great warrior, and being an advocate of the methods of modem strategy, above all else he prized cybernetics as a military art. His kingdom swarmed with thinking machines, for Poleander put them everywhere he could; not merely in the astronomical observatories or the schools, but he ordered electric brains mounted in the rocks upon the roads, which with loud voices cautioned pedestrians against tripping; also in posts, in walls, in trees, so that one could ask directions anywhere when lost; he stuck them onto clouds, so they could announce the rain in advance, he added them to the hills and valleys—in short, it was impossible to walk on Cyberia without bumping into an intelligent machine. The planet was beautiful, since the King not only gave decrees for the cybernetic perfecting of that which had long been in existence, but he introduced by law entirely new orders of things. Thus for example in his kingdom were manufactured cyberbeetles and buzzing cyberbees, and even cyberflies—these would be seized by mechanical spiders when they grew too numerous. On the planet cyberbosks of cybergorse rustled in the wind, cybercalliopes and cyberviols sang—but besides these civilian devices there were twice as many military, for the King was most bellicose. In his palace vaults he had a strategic computer, a machine of uncommon mettle; he had smaller ones also, and divisions of cybersaries, enormous cybermatics and a whole arsenal of every other kind of weapon, including powder. There was only this one problem, and it troubled him greatly, namely, that he had not a single adversary or enemy and no one in any way wished to invade his land, and thereby provide him with the opportunity to demonstrate his kingly and terrifying courage, his tactical genius, not to mention the simply extraordinary effectiveness of his cybernetic weaponry. In the absence of genuine enemies and aggressors the King had his engineers build artificial ones, and against these he did battle, and always won. However inasmuch as the battles and campaigns were genuinely dreadful, the populace suffered no little injury from them. The subjects murmured when all too many cyberfoes had destroyed their settlements and towns, when the synthetic enemy poured liquid fire upon them; they even dared voice their discontent when the King himself, issuing forth as their deliverer and vanquishing the artificial foe, in the course of the victorious attacks laid waste to everything that stood in his path. They grumbled even then, the ingrates, though the thing was done on their behalf.