Lem, Stanislaw (20 page)

and locate the opening, a black dot in that white-hot furnace. Steer

straight down into this, and put aside all fear, for the tunnel's

width will let eight ships, starboard to larboard, pass through. The

sight that then appears outside your portholes truly has no equal.

First there is the famous Phlogistinian Flamefall, and then as

depending on the weather: when the solar depths are swept with

pyromagnetic storms that surge a billion miles or more away, one sees

great tortured knots of fire, pulsing arteries swollen with white,

glowing clots; when, on the other hand, the storm is closer, or it is

a typhoon of the seventh order, the roof will shudder, as if

that white dough of incandescence were about to fall, but this is an

illusion, for it spills over but does not fall, and burns, but cannot

consume, held in check by the tensile ribs of the Fffian Force

Fields. But when one observes the core of the prominence bulge, and

the long-forked bolts of the foun-tainheads they call Infernions

flare closer, it is best to keep a firm grip upon the wheel, and look

sharp into the solar viscera and not at any chart, for the

utmost steering skill is needed here. Indeed, that road is never

traversed the same way twice; the entire tunnel gouged through

Glossaurontus twists continually, writhes and thrashes like a serpent

flailed. Keep therefore your eyes well peeled, and your safety

frigi-packs (that rim your visors with transparent icicles) hard by,

and carefully watch the blazing walls that rush up and lash their

thundering tongues, and should you hear the hull begin to

sizzle, battered and bespattered in the seething solar cauldron, then

trust to nothing but your own lightning reflexes. Though you

must also bear in mind that not every burst of flame nor every jump

of the tunnel signifies a starquake or a squall in the white oceans

of fire; remembering this, the seasoned mariner will not cry

'man the pumps' at the drop of a match, and later have to face the

ridicule of his peers, who will say he is the type that would try to

douse a star's eternal light with a beaker of liquid nitrogen. To the

one who inquires what he should do if a real quake descends upon his

vessel, most wags will answer that then it is quite enough to heave a

sigh, there being little time for prayer or the writing of wills, and

as for the
eyes
, these may be open or shut according to

personal preference, for the fire will burn them out in any event.

Such disasters, however, are extremely rare, since the brackets and

braces installed by the Imperial Myrapocles hold marvelously well,

and really, intrastellar flight, gliding past the curved, sparkling

hydrogen mirrors of Glossaurontus, can be a most delightful

experience. Then too, they say—and not without reason—that

whoever enters the tunnel will at least exit soon after, which

certainly cannot be said of the Great Shroud Wastes. And were the

tunnel to be totally destroyed by a quake, the only alternate route

possible would go through those Wastes, which—as their name

indicates—are blacker than night, for the light of the

neighboring stars dares not enter there. There, as in a mortar, one

finds a constant colliding and crashing together—which makes a

terrific din—of scrap metal, cans, wrecks of ships that were

led astray by the treachery of Glossaurontus and crushed in the cruel

grip of those bottomless gravitational vortices, then left to drift

in circles until such time as the Universe itself runs down. To the

east of the Shroud is the kingdom of the Slipjaws, to the west, the

Bogglyeyed, and in the south are roads, heavily dotted with fortified

mortalitaries, leading to the gentler sphere of sky-blue Lazulia,

beyond which lies the bud-beaming Murgundigan, where the

archipelago of iron-poor stars, known as Alcaron's Carriage, shines

blood-red.

"The Shroud itself, as we said,

is as black as the Glossaurontian corridor is white. Nor does the

only peril there lie in its vortices, in debris pulled down from

dizzy heights by the current, in meteors gone berserk; for some say

that in an unknown place, among dark, crepuscular caverns, at the

bottom of an immeasurably deep and unplumbed profundity, for

ages and ages now there sits a certain creature, anomalous and

wholly anonymous, for anyone who meets the thing and learns its name

will surely never live to tell a soul. And they say that that

Anonymoid is both a pirate and a mage, and it lives in a castle

raised by black gravitation, and the moat is a perpetually raging

storm, and the walls non-being, impenetrable in their nothingness,

and the windows are all blind, and the doors dumb; the Anonymoid lies

in wait for caravans, but whenever it feels an overwhelming hunger

for gold and skeletons, it blows black dust into the faces of the

suns that serve as signposts, and once these are extinguished, and

some wayfarers have strayed from their path of safety, it comes

whirling out of the void, wraps them tightly in its coils, and

carries them off to its castle of oblivion, without ever

dropping the least ruby brooch, for the monster is monstrously

meticulous. Afterward, only the gnawed remains drift away and float

through the Wastes, followed by long trails of ship rivets, which are

spit out from the monster's maw like seeds. But lately, ever since

the Glossaurontian tunnel was opened by the forced labor of

innumerable turboservoserfs, and all navigation takes the way of that

brightest of corridors, the Anonymoid rages, deprived of further

plunder, and the heat of its fury now illumines the darkness of the

Shroud, and it glows through the black barriers of gravitation like a

fiend's skull rotting in some dank, phosphorescent cocoon. There are

scoffers, true, who say that no such monster exists and never did—and

they say so with impunity, for it is hard to assail an opinion of

things for which there are no words, an opinion formed moreover on a

quiet summer afternoon, far from cosmic shrouds and stellar

conflagrations. Yes, it is easy not to believe in monsters,

considerably more difficult to escape their dread and loathsome

clutches. Was not the Murgundiganian Cybernator himself, with an

entourage of eighty in three ships, swallowed up, so that nothing

remained of that magnaterium but a few chewed buckles, which were

cast up on the shore of Solara Minor by a nebular wave and

subsequently discovered by the villagers of those parts? And

were not countless other worthies devoured without mercy or appeal?

Therefore let at least electronic memory pay silent tribute to these

poor unburied multitudes, if no avenger can be found for them, one

who will deal with that perpetrator according to the old sidereal

laws."

All this Trurl read one day from a

book, yellowed with age, which he chanced to obtain from a passing

peddler, and he took it straightway to Klapaucius and read it a

second time, aloud, from beginning to end, as he was much intrigued

by the marvels described therein.

Klapaucius, a wise constructor who

knew the Cosmos well and had no little acquaintance with suns and

nebulae of various kinds, only smiled and nodded, saying:

"You don't believe, I hope, a

single word of that rubbish?"

"And why shouldn't I believe it?"

Trurl bridled. "Look, here's even an engraving, skillfully done,

of the Anonymoid eating two photon schooners and hiding the booty in

his cellar. Anyway, isn't there in fact a tunnel through a

supergiant? Beth-el-Geuse, I mean. Surely you're not such an

ignoramus in cosmography to doubt that possibility…"

"As for illustrations, why, I

could draw you a dragon right now, with a thousand suns for each eye.

Would you accept the sketch as proof of its existence?"

Klapaucius replied. "And as for tunnels—first of all, the

one of which you speak has a length of only two million miles, not

some billions, and secondly, the star of which you speak is

practically burnt out, and in the third place, intrastellar travel

presents no hazard whatever, as you know perfectly well, having flown

that way yourself. And as for the so-called Great Shroud Wastes, this

is in reality nothing but a cosmic dump some ten kiloparsecs across,

floating in the vicinity of Maeridia and Tetrarchida, and not around

any Slopjaws or Gaussauronts, which don't exist anywhere; and it's

dark there, yes, but simply because of all the garbage. And as for

your Anonymoid, there's obviously no such thing! It isn't even a

respectable, ancient myth, but some cheap yarn concocted out of a

half-baked cranium."

Trurl bit his lip.

"You think the tunnel safe,"

he said, "because it was I who flew it. But you would be of an

altogether different opinion had it been you, instead. But enough of

the tunnel. As far as the Shroud and Anonymoid are concerned, it

isn't my habit to settle such things with words. We'll go there, and

then you'll see"—and he held up the heavy book—

"you'll see what's true in here, and what is not!"

Klapaucius did his best to dissuade

him, but when he saw that Trurl, stubborn as usual, had absolutely no

intention of backing down from so singularly conceived a sally, he

first declared that he would have nothing more to do with him, but

before very long had joined in preparing for the voyage: he didn't

wish to see his friend perish alone—somehow, two can look

death in the eye more cheerfully than one.

Finally, having stocked the larder

with plenty of provisions, for the way would lead through vast,

barren regions (not as picturesque, to be sure, as the book

depicted), they took off in their trusty ship. During the flight,

they stopped now and then to ask directions, particularly when they

had left far behind the territory with which they were familiar. Not

much could be learned from the natives, however, for these spoke

reliably only about their immediate surroundings—of things

that lay beyond, where they had never ventured themselves, they

gave the most absurd account, and in great detail, elaborating with

both relish and a sense of dread. Klapaucius called such tales

"corroded," having in mind the corrosis-sclerosion that

attacks all aging brains.

But when they had come within five or

six million light-blocks of the Black Wastes, they began to hear

rumors of some robber-giant who called himself The PHT Pirate. No one

they spoke to had actually seen him, nor knew what "PHT"

was supposed to mean. Trurl thought this might be a distortion of

"pH," which would indicate an ionic pirate with a high

concentration and very base, but Klapaucius, more level-headed,

preferred to refrain from entertaining such hypotheses. To all

accounts, this pirate was an ill-tempered brute, as evidenced by the

fact that, even after stripping his victims of everything, he was

never satisfied, his greed being great and insatiable, and beat them

long and cruelly before setting them free. For a moment or two the

constructors considered whether they shouldn't arm themselves

with blasters or blades before entering the Wastes, but soon

concluded that the best weapon was their wits, sharpened in

constructorship, subtle, agile and universal; so they set out just as

they were.

It must be confessed that Trurl, as

they traveled on, was bitterly disillusioned; the starry starlight,

the fiery fires, the cavernous voids, the meteor reefs and shooting

shoals were nowhere near as enchanting to the eye as promised in the

ancient tome. There were only a few old stars about, and those were

unimpressive, if not downright shabby; some barely flickered, like

cinders in a heap of ashes, and some were completely dark and

hardened on the surface, red veins glowing dully through cracks in

their charred and wrinkled crusts. Of flaming jungles of combustion

and mysterious vortices there was not a sign, nor had anyone ever

heard of them, for the desolate waste was a place of tedium, and

tedious in the extreme, by virtue of the fact that it was desolate,

and a waste. As far as meteors went, they were everywhere, but

in that rattling, clattering swarm was a good deal more flying refuse

than honest magnetites, tektites or aerolites—for the simple

reason that the Galactic Pole was only a stone's throw away, and the

swirling dark currents sucked to this very spot, southward,

prodigious quantities of flotsam and jetsam from the central zones of

the Galaxy. Hence all the tribes and nations in the neighborhood

spoke of this area not as any sort of Shroud, but as nothing more or

less than what it was: a junkyard.

Trurl hid his disappointment as best

he could, in order not to occasion sarcastic comments from

Klapaucius, and steered straight into the Wastes. Immediately sand

began to patter on the bow; every kind of stellar debris, spewed from

prominences or supernovae, collected and caked up on the ship's hull,