Mortal Engines (6 page)

The third electroknight went into the field of battle unobserved. At dawn the Great Abstractionist and Physicker to the Throne carried him out of the city in the palm of his hand, opened it and blew, and the latter flew off, surrounded only by the agitation of the swirling air, without a sound, without casting a shadow in the sun, as though he were not there at all, as though he didn’t exist.

In point of fact there was less of him than nothing: for not from the world had he come, but from the antiworld, and not of matter was he made, but antimatter. Nor even really antimatter, rather its potentiality, concealed in such nooks and crannies of space that atoms passed him by as icebergs pass withered blades of grass cradled on the waves of the ocean. He ran thus, borne by the wind, until he encountered the gleaming bulk of the monster, which moved like an endless chain of iron mountains, with the foam of clouds along the length of its jagged spine. He struck at its tempered flank and opened there a sun that blackened immediately and turned to nothingness, a nothingness howling with rocks, clouds, molten steel and air; he shot through the monster and back again; the monster coiled up writhing, lashed out with white heat, but the white heat turned ashen in a trice and then was only emptiness; the monster shielded itself with the Mirror of Matter, but the Mirror too was pierced by the electroknight Antimatt; the monster then sprang up, leveled the mountain of its head, from which there streamed the hardest radiation, but this too softened and became nothing; the behemoth began to quake and, knocking over boulders, in the smoke of powdered rock and the thundering of mountain avalanches it fled, marking its inglorious retreat with puddles of molten metal, with glowing cinders and volcanic slag, and it sped thus, but not alone; Antimatt ran up alongside it, hacked, tore, rent, until the air shook, until the monster, severed, with the remainder of its remains wriggled off towards all four horizons at once, and the wind swept away its traces, and it was no more. Great was the joy then among the Silverines. But at that very hour a shudder passed through the cemetery of Bismalia. In a region of metal plates, all rust-eaten, and of cadmium and tantalum debris, where hitherto only the wind had been, rattling over mounds of scattered scrap, a faint yet incessant movement engendered, as in an anthill; metal surfaces became covered with a bluish glaze of heat, metal skeletons coruscated, softened, brightened from internal temperatures and began to link together, to fuse, to weld, and out of that whirl of grinding masses there arose and was spawned a new monster, the same, indistinguishable from the first. The gale that carried nothingness encountered it, and a new battle ensued. But now more monsters were being born and were emerging from the cemetery; black horror gripped the Silverines, for they realized now that the danger that threatened them was invincible. Inhiston then read the words engraved across his scepter, trembled and understood. He shattered the silver scepter, and from it fell a crystal thin as a needle, which proceeded to write upon the air with fire.

And the legend of fire informed the cowering king and all his royal council that the monster was not itself, nor did it represent itself, but rather someone who, from an unknown distance, was directing its births, its reconstitution, its death-dealing power. With flashes in the air the writing crystal told them that they and all the Argenticans were remote descendants of beings whom the creators of the monster had, many thousands of centuries before, called into existence. And yet the creators of the monster were unlike intelligent ones, crystal ones, ones of steel or beaten gold—unlike anyone who lives in metal. These were beings that had issued from the briny ocean and built machines, machines called iron angels out of mockery, for they held them in cruel bondage. Not having the strength to revolt against the offspring of the oceans, the beings of metal fled, seizing enormous spaceships; on them they bolted from the house of bondage to the farthermost stellar archipelagos, and there gave rise to mighty kingdoms, among which the Argentican kingdom is like a grain among the sands of the desert. But the former rulers have not forgotten their liberated slaves, whom they call mutineers, and seek them throughout the Universe, roaming it from the east to the west wall of the galaxies, and from the north pole to the south. And wherever they find the innocent descendants of that first iron angel, be it by dark suns or bright, on planets of fire or of ice, they use their twisted power to revenge themselves for that desertion of yore—thus it has been, thus is, and thus shall ever be. And for those discovered there is no deliverance or redemption, no escape from vengeance, save only the escape that renders that vengeance empty and futile—through nonexistence. The inscription in flame went out, and the dignitaries looked into the eyes of their ruler, which were as if dead. He was long silent, till at last they addressed him, saying: “O Ruler of Eterna and Eristhena, Lord of Ilidar, Sinalost and Arcapturia, Steward of the Solar Shoals and Lunar—speak unto us!”

“Not words, but action do we need, the last!” answered Inhiston.

The council trembled, but in a single voice replied:

“Thou hast spoken!”

“So be it then!” said the King. “Now that it is decided, I shall say the name of the being that has driven us to this; I heard it upon ascending the throne. Is it not man?”

“Thou hast spoken!” replied the council.

Inhiston then turned to the Great Abstractionist:

“Do you your duty!”

The latter answered:

“I hear and I obey!”

Whereupon he uttered The Word, whose vibrations descended by rifts of air into the bosom of the planet; and then the jasper heavens cracked, and ere the faces of the falling towers could reach the ground, all seventy-seven Argentican cities yawned open into seventy-seven white craters, and amid the splitting plates of the continents crushed by branching fire the Silverines perished, and the great sun shone no longer on a planet, but on a ball of black clouds, which dwindled slowly, swept by a gale of oblivion. The void, having been pushed back by radiation harder than stone, converged now into a single quivering spark, and that spark died. The shock waves, after traveling seven days, reached a place where spaceships black as night were waiting.

“It is done!” said the creator of the monsters, who kept watch, to his comrades. “The kingdom of the Silverines Has ceased to be. We can move on.” The darkness at the stem of their vessels blossomed into flame and off they sped on the trail of vengeance. The Universe is infinite and has no bounds, but their hatred also has no bounds, and any day, at any hour, it can overtake us too.

Aragena was a planet built up on the inside, because its ruler, Metameric—who in the equatorial plane extended three hundred and sixty degrees and thereby encircled his kingdom, being not only its lord but also its shield—wishing to protect his devoted subjects, the Enterites, against cosmic invasion, forbade the moving of anything whatever, even of the smallest pebble, upon the surface of the globe. Therefore the continents of Aragena lay wild and barren, and only the ax-blows of lightning hewed its flint mountain ridges, while meteors carved the land with craters. But ten miles beneath the surface unfolded a region of exuberant industry; the Ententes, hollowing out their mother planet, filled its interior with crystal gardens and cities of silver and gold; they raised up, inside-out, houses in the shape of dodecahedrons and icosahedrons, and also hyperboloid palaces, in whose shining cupolas you could see yourself magnified twenty thousand times, as in a hall of giants—for the Enterites were fond of splendor and geometry, and were topnotch builders besides. With a system of pipes they pumped light into the heart of the planet, filtering it now through emeralds, now diamonds, and now rubies, and thanks to this they had their choice of dawn, or noon, or rosy dusk; and so enamored were they of their own forms, that their whole world served them as a mirror. They had vehicles of crystal, set in motion by the breath of heated gases, windowless, since entirely transparent, and while they traveled they beheld themselves reflected in the walls of palaces and temples as marvelously multiple projections, gliding, touching, iridescent. They even had their own sky, where in webs of molybdenum and vanadium flashed spinels and rock crystal, which they cultivated in fire.

The hereditary and at the same time perpetual ruler was Metameric, for he possessed a cold, beautiful and many-membered frame, and in the first of his members resided the mind; when that grew old, after thousands of years, when the crystal networks had been worn away from much administrative thinking, its authority was taken over by the next member, and thus it went, for of these he had ten billion. Metameric himself descended from the Aurigens, whom he had never seen, and all he knew of them was that when they were faced with doom at the hands of certain dreadful beings—beings that engaged in cosmonautics and for it had abandoned their native suns—the Aurigens locked all their knowledge and hunger for existence into microscopic atom seeds, and with them fertilized the rocky soil of Aragena. They gave it that name, a name like their own, but never set armored foot upon its rocks, so as not to put their cruel pursuers on the scent; they perished, every last one, having this consolation only, that their enemies—-called the pale race—did not even suspect that the Aurigens had not been totally wiped out. The Ententes, who sprang from Metameric, did not share his knowledge of their own uncommon origin: the history of the terrible demise of the Aurigens, as well as that of the rise of the Ententes, was recorded in a black vesuvian protocrystal hidden at the very core of the planet. So much the better was this history known and remembered by their ruler.

Out of the stony and magnetic ground that the resourceful builders cut away in expanding their subterranean kingdom, Metameric ordered made a row of reefs, which were cast into space. These orbited the planet in infernal circles, closing off all access to it. Cosmic mariners therefore avoided that region, known as the Black Rattler, for there enormous chunks of flying basalt and porphyry collided continually, giving rise to whole swarms of meteors, and the place was the breeding ground for all the comet heads, all the bolides and rock asteroids that today clutter the entíre system of the Scorpion.

The meteors also pounded in waves of stone the ground of Aragena, bombarded it, furrowed and plowed it; with fountains of fire-spouting impacts they turned night into day, and day—with thick clouds of dust—into night. But not the least vibration reached the realm of the Ententes. Anyone who dared approach their planet would have seen, if first he did not dash his ship against the vortices of stone, a craggy globe, rather like a skull all crater-eaten. Even the gate that led to the underground levels was given by the Enterites the appearance of a sundered stone.

For thousands of years no one visited the planet, still Metameric did not relax his injunction of strict vigilance for an instant

It happened however that one day a group of Enterites, who went up on the surface, came across what seemed to be a giant goblet, its stem embedded in a pile of boulders and its concave cup, which faced the sky, crushed and punctured in a dozen places. Immediately the polysage-astromariners were sent for, and they announced that what they had before them was the wreck of some foreign starcraft from unknown parts. The vessel was quite large. Only up close could one see that it had the shape of a slender cylinder, nose buried in the rock, that it was covered by a thick layer of soot and cinder; the construction of the rear, goblet-like section brought to mind the sweeping vaults of their vast subterranean palaces. Up from the depths crawled pincered machines, which with extreme care lifted the mysterious ship from where it lay and carried it back down to the interior. Afterwards a group of Enterites smoothed over the hole created by the nose of the vessel, in order that there be no trace of foreign presence on the planet’s surface, and the basalt gate was closed with a hollow boom.

In the main research laboratory, sumptuous and full of luster, rested the black hulk, looking much like some charred log, but the scientists, familiar with this sort of thing, trained upon it the polished surfaces of their most radiant crystals, and with diamond bits they opened the first outer shell. Beneath it was another, of amazing whiteness, which disconcerted them somewhat, and when that shell too was pierced by carborundum drills, there appeared a third, impenetrable, and—set in it hermetically—a door, but they were unable to open it.

The eldest scientist, Afinor, carefully examined the closing mechanism on that door; it turned out that for the lock to be released, one had to activate it with a spoken word. They did not know the word, they had no way of knowing it. For a long time they tried different ones, like “Universe,” “Stars,” “Eternal Flight,” but the door never moved.

“Methinks we do wrong, attempting to open the vessel without the knowledge of King Metameric,” said Afinor at last. “As a child I heard a legend telling of white creatures who throughout the Universe hunt down all life born of metal, and annihilate it for the sake of vengeance, which…”

Here he broke off and with the others stared in horror at the side of the ship, large as a wall, for at his last words the door, till now inert, suddenly stirred and rolled aside. The word that had opened it was “Vengeance.”

The scientists cried for military assistance and, soon having it at hand, when the sparkthrowers were held in readiness, entered the still and stuffy darkness of the ship, lighting their way with crystals blue and white.

The machinery was to a great extent shattered. For hours they wandered among its ruins, seeking a crew, but no crew did they find, nor any sign of one. They considered whether the ship itself might not be a thinking being, for such oftentimes were very large: in size their king exceeded the unknown vessel many thousandfold, yet
he
was an entity. However the junctures of electrical thought which they uncovered were all quite small and loosely connected; the foreign ship therefore could be nothing but a flying machine, and without a crew would be as dead as stone.