Authors: The Cyberiad [v1.0] [htm]
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,