Fiasco by Stanislaw Lem Read Free Book Online

from the carcass of some mountainous monstrosity. One could even make out on them the reddish, bloodclotted places where the tendons had been attached. Nearby were draped skin coverings, with bits of hair that the wind gently combed and lay in changing waves. Through the mist loomed more many-storied arthropods, gnawing through one another even in death. From faceted, mirrorlike blocks thrusted antlers, also gleaming, among a spill of femurs and skulls of a dirty-white color. He saw this, realizing that the images that arose in his brain, the macabre associations, were only an illusion, a trick of the eyes shocked by the strangeness. If he dug methodically in his memory, he would probably remember which compounds yielded—in a billion-year chemistry—precisely these forms that, stained with hematites, impersonated bloody bones, or that went beyond the modest accomplishments of terrestrial asbestos to create an iridescent fluff as of the most delicate fleece. But such sober analysis would have no effect on what the eyes saw.
    For the very reason that here nothing served a purpose—not ever, not to anyone—and that here no guillotine of evolution was in play, amputating from every genotype whatever did not contribute to survival, nature, constrained neither by the life she bore nor by the death she inflicted, could achieve liberation, displaying a prodigality characteristic of herself, a limitless wastefulness, a brute magnificence that was useless, an eternal power of creation without a goal, without a need, without a meaning. This truth, gradually penetrating the observer, was more unsettling than the impression that he was witness to a cosmic mimicry of death, or that these were in fact the mortal remains of unknown beings that lay beneath the stormy horizon. So one had to turn upside down one's natural way of thinking, which was capable of going only in one direction: these shapes were similar to bones, ribs, skulls, and fangs not because they had once served life—they never had—but only because the skeletons of terrestrial vertebrates, and their fur, and the chitinous armor of the insects, and the shells of the mollusks all possessed the same architectonics, the same symmetry and grace, since Nature could produce this just as well where neither life nor life's purposefulness had ever existed, or ever would.
    Fallen into such philosophical reverie, the young pilot gave a start, remembering how he had come here, and his vehicle, and his mission. Obediently, the iron strider magnified that waver and jerk a thousand-fold, bringing him back to reality with the howl of its drive transmission and the trembling of its entire mass. The pilot blushed. Collecting himself, he moved on. At first he was reluctant to set his feet, which landed like steam hammers, on the pseudo-skeletons, but sidestepping them proved as futile as it was troublesome. Therefore he hesitated only on occasion, when his way was blocked by a particularly remarkable structure, and even then he walked around it only if plowing through the high heap and crushing it presented any difficulty to his servant-giant. Also, from up close the impression that he was tramping through endless bones—smashing craniums, branched phalanges of wings, zygomatic arches that had separated from the frontals, plus various horns—dwindled to nothing. Sometimes it was as if he were walking on the remains of organic machines—hybrid beings, half-animal, arisen from the union of the living and the nonliving, of reason and unreason—and sometimes it was as if he were bringing his iridium boots down on weirdly spreading gems, precious and impure, partially clouded due to interpenetrations and metamorphoses. Because from his height he had to watch constantly where and at what angle he was placing the towerlike legs, and because this march of the first stage was taking more than an hour—it was necessary to go slow—he laughed at the mighty efforts made by the artists of Earth