Fiasco by Stanislaw Lem Read Free Book Online Page A

to reach beyond the boundary of human imagination (which must visualize everything); at how the poor devils beat against the walls in their minds; and at how little, really, they departed from platitude, though straining to the utmost to depart—while here, in a single acre, there was more proud originality than in a hundred of their anxious, anguished art shows.
    There being no stimulus to which a man did not soon become accustomed, before long he was marching through the cemeteries of chalcocites, spinels, amethysts, plagioclases—or, rather, their distant, nonterrestrial relatives—as if this were ordinary rock debris underfoot. In an instant he shattered a branch that had taken millions of years to crystallize into unique, unrepeatable forkings, not wanting to but forced to reduce it to powdered glass. Although from time to time he regretted the loss of the more splendid of these works of eons, they crowded each other so much, eclipsed each other in such extreme profusion, that finally only one thing impressed him.
    Namely, the extent to which this region seemed to him—and not to him alone!—a dream, a kingdom of phantoms, and of a beauty afflicted by madness. This was a realm—he said to himself, almost aloud—where nature slept, incarnating her magnificent grimness, her unfettered nightmares, directly somehow, without the mediation of any Psyche, into the solid hardness of material forms. Just as in a dream, whatever he saw was both totally alien and extremely familiar, reminding him continually of something that in the next minute would always elude him, and he would remain with a senselessness that concealed some subtle deceit—because here things seemed definite-defined only in their ancient origins; they could never complete themselves, never achieve full realization, never decide on a conclusion, on a destiny.
    Thus he mused, dazed by both the surroundings and his own reflections, since he was not in the habit of philosophizing. He had the risen sun behind him now, so his shadow preceded him, and it was strange to see, in the movements of that long, sharp-cornered, forward-rushing silhouette, its machine nature and his own, human, nature combined. The shape was that of a headless robot swaying, as it went, like a boat, but it had at the same time movements peculiar only to him, displaying them as if with a perverse ostentation since they were magnified, exaggerated. True, he had noticed this before, but the nearly two-hour march in this enchanted place somehow charged or sharpened the imagination. And it did not bother him when, turning more to the west from Roembden, he lost radio contact with the Roembdenites. He would be emerging from the radio shadow at mile thirty—not that far ahead—but for now he wanted to be by himself, free of the stock questions and the reports in reply.
    On the horizon there were dark shapes, he could not tell whether of clouds or mountains. Angus Parvis, on his way to Grail, not once in the whole rambling sequence of his ruminations connected his name with Parsifal. It was always difficult for a man to step out of his mental identity—it was like jumping out of one's skin—let alone into mythology. His attention wandered from the immediate surroundings of his route, particularly as the scenery of counterfeit death, the anatomical theater of planetary minerals, was thinning out. He passed places that gleamed with such deception, as if arranged mysteriously for his eyes alone—he passed them now with true indifference. (From the moment he made his decision, he refused to think about what had prompted that decision. This was not a problem for him. As an astronaut, alone for long periods, he had learned how not to argue with himself.) He marched on in the swaying Digla: the colossus had to tilt from side to side, but he was well acquainted with that. The tachometer indicated about thirty miles an hour.
    The grisly reptilian-amphibian dances of death gave way to gentle folds of