Mortal Engines by Stanislaw Lem Read Free Book Online Page A

from view. Then followed an uneasy night of expectation; one waited for the sounds of battle, for red glows in the sky, but nothing happened. Only at daybreak did the wind bring a faint rumbling, as if from some distant storm. Then silence again, and the sun shining. Suddenly a hundred suns blazed overhead and a pile of fiery bolides came crashing down on Eterna; they crushed the palaces, smashed walls to smithereens, burying beneath them victims who despairingly called for help, but one could not even hear their futile cries. This was Brazen returning, for the monster had shattered him, dismembered him, and flung the remains above the atmosphere; now they descended, molten in their fall, and turned one-fourth of the capital to rubble. It was a most terrible defeat. For two days and two nights afterwards there fell out of the sky a brazen rain.
    Then issued forth against the monster dizzying Mercuriel, indestructible it would appear, for the more strokes he received, the more durable he grew. Blows did not disperse him—on the contrary, they consolidated him. Wavering above the plain, he came to the mountains, among them discerned the monster, and advanced upon it, rolling down a rocky slope. The latter awaited him, motionless. Heaven and earth shook with thunder. The monster turned into a white wall of fire, Mercuriel turned into a black abyss that swallowed it. The monster thrust itself clean through him, wheeled around on wings of flame and charged a second time—and again passed through its assailant, rendering him no harm. Violet lightning crackled from the cloud in which they clashed, but no thunder could be heard, the thunder was drowned in the booming struggle of the giants. The monster saw that nothing would be accomplished in this way, so it sucked its entire outer heat into itself, flattened out and made of itself a Mirror of Matter: whatever stood opposite the Mirror was reflected in it, not with an image however but with the reality. Mercuriel beheld himself repeated in that glass, he struck, he grappled with himself, his mirrored self, but as it was himself he naturally could not defeat it. For three days he battled thus, till he absorbed such a multitude of blows that he became more solid than stone, than metal, than anything, with the sole exception of the core of a White Dwarf—and when he reached that limit, both he and his mirrored reproduction sank into the bowels of the planet, leaving behind nothing but a chasm in the rock, a crater which instantly began to fill with ruby-bright lava from the subterranean depths.
    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