The Star Diaries by Stanislaw Lem Read Free Book Online Page A

whose physical appearance inspires in us both ridicule and horror, a horror we are scarcely able to overcome. Today we see, there on that hitherto white, unsullied seat, a creature that lacks even the courage of a consistent criminal, for it ever seeks to dress its body-strewn career with the splendor of false names, names whose true and terrible meaning may be deciphered by any objective student of interstellar civilization. Yes, Esteemed Council…”
    In point of fact I got only fragments from this two-hour harangue, but they were more than enough. The Thubanian created a picture of monsters wallowing in a sea of blood, and he did this without haste, methodically opening still other learned books, records, annals, chronicles, all placed in preparation on his desk, and took to hurling the materials to the floor when he was done with them, as if in a sudden fit of disgust, as if the very pages that described us had become caked with the victims’ blood. Then he turned to our recorded history; he told of the massacres, pogroms, wars, crusades, genocides, and using slides and full-scale charts showed the technologies of crime, instruments of torture, ancient and medieval. When he started in on the present day, sixteen assistants had to wheel in carts that groaned beneath stacks of additional documentation; other assistants, or rather UP paramedicals, meanwhile administered (from tiny helicopters) first aid to the hundreds of listeners who had grown weak during the lecture, but me they ignored, in the naïve, belief—I suppose—that the stream of gory details of Earth’s culture would not affect me in the least. But actually about halfway through that presentation I began, like one on the brink of madness, to fear my very self, as if, thrown in among these phantasmagorical, outlandish beings that surrounded me on every side, I were the only monster. Then, just as it seemed that this horrible list of accusations would never end, the words were uttered:
    “And now let the Esteemed Assembly proceed to vote upon the motion of the Rhohch delegation!”
    The hall fell into a deathly silence, till something stirred right beside me. It was my Rhohch rising, in the attempt—a desperate attempt—to refute at least a few of the charges made. But he put his foot in it completely when he tried to assure the assembly that mankind felt the deepest respect for the Neanderthals, its venerable ancestors, who had died out entirely by themselves; the Thubanian, however, demolished my defender on the spot with a single, well-aimed question, put directly to me: on Earth, did calling someone a “Neanderthal” pass for a compliment, or was it instead a term of abuse?
    Well it was all over now, I thought, every hope was lost, and I would be limping home like a dog sent back to its kennel for having been caught with a little bird, half-smothered, in its jaws. But then, in the hum and buzz of the hall, the Secretary-General leaned over to the microphone and said:
    “The chair recognizes the representative from the Iridian delegation.”
    The Iridian was short, silvery gray and plump, like a puff of smoke caught in the slanting rays of the winter sun.
    “I would like to ask,” he said, “who will be paying the Earthlings’ enrollment fee? They themselves? It’s a considerable sum—a billion tons of platinum, not every applicant has that kind of metal!”
    An angry murmur filled the amphitheater.
    “Your question will be appropriate only when the motion of the Rhohch delegation has been taken to a vote and passed!” said the Secretary-General after a moment’s hesitation.
    “With the permission of Your Galactitude!” returned the Iridian. “I happen to be of a somewhat different opinion and therefore wish to support the question I just raised with a few observations, which I think you shall find most relevant. I have here, to begin with, a work of that renowned consultant planetologist, hyperdoctor Phrogghrus, and I quote from it as