Read Online Tales of Pirx the Pilot by Stanislaw Lem - Free Book Online
Authors: Stanislaw Lem
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fluttered aimlessly in space like flakes of charred paper. Throughout this flurry of oscillating movements there was the awareness of some terrific exertion of will, some last-ditch effort to traverse the realm of murky oblivion that had once been his own body but was now reduced to an insensate, chilling nothingness—to reach out and touch someone, to catch one final glimpse of him…
“Hold it,” something said in an astonishingly clear and matter-of-fact voice, one decidedly not his own. Some sympathetic onlooker? Where? He could have sworn he’d heard a voice. No, it was only his imagination playing tricks on him.
“Hold it. If others have lived to tell about it, then it can’t be fatal. So just hang in there.”
The words spun around until they were emptied of their meaning. Then it started up again: the slow dismemberment, the breaking up, the crumbling apart of everything like gray, water-soaked tissue, melting like a snowcapped peak warmed by the sun. Swept up by it, he was freighted passively away.
I’m a goner, he thought in earnest, convinced that this was death, that it was not a dream. It swamped him—no, not him, but them, his manifold selves, too prolific to be counted.
What am I doing here? Where am I? In the ocean? On the Moon? Taking part in some experiment…?
He refused to believe it was an experiment. What—vanish because of a little paraffin and a tankful of salt water? Hey! Enough of this crap. And he began to fight back against whatever it was; he exerted every muscle; it was like trying to heft a boulder. But there was nothing left of him, not enough to make his muscles flinch. During his last glimmer of consciousness he mustered the strength to groan—feeble and distant, the sound was like a radio signal from another planet.
For a second or so he almost revived, only to surrender to an even blacker, more nullifying ordeal.
He was not in any physical discomfort. If only it had hurt! If only he could have experienced a twinge of real pain, the kind that bestows limits, presence, confirmation of self… But it was painless, a numbing surge of nothingness. He felt the air rush into him—spasmodically, in snatches, not into his lungs but into that wilderness of shuddering, stunted thought-scraps. Whine, groan—anything to hear your own voice…
“You can moan without thinking of the stars,” said some intimate yet strangely anonymous voice.
Whine? Moan? How could he? He was dead. Extinct. Defunct. Look: he was a hole, a sieve, a labyrinth of tortuous caves and passages, transparent, porous… Oh, why hadn’t they told him it would be like this? Cold and clammy streams … they were running through him … freely … without obstruction… The bastards! Why hadn’t they told him?!
Soon the sensation of airy transparency gave way to raw fear, and it persisted—even after the darkness, convulsed by shimmering spasms, had vanished.
The worst was yet to come, but it defied description, even clear recollection; there was no vocabulary for it. Yes, the “victims” were the richer for the experience, the hellish nature of which escaped their professors—but it was scarcely an experience to be envied.
Pirx had to undergo still more punishment. He would vanish for a while, then return to life, not singly but in multiple versions; have his brain eaten completely away, then recover long enough to be plunged into a series of abnormal states too intricate to articulate, whose leitmotif was a conscious and ineradicable terror transcending time and space.
Pirx had had a bellyful.
Later Dr. Grotius said:
“Your first groan came at the one-hundred-thirty mark, your second at the two hundred twenty-ninth. All told, a loss of three points—but not a single jerk! Fold one leg over the other, please. I’m going to test your reflexes… Tell me, how did you manage to stick it out so long, especially toward the end?”
Pirx was sitting on a neatly folded towel, the more pleasant for being
“Hold it,” something said in an astonishingly clear and matter-of-fact voice, one decidedly not his own. Some sympathetic onlooker? Where? He could have sworn he’d heard a voice. No, it was only his imagination playing tricks on him.
“Hold it. If others have lived to tell about it, then it can’t be fatal. So just hang in there.”
The words spun around until they were emptied of their meaning. Then it started up again: the slow dismemberment, the breaking up, the crumbling apart of everything like gray, water-soaked tissue, melting like a snowcapped peak warmed by the sun. Swept up by it, he was freighted passively away.
I’m a goner, he thought in earnest, convinced that this was death, that it was not a dream. It swamped him—no, not him, but them, his manifold selves, too prolific to be counted.
What am I doing here? Where am I? In the ocean? On the Moon? Taking part in some experiment…?
He refused to believe it was an experiment. What—vanish because of a little paraffin and a tankful of salt water? Hey! Enough of this crap. And he began to fight back against whatever it was; he exerted every muscle; it was like trying to heft a boulder. But there was nothing left of him, not enough to make his muscles flinch. During his last glimmer of consciousness he mustered the strength to groan—feeble and distant, the sound was like a radio signal from another planet.
For a second or so he almost revived, only to surrender to an even blacker, more nullifying ordeal.
He was not in any physical discomfort. If only it had hurt! If only he could have experienced a twinge of real pain, the kind that bestows limits, presence, confirmation of self… But it was painless, a numbing surge of nothingness. He felt the air rush into him—spasmodically, in snatches, not into his lungs but into that wilderness of shuddering, stunted thought-scraps. Whine, groan—anything to hear your own voice…
“You can moan without thinking of the stars,” said some intimate yet strangely anonymous voice.
Whine? Moan? How could he? He was dead. Extinct. Defunct. Look: he was a hole, a sieve, a labyrinth of tortuous caves and passages, transparent, porous… Oh, why hadn’t they told him it would be like this? Cold and clammy streams … they were running through him … freely … without obstruction… The bastards! Why hadn’t they told him?!
Soon the sensation of airy transparency gave way to raw fear, and it persisted—even after the darkness, convulsed by shimmering spasms, had vanished.
The worst was yet to come, but it defied description, even clear recollection; there was no vocabulary for it. Yes, the “victims” were the richer for the experience, the hellish nature of which escaped their professors—but it was scarcely an experience to be envied.
Pirx had to undergo still more punishment. He would vanish for a while, then return to life, not singly but in multiple versions; have his brain eaten completely away, then recover long enough to be plunged into a series of abnormal states too intricate to articulate, whose leitmotif was a conscious and ineradicable terror transcending time and space.
Pirx had had a bellyful.
Later Dr. Grotius said:
“Your first groan came at the one-hundred-thirty mark, your second at the two hundred twenty-ninth. All told, a loss of three points—but not a single jerk! Fold one leg over the other, please. I’m going to test your reflexes… Tell me, how did you manage to stick it out so long, especially toward the end?”
Pirx was sitting on a neatly folded towel, the more pleasant for being
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