Fiasco Read online

  His heart was beating more heavily than usual, but everything went without a hitch. He saw the barren basin, dark gray in the low mist, the distant rows of lights that marked the borders of the landing field, and, at the base of the control tower, the tiny form of Goss, a veritable ant. Parvis was surrounded by a pleasant, not insistent sound; his ears, able more and more to distinguish the different noises, recognized the background bass of the main engines, which sometimes built up to a muffled singing and sometimes grumbled a mild reproach when the hundred-ton legs, thrusting forward, were halted too abruptly. He was now able to pick out the choral call of the hydraulics, whose oil coursed through thousands of ducts and cylinders, setting up a steady beat of pistons that bent and extended each limb as the tank-clad feet walked the concrete. He could even hear the delicate whine of the gyroscopes that autonomously assisted him in maintaining balance. When he tried a sharper turn, the massive structure that he occupied proved to be not so maneuverable, and although the engines obediently roared full-force, the giant began to sway—but did not go out of control, because Parvis instantly eased up, increasing the radius of the curve.

  Then he began to play with lifting the multiton boulders that lay beyond the edge of the concrete field. Sparks flew and there was a shrill grating sound when the pincers grasped and bit into the stone. Before an hour went by, he felt sure of his Digla. He had achieved, again, the familiar state that veterans called "fusion of man and strider." The boundary between himself and the machine had disappeared; its movements were now his movements. To complete his preparation, he climbed quite high up a debris-covered slope, and had become so proficient that he could tell, from the rumble of the rocks as they began to slip from under his crushing feet, exactly how much he could demand of his colossus. Already he was fond of it.

  It was only when he went back down to the hazily lit lines of the landing field that his satisfaction with himself got punctured by the needle-reminder of the excursion before him—and the knowledge that Pirx and two other people, encased in the very same giants, had become trapped in the Depression of Titan. Whether it was for additional practice or to say good-bye, he could not say, but he circled the ship in which he had landed, then held a brief conversation with Goss. The chief was now standing beside London, behind the glass of the tower. Parvis saw them, heard from them that there was still no news about the missing men. Leaving, he lifted high an iron hand. Someone might have thought the gesture melodramatic or even clownish, but he preferred it to any words. He did a steady about-face, put a holographic of the terrain to be crossed on the single, ceiling-high monitor, switched on the azimuth finder and the projection of the path to Grail, and set out, a twelve-meter step at a time.

  There were two kinds of landscape characteristic of the inner planets of the Sun: the purposeful and the desolate. Purpose informed every scene on Earth, the planet that produced life, because every detail there had its "benefit," its teleology. True, it did not always—but billions of years of organic labor had accomplished much: thus flowers possessed color for the purpose of attracting insects, and clouds existed for the purpose of dropping rain on pastures and forests. Every form and thing was explained by some benefit, whereas what was clearly devoid of any benefit, like the icebergs of Antarctica or the mountain chains, constituted an enclave of desolation, an exception to the rule, a wild though possibly attractive waste. But even this was not certain, because man—undertaking the deflection of the course of rivers to irrigate areas of drought, or warming the polar regions—paid for the improvement of some territories with the abandonment of others, thereby upsetting the climatic equilibrium of the biosphere, which had been adjusted so painstakingly (though with seeming indifference) by the efforts of natural evolution. It was not that the ocean depths served the creatures there with darkness, to protect them from attack—a darkness they could light, as they needed, with luminescence—but vice versa: the darkness gave rise precisely to those that were pressure-resistant and could illuminate themselves.

  On planets overgrown with life it was only in the depths, in caves and grottoes, that the creative power of nature could timidly express itself, a power that, not harnessed to any adaptational requirement, or hemmed in, in the struggle for survival, by the competition of its own results, could create—over billions of years, with infinite patience, in droplets of hardening salt solutions—phantasmagoric forests of stalactites and stalagmites. But on such globes this was a deviation from the planetary labors, a deviation locked away in vaults of rock and therefore unable to reveal its vigor. Hence the impression that such places were not usual in nature but, rather, spawning grounds for monstrosities only on the fringe of things. Infrequent exceptions to the statistical rule of chaos.

  In turn, on globes parched like Mars or, like Mercury, immersed in a violent solar wind, the surfaces, due to that rarefied but incessant exhalation from the mother star, were lifeless wastes, since all raised forms were eroded by the fiery heat and reduced to dust that filled the crater basins. It was only in places where eternal, still death reigned, where neither the sieves nor the mills of natural selection were at work, shaping every creature to fit the rigors of survival, that an amazing realm opened up—of compositions of matter that did not imitate anything, that were not controlled by anything, and that went beyond the framework of the human imagination.

  For this reason, the fantastic landscapes of Titan were a shock to the first explorers. People equated order with life, and chaos with a dreary inanimateness. One had to stand on the outer planets—on Titan, the greatest of their moons—to appreciate the full error of this dichotomy-dogma. The strange formations of Titan, whether relatively safe or treacherous, were ordinary rubble heaps of chaos when viewed from a distance and a height. But they did not appear so when one set foot on the soil of this moon. The intense cold of this whole sector of space, in which the Sun shone but gave no heat, proved to be not a throttle but a spur to the creativity of matter. The cold, indeed, slowed the creativity, but in that very slowing gave it an opportunity to display its talent, providing a dimension that was indispensable to a nature untouched by life and unwarmed by sun: time—time on a scale where one million centuries, or two million, was of no significance.

  The raw materials here were the same chemical elements as on Earth. But on Earth they had entered the servitude, so to speak, of biological evolution and only in that context amazed man with subtlety—the subtlety of the complex bondings that combined to form organisms and the interdependent hierarchies of species. It was therefore thought that high complexity was a property not of all matter but only of living matter, and that chaos in the inorganic state produced nothing more than haphazard volcanic spasms, lava flows, rains of sulfurous ash.

  The Roembden Crater had cracked, once, at the northeast on its large circle. Then a glacier of frozen gas crept through the gap. In the following millennia, the glacier retreated, leaving on that furrowed terrain mineral deposits—the delight and vexation of the crystallographers and other, no less dumbfounded scientists. It was indeed a sight to see. The pilot (now operator of a strider) faced a sloping plain ringed by distant mountains and strewn with … with what, exactly? It was as if the gates of unearthly museums had been flung open and the remains of decrepit monsters had been dumped in a cascade of bones. Or were these the aborted, insane blueprints for monsters, each one more fantastic than the last? The shattered fragments of creatures that only some accident had kept from participating in the cycles of life? He saw enormous ribs, or they could have been the skeletons of spiders whose tibiae eagerly gripped blood-speckled, bulbous eggs; mandibles that clung to each other with crystal fangs; the platelike vertebrae of spinal columns, as if spilled out in coin rolls from the bodies of prehistoric reptiles after their decay.

  This eerie scene was best viewed, in all its wealth, from the height of the Digla. The area near Roembden was called, by the people there, the Cemetery—and in fact the landscape seemed a battlefield of ancient struggles, a burial g
round that was an exuberant tangle of rotting skeletons. Parvis saw the smooth surfaces of joints that could have emerged 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 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 rock covered with a volcanic tuff finer and lighter than sand. Though he could accelerate, he knew that the sensations experienced at full speed were hard to take for long, and he had a march of several hours ahead of him, in much more difficult terrain, before he reached the Depression. The flat, toothed contours on the horizon no longer looked like clouds. As he walked toward them, his shadow swept before him, misshapen. Because of the strider's great mass, the legs were only a third the length of the trunk. Pressed to increase its speed, it had to lengthen its steps, throwing each limb forward in turn with the hip. The hip could move because the circular mounting of the legs (more precisely, their undercarriage) was an enormous bearing pla
te into which the trunk fitted. The problem was that to the lateral tilting was then added the up-and-down motion of the giant, making the landscape reel before the operator like a drunkard. Such heavy machines were not built for running. Even a jump from a height of two meters was unwise on Titan. On lesser spheres, and on the Earth's Moon, there was more freedom of movement. But the constructors had not concerned themselves about the speed of these machines, whose walking was not to serve as a means of transportation but, rather, to perform heavy tasks. The ability to cover a distance was a plus, making the industrious colossi more self-sufficient.

  For an hour or more, it seemed to Parvis alternately that 1) any second he would become stuck in a chaos of rock, and that 2) the azimuth line had been drawn by a genius, because each time Parvis approached a pile of rubble—slabs of stone balanced so precariously that it looked as if the least breeze would start a thundering avalanche—at the last moment there would always be a convenient way through, so he never needed to circle around or backtrack out of cul-de-sacs. Before long, he concluded that on Titan the best operator would be cross-eyed, since one had to watch the terrain in front of the machine, from a height, and at the same time the glowing directional indicator, which quivered like the needle of an ordinary compass on a semi-transparent map. Somehow he managed, doing not badly at all, relying on his eyes and on the needle. Cut off from the world by the roar of the power units and the overall rumble of resonance in the frame, he still could see Titan through the nonreflecting glass of his compartment. No matter where he turned his head—and he did so whenever more level terrain permitted—he saw, above a sea of mist, mountain ridges split by volcanoes that had been dead for centuries. Proceeding along the ragged ice, he noticed, sunken deep within it, the shadows of volcanic bombs and darker, unidentifiable shapes—as of starfish or octopuses set like insects in amber.