Mortal Engines

The Tale of King Gnuff

After the good king Helixander’s death, his son, Gnuff, ascended the throne. Everyone was unhappy about this, because Gnuff was ambitious and cowardly. He decided he would earn for himself the epithet of Great, yet he was afraid of drafts, of ghosts, of wax, for on a waxed floor one could break one’s leg, of relatives, in that they might interfere in his governing, and most of all—of having his fortune told. Immediately as he was crowned, he ordered that throughout the kingdom doors be shut and windows not opened, that all the fortunetelling consoles be destroyed, and to the inventor of a machine that got rid of ghosts he gave a medal and a pension. The machine was truly good, for not once did Gnuff see a ghost. Also he never went out into the garden, for fear of catching cold, and took walks only in the castle, which was very large. Once, while strolling through the corridors and suites of rooms, he wandered into the old part of the palace, which he had never visited before. In the first hall that he discovered stood the household guards of his great-great-grandfather, all wind-up, dating from the days before electricity. In the second hall he saw steamknights, also rusted, but this was not of interest to him, and he was about to turn and leave when he noticed a small door with the inscription: do not enter. It was covered with a thick layer of dust and he would not have bothered with it, but for that sign. The sign outraged him. What was this—someone dared forbid him, the King? He opened the creaking door, not without difficulty, and a winding stairway led him to an abandoned tower. And there stood a very old copper cabinet; it had little ruby eyes, a wind-up key and a tiny hatch. He realized this was a fortunetelling cabinet and again was angered, that despite his order it had been left in the palace, but then he thought, why not at least try it once and see what the cabinet does? So he went up to it on tiptoe, turned the key, and when nothing happened, banged on the hatch. The cabinet gave a husky sigh, the mechanism started grinding, and looked at the King with a ruby eye, as if askance. That sidewise glance reminded him of Uncle Cenander, his father’s brother, who formerly had been his tutor. He thought, it must be Uncle who had the cabinet put here, to spite me, for why else would it give that look? A funny feeling came over him, and the cabinet, stuttering, very slowly began to play a dismal tune, as if someone were striking an iron tombstone with a shovel, and out through the hatch fell a black card with bone-yellow rows of writing on it.

The King took fright in earnest, but could not now overcome his curiosity. He grabbed up the card and ran to his chambers. When at last he was alone, he took it from his pocket. “I’ll look, but just to be safe, only with one eye,” he decided, and looked. On the card was written:

Now strikes the hour, now strike the kin,

A family war is ushered in.

Aunts and uncles, nephews, nieces

Hack each other into pieces;

Cousin does in second cousin,

Digs a grave, then digs a dozen;

In-laws fall and offspring drop,

Stepsons will at nothing stop;

There, daughters quartered with a laugh,

Here, a half brother cut in half;

The ax for gramps, the ax for granny,

The ax for sister and her nanny;

Brother murders brother, mother,

One good turn deserves another.

Relatives have certain worth,

But they’re more certain in the earth.

The hour strikes, now sound the knell,

Bury your relations well;

You yourself must hide and bide

Everywhere, yet stay inside,

The ties that bind go very deep,

Beware of treason in your sleep.

So badly was King Gnuff frightened, that everything grew dark before his eyes. He repented of the lack of caution that had led him to wind up the fortunetelling cabinet. It was, however, too late now, and he saw that he must act if the worst was to be avoided. Not for a moment did he doubt the import of the prophecy: he had long suspected that his closest relatives were a threat to him.

To tell the truth, it is not known whether all of this took place exactly as we have related here. But in any case sorry things—even grisly—happened after that. The King had his entire family put to death; only his one uncle, Cenander, managed to escape at the last minute, disguising himself as an upright piano. This failed to save him, he was shortly apprehended and surrendered his head to the block. On this occasion Gnuff was able to sign the sentence with a clear conscience, for his uncle had been seized while attempting to start a conspiracy against the Monarch.

Orphaned with such suddenness, the King went into mourning. He was now much easier in his mind, though saddened too, for at heart he was neither wicked nor cruel. The King’s peaceful mourning did not last long, it occurring to Gnuff that he might have relatives about whom he knew nothing. Any one of his subjects could be some distant cousin several times removed. So for a while he beheaded this one and that, but the beheadings did not set his mind at rest, for one could hardly be a king without subjects, and how could he kill them all? He became so suspicious that he ordered himself riveted to the throne, so no one could topple him from it; he slept in an armored nightshirt, and thought continually of what to do. Finally he did something extraordinary, so very extraordinary that he probably did not hit upon the idea himself. They say it was whispered to him by a traveling peddler dressed as a sage, or perhaps a sage dressed as a peddler—there are different accounts. The castle servants reportedly saw a masked figure, whom the King admitted to his chambers at night. The fact is that one day Gnuff summoned all the court architects, all the master electrologists, platesmiths and tuners, and announced that they were to enlarge his person, and enlarge it to extend beyond all horizons. The commands were carried out with amazing speed, as the King appointed to the post of director of the Planning Commission his trusty executioner. Processions of electricians and builders began carrying wires and spools into the castle, and when the built-up King had filled the entire palace with his person, so that he was, at one and the same time, in the vestibule, the cellar and the wings, they turned next to the residences close at hand. In two years Gnuff covered the downtown area. Houses not stately enough, and therefore unworthy to be occupied by the monarch’s mind, were leveled to the ground; in their place were erected electronic palaces, called Gnuff’s Amplifiers. The King spread little by little but inexorably, many-storied, precisely connected, enhanced with identity substations, till he became the whole capital city, and did not stop at its borders. His mood improved. He had no relatives, and now no wax or drafts to fear, for he didn’t need to take a step anywhere, being everywhere at once. “I am the state,” he said, and not without reason, for besides himself, a self that inhabited the squares and avenues with rows of electrical edifices, no one any longer lived in the capital; except of course the royal dusters, sweepers and household wipers-off of grime; these tended the King’s cogitation, which flowed from building to building. Thus there circulated throughout the city, for miles and miles, the satisfaction of King Gnuff, for he had succeeded in achieving greatness temporal and literal, and in addition was hidden everywhere, as the prophecy required, for indeed he was all-present in the kingdom. And what a pretty picture it made at dusk, when the King-titan through a soft glow winked its bulbs in thought, then slowly dimmed, sinking into a well-earned sleep. But that darkness of oblivion, after the first few hours of night, gave way to a fitful flickering, now here, now there, erratic flashes blinking on and off. These were the monarch’s dreams beginning their swarm. Turbulent streams of apparitions coursed through the buildings, till in the murk the windows lit up and whole streets exchanged alternate bursts of red and violet light, while the household sweepers, plodding their way along the empty sidewalks, sniffed the burnt smell of the heated cables of His Royal Majesty and, sneaking a look inside the light-flooded windows, said to one another in low voices:

“Oho! Some nightmare must have Gnuff in its clutches—if only he doesn’t take it out on us!”

One night, after a particularly hard-working day—for the King had been thinking up new kinds of medals with which to decorate himself—he dreamed that his uncle, Cenander, had sneaked into the capital, taking advantage of the darkness, wrapped in a black cloak, and was roaming the streets in search of supporters, to organize a vile conspiracy. Out of the cellars crawled a host of masked ones, and there were so many of them and they showed such readiness for regicide, that Gnuff started trembling and awoke in terror. It was already dawn and the golden sun played upon the little white clouds in the sky, so he said to himself; “A dream, nothing more!”—and resumed his work of designing medals, and those he had invented the previous day were pinned onto his terraces and balconies. When however after his daylong toil he again settled down for the night, no sooner did he doze off than he saw the conspiracy in full flower. It had happened this way: when Gnuff, before, wakened from the conspiring dream, he did so incompletely; the downtown sector, in which had hatched that antigovernment dream, did not wake up at all, but continued to lie in its nightmare grip, and only the King awake knew nothing of this. Meanwhile a considerable part of his person, namely the old center of the city, quite unaware that the uncle-malefactor and his machinations were only a phantom, remained under the delusion of the nightmare. That second night Gnuff dreamed he saw his uncle in a state of feverish activity, mustering the relatives. And they all appeared, every last one, posthumously creaking their hinges, and even those with the most important parts missing raised up their swords against the rightful ruler! There was great commotion. Hordes of masked ruffians rehearsed in whispers rebel cheers; down in the vaults and cellars they were already sewing the black banners of insurrection; everywhere poisons were being brewed, axes sharpened, grenades assembled, and preparations made for an all-out encounter with the hated Gnuff. The King took fright a second time, awoke shaking, and was about to call—using the Golden Archway of the Royal Mouth—all his troops to his aid, to have them cut the conspirators to ribbons with their swords, but he quickly saw that this would serve no purpose. The soldiers, after all, could not enter his dream, could not crush the conspiracy growing there. So for a time he tried by sheer force of will to rouse those four square miles of his being that persisted in dreaming of rebellion—but in vain. Though truly he had no way of knowing whether it was in vain or not, for while awake he could not detect the conspiracy; it appeared only when sleep overtook him.

While conscious, he could not gain entry to the insurgent sectors, which is not surprising, since reality cannot penetrate its way into a dream’s interior, only another dream can do that. The King realized that in this situation the best thing was for him to fall asleep and dream a counterdream, and not just any kind, obviously, but one monarchistic, wholly devoted to him, flags waving in the wind; with a royal dream like that, rallied around the throne, he would then be able to wipe out the treasonous nightmare.

Gnuff set to work, but his fear kept him awake; so he began in his mind to count pebbles, till this exhausted him and he fell into a deep slumber. It turned out then that the dream under the leadership of his uncle had not only entrenched itself in the downtown district, but was even beginning to imagine arsenals filled with powerful bombs and demolishing mines. Whereas he himself, try as he might, succeeded in dreaming up no more than a single company of cavalry, and unmounted at that, poorly disciplined, and armed only with pot lids. “This isn’t working,” he thought, “I’ll have to start again from scratch!” So he set about waking, which was slow and difficult, at last he awoke all the way, but then a terrible suspicion came upon him. Had he in fact returned to reality, or was this instead a different dream, the semblance only of wakefulness? How to proceed in such a tangled situation? To sleep or not to sleep? That was the question! Suppose he did not now sleep, feeling himself to be secure, for indeed in the world of reality no conspiracy existed. No harm would be done: that regicidal dream would dream itself out, dreaming on to its dreamed conclusion, until in the final awakening the sovereign state regained its proper unity. Very good. Ah but if he did not dream a counterdream, going on the assumption that he was safely awake, while in actual fact his alleged awakedness was but a different dream, adjoining the other, the uncle dream, then this could lead to catastrophe! For at any moment the whole accursed band of regicides, with that odious Cenander at its head, could tear from that dream into this, the dream that feigned reality, in order to deprive him of his throne and life!

“It is true,” he reflected, “the depriving would take place only in a dream, yet if the conspiracy overruns my entire royal psyche, if it takes control from the mountains to the oceans, and if—O dreadful thought!—my self no longer wishes to awake, what then?! In that case I will be cut off from reality forever and Uncle will do with me what he wishes. He’ll torture me, humiliate me. To say nothing of my aunts—I remember them well: no mercy shown, never, no matter what. That’s how they are—or rather, were—no, are again in this horrible dream! And anyway, why speak of dreams? A dream can only be where there is also a reality to return to (and how shall I return, if they succeed in keeping me in the dream?); where there is nothing but dream, dream is the sole reality, and therefore it is not a dream. Hideous! All this, of course, comes of that wretched excess of personality, that expansionism of the mind—much good it has done me!”

In despair he saw that inaction could very well destroy him, and that his only hope lay in the immediate mobilization of his psyche. “I must proceed as though I were asleep,” he said to himself. “I must dream a multitude of devoted subjects, all full of love and enthusiasm, battalions loyal to the bitter end, dying with my name upon their lips, and plenty of armaments. It might even be a good idea to think up quickly some miracle weapon, for in a dream surely everything is possible: let’s have a substance for removing relatives, anti-uncle cannons, something of that sort. In this way I’ll be prepared for whatever happens, and if the conspiracy shows itself, insidiously creeping from dream to dream, I’ll smash it in a single blow!”

King Gnuff heaved a sigh with every square and boulevard of his being, so complicated was all this, and got down to work—that is, he went to sleep. In his dream, troops of steel were to stand in formation, with hoary generals at their head, and crowds cheering to the thunder of trumpets and kettledrums. But all that appeared was a tiny bolt. Nothing—only this bolt, perfectly ordinary, a little jagged around the edges. What was he to do with it? He thought and thought, meanwhile he felt a strange uneasiness, a growing uneasiness, a faintness, a mounting fear, till suddenly it dawned on him: “Bolt rhymes with revolt!!”

He quaked all over. So then, the symbol of his downfall his overthrow, his death! Therefore the mob of relatives was even now coming for him, in stealth, in silence, having tunneled through that other dream to reach this dream—and any minute he would plunge into the treacherous pit, dug out of dream from under dream! Then the end was imminent! Death! Annihilation! But from where? How? In which direction?!

Ten thousand buildings of his royal person blazed; the substations, decked with medals and festooned with ribbons of the Cross of Greatness, shook; the decorations rang out rhythmically in the night air, such was King Gnuff’s struggle with the dreamed dread symbol of his downfall. At last he overcame it, mastered it, till it vanished so completely, it was almost as if it had never been. The King looked—where was he now? In reality or in another illusion? In reality, it would seem, yes but how could he be certain? It was possible, of course, that the uncle dream by now had finished dreaming, that there was absolutely no need to worry. But again: how could he find out? There was one way and one way only, with dream-spies disguised as subversives to comb and ceaselessly probe his entire, own, sovereign self, the kingdom of his being, and nevermore would the royal soul know peace, he would always have to be on guard against conspiracy slumbering in some secret comer of his vast consciousness! And so onward, come, buoy up the figments of fealty and devotion, dream of homages rendered and thronging delegations aglow with law-abiding zeal, attack with dreams all the valleys, darknesses and reaches of your person, that in them no intrigue, no uncle be allowed to hide! And then swept over Gnuff the rustle of standards so dear to his heart, no trace of Uncle, not a relative in sight, he was surrounded only by loyalty, he received oblations, ovations, tributes neverending; one could hear the peal of beaten gold medallions rolling at his feet, sparks flew from chisels as artists hewed him monuments. The King’s soul brightened within him, for here now was heraldry, embroidered-emblazoned, a tapestry hung in every window, artillery lined up to fire its salute, and trumpeters putting to their lips their trumpets of bronze. When however he took a closer look at all of this, he saw that something—somehow—wasn’t right. The monuments—not bad, but not much like him either; in the twist of the face, in the scowl there was something decidedly avuncular. The standards blowing—all right, but that tiny ribbon with them, indistinct, almost black; if not black, at least dirty, in any case—not clean. What was this? Some sort of innuendo?!

Good heavens! But those tapestries—worn through in places, practically bald, and Uncle—Uncle had been bald… No, this could not be! “Back! Retreat! Wake up! Wake up!!” he thought. “Sound the alarm, reveille, away with this dream!” he wanted to shout, but when everything had vanished, it was no better. He had fallen out of one dream into another, a new dream, a dream dreamed by the dream preceding, which in turn had occurred in an earlier dream, therefore this present dream was already—as it were—to the third power. Everything in it changed, openly now, into treason, everything reeked of betrayal, the standards turned inside out—like gloves—from royal to black, the medals came with threaded screws, like severed necks, and from the golden bugles burst not battle charges, but his uncle’s laughter, a thunderclap-guffaw that spelled disaster. The King roared in a voice stentorian, he called for his soldiers—let them prick him with their lances, so he could wake! “Pinch me! Pinch me!!” he demanded with a mighty howl, and: “Reality!! Reality!!!”—but to no avail; so once again he strained and struggled from the traitorous, king-hating, assassinating dream to the dream of the throne, but by now the dreams in him had multiplied like rats, scurrying-scuttling everywhere, by now building infected building with the nightmare, in all directions spread a sneaking, a skulking, a slinking around, some sort of skulduggery, just what it was he didn’t know, but God-awful for sure! The electronic edifice in all its hundred stories dreamed of bolts, revolts, insurrection and defection, in every identity substation there schemed a band of relatives, in every amplifier an uncle cackled; the foundations trembled, terrified of themselves, and out of them a hundred thousand kin came swarming, false pretenders to the throne, two-faced first-born foundlings, glowering usurpers, and though not one of them knew whether he was a creature dreamed or dreaming, and who was dreaming whom, and why, and what all that implied—they all without exception made straight for Gnuff, to cut him down, to pull him from the throne, hang him, swing him from the highest belfry, ding to kill him, dong to bring him back again, hey! fill him with lead, ah! off with his head—and the only reason they had done nothing yet was that they couldn’t agree on where to start. Thus in torrents rushed the phantom monsters of the royal mind, until from the overload there was a burst of flame. No longer a dreamed but a very real fire now filled the windows of the King’s person with a golden blaze, and Gnuff collapsed into a hundred thousand separate dreams, linked by nothing now but a conflagration—and he burned for a long, for a very long time…