The New Cyberiad“Our perfection is our curse, for it draws down upon our every endeavour no end of unforeseeable consequences!”
—Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad
The First Sally, or, The Decision to Recreate the Palefaces
The green sun of the Gros Horloge system shone down benignly and with wide-spectrum plentitude upon two figures seated in an elegant landscaped garden, where, alongside the vector-straight beryllium paths, beds of nastysturtiums snapped, blueballs and cocktuses swelled, rhododendrites synapsed, and irises dilated. Each recumbent figure rested on a titanium and carbon-fibre lawnchair large as one of the sentient ocean liners employed by the Sea Gypsies of Panthalassa IX.
These titanic figures exhibited a curious mix of streamlining and bumpy excrescences, of chrome supplene
